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Chapter Five Parallel Lives THE WIDESPREAD CIRCULATION of the literary classics, though certainly crucial to the intelligentsia’s goals, did not suffice to integrate the diverse estates of Russian society into a single national community. By themselves, the classic works could no more create a public sphere than a script alone can call the theater into being. Civil society, too, requires actors. And its players, in turn, need role models. Whatever their background, readers could, of course, extrapolate some notion of who the author was simply from reading the classic texts. As Stanley Fish has observed , it is impossible to read without “some specification of what kind of person—and with what abilities, concerns, goals, purposes, and so on—is the source of the words you are reading.”1 With their colorful narrative personae, Gogol’s stories provided abundant raw material out of which newly literate readers could imagine the teller of the tale. But here, precisely, was the rub. Few of Gogol’s narrators—consider, for example, Rudyi Pan’ko and the eccentric sexton of Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka or the nostalgic sentimentalist of “Old-World Landowners”—exhibited the national pride and civic conscience the intelligentsia desired to instill in newly literate readers. To address this gap, educators and popular enlighteners had recourse to biography, a genre particularly suited to providing civic role models for the novice readership of late imperial Russia. Biography accorded with the established tastes of popular readers, in whose cultural experience “lives”— especially saints’ lives—had played an integral part. The religious overtones that accompanied models of Russian authorship strengthened this implicit connection. No less than the teacher and the prophet, the seemingly worldly image of the writer-citizen was surrounded by a saintly aura. As articulated in one of the founding texts of this tradition, Nikolai Nekrasov’s “Poet and Citizen,” it combined the civic ideals of the French Revolution with the sacred imperatives of the Christian martyrological tradition.2 In one characteristic passage the Citizen exhorts the reluctant Poet: “Walk through fire for the homeland’s honor, / For your convictions, and for love, / Go perish in innocence— / Not in vain will you die: a deed is lasting / When bought by blood. . . .”3 Equally important, hagiography was openly 104 didactic, and readers therefore approached life stories with an eye to drawing out a lesson, if not directly imitating the subject. As the earlier example of Tolstoy’s publication Gogol as a Teacher of Life showed, popular literary biographies could exploit these generic expectations for their own ends. Finally, the realities of cultural politics supplied an impetus to popular biography . Inasmuch as the liberal intelligentsia strove to lay a cultural foundation for a national ideology independent of church and state, they were effectively competing with officially sponsored popular literature. They therefore stood in need of charismatic figures—like the heroes already found in mainstream popular literary culture—as symbols of a new, truly comprehensive national identity.4 POPULARIZING GOGOL’S LIFE Thanks to the painstaking research of Panteleimon Kulish and Vladimir Shenrok, the educated reading public of late imperial Russia became intimately acquainted with Gogol’s life. Even after the completion of Shenrok’s omnium-gatherum, Materials for a Biography of Gogol, the collection and publication of biographical documents continued. Even Shenrok himself persisted, publishing a four-volume edition of Gogol’s letters in 1901. Labors such as these now threatened to go on indefinitely and drew the attention of an increasingly smaller and more specialized audience. Notwithstanding the fact that the “task of the fact-collector” remained valuable, it seemed unlikely that another unwieldy tome of “materials” would offer any practical benefit to the broad reading public. As a reviewer for Adol’f Marks’s illustrated magazine The Grainfield put it already in 1895: I fear that he [Mr. Shenrok] has obscured Gogol’s image for many readers. . . . [He] does not have mastery over the rich material he has gathered; one might say just the opposite, that his material overwhelms him. . . . As it stands [he] frequently confuses his reader with perpetual digressions, the absence of a well thought-out plan, an amassing of superfluous details, and endless repetitions. . . .5 Himself cognizant of this pitfall, Shenrok had pledged to write a one-volume compendium “for those not interested in the details,” but he never followed through on the promise.6 In Shenrok’s telling, Gogol’s life still lacked what Hayden White has called the “value of narrativity.” It was necessary somehow...

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