Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word

Rereading Gogol's Miswritten Book: Notes on Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends

Alexander Zholkovsky Rereading GogoI's Miswritten Book: Notes on Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends AS MY BLOOMIAN title implies territoriality, it must be acknowledged from the start that a number of maps have been charted for GogoI's "artistic space" in general and for Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends in particular.l "Forgotten " as these passages may be, they turn out to be sufficiently crowded for Doppelganger to find themselves elbowing each other in the maze. 2 What makes Selected Passages so rereadable now is, I think, the current postmodern climate, fostering the different but cognate critical strategies that focus on antiutopian discourse, writing (ecriture), polyphony, psychoanalysis, reader response, intertextuality , and literature as institution. Such a perspective encourages projecting Selected Passages onto a variety of cultural texts, making it a test case for some major theoretical issues, of which I will begin with skaz. 1. SKAZ, GOGOL, AND HIS CHARACTERS The definition of skaz hinges on the distinction between the intellectually and stylistically unreliable narrator and the implied author, who towers above him simply because we the readers cannot imagine an author so stupid and inept. But what about Selected Passages, where just that is known to be the case? And how do we then deny Gogol the benefit of stupidity in his best-skaz-writing, whose striking similarity to Selected Passages has been noted by GogoI's contemporaries and later critics.3 Some crucial boundaries were blurred already in such texts as "The Overcoat," where the absence of a consistent narrative per172 Rereading Gogol's Miswritten Book spective-rather than an identifiable, if flawed, narrator-foregrounds the act of writing itself.4 Selected Passages constitutes a further confusion of author and character-narrator, and in fact Gogol himself admitted that in writing Selected Passages he had behaved like a Khlestakov.·5 The affinity between Gogol and his characters is well known. Gogol, who was famous for impersonating the comic characters of his texts and improvised scenes, has described his creative process as a satirical exorcism of the worst aspects of himself and specified the corresponding literary technique as "demotion from the rank of general to that of enlisted man."6 Identifying secretly with his lowly alter egos, Gogol often endowed them with "authorial" status (e.g., Khlestakov , Chichikov, Nozdrev, Poprishchin, Akakii, the Postmaster) and ended up as a literary character himsel£7 This conflation began with anecdotes and continued with biographies-genres that treat the writer as character, in Gogol's case as a comic maskH A high point in fictionalizing Gogol qua Gogolian Character was reached in Bunin's short story "Zhilet Pana Mikhol'skogo" ("Mr. Mikhol'skii's Vest," 1934), which depicts Gogol as envious of the article of clothing belonging to the narrator.9 Gogol qua Grotesque Author appeared even earlier-in Dostoevsky 's The Village of Stepanchikovo.1O Perhaps there was poetic justice in this. After all, it was Gogol who started the game by placing Khlestakov on a friendly footing with Pushkin. And in demoting the author from his privileged position above the characters (in the Bakhtinian sense), Dostoevsky was only following in Gogol's narrative footsteps. Therefore, who else should inaugurate the carnival of professional and would-be writers in Dostoevsky's novels but Gogol, indeed, the Gogol of Selected Passages, in the guise of Foma Opiskin, the self-appointed "writer" of books and of the destinies of his entourage ? Foma's very name is emblematic of the author-character oscillation . Dostoevsky probably had in mind the two great Catholic Thomases (discovered by Gogol in the 1840s, Aquinas and aKempis, especially the latter, whose De imitatione Christi Gogol emulated in Selected Passages),ll as well as Foma Grigor'evich, one of the "authors " of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. In a Gogolian manner (cf. Akakii Akakievich), Foma became Foma Fomich, with a pejorativediminutive family name, structurally reminiscent of Bashmachkin. Also semantically, opiska, "misspelling," evokes Akakii's profession (and the oshibka, "mistake," he almost made in copying when he became excited over his new overcoat) and, more generally, his status as a "mis-person." To complete the picture, among the numerous 173 Alexander Zholkovsky "poor clerks" in the pre-"Overcoat" literature there was one Foma Fomich Openkin, a creation of Bulgarin,12 the same Bulgarin who, after the failure of"Hanz Kuechelgarten," obtained for its author the position of collegiate registrar (the title that Gogol, in the spirit of...