Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

In the domain of fantasy, Gogol’s masterpiece is to be found in this same collection. It is called Viy. It is the story of a beautiful lady who is a witch. She casts her spell on a student in theology, and when she dies, her dying will is that he shall spend three nights in reading prayers over her body, in the church where her coffin lies. During his watch on the first night, the dead maiden rises from her coffin, and watches him with glassy, opaque eyes. He hears the flapping of the wings of innumerable birds, and in the morning is found half dead from terror. He attempts to avoid the ordeal on the second night, but the girl’s father, an old Cossack, forces him to carry out his daughter’s behest, and three nights are spent by the student in terrible conflict with the witch. On the third night he dies. The great quality of this story is the atmosphere of overmastering terror that it creates.

With these two stories, Taras Bulba and Viy, Gogol took leave of Romanticism and Fantasy, and started on the path of Realism. In this province he was what the Germans call a bahnbrecher, and he discovered a new kingdom. It may be noticed that Gogol, roughly speaking, began where Dickens ended; that is to say, he wrote his Tale of Two Cities first, and his Pickwick last. But already in this collection of Mirgorod tales there are two stories in the humorous realistic vein, which Gogol never excelled; one is called Old-fashioned Landowners, and the other How Ivan Ivanovitch quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovitch.

Old-fashioned Landowners is a simple story. It is about an old couple who lived in a low-roofed little house, with a verandah of blackened tree-trunks, in the midst of a garden of dwarfed fruit-trees covered with cherries and plums. The couple, Athanasii Ivanovitch and his wife Pulcheria Ivanovna, are old. He is sixty, she is fifty-five. It is the story of Philemon and Baucis. Nothing happens in it, except that we are introduced to these charming, kind, and hospitable people; that Pulcheria dies, and that after her death everything in the house becomes untidy and slovenly, because Athanasii cannot live without her; and after five years he follows her to the grave, and is buried beside her. There is nothing in the story, and there is everything. It is amusing, charming, and infinitely pathetic. Some of the touches of description remind one strongly of Dickens. Here, for instance, is a description of the doors of the house where the old couple lived:

“The most remarkable thing about the house was the creaking of the doors. As soon as day broke, the singing of these doors was heard throughout the whole house. I cannot say why they made the noise: either it was the rusty hinges, or else the workman who made them hid some secret in them; but the remarkable thing was that each door had its own special note. The door going into the bedroom sang in a delicate treble; the door going into the dining-room had a hoarse bass note; but that which led into the front hall made a strange trembling, groaning noise, so that if you listened to it intently you heard it distinctly saying, ‘Batiushka, I am so cold!’”

The story of the two Ivans is irresistibly funny. The two Ivans were neighbours; one of them was a widower and the other a bachelor. They were the greatest friends. Never a day passed without their seeing each other, and their greatest pleasure was to entertain each other at big, Dickens-like meals. But one day they quarrelled about a gun, and Ivan Nikiforovitch called Ivan Ivanovitch a goose. After this they would not see each other, and their relations were broken off. Hitherto, Ivan Nikiforovitch and Ivan Ivanovitch had sent every day to inquire about each other’s health, had conversed together from their balconies, and had said charming things to each other. On Sundays they had gone to church arm in arm, and outdone each other in mutual civilities; but now they would not look at each other.

At length the quarrel went so far that Ivan Ivanovitch lodged a complaint against Ivan Nikiforovitch, saying that the latter had inflicted a deadly insult on his personal honour, firstly by calling him a goose, secondly by building a goose-shed opposite his porch, and thirdly by cherishing a design to burn his house down. Ivan Nikiforovitch lodged a similar petition against Ivan Ivanovitch. As bad luck would have it, Ivan Ivanovitch’s brown sow ate Ivan Nikiforovitch’s petition, and this, of course, made the quarrel worse.

At last a common friend of the pair attempts to bring about a reconciliation, and asks the two enemies to dinner. After much persuasion they consent to meet. They go to the dinner, where a large company is assembled; both Ivans eat their meal without glancing at each other, and as soon as the dinner is over they rise from their seats and make ready to go. At this moment they are surrounded on all sides, and are adjured by the company to forget their quarrel. Each says that he was innocent of any evil design, and the reconciliation is within an ace of being effected when, unfortunately, Ivan Nikiforovitch says to Ivan Ivanovitch: “Permit me to observe, in a friendly manner, that you took offence because I called you a goose.” As soon as the fatal word “goose” is uttered, all reconciliation is out of the question, and the quarrel continues to the end of their lives.

In 1835, Gogol retired definitely from the public service. At this point of his career he wrote a number of stories and comedies, of a varied nature, which he collected later in two volumes, Arabesques, 1834, and Tales, 1836. It was the dawn of his realistic phase, although he still indulged from time to time in the fantastic, as in the grotesque stories, The Nose—the tale of a nose which gets lost and wanders about—and The Coach. But the most remarkable of these stories is The Overcoat, which is the highest example of Gogol’s pathos, and contains in embryo all the qualities of vivid realism which he was to develop later. It is the story of a clerk who has a passion for copying, and to whom caligraphy is a fine art. He is never warm enough; he is always shivering. The ambition, the dream of his life, is to have a warm overcoat. After years of privation he saves up the sum necessary to realise his dream and buy a new overcoat; but on the first day that he wears it, the coat is stolen from him.

The police, to whom he applies after the theft, laugh at him, and the clerk falls into a black melancholy. He dies unnoticed and obscure, and his ghost haunts the squalid streets where he was wont to walk.

Nearly half of modern Russian literature descends directly from this story. The figure of this clerk and the way he is treated by the author is the first portrait of an endless gallery of the failures of this world, the flotsam and jetsam of a social system: grotesque figures, comic, pathetic, with a touch of tragedy in them, which, since they are handled by their creator with a kindly sympathy, and never with cruelty or disdain, win our sympathy and live in our hearts and our affections.