Devil dreams
Kathy O'Shaughnessy
Russian 19th-Century Gothic Tales Edited by Valeria Korovin (Central Books £8.95)
Round the time Mary Shelley was .scribbling Frankenstein in Switzer- land, long after Byron and Shelley had gone to bed, the 'gothic tale', like an international ghost, made its way to Rus- sia. The idea is at first incongruous. It is rather as if in the middle of a realistic 19th-century hunting scene a quaint but ugly gargoyle appeared. But then perhaps this makes good sense, for in England eerie castles, gloomy forests and the howl of the supernatural came to fictive life when the drawing-room was at its most sedately civilised; in, of all decorous centuries, the 18th. It surfaced in Russia about 50 years later.
Russian 19th-Century Gothic Tales is a collection of 26 stories written mostly by lesser known Russian authors, but includ- ing contributions from Gogol, Pushkin and Lermontov. These last far surpass the rest, but many are enjoyable, a few very good. They are certainly different. The hero no longer has a visible or human enemy with whom, if necessary, he can fight a duel. More often than not the enemy is the devil, neither human nor quite visible: But I stood for a long while, motionless, staring at the mirror-like surface of the water in which I seemed to discern the face of my enemy in the pale moonlight.
It is worth pointing out that much of these stories' appeal lies with the elusive enemy who, though alien, is yet more closely linked to the hero than any human antagonist. Rather, the devil tends to embody the bad aspects of the selfsame hero. The hero is thus in the difficult situation of trying to escape from an enemy who seems familiar, (possibly reminding him of himself, shades of the doppelgan- ger) and is linked with his own vices of greed, lust and so forth.
In the cruder tales, good and bad pola- rise with mediaeval clarity, witches go up the chimney, and if you sell your soul for money you can't have love. If, on the other hand, you renounce money, you can have both. En masse, the authors seem oblivious to any irony here. This is certainly the case in Antony Pogorelsky's 'The Lafertovo Poppy-Cake Seller', where the heroine, Masha, has an evil aunt who wishes her to marry Satan. She does not want to, not least because she has seen Satan metamor- phosise from a black cat into a very unappealing young man. The aunt then dies, and bequeaths her treasure to Masha if she marries Satan. Masha's mother is terribly greedy and wishes her daughter to be rich at all costs. Eventually, virtue triumphs as Masha renounces the money for love, and ends up with both.
Earlier on in the tale, the mother re- ceives a severe fright at the aunt's funeral, in a typically Russian, ungothic moment: Later she confessed secretly to Masha that she thought the dead woman had opened her mouth and tried to grab her by the nose.
This literal detail is delightfully unghost- ly and ridiculous. It reminds one of Gogol's absurdity. And sure enough, the editor has decided to include Gogol's ungothic tale, The Nose'. True, it is a story about a disembodied nose, but that doesn't mean it is uncanny, or to do with the supernatural. By and large, the gothic mode doesn't like the ridiculous. In one unusually European tale a hero says as much. He is in the Byronic mode, fashionably self- destructive: 'There was about my love much that was strange, weird, even savage; I was prepared to be misunderstood, but never to be ridiculous.'
And in fact, one has the feeling that this genre did not suit Russian writers particu- larly well. There is an abrupt freshness and comedy about the detail quoted above, for example, that suggests an author more at home with the locally imaginable than the stylised horrors of the conventional gothic tale.
The best writers make their characters breathe with some kind of psychological life within those conventions. They can be used with great subtlety and sophistication. Pushkin does this superbly well in both `The Undertaker' and the famous 'Queen of Spades'. This may be a parody on one level, yet it masters the genre beautifully even as it parodies. The main character, Hermann, is deluded that a magic succes- sion of cards, three, seven, ace, is found to win money. Pushkin brings this delusion gloriously close to realisation by letting Hermann win with the three and the seven. The reader is equally seduced by the idea of talismanic magic, strangely significant numbers. Finally the queen of spades turns up instead of the ace, to Hermann's infinite horror. He is in fact mad.
Two ways in which authors can permit impossible or magical events to happen, without openly writing non-realistic fic- tion, are by using dream or madness. One is a departure from reality, or conscious- ness, the other from reason. It seems unremarkable that writers should have wished to represent human behaviour and events that fell outside the boundaries of normality, and the gothic genre offered ample scope for this, even if its conven- tions were played at (ie it's all a dream) rather than fully enacted. 'Little by little', says the hero of 'The Terrible Fortune Teller', in a conclusion typical of many of these stories, 'I realised that what I had seen had been nothing but a dream, a terrible, ominous dream'. He then con- tinues, untypically but articulately: `So it was a dream', you will say almost with displeasure. Friends, friends! Surely you are not so degenerate as to be disappointed that this did not really happen? . . . if you have not suffered with me, if you have not felt
what I felt so acutely, if you have 0 experienced what I experienced in .111Y dream, that is the fault of my story-tellingi All this existed for me, existed horribly, it were real.
At this point the reader wakes up t°°' and realises, first, that it's only a story( very gripping one), and second, that, as the author says, the dream may not be real, but the dreamer's state of mind certainlY is. And this is exactly what the gothic tale was so good at dramatising. I must just add that this collection includes a fascinating fragment, an nn7 finished story by Lermontov written Just before his death called `Stuss', and that this, is a beautifully produced book, illustrated and with very heavy paper.
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