Tag Archives: gogol

As a Hatter

As an artist, Gogol stands apart from all other creators of literature that we have encountered in the course. His stream-of-consciousness style is remarkable, and he has a certain singular way of painting the desires, motivations, and experiences of the pitiful mid-tier Russian civil servant that immediately took hold of my imagination, and I am sure that of others. He does all this with incredible humor, and manages to construct a narrative with incredible speed and power. The previous Gogol work we studied, The Nose, was understandably fixated on its titular focus. However, this olfactory obsession is not contained to The Nose. At several painfully obvious points in Diary of a Madman, the Gogol work we most recently studied, Gogol brings the faces’ most famous organ to the forefront. On page 165, he rather innocently writes “I had to hold my nose” (as a result of a nasty smell). Later, however, he mentions a dog “trying to sink his teeth” into the narrator’s nose. Again, on page 170, Gogol writes “It’s not as if his made of gold”, in reference to the narrator’s romantic adversary, the Kammerjunker. This is slightly more telling, using the nose as a central to pin an entire personality on. The narrator’s nose is mentioned again on page 176, and on page 178, perhaps most noticeably as the last word in the entire work. This last flourish convinces me that mention of the nose is not coincidental, and instead is entirely purposeful by Gogol. In the last sentence, the King of France is said to have a wart “right under his nose” as a way of devaluing him and demeaning him in the insane narrator’s mind. This goes hand and hand with the earlier description of the Kammerjunker’s nose being “not gold” as a way of rejecting his (in the narrator’s mind) superiority and wealth. I first thought of “noses” in the context of Gogol’s The Nose, it is quite evident after study that Gogol does have a strange fixation on the body part, and particularly enjoys using it as a barometer for certain characters when observed by the narrator.

When reading Diary of a Madman, I initially took the title as a semi-ironic take on the state of the archetypal St. Petersburg bureaucratic existence. As the story progressed, becoming more surreal and Kafkaeque, I took the title at face value, watching with interest as Gogol initiated a subtle descent into insanity. This was cemented during the talking dog (at the apartment) sequence, and carried on into the narrative past this first real expression of “madness” in the narrator. My opinion of the title changed for a third time during the final, “King of Spain” sequence. During this period of the story, in which the narrative becomes feverish and hazy, the title seems more of an overdone farce, Gogol commenting on a modern ideal of insanity, and taking it to full, demonstrative irony. The idea and demonstrated version of madness certainly fits Gogol’s writing in The Nose. I am glad to have discovered Gogol as a writer, realizing his place in the pantheon of surrealists alongside Kafka and Murakami.

The Madman’s Self-Deception

Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” both feature protagonists who descend into madness while chasing such morally empty objectives as lust, respect, and fortune. Throughout the path to their eventual insanity and institutionalization for insanity, the symptoms of madness present themselves in a way that degrades the subjects. Madness is not a wild release for the protagonists in this story; it is much more of a reminder of the realities that Aksenty in “Diary of a Madman” and Hermann in “The Queen of Spades” are dissatisfied with. In fact, while Aksenty and Hermann lose their grip on reality through the distortion of insanity, their self-deception also reinforces their position in reality in cruel fashion .

Arksenty Ivanovich Poprischin is a social servant who aims to achieve power and dignity even though he greatly underachieves. He places the blame for this on his boss, the Section Chief, yet  he also sees a path to liberation through the Section Chief’s daughter, Sophie. Arksenty falls in love with her, comparing her to a little bird with whom he could cast aside his personal insecurities. Arksenty’s madness eventually conceives of a dog who writes letters. Arksenty reads the letters, and they reveal Arksenty’s irrelevance to Sophie, her love with another man, and general insults about Arksenty’s appearance. If these letters are an invention of Arksenty’s crazed mind, why do they further degrade him? Even if the letters had been real, his madness now supplies an innocent, objective figure (Madgie the dog) to deliver insults to Aksenty. Either way, the letters seem to reinforce his position of irrelevance which he hopes to transcend. In this way, Arksenty’s madness misleads his ultimate goals by delegitimizing them.

In Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” Hermann also misleads himself in the midst of his obsession with discovering the secret of the card game fero. Hermann feigns love for Lizaveta in order to chase an empty and corrupt wealth. He wants to gain access to the countess’ secrets that were born out of necessity and gifted to the countess only to alleviate her from poverty. After his armed appearance shocks the countess to death, Hermann’s mad consciousness punishes Hermann for his shallowness; the wink of the countess’ corpse and her appearance as a ghost to reveal the card game secret only pit Hermann against himself. He misleads himself into thinking that he possesses a secret, and then through this arrogance he loses his final card game and goes insane.

Madness, through all of its distortions, imprisons the protagonists in their own sad realities in these stories. This raises some questions: Is this punishment for their moral shallowness? If so, why is such a punishment self-inflicted, and what does it say about the way Russian society viewed insanity?

A Palm Full of Copecks Helps the Medicine Go Down

In the United States, we find ourselves at an extremely contentious time in terms of national politics. The New Right conservative movement has reached its zenith and ultimate form with the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, while another Clinton is poised to ascend to the nation’s “throne”. The Republican and Democratic parties are extremely divided over many issues, perhaps none more so than the structure and size of government in the USA. The Democratic Party stands for government as a tool to aid the nation’s citizens in many areas, and thus favors increased power, breadth, and size of government. The Republican stance is one of limited government, where government serves as the common bond between a collection of states with self determined laws, and a mechanism for common national defense. In the Republican view, less government oversight allows citizens to aid themselves with increased efficiency and effectiveness.

It is no small coincidence that the term “bureaucracy” was introduced practically simultaneously with the beginning of our discussion of St. Petersburg. Although Russia was a monarchy until the early 20th century, civil servants dominated St. Petersburg, much as they do today in Northern Virginia, The District of Columbia, and Metro-area Maryland. With this acknowledgment, a study of some rudimentary mechanisms of Petrovian-bureaucracy seems highly in order.

Bureaucracy, in a Petersburg-ian context, is a major theme throughout every one of the assigned works. According to Brodsky, Petersburg was home to “a web like bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy is also a central tenant of Lieutenant Kizhe. Most specifically, though, a convoluted bureaucratic system that would give modern Republicans fits is displayed in The Nose. Bribery is mentioned often. When the police officer returns his nose, Kovalyov “got the message and pressed a 10 ruble note into his hand”. Likewise, when arriving at the Police Superintendent’s home, it is thought that even if Kovalyov had “brought with him a few pounds of tea or a bolt of cloth” (as a bribe) the Superintendent would not have granted him “a particularly effusive welcome”. By emphasizing that these gifts usually would get a kind welcome, and that this was out of the norm, Gogol shows how pervasive the bribe was at this time. It would appear again in Soviet times. Earlier in the story, during the print shop episode, Kovalyov says “I would be extremely grateful to you, and very glad this incident has brought me the pleasure of your acquaintance. In normal context, this may be perceived as simple niceties, but in the context of bureaucratic St. Petersburg and The Nose, we can be sure that “grateful” has some monetary connotation. Although the story is incredibly irreverent and humorous, some comment on Gogol’s residence of St. Petersburg and its corruption circa 1835 is plainly visible.

Olfactory Blues

This week, I’ve chosen to focus on probably my two favorite readings to date: Gogol’s “The Nose” and Dostoevsky’s “White Nights”. Both stories pandered to the romantic side of me, which I absolutely adored. In “The Nose”, the absurdity of social standing is teased as Kovalyov wakes up without his nose and suffers at its hand as it surpasses him in rank. The narrative of the protagonist wandering around St. Petersburg is cartoonish and charming, especially as he struggles with his love interest’s nagging mother. The ridiculous nature of her letter in response, spinning a missing nose into a proposal acceptance, is hilarious: “If by this you mean to say that I am, as it were, turning up my nose at you, that is, rejecting you out of hand, then I am surprised that you yourself should bring this up, since I, as you are aware, was of a directly contrary opinion, and if you were now to seek the hand of my daughter in the legitimate way I would be prepared forthwith to grant your request, for this has always been the object of my most earnest desire…” (57). The desperate mother peddling her daughter in the face of a rogue nose adds to the sheer madness of the piece and contributes to the social climbing motif in a misogynistic but comical way. The internal struggle of Kovalyov is different yet similar to the struggle of Dostoevsky’s narrator in “White Nights”, as both grapple with a whimsical identity crisis set in a whimsical city — whether stemming from unrequited love or societal insecurity, their experiences are beautifully melancholy. As Dostoevsky’s narrator says, “The dreamer’ – if you want an exact definition – is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort.” Both of these pieces took different spins on the hopeless human condition in a conflicted and cosmic city.

All a dream?

The setting of the Nose in St. Petersburg is important and helps make sense of the story. The events are concretely set in the city, with many references to the city’s landmarks throughout. These concrete, realistic details are juxtaposed with the absurd, dreamlike events of the story (Kovalyov having lost his nose without noticing; the strange fog that obscures the ending of scenes, which the narrator waves away). The Russian title is actually “Нос” (Nose), which is the Russian word for dream (“сон”) backwards.

The strangeness of the story is less surprising given this particular setting, because it corresponds with the strangeness of the city itself. The fact that it appeared remarkably quickly and became a focal point of the culture; the fact that it was built on swamps and water, seemingly impossible; the surreal white nights of the far north; all of these make the reality of the city seem more uncertain.

In previous texts, (like Alexander Herzen’s comparison of Moscow and St. Petersburg), the city was criticized for its bureaucracy, the political pressure and ladder-climbing. Gogol parodies this importance of political rank above all else when Kovalyov is afraid to talk to his own nose because it outranks him. No one else seems to notice anything strange about it, either, and pay all due respect to it.