Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word

Gogol's Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics

Gary Saul Morson Gogol's Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics "I understand absolutely nothing," said the nose. "Explain it more satisfactorily." -"The Nose" Slowly, as slowly as one can possibly imagine, did he [Selifan] go down the stairs, leaving the imprint of his wet boots on the worn steps, and for a long while did he keep scratching away at the nape of his neck. What did this scratching signify? And what was its general portent? ... God knows, you can't guess. Many and sundry are the things portended when the Russian people scratch the napes of their necks. -Dead Souls 1. THREE IDEAS IN HIS classic study The Russian Idea, Nicholas Berdiaev wrote: "What will interest me in the following pages is not so much the question: what has Russia been from the empirical point of view, as the question: what was the thought of the Creator about Russia, and my concern will be to arrive at a picture of the Russian people which can be grasped by the mind, to arrive at the 'idea' of it."l This idea itself-the idea of the Russian idea-has obsessed Russian intellectuals. Berdiaev's own book stands as one of the great expressions of their mad pursuit of total explanation and their frenetic construction of historicist systems that can be readily "grasped by the mind." Critics of Russian thought, both Russian and Western, have repeatedly stressed the determination with which Russian intellectuals posed the eternal, "accursed questions" and arrived, time and time 200 Gogol's Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics again, at "final" answers. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history offers an encyclopedia of mutually exclusive keys to history, to human life, to ethics-to everything. Viewed from the perspective of God, the apocalypse, or the Laws of History, what is the significance of our lives and of our activity? The fact that each ultimate answer to this question rapidly turned into a penultimate one, and each penultimate one faded into mere historical curiosity, did not prevent new thinkers from making the same claim of finality. Soviet communism has been taken as the culmination, for better or worse, of the Russian idea. What these Russian philosophies share is an approach I like to call semiotic totalitarianism. They are semiotic because they take everything in existence as a sign of some underlying pattern or meaningful system. That system can in principle account for everything, which is why it is totalitarian. The disorder of life as we experience it is felt to be something unnatural or illusory, something that can be seen through, explained away, or interpreted as a mere instantiation of something else that is hidden. Knowledge of that hidden something , if we only had it, would answer all questions. Like Hermann in "The Queen of Spades," who is literally haunted by a secret that will eliminate chance and serve as the "philosopher's stone," many Russian thinkers and novelistic heroes have sought and claimed to have found a mystical certainty, the "key to the mysteries." Dostoevsky's underground man offers and parodies some of the most striking images of this kind of thinking: "We have only to discover these laws of nature.... All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms to 108,000 and entered in a table; or better still there would be published certain edifYing works like the present encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and designated that there will be no more incidents and adventures in the world." These lines, I think, characterize not only the particular systems mentioned by the underground man but also all forms of Russian semiotic totalitarianism . For all their diversity, Russian intellectual movements have displayed a remarkable similarity in tone and impulse. What Russian Marxism and its apparent opposite, Russian Formalism, share is the faith that chance, freedom, and real originality are illusions, epiphenomena , and, ultimately, mere products of a system. Taking Formalist premises to an extreme, Osip Brik declared that ifPushkin had not created Eugene Onegin, someone else would have. As there is such a thing as vulgar Marxism, there is evidently also vulgar Formalism. But even at its more refined moments Formalism produced the "sci201 Gary Saul Morson entific" theory that all of culture is a "system of systems" and that what appears to be chance from the perspective of anyone cultural system...