Combing through literature's past reveals a seemingly endless stream of fun surprises, and Gogol's stories certainly count among them. He is the first uniquely Russian writer, and his profound influence on subsequent literary giants cannot be overestimated. His all too short life leads one to wonder what further contributions he might have made had he lived past the age of forty three. Gogol's writing sprawls across many genres, making his work difficult to categorize. His work reveals a writer both realist and romantic, balancing elements of the fantastic and supernatural with real life struggles and recognizable characters. It is a blend of the Ukrainian folkloric past and the modern-day Russia in which he lived. His humor lends perhaps the most humanizing touch to his storytelling. Writing genuinely funny and (simultaneously) meaningful stuff is hard, and his natural sense of the absurd and ironic is something that is impossible to fake. Gogol had it all.
I was taught that the American contribution to world literature is the short story. But as I've explored the short stories of Russia, I have come to believe that while the Americans may have invented the form, the Russians perfected it. In fact, Russia emerged from the cultural wilderness in the mid-nineteenth century with a firm grasp on both the conciseness and immediacy of the short story and the sprawling, large scale scope of the novel. Russia's literature appears to have arrived mature and fully formed, seemingly all at once, and Gogol's stories were the first flowering of Russia's new literary identity. Had he lived to finish his groundbreaking novel Dead Souls, a partially realized, multi-volume reworking of Dante's The Divine Comedy in his modern day Russia--he would have even further cemented a reputation as one of his nation's leading creative forces on the cutting edge of a cultural renaissance.
Thus, in describing his work, one is almost reduced to saying things like, "This is so cool!" and "Whoa! This guy could really write!" As it is true with all literary criticism, description underserves the work, and there's no substitute for immersing oneself in his stories. Both the author and the Russia he knew no longer exist, but his stories have a timeless quality to them. Here are some more gems:
The Mantle and Other Stories (18??) by Nikolai Gogol
The funny thing about translated literature is that you'll often find several English titles for the same work. Such is the case here. The title story is actually Gogol's signature work, "The Cloak", a story we've already explored as part of Taras Bulba and Other Tales. You can read about it here.
Also included in this collection is "The Nose", a surreal masterpiece about a civil servant who has lost his nasal appendage to a careless barber. As the story opens, the barber finds the nose in a loaf of bread served by his wife at the breakfast table. He hastens out the door to throw it off a bridge, relieved to be free of culpability. The nose's owner, a civil servant named Kovaloff, awakens to find a blank space where his nose once was and tries everything he can to track down his nose and return it to its rightful place. A source of even further humiliation is that his nose has achieved a higher social rank, strutting about in more elaborate clothes and riding in carriages that indicate a superior social position. The police don't take him seriously, and his attempt to place an ad for his lost nose is also unsuccessful.
This is a brilliant story, combining sharp social satire of the lives of civil servants in St. Petersburg with playful, surreal imagery that recalls Terry Gilliam's animated cartoons for Monty Python's Flying Circus. Gogol even addresses the absurdity of the tale with a flash of metafiction in the story's closing pages as he anticipates criticism for such a fantastic tale. This is another Rod Serling-esque story. Excellent stuff.
"Memoirs of a Madman" (often titled "Diary of a Madman" to avoid confusion with Gustave Flaubert's work of the same name, only to face further confusion in 1981 with the release of the identically titled Ozzy Osbourne album), is another of Gogol's great achievements. It is a first person account of one man's descent into insanity that cleverly takes more than a few satirical swipes at Russian society. A titular counselor--the lowest rank of civil servant at the time and one of Gogol's favorite character types--displays a gradual but thorough loss of his hold on reality in his diary. This story is paced perfectly, from his initial inkings of fancy that dogs are able to secretly speak and write letters, to the full blown delusions of grandeur that he is, in fact, a Spanish monarch. All of this is balanced by Gogol's measured prose (in English, of course), which becomes bolder and more outlandish as the piece progresses. Darkly funny, indeed.
The remaining two stories have deep roots in Cossack folk tales with characteristically Gothic touches. "A May Night" is part comedy of errors and part supernatural folktale with a surprisingly intricate plot. This is the story of a love triangle involving Levko, the son of the village headman (a sort of Cossack village leader), his father and a pretty young girl. It also involves a local legend about the death of a young girl whose widower father married a vengeful witch who drove her stepdaughter to suicide by drowning herself in a nearby pond. These two plot elements resolve in a well executed moonlit climax in which young Levko and the ghost of the drowned girl help one another find to satisfaction and revenge. Along the way, we meet many village characters drawn with Gogol's signature wit and perception. This story leaves the reader with a similar sense of satisfaction, being perhaps the best combination of Ukrainian folk lore and wry social comment in the stories we have explored.
"The Viy" is a no-holds-barred horror story, ideal for campfire gatherings and certain to terrorize children and unsettle grownups in a young monastery student, terrorized by a witch when stopping at an old woman's farm for lodging, is inexplicably summoned back to the countryside to perform funeral rights at the specific request of a young girl who has died. "The Viy" has everything--scary supernatural gnome-type creatures, freaky form-shifting witches, dark quasi-religious overtones, and wonderfully detailed characters. This story is scary and entertaining in a very over-the-top way. Fantastic stuff, easily spoiled by my brand of bloggy encapsulation. If you like stories like this, you'll want to read it yourself.
French author Prosper Mérimé, whose novel, Carmen was adapted by Bizet into the famous opera of the same name, provides some dismissive introductory notes that pretty much belittle all the aspects of Gogol's style that I enjoy most. This is the type of preface that can really ruin a reader's experience of a good book and should be heartily ignored or at least postponed until you've read all the stories so you can make up your own mind. To be fair, Mérimé wrote his remarks before Gogol's work could be put into historical context, so we can forgive him a little shortsightedness. But we don't have to be influenced by his opinions prior to reading Gogol's stories. So skip it until you've finished the book.
We'll look at some more Russian short stories next time.
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