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Chapter Three: Unveiling Gogol’s Life
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Chapter Three Unveiling Gogol’s Life SATISFIED THAT an exact impression had taken, the sculptor lifted the cast from the dead man’s face. It was morning in Moscow, 21 February 1852, and just minutes earlier Nikolai Gogol had breathed his last. Though alarmed by his behavior in recent weeks—his ceaseless brooding , his refusal to take nourishment, his nightly vigils and, not least of all, the auto-da-fé that reduced the manuscript of Dead Souls, volume 2, to ashes—neither the attending physicians nor Gogol’s friends truly believed he was going to die. Familiar as they were with his many complaints, they had encouraged and cajoled him, holding out hope that once again both the author’s health and his novel would eventually be restored. But none of them could shake Gogol’s conviction. He claimed to have heard voices calling him to his death and declined as useless the advice of the numerous medics summoned by his host, Count Aleksandr Tolstoy. Finally, after a lengthy consultation on 20 February, the doctors resolved to treat the patient forcibly. Gogol’s desperate protests went unheeded, and he lacked the physical strength to resist their ministrations. The bloodletting, the hot bath accompanied by dousings of cold water as well as the application of mustard poultices and other sundry preparations could only have hastened the demise of a man suffering from starvation and extreme exhaustion. Only sporadically did an intelligible phrase interrupt his subsequent delirium, which concluded with a plea for a ladder. Thereafter he lapsed into silence, unconsciousness, and, at last, death. Before the body was dressed for burial , Nikolai Ramazanov, one of the circle of Russian artists with whom Gogol had fraternized in Rome, laid on the coat of plaster that would capture the writer’s image for posterity.1 (See figure 2.) Death masks originated as a sign to the spirit in the afterlife. Believing that immortality depended on the reunion of the soul with the body, the ancient Egyptians feared that the decay of the human countenance would prevent the soul from recognizing its true companion. As an emblem of the body’s identity, the death mask ensured that the soul would not stray into an oblivion where it would rove forever homeless. By the nineteenth century , death masks had long ago lost their original necromantic function; 55 nevertheless they persisted as an almost routine form of reverence offered to deceased princes and poets.2 Like their archaic counterparts, these masks promised to rescue the spirit from oblivion. However, in the disenchanted realm of modern Europe they performed their mnemonic role not for the dead but for the living. “It is . . . characteristic,” Walter Benjamin once observed that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of—first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end—unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it—suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.3 Having arrested for contemplation this vital moment when consciousness and unconsciousness coalesce, when a panoramic awareness of “real life” Gogol’s Afterlife 56 Figure 2. Gogol’s death mask [35.172.193.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:07 GMT) unfolds, when not only the “unforgettable” but also destiny emerges, Gogol’s death mask sanctioned the recollection and narration of his life story.4 However, to compose Gogol’s biography was nothing so quick and straightforward as casting a plaster mold; it resembled instead the more gradual and painstaking technique of carving in stone. Noting the swell of curiosity about Gogol in the year following his death, Sergei Aksakov counseled patience commensurate with the task. The rules of decorum set the first hurdle before a full accounting of Gogol’s life: those of his friends and associates who were still alive could not be expected to disclose all the details of their private conversations and correspondence with him. But, along with this essential source material, a dispassionate assessment of the man required a certain distance. Just as Gogol himself needed to withdraw to his “beautiful remove” in Italy...