After having laid bare the vices of the Russian administration, in his
satiric comedy of “The _Revizor_,” Gogol attacked the social question
in his romance of the “Dead Souls.” He set himself to work at the very
moment when the Tsar Nicolas, in a liberal humor, proclaimed in a
_ukaz_ of prodigious power the principle of the abolition of serfage.
Unhappily this liberal policy of the throne was not strong enough to
hold its own before the dissatisfaction of the higher classes: the
decree was not put into effect. But the impulse was given, and Gogol’s
satire once more became the echo of the popular feeling.
The very title of the romance was a satiric touch, the significance
of which could not escape a Russian, but which for a French reader
needs rather a long explanation. At the time of serfdom, a Russian
proprietor’s fortune was not valued according to the extent of his
lands, but according to the number of male serfs which were held
upon them. These serfs were called “souls” (_dushi_). The owner of a
thousand souls was a great proprietor; the owner of a hundred souls
was only a beggarly country squire. The proprietor paid the capitation
tax for all the souls on his domain; but, as the census was rarely
taken, it happened that he had long to pay for dead serfs, until a new
official revision struck them out from among the number of the living.
It is easy to see what these dead souls must have cost a proprietor
whose lands had been visited by famine, cholera, or any other scourge;
and his interest in getting rid of them will be explicable.
What seems more surprising is, that there were people ready to purchase
them. But here, again, it is sufficient to lessen the strangeness of
the fact, if we accompany it with a simple explanation. There was in
Russia, at the time to which Gogol’s novel transports us, a sort of
bank, established and supported by the State, and directed by the
managing boards of certain institutions for orphan boys and girls,
deaf-mutes, and others. This bank borrowed money at four per cent, and
loaned on deposits. Here a man could pawn his personal property, or
mortgage his real estate and his peasants up to ten thousand souls,
say at two hundred rubles a head; in other words, up to two million
rubles. Here is a reason why the hero of Gogol’s romance, Tchitchikof,
a former customs officer, dismissed for embezzlement, purchases dead
souls. He hopes some day to possess a sufficient number to populate an
out-of-the-way estate in a distant province of the empire, and to pawn
this domain to the State for a sum large enough to permit him to go and
live in grand style abroad.
As can be seen, the motive of the book has lost its point since the
abolition of serfage, and this motive never was very interesting except
for Russian readers. But this motive serves Gogol only as a piquant
pretext for a series of studies of provincial life in Russia. These
studies have an originality, a variety, and sometimes a force, so great
that it is to be feared lest our analysis can give only a very feeble
notion of it.
The hero of “Dead Souls” is a veritable hero of a realistic romance;
that is to say, he has nothing which justifies the title of hero. He
is neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor lean, neither stiff nor
pliant; he cannot any longer be taken for a young man. He is more
prudent than courageous, more ambitious than honorable, more obsequious
than dignified, more scrupulous of his bearing than of his conduct;
at once capable of trickery, and guilty of heedlessness; without
talent, but not without expedients; with no foundation of goodness,
but not without some small change of benevolence; without conscience,
but not lacking a certain varnish of decency and gravity. This
characterless[19] personage is brought out in a sort of relief by the
very frame in which the author has ingeniously placed him. Tchitchikof
travels across the province; and Gogol does not separate him from what
is his indispensable accompaniment in his outlandish Odyssey,--I mean
from his coach, his horses, and his servants.
Petrushka, his lackey, is a blockhead of thirty summers, with a big
nose, thick lips, coarse features, and with a skin exhaling an odor
_sui generis_ which clings to every thing that comes in his vicinity.
He speaks rarely, and reads as much as possible; but little difference
makes it to him, what the nature of the book may be. He does not bother
his head with the subject. “What pleased him was not what he read: it
was the mere act of reading. It did not trouble him to see that he was
eternally coming upon words the meaning of which the deuce alone knows.”
The coachman, Selifan, is a little man, as talkative as Petrushka is
silent. He fills the long hours of the journey across the deserted
steppe or the monotonous cultivated fields, with monologues laughable
in their variety. For the most part, he addresses his incoherent
discourse to his horses. With his reproaches, sometimes accompanied
by a blow of the whip under the belly or across the ears, he stirs
up “Spot,” a huge trickster, harnessed on the right for draught,
who makes believe pull so that one would think that he was doing
himself great injury, but in reality he is not pulling at all. The
bay, on the contrary, is a very “respectable” horse: he does his
work conscientiously; as does also the light sorrel, surnamed the
Assessor because he was bought of a justice. The coachman, Selifan, who
understands the spirit of his animals, finds no subject too lofty for
their comprehension. He quotes their master’s example, who is a man to
be respected because he has been in government service, because he is a
college councillor;[20] and when once he enters into these abstract and
subtile considerations about duty, he goes so far, he soars so high,
that he regularly gets lost in the confusing network of Russian roads,
and sometimes he finishes his discussion in the bottom of a slough.
As to the carriage, it also has its strange physiognomy, and, so to
speak, its national stamp. It is the britchka, with leather flaps
fortified with two round bull’s-eyes; the britchka, whose postilion,
not booted in the German fashion, but simply with his huge beard and
his mittens, seated on no one knows what, whistles, brandishes his
whip, shouts his song, and makes his team fly over the trembling earth.
In this equipage Tchitchikof reaches the village of N----. He
introduces himself to the mayor, to the vice-mayor, to the fiscal
attorney, to the _natchalnik_ of the court, to the chief of police,
to the _vodka_-farmer, to the general director of the crown works.
His politeness, his flattering words skilfully accommodated to each
of these gentlemen, his air of concern in presence of the ladies,
immediately give him the reputation of being a man of the best tone.
He is overwhelmed with invitations; he makes his first appearance in
the fine society of N---- on the occasion of a party given by the
mayor. The throng of functionaries is divided into two classes,--the
“slenders” (_fluets_), who hover like butterflies around the ladies,
jargon gayly in French, and in three years succeed in mortgaging all
their paternal property to the _Lombard_; and secondly the “solids”
(_gros_), who _thesaurize_ without making any stir, buy estates in the
name of their wives, and some fine day go into retirement, so as to go
and live like village proprietors, like true Russian _barins_, until
their heirs, who are generally the “slenders,” come to take possession
of the inheritance, and make a single mouthful of it.
In this somewhat monotonous throng, Tchitchikof’s attention is
attracted by two country gentlemen,--Manilof, a Russian _Philinte_,
extremely fair-spoken, assiduous, and sensitive; and Sabakévitch, a
colossus of brusque manners, of laconic speech. Both of them invite the
new-comer to honor with his presence their dwellings, which are only a
few versts distant. Here the novelist’s plan becomes apparent. He is
going to take his hero and his readers from visit to visit, through
all the households of these provincial proprietors, whose foibles he
intends to make sport of, and whose vices he intends to scourge. And
what the traveller’s business will bring under our observation in his
peregrinations, will be the condition of the serfs under different
masters,--a precarious and ill-regulated condition under the best,
lamentable under those who are bad. Thus the importance of the literary
value in the romance of the “Dead Souls,” whatever it may be, fades
before the political and social aim of the conception. Or, rather,
here may be seen the new and durable character which Gogol impressed
upon the national romance. He applied that form in which fancy reigns
to the real description of Russian life: that is to say, he devoted it
to the portraying of those abuses of every sort in which the Russian
is still, to a certain degree, swaddled; to the expression of the
sufferings under which the thinking class, more oppressed to-day than
the serfs of yore, feel themselves more and more crushed; finally, to
the translation of all those obscure but insistent desires, those vague
but ardent aspirations, which are summed up in the old Muscovite cry
“Forward!” repeated to-day in a whisper, from one end of the country to
the other, like a watchword.
The first household which Gogol brings us to visit, in company with the
purchaser of dead souls, is that of the Manilof family. At the very
approach to the village of Manilovka, you begin to feel an impression
of vulgarity, of vapidness, and of _ennui_. The country is poor, but it
does not exclude pretentiousness: in the bottom is a greenish pond,
like a billiard-cloth, and on the higher part of the rising ground a
few atrophied birches. Under two of these decrepit and consumptive
trees stands an arbor with flat roof, with green painted lattice-work,
the entrance of which is made by two little pillars with a pediment,
on which can be read the inscription: “_Temple de la méditation
solitaire_.”
The frame is entirely appropriate to the characters. Manilof is a
pale blonde, with eyes blue as faïence. “His ever-smiling face, his
ever-sugared words, make you say at first, ‘What a good and amiable
man!’ The next minute you will not say any thing; and the third you ask
yourself, ‘What the deuce is this man, anyway?’” Above all, he is a man
weary of life. He has not a passion, or a hobby, or a fault. He has
nothing decisive in his character. At one time he was in the service;
and he left in the army the reputation of being a very gentle officer,
but a “spendthrift of Levant tobacco.” After returning to his estate,
he allowed the management of it to go as chance would have it. “When
one of his peasants came to find him, and said, scratching the nape of
his neck, ‘_Barin_, let me go and find some work so as to earn enough
to pay my _obrok_ (quit-rent);’--‘All right, go ahead!’ he replied,
drawing a full whiff from his pipe; and he did not take the trouble
to think that this man wanted to get out of his sight so as to have a
better chance to indulge in his habits of drunkenness.” Manilof himself
is continually plunged in a sort of somnolent revery which is like
intoxication of the mind. His thoughts do not emerge from the embryonic
state, but they come back with the persistence of the fixed idea in the
brain of a man who has no ideas. His bureau always has the same book
open at the same place. The parlor of his house was hung round with
silk and luxuriously furnished many years ago. It has always lacked two
arm-chairs, “which aren’t done yet;” and this has been so since the
first days of his marriage. A bronze candelabrum, which is an object
of art, has as a pendant a wretched copper candlestick, out of shape,
humpbacked, soiled with tallow.
This disorder disturbs no one in the house. Manilof and his wife are
enchanted with every thing,--with themselves, with their children,
with their neighbors, with the city of N----. Every _tchinovnik_ is
the “most distinguished, the most lovable, the most honorable of
men.” People so prone to admiration and to praise melt into gush at
the visit of their guest. He, in his turn, praises Manilof’s merits
to the skies, goes into ecstasies over the precocious intelligence of
their two sons Alcides and Themistocles; and when he has charmed them
all by his delicate attentions, he takes Manilof aside, and asks if
he has lost many peasants since the last census. The proprietor, in
great perplexity as to what answer to give, summons his _prikashchik_,
formerly a peasant, who has cut his beard and thrown his kaftan to the
winds, a great friend of the feather-bed and fine down foot-warmers,
godfather or relative of all the big-wigs of the village, a tyrant over
the poor devils whom he loads down with fees and tasks. The chubby
old fellow, who gets up at eight o’clock in the morning, and who gets
up simply to put his red-copper _samovar_ on the table, and then to
tipple his tea like a gourmand for an hour and a half, has no greater
knowledge than his master about the insignificant question of the
mortality of the serfs. “The number of the dead? That’s something we
don’t take note of. How’s that?--the number of the dead? No one has had
the idea of counting them, naturally.”
Tchitchikof asks to have an exact list made out, with the names,
surnames, nicknames, dates of birth, color of eyes, tints of hair.
When the _prikashchik_ has gone, Tchitchikof comes to the delicate
explanation. At first Manilof takes his guest to be crazy; but his face
has nothing about it that is not re-assuring. He still hesitates, in
the fear of some illegality. The purchaser dispels this fear. The bill
of sale will not say any thing about dead souls. “Dead? Never! We will
have them entered as living; they are so inscribed on the official
registers. No one shall ever induce me to break the law. I respect
it. I have suffered enough from my uprightness during my career as a
_tchinovnik_. Duty first, the law above all things. That’s the kind of
man I am, and I shall die the same. When the law speaks, there must
be no objections!” Manilof is therefore re-assured; and when he is
convinced that the crown has only to gain by this exchange of property,
even though it be fictitious, he offers all his dead souls for nothing.
He would like to have many other occasions to show his new friend “all
the drawing of his heart, all the magnetism of his soul.” The friend
takes his departure, promising the precocious children some toys;
and “when the cloud of dust raised by the britchka had drifted away,
Manilof came into the house again, sat down, and abandoned himself to
the sweet thought that he had shown his crony a perfect amiability,
such as might have been expected from his eminently benevolent and
complaisant soul.”
Not all his negotiations come to this successful issue with such ease.
In driving over to the house of the laconic giant Sabakévitch, the
equipage gets off the track, and the carriage is overturned directly in
front of a country-house where an old Russian lady, Mrs. Karabotchka,
lives. As in the case of Manilof, the appearance of the landscape
in some degree gives the clew to the character of the native. The
landscape is little else than a nest for poultry. Fowls of every sort
fill the court-yard, behind which stretch vegetable-gardens, variegated
here and there with fruit-trees protected by great webs of thread.
Amid this vulgarly utilitarian nature, rises a pole which ends in a
bar shaped like a cross; and on the arm of this cross is nailed a
nightdress, surmounted by a damaged bonnet belonging to “the lady and
mistress of all this property.”
Tchitchikof does not waste so much politeness upon Nastasia Petrovna
(these are the lady’s given names) as upon Manilof. He is Russian;
that is to say, he possesses in perfection all those shades of speech
and all those different intonations by which it is possible to show
the one with whom you are speaking, veneration, respect, deference,
esteem, vulgar consideration, disdainful familiarity, and, descending
still lower, all degrees of patronage, even to the extreme limit of
scorn. Accordingly he opens his project in free-and-easy style. But the
proposition shocks the worthy woman. “What do you want to do with my
dead?” she asks, fixing upon him two great eyes streaked with yellow
saffron. She suspects some shrewd trick in this business; and her
obstinacy, characteristic of the narrow-minded but calculating _baba_,
finally exasperates the purchaser, who gets carried away, pounds the
floor with a cane-seated chair within his reach, and to the old woman’s
horror mingles the name of the Devil in his furious exclamations.
These violent actions, however, have less effect than a promise deftly
introduced into the conversation: “I wanted to buy of you your various
farm products[21] because I have charge of various crown contracts.”
This mention of the crown brings the old blockhead to terms. “_Nu_,
yes, I consent. I am ready to sell them for fifty paper rubles. Only
look, my father, at that question of supplies. If it happens you want
rye-flour or buckwheat, or grits, or slaughtered neats, then please
don’t forget me.” One good turn deserves another. The contract is
instantly drawn up; and Mrs. Karabotchka, seeing her guest fetch forth
from his travelling outfit a supply of newly stamped paper, arranges
to have him leave a package for five rubles in case of necessity.[22]
All this comedy would be well worth translating word for word. The
situation already treated in the preceding canto is here renewed with
consummate art. The characters are developed in broad light: the
contrasts are forcibly brought out; the drawing is full of freedom in
its requisite vulgarity; the coloring is full of brilliancy in its
rather trivial boldness. This country scene is itself enclosed between
two capital bits of narration, opening and ending the chapter or canto
with a symmetry of the most skilful effect.
At the beginning of the episode comes the soliloquy of Selifan
the coachman, with his horses, already mentioned; the britchka’s
wanderings in a pouring rain, across roads torn up by the storm;
finally the catastrophe which sends the whole equipage to the bottom of
a ditch into the mud.
At the end of the canto we have the britchka’s return guided by a
little girl of the neighborhood, a sort of wild Indian with bare legs
literally shod with fresh mire. Selifan drives his team with a silent
care which makes a pointed contrast with his loquacious spirit the day
before. The horses, especially the mottled one, miss his discourses;
for he substitutes for them a hail-storm of treacherous goads in the
fat, pulpy, soft, delicate, and sensitive portions of their bodies. At
last, when the carriage has emerged from the region of mud, and has
passed all these roads, running, in every sense of the word, “like
crawfish at market when they are allowed to escape from the bag;” and
when the coachman has reached the highway, and caught a glimpse of
the public house, “he reined in his team, helped the little maiden to
dismount, and, as he helped her, he looked at her for the first time.
He muttered between his teeth, ‘What muddy legs! hu! hu! hu! all the
way from here home, she will soil the clean grass!’ Tchitchikof gave
the little maiden a copper coin, about two kopeks: she turned her back
quick as a flash, and off she went, starting with five or six mad
gambols; she was enchanted at the splendid gift, still more enchanted
at having been allowed to sit on the coach-box of the britchka.”
At the public house Tchitchikof falls in with a character whom he has
already met at the crown solicitor’s at dinner, where his familiarity
surprises him, less, however, than his skill at cards, and the
suspicious way in which the other players watch his fingers. He is a
terrible braggart, and he carries off the traveller willy-nilly. Once
again the domain resembles the owner. Nozdref is a great hand for
going to fairs, a mighty tippler, a mighty gambler, a mighty liar,
or, as they say in Russia of these impudent improvisers, “a mighty
maker of bullets.” He is always ready to sell all his possessions
at a bargain. He sometimes wins at play, and he spends his gains
in purchases of every sort. The booths at the fairs in a few hours
absorb all his winnings. Generally he loses; and, with the forlorn
hope of getting back his money, he casts into the same hole his
watch, his horses, and both carriage and coachman. Some friend has
to carry him home in a simple short overcoat of Bokharian stuff,
despoiled and shorn, but filled only with thoughts of having his
revenge next market-day. This imbecile’s country-house has nothing
more remarkable than his kennels, where beasts of every race growl
and bark. As to the mill, the clamp which tightens the mill-stone is
missing. The fields lie fallow. Nozdref’s work-shop is adorned only
with Turkish guns, swords, poniards; add to that, pipes of every clay
and of every size, and an old hand-organ. Here the negotiations about
dead souls do not run smoothly. Nozdref treats his man as though he
were a liar, a sharper: he wants to compel him to a bargain no less
preposterous than disadvantageous; then he offers to put up souls at
lansquenet. Tchitchikof, in spite of insults, accepts only a part of
the queens; and the game has hardly begun before he refuses to play
in consequence of the strange pertinacity shown by his adversary’s
sleeve in pushing forward the cards which are not in the game. Hence a
terrible quarrel. Nozdref seizes the suspicious player by the throat,
and calls his valets to thrash him. The comedy is changing into a
tragedy. The purchaser of souls is paler than one of his dead. At the
critical moment a carriage drives up, and from it descends the _deus ex
machinâ_, a police-officer, who comes to arrest Nozdref for assault and
battery committed by him and some other gentlemen on the person of a
Mr. Maksimof, whom they had beaten on leaving some orgy.
The procession of vices and absurdities sweeps on. Next to Nozdref,
the rascally brutal gambler, appears Sabakévitch, the Russian
gormandizer,--a colossus with enormous feet, with a back as wide as the
rump of a Viatkan horse, with arms and legs huge as the granite posts
which fence in certain monuments; a man capable of wrestling with a
bear, himself a bear, as his surname Mikhaïl, which is the nickname of
the bear in Russia, sufficiently indicates.[23]
After Sabakévitch comes the miser Plushkin, a portrait whose hideous
relief outdoes the effect of Balzac’s Grandet. The village where
he lives still preserves traces of former wealth, rendering more
noticeable and more frightful the state of degradation and wretchedness
into which the present proprietor has let it fall. The appearance of
the miser on his threshold, his sullen reception of the traveller,
the characteristics of his dress and his person, the enumeration of
the treasures which fill his sheds, the utensils crowding his office,
the bric-à-brac loading his what-not, the description of his stingy
ways, the contrast with his wise and happy past, the account of his
domestic troubles, and of his rapid transformation under the influence
of anxiety and loneliness,--all this makes this canto not only a
picturesque painting, a most lively comedy, but, more than all, a
psychological study as deep as it is novel. In fact, avarice may have
been as well described in its effects; it had never before been so
studied in its principles, and, as it were, determined in its essence.
Plushkin has sold Tchitchikof all his dead souls, and all his runaway
serfs into the bargain. The list of the different purchases already
concluded reaches a respectable length. The names, surnames, nicknames,
description, and other particulars, complaisantly noted down by those
who sell, give Tchitchikof the illusion of having actual property. His
imagination brings all these dead to life. He knows their ways, their
faults, their habits, the distinctive characteristics of each. The
only thing that is left is to have all the purchases sanctioned by the
tribunals. Now or never is the chance to show up in satire the Russian
_tchinovnik_ and his incurable corruption. The cunning tricks of the
clerks, whose slightest service must be bought, the _natchalnik’s_
collusion, the character of the witnesses, the method of blinding the
chief of police as to the nature of the contract,--here would be the
material for another comedy in the style of “The _Revizor_.”
Every thing comes out just as Tchitchikof desires. In the village, he
marches from ovation to ovation: he seems at the height of his good
fortune. But, unhappily for him, Nozdref meets him at the mayor’s ball,
and publicly and in a loud voice makes sport of him on account of his
craze for purchasing dead souls. This mysterious word has its effect.
Tchitchikof is shunned as a dangerous man. The tattle of a whole idle
village ravins on his reputation. Justice is stirred up: it imputes to
him all sorts of misdemeanors and even crimes. True, these imputations
almost instantly are shown to be false; but public opinion does not
make charges against an innocent man for nothing. Suspicion always
hovers about him. Every townsman goes a little farther than what has
been already supposed. One day the postmaster comes declaring that
Tchitchikof is Capt. Kopéïkin. This Kopéïkin is a robber chieftain,
known by his wooden leg and his amputated arm. It is needless to say
that Tchitchikof possesses all his limbs.
Finally Nozdref, who has done all the harm, makes partial reparation.
He tells Tchitchikof what is thought and said about him in the city of
N----. The man of “acquisitions” has his britchka cleaned and greased,
straps his valise, and gives Selifan his orders for their departure.
Selifan scratches the nape of his neck at this order to depart. What
did this expressive pantomime mean? Did he regret the wine-room, and
his friends the tipplers, he with the _tulup_ thrown negligently over
his shoulders? Was he deep in some love-affair, and did he mourn the
_porte-cochère_, under the shelter of which he squeezed two whitish
hands at the hour when the bandura-player, in red camisole, claws his
instrument? Did he merely turn a melancholy glance towards the kitchen
with its savory perfume of sauer-kraut, and look with dismay on the
weariness of the cold, the wind, the snow, and the interminable roads,
following this life of contemplation? “His gesture might signify
all that, and many other things; for among the Russians the action
of scratching the nape of the neck is not the indication of two or
three ideas, limited in number, but rather of an infinite quantity of
thoughts.”
They depart. A new Odyssey begins; that is to say, a new series of
visits, and a new gallery of portraits. This time the author seems to
have desired to soften his satire, and to add to the critical portion
of his work certain theories, or, at least, certain counsels. Taking
as his text Andréi Tentyotnikof,--a sweet-tempered and easy-going
gentleman, who is slowly consuming away in the vague torment of a
sentimental life,--he propounds his ideas on education, and lays out
his programme of studies in the fashion of Rabelais, his favorite
author. In contrast to Andréi he places the charming figure of
Julienne, daughter of the old general Betrishef. Those who blame Gogol
for never having created an elegant and graceful heroine have not read
the thirteenth canto of “Dead Souls.” Never to be forgotten when once
met is the dazzling amazon, whose portraiture thus begins: “The person
so suddenly introduced was bathed and caressed by the light of heaven;
she was as straight and as agile as a rosewood javelin.” Andréi is in
love with her. But this romance is scarcely begun before it is hidden
from us, and in its place comes satire again.
We fall back into vulgar life, and into the most beastly epicureanism,
with the gastronomist Peetukof. This jovial fat-paunch has a splenetic
neighbor. With good health, and eighty thousand rubles income, the
handsome, gentle, and good Platonof is bored. He has only this word
on his tongue: _ennui_. His brother-in-law Konstantin is apparently
the only one of these Russian grandees whom Gogol has been pleased to
spare. Industrious as an ox, he demands of his serfs constant labor.
“I have discovered,” he says, “that when a man does not work, dreams
come along, his brains run away, and he becomes a mere idiot.” This
proprietor has, moreover, no claims to noble descent. “He took very
little thought about his genealogical tree, judging that the possession
of proofs was not worth the labor of research, and that such documents
have no application to agriculture.” Finally, he contented himself with
speaking Russian without going round Robin Hood’s barn, and, without
any admixture of French, in thorough Russian style.
This wise man has made his property a model domain, and he would like
to see the country peopled with good proprietors like himself. He
lends Tchitchikof money to purchase an estate in the neighborhood. But
we may conjecture that the adventurer will not settle down so soon.
In fact, we are yet to see other absurd specimens; for example, the
fool Koshkaref, who, though within two steps of ruin, plays with
governmental forms. He has transformed his domain into a little state
divided into bureaus, with such inscriptions as these: “Depot of Farm
Utensils;” “Central Bureau for the Settlement of Accounts;” “Bureau
of Rural Matters;” “School of High Normal Instruction;” etc. It is
needless to say, that, through the fault of the employees, the bureaus
do not work; for the Bureau of Edifices has taken his last ruble, and
the poor sovereign’s ruin is rapidly drawing nigh.
Finally, the spectacle on which the narrator longest holds our
attention is that of the poverty whereto the various faults or vices,
touched by our finger in this tale, bring the great majority of the
small proprietors of Russia. Klobéyef has been ruined this ten years.
He still lives, and his existence is a problem. To-day is a gala day,
grand dinner, play by French actors: the next, not a morsel of bread
in the larder. Any one would have hung himself, drowned himself, or
put a bullet through his head. Klobéyef finds the means of keeping
up this alternation of luxury and wretchedness. He is a well-bred,
enlightened, intelligent man: he absolutely lacks common-sense. When
he is in trouble, he opens some pious book; and when the compassion of
his old friends, or the charity of some strange lady on the lookout
for good works, succeeds in rescuing him, for the time being, from
the final tragedy, he ascribes praise to Providence, thanks the holy
images, and begins to bite off from both ends this fortune come from
Heaven.
With this portrait we must end the analysis of “Dead Souls.” The
impression, as can be seen, is truly heart-rending. According to the
author’s own statement, “it is a picture of the universal platitude
of the country.” The story is told, that the scoffer Pushkin, after
hearing his friend Gogol read this romance, said to him, in a voice
broken by emotion, “Good God! the sad thing is our poor Russia.” It is
indeed this state of moral wretchedness which Gogol strove above all to
make the Russian reader feel, even though he had to do so at the cost
of his own popularity.
I shall pass briefly over the last part of the romance, which is only
an arrangement drawn from the author’s notes. The adventurer is seen
for the second time in the clutches of the law. He has forged a will,
like Crispin in “Le Légataire;” and he is only released from prison
by the intercession of an old philanthropist, who finally succeeds in
softening the governor-general’s severity. Tchitchikof has agreed to
become an honest man, or at least to marry, and to found a line of
honest folk.
It has been thought that in this violent but straightforward governor,
“animated by healthy hatreds” as Alceste says, Gogol meant to picture
the Tsar Nicholas. Gogol belonged, indeed, to an epoch when Russia as
yet expected her salvation and delivery from above. However, the tsar
is not mentioned here more than elsewhere in “Dead Souls;” and the
author, whose patriotism shines forth in so many places in the book,
does not seem to have cared, as might have been expected, to personify
the country in the emperor. I might adduce, in proof, all the passages
where, by way of compensation, words about Russian soil, Russian
horsemanship, Russian idiom, etc., bring out, through the ironical and
trivial prose of the satire, the poet’s passionate lyric utterances
which were revealed to us in his first writings. Here is a fragment
which deserves to be enshrined in an anthology along with the piece
about the Dniépr or the “Ukraine night:”--
“Russia! Russia! from the beautiful distant places where I dwell[24] I
see thee, I see thee plainly, O my country! Thy nature is niggardly. In
thee there is nothing to charm or to awe the spectator.... No: there
is nothing splendid in thee, Russia, nothing marvellous; all is open,
desert, flat. Thy little cities are scarce visible in thy plains,
like points, like specks. Nothing in thee is seductive, nothing even
delights the eye. What secret mysterious force, then, draws me to
thee? Why does thy song, melancholy, fascinating, restless, resounding
throughout all thy length and breadth, from one sea to the other, ring
forever in my ears? What does this song contain? Whence come these
accents and these sobs which find their echo in the heart? What are
these dolorous tones which strike deep into the soul, and wake the
memories? Russia, what desirest thou of me? What is this obscure,
mysterious bond which unites us to each other? Why dost thou look at
me thus? Why does all that thou containest fix upon me this expectant
gaze? My thought remains mute before thy immensity. This very infinity,
to what forebodings does it give rise? Since thou art limitless,
canst thou not be the mother country of thoughts whose grandeur is
immeasurable? Canst thou not bring forth giants, thou who art the
country of mighty spaces? This thought of thy immeasurable extent is
reflected powerfully in my soul, and an unknown force makes its way
into the depths of my mind. My eyes are kindled with a supernatural
vision. What dazzling distances! What a marvellous mirage unknown to
earth! O Russia!”