Some of you might be interested in the exchange of ideas about Gogol that Susanne and I had following our class on Monday night:
Dear Susanne,
Thank you for a wonderful discussion of Gogol last night!
Before moving on to Tolstoy, I just wanted to make several observations about Gogol that did not come up during our class discussion.
You referred to Chichikov and to a certain extent Akakevich as “heroes” because they succeeded extraordinarily well in subduing their human emotions—and thus their vulnerabilities-- for the sake of achieving a specific self-aggrandizing personal goal. Yet it seemed to me that Gogol was using the word “hero” in both cases in the same sense that Lermontov used it, which is to say, ironically. Both Gogol characters were unthinking, unfeeling, inhuman humans, much like Lermontov’s hero. They had both lost their capacity for empathy or compassion and for creating lasting bonds with another human being. They both lacked any kind of curiosity, their intellectual growth had ceased completely, and they were incapable of self-reflection. They were both totally focused on themselves and the pursuit of their own self-imposed and materialistic goal, and both could not see and had no interest in what was going on in the world beyond their own”noses” (The Nose!)). Words like charity, forgiveness, tolerance, selflessness, guilt, conscience, and reflection had no place in the narcissistic, cold little world they carved out for themselves. To be sure, Akakevich was not malevolent and cold-hearted in the same way that Chichikov was, but neither would I consider him to be a heroic human being.
What we could say is that in their total materialistic self-involvement and stunted humanity, Chichikov and Akakevich were “heroes”of their time much like Lermontov’s hero was, i.e., they embodied and epitomized absolutely magnificently and completely all of the glaring foibles and evils of their own society. They were the symbols par excellence of a society where everyone was rushing around mindlessly to achieve their own selfish goals and gave no thought to their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual vitality.
In short, the irony that Gogol conveys so artfully is that people like Chichikov--—the “hero” of this sick and decaying society rather than Gogol’s own personal concept of a hero—are the true “dead souls” in this society, even more so than the dead peasant. s The minds and spirits of the people in this society the essence of what separates human beings from animals, have shriveled up and died in their frenzied pursuit of petty, selfish, and completely materialistic goals.
It is no surprise, for example, that Manilov never completed any project that required intellectual effort, and always had a book lying around his study bookmarked at p. 14 that was never completed. He grew bored easily, disliked and thus totally ignored vexing and unpleasant problems, and preferred to live mindlessly in a “sweet” little world of his own creation with his equally saccharine and mindless wife and 2 sons. Nothing could stir him from his mental stupor. Neither is it a surprise that Korobochka opens her door in the middle of a stormy night to a complete stranger as soon as Chichikov tells her that he is a “nobleman” and insinuates that he will buy her lard and bird feathers in addition to her “dead souls.” With Korobocka, materialism trumped personal safety and common sense. As for Nozdryov, he lies reflexively, loves picking fights, acts without giving a thought to the consequences, boasts insufferably, gambles irresponsibly, and treats family as badly as strangers. He is a spoiled, bratty, selfish, cruel child who has never grown up and who has not learned to think before he acts, to understand that he needs to be his brother’s keeper, and that actions have consequences (“ Noz. At 25 was exactly the same as he had been at 18 and 20, a great carouser…..69) He feels no pangs of conscience, no sense of guilt, not remorse for hurting other people, and moves breezily from one fight to another. He has no sense of familial loyalty and no ties to anyone (he treats his brother-in-law despicably and has no apparent allegiance to his own sister who is married to him). Furthermore, like Manilov, his study shows absolutely no signs of mental activity : “there was no trace of what is usually found in studies [in Nozdryov’s study], that is, books or papers; there hung only sabers and two guns—one worth 300 and the other 800 roubles. (73)” Like everything in Nozdryov’s worthless life, the only things that have worth are the tangible objects. People are of value to Nozdryov only in so far as they can help him acquire more prestige and wealth for himself.
As for the physically healthy, ruddy, powerful Sobakevich, his soul is no less atrophied impassive, and lifeless. He thinks well of no one, puts down everyone behind their back, is suspicious of everyone, and interacts socially with cool detachment. When Chichikov outlines his plan to buy dead souls, Sobakevich shows absolutely no emotion: “…nothing in the least resembling expression showed on his face. It seemed there was no soul in his body at all, or if there was, it was not at all where it ought to be… (100) Furthermore, he shows absolutely no curiosity about why Chichikov might want to buy dead souls. It is all a business transaction, and nothing personal or human is allowed to get in the way of making a profit.
Plyushkin’s soul is no less shriveled up, atrophied, and rotting. Whereas he was merely thrifty in his early years, that positive impulse became distorted and perverted as he aged into a cruel and implacable miserliness. He had more than enough money, but he hoarded everything he had. He cut off ties with his daughter, treated his peasants inhumanly, and contracted into an impenetrable world of pure selfishness. “Human feelings, never very deep in him anyway, became shallower every moment, and each day something more was lost in this worn-out ruin. (119)” In short, more of his humanity and his soul were being eaten away by his inability to transcend his own needs and to think of anything other than self-gratification.
In the final analysis, Chichikov seems no less of a dead soul than the characters he encounters. He has the “self-control” to withhold a contribution to help his former teacher who is penniless and walks out on the daughter of a superior as soon as he receives the father’s help to advance himself. When he begins to wonder about the lives of the dead souls on his list and succumbs to a reflective moment, he immediately collects himself and chastises himself for engaging in such meaningless, time-wasting “drivel”(140).
In other words, all of these people have empty, dead souls despite their external appearance of prosperity. They have no connection to other human beings, no feeling for anyone other than themselves. They have created nothing in their life that is substantial and enduring in terms of family or values, and they have nothing to ground them firmly either spiritually or intellectually in this world. Indeed, the puny, badly rooted trees with beautifully painted supports in the town garden of N. is a perfect metaphor of the internal landscape of the characters in Dead Souls. They all seem lovely and charming and strong on the outside, but they have no inner strength, and their superficial values and “achievements” will not endure into future generations despite their pompous pretensions about “posterity.” (244)
In short, I would say that instead of lauding the pioneering, single-minded, go-getting, hard-driving capitalistic spirit of men like Chichikov and to a lesser extent Akakevich, as well as the other characters in N. , Gogol is highly critical of them. For Gogol, such individuals fail to mature into thinking, self-aware human beings who feel a responsibility to others. They lose the joy of living, the intellectual curiosity and innocence of childhood, and the easy camaraderie and friendships of youth. Living for all of them is a process of spiritual and intellectual decay, distortion, compression, alienation, and perversion. Even if they once showed some positive tendencies in their youth, they invariably lacked the spiritual strength to nurture these good qualities and bring them to light, e.g., Nozdryov’s brother-in-law.
Gogol writes, for example, “So take with you on your way, as you pass from youth’s tender years to hardening manhood, take with you every humane impulse, do not leave them by the wayside, you will not pick them up later.! (128) Furthermore, Gogol writes:
“[international acclaim] is not the lot of the writer[like me] …who has dared to call forth all that is before our eye every moment and which our indifferent eyes do not see—all the terrible, stupendous mire of trivia in which our life is entangled, the whole depth of cold, fragmented, everyday characters that swarm our often bitter and boring earthly path, and with the firm strength of his implacable chisel dares to present them roundly and vividly before the eyes of all people.” (134)
Thus, my major point: for Gogol, the tragedy of people like Chichikov, Plyushkin, Sobakevich, Nozdryov, etc. is that in their progression from youth to adulthood, they have lacked the spiritual will to cultivate their higher nature and instead allowed the essence of their humanity, namely their souls, to wither and die. For Gogol, they are the real "dead souls."
Dear Friends of Russian Literature,
Some of the emails I am receiving from you (castigating Akaky and Chichikov for their materialism,narcissism and stunted person growth) cause me to think that I failed to make clear three of my major arguments:
1. One can NEVER read Gogol straightforward. He is not a realist, he is not a psychological writer (as Tolstoy and Chekhov will be), he is a LITERARY writer. His characters are metaphors and often even allegories of certain modes of existence. In the case of Akaky Akakievich the mode of existence is that of the saint, the human being who has divested himself of all human needs. All saints are narcissists, that has long been known.
2. Dead Souls is Russia's first "epic" (poema), but it was written by a deeply troubled, deeply suffering writer who craved human closeness and never got it because his mode of loving was deeply despised. He was condemned to observe life from the margins (although he appeared to live at the center of literary society); this sharpened his perception of human hypocrisy. There can be very few heroes in such a world.
3. Within the constraints of Russian society, whose soul-deadening oppressiveness during the reign of Tsar Nicolai II is very hard to imagine for us who live in such freedom in 21st century America, the degree of independence that both Akaky Akakievich (destined by virtue of his name to become a copy of a non-entity) and Chichikov have achieved is truly heroic.
It is very easy to sit in judgment over the "narcissism" of people who develop survival strategies in the midst of terror and oppressiveness when oneself is utterly free to do whatever one likes and to say whatever one thinks. I do not see that as individuals and as a society we are proving ourselves unselfish and non-materialist commensurate with the extraordinary material comforts and personal freedoms we have been granted.
It is ESSENTIAL to look at Chichikov NOT from an easy chair placed in a well-heated study in 21st century America, but from WITHIN his biography -- that is why Gogol writes the third section of Dead Souls in a different style and gives us Chichikov's biography. You must enter this biography EMPATHICALLY, you must ENTER the narrative of his character formation in order to understand that the independence he achieved is, in fact, heroic and that within the constraints of his society Chichikov is, in deed, as Gogol asserts, a decent man.
I am somewhat sorry that the last section of my talk on 12/13 did not get recorded because I unfolded for you the tragedy of growing up in a system that rewards behavior over achievement and I described for you the consequences of such a system:
Step 1: Pure survival is ensured by:
1. obedience, which requires superb self-control, self-discipline, suppression of individuality and pride
2. smooth conformism (level1) -- a disappearance into the crowd. You don't want to be noticed ever.
2. hyper conformism (level 2), which expresses itself in the imitation of the behavior of others
3. pressure to imitate leads to the close observation of others
Step 2: Super survival, meaning getting ahead, is ensured by
1. close observation of others all the time
2. noting weaknesses in others
3. exploiting those weaknesses in order to gain an advantage.
This means that you are condemned to wear a mask all the time. You can never lose control over yourself because you cannot afford to show who you really are, what you desire; because when you do, someone else will exploit your weakness to gain an advantage.
It is a merciless, cruel, soul-deadening system that isolates human beings form each other, stunts their growth, prevents the nurturing of individuality, originality, and empathy. In Dead Souls, Chichikov's teacher is the prime representative of that world. He is a caricature of Tsar Nicoloai. If Pushkin had lived, he would have recognized it and laughed his head off.
The Tsar-teacher's system fosters duplicity, suspiciousness, secrecy, dishonesty, flattery, avarice, cruelty. All totalitarian regimes foster those traits.
This is the world in which A.A. and Chichikov grew up. It is also the world another Nicolai describes in 1513: Niccolo Machiavelli delivers a description of precisely that world in his major work of political advice, The Prince. And the world of Cleopatra, according to Stacey Schiff's recent book, wasn't that different.
Within that world, Chichikov managed to come out a decent man: he does not hurt other human beings but finds a way to game the system itself. He is a brilliant con artist who exploits the legal loopholes of the insane tsarist economic system and, to some degree, the gullibility of those people who have bought into the system.
He has many good traits: self-discipline, self-control, goal-orientedness, self-reliance; he avoids hurting others.
The pressure on mid to late 19th century Russian intellectuals was to break out of that system and to develop notions of autonomy, individuality, empathy, rich inner lives. This is Dostoevksy's great project (developing a sophisticated conscience); whereas Tolstoy and Chekhov aim at developing empathic relations with other human beings.
And yet: it is ESSENTIAL to remember Chichikov, because once we hit 1917, we are reverting very rapidly to a totalitarian regime. By 1929 everything that was gained in terms of personal freedom since about 1850 was lost.
Susanne Klingenstein
Hi Susanne,
Several more points about Gogol:
1) Why do you say that Gogol is a LITERARY writer and not a realist or psychological writer? Why can’t a writer be all 3 simultaneously? It would seem to me that metaphors and allegories can be used by a writer to convey psychological and/or realistic issues. The distinction seems arbitrary and unhelpful in analyzing Gogol’s novel. Metaphors and allegories are used to make a point, and that point can be a combination of social commentary, psychological insight, moralizing, and social commentary.
2) It is absolutely true, as you point out, that a totalitarian world such as the one Gogol was living in engenders and indeed, demands conformity and anonymity. It strips the person of his individuality and requires all his strength simply to survive. On that basis, you seem to rationalize the kind of inhumanity and alienation that we see in The Two Ivans, The Overcoat, and Dead Souls: self-centeredness, narcissism, and selfishness were “survival” strategies that enabled one to survive in this cruel, cold world. We in our comfortable 21st century perches cannot understand what people at that time had to endure just to survive.
Nevertheless, thousands of years earlier both Judaism and later Christianity addressed the behavior of the individual and did not distinguish between people living under totalitarianism or democracy. Both religions taught people to do the right thing with respect to other human beings regardless of what was going on around them politically and socially. It provided a template for human behavior in the toughest of times as well as the best of times. Jews living in Russia during the 19th and early 20th century (like my father and grandfather) hardly led a life of comfort and security, and yet they managed to maintain strong family ties, a sense of individual worth, a respect for education and intellectual achievement , and a recognition of the need to care for and provide for those less fortunate (tzedakah). In other words, neither the totalitarian government or the cruelty of the society toward Jews destroyed the value system of the Jews themselves.
Thus, there is no way to rationalize the cruelty of two friends who become bitter enemies (The Two Ivan) out of sheer pettiness by saying that it was the fault of the “system.” Nor can we say that Chichikov’s selfishness in the face of his former teacher’s penniless plight was caused by the “system,” since many of his own, less “perfect” classmates provided financial help to the teacher. Nor can we say that Chichikov’s cruel use of the daughter of his superior to advance his own position was caused by the “system. Nor can we say that the administrator’s sadistic treatment of A.A. in front of his friend was caused by the “system.” These examples are all morally wrong, violate every religious tenet of Judaism and Christianity, and would certainly have been recognized as such even within totalitarian Russian Orthodox Russia.
3. Whereas you call Chichikov a “decent man,” I would call him just the opposite. Nor would I be alone, it would seem , since Gogol says pretty much the same thing about his “hero”:
But such is not the lot of the writer…who has dared to call forth all that is before our eye every moment and which our indifferent eyes do not see—all the terrible, stupendous mire of trivia in which our life is entangled, the whole depth of cold, fragmented, everyday characters that swarm our often bitter and boring earthly path, and with the firm strength of his implacable chisel dares to present them roundly and vividly before the eyes of all people.
Contemporary judgment will call [this realistic writer] insignificant and mean the creations he has fostered, claim he insults mankind, will ascribe to the writer the qualities of the heroes he has portrayed, will deny him heart, and soul, and the divine flame of talent.
Contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation.
“I am destined by a wondrous power to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, to view the whole of hugely rushing life, to view it through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it!
3) There are 2 examples in Gogol where characters show incipient goodness but fail to act on their positive inclination. In The Overcoat, the young co-worker is pained at the abuse heaped on A.A. and remains haunted by the cruelty years later. In Dead Souls, the brother-in-law of Nozdryov seems to be a loyal and caring husband and tries to restrain Nozdryov. Yet both characters fail to act on their nobler impulses, and nothing changes in the end.
The point (regardless of whether one calls it literary, psychological, or realistic) for Gogol is that following through on our nobler impulses requires strength, courage, and consistency. It may not be an easy path to follow, but it is what human beings need to do: “So take with you on your way, as you pass from youth’s tender years to hardening manhood, take with you every humane impulse, do not leave them by the wayside, you will not pick them up later.! (128)
Warm regards,
Lyn
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