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Chapter Seven Twilight of the Idols IN 1934 THE AVANT-GARDE POET and prose miniaturist Daniil Kharms wrote a comic vignette entitled “Pushkin and Gogol.” The piece was based on a ludicrous and deceptively simple premise . Here is how it begins: [GOGOL falls out from the wings onto the stage and lies still.] PUSHKIN [walks out on stage, trips over GOGOL and falls]: What the devil! Seems I tripped over Gogol. GOGOL [picking himself up]: What mischievousness! They just won’t let a body rest. [Starts walking, trips over PUSHKIN, and falls.] Seems I tripped over Pushkin! PUSHKIN [picking himself up]: Not a moment’s peace! What the devil! Over Gogol again!1 And on it goes: the quintessential classics of the modern Russian literary tradition tumble across the stage, cursing all the way, until they disappear in the wings at the opposite end and the curtain falls. Depending on your taste for vaudevillean pratfalls, the action of Kharms’s vignette might appear self-sufficiently funny or, rather, just insufficiently funny. In either case, “Pushkin and Gogol” demands little by way of commentary at first glance. Yet if we delve beneath its concrete, repetitive surface and briefly venture a “thick description,” we can discern in the playlet both a complex cultural gesture and a deep insight into the status of the classics in the epoch of Stalinism. First and foremost, the effect of the play requires the recognition that the comic bumblers on stage are precisely classics of Russian literature and not simply a pair of anonymous klutzes. Its humor derives from the parodic techniques of mechanization and displacement, which refashion Russia’s two greatest writers in the mold of a slapstick team à la Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges.2 By investing Russian literature’s founding fathers with comic roles, Kharms pokes fun at them much in the way Gogol himself gibed at Pushkin in the mid-1830s. During the magnificent lying scene 143 in The Inspector General, for instance, Khlestakov regales the locals with anecdotes of his Petersburg life, careening from its fearsome bureaucratic administration to its genial literary circles. “I see writers all the time,” he confesses, “and am on intimate terms with Pushkin. I often say to him: ‘Why, Pushkin old pal, what’s new?’—‘Well, so-so, friend,’ he answers, ‘so, well, there it is.’ What a character!” (4:48). Pushkin’s preposterous rejoinder skirts illiteracy and so ironically alludes to the wit and elegance of his language. But the object of Gogol’s fun here is not poetry or conversation per se. Rather, this improvisational wish fulfillment takes aim at Pushkin’s cultural authority, which prompted impostors and social climbers like Khlestakov (not to mention Gogol himself) to weave fantasies of eminence by association in order to impress both others and themselves. This parodic quality situates Kharms’s “incident,” as he called it, squarely alongside other flamboyant attacks on tradition by members of the avant-garde; for example, the futurists’ notorious call to throw Pushkin overboard the ship of modernity. But “Pushkin and Gogol” represents more than just a son’s irreverent gesture in a Bloomian struggle with literary forefathers . When we frame it in its immediate cultural context, additional layers of meaning emerge. The year 1934 inaugurated an officially sanctioned artistic method, socialist realism, as well as a monopolistic arm of literary policy, the Union of Soviet Writers. Some seventeen years after the revolution, with the political and economic base securely under the Communist Party’s thumb, Stalin finally moved to centralize control over literature and the arts. Kharms’s playlet addressed the perils of this new disciplinary regime, which combined aesthetic conservatism with an ideology of heroic nationalism. “Pushkin and Gogol” enacted, for example, the interpretive reduction that inevitably accompanies the mass propagation of imaginative literature. The complex texture of Gogolian comedy diminishes into the nonsensical and eternal recurrence of a sight gag. At the same time, the very physicality of the humor and coarseness of the language restore to Pushkin and Gogol a material and psychological humanity that their standing as classics tended to mask or deny. Kharms reminds us that even a classic can sometimes come a cropper. Finally, the vignette bore wry witness to the cult of the classics that occupied the symbolic center of Stalinist literary policy, and, not least of all, to the risk of artistic paralysis that such a cult entailed. The spectacle of Pushkin and Gogol perpetually colliding, each unable to get out of...

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