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Robert Louis Jackson GogoI's "The Portrait": The Simultaneity of Madness, Naturalism, and the Supernatural •IN "LE DANTYU as a Beacon," the artist-typographer Ilia Zdanevich's fifth drama (or dra, as he called his productions ), published in Paris and dated 1923, two of the main characters are painters. The hero-painter is, in fact, based on a "real" artist by the name of Mikhail Le Dantyu who died in 1917. In the dra this real painter is contrasted with a villain-painter who is a "realist." The villain-artist paints a portrait of a dead woman: it is described as the "living image of her." In contrast, the hero-artist, the "real" Mikhail Le Dantyu, paints an "unlike" portrait of the dead woman. In the dra both portraits come to life. When the unlike portrait touches the dead woman, she comes to life. Then the unlike portrait kills her, setting off a series of murders, which are finally resolved by the resurrection of the forces of life. We have no difficulty in recognizing in Zdanevich's dra a parodic inversion of Gogol's "The Portrait." In that tale, in its second part, a religious painter, desiring to introduce the "Prince of Darkness" into one of his religious epics, strives to paint the portrait of a demonic moneylender, more precisely the Antichrist, with "scrupulous exactitude ." He succeeds in creating a living-that is, a dead-image of him. "Temnye glaza ... starika gliadeli tak zhivo i vmeste mertvenno " ("The dark eyes of the old man looked out in such a lifelike and yet dead way," 111:405). The moneylender dies. The character of the painter changes for the worse. He escapes the baneful influence of the portrait, finally, by giving it away, entering a monastery, and consecrating himself to God. The power of the Antichrist, however, continues to live in the portrait and to bedevil all those who come into contact with it. In the 105 Roberl Louis Jackson first version of the story the portrait is the harbinger of the Apocalypse . The painter's son-he tells his father's tale in the second part of the story-finds the portrait but fails to destroy it. The portrait disappears again. Evil turns out to be elusive. In the first version of "The Portrait" Gogol foregrounds the action of the supernatural, while posing the aesthetic theme of the relation of art to reality. In the second version of his tale he foregrounds the aesthetic theme. Here he by no means abandons the supernatural , but, as though following Pushkin's recipe for the fantastic, integrates the supernatural into the aesthetic and psychological drama in such a way as to make it difficult for the reader to know whether it is the power of the supernatural or the failure of the painter's aesthetic that brings about the evil portrait and, with it, the direct entrance of the Antichrist into the world. Here I should like to focus on the way the categories of the fantastic (or supernatural), the aesthetic, and the psychological interact, indeed, at times seem identical with one another in GogoI's "The Portrait." The misfortune of the painter of the portrait and of those who look at it may be summed up in Nietzsche's epigram: "And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you" ("Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein").1 In GogoI's case the look would have to be understood , on the aesthetic plane, as obsessive concern with imitation of an object, that is, with "naturalism." Gazing into the eyes of the moneylender in an effort to capture every detail, the painter finds these eyes gazing hypnotically back into his own. The result of the painter's effort to capture the living image of the moneylender is that he becomes a prisoner, as it were, of the "evil eye." He experiences in turn a psychological crisis. On the fantastic plane of the story's action the effort to imitate reality results in the reification of the evil spirit of the moneylender. The devil breaks through the defenses of everyday reality. In purely aesthetic terms the painter's attempt to reproduce reality with absolute exactitude leads to the "super" natural, to a kind of magic realism , to a picture of reality, finally, that not only pushes realism to its limits and beyond but evokes in the viewer a disturbing sense of the...

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