“But what was Ellis afraid of?” I thought. “Is it possible that even she isn’t immortal? That she is doomed to annihilation, to destruction? How can that be?”
A soft moan sounded close at hand. I turned my head. Two paces off lay, outstretched and motionless, a young woman in a white gown, with disheveled hair and bared shoulders. One arm was thrown up over her head, the other fell across her chest. Her eyes were closed, and a light scarlet froth foamed from between her compressed lips. Could that be Ellis? But Ellis was a phantom, and I saw before me a living woman. I approached her, bent down….
“Ellis? Is it you?” I exclaimed. Suddenly, with a slow quiver, the broad eyelids were lifted; dark, piercing eyes bored into me—and at that same moment her lips also clung to me, warm, moist, scented with blood … the soft arms wound themselves tightly around my neck, the full, burning breast was pressed convulsively to mine. Farewell! Farewell forever!—a fading voice said distinctly—and everything vanished.
I rose to my feet staggering like a drunken man, and passing my hands several times across my face, looked attentively about me. I was close to the highway, a couple of miles from my manor. The sun had already risen when I reached home.
All the following nights I waited—and not without terror, I admit—for the appearance of my phantom; but it didn’t visit me again. I even—once—went at twilight to the old oak; but nothing unusual happened there either. I didn’t grieve much, however, at the end of my strange friendship. I thought long and hard about this incomprehensible, almost inexplicable business and concluded that not only would science be unable to explain it, but that in folk-tales and legends there was nothing like it. What was Ellis, really? A vision, a wandering soul, an evil spirit, a sylph, a vampire? At times it seemed to me once more that Ellis was a woman whom I had formerly known, and I made strenuous efforts to recall where I had seen her…. There now—it sometimes seemed to me—I’m just about to remember it, in another moment…. In vain! Again everything would melt like a dream. Yes, I pondered a great deal, and as might be expected, I arrived at no conclusion. I couldn’t make up my mind to ask the advice or opinion of other people, because I was afraid of gaining the reputation of a madman. In the end I have cast aside all my speculations: to tell the truth, I’m in no mood for them. The Emancipation has taken place, with its division of crop land, and so forth, and so on, whereas my health has failed and my chest gives me pain, I am subject to insomnia, and have a cough. My body is withering away. My face is as yellow as the face of a corpse. The doctor declares that I have very little blood, and calls my malady by a Greek name—anaemia—and has ordered me to Gastein. But the Justice of the Peace tells me that he won’t be able to make the peasants “toe the line” without me….
So you see how things are with me now!
But what of those keen, piercingly-clear sounds—the sounds of a harmonium—which I hear as soon as anyone begins to speak to me about death? They grow ever louder and more piercing…. And why do I shudder at the mere thought of annihilation?
Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood; revised by A.L. and M.K.
Senilia: Poems in Prose
1. COUNTRYSIDE VILLAGE.
Last day of June; Russia all around for a thousand versts—my native land.
The seamless blue of the entire sky; a single cloudlet neither floating nor melting. Absolute stillness and gentle warmth, air like fresh milk! Larks peal from on high; curved-neck doves coo; swallows hover in silence; horses quietly snort and chew; dogs do not bark and stand still, wagging their tails.
It smells of smoke and grass—a bit of tar—and a bit of leather. Hemp-fields are in full growth and give off their strong but pleasant smell.
A deep, but gently sloping ravine. Down its sides are several rows of top-heavy broom, splintered at their base. Through ravine runs a stream; small pebbles on its bed are atremble through the shimmer. Far away, at the vanishing point of the earth and the sky, lies the bluish thread of a great river.
Along one side of the ravine—neat barns, grain cribs with close-fitting doors, on the other—half a dozen pine huts with shake roofs. Atop each roof the tall stave of a starling-roost, on every porch roof a short-maned horse in cast iron. The wavy window glass gives off rainbow colors. Baskets with bouquets of painted daisys on the shutters. In front of each hut proudly stands a well-made bench. On the earthworks the cats have curled up, pricking up their transparent ears; behind the tall thresholds the dark storerooms beckon.
I am lying at the very edge of the ravine on an outspread horse blanket; all around are great heaps of new mown hay whose fragrance is overwhelming. The shrewd owners have strewn the hay in front of their huts: let it bake out a little, and then into the barn! That’ll make it good to sleep on!
The curly heads of children poke out of each heap: cockaded chickens search the hay for moths and bugs; a white-muzzled pup rolls around in the tangled stalks.
Tow-headed lads, in clean tunics belted low, in heavy top boots, exchange spirited remarks while leaning on an unharnessed cart—and scoff.
A moon-faced girl looks out of a window; she’s laughing partly at their words, partly at the antics of the youngsters playing in the piles of hay.
Another girl, with strong arms, is hauling a large wet bucket from the well … The bucket trembles and sways on its rope, spilling out long fiery drops.
Before me stands the old farm-wife in a new checkered apron and new slippers.
A strand of large blown-glass beads are wound around her thin swarthy neck; her grey head is covered with a yellow scarf with red dots; it has slipped down over her dim eyes.
But those old eyes smile cordially; her wrinkled face smiles. After all the old lady is in her seventh decade … one can see even now: she was a beauty in her day! On the outspread weatherbeaten fingers of her right hand she balances a jug of unskimmed milk, fresh from the cool cellar; the sides of the jug are covered with beads of dew, like jewels. On the palm of her left hand the old lady brings me a large piece of still-warm bread, as if saying: “Here, eat in good health, dear visiting traveller!”
Suddenly the cock crows, restlessly flapping his wings: unhurrriedly, the stalled calf lows in answer.
“O what a rich yield of oats it’ll be!” I hear the voice of my coachman.
O the bliss, peace and plenitude of a free Russian village! So still, yet so abundant!
And the thought comes to me: what need do we have for the cross on the cupola of St. Sophia in the City of Kings—Constantinople, and everything else we strive for—we city folk?
February, 1878
2. NESSUN MAGGIOR DOLORE.
(There is no greater grief)
The azure of skies, the weightless down of clouds, aroma of flowers, sweet sounds of a young voice, translucent splendor of great works of art, the smile of happiness on a lovely woman’s face and those magic eyes … what for, what is all this for?
A spoon of a horrid, useless medication every two hours—that’s what is really needed.
June, 1882
Translated by A.L. and M. K.
A3. Arabesque and Bizzare Universes of Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852)
“Take the winter scene. It’s only fifteen rubles!
The frame alone is worth more than that.”
From the final version of The Portrait
N. V. GOGOL, established as a writer well before Lermontov was out of his teens, is regarded in Russia as second in literary importance only to Pushkin. If the latter’s writings are marked by conciseness, economy, and clarity, Gogol’s style is noted for expansiveness, ambiguity, and verbal play amounting to true virtuosity. Selections from Gogol’s oeuvre are placed here after Lermontov’s because they mark a transition in the Russian aesthetic awareness which began to favor prose over poetry as an exclusive vehicle for all literary needs. The most prominent of these was the utilitarian aspect of literature, as a national art form serving the masses—a notion to which Gogol himself contri
buted greatly. Within this context poetry fared quite poorly, as its multiple intricacies and nuances could be only understood by an exclusive club of like-minded, well educated individuals. But Gogol might have inaugurated the reign of the dominance of prose over poetry for personal reasons, as his first published work, a super-romantic narrative poem, was an utter fiasco which he decided to burn. Thereafter Gogol did not publish a single poem.
Gogol’s fame began with his very first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-2) which, together with its sequel Mirgorod (1835), constituted a series of tales united by a Ukrainian setting, descriptions of local color and nature. The stories expressed both the pathos of heroism and supernatural terror stemming from native beliefs and myths, and the bathos of folksy humor, banality, silliness and sheer stupidity permeating provincial life. Cossacks, Gypsies, seminarians and local folk are described selling and buying pretzels, kerchiefs, bushels of wheat and all kinds of wares at country fairs and relishing their food to the point of choking on their dumplings. But drowned maidens, witches, devils and other “colossal creations of the popular imagination,” as Gogol put it, also make their appearance. Comprising a grotesque gallery of creatures and characters with radish-shaped heads, overgrown bellies, magnetic eyes—all inextricably bound to the countryside, at once coarsely prosaic, enchanted and mystical, and strung together by the narration of the bee-keeper Pan’ko—Evenings and Mirgorod tales were more a product of Gogol’s oxymoronic mind with its taste for the carnavalesque than the “slice-of-life” episodes many contemporary critics saw in them. Yet the series was received in the capital as a picture-postcard-perfect reflection of Ukrainian folk life and assured for Gogol instant recognition. Since Evenings marked Gogol’s first leap into the fantastic realm, we have chosen to excerpt one of its stories, Vji, to represent this period. Vyi provides all the ingredients that would normally startle a city-dweller: the local color and customs of the provinces, the flight of an unsuspecting protagonist mounted on a witch’s back over this enchanted countryside (an image used to great effect a century later by M. A. Bulgakov in his exquisite fantasy-novel, Master and Margarita), the horror of witnessing an old hag turn into that witch, and also of meeting a truly horrific ruler of the netherworld—Vyi—to whose magnetic powers the protagonist succumbs. The fact that Petersburg dwellers of Gogol’s time (and, regrettably, subsequent commentators on Gogol) failed to notice that Vyi—despite the author’s claim to the contrary in his footnote—did not have a Ukrainian folk genesis, but German, never became an issue: Gogol’s rise to a leading place in Russian prose was assured.
The surprise which affected Russian readers of Gogol’s early fiction only increased when the author changed the locale of his stories to St. Petersburg in Arabesques (1835).1 A word must be said about a fantasy-making device found in Arabesques which made possible Gogol’s absurd fusion of the Real and the Other. The term arabesque has been used in diverse fields, but Gogol paid special attention to its function in art and framing. In the book’s first essay, “Sculpture, Painting, and Music,” the art of painting, when personified, “reaches out from behind the multitude of antique gilded frames,” and is caught in the whirlwind of “long galleries, flashing by, as if in a fog.” It is important to note that in European art, arabesque frames allowed parts of the represented world (usually some form of vegetation like branches of trees or curling vines) to protrude or “grow beyond” the confines of the painting. This function of protruding beyond the ordinary frame of things is at the core of Gogol’s poetics in Arabesques. Images of grapevines reaching into the heavens, together with other vegetation, breaking the simple geometry of buildings, the sense of boundlessness in his depictions of genius (all found in his essays), moonlight unable to be contained by the frame of the window in The Portrait, as well as the notion of the portrait stepping out of its frame, fogs causing the narrative to take abrupt shifts in a related story, The Nose—all these were but a fraction of the imaging with which the author bombarded his readers, as if afraid of stasis or a moment’s calm contemplation.
The frames unable to contain the pictures they hold unite Gogol’s fictional and non-fictional prose into a whole which may properly be called nothing else but Arabesques. From these we offer Nevsky Prospect and the Diary of a Madman. The former was especially valued by Pushkin for its remarkable symmetry and perhaps better than any other tale shows Gogol to be the true progenitor of the Petersburg myth. At first depicted in the daylight, the city when night falls is veiled with disorienting mists and fogs, which confuse perceptions and cause the protagonists to make mistakes with fatal consequences. Nothing is to be trusted on Nevsky Prospect for it “deceives at all hours < … > especially when night descends on it < … > and when the Devil himself ignites the street lamps for the purpose of showing everything not in its true guise.” It is this central Petersburg avenue which is frequented by the protagonist of the Diary of a Madman, Poprishchin. Quite apart from its general relevance for the insanity theme in Russian literature, this work had a unique meaning within Arabesques, relative to the issue primarily concerning Gogol at the time—the ability to touch the Sublime. Gogol created a persona one might call the “lofty narrator,” who alternately appears in the book as a historian or an expert on architecture, but who in the first essay (mentioned above) poses as an art-loving friar, raising successive toasts to Sculpture, Painting, and Music “in his peaceful cell.” This detail has a bearing on the overall symmetry of Arabesques, thematically relating to the final tale, The Diary of a Madman, in one episode of which Poprishchin’s head is shaved in prison—an act he mistakenly believes to signify a consecration into a monastic order by force, something he really dreads.
It is also noteworthy that Poprishchin (whose name derives its meaning in Russian from a furuncle or boil) is the only protagonist in Arabesques who is a narrator in his own right, thus implicitly serving as an alter-ego to the lofty monk-narrator. The parallel is further reinforced by the fact that the monk-narrator proper ends his essay by choosing music as the supreme form of art—in his early drafts Gogol planned to make Poprishchin a musician. Some references to music still remain in the Diary. The daughter of Poprishchin’s superior sings like a canary, a friend of Prprishchin’s plays the trombone beautifully, and in the tale’s final passage there is “a chord resounding in the mist”. But there are no clues available as to what made Gogol to switch the narrator from a musician to a clerk. Given Gogol’s facetious alter-ego motif in the Diary of the Madman however, there is reason to suspect that the author wished to hide the true source of his inspiration, namely E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel, Lebensansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufaelligen Makulaturblaettern. (The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, along with A Fragmentary Biography of the Conductor Johannes Kreisler as recorded on Random Galley-proofs). Hoffman’s protagonist, the tomcat Murr, has supposedly written his wild autobiography on the backs of the pages of a manuscript which he has clawed to shreds. Interspersed with Murr’s horrid poetry and musings on the superiority of cats to humans is the biography of Johannes Kreisler, Murr’s owner. Kreisler is a composer who, although suffering bouts of paranoia, is a true musical genius. His story proceeds in reverse order to Murr’s, creating a fragmentary, schizophrenic text, with the resultant effect not unlike Gogol’s. The Diary of a Madman, which Gogol originally titled The Diary of the Mad Musician and then Tatters from the Diary of the Madman, features a correspondence between two pampered lapdogs. Finally, it must be noted that Gogol, just as Hoffmann, felt unappreciated as a child, admitted to hearing the Devil’s and other voices in his head, and it is no accident that he was under the influence of Hoffmann’s amazing creative output.
Gogol’s adaptation of nightmarish themes from The Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann has been noted by a host of commentators. The reason that the threads to Hoffman’s lesser-known novel were not heretofore noted might lie in the care Gogol took to separate his persona
from the protagonist of The Diary of the Madman as well as from the likely source of its inspiration. After all, Kreisler was the actual pseudonym under which Hoffmann himself published his brilliant essays on music, and Murr was the real name of his own cat. Gogol’s dogs in the Diary had, of course, no relation to reality, nor did their “writings.” Regardless of its initial designs, the Diary of a Madman is clearly a masterpiece in its own right, perfectly reflecting not only Gogol’s own crisis, but also convincingly tracing the humorous, yet tragic, progress of a perfectly average Petersburg clerk to the point when he can imagine himself to be the King of Spain and hear dogs talking. Firmly anchored in the world of the 1830s, there is nonetheless a touch of modernity in the tale’s focus on the absurdity of human existence.
The same sense can be gained in a story related to the Arabesques cycle, The Nose, which concludes our sampling of Gogol’s fiction. In it the Nose—magically separated from its normal place—independently achieves a rank higher than its owner, the protagonist Kovalev. The story’s modernity can be demonstrated by comparing the beginning of Kafka’s Metamorphosis—”As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”—with the way Gogol anticipated an equally absurd state eight decades earlier, as he has Kovalev wake up early one morning and “to his great astonishment find a completely flat space where his nose should have been.” Kafka’s explicit verbal modeling expresses the static and exitless existence of an insectoid human with an apple (symbol of original sin) embedded in its carapace. Gogol’s noseless protagonist shows a remarkable agility in his endless and humorous search for his just as remarkably mobile nose; the sins of Gogol’s story—if there are any indeed—exist only on the implicit level (such as the sexual connotations of the subject matter, or the sacrilegious overtones of finding a “nose” instead of the “body of Christ” in the daily bread). It must be also said that the real and quite typical horrors of twentieth-century Soviet Russia, such as a wife “going to the police herself to report” on her husband, or the dictum that a writer must only write “useful literature for his country,” and if he does not, he just might become a candidate for physical extermination in a concentration camp, all these true horrors are anticipated by the power of Gogol’s prophetic writing. Indeed, there is a dreadful accuracy in the economy with which Gogol can paint when he is at his best, and that he most definitely is in The Nose. For instance, the scene of the barber waking up at his home and seeing his portly wife who didn’t like any caprices is used on a number of occasions in Russian literature. In our volume this uneven family situation is exploited by Fyodor K. Sologub in his short story A Little Man, but for an altered purpose and with a prodigiously different outcome. Even one gesture, such as the one expressing Praskovia Osipovna’s demeaning attitude to her husband when she “tossed a loaf of bread on the table”—in lieu of a cup of coffee—to appease his modest wishes, would be developed as a leitmotif for a matriarch’s attitude to her sons in an entire novel, The Golovlev Family, by Satykov-Shchedrin. In that social satire of the 1870s a just-as-portly mother would occasionally “fling a bone” to her children whom for reasons of economy she kept half starved—just as Gogol’s Praskovia Osipovna did to her husband.
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