DEAD SOULS
The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their
language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who
live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when
he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an
ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among
the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the
tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a
small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people
who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble
lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart.
Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the
Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so
far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem,
“Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an
aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he
got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his
invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would
be great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with
Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the
glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition
in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of
fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something
important to say to their people.
Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from
the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is
supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a
clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the
laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized
“propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his
liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced
yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it
might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a
German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of
dealing with the real problems of your country and time.
Gogol wrote a play called “The Inspector-General,” which tells how a
government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town,
and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their
various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the
inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful
traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his
great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his
custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man
to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town
functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the
functionaries, to their great dismay.
Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he
ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the “grand
monarch,” taking delight in Moliere’s ridicule of his courtiers. The
monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the
functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter.
Then Gogol wrote a long novel, “Dead Souls.” He introduces us to a young
man who might be a graduate of any one of a thousand schools and
colleges and universities of “salesmanship” in the United States. So
brilliant are this young man’s talents:
Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to
support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses;
if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also
Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation
related to some investigation which was being made by the
government, he would show that he also knew something about the
tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about
billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if
people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with
tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy,
he knew all about brandy.
This expert in the psychology of salesmanship had a truly Yankee idea to
make his fortune. At that time the Russian peasants were sold with the
land, and the landlord had to pay taxes on all his serfs. A reckoning
was made at certain periods, and if any serfs died in between the
periods of reckoning, the landlord had to pay taxes just the same. Now,
said the salesman to himself, any landlord will be glad to sell me these
“dead souls”; and when I have bought a great number of them, I will get
hold of a piece of land, and move all these “dead souls” to that land,
and some bank will lend me a great sum of money, not knowing they are
dead.
To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in
itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets
us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the
landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don’t know what
to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a
situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it
is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol’s story became a
revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about
among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second
edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned
into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written,
and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter
part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the “Russian soul,” and
makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from
Oriental barbarism to modern individualism.