Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

The life of Nikolai Gogol occupies this singular position in relation to his own work: it lacks any interest except if it is seen as the creation of Nikolai Gogol. The text presupposes the life in the sense that the latter has any sense (or is legible) as a text by Gogol. Retrospectively, although simultaneously, that life is part of a Gogolian universe which transcends the author and his works in order to create a Gogolian tradition. Its contemporary lineage is clear in such works as those by Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera. But Gogol himself is the heir to the carnival tradition of literature employed by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the work of Rabelais, as he is the heir also of the tradition of Cervantes, whose grand themes coincide notoriously with those cited by Fanger to explain Gogol: metamorphosis, the road, displacement, identity, recognition.

Only within these bounds do I speak of a Gogolian life inseparable from a Gogolian work and a Gogolian tradition.

III

Gogolian Gogol:

Donald Fanger recalls two statues of the author. One, done in 1909, is by the sculptor Andreev. Seated wrapped in an overcoat, head hanging and shoulders drooping, Nikolai Gogol is a figure of perverse melancholy. The statue reflects a work that, according to Merezhkovsky, was “a long exercise in artistic deformation.” The other statue, erected in Moscow on orders from Stalin on the occasion of the writer’s one hundredth anniversary, presents a tall, erect, defiant man, his eyes blazing, his chin thrust forward: this is Gogol the realist, Gogol the progressive, Gogol the citizen about to jump onto his tractor. Useless to remember that the apparition of the second statue signified the disappearance of the first, which was restored only on the death of the dictator.

Between both statues — the tragic, the heroic — jumps a gnome. This is Gogol the character in Gogol, the “new” student who arrives from the Ukrainian countryside at the school of higher sciences at Nezhin, with a beaked profile and a little head bobbing out of his winter clothing as if out of a collar of feathers. A bird hermetically sealed, writes his fellow student Lubich-Romanovich, inside his excessive clothes, far too warm for the climate. He lakes a long time to undress, adds the school companion. The clothing — the overcoat — is a carapace like Samsa’s in The Metamorphosis: the body is absent, its presence and its pleasure postponed.

He is called “the mysterious dwarf.” He must, his biographer Henri Troyat tells us, be secretive: secrecy is the spring of his life. He writes to his mother from school: “No one hears me complain … I praised those who were the cause of my disgrace. It is true that for all of them I am an enigma. No one guesses who I am…” This human enigma, beaked bird and mysterious gnome, appears in the academic, bureaucratic, editorial, and literary world of Russia. He is a reality that is also a deception: his mother believes that Gogol, like a character in Gogol, is the author of all the successful novels published in Russia. The son is responsible for sowing the seed of this new deception. He is what he is, but with a dimension that disguises him and deceives all others. The disguise can be quite delirious: his mother comes to believe, and says so to anyone wishing to listen to her, that her son Nikolai Gogol is the genius who has invented all the technological marvels appearing in Russia, one after the other, in those days. Mother attributes to son nothing less than the invention of the railroad engine and the steamship. Mother is son’s accomplice, the ideal reader of Gogol the character in Gogol.

But, besides the mother-reader, the Gogolian Gogol has yet another accomplice for this displacement of identities: the brother-writer. The origin of Dead Souls is worthy of a novel in itself. It is the gift — the offering, rather — that Pushkin, one night, makes to Gogol. Gogol writes in his An Author’s Confession: “For some time now, Pushkin has been inviting me to undertake a great work … He has told me: Why, having the power to divine man and to paint his full body with but a few strokes, as if he were alive, do you not undertake an important work? What a pity! He went on to talk about my weak complexion, the illnesses that could put an end to my days. He cited the example of Cervantes, who, though the author of a few admirable novellas, would never have occupied among writers the position he now holds if he had not sat down to write Don Quixote. In conclusion, Pushkin offered me his own theme, from which he wanted to extract a sort of poem. Listening to him, I believe that he never would have ceded this story to anyone else but me.” Pushkin’s gift was the story of an adventurer who bought, at a low price, the dead souls of the propertied estates, profiting from an anomaly in the law which permitted the owners to retain the names of dead serfs, deriving economic profit from the swindle.

In possession of his theme, which he conceived as a comic displacement within the width and breadth of Russia, Gogol the Gogolian must flee Russia so as to write secretly, from afar, disguised as a Russian in Paris and Rome, inventing deceits parallel to those of Chichikov and thus maintaining the Gogolian homonymy of life and work, the continuing creation of Nikolai Gogol. Is there anything more Gogolian, for example, than his return to Russia in 1839, when, already safely back in Moscow, he writes a letter to his mother from there but dated as if from Trieste, in which he tells her: “As regards my return to Russia. I have not yet made up my mind. I am in Trieste, where I have begun taking sea baths…”

Back in the Ukraine, Mrs. Gogol’s white head nods. She deserves the lie: she is her son’s original accomplice. As Troyat notes: “The same way that others feel relief in telling the truth, [Gogol] feels at ease only in imposture…”

He tries to heal his body; he tries to heal his fortunes. He seeks time for his imagination and his writing; he moves in official circles; he seeks patronage, praises the Tsar and authoritarianism. He maneuvers ceaselessly to survive as a creative enigma, as a disguised being, as a Gogolian character, offending in equal measure the Occidentalizing progressives gathered under the renovating banner of Belinsky and the traditionalist Slavophiles and officialists grouped under the reactionary aegis of Pogodin.

One must conclude that he preferred the former because he was more Gogolian with the latter. He asks Pogodin to lodge him in his house in Moscow in 1842, the year of the censorship first and the publication later of Dead Souls. In Pogodin’s house, he then lives an unpublished chapter of Chichikov’s comic epic. Gogol detests Pogodin, surely because of the Slavophile critic’s weakness in giving him lodging, and ceases to speak to him. The host and his undesired guest communicate through letters sent from bedroom to bedroom, and in them they insult and mutually pity each other for having to live together under the same roof. Pogodin sends Gogol his food; he even sends him money. These are reasons for Gogol to hate him even more and to insist on overstaying his welcome. He is a haughty beggar indeed, worthy of a comedy from the pen of Plautus, Molière, or Sheridan: worthy, let us say it, of Gogol’s Inspector-General. He deserves it all and is obliged to give nothing in return. He is Gogol, a character in Gogol.

Pogodin complains bitterly. He reproaches Gogol for his whims, his hypocrisy, his lies, his crude manners toward Pogodin, Pogodin’s wife, and Pogodin’s mother. But Gogol has established only one condition to accept the hospitality of the suffering literary critic: “No one should oppose me, ever.”

When, a short time after the publication of the novel, Gogol at long last leaves the Pogodin place, each of the parties has his final say in letters that they send to other people. Pogodin writes: “I sigh with relief … A mountain has fallen from my shoulders … Gogol is an abominable being…” And Gogol writes: “Pogodin is vile, dishonest, and lacking in delicacy … It is a vile thing to remind the man you are lodging that he must be grateful … Pogodin deserves nothing but my scorn…”