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John Kopper The "Thing-in-Itself" in Gogol's Aesthetics: A Reading of the Dikanka Stories • No matter what anyone did, her legs would go their own way, and something forced her to dance. They may sow it properly, but there's no saying what it is that comes up: not a melon-not a pumpkin-not a cucumber, the devil only knows what to make of it. -Dikanka THE SENTENCES concluding the two volumes of GogoI's Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, used as an epigraph to this essay, mark the emergence of a unique voice in world literature. The wild register ofits obsessions is unmistakable. Legs dancing by themselves , communicating their motion to other legs at the bidding of an unseen choreographer, foreshadow the many places in Gogol's later works where his characters are infected and possessed by a contagious automatism. The melons and pumpkins of the second passage are not so much an example of but a metaphor for another characteristically Gogolian device, the sudden deflection of narrative, where a change in either plot or authorial tone erupts into the story without preparation and diverts the tale into new channels. Ifthe marionettelike legs of volume 1 exemplify the inhuman in Gogol, the enchanted vegetable patch of volume 2 is a very emblem of Gogol's writing, where the expectations planted in the reader's head may be precipitiously and violently subverted by the story. The conclusions of the two story sets of 1831 and 1832 are a reminder that many of the stylistic and thematic issues Gogol addresses in later works receive preliminary attention in Dikanka. While Nabokov eccentrically dismissed Dikanka as "the juvenilia of the false humorist," a work in which Gogol "was skirting a very dreadful precipice," most students of Gogol have tended to look 40 The "Thing-in-Itself" in Gogol's Aesthetics upon the two volumes of pseudo-Ukraininan tales as an anticipatory step toward the major pieces of the years 1836-42.1 The common thread seen in the stories has differed with the age and the critic: Vissarion Belinskii used Dikanka's reliance on village realia and dialectal color to annex it ex post facto to the "Natural School," and twentieth-century readers like Vasilii Gippius and Iurii Mann have seen in Dikanka the origin of certain character types and GogoI's initial exploration of the fantastic, respectively. The unnerving flavor of the passages certainly gives a foretaste of Gogol's characteristic mixture of realism and magic. But it offers more. Behind the nonsense of these lines are concealed a metaphysic and an aesthetic peculiar to Gogol and highly unusual in their nineteenth-century context . It is difficult to make hasty generalizations about the construct of mind in a century that began with Austen mocking the faculty of intuition and Zhukovskii exalting it, and closed with Zola and Tolstoy betraying a skittish horror of the power of sexual drives even as an Artsybashev promoted their balanced expression. But uniting virtually all nineteenth-century European writing is a conviction that the human mind is a prodigiously capable instrument, however fettered by external constraints and buffeted by internal impulses. It is this tradition that Gogol transgresses in Dikanka in order to produce an aesthetic of inscrutability. The involuntary multiplication of an action and the sudden redirection of plot are symptomatic of a new approach to both experience and the art that imagines it. They represent GogoI's fictional articulation of a long-standing problem in Western thought, the relationship between sensible and supersensible experience, things "seen" and "unseen." In the philosophical discourse of Gogol's time the first term of these pairs was known as the "phenomenon" and the second as the "noumenon," a Platonic opposition resurrected by Kant and used in Germany as a dividing line in determining philosophical allegiances for two generations after him. Although originally used by Kant as criteria of epistemology, "phenomenon" and "noumenon" acquired value in aesthetic debate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a result of Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790). Indeed, a characteristic feature of European aesthetics as it responded to Kant was its unfading attention to these categories. During the fifty years preceding GogoI's writerly debut, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, the ability of art to render supersensible experience legibly-or at the very least to refer to that experience even as it remained beyond mimetic transcription -became a central subject of discussion in...

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