Gogol’s Laugh

Moller painted him in Rome in the early 1840s for his mother: a pale face, a high collar, the look of a man who has already heard himself imitated. The Tretyakov holds a replica. It is a quieter likeness than the later lithographs, which make him a national type. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s life calls him a Ukrainian-born humorist, dramatist and novelist whose works, written in Russian, changed the direction of the literature. The sentence is large. The path underneath it runs from a farm tale told as if by a beekeeper to a poem in prose about buying the names of the dead, and then to a stove.

He was born on 19 March 1809, 31 March New Style, at Sorochintsy near Poltava, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Ukraine. Britannica is careful about the geography and about the language of the books. The early stories drink from Ukrainian folklore, Cossack legend, and the colour of a countryside he had actually seen. The later Petersburg tales and the great comedy drink from offices, inns, and the fear of an inspector. Both halves are Gogol. To split them into a patriotic contest is to miss how a writer works: he takes the voices he has, and he makes a world that will not sit still.

His father wrote plays. His mother was devout. He was not a brilliant schoolboy at Nizhyn, but he could mimic anyone in the room, a talent the 1911 Britannica still mentions as the seed of the actor he briefly tried to become. In 1828 he went to St Petersburg with the usual young man’s freight: a poem, a hope of the stage, a wish to be seen. The stage refused him. The poem Hans Küchelgarten, published under a thin mask, was ridiculed. He bought the copies he could find and burned them in a hired room at an inn. It is the first fire in the biography. It will not be the last. Failure, for him, was never only private. It had to be made into a scene.

The lithograph is later and public. The young man in Petersburg was neither. He clerked, taught history without much success, and then found the voice that made the capital listen. Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32), told as if by Rudy Panko the beekeeper, gave Russian readers a South they had wanted without knowing the names: fairs, ghosts, a night before Christmas, laughter that is not yet bitter. Pushkin noticed. The acquaintance matters because Gogol needed, at the start, a blessing from the language’s centre. He also needed to leave the blessing behind. The Dikanka colour is not a costume he wore forever. It is the first instrument. The second is colder.

Arabesques and Mirgorod followed. Taras Bulba is the Cossack tale that later centuries would argue over as history; it is a romance of brotherhood and slaughter, not a chronicle. Beside it sit quieter rooms: the old-world landowners who live as if time had stopped in a country house, and the first sketches of clerks whose lives are a salary and a coat. Britannica, in the literature essay, puts “The Nose” (1836) among the finest nonsense in any language: a barber finds a nose in a loaf, a major finds his face smooth, the nose rides about Petersburg in uniform, and no system of explanation will hold. The story is not an allegory waiting for a key. It is what happens when the city’s order is shown a fact it cannot file.

“Diary of a Madman” (1835) is the other short door into that strangeness. A clerk keeps a journal, rises through imagined Spanish royalty, and ends by asking his mother to take away the pain in his head. Pathos and mockery, Britannica’s literature essay says of this tale and of “The Overcoat,” mix in an amazing display. The joke is never only on the clerk. It is on a city that has no other language for a man except rank. Old-World Landowners, in Mirgorod, is the opposite temperature: a couple who live on dumplings and affection until a cat, a death, and time undo the house. Gogol can do tenderness. He simply will not let it remain unthreatened.

The same years produced The Inspector General, or Revizor, staged in the spring of 1836. A penniless traveller, Khlestakov, is taken for an inspector from St Petersburg. The town — governor, judge, postmaster, charities that starve the sick — pours bribes and daughters toward him. He accepts, writes a mocking letter, and leaves. A real inspector is then announced. The last scene is silence. Gogol later wrote, in a passage Thomas Seltzer printed with the play, that Pushkin had taught him to look seriously at laughter, and that in this comedy he meant to gather “all the bad in Russia I then knew into one heap” and have one big laugh over it. Permission to stage it, under Nicholas I’s censorship, came through Zhukovsky and, the same introduction records, the emperor’s own intercession. Nicholas is said to have remarked that everybody got it, and he most of all. Treat the remark as a later story about a first night. The play does not need it. The trap is already on the page.

What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself, oh you!

Seltzer’s governor turns on the audience as well as on himself. The line is a revision Gogol added so that the laugh would not stay safely in the stalls. Russian comedy after him never quite recovered the right to be only funny. The officials are fools, but they are the country’s ordinary machinery. A visitor who knows nothing of the Nikolaevan civil service can still feel the heat: the wish to be taken for someone, the terror of being seen. Khlestakov is not a clever rogue. He is a blank the town writes on. That is crueller than a villain with a plan.

After the premiere Gogol went abroad. He spent long stretches in Italy, especially Rome, and wrote much of Dead Souls there. Distance, for this writer, was not escape from Russia. It was a way to see the road. The first part appeared in 1842 and is subtitled a poem, a word that still startles readers who come for a novel. Pavel Chichikov travels the provinces buying “dead souls”: serfs who have died since the last census but still count, on paper, as property that can be mortgaged. The scheme is a ruse. The book is a gallery. Manilov’s syrupy dreams, Korobochka’s fear of being cheated, Nozdryov’s chaos, Sobakevich’s brute inventory, Plyushkin’s decay — each estate is a way of being dead while the body is still moving.

The 1842 title page is plain. The book is not. Britannica calls Dead Souls a foundation of later realism and also a work of comic genius that will not stay inside realism’s house. Chichikov is polite, plump, and empty in a new way: not a Byronic rebel, not a folk devil, but a man whose soul is a transaction. The landowners he visits are funnier and more frightening than he is, because they have settled into their distortions. Russian criticism agreed, the 1911 Britannica notes, on the force of these pictures even when it argued about the author’s aim. From a French version an English reader can taste the plot. The sentences themselves — the lists, the sudden lyric, the narrator who cannot stop adding one more detail — have to be met in Russian or in a translation that is not in a hurry.

Alexander Agin drew the poem in the 1840s; Evstafy Bernardsky cut the wood. Gogol, writing from Italy, refused to have such plates bound into a new edition. He called them a confectioner’s trick. The drawings went out on their own, seventy-two of them before the project stalled, and later collectors finished the hundred. Use Agin as a contemporary eye, not as Gogol’s approved face of the book. Chichikov in a tight coat, a provincial room, a handshake that is already a lie: the illustration is social weather. The prose is weather plus a hymn that should not be there and is.

For what Russian does not love to drive fast? Which of us does not at times yearn to give his horses their head, and to let them go, and to cry, “To the Devil with the world!”?

Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells.

The troika passage sits at the end of the first part, after a swindler’s road. Gogol turns from Chichikov’s britzka to the country itself, a vehicle no German coachman drives, and asks where it is going. Hogarth’s English keeps the breathlessness. The Russian is more famous still: «Русь, куда ж несёшься ты?» Nations have quoted it as prophecy, as boast, as dread. The honest reading is the one the book earns: a lyric that refuses to explain the gallery of deadness it has just walked through. The poem does not answer its own question. That is why it still moves. A closed moral would be smaller than the road.

The same year as the poem, 1842, brought “The Overcoat,” in some English books “The Cloak.” Britannica’s literature essay calls it probably the most influential Russian short story. Akaky Akakievich copies documents. His colleagues bait him. When they jolt his arm he says, in the public-domain English that has carried the tale for more than a century, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” A young clerk hears, in that voice, other words: “I am thy brother.” Akaky saves for a new coat, possesses it for a moment of pride, is robbed, is crushed by a Person of Consequence, and dies. Then the city has a ghost who snatches cloaks. Pathos and mockery share the page. The ghost is not a consolation. It is Gogol refusing to let the laugh be simple.

Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?

The 1840s drawing is almost a whisper beside the lithograph: profile, hair, a man who might be anyone’s cousin. Akaky is built from such unimportance. Later readers liked to say that Russian prose came out from under Gogol’s overcoat. The sentence is often hung on Dostoevsky. It is not securely his, and it is too neat. What is secure is the lineage Britannica and every history of the short story record: the “little man” as a figure who can carry a whole moral weather, and a Petersburg of stairwells and winter that Dostoevsky would heat until it burned. Gogol got there first, and he got there with a joke that hurts.

He tried to write a second part in which Chichikov would fall and be redeemed. The spiritual turn of the last years is not a secret add-on. It is the same hunger that made the comedy: a wish that laughter be for something. Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847) offered advice on faith and household order and dismayed the readers who had loved the heap of badness. In 1848 he went on a pilgrimage to Palestine. Britannica’s student account, following the standard life, has him wandering, then settling in Moscow under the influence of a severe priest. The second part of the poem would not come right. He fasted. He prayed. He was ill.

Repin painted the stove in 1909: Gogol, the servant, the papers taking fire. It is a legend in oil, more than half a century late. The fact underneath is smaller and worse. Shortly before his death he burned the manuscript of the second part. What survives of that continuation is fragment and report. He died in Moscow on 21 February 1852, 4 March New Style, worn down, the lives agree, by fasting and a mind that had turned against its own gift. He was forty-two. Pushkin had died at thirty-seven. The two deaths still sit beside each other in the schoolroom, which is a distortion and also a map: the language’s founder, and the man who taught the language to laugh at a clerk.

Petersburg in these books is not a postcard. It is a climate of ranks, bridges, and shops where a nose can rent a room in a uniform. “Nevsky Prospect” watches the avenue at dusk and refuses both the romantic woman and the safe moral. The city promises transformation and delivers a trick. Gogol had wanted to be an actor on that street. He became the man who could make the street itself perform. Later Dostoevsky would heat the same stairwells until they burned. Gogol’s Petersburg is colder and funnier. The cold is the art. You laugh, and then you notice that the laugh has nowhere kind to land.

Style is the other half of the path. He lists. He interrupts. He tells you a character’s name as if gossiping, then spends a page on a coat button. The 1911 Britannica, trying to explain him to English readers, said no one could fully know the humorist without the language and the society. That is still true, and it is not a closed door. A good translation keeps the lists and the sudden hymn. What it cannot always keep is the sense that the narrator has sat down beside you and will not stop adding one more impossible detail. That voice — half clerk, half bard — is why schoolchildren still meet him as funny and adults return to find him frightening.

The Dikanka nights still work if you want colour before the office. “Christmas Eve” is the one families still tell: a devil, a blacksmith, the empress’s slippers, a sky that behaves like a folk tale. Viy, in Mirgorod, is the student and the witch, a church at night, a horror that Gogol never fully explains. These are not the “real” Gogol as opposed to the later one. They are the same appetite for the impossible, before the impossible put on a civil-service uniform. Read one before The Nose and you will hear the kinship. A flying smith and a walking nose are cousins.

The creative path is not from “Ukrainian colour” to “Russian satire” as if one cancelled the other. It is from mimicry to a world that mimics back. Dikanka still shimmers if you want the night and the fair. The Nose is the short door into the strangeness. The Inspector General is the play to see or to read aloud, because the names want mouths. The Overcoat is the story after which ordinary cruelty is harder to enjoy. Dead Souls is the long road: start for Chichikov’s smile, stay for Plyushkin, and let the troika happen to you at the end without deciding too quickly what Russia is. Gogol is not a guide to a nation’s destiny. He is a writer who can make a coat, a nose, and a dead name on a list feel like the whole of a life.

Read him slowly enough to notice when the narrator becomes a gossip, then a poet, then a man who is suddenly sorry. That change of weather is the art. Turgenev’s later hunters, Dostoevsky’s clerks, even the quiet of Chekhov’s towns, all walk roads Gogol had already rutted. He remains odd. The oddness is the point. A literature that could only be noble would have been smaller. He made room for the ridiculous, and then he refused to let the ridiculous be merely safe. That is a harder gift than a hymn, and it lasts longer than a fire.