More thoughts on the Gogol, Susanne and Chevre, I am sorry we did not have more time for the discussion. Clearly, the class has lots of complementary and conflicting views on this fascinating work.
In my view, Dead Souls fits into the "quest/trial" genre of literature. Gogol apes the structure of the Iliad with the serial trials. The difference in Gogol is that the goal of the quest is always in doubt, whereas, in literature generally, it is known in advance - whether it is love, G-d, the Holy Grail, etc.
In fact, the goal of this work is unclear. What are Gogol's social and political observations? He is opaque. He proffers conflicting clues. he obfuscates. He eludes the censors, in effect. What does hold true here, however, is that Chichikov is saved by many dei ex machina at the end of Volume One, falling clearly into the classical tradition.
Furthermore, I perceive that the issue of social satire and criticism in his writing is really intriguing and contradictory. Gogol himself could not have been surprised reasonably that his readers saw him as a Russian Chaucer. He just pulverizes character types. I think he played a trick on the censors, and to some but not all readers, by protesting too much. He wears a mask at all times. It is a double question of the unreliable narrator and the unreliable author.
He compounds this "artful play" by introducing "unreliable, ironic" characters. (I see from the comments of some of our colleagues that many of you share this view, i.e. the living souls are actualized dead souls and vice versa, etc.) Gogol often addresses the reader, as if the reader is a character, and co-opts (or at least attempts to) the direction of the reader's thinking as he leads the reader/character through the work. In my view, he clearly wanted to distract the censors from his pointed and biting social and political satire.
Moreover, I found the third part of the first book interesting in terms of the literary perspective. Gogol is, maybe, an early progenitor of psychological pre-Freud) literary criticism leading up to Russian Social Realism. His psychological perspective is a broad sweep, not refined as it later becomes in literature and science. We don't achieve much depth on Chichikov himself (who is a Russian type), but we do arrive at a rich and fulsome portrayal of the Russian character as a whole.
Gogol himself, as a complex narrator, is an early "Angry Man" who focuses on the truly harshest aspects of life under the tsarist regime, points to the injustice and suffering, emphasizes the burdens of boredom and intellectual stagnation, loneliness and isolation that the sheer size and emptiness of the country impose on the individual (rather than the American tendency to praise the vastness, opportunity and openness of America). He thrashes about taking on all adversities and opinions.
Of course, Gogol presents a mutated capitalist view of the world, not Marxist or socialist, as we see evolving in European art and literature 50 years later. Gogol may be, in his own mind, attempting to strengthen love of country and nationalist ideals, but the effect of his art on the contemporary (and probably contemporaneous) reader is a robust struggle and caustic combat against tsarist/aristocratic/oligarchic ideology and ideals of Russia.
In addition, my view is that he is taking on the literary criticism establishment that existed in his day. He is opting to overturn the rules of classical criticism and writing, while using/usurping some of the morphology of classical writing. He upends it. A quest without a goal, a character without a soul cannot portray real classical tragedy, etc.
It's thirty years since I have read Lukacz. I have to go back to see what he wrote about Gogol and even Pushkin, if anything. How did the Marxist literary critics get their arms around Gogol? However, Gogol does enter into debates with anonymous critics within the body of the work. He anticipates rejection and debasement. Where and when does it appear in Russian literary criticism? Gogol is an interesting puzzle.
His personal views may be inherently conservative, but his life-style is not and his writing is complex and ambivalent. He is not someone who is himself a conformist to literary style, standards, use of language, and so forth. So which mask is he wearing when we encounter him? How many masks can he wear in one piece? How did he get anything past the censors? I am delighted that we are enjoying this opportunity to delve into the work further. I welcome everyone's take on this. Alix Ginsburg
P. S. I would love to know if anyone ever wrote a dissertation analyzing Tevye der Milchiker in relationship to Chichikov. Does anyone know of such a thing? Do we have any evidence that Shalom Aleichem read Dead Souls?
No comments:
Post a Comment