The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanticisms 117

Akaky himself is so timid he can hardly carry on a conversation, mumbling meaningless particles in place of nouns and verbs. He enjoys copying and is indifferent to rank. But the Petersburg frost makes a new overcoat imperative. He saves up for it, falls in love with it while the tailor is sewing it (or “her”: the Russian word for overcoat, shinel', is feminine in gender) - and she is stolen off his back by hoodlums the first night he wears her. Reprimanded by a general after futilely seeking help from the police, the depleted Akaky dies of humiliation and a chill, only to reappear as a vengeful ghost who pulls overcoats off shoulders of all ranks.

The clerk Akaky is meek. Other pathetic clerks in Gogol’s Petersburg are ambitious. One such is the hero ofDiary of a Madman, Poprishchin, pen-pusher and quill-sharpener. We watch him go out of his mind, entry by entry. Smitten with his boss’s daughter, he gets access to her by purloining letters written by her dog. “Perhaps” - he writes in his diary a few days before declaring himself to be the King of Spain - “I’m really a count or a general, and am merely imagining I’m a titular councilor? Perhaps I really don’t know who I am at all?” As we shall see in Chapter 6, Dostoevsky begins his career by literally rewriting these poor Gogolian clerks, who become the eyes and ears of his early worldview, growing gradually more self-conscious, shrewd, and cruel.

Like his madman Poprishchin and his con man Chichikov from Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol also did not wish people to know precisely who, or where, he was. He had a dazzling gift for distortion and concealment. A brilliant mimic from early childhood, Gogol could create any role out of the most casual verbal prompt. He falsified personal events in his letters home. He left no diaries, memoirs, wife or close family. Even after he had become Russia’s most famous prose writer, he was infuriated when a friend published a realistic portrait of him. Gogol perceived himself and his work in a messianic light. Until fully shaped, his person and message should shine through to others only darkly, if at all. Gogol abandoned Russia in 1837 and spent most of the rest of his life in Italy, writing and despairing of ever completing his epic Dead Souls.

Perhaps a private, evasive, deceptive psyche like Gogol’s can be most accurately grasped by a creative writer of equivalent genius. Pushkin, with his brilliantly visible public life, is well served by several full-length biographies in English, most recently the fascinating and irreverent account by T. J. Binyon (Pushkin: A Biography, 2002). But arguably the best English-language biography of Gogol is still Vladimir Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (1944), a slim volume extremely thin on events. Nabokov begins the story with Gogol’s death in 1852 from malnutrition and gastroenteritis, huge leeches hanging from his nose, after he had burnt, in a frenzy of repentance and on the advice of his Roman Catholic confessor, Parts 2 and 3 of Dead Souls. “Gogol was a strange