Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Maguire, "Legacy," p. 16. (Full citations to the works cited in this essay are given in the accompanying "Works Cited.") 2. Ibid., p. 37. 3. Some of the major texts of Soviet Gogol scholarship have recently become available even to the non-Russian-speaker; see the selections in George Gibian's edition of Dead Souls and in the (less successful) special issue of Soviet Literature, as well as the awkward but adequate translation of Anna Yelistratova's comparative study. Maguire has done a great service by translating and editing Gippius's Gogol; as William Mills Todd III states, the translation, with its corrected and expanded references, "is generally more useful than the 1924 Russian original" (Todd, p. 256n). (See also Meyer and Rudy, Trahan, and Vinogradov.) The Western scholar has recently been offered an invaluable bibliographical tool, The Gogol Bulletin (ed. George Gutsche and Gavriel Shapiro), which from 1985 through 1988 provided a yearly list of publications and dissertations, abstracts of conference papers, and announcements of work in progress on Gogol. (One must hope that it will soon resume publication.) See also the comprehensive bibliography by Philip Frantz. 4. Bibikhin, GaI'tseva, and Rodnianskaia, p. 391. It is now possible for the Soviet reader to obtain firsthand knowledge of Nabokov's anathematized study: a nearly complete translation appeared in Novyi mir in 1987. Omitted are Nabokov's examples of mistakes in English translations of GogoI's works, as well as the italicized words in the following sentence: "Ever since Russia began to think, and up to the time that her mind went blank under the influence ofthe extraordinary regime she has been enduring for these last twenty-five years, educated, sensitive and free-minded Russians were acutely aware of 243 Notes to Pages 2-22 the furtive and clammy touch of poshlust" (Nabokov, Gogol, p. 64). An introduction by S. Zalygin first compliments Nabokov on his "aristocratically refined" writing style and then points out that refinement is not a native Russian literary trait: "Here we must remember that the truly great Russian writers-Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and even Chekhov-not only never strove for refinement but even denied the need for it in their work. Chekhov identified refinement with coldness and even considered it a literary defect" (Novyi mir, p. 173). 5. Bibikhin et aI., p. 394, re Karlinsky, and p. 400, re Fanger. 6. See the Transactions/Zapiski of the Association of RussianAmerican Scholars in the USA, no. 17, devoted to GogoI. 7. Maguire, "Legacy," p. 51. See also his "Gogol's 'Confession . 8. See also Bocharov, "0 stile Gogolia." A sophisticated linguistic approach to late Gogol is developed in the discourse analysis of Thomas Lahusen. 9. Lotman, "Kopeikin," p. 29. 10. See Mann, V poiskakh, pp. 16-17. Perhaps the time has come to find a term (semio-structuralism?) adequate to distinguish the lively and productive school of Soviet (and emigre) structuralism from its moribund Western counterpart, especially since the former is no longer a purely Soviet phenomenon. 11. Fanger, review of Todd's Fiction and Society, p. 106. 12. But see Debeaux; Shukman; and the essays by Cathy Popkin and Alexander Zholkovsky in the present volume. 13. Pliashko; Zolotusskii, '" Zapiski sumasshedshego' 'Severnaia pchela,' " in his Trepet serdtsa, pp. 328-44. Sergei Bocharov, Around "The Nose" 1. S. G. Bocharov, "Zagadka 'Nosa' i taina litsa," in 0 khudozhestvennykh mirakh (Moscow, 1985), pp. 124-60. 2. V. V. Vinogradov, "Naturalisticheskii grotesk: Siuzhet i kompozitsiia povesti Gogolia 'Nos,' " in his Izbrannye trudy: Poetika russkoi literatury (Moscow, 1976), pp. 5-44. 3. Innokentii Annenskii, Kniga otrazhenii (Moscow, 1979), pp. 19-20. 4. The comparison belongs to G. A. Fedorov and arose during a conversation on the topic of these remarks. 5. Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), p. 46. 6. Thomas Mann, "Voyage with Don Quixote" (1934), in his 244 Notes to Pages 23-31 Essays ofThree Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 446. 7. lu. V. Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow, 1978), pp. 129, 131. 8. English translations from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 341. 9. See P. A. Florenskii, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny (Moscow, 1914), p. 707. 10. V. G. Belinskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1982), 8:283. 11. S. T. Aksakov, Istoriia moego znakomstva s Gogolem (Moscow , 1960), p. 171. 12. loann Zlatoust...