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Artificiality and Nature in Gogol'sDead Souls
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Katherine Lahti Artificiality and Nature in Gogol's Dead Souls THE COURSE this paper will follow should be clear from its title. It will point out an opposition in the text of Gogol's Dead Souls, demonstrate that certain moments in the text are actually elaborations of this opposition, and lastly show how the author ultimately reconciles the two poles. The opposition is one between artificiality and nature, surely an intuitable distinction, yet one the author articulates for the reader at the conclusion of his well-known description of Pliushkin's garden: In a word all was beautiful as neither nature nor art can contrive, beautiful as it only is when these two come together, with nature giving the final touch of her chisel to the work of man (that more often than not he has piled up anyhow), alleviating its bulky agglomeration and suppressing both its crudely obvious regularity and the miserable gaps through which its stark background [or plan] clearly showed and casting a wonderful warmth over all that had been evolved in the bleakness of measured neatness and propriety. (VI:1l3)! This explicit rendering of the opposition supplies some attributes of Gogol's conceptions of artificiality (here of art) and of nature as exhibited in Dead Souls: art is contrived and cold while nature is full of wonder and is warming; art is made and accumulated while nature moves itself. As places where things are both artificial and natural, gardens are important in Dead Souls. In Pliushkin's garden the forces of nature are ascending. The opposite is the case with the first garden Gogol describes. Upon arriving in the town of N., the hero of the novel, Chichikov, cases the town a bit before evening. We read, "He also looked into the town park, which consisted of some spindly trees which had not taken root properly and which were propped up from below by triangular supports very beautifully painted with green oil paint" (VI:ll/21). As in this citation, where a few unwell little scraps of nature are overwhelmed by attending artifacts, Gogol consistently 143 Katherine Lahti depicts artifacts and natural things in discord, and, as in the citation given above, the tension created by the disunity is the source of much of Gogol's humor in Dead Souls. The techniques of opposition are numerous. Artifacts and natural things are physically juxtaposed, as when the road upon which Chichikov's carriage is rolling changes from cobblestone to dirt at the border between town and country.2 Characters in the work gravitate toward one or the other, as when Korobochka repeatedly asks Chichikov to buy honey and jute instead of his desired goods, and when Chichikov consistently declines to touch Nozdrev's dogs (VI:50-55, 68-78/59-64, 77-87). As will be elaborated below, Gogol contrasts the characters' use of natural and artificial, constructed speech. He uses similes and metaphors that awkwardly portray some natural thing as an artifact or vice versa. Since the publication of Carl Proffer's study on the Gogolian simile, it has become a commonplace of Gogol criticism that the characters in Dead Souls are dehumanized as the author compares them with inanimate, or at least nonhuman, entities.3 Proffer's work is part of a greater tendency in Gogol criticism which uses two categories borrowed from Russian grammar, the categories of animacy and inanimacy, to describe entities in the text and ultimately to interpret its title, Dead Souls. Although the opposition between animacy and inanimacy does function in the text (for instance the narrator states explicitly that Sobakevich shows no emotion, as if his soul were beyond the mountains ([VI: 101/109-10]), the opposition between nature and artifact, after subsuming under its own categories much material that other critics classify as either animate or inanimate, proceeds to explain more in the text and, I believe, leads to more interesting conclusions. Even when not presenting them in opposition to natural things, Gogol underscores the artificial quality of artifacts by showing them in the process of being made. Typically, the narrator states what the raw material was, describes the work performed on that raw material , supplies the names of the tools used, and gives the name of the finished product. Very early on in the first chapter Chichikov removes a woolen scarf that the narrator says is rainbow-colored and is of the sort "that wives make for their husbands with their own hands" (VI:9/19). The very...