Talking of books
The comedy of a dead soul
Benny Green
Ever since Maurice Baring dubbed him "the greatest humorist of Russian literature" more than sixty years ago, there has been a tendency to regard Nikolai Gogol with a kind of uncertain approval, as though the fact that his jokes seem a bit peculiar is due to some lack in ourselves. For this reason I would think that Henri Troyat's life of Gogol might come as something of a surprise. One of Troyat's virtues is that his lives take on the contours of his subjects' best work, so that just as his life of Tolstoy has proportions as vast as those of War and Peace, a groundplart as grandiose, a theme as ambitious and a conflict almost as exciting, so • his life of Gogol turns out to be a farce as bitter as anything in Dead Souls or The Inspector-General. It is certainly true that Gogol was a humorist in the sense that he made people laugh. But his prose contains the sting of a scorpion, and the plains of his action are pitted with booby-traps and pitfalls for the reader's gentlemanly pretensions.
The orthodox tactic is to see Gogol as Baring did, as a kind of Ukrainian Dickens using the old Tsarist Empire as the stage for picaresque adventures on a Pickwickian scale of absurdity. And it is true that some of the Dickensian parallels are striking. After all, Dead Souls opens with a stranger arriving by coach at a wayside country inn. Then there is the same urge to dance a crazy irreverent fandango around the letter of the law, for the imposture on which the plot of Dead Souls is built could only have been conceived within the framework of just such a corrupt and decrepit bureaucratic superstructure as inspired Dickens, thirteen years later, to deride the Circumlocution Office. There is the same stewpot viscidity of the prose, the same interminable digressions, the same tendency of the respective illustrators to resort to caricature, the same use of humorous effects to surprise the reader; no more delightful shock awaits the newcomer to Gogol than that moment in Dead Souls when he suddenly springs the trap on Wordsworthian Romanticism with "No sooner had the town receded than both sides of the road began to provide the usual stuff and nonsense of descriptive writers".
But there was a self-loathing bubbling away inside Gogol which somehow got mixed up with the springs of laughter, and caused him to see the whole business of life as a squalid fraud. His Russia is a gross, grey place polluted by the stink of humanity, and one great virtue of Troyat's carefully researched book is the way it lights the contrast between the faintly ridiculous idealist of nineteen and the festering cynic of middle age. The effusions of extreme callow youth, fed on the dangerously inflammable fuel of Goethe, Chateaubriand and Pushkin, inspire young Gogol to write about a marble goddess whose "lightning glances seared the soul"; before the end the whole of humanity stares down its snout with a look of idiotic indifference on its swinish face, In his attempt to explain this frightful change, Troyat is very nearly reduced to despair at the banality of his own conclusions; Oedipus, he confesses, would appear to be getting in on the act yet again. But Gogol was obliged to endure the ultimate irony of seeing his finest satires misused. The actors and actresses who introduced that last word on functionolatry, The Inspector-General, had not the faintest idea what the play was about, ignored the author's advice, said all their lines wrong and mortified Gogol 's excessively conservative soul by getting him into hot water with the authorities.
And yet there was a kind of justice in it. Gogol was one of those strange men whose self-knowledge, profound as it might be, can never grasp the proposition that it is possible for the reactionary soul to be forever at war with the anarchic intelligence. It is said that Dickens was a revolutionary who would have been scandalised at the very suggestion, which provides yet another parallel with Gogol. Turgenev once noted in his diary that although Gogol was not the type of man he could admire, he was indisputably a great poet, and it is interesting that as early as 1836 the great poet is exhorting the cast of The Inspector-General, "The less the actor works for laughs, the funnier his part will be", or, to put it in the vernacular of another time and another place, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of being earnest. Troyat reveals, incidentally, that it was not Gogol who thought of the idea for the play, but Pushkin, whom Gogol pursued with the relentless passion of idolatory, and who supplied his young friend with the play's theme with what seems astounding generosity. Troyat, observant as always, notes that the German dramatist Kotzebue had already used the same idea, but that he "could not have inspired Gogol." I wonder why not; when Chichikov starts his crazy search for dead souls, he has not reached the end of the first chapter before encountering a playbill which "had nothing of great note in it; it announced a drama by Kotzebue". The wickedly casual malice of that dismissal suggests that Gogol knew perfectly well whom he was dealing with; Kotzebue had a great if inexplicable vogue across Europe at that time, and quite possibly Gogol was unfortunate enough, perhaps as a young man in St Petersburg, to have been exposed to Kotzebue's daft contrivances in The Little German Town and seized on the germ of The Inspector-General.
Once before, in his biography of Tolstoy, Troyat grappled with a subject whose life was an irreconciliable conflict between the lust for religious certitude and the intellectual fastidiousness which denies that certitude. Gogol too wrestled with the demons of doubt as well as those of orthodox Christian theology, and there is something hair-raisingly apposite in the circumstances of his death before he was fifty. In his last years Gogol fell under the influence of an odious and extremely stupid priest who induced him to burn the second, unpublished section of Dead Souls because of its secular overtones. Gogol fell ill and was delivered into the hands of a gang of doctors who bled him with leeches till there was nothing left. And so an artist who feared devils and all his life poked murderous fun at venality and incompetence, was finally murdered by a demonic priest and as well-meaning a bunch of medical duffers as ever slaughtered a patient. It sounds perhaps like one of Zola's less effective contrivances, or even something out of Kotzebue. But it was not. It was the final scene in the last tragi-comedy of Gogol's life. Troyat's book will surely give great pleasure, not just for itself, but for the way it will send readers scurrying to Dead Souls, one of the great derisive masterpieces of the world.
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