have you met my friend nik?
unspooling Nikolai Gogol... pt. 1?--cuz, who knows, maybe we'll visit him again some time
You know, I was pretty sure we’d finally be unspooling Nikolai Gogol’s majestic short story, “The Portrait” (1835), this week. That was certainly my intention, but I just kept writing and writing and, before long, the thread started getting longer than I had planned or envisioned. And when I still couldn’t stop writing and landed in “Okay, this is starting to get ridiculous”-territory, I knew that keeping the thread together would be asking a lot.
Sooooo—and take a breath with me now, at least one of us needs it—we’re going to pivot yet again this week. Which is becoming something of a feature here at unspooling, isn’t it? (Feature or bug? I suppose time will tell. I tend to take it as a good sign when I’m so interested that I simply can’t stop myself.)
Anyway, here’s the new plan:
Today, we’re unspooling Nikolai Gogol… in general, I guess? I don’t know, don’t look at me—I only work here. But rather than focus on a single work, which we’ll do next week, we’re going to take a brief look at the artist himself. We’ll start with a short bio and then dive into the aspects of his writing that I think make him worth reading. Along the way, I’ll present selected bits of prose that I find especially appealing and want to share.
Meaning—baring any other curveballs!—that the oft-promised and long-delayed thread unspooling “The Portrait” will finally release next week. I’m excited to finally get that one off the back burner and into your hot little hands!
I have so many fond memories of discovering a new favourite because of great recommendations over the years; hopefully, this thread does the same for a few of you!
Okay, that’s enough of the housekeeping, now let’s get to the good stuff…
for those unacquainted with nikolai vasilyevich…
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in 1809 to a landowning family in the small Ukrainian village of Sorochyntsi, in what was then a heartland province of the vast Russian Empire. Gogol’s father was a moderately successful playwright and poet in his own right, and his landholdings afforded him the ability to send his gifted young son to art school in the city of Nizhyn, in what is now northern Ukraine.
And already—if we think back to last week—we can see how widespread and significant the impact of Peter I’s reforms had already become not even a full century after his death. An art school education and a career as a popular writer would have been unthinkable in earlier periods of Russian history. So… thanks?
Way to make killing all those people amount to something Pete… I guess…
Just remember kids: the historical context always matters!
At school, Gogol wasn’t terribly popular with the other kids—he was probably a bit weird, what with being a burgeoning genius and all—but he did show an “unusual talent as a mimic and actor,” qualities which would later help him to express his creative vision in prose.
In 1828, at the ripe age of nineteen, Gogol emerged from the academy in Nizhyn ready to make a name for himself. Without delay, the provincial country boy chased his vague ambitions all the way to the capital. St. Petersburg; not only the political seat of power but the empire’s literary bedrock as well. Like moth to flame, Gogol was drawn to St. Petersburg. He wrote a lot in these early years. And by 1831, he was already a recognized author, with a collection of short stories inspired by his native Ukraine (entitled Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka) immediately establishing his reputation as a writer of remarkable ability and considerable ingenuity. Critics loved him and, although Russia’s literate public was pretty small at the time, the reading public loved him as well.
And you can take it from me, Gogol’s “Ukrainian Tales” are wild yarns, indeed—well worth checking out for yourself, by the way! (I highly recommend the Richard Paver and Larissa Volokhonsky translations cited in the bibliography below.)
Take “The Night Before Christmas,” for example; a whimsical holiday tale celebrating the righteousness of Christian virtue. (The title is sometimes translated as “Christmas Eve” in English—probably to avoid confusion with that annoying poem—but Gogol did it first and better, so we’re sticking with his intended title)
The story revolves around Vakula, a good Christian blacksmith who desires to win the hand of Oksana, the most beautiful maiden in the village.
Okay, sure, it’s a pretty standard setup, but we can already see the theological bent we spoke about last week that gives Russian literature its unique flavour. The exact details of the tale itself and the fabulous way it unfolds is all Gogol, however, his immense talent evident from the very start of his career.
Already, Gogol had mastered the art of repetition—using it for both comedic and dramatic effect—and so, Vakula and Oksana encounter each other on several different occasions during the opening half of the story. At first, Oksana is cruel and callous, laughing off Vakula’s unrequited affection. The daughter of a local Cossack big man, Oksana has both the looks and social standing to take her pick of the suitable bachelors—and she knows it. She imagines herself as a match for a modern gentleman (which we can read as representing “European” masculinity), not a humble blacksmith, such a match would be unthinkable for so graceful—if not gracious—a young woman. If anything, Vakula is little more than a plaything for Oksana, whose flirtations quickly turn to insults about how dirty his hands are or how he stinks of metal and smoke (which we’re supposed to understand as further evidence of Vakula’s good nature, by the way, because it demonstrates what an honest, hard-working young man he is!—We should also read this as Vakula representing an idealized form of traditional Russian masculinity, which feels like Gogol’s attempt to argue for its superiority against the more fashionable “continental masculinity,” so in vogue in Russia during his life). After yet another typically disjointed interaction, Oksana scoffs and tells Vakula that, sure, she’ll marry him, but only after he has delivered the impossible: the precious slippers of the tsaritsa (empress) herself.
Although—if you remember from last week—we’ve already seen how deeply entwined modern Russian literature and classical themes are, so you might already suspect that this impossible task might not be as impossible as Oksana presumes it will be…
Struggling against a blizzard of emotions, and battling against a literal snowstorm as well, Vakula tortures himself over Oksana’s taunt. He desires her; he desires not to desire her; he knows he cannot escape his desires; he revolves himself to accept his desires.
It’s a veritable emotional roller coaster.
And if all of this sounds fairly conventional so far, that’s only because I haven’t mentioned the concurrent subplot wherein Gogol introduces the story’s many supernatural and fantastical elements. For instance, shortly after the tale begins, the devil arrives on Earth to wreak havoc and disrupt the celebrations in honour of his eternally hated rival (he steals the moon, for example—literally, by the way, by simply jumping up and removing it from the sky, securing it in a pouch he wears around his waist—the night’s temporary moonless-ness being partially responsible for confusing the story’s characters and sending them in unexpected directions).
I find the comedic imagery in one early section, particularly hilarious:
It was freezing, and up aloft it got so cold that the devil kept shifting from one hoof to the other and blowing into his palms, trying to warm his cold hands at least a little. It’s no wonder, however, that somebody would get cold who had knocked about all day in hell, where, as we know, it is not so cold as it is here in winter, and where, a chef’s hat on his head and standing before the hearth like a real cook, he had been roasting sinners with as much pleasure as any woman roasts sausages at Christmas.
Excerpt from “The Night Before Christmas” (1830) by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
I mean, this is supposed to be the devil—the Big Bad of Christian mythology, the very embodiment of Evil—and yet it’s immediately clear, we aren’t supposed to see him as a serious threat.
No devil worthy of being The Devil would be bothered by a bit of cold. (Even the cold of northern Russia). And he wouldn’t be caught dead in a chef’s hat, either—roasting sinners be damned.
The devil in Gogol’s “The Night Before Christmas”—(eat your heart out Dasher and Prancer, Donner and Vixen!)—is a heel; an archetype of vanquishable evil that the audience and characters alike can ridicule.
So, it comes as no real surprise when the devil winds up in a sack of coal, instead of repeating his Edenic success…
Alright, let’s connect these plots and see how the story concludes.
Evidently having heard tell of Vakula’s piety all the way from the deepest depths of the inferno itself, the devil decides to pay a visit to Vakula’s mother, who just so happens to be a witch named Solokha, to mess with the consummate good boy. The devil and witch are just about to commiserate when they are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of one of Solokha’s many gentleman callers. Ergo, the witch hides the devil in an empty sack of coal and receives her visitor, who turns out to be the village Mayor and none the wiser to Solokha’s previous guest. Gogol then uses repetition to wonderful effect yet again, when Solokha repeats her sack-stuffing trick with the Mayor and then with two subsequent visitors as well. Eventually, Solokha has hidden the devil in one sack; the Mayor in another; and the village sexton and a Cossack chief in a third, all in a matter of minutes (these latter two, though stacked on top of each other, nonetheless remain ignorant of the other for now).
Solokha’s final visitor, however, is her son, Vakula (that Vakula is a witch’s son seems an odd choice at first until you consider that it continues to reinforce just how righteous a Russian man can be; that if he stays faithful, nothing, can stop him). Vakula’s returned home ostensibly for plot purposes, which requires that he—being the good Christian boy that he is—take the sacks with him to dispose of on his way to church that evening, having mistaken them for trash.
(What a good boy!) I’m sorry — I know this makes Vakula sound like a beloved golden retriever, but he makes me chuckle!
With the sacks slung over his shoulder, Vakula runs into Oksana yet again, whose frosty demeanour finally breaks him (and I will say: the concept of a man repeatedly ignoring and trying to overturn a woman’s rejections has really not aged well, but that’s art!). The blacksmith vows to end his insufferable life and runs off in the direction of the river to do the deed.
At this point, Oksana finally begins to question her treatment of Vakula (although I think you could have stuck to your guns, girl! Respect yourself!), contemplating his presumed demise, and feeling a bit guilty about her role in bringing it about, she finds her feelings toward Vakula softening… and transmuting into something else entirely… but more on that later.
Unable to drown himself because of the sinfulness of the deed—duh!—Vakula’s last resort is to ask the local Cossack magician how to make a deal with the devil. Which somehow isn’t similarly sinful and forbidden (though I suspect this is supposed to mirror Eve’s Temptation of Adam). The magician tells the blacksmith that he cannot provide what Vakula already carries on his own back and our hero leaves dismayed, unable to parse the meaning of this apparent riddle.
That creaking you hear is Gogol stretching this premise to its literary load-bearing limit, by the way.
It isn’t long before Vakula finally begins to tire from the weight of the sacks and he begins to contemplate suicide again, believing that his apparent weakness must account for Oksana’s unwillingness to love him. Ordinarily, three sacks of coal would have proven no serious burden for the burly metalwork, but now his muscles can endure no more. His strength, evidently, has left him. Plus, he can’t even sell his soul for a slipper. What’s a fella to do?
Upon dropping his burden, however, Vakula is surprised to hear the devil, the Mayor, the sexton, and the Cossack chief (who also happens to be Oksana’s father, by the way) all squeal in pain and slither out of the sacks into the brutal winter cold.
The three men run off, but Vakula captures the devil, quickly turning the table on the demonic trickster by catching him by the tail and threatening to make the sign of the cross. Beaten at his own game, the devil agrees to fly Vakula to the imperial palace, where the empress finds the humble blacksmith so charming that she willingly and happily gives her slippers to him. (See, the empress was wise enough, unlike Oksana, to recognise a virtuous Russian man when she saw one!)
“The Night Before Christmas” has a decidedly happy ending when the slippers ultimately prove unnecessary; Oksana, of course, has fallen hopelessly in love with Vakula after finally considering just how good of a Christian boy he is!
“The Night Before Christmas” is a decent example of literature as socio-philosophy in its native Russian context (though it’s far from Gogol’s best), with the story serving as the vehicle for an idealized vision of the humble life of an honest, virtuous Christian (and the bountiful rewards to be won through such faithfulness). We can see all the hallmarks of that pillar at work: a theological premise, social commentary, philosophical musings—it’s all here.
That’s interesting enough, at least for history nerds like me, but I don’t think that’s what makes Gogol a joy to read and a writer worth sharing with others. Rather, it’s his unique compositional style and novel approach to narrative structure that keeps his works relevant for popular audiences. As a nineteenth-century Ukrainian-Russian writer, Gogol was steeped in a particular literary culture, one with a dedicated socio-philosophical bent. I think those qualities are obvious and abundant in his work. But as an individual artist, Gogol was also a committed visionary, a master manipulator of form, and an organic storyteller of extraordinary ability.
So, it’s not so much that Gogol always arrives at the most original conclusion—the moral of “The Night Before Christmas” isn’t exactly novel, or, for me at least, terribly compelling—but rather that he arrives by such fantastic and imaginative means, almost as if he allows the story to have a mind of its own and flow in a manner conducive to its ultimate intention, no matter how absurd or outlandish the result might be.
Literary scholars have described Gogol’s narratives as unfolding by way of perpetual diversion. His genius is often best revealed in how the whole comes together to become greater than the sum of the parts.
Gogol is worth reading, not because he constructs locomotive plots, but because his prose is so compelling, so beautiful, and so imaginative that it captures a voice as unique as any I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps as unique as our species is capable of producing.
Reading Gogol is an experience.
Few artists ever achieve such heights in their chosen medium.
For example, consider the vivid expressiveness of another comedic characterization and just how much story-telling Gogol crams into a single paragraph:
As soon as the booming seminary bell that hung by the gates of the Bratsky Monastery in Kiev rang out in the morning, crowds of schoolboys and seminarians came hurrying from all over the city. Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers and theologians, notebooks under their arms, trudged to class. The grammarians were still very small; as they walked they pushed each other and quarrelled among themselves in the thinnest trebles; their clothes were almost all torn or dirty, and their pockets were eternally full of various sorts of trash, such as knucklebones, whistles made from feathers, unfinished pieces of pie, and occasionally even a little sparrow that, by chirping suddenly amidst the extraordinary silence of the classroom, would procure for its patron a decent beating on both hands, and sometimes the cherrywood rod. The rhetoricians walked more sedately: their clothes were often perfectly intact, but instead their faces were almost always adorned with some rhetorical trope: one eye completely closed, or a big bubble instead of a lip, or some other mark; these swore by God and talked among themselves in tenors. The philosophers dropped a whole octave lower: there was nothing in their pockets except whatever came along on the spot; the smell of pipes and vodka sometimes spread so far around them that a passing artisan would stand for a long time sniffing the air like a hound.
Excerpt from “Viy” (1835) by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
We learn so much about the denizens of Bratsky Monastery from the terrifying Gothic tale “Viy” in just this brief glance. Gogol elucidates distinct images of each group; the grammarians seeming impetuous, impulsive creatures; the rhetoricians appearing to be clowns with a façade of solemnity; and the philosophers caring for naught but the present (and all the more so if inebriated). These beautifully satirical descriptions sing with irony and sting with scorn.
And boy, does he have a way of rendering descriptions for throwaway details so lavish, they border on grandiose:
Weddings in the old days were no comparison with ours. My grandfather’s aunt used to tell us—oh, ho, ho! How girls in festive headdresses of yellow, blue, and pink stripes trimmed with gold braid, in fine shirts stitched with red silk and embroidered with little silver flowers, in Morocco boots with high, iron-shod heels, capered about the room as smoothly as peahens and swishing like the wind; how young women in tall headdresses, the upper part made all of gold brocade, with a small cutout behind and a golden kerchief peeking from it, with two little peaks of the finest black astrakhan, one pointing backward and the other forward, in blue jackets of the best silk with red flaps, stepped out imposingly one by one, arms akimbo, and rhythmically stamped away at the gopak.
Excerpt from “St. John’s Eve” (1830) by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
sing o muse…
Of Gogol’s “Ukrainian Tales,” my personal favourite is “The Terrible Vengeance”—although on another day I just as well might claim the hilarious, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich;” on another, the heart-warming, “Old World Landowners.”
The strange plot of “The Terrible Vengeance” revolves around a sorcerer—the Antichrist in disguise—who attempts to marry his daughter, Katerina, and the Cossack hero, Danilo, who valiantly attempts to defend her from the fiend (given the gender dynamics of his deeply traditional culture, and the age in which he lived and wrote, female characters are all-too-often mere set dressing or plot devices in Gogol’s work).
In this tale, however, things don’t end quite so happily. For anyone.
Danilo dies, shot by the sorcerer; Katerina also dies, stabbed by the sorcerer; the sorcerer… escapes?—but not for long! His ultimate fate is so grim (and awesome!) that it’s worth reading for yourself in full:
And now he felt no fear, he felt nothing. Everything seemed somehow vague to him. There was a ringing in his ears and in his head, as from drunkenness; and everything before his eyes appeared covered with cobwebs. Leaping on his horse, he headed straight for Kanev, thinking to go from there through Cherkassy to the Tartars, right to the Crimea, himself not knowing why. He rode for one day, for another, but there was no Kanev. It was the right road; it should have been here long ago, but Kanev was nowhere to be seen. Church tops gleamed in the distance. But that was not Kanev, it was Shumsk. The sorcerer was astonished to see that he had gone in a completely different direction. He urged his horse back to Kiev, and a day later a city appeared—not Kiev but Galich, a city still further from Kiev than Shumsk, and not far now from the Hungarians. Not knowing what to do, he turned his horse back again, but again felt he was going ever further in the contrary direction. No man in the world could tell what was in the sorcerer’s soul; and if anyone had looked into it and seen what went on there, he would not have slept the whole night long and would never have laughed again. It was not anger, or fear, or wicked vexation. There is no word in the world that could name it. He was burnt, scorched, he would have trampled the whole world under his horse’s hooves, or taken the whole country from Kiev to Galich, its people and all, and drowned it in the Black Sea. But it was not from anger that he would have done so; no, he did not know why himself. He shuddered all over when just ahead of him the Carpathian Mountains appeared, and tall Krivan, its crown covered with a gray cloud as with a cap; and his horse raced on and was already roaming in the mountains. All at once the clouds cleared, and before him in terrible majesty appeared the rider… The sorcerer tries to stop, he pulls hard on the reins; the horse whinnies wildly, tossing its mane and racing toward the knight. Now the sorcerer fancies that everything in him is frozen, that the motionless rider stirs and all at once opens his eyes; he sees the sorcerer racing toward him and laughs. Like thunder the wild laughter spilled over the mountains and rang in the sorcerer’s heart, shaking everything within it. He fancied someone strong got into him and went about inside him, hammering on his heart and nerves… so terribly did this laughter resound in him!
The rider seized the sorcerer with a terrible hand and lifted him up in the air. Instantly the sorcerer died and opened his eyes after death. But he was now a dead man and had the gaze of a dead man. Neither the living nor the resurrected have such a terrible gaze. He rolled his dead eyes in all directions and saw dead men rising from Kiev, from the land of Galicia, and from the Carpathians, their faces as like his as two drops of water.Pale, pale, one taller than another, one bonier than another, they stood around the rider, who held this terrible plunder in his hand. The knight laughed once more and threw him down into the abyss. And all the dead man leaped down into the abyss, picked the dead man up, and sank their teeth into him. yet another, taller than all of them, more terrible than all of them, wanted to rise out of the earth; but he could not, he had not the strength to do it, so great had he grown in the ground; and if he had done it, he would have overturned the Carpathians, the Seven cities, and the land of the Turks; he stirred just slightly, and the quaking from it went all over the world. And many houses fell. And many people were crushed.
A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water. It is the dead men gnawing the dead man, in the abyss without issue, which no man has ever seen, fearing to pass near it. It happens not seldom in the world that the earth shakes from one end to the other: learned people say it is because somewhere by the sea there is a mountain out of which flames burst and burning rivers flow. But the old men who live in Hungary and the land of Galicia know better and say that the art shakes because there is a dead man grown great and huge in it who wants to rise.
Excerpt from “The Terrible Vengeance” (1832) by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Paver and Larissa Volokhonsky, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
If “The Night Before Christmas” seems like a charming folk tale, then “The Terrible Vengeance” feels like an epic tragedy ripped straight from the ancient world—possessed of a classical vibe in the literal sense. The sombre tone lends gravity to proceedings that are literally biblical in proportion. “The Terrible Vengeance” is like the mutant offspring of Milton and Homer and Dante. (Not quite sure how the logistics of that would work, but moving right along…)
Scholars have noted that while “The Terrible Vengeance” contains folkloric elements, and Gogol frames the story as if he is retelling an ancient legend he had once heard, the story is believed to be a creation of his own incredible imagination.
Gogol wrote with effortless originality, whether that was reflected by the tale itself, or in how it is presented.
“could this, too, have been a dream?”
All of the stories I’ve discussed so far, including “The Portrait,” were published within the first five years of Gogol’s career, between the years 1831 and 1835.
The immediacy of his success speaks, I think, to the profundity of his genius. So pertinent was his art, so severe was his talent, that he simply would not—could not—be denied.
In addition to the “Ukrainian Tales,” Gogol also saw most of what would be considered his “Petersburg Tales” published in this same era. He wrote a few dramatic plays in the mid-1830s as well, with his 1836 satire The Government Inspector drawing particularly effusive praise.
Gogol was often dismayed by the public’s reaction to his parodies. His intent was usually to bolster the Russian state and church—to strengthen them through intelligent criticism—but he was sometimes viewed and cast as a bitter satirist. The effects of his art disturbed him, so powerful were his creations, so frightening was their ability to change and affect the world.
Gogol left Russia in 1836 and spent most of the rest of his life in Italy (which is worth remembering for next week, by the way).
Unfortunately, this also brings us to the end of Gogol’s creative output, that is, with one huge exception: his exceptional novel, Dead Souls (1841). (But I won’t say anything more about Dead Souls right now because we’ll certainly be unspooling it at some point in the future).
Consider that for a second.
A young man in his early and mid-twenties, produced enough great art in just a few years to become a canonized saint of Russian literature and a lauded writer the world over.
I’ll confess; it doesn’t take me the full second to feel envious of this accomplishment.
Gogol returned to Russia in 1841 to oversee the publication and release of Dead Souls and would return again in 1848 to spend his last years in fear and madness.
As his stories reveal, Gogol was a committed Orthodox Christian, for much of his life, and I’m sure Gogol felt that his faith was a positive force, however, his religious proclivities seem to have suffocated his creative output in what would turn out to be his later years. It also appears to have resulted in his demise (though Russian men, as a demographic, have never been long-lived).
Under the auspices of a particularly irresponsible religious teacher, who convinced him that evil was manifest throughout the world, and even embedded within his art, Gogol destroyed invaluable manuscripts(!!) and eschewed new compositions in his final years. His grip on sanity began to slip as he became increasingly extreme in his religious practice.
Although if I truly and honestly believed in the existence of Evil (with a capital “e”), and its pervasive totality, I’d probably go crazy, too.
Unable to cope with his overwhelming fear of eternal damnation in Hell (ah, yes, that old traumatic chestnut), Gogol adopted an even more austere lifestyle in a misguided attempt to achieve spiritual purity that led to him falling ill. He died in 1852, a month shy of his 43rd birthday. (The circumstances of Gogol’s death are also worth keeping in mind for next week).
Gogol’s writing career was as brief as it was spectacular.
If nothing else, I hope this thread did him some semblance of justice to that, though I certainly feel unworthy of such a task.
And that’s all I have! There’s no great concluding point this week, but it’s been fun following these related threads over the last few weeks. And we’ll continue to do that next week when we examine one of Gogol’s best short stories, “The Portrait.” It’s creepy and inspiring stuff all at the same time—I’m excited to share it with you all.
Until then, be well, and thanks for reading!
bibliography
Gogol, Nikolai. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Translated by Richard Paver and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 1998.