A clerk is being tormented by his colleagues. Paper is showered over his head; his arm is jogged so that he cannot copy. And he says the only thing he says in the whole story on his own behalf:
"Leave me alone, why do you torment me?"
One of the young men laughing at him stops. Gogol follows him out of the room and into the rest of his life:
And there was something strange about his words, and about the tone of voice in which they were spoken.... And for a long time after that, in times of great merriment, he would recall this downbent clerk with a receding hairline and his penetrating words: "Leave me alone, why do you torment me?" and in these words he could hear another message: "I am your brother." At these moments the poor young man would cover his face with his hands. Many a time during his life did he shudder at the sight of man's cruelty to man, at the vicious coarseness concealed behind a refined, educated and civilized veneer and, Lord! even in those whom the world has recognized as noble and honest.
I am your brother. That paragraph, written around 1840, is the seed of a century of Russian literature. Out of it came the whole "natural school", the clerks and copyists and downtrodden petty officials of the next fifty years, and the critical tradition — Belinsky, then Chernyshevsky, then Dobrolyubov — that made literature the only available opposition in a country with no parliament and no press.
It is also why this volume exists, and why its foreword has a hole in it.
This is A Selection, issued by Progress in the Russian Classics Series in 1980, newly translated by Christopher English — with The Government Inspector done jointly by English and Gordon McDougall — and illustrations compiled by Nina Glazunova. It is generously chosen: two tales from Mirgorod — "Old-World Landowners" and the story of the two Ivans — five of the St Petersburg stories, including "Nevsky Prospekt", "The Nose", "The Greatcoat" and "Diary of a Madman", and the whole of The Government Inspector.
English's translation is the best in this series. It is genuinely funny, which almost no Gogol translation is, and it keeps the narrator's habit of falling over his own sentences. The Mayor's tirade in the last act comes into English with its spit intact.
The play also carries a short "Note from the Translators", and it is the most engaging piece of apparatus in the volume — not least because it is about a problem rather than about Gogol's greatness. Gogol's names are jokes, and the translators have left them in Russian:
It has been thought advisable to keep the text of the published version of The Government Inspector as close as possible to the original, and thus no attempt has been made here to translate the names, with the inevitable loss of a certain amount of specifically Gogolian, but untranslatable, humour.
Then they tell you what you are missing, because this translation had another life. An adapted version was performed by the Oxford Playhouse Company in 1975, and on that stage the names were Englished. The note lists them: Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin became Slapkin-Dashkin; the Warden of Charities Zemlyanika became Strawberry; the Inspector of Schools Khlopov became Flogov; the Postmaster Shpyokin, who reads other people's letters, became Snoopin; the locksmith's wife Poshlyopkina became Slapcheekina; and Khlestakov's literary friend Tryapichkin became Trashkin.
A Progress Publishers translation that played the Oxford Playhouse is not what one expects to find in this series, and the fact that the house printed the English stage names in a Moscow edition — knowing they were better jokes than its own text could carry — is a small piece of honesty worth recording.
The jacket assembles three witnesses. Pushkin thought highly of Gogol. Turgenev called him a man "whose name stands for an entire epoch in the history of our literature". And, given the most space, Chernyshevsky — identified as "the leader of Russian revolutionary democracy":
"It is a long time since the world knew a writer," wrote the leader of Russian revolutionary democracy, writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, "who was of such vital importance to his nation as Gogol is to Russia... He showed us what sort of people we are, what we lack, to what we should aspire, what we should abhor and what we should love."
Inside, a foreword of just under three thousand words by Professor Sergei Mashinsky, Doctor of Philology, a real Gogol scholar. It is a decent essay. It places Gogol in the line of Russian satire "from Kantemir to Fonvizin, via Griboyedov and Gogol to Shchedrin and Chekhov", it is good on the St Petersburg stories, and it opens by quoting Belinsky on Russian writers as society's "only leaders, protectors and deliverers from Russian autocracy".
Belinsky appears three times in Mashinsky's foreword. Every appearance is praise of Gogol. He hails Gogol as "one of the great leaders" of Russia "on the path of consciousness, development, progress", and as "Russia's first writer and the leading light in modern Russian literature".
Now the count that matters. In those 2,976 words the following do not appear: Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends; the word "religious"; the word "crisis"; the word "reactionary"; the word "letter"; and any mention of Gogol burning the second part of Dead Souls.
In January 1847 Gogol published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. It is a book of religious and political instruction in which he defended serfdom, upheld autocracy and the Orthodox Church, and advised landowners on keeping their peasants illiterate, pious and obedient. It appalled almost everyone who had admired him.
On 15 July of that year, from Salzbrunn in Silesia, dying of consumption, Vissarion Belinsky wrote him a letter. It is the most famous document in nineteenth-century Russian criticism, and the sentence everyone knows is this:
"Proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and Stygian darkness, panegyrist of Tartar morals — what are you about!"
The letter could not be printed in Russia. It circulated in manuscript for decades and became a founding text of the revolutionary intelligentsia. In 1849 Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death — reprieved on the scaffold, and sent to Siberia — for, among other things, reading it aloud to the Petrashevsky circle.
Gogol never recovered. He spent his last years under the direction of a confessor, burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls, refused food, and died in 1852.
None of this is in the volume you are holding.
We are not complaining that a short foreword is incomplete. We are pointing at the specific shape of what has been left out, because it is the shape of an argument.
The Russian Classics Series rests on a claim, and it is a defensible one: that the great nineteenth-century writers, whatever their own politics, exposed the society that produced them so thoroughly that the revolution can claim them as ancestors. Engels made the case for Balzac; the preface to this series' Turgenev volume makes it explicitly. For Gogol the claim is easier than for anyone, because Belinsky and Chernyshevsky made it at the time, and because "I am your brother" is on the page.
But the Gogol case is also where the claim runs into its hardest test, and the test has a date on it. The man who wrote that paragraph went on, seven years later, to publish a defence of serfdom — and the critic the jacket calls "the leader of Russian revolutionary democracy" did not respond by explaining that the work was greater than the man. He responded by calling him a proponent of the knout.
That is the interesting thing, and it is a Marxist thing. The Engels argument says an artist's truthful eye can defeat his own politics. Belinsky's letter says that when the artist then turns round and preaches the knout, you say so, loudly, and the earlier work does not buy him an exemption. Both are true, and holding both is the whole difficulty of reading a class's literature against that class.
A foreword that quotes Belinsky three times in praise, and never once mentions that Belinsky's most famous act was a denunciation of this author, has not resolved that difficulty. It has removed it. The reader is given the continuity — Gogol to Belinsky to Chernyshevsky to the revolution — as a smooth line, when in fact the line is a quarrel.
What survives all this is that Gogol is the funniest writer in Russian and one of the strangest in any language.
"The Nose" is about a nose that leaves its owner's face, is discovered in a loaf of bread, acquires the rank of state councillor, and is seen about town in a uniform. Nothing in it is explained; the narrator ends by complaining that such things do happen, rarely, but they do. "Diary of a Madman" is the record of a clerk's disintegration through dated entries that stop being dated. "Nevsky Prospekt" opens with a prose-poem to a street and ends with two ruined lives, and then tells you the street is lying to you.
And "The Greatcoat" is the story of a man whose entire inner life is the copying of documents — who loves certain letters of the alphabet — and who, having saved for a coat, is robbed of it and dies, and returns as a ghost to take coats off the shoulders of important persons. Gogol's contemporaries read it as pity. Later readers noticed the ghost is also a joke, and that Akaky Akakievich's ambitions never rise above outerwear. Both readings are correct, which is the trouble with Gogol and the reason he does not stay put.
The volume opens with "Old-World Landowners", and it is worth saying what it does, because it is the story most often patronised.
Two elderly Ukrainian gentry, Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna, live in a small warm house and do nothing at all except eat and love one another. Gogol spends pages on their stoves, their preserves, their pickled mushrooms. A modern reader waits for the satire on parasitism, and it does not come — or rather it comes, and then something else arrives that is much larger. Pulcheria Ivanovna dies. And Afanasy Ivanovich, years later, hears her voice calling him from the garden:
He entirely surrendered to the conviction that this was Pulcheria Ivanovna calling him; he surrendered with the submission of an obedient child, withering away, guttering and melting like a candle, and finally snuffing out like the miserable flame of a candle which has burnt itself to nothing. "Lay me to rest beside Pulcheria Ivanovna" — this was all he had to say before he passed away.
Then, in the next paragraph, the estate is looted by the bailiff in collusion with the headman, and the house stands empty.
Both things are true and Gogol puts them side by side without a joining word: the deepest love in the book belongs to two useless people whose way of life was sustained by serfs, and it dissolves into theft within a page of their deaths. Mashinsky's foreword handles this well — it notes that Gogol "seems to be sorry for these two old dears, bound together by their patriarchal feelings, their good nature, naiveté and helplessness". That is exactly right, and it is the kind of double vision the rest of the foreword's framework cannot quite accommodate.
Two of the endings in this selection deserve to be read before anything else in it.
The story of the two Ivans is a hundred pages about a quarrel between neighbours over the word "gander" and a brown sow that eats a legal petition. It is very funny for a long time, and then Gogol returns years later to find both men grey, still litigating, each certain the case will be decided tomorrow, and he leaves on this:
"What a dreary world we live in, gentlemen!"
Mashinsky quotes that line in his foreword and reads it, rightly, as the turn from humour to "undisguised satire". What he does not say is that the sentence is not satire at all by the time you reach it. It is the author giving up on his own joke.
And then "Diary of a Madman", which ends with the clerk Poprishchin — now convinced he is the King of Spain, being beaten in an asylum he believes to be the Spanish court — breaking into the most beautiful passage Gogol ever wrote:
give me a troika with three horses as fast as the wind! Climb aboard, coachman, ring, my bells ... and bear me hence from this world! Further and further still, so that nothing more can be seen of it, not a thing! Look at the sky unfurling there before me; a star twinkles in the distance; the forest streaks by with its dark trees and silver moon; a grey mist wreathes beneath the horses' feet ... on the one side you see the sea, on the other Italy; now Russian cottages come into sight. Is that not my house I can dimly see in the distance? Is that my mother sitting by the window? Mummy, save your poor son! shed a tear on his poor battered head and look how they are tormenting him! press your orphan boy to your breast! there is no place for him on earth! he is persecuted! — Mummy! have pity on your sick little child!...
A madman in restraints cries out for his mother, and for a page and a half Gogol lends him the full lyric resources of Russian prose. Then, in the same breath, without a paragraph break, the last line of the story:
But do you know that the king of France has a wart bang under his nose?
That is Gogol entire, and no critical tradition has ever fully digested it. The pity is real; the troika is real; the wart is real. He will not let you keep the tears without the absurdity, and he will not let you laugh without the asylum. Anyone who has decided in advance what Gogol is for — whether that is exposing the tyranny of the landowning class or affirming the exalted principles of humanism — has to get past that wart, and nobody has.
The Government Inspector closes the volume, and it contains the moment where the whole of Gogol's method turns to face the audience. The Mayor, having been swindled by a nobody he mistook for an inspector, and knowing that a writer will make a comedy of it, rounds on the theatre:
"Take no notice of rank, or reputation, anything for a cheap laugh and a snigger in the stalls! What are you laughing at? You're laughing at yourselves, that's what!... I'd like to get my hands on those scribblers! Penpushers! Dirty liberals! Grass-snakes!"
A corrupt official in an 1836 comedy tells the audience they are laughing at themselves, and calls the author's allies dirty liberals. Tsar Nicholas I attended the first night and is said to have enjoyed it. Nothing in Gogol is ever quite on one side.
All of it, and the quarrel too.
Read the selection for the reason Belinsky first read it — because a clerk saying "Leave me alone, why do you torment me?" did more to make cruelty visible than any pamphlet of the period. Read The Government Inspector for the pleasure of watching a whole provincial administration exposed by its own panic.
And read Mashinsky's foreword with the missing seven years restored. He ends by saying that Gogol's works "affirm the exalted principles of humanism", that they are "a pure font of poetry", and that "drinking of it the reader absorbs noble moral ideas and in the process he too becomes a purer and better person". That is not false. It is, though, the tone of a man writing about a saint, and Gogol was not one. He was a frightened religious reactionary who happened to possess the most subversive comic gift in Europe, and the argument about what to do with that fact has been running since 1847.
This series would rather you had the argument than the sainthood.