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Introduction HOW, AFTER ALL, did Nikolai Gogol become a classic? The designation is so much a reflex in Russia’s cultural consciousness that this question seems never to occur.1 And yet, to answer it proves not quite the straightforward task that we might suppose. In point of fact, Gogol’s life and writing correspond only meagerly to the values historically associated with the classic. Take, for example, the definition offered by Gogol’s French contemporary Charles Augustin SainteBeuve in one of his best-known Causeries du lundi, “What Is a Classic?”: A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human spirit, who has truly increased its treasure, who has caused it to take a step forward, who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth or laid fresh hold on some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and explored; who has conveyed his thought, his observation, or his discovery in whatever form, only let it be liberal and grand, choice and judicious , intrinsically wholesome and seemly; who has spoken to all men in a style of his own which at that same time turns out to be every man’s style, a style that is new without neologism, at once new and old, easily contemporaneous with every age.2 Inspired by the example of Goethe, Sainte-Beuve equates the classic with what is “healthy,” “vigorous, fresh, and hardy”—not qualities that sit comfortably with Gogol. Monomaniacs, existers, and other sundry dead souls populate almost all of his fictional works. And the man himself, infirm from youth, was by all accounts an inveterate hypochondriac (when he was not genuinely suffering from hemorrhoids or bouts of dyspepsia). To address the terms of Sainte-Beuve’s definition more explicitly, several of Gogol’s masterpieces fit into the category of the “choice and judicious ,” the “intrinsically wholesome and seemly” only with the most skillful maneuvering, if at all. Gogol’s contemporary critics often vilified him for breaches of literary decorum, and Stepan Shevyrev, editor of the Moscow Observer, refused to publish “The Nose” because he found it “filthy.”3 Add 3 to that Gogol’s style: notorious for its solecisms, eccentricities, and arabesques (not to mention occasional grammatical mistakes), it cannot exactly pass as “every man’s style” or “easily contemporaneous with every age.” Indeed , it may not have been contemporaneous even with its own. As the famous lexicographer Vladimir Dal’ put it: “Gogol is an extraordinary person! You are carried away by his narrative, you avidly gulp down absolutely everything, you re-read it again and you don’t notice the peculiar language in which he writes. You begin to analyze it minutely, and you see that a person absolutely ought not to write and speak this way. You try to correct it and you spoil it—you can’t touch a word. What would happen if he wrote in Russian?”4 Nor does Gogol quite fit the measure of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated reply to the question “What is a classic?” Like Sainte-Beuve, Eliot believed that a classic must exemplify a common style. This style, albeit the achievement of the individual author, necessarily derives from a tradition. It has, in Eliot’s words, “a history behind it: a history, that is not merely a chronicle, an accumulation of manuscripts and writings of this kind and that, but an ordered though unconscious progress of a language to realize its own potentialities within its own limitations.”5 Certainly Gogol did explore both the expressive potentialities and the limitations of the Russian language in his work. However, the progress of Russian prose style had yet to achieve anything resembling an order; Gogol had, at best, only an embryonic history on which to rely. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Nikolai Karamzin had laid the foundation for a variety of genres, from the tale to the travelogue to the narrative history. And later, in the 1820s, such writers as Aleksandr Bestuzhev and Vladimir Odoevsky actively cultivated short prose forms. But their efforts did not yet amount to a tradition in Eliot’s sense. Meanwhile, the novel fared no better. With the luminous exception of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (notably, a novel in verse), the preponderance of novels produced and consumed in Russia at this time were either translations or adaptations from foreign originals.6 If an existing historical order was essential to the attainment of a classic , so also, Eliot argued...

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