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Susanne Fusso The Landscape ofArabesques • IN GOGOL'S 1835 collection Arabesques, landscape is destiny. According to GogoI's historical scheme, the character of a people is deeply affected by the geography of its homeland, and even forms of government are dictated by the lay of the land. The preoccupation with landscape in Arabesques is more than just a thematic one, however. Like many works of art, Arabesques itself contains the clue to how it is written and how it is to be read. It is no coincidence that the right way to read Arabesques is most vividly expressed as the right way to view a landscape, for early Romantic English theories of landscape gardening are central not only to Arabesques but to Dead Souls, the work for which Arabesques in many ways serves as both introduction and gloss. GogoI's letters about Arabesques at the time of its publication are characteristically apologetic. To Pogodin he writes, "I am sending you my omnium-gatherum [vsiakaia vsiachina). Smooth it out and pat it down a bit: there is much that is childish in it, and I have tried to throw it out into the world as soon as possible, so as to throw all the old stuff out of my desk at the same time, and to brush myself off and start a new life."! The impulse to take Gogol at his word, to regard Arabesques as a work whose composition is dictated solely by what manuscripts happened to be lying on his desk one day in 1834, has betrayed itself in the attitudes of critics and editors from the time of the work's publication. Gogol himself, in his 1842 Collected Works, set the precedent for the destruction of the integrity of Arabesques by separating the fictional pieces from the nonfictional. This separation was also observed in the 14-volume Academy edition, sending Viktor Shklovskii back to the Tikhnonravov edition to recapture the work's original shape. 2 Even the recent Ardis translation of Arabesques, billed on its cover as the "first complete English translation ," omits the two fictional fragments "Chapter from a Historical Novel" ("Glava iz istoricheskogo romana") and "The Captive" 112 The Landscape ofArabesques ("Plennik").3 The omission is a serious one, for along with "A Glance at the Composition of Little Russia," presented as the first chapter of an entire history of the Ukraine, and the internally fragmentary "The Diary of a Madman," published in Arabesques as "Scraps from the Diary of a Madman" ("Klochki iz zapisok sumasshedshego"), the historical fragments exemplify the discontinuity and incompletion that are the subject of philosophical and aesthetic inquiry elsewhere in the text. Critics like Shklovskii and Donald Fanger have resisted the urge to ignore the distinctive unity of Arabesques.4 They may find their warrant not only in the external evidence ofGogol's careful assembly of the work's parts but in the clues to the proper way to read the text that are offered within the work itself. In the essay "On the Middle Ages" Gogol writes: People have looked [at the history of the Middle Ages] as at a pile of dissonant, heterogeneous events, as a crowd of fragmented and senseless movements that have no main thread that would combine them into a single whole. In fact its terrible, unusual complexity cannot help but seem chaotic at first, but look more attentively and deeply, and you will find a connection, and a goal, and a direction; however I will not deny that in order to know how to find all this you must be gifted with the kind of sensitivity that few historians possess. (VIII: 16) Throughout Arabesques, whether the subject is history, geography , or art, Gogol reiterates the need not only to apprehend multifarious , individual, partial detail but to use one's intellectual powers and artistic sensitivity to assemble the seemingly fragmentary data of experience into a unified whole." The two mental operations are likened at one point to two ways of perceiving a landscape: "You cannot come to know a city completely by walking through all its streets: for this you must go up to an elevated place from which it would be entirely visible, as if on your palm [kak na ladoni]" (VIII:30). Neither the intimate, close-up perception of detail (walking through the streets) nor the panoramic overview (standing on a height) is sufficient for a true conception of the whole. For Gogol, detail without overview is embodied in the demonic fragmentation of nineteenthcentury...

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