Part 4
The first part of this collection constitutes one of the great romances of history--“Taras Bulba.” It is long enough to be a short novel, and, indeed, it is a novel in plot. Briefly, it tells the story of a mighty Cossack colonel, whose name gives the work its title. The romance opens with his two sons, Ostap and Andríi, coming home from school and meeting their Homeric old father and gentle, homely, and adoring mother. The father cannot be convinced that his boys have not been injured by their course at school until he engages in violent fisticuffs with Ostap. Almost immediately, to the heart-breaking of the old lady, who plays a small part in the whole scheme of her husband’s life, Taras Bulba personally takes his boys away to the great Cossack camp, where these corsairs of the steppes are gathered waiting for some chance of foray, or a war that may promise them spoils. The revelling scenes of the camp are pictured with tremendous verve, and the doughty, fear-despising, Jew-abusing Cossack is pictured to the life.
At length, a cause of war against the Tartars is cooked up and their city besieged. One night, Andríi, the younger son of Taras Bulba, is awakened by the gliding of a woman’s figure near his sleeping quarters. She proves to be the servant of a beautiful Tartar maiden, the daughter of the Governor of the beleaguered city, who with all the other inhabitants is dying of starvation. Andríi gathers some provisions and follows the old woman by a secret underground passage into the city, where he meets the young beauty, who had previously enchanted him with a single glance while he was on the march from his home to the Cossack camp. For the sake of her love he renounces his own people and fights tremendously against them in the subsequent battle. During the mêlée he meets his father, who slays him with a single blow and scarcely regrets the death of his traitorous son. Ostap is captured and carried away to a distant city. Knowing that his son is to be executed with torture, old Taras Bulba arises from his bed of many wounds and, after a long journey, makes his way to the foot of the scaffold in the public square. The boy suffers terribly, but is brave to the end.
But when they took him to the last deadly tortures, it seemed as though his strength were failing. He turned his eyes about.
Oh, God! all strangers, all unknown faces! If only some of his relatives were present at his death! He would not have cared to hear the sobs and anguish of his feeble mother, or the unreasoning cries of a wife, tearing her hair and beating her white breast; he would have liked to see the strong man who could refresh him with a wise word, and cheer his end. And his strength failed him, and he cried in the weakness of his soul, “Father, where are you? Do you hear all?”
“I hear!” rang through the universal silence, and all that million of people shuddered in concert.
Force is its prime quality--physical, mental, religious. “In this story,” writes Professor Phelps, “the old Cossacks, centuries dead, have a genuine resurrection of the body. They appear before us in all their amazing vitality, their love of fighting, of eating and drinking, their intense patriotism, and their blazing devotion to their religious faith. Never was a book more plainly inspired by passion for race and native land. It is one tremendous shout of joy”--which even tragedy cannot silence.
Gogol was a stylist of no mean order, as “Taras Bulba” well demonstrates. It is full of Homeric passages, whose pungent vigor even survives translation. And for sheer beauty what can surpass this, the opening passage of “Night in May”?
Do you know the beauty of the nights of Ukraine? The moon looks down from the deep, immeasurable vault, which is filled to overflowing and palpitating with its pure radiance. The earth is silver; the air is deliciously cool, yet almost oppressive with perfume. Divine, enchanting night! The great forest trees, black, solemn, and still, reposing as if oppressed with thought, throw out their gigantic shadows. How silent are the ponds! Their dark waters are imprisoned within the vine-laden walls of the gardens. The little virgin forest of wild cherry and young plum-trees dip their dainty roots timidly into the cold waters; their murmuring leaves angrily shiver when a little current of the night wind stealthily creeps in to caress them. The distant horizon sleeps, but above it and overhead all is palpitating life; august, triumphal, sublime! Like the firmament, the soul seems to open into endless space; silvery visions of grace and beauty arise before it. Oh, the charm of this divine night!
Suddenly life, animation, spreads through forest, lake, and steppe. The nightingale’s majestic trill resounds through the air; the moon seems to stop, embosomed in clouds, to listen. The little village on the hill is wrapt in an enchanted slumber; its cluster of white cottages gleams vividly in the moonlight, and the outlines of their low walls are sharply clear-cut against the dark shadows. All songs are hushed; silence reigns in the homes of these simple peasants. But here and there a twinkling light appears in a little window of some cottage, where supper has waited for a belated occupant.
Gogol’s reputation as a humorist is strongly supported by his comedy “Revizor” (“The Inspector-General”). It is held to be the best comedy in the Russian language, and, while it brought out no immediate followers, it did arouse an immense amount of amused discussion at the time of its production.
The plot is simple enough. The officials of a provincial government office are looking for the arrival of an inspector, who is supposed to be coming _incognito_ to inspect their accounts. A traveller happens to arrive at the inn, and him they all suppose to be the dreaded official. Made anxious by their guilty consciences, each attempts to plead his own cause with the supposed judge, and no one hesitates to denounce a colleague in order to better his own standing. The traveller is at first amazed, but he is astute enough to accept the situation and pocket the money. The confusion grows until the crash of the final thunderbolt, when the real inspector arrives upon the scene.
In his “Confessions of an Author,” Gogol says: “In the ‘Revizor,’ I tried to present in a mass the results arising from the one crying evil of Russia, as I recognized it in that year; to expose every crime that is committed in those offices, where the strictest uprightness should be required and expected. I meant to satirize the great evil. The effect produced upon the public was a sort of terror; for they felt the force of my true sentiments, my real sadness and disgust, through the gay satire.”
The play was received with uproarious laughter all over the empire, but it is a singular comment upon the Russian character of the period to observe that, while it produced so great a furor that the Czar read it with tears of laughter and afterwards handsomely pensioned the author, it led to no official reforms.
A single specimen of its dry humor will illustrate. I quote from Turner’s “Studies in Russian Literature.”
The prefect is alarmed at the intelligence that his superior, the revising [inspecting] officer, may be expected on any day or at any hour, and begs the postmaster to open all the letters that may in the meantime pass through his office. That exemplary official informs him that such has always been his custom, “not from any state reason,” as he takes care to explain, “but from curiosity;” some of the letters he had opened being so entertaining that he really could not find the heart to send them on, but had kept them in his desk. When reminded by a cautious colleague that this is likely to get him into trouble with the public, the prefect cuts short the remonstration by crying out, “Oh, _batoushka_ [a diminutive term of endearment, meaning practically ‘little father’], don’t you see this is a family affair of our own? What have the public to do with it?”
Gogol founded the realistic school in Russia when he produced his masterpiece “Dead Souls,” a work sufficiently powerful to raise him at once to the pinnacle of literary fame. The idea of the book consists of the ingenious plan of a certain Tchitchikoff, who had lost his place in consequence of his misdemeanors in the custom-house having been discovered. In order to retrieve his fortune he visits different landed proprietors and buys from them the names of all their serfs who have died since the last census. Having thus established an ownership, he succeeds in borrowing large sums of money by giving the names of the dead serfs as security, since these dead souls have been legally made over to him. Naturally, the bankers think that they are making the loan upon good live collateral. What becomes of Tchitchikoff, we do not know, for Gogol destroyed the manuscript of the last section of his work--some say, in a fit of abstraction; others, under the influence of religious enthusiasm.
Upon this framework, the author has produced a series of remarkable descriptions--not pure realism, indeed, in our modern acceptation of the term, but rather akin to the realism of Dickens. Its truthful picture of Russian life, its repellent yet attractive qualities, its penetratingly keen analysis of character, caused Pushkin to exclaim when Gogol read him the first chapters of his book, “God, how miserable life is in Russia!”
Rarely do power and delicacy unite in a stylist as they do in Gogol. For the one, we may find an origin in his love for the sun-steeped and snow-blown plains of his native Cossack country--a love which constantly manifested itself in a real nostalgia, yet never brought him back for long from his wanderings, especially in Italy. But for the other, that delicate power of evocation--that compound of Loti’s subtlety of nature-sense, Hoffmann’s light fantasy, and Daudet’s airy narrative manner, half-humorous, half-pathetic--for this we must look to some inborn faculty. In any other writer we might trace this gossamer lightness to much commerce with the thoughts of women. But no woman ever entered largely into Gogol’s life, and when he died, on March 4, 1852, being not yet forty-three years of age, his mother--always his mother--was still his only love. His last days were shadowed by a growing ineptitude. His frail body weakened by religious fastings, his resources scattered by prodigal gifts, his mind enfeebled and depressed--his passing was sad, lonely, and almost unnoticed.
Gogol was the first great prose artist in Russian literature. In the tale and the sketch, in comedy, in romance, and in realism, he not only blazed new trails but penetrated so far into the unknown that others for a long time followed only at a distance. But follow they did, for, as one of his compatriot wits has observed, “We have all hidden under ‘The Cloak.’”
The masterpiece of fantastic narration and character delineation which follows in translation was published, under the title “Shinel,” in 1839, when Gogol was thirty. It is overlong, according to our modern standards, yet not as a piece of artistic workmanship. Its humor, its suggestiveness, its pathos, its whimsicality, all rank it with the world’s great short fictions.
THE CLOAK _By Nikolai Gogol_
In the department of ------ but it is better not to name the department. Nothing is more annoying than all kinds of departments, regiments, law courts--in a word, any branch of public service. Nowadays things have come to such a pass that every individual considers all society offended in his person. Only lately, I have heard it told, a complaint has been received from a district chief of police--I don’t remember of what town--in which he sets forth clearly that the Imperial institutions are on the wane, and that the Czar’s sacred name is being uttered in vain; and in proof of his assertion he appended to the petition a voluminous romance, in which a district chief of police is made to appear at least once every ten pages, often in a hopelessly drunken condition. Therefore, to avoid all unpleasantness, it is better to designate the department in question as a _certain department_.
* * * * *
So, in a _certain department_ there served a _certain official_--in no way a remarkable official, at least in appearance; short of stature, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, somewhat even dull-sighted, with a bald forehead, wrinkled cheeks, and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal. Poor man--the St. Petersburg climate was to blame! As for his official rank--with us a man’s rank comes before all!--he was what is called a perpetual titular councillor, a type which, as is well-known, has evoked the jests of many writers, following the praiseworthy custom of belaboring those who cannot bite back.
The official’s name was Bashmachkin. As is quite evident, it was derived from _bashmak_ [shoe]; but when, at what period, and in what manner, nothing is known. It is certain that his father and grandfather, and even brother-in-law--in fact, all the Bashmachkins--wore shoes, which were reheeled three times a year. His name was Akaki Akakievich. Perhaps it may seem to the reader as somewhat odd and far-fetched; but he may rest assured that it was by no means far-fetched, and that, owing to the circumstances which led to it, any other name would have been impossible. This is how it happened.
Akaki Akakievich, if my memory serves me right, was born in the evening of the 23rd of March. His mother, the wife of an official, and a very good woman, made all the proper preparations for baptizing the child. She lay on her bed opposite the door, and at her right hand stood the godfather, a most excellent man, Ivan Ivanovich Eroshkin by name, who served as the chief clerk of the Senate; and the godmother, Arina Semenovna Bielobrushkova, the wife of an officer, and a woman of rare virtues. They offered the mother her choice of three names: Mokiya, Sossiya, and that of the martyr Khozdazat.
“No,” said the mother. “What a lot of names!”
So as to please her, they turned to another page in the calendar, and hit upon the names of Traphili, Dula, and Varakhasi.
“That sounds like a judgment!” muttered the sick woman. “What names! I truly never heard the like. Varadat and Varukh would have been bad enough, but Traphili and Varakhasi!”
They turned to another page. The result was: Povsikakhi and Vakhtisi.
“Enough,” said the mother. “I now see that it is fate. And since it is so, I think he had better be called after his father. Akaki was his father’s name, let the son too be Akaki.”
In such manner he became Akaki Akakievich. The child was christened, at which he wept and made a bad grimace, as if he foresaw that he was to be a titular councillor. That is how it all came about. We have mentioned it so the reader might judge for himself that it was entirely due to circumstance, and that to have given him any other name would have been impossible.
When and how he entered the department, and who appointed him, no one could remember. However much the directors and chiefs were changed, he was always to be seen in the one and same spot, the same attitude, the same occupation, always the letter-copying official, so that afterwards the conviction grew that he came into the world as he was, in uniform and with his bald spot. No one showed him the slightest respect in the department. The porters not only did not rise from their seats when he passed, but did not even glance at him; he might have been a common fly that flew through the reception room. His chiefs treated him with a sort of cold despotism. Some insignificant assistant to the head clerk would thrust a paper under his very nose, without saying so much as “Copy,” or “Here is an interesting little case,” or, in fact, anything pleasant, as is usual among well-bred officials. And he would accept the paper, without looking to see who gave it to him, and whether he had a right to do so; he would take it and immediately start to copy it.
The young officials made merry at his expense so far as their official wit would permit. In his presence they invented stories about his life. Of his seventy-year-old landlady they said that she beat him; they asked him when their wedding would be, and, strewing small pieces of paper over his head, called it snow. Not a single word would Akaki Akakievich answer to this, as though no one were near him. It did not even affect his tasks; in the midst of all these taunts he made not a single error in copying. Once, however, when the jesting became unbearable, because they pushed his elbow while he was at his work, he exclaimed:
“Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?”
And there was something strange in these words and the voice in which they were uttered. There was something in it which stirred one’s pity; so that, in fact, a young man, only recently appointed, who, following the example of others, permitted himself to make fun of him, suddenly stopped short, like one stunned, and from that time everything seemed to him to undergo as it were a transformation and to assume a new aspect. Some invisible power repelled him from his companions, with whom he had become acquainted on the assumption that they were well-bred, estimable men. And for a long time afterward, even in his merriest moments, there appeared before his eye the little official with the bald forehead, and his penetrating words: “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” And in these touching words other words resounded: “I am thy brother!” At this thought the young man would cover his face with his hands, and many a time later in the course of his life he shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage uncouthness hidden under the delicate and cultivated worldliness, and, oh, God! even in the man whom the world acknowledges as honorable and honest.
It would be no easy matter to find another man who attended so faithfully to his duties. It is not enough to say that he labored with zeal; no, he labored with love. This copying presented to him a sufficiently varied and agreeable existence. Enjoyment showed on his face; he had his favorites among the letters, and when they came his way he was not himself; he would smile, wink, and work his lips, so that by looking at his face it seemed that you could read every letter which his pen put down. Were he rewarded according to the measure of his ardor, he would, to his own astonishment, have been made even a councillor of state. But his companions had their little joke about his work.
It would be untrue to say that _no_ attention was paid him. One kindly director, wishing to reward him for his long service, ordered him to be given something more dignified to do than mere copying; namely, he was requested to draw up some sort of report to another office of an already concluded affair; all that he was required to do was to change the heading, and to alter certain words from the first to the third person. This entailed him such labor that he began to perspire, to wipe his forehead, saying finally, “No, better give me copying.” From that time on he was let alone in his copying. Aside from this copying, nothing seemed to exist for him.
He gave no thought to his dress. His uniform was not green, but rather a reddish-mealy color. Its collar was narrow and low, so that his neck, though not really long, seemed inordinately long as it projected from the collar, quite like the necks of the plaster cats with wagging heads that one sees carried upon the heads of foreign peddlers. And something always clung to his uniform; it was a bit of straw, or perhaps a thread. Besides, he had the unfortunate tendency, while walking in the street, to go past a window precisely at the moment when they threw out of it all kinds of rubbish; hence he always carried about on his hat pieces of melon-rind and articles of a similar nature. Not once in his life did he direct his attention upon what was happening daily in the street--quite unlike his colleague, the young official, whose glance was sufficiently far-reaching and keen to observe when any one’s trouser-straps became undone on the opposite sidewalk, which always called forth upon his face a smile of gratification. But Akaki Akakievich, when he happened to look at all, saw in everything only the clear, even strokes of his written lines, and only when, from goodness knows where, a horse’s head suddenly popped over his shoulder and sent a whole gust of wind from its nostrils into his face, did he begin to notice that he was not in the middle of a line, but in the middle of the street.
On arriving home, he would sit down immediately at the table, gulp down quickly his cabbage-soup, eat a piece of meat with onion without noticing their taste, consuming everything--together with flies or anything else which the Lord happened to send at the moment.
Becoming conscious of the swelling of his stomach, he would rise from the table, take down a bottle of ink, and begin to copy papers which he had brought home. If such were wanting, he had the habit of making a special copy for his personal gratification, particularly if the paper happened to be remarkable, not indeed so much on account of the beauty of its style, but of its being addressed to some new or important person.