Nikolai Gogol
(1809–1852)
The Government Inspector
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996
Gogol’s famous novella Diary of a Madman was a work of fiction not autobiography, but he himself saw demons everywhere. A man of contrasts, he was painfully shy but relentlessly egotistical; lacking in self-confidence he felt it was his duty as an artist to show the people where they were going wrong; progressive in his literary style, he was reactionary in the treatment of themes; his laughter was full-throated but cruel, a weapon rather than a tool – “at once naïve and cunning”, said Pushkin. He brought pleasure to others but tragically could bring none to himself.
He was born Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol-Yanovski on 20 March 1809 in the Ukraine. His literary bent probably came from his father, a minor aristocrat who used to write comedies for the private entertainment of friends. His temperament and psychology, on the other hand, were products of his mother’s dominating influence. Intense and neurotic, she had married at fourteen and produced five children in all, three daughters and two sons. Nikolai was the one who suffered most.
When his father died, the young Nikolai was still at school. While his grandmother continued to fill his head with horrifying tales of the supernatural from Ukrainian folklore, his mother concentrated on his spiritual upbringing. She in her turn terrified him with warnings of hellfire and damnation while at the same time planting in his mind the supernatural belief that he had been picked out by destiny for great things. He went to church “in a fever of mingled adoration and dread”, dreaming of taking St Peterburg by storm, while in periods of solitude he was aware of “an agonising sensation of emptiness”.
Like generations of young aristocrats before him, he left for the capital in 1828. In looks and manner unprepossessing, he couldn’t even find his way into a lowly clerking position as he had no connections and his provincialism didn’t help. He tried acting but his voice was weak and, although he had a genuine gift for performing, he was temperamentally unsuited to it as a profession. But he had brought with him a fragment of juvenilia, a narrative poem called Hanz Kuechelgarten, which he had printed at his own expense, seeing in this way to achieve his destiny – “to live without justifying my existence somehow would be shameful”. But critical reaction was harsh and he spent the next few weeks buying up all the copies he could find and destroying them. Sensitive to criticism, he would spend years reworking texts which had met with a bad press.
The year 1831 was to prove the turning point in his literary fortunes with the publication of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, a set of four stories rich in evocation of his Ukrainian background and filled with insouciant folk humour. In 1835 two more sets of stories appeared, Mirgorod and Arabesques, and he started work on Dead Souls, the magnum opus which was to absorb much of his creative life until his death seventeen years later.
Many of his early stories were based on folk legends, gradually moving from the romantic evocation of a mythological past to a more realistic application of his humorous standpoint. He claimed that they were concocted as a reaction against his current circumstances: “I was suffering periods of depression and in order to exorcise them I invented the funniest things I could think of.” But at the same time his humour was a retaliation against life which he felt was as absurd as it was fatuous. “The world is at once both funny and appalling,” he wrote to friends. The last line of Mirgorod (1835), “It is gloomy in this world, gentlemen!” summed up Gogol’s attitude precisely.
But if his humour was in large part a defence mechanism to help him overcome his feelings of inferiority and make the business of living easier – to laugh at the world first before is laughed at him – on another level his intentions were decidedly satirical and didactic. In Gogol’s view, man was part of nature but had somehow become distanced from it, his activities and imagination fatally stunted. This was why in the earlier works he had found it more comforting to look back at a rosy folklorique past rather than head-on at the foolish, blighted, stuffy and spiritually dead present.
Further works like Diary of a Madman, The Nose, Nevski Prospekt and The Overcoat extended his facility and his range, for the first time bringing onto the literary stage the life of the little man, the downtrodden, time-serving drudge who was now becoming a familiar type all over Russia. Such works helped his literary reputation to grow, while his sense of artistic well-being was increased due to his friendship with Alexander Pushkin whom he had met in 1831, and whose sympathetic guidance and support were to provide for a brief period the steadying influence and emotional anchor he had lacked as a youth.
Towards the end of 1835 he asked Pushkin to suggest an idea for a comedy. The result was The Government Inspector which, despite the benevolent reaction of the Tsar, was coldly received by the Court hangers-on and civil service drones who felt its satire came too close for comfort. “Everyone is against me,” he complained to the actor Shchepkin. “I realise now what it is to be a writer of comedy. You show the truth and not just one man but every member of every class rises up against you.” One of his most characteristic works, the play is a frightening and grotesque tragi-comedy, anticipating Beckett and Ionesco by a century.
He continued picking at the play over the next few years, and in one commentary identified three types of laughter: the first is light and idle, the second is jaundiced and cynical, but the third and best type is that which bubbles up from the deep well of the spirit to counter the essential triviality and emptiness of life. Gogol’s most characteristic works show a Russia in the grip of spiritual atrophy, its soul lost to a devil whose horns and tail are concealed beneath the caps and cloaks of authority and the ubiquitous uniform of dull routine.
Whether it was just to escape his critics or whether because he was beginning to find the growing unrest in Russian discomfiting, Gogol abruptly left for Rome, and was only to see his homeland again on two occasions. The death of his mentor Pushkin in a duel in 1837 was a heavy blow: “My life, my supreme delight has died with him.” Gogol now found himself alone in an increasingly hostile world.
Then 1842 was a bad year and led to increasing mental torment and crises of confidence. Two new plays, Marriage and The Gamblers were produced, neither of which was a success. Later in the year, in a fit of despair, he destroyed the newly written second part of Dead Souls. The first part had shown a relentlessly negative side of human nature and the sequel had been conceived as a corrective pointing out the good, but Gogol’s inability to complete a satisfactory version of part two suggests he was finding it more and more difficult to see any light anywhere.
He was also becoming increasingly unhappy with the social scene at home and, despite his claim that the artist must adopt an apolitical stance, he set out his personal agenda in Selected Passages From Correspondence With My Friends. It was a mixture of extreme conservatism, sycophancy and naïve political theorising which was so fiercely attacked, not least by his friends, that his mind finally gave way. Pathologically disillusioned, his ideals failing so short of reality, he sought refuge, either deliberately or sub-consciously, in a kind of melancholy madness characterised by feelings of religious guilt and a deep self-lacerating desire for penance.
Not that it brought him any spiritual comfort: “I confess Christ only because my reason and not my religion commands me to do so.” On a pilgrimage to the Holy Land he fell under the influence of one Father Matthew Konstantinovski, a country priest who, depending on one’s interpretation, either guided and supported a tortured soul through his final painful years, or spiritually hounded him to death. Either way, the author’s approaching end was wretched in the extreme.
In 1848 he returned to Moscow and joined for a while in the literary life of the city, making friends with Ostrovsky, Lermontov, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. But this brief respite from his inner torment was not to last. He retreated further and further from human society into a world of increasing religious fanaticism and privation. He underwent long periods of fasting and in his weariness frequently contemplated suicide. He allowed himself to be subjected to horrifying medical treatments, with leeches applied to his nose and frequent head-dousings with ice-cold water. It was an eerie echo of the punishment the first-person narrator had received in Diary of a Madman. He eventually died on 21 February 1852 aged just 42.
Turgenev’s comment, “This was a great artist, and I listened to hm with veneration even though I could not agree with him,” seems a strangely appropriate epitaph for this unhappy and complex man. He had dared to write the truth, but had also chosen to laugh at it, a thing which those he had most wanted to reach would not and never did forgive.
