The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

118 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

creature,” Nabokov writes. His basic units were not ideasatall but “focal shifts,” abrupt and irrational. “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight . . . but with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent.”22 Respect for rank, good taste, clarity of confrontation, the straight line of honor that permits one to come back home with head held high: this is Pushkin’s familiar landscape. And on the other side, we have Gogol: the sudden crooked “focal shift” of evasion and embarrassment, what Nabokov called “a jerk and a glide,” with the hero darting away out from under our nose.

Pretendership (two authors, two plays, two novels)

As our final juxtaposition of Pushkin and Gogol we will consider, very selectively, four famous works – one novel and one play for each. Our focus for all four is “pretendership” – in Russian, samozvanstvo (literally, “self-naming”): the act of presenting yourself publicly as someone other than who you are. This gesture is relatively straightforward when the pretender in question is clinically mad, as is Poprishchin (protagonist of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman) when he declares himself the King of Spain. Our upcoming examples are more complex. Both of Pushkin’s pretenders are real historical figures in fictionalized garb. What they pretend to is the Russian throne. The two home texts for these adventurers are the drama Boris Godunov (1825), in which a young runaway monk, Grigory Otrepiev, invades Russia claiming to be the Tsarevich Dmitry, youngest son of Ivan the Terrible; and the novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836), in which the Cossack chieftain Emelyan Pugachov claimsto be Peter III, deposed and deceased spouse of Empress Catherine II. Pushkin’s Pugachov, in conversation with thenovel’s hero Grinyov, remembers (from oral legend? from Pushkin’s play?) Otrepiev’s success at toppling the Godunovs and is inspired to imitate it.

In contrast to Pushkin, both of Gogol’s pretenders – or better, imposters – are fictional creations with wholly civilian concerns. Khlestakov from The Government Inspector (1836) is a Petersburg fop who, passing through a provincial town, is mistaken for a police investigator by the gullible, corrupt local bureaucracy. Chichikov from Dead Souls (1842) is a trickster in the mode of traveling salesman – or better, buyer-up of deceased serfs. These two imposters are fictional in a deeper sense than the fact that Gogol made them up. They also make themselves up as they go along, as do all rogues, feeding