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Chapter Three The Meaning of Poverty Gogol’s Petersburg Tales Right so as by richesses ther comen manye goodes, right so by poverte come ther manye harmes and yveles. —Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Tale of Melibee” Linked with this treatment of laughter is [Gogol’s] effort to overcome the comicality, theatricality, and seriousness of the liturgical attitude toward art. —Mistranslation of Iu. M. Lotman IN THIS CHAPTER we turn to Gogol’s Petersburg tales, five stories about the downtrodden and impoverished in Russia’s daunting and cruel metropolis.1 In the last 100 years, the tales’ fame has rested on their absurd violations of narrative and logical propriety, but at the same time they address a number of serious topics, most prominently poverty and vice. Moreover, Gogol can be seen thinking long and hard in them about sympathetic emotion, imagination, and art. Gogol’s attitude toward the poor has been a point of dispute, sometimes bitter, since his works first appeared. The squabbling continues to this day, most famously in regard to the so-called pathetic or humane passage in “Overcoat,” where a narration designed to make us laugh at the hero is interrupted by a brief rhetorical flourish suggesting that the lowly Akaky Akakievich is our brother. This is, of course, the claim of similitude that concerns us generally. As the multitude of opposed critical contentions suggests, the passage is ambiguous enough to give heart to several different interpretations, for, as Eikhenbaum first noted, “Overcoat” is built on grotesque juxtapositions, incompatible elements of mockery and sympathy placed side by side, their meaning left for readers to unravel (284–91). That fact alone, however, need not drive us into the camp of those modern commentators (Bitov, 78 Bernheimer, Fanger, Zholkovsky) who argue the writer’s true intention is precisely to escape fixity and celebrate ambiguity, whether from artistic ingenuity or personal anxiety. The image of a humanitarian Gogol was originally popularized by Vissarion Belinskii, that era’s most famous critic. Belinskii and influential allies such as the writers of physiological sketches perceived in Gogol’s texts a deep compassion for his downtrodden heroes and spoke of the use of humor as a kind of sugar, to make the bitter pill of social commentary go down easily with a reading public unused to stark depictions of reality. I take this to be entirely wrong, and the writer’s humor to be a kind of apotropaic and alienating gesture, a claim Gogol makes explicitly and repeatedly in theoretical works. His Petersburg heroes are in fact more violators of the social system than its victims. Belinskii’s complete misunderstanding of Gogol became public knowledge during the controversy surrounding Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, whose appearance late in Gogol’s career revealed the socially concerned, liberally intentioned champion of the little man as in fact an anxiety-ridden apologist for a reactionary and draconian social order, concerned with keeping the poor in line rather than with publicizing their perspective or improving their lot. With Belinskii’s assessment tarnished, a counter-reading eventually sprang up in the twentieth century, as scholars such as Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, Eikhenbaum, Bem, Chizhevsky, and Setchkarev called attention to the lack of actual signs of sympathy for heroes like Akaky Akakievich and adduced from among Gogol’s avowed moral and artistic goals a number of possible reasons for this. Inexplicably enough, Belinskii’s view survives to the present day, especially in criticism from Russia, where Eikhenbaum’s observation is regularly dismissed as an overstatement even by such thoughtful latter-day critics as Iurii Mann.2 Like Karamzin and Pushkin, Gogol continues to see poverty, sympathetic insight, imagination, and art as inextricably linked. The problem of poverty once again raises the problem of art. The linkage is crucial and perilous because Gogol harbors a truly herculean ambivalence when questions of poverty arise—exactly as he does, as the next chapter will try to show, with questions of art. On one hand, he makes a standing claim throughout his life that we are all impoverished, at least spiritually, and must learn to see ourselves as such—an imaginative act, it should be noted—in order to achieve salvation. On the other hand, Gogol’s normal response to material poverty is to blame the poor (an act, however, which he construes as very charitable on his part); moreover, he produces an ongoing stream of elaborate conceptual schemes for avoiding sympathy and for covertly disproving any similitude between classes. Gogol will ultimately conclude that nothing...

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