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24 Chapter Two Nikolai Gogol’s Commercial Landscape (1829–1852) It’s dreary living in the hut. Oh, take me away from home, To where there are throngs and noise, Where the girls all skip about, Where the boys carouse! —From an ancient legend1 SO BEGINS NIKOLAI Vasilevich Gogol’s 1829 “The Sorochintsy Fair” (“Sorochinskaia iarmarka”): an epigraph from an “ancient legend” (starinnaia legenda) of dubious origin, a wistful longing for urban entertainment. This anonymous opening summons a procession of wares that will form an immense marketplace: Since morning the endless string of ox-carts with salt and fish had been making its way along the road. Mountains of earthenware pots, packed in straw, bumped slowly about [medlenno dvigalis’], annoyed, it would seem, at their confinement to the dark; only at a few points would some brightly decorated bowl or tureen ostentatiously make an appearance from behind the tall wattle side of the cart and draw the onlookers’ admiration with its gorgeous patterns [privlekala umilennye vzgliady poklonnikov roskoshi].2 And so begins Gogol’s career as a Russian comic prose writer, making his way, amidst a parade of props, characters, and costumes, into the landscape of a story. The similarity between the entrance into the fair and the entrance into Gogol’s fiction is anything but accidental. The stories that comprise the collection Evenings on a Village Farm near Dikanka (Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki), Gogol’s first significant contribution to Russian literature, present the reader with a fair of salt, fish, oxen, and artfully painted pots (their craftsmanship a reminder of provincial art). “The Sorochintsy Fair” provides a map of Gogol’s commercial landscape. With its vehicles, market stands, Nikolai Gogol’s Commercial Landscape (1829–1852) 25 and goods for sale, the landscape itself is essential to the exchanges that will take place there. Gogol may have been only twenty-two when he published “The Sorochintsy Fair,” but the story introduces a relationship between space, time, and material objects that would give structure to his later work.3 Gogol instills a collective spatial memory in the minds of his readers with his commercial landscape. The fair, however, is ephemeral, and the transience of this pseudo-urban space reflects the impermanence of life itself. From the folk-influenced Evenings to the Petersburg tales to the heroic epic Taras Bulba, Gogol’s commercial landscape undergoes its own series of transformations , from naive and folkloric to deceptive, finally emerging as the quintessential metaphor for the commodification of the human spirit in his narrative tour de force Dead Souls. Gogol’s fair would also provide a framework and literary address for the development of the geographically cohabitant Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish literatures that emerged in the Pale of Settlement. Gogol’s early commercial landscape already consists of three defining motifs: the theatrical, the ethnographic, and the “otherworldly.” These motifs gave shape to Gogol’s poetics. The marketplace is first and foremost a stage—a surrogate, perhaps, for the St. Petersburg stage on which Gogol had hoped to produce his father’s Ukrainian plays.4 As we have seen in chapter 1, the marketplace was an ideal theater for the masking and unmasking that was essential to Renaissance drama. Gogol borrows many of his vernacular themes from the Renaissance theater, renewing them to fit his own nineteenth-century context. Moreover, like the puppets in the Ukrainian nativity theater, vertep, Gogol’s characters perform their archetypal identities for the reader. The recognizably Ukrainian setting of Gogol’s early stories has been interpreted as both a unifying and a distancing device vis-à-vis Gogol’s imperial Russian readership. Adherents to the “universalist ” school of Gogol scholarship contend that folk culture, which had come into fashion among the Romantics, often stood in for an authentic, collective Slavic soul, which included Russians as well as Ukrainians.5 The “national” camp claims that Gogol’s ethnographism is a subtle act of resistance , and that he asserts Ukraine’s difference from Russia through cultural and political shibboleths.6 I take the position that Gogol was writing, to the best of his ability, for both a Russian and a Ukrainian audience, and that he used the stereotyped dichotomy between rural Ukrainians and urban Russians to simplify (and sometimes to thwart) metaphors for pure soulfulness and corrupt materialism.7 Just as the cosmopolitan characters who appear in Gogol’s Ukrainian stories show that capitalism and the Enlightenment have reached rural Ukraine, elements of Gogol’s Ukrainian marketplace appear [3.141.100.120...

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