Russian Literature Archives - Page 11 of 13

Nabokov’s Professor Pnin and the Pain of the Past

Pnin is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written at the same time as his more famous Lolita. But Pnin is, to my mind at least, a much more enjoyable book than Lolita is. It is helped in this by its protagonist, the lovely and lovable Professor Tim Pnin, an American of Imperial Russian extraction like Nabokov himself, but one whose success in falling into American culture, his naturalization notwithstanding, has not been nearly so successful.

What this leads to is a series of comic misunderstandings and slapstick humour, bad accents and worse grammar, all of which ultimately make Pnin an almost light-hearted and innocently enjoyable book. But beneath the surface there is an unmistakable note of sadness, a mourning for the past that Pnin has left behind him in his homeland and is unable to forget altogether, and a sense of narrative sympathy towards all those who history treats as pawns or playthings of its grand designs. Once the laughter has stopped, then it’s time for the tears.

A photo of Vladimir Nabokov looking ready for a fight — Our author, Vladimir Nabokov. Pnin is in many ways similar to Nabokov. Both were Russians of noble birth who ended up in America in academic institutions, but Nabokov is a far more cunning man than dear Pnin ever could be, and much better at English

Tim Pnin’s Origins and Ancestors

Let’s begin with Pnin. Pnin is a Russian from a good family of minor nobility, not that that matters when bombs start flying in Saint Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. He escapes to Europe, his family die, and when Hitler gains power and starts using it Pnin makes the journey to America, where his Russian wife (but met in Europe) leaves him almost at once. There, with the help of old-world knowledge and the network of fellow intelligent Russians that soon formed in the United States, Pnin ends up at Waindell College, a small university in a small university town, and settles down to teach and become a real American.

We first meet him on the train, because his life is one of movement, often involuntary. And we meet him on the wrong train because he is a fool. He has used a timetable that is five years out of date. In this moment the problem that is doomed to plague Pnin for the whole book is made clear – he is out of touch, and doesn’t seem to know it. As a result of all this, and his poor English and worse social skills, he becomes a comic figure in the vein of Gogol’s civil servants and Chekhov’s banal mediocrities. He struggles with teaching and academic intrigues, with finding places to stay, and even with driving. And wherever he goes and whatever he does, somehow memories of the past he has lost find a way of returning to him, for better or for worse.

Poor Pnin – Sympathy and Comedy

It is perhaps as a teacher that Pnin is at his most comedic. He is not the proud leader of a Russian department but rather slotted in, through academic jiu-jitsu, as part of the German Department in some kind of comparative role, and he has only a few students at the best of times. He is not a good teacher, by any stretch of the imagination, but he is one of those who we tend to look back on fondly. I know that I remember the teachers with heart and humour far better than I do the cold, bespectacled men who got me to Cambridge and then vanished into an almost-robotic silence in my memory. Pnin not like them – he is a fun teacher, beloved for “those unforgettable digressions of his”, and “what his listeners politely surmised was Russian humour”.

Against his pupils, brimming with ignorance and at best a secondhand passion for such books as Anna Karamazov, Pnin espouses in broken English the love that he cannot truly hope to translate, and fails dramatically at teaching anything akin to grammar or vocabulary. Poor Pnin at first veers uncomfortably between being the permanent butt of a joke and someone we can at least extend some sympathy to, but by the end of the book he has managed to acquire a sort of heroic dignity. Not that that stops him from regularly falling downstairs, mistaking one professor for another, and various other mishaps.

Pnin and his novel seem to bring over to American literature that very Russian mood of “smekh skvoz’ slyozi”, or “laughter through tears”, where comedy can at any moment transform into the deepest sadness and pity.

One example of this is Pnin’s purchase of a football for the son of his ex-wife and her second husband. Viktor is coming to stay with Pnin at his ex-wife’s behest. At first the whole idea is comic – Pnin goes to the store, has some difficulty with the American conception of “football” (“No, no,” said Pnin, “I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!”), but eventually gets the soccer ball he wants to give out of kindness alone. Yet when Viktor actually arrives, he reveals, unwittingly, that he doesn’t like sport, and Pnin’s mood is as deflated just as much as any ball could be, and he throws the ball out of the window when Viktor isn’t looking. The final scene of the chapter has the ball rolling through a windy night, alone and prey to the elements. Poor Pnin.

History’s Pnin-pong Ball

But all this pain is most in evidence whenever the novel deals with the theme of history itself and its effects upon the individuals who get in its way. I noticed that each chapter begins, more or less, with comedy, but ends with bleak rumination and the lonely exploration of Pnin’s memories. Pnin and his fellow Russian nobles left Russia under threat of death, and tried, some with success, some without, to establish themselves in Europe, and then when that dream failed due to Nazism, they headed West once again, to America. Some died in the struggle. Pnin’s first love was among those who were put to death in the concentration camps – she was a person who through the lens of memory becomes a symbol of a more innocent time, of peace and honesty as opposed to the serial adultery of his actual wife.

One recounted memory that I remember particularly strongly is of Pnin, the girl, and a few other young Russians putting on a play in an aristocratic estate in one of the Baltic parts of the Russian Empire. We don’t see the play in any great detail, but the image of its performance is a strong one. For those Russians, in the period of their youth before the Revolutions came, life was merely a game, a play, with no true conflict and no chance that history might turn against them and scatter them like leaves in the wind. Of course, their attitude towards life is not something to be applauded, but the tragedy that took place is something that within the context of their own lives ought to be lamented. Their peace turned out to be only a dream, and they were ill-prepared for the reality.

A picture of a country estate owned by the Nabokov family. In such a place Pnin would have put on his play — One of the Nabokovs’ estates in Russia, lost in the Revolution. In such a place it is easy to relax and believe that the world will sort itself out, and the most stressful part of the day can be just putting on a play. The play Pnin was in would have taken place in a similar such location.

What I liked was that Nabokov doesn’t stop with just criticising the Soviets and the Germans, the low-hanging fruit of the Second World War. He also suggests, with ever more urgency as the book goes on, that McCarthyism in America is another such dangerous and hateful trend. Pnin’s unpopularity as a teacher is, yes, partially due to the fact that he can’t exactly teach, but it’s also increasingly due to a cultural shift that sees everything “Russian” as being “commie” and dangerous. Even though he has escaped to America, Pnin can’t escape the hands of fools who wish to turn ordinary people’s lives into tools for political games. We as readers can only hope that he and the other Russians escape the worst years of American repressions intact.

Language in Pnin

Nabokov is a master wordsmith – everybody knows as much – but Nabokov’s language in Pnin is also, surprisingly perhaps, another place where sympathy can be located. Pnin is introduced as something of a fool when he speaks, spouting Russianisms and using idioms wrongly. At first we laugh, because such moments are indeed very funny. When he discovers that he is on the wrong train at the novel’s beginning we hear: ““Important lecture!” cried Pnin. “What to do? It is a catastroph!”” Having spent a lot of time among Russians with varying levels of English, I find Nabokov’s portrayal leaves nothing to be desired. As the novel goes on, Pnin’s English continues to be serviceable but broken, Russified, and occasionally plain wrong. We laugh and continue to think of Pnin as an affable old fool, as out of touch linguistically as he is culturally.

But then, when Pnin is at a retreat for fellow Russians in the American countryside, Nabokov takes his foot off the breaks and Pnin begins to speak. He does not lurch in broken sentences, but words – intelligent, reasonable, words – flow warmly from his mouth. And suddenly we realise that the fool we thought we saw, the bumbler who can scarcely speak, is not the real Pnin, but just the shadow that he is capable of translating. And we feel sad for him, so often isolated from his true self. He talks of beauty and of literature with wit and character, and we can only wish that his English were good enough to get the words out at other times – for his students’ sakes, at the very least.

Another moment that truly humanises poor old Pnin comes at the very end of the novel, when the narrator is relating Pnin’s courtship of his future ex-wife, an artistic young poet who is a member of fashionable social circles where Pnin would never end up in a million years. And yet Pnin writes her a letter where he bares his soul and asks for her hand. We see Pnin as he really is, not barred by language or custom – we see him free and in love. “I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything… I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy”. The language is poetic, the sentiment heroic. This is the true Pnin.

Conclusion

Nabokov is famous for his formal trickery, unreliable narrators, and gameplaying, and in Pnin this is not limited to bad puns alone. The book ends with one of those classic reversals of postmodern ingenuity that no doubt will leave an eventual rereading of the book all the richer by undermining a lot of the narrative that has gone before. In other words, the ending does cheapen the rest of the book, no matter how much it does give you things to think about. To each their own, but personally I’m content just to enjoy the rest of the book without overthinking the implications of the closing pages. A second time through, no doubt, I’ll see everything a little differently. But for now, I’ll save myself the trouble.

Pnin is a short book, which makes it easy to recommend. However masterful its prose, I enjoy how much attention poor Professor Pnin receives. Like him, the book is funny and a little twee. But also like him, underneath the bumbling exterior there lurk depths that are worth looking into, and reveal a sadness and isolation that lend Pnin’s story a tragic note. Alongside the laughs there are also the tears that come from an understanding of another’s suffering, a suffering that until we have taken a trip through Pnin’s world may well have been completely unknown to us. The book summons up sympathy, and that’s a very valuable thing, especially in our modern world, where history continues daily creating playthings of individual lives. Perhaps you have already met your Pnin – perhaps your meeting is still to come. But now, at least, you’ll be ready for him.

For my rather more lukewarm response to Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, follow this link.

Literature in the Face of Death and Mourning

Today my father was cremated. Though he had lived an enviable life he was just fifty-nine – not an age at which many would be satisfied to face death. For my brother and me, at sixteen and twenty-one, it feels far too soon to lose him, and more than a little unfair. But so sudden was the cancer that we all had little say in the matter. Death affects us all in different ways, and those of us touched by it must find our own solutions for coping, whether they be fighting bravely against the current, or following it into a numbing despair that seems, all things considered, reasonable enough. I want here to set down a few thoughts about books, and their value, in times of difficulty. Exhaustion has left my mind not entirely clear, so I apologise for mistakes and incoherency. This is, I’m afraid, a personal piece.

Medicine

I am the only one in my family who reads fiction. My father was a great lover of non-fiction and read widely, according to his whimsy, in the way that only one who is naturally intelligent but has never been confined in a university can. When news of his several brain tumours came, just over two months ago, in spite of his inability to read properly he did what he could to try and understand the disease that was killing him, and see if he might not discover a solution that the doctors had passed over or did not know. I myself placed my faith in them, because I know many medics at Cambridge, and they have always struck me as the greatest, hardest working, and best of all the students there. If anybody could save him, it seemed to me that a doctor would be the one.

A picture of Tolstoy — Leo Tolstoy may have ended up with some odd views about God and religion, but at his best his fiction can instil a sense of wonder that lets us weather the storm the death brings into our lives

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy on several occasions displays a sort of scorn towards medicine. Doctors come to try to rescue Kitty from her despair, proscribing contradictory remedies that never work and looking like fools in the process. Of course, Tolstoy has a point that is still relevant today, when it has been proven how much our mental health can affect our physical health. Often the best remedies can be ones of the heart and head, and not things we ingest. Tolstoy’s mistake, at least as I see it, is that he thinks all diseases work this way and doctors have no purpose. But he was as opinionated as they come, and I can understand why he thought that way – at least in the late 19^th century medicine still had something alchemical to it. Now we are much luckier. My father’s problems were in his head, yes, but not his mind.

Wonder

I thought of Tolstoy a lot as my father rapidly declined. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Hadji Murat, and Anna Karenina in particular were sources of comfort. They made death real, but Tolstoy, the spiritual man, also made death valuable and sacred by imbuing it with a sense of wonder and mystery. He makes us see its horror, yes, but he also shows that through it there may also come a kind of salvation. There was a sense of wonder in seeing my father’s casket, and a sense of wonder in hearing our bagpiper piping us all in. In moments of such wonder you can feel that death is but a stepping-stone to something that lies beyond.

Tolstoy, like the best of our writers and artists, instils this sense of wonder. They make us see that death is not an end, but a new beginning. By making us aware of the mystical, the spiritual component that accompanies a passing on, they give us the consolation that mere thoughts and intellectual rigor cannot. Schopenhauer’s idea of death as returning to sleep is nice, but not nearly so nice as what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers of spiritual conviction can achieve at their best. The Bible, and the other mystical books of our world’s religions, are full of tales that inspire wonder. They give us food for belief in magic, the sort of magic that makes the world glisten and shine with meaning. I’m thinking of Ivan Karamazov’s sticky buds here. And when we feel wonder, nothing, not even death, can hurt us or our love for the world.

Dreams and Levin’s Brother

For what consolation can rationalism offer here? The man under the shroud is still dead and cold. Death can lose its sting through thinking about the absence of our perceptions in the tomb, but loss of life will never cease to be painful to contemplate unless we see the mystical opportunities that surround it. My father came to me in a dream. He was in the Saint Petersburg Metro, healthy and well again, and heading onwards. He did not speak, but we embraced. The dream came during his final night alive – he died the next afternoon. Of course, it could have been just luck that made him appear at that time. But I see no reason to favour seeing it as mere chance instead of a holy and hopeful sign.

I cannot explain my dream, except as a revelation of the magic and mystery of our human souls. I remember clearly the death of Levin’s brother in Anna Karenina – his death was not one, but twofold. He said his final words and departed in dignity as a soul – “Don’t leave me”. And then he struggled on for another day, and when the characters gathered round his deathbed mention he has finished his struggling he suddenly comes back to life to say: “Not yet… just a little longer”. And then he dies as a body as well.

Conclusion: Narratives against Death

I have an advantage as a reader and as a writer. I live in stories, and I build them. Death, as Walter Benjamin remarks, destroys the placidity of our bourgeois existence – it is the one thing that breaks through even the strongest of our illusions and delusions about our lives. It creates a rupture and destroys the meaning of our world. In the initial weeks of my father’s illness I was almost glad to have, for the first time, a real reason to be depressed. It felt right for once to be in mental anguish. But of all my family I have been the one to cope with the fewest tears and the least pain, and I can’t help but think that reading has something to do with that.

Against the rupture of death, I was able to create a narrative, to come to an understanding with what has happened. I had read about death many times, and when the grief came, I saw how it reflected countless moods I’d seen in books. It gave me the community of fellow-sufferers and their strengths, and their own attempts to move on. And it made me feel less alone. By understanding that stories are the way we give meaning to our lives, I was able to reconfigure the meaning of my own to take into account my father’s death. Perhaps I am deluding myself in talking of wonder, in seeing signs in dreams and the dewy grass. But it is the power of books that they give you the choice to do so. They give you the tools to choose your fate. And that is a magical thing, whatever you believe.

Have you found literature to be a consolation in times of great suffering? Or have all our great scribblings become petty and unreal for you under the harsh light of death? Do leave a comment and let me know what you think

Two Petersburg Tales – Nevsky Prospekt and the Notes of a Madman

I’ve written earlier here about Gogol’s “The Nose”. But Gogol wrote more tales about Saint Petersburg than just that one and the equally well-known “The Overcoat”. He wrote five Petersburg Tales in all, and today I’ll give my impressions on both “Nevsky Prospekt” and “Notes of a Madman”, which are good, but not nearly as good as those other two tales. Since I’ve now been living in the city again for a month already, they make for interesting reading. As for the story “The Portrait”, which I liked a lot, I’ll save it for another time.

Nevsky Prospekt

In Saint Petersburg, in spite of the best efforts of the Bolsheviks to replace it with Moskovsky Prospekt (Moscow Avenue) in the south, the most important street in the city is still Nevsky Prospekt. At its far end there lies the golden spire of the Admiralty Building, and halfway down there is the Cathedral of our Lady of Kazan, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the whole city. As for the other buildings, just as was the case in Gogol’s time there are a lot of shops, though now they are much more touristy than once they were. Though you can buy yourself some upmarket things here too, such as caviar, if you’re concerned at all about saving money you would be better off looking elsewhere. During the day in the summer it’s packed with tourists, and during the evening they are joined by local musicians, strutting their stuff.

It is this place, half magical, half grimy and commercial, that forms the theme of Gogol’s Petersburg Tale: “Nevsky Prospekt”. Rather boringly he describes life on the avenue for about ten pages, from dawn till the narrator gets tired and distracted (half way through the afternoon). There is a lot that is interesting if you happen to like this sort of stuff, but I’m not sure there are that many that do. There is irony in abundance, and lots for me to take apart when I inevitably have to write an essay on the Petersburg Tales, but that doesn’t make for great reading.

Eventually, we meet our two heroes – for this is not one story, but two, taking place on the same city’s street. The first is Piskarev, while the second is Pirogov – one of those characters with a classical Gogolian name. “Mr Pie”, I suppose, would convey the idea in English.

Piskarev’s story – the first of the beautiful women

Piskarev’s story centres around a woman, seen by him as he’s walking down Nevsky Prospekt. This woman, as is frustratingly common in the Petersburg Tales and Russian literature of this period more broadly, is mind-blowingly beautiful. I say this because Gogol seems to forget that women have personalities, and their beauty seems to be his excuse to avoid coming up with one. Though, perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much, since in actual fact this story plays with this idea anyway.

Anyway, Piskarev is an artist, and he decides to follow this woman home – as one does in early 19^th century Russia. As he chases after her he continually imagines that she gives him signs of encouragement, from “an easy smile” to a beckoning gesture with her finger. At this point I was sure Gogol was simply demonstrating the degree to which Piskarev was deluding himself in his attempted pursuit of the woman, but in actually all of these signs are happening in the real world, and not just in his head, though we don’t yet know it. Piskarev heads up to the fourth floor, which in Gogol’s world always hints at the devil (the Russian word for “devil” and for “four” are almost the same), where he finds a trio of women, including the one he followed. I thought it was a parallel to the Fates of Greek Mythology.

And all the while Piskarev heaps on his adoration for the girl – “God, what godly features!”. But he is betrayed, for this woman is no goddess: she is just a prostitute, even though her beauty is mindblowing. The destruction of Piskarev’s delusions are too much to bear, especially when the woman starts speaking “such stupid things, such base things” – and he flees. That night he dreams that she is not a prostitute at all, and that she was merely testing him, and now is inviting him to a ball. He goes, speaks with her again, and finds her to be closer to what he wants. But then he awakes, and the dream is gone.

In search of the dream girl

Piskarev cannot let things stand like that, especially when his dream was so wonderful compared to the reality he’d encountered. He attempts to go to sleep again, and sleeps as much as he can, all to try to recover that dream, so that “eventually the dreams became his life”. He stops going out, lives only to fall asleep. But the dream fades and fades, and he is forced to resort to opium to return its contents to him. With this preference for the dream over reality comes a theme that runs throughout the Petersburg Tales – that of the sanctity of life. Because in his preference for the dream, Piskarev comes to believe “It was better that she had never existed! That she’d not lived in the world, but was just the creation of an inspired artist’s mind!” – he comes to reject life itself.

Eventually he decides to go back to the woman, to try to save her from her situation. But she doesn’t want to be saved – she appears to be happy. “I only just woke up – they brought me back at seven in the morning. I was completely pissed!”. Piskarev’s artistic imaginings mean he cannot bear the thought that beauty of body doesn’t always correspond to what we assume beauty of mind is. Piskarev doesn’t value her – he only sees her as an artistic object. Dejected and humiliated by her refusal to come with him, Piskarev kills himself. For not valuing her life his punishment is to cease to value his own.

Pirogov’s Story – yet another beauty

Pirogov’s tale concerns another attempted seduction – this time of the wife of a German craftsman – and is as packed with delusion as Piskarev’s story was. Schiller is the name of the German, a drunk but talented worker whose wife has the misfortune of being seen by Pirogov as he was walking down Nevsky Prospekt. Pirogov decides to use all his powers to spend time with her, including paying an extortionate sum to Schiller for the pleasure of a new set of curtains, which gives him plenty of opportunities to drop by and check on their progress. The delusions here concern Pirogov’s view of himself: “politeness and his magnificent rank absolutely gave him the right to full attention”. What this means in practice is that he assumes he can get whatever he wants because he is a civil servant and Schiller is not.

In this manner kisses with Schillers wife, inappropriate touches, and so on and so forth take place, all while Pirogov justifies the whole thing to himself as being completely in accordance with public etiquette. The situation is funny, but horrific at the same time. The wife, whose Russian is almost non-existent, is a completely passive victim in the text. The high point of the story I shall quote in full because it is particularly comic. Pirogov has determined when Schiller will not be home so that he can finally have some time alone with his wife. He enters, finds her alone, and decides to ask her if she’d like to dance.

“The German agreed at once, for Germans are always lovers of dance. On this front Pirogov had placed a lot of his hopes: firstly, it already gave her pleasure; secondly, it could show his own talents and gracefulness; thirdly, while dancing you can get very close, embrace the cute little German and start the whole thing off – in short, he concluded he would have complete success here. He started some kind of gavotte, knowing that Germans need gradual seduction. The cute little German stepped into the centre of the room and raised one beautiful little leg. This situation so overjoyed Pirogov that he lost all control and began to kiss her. The German began to cry out, which in fact just increased her wonderfulness in the eyes of Pirogov, and he covered her in even more kisses. But just at that moment the door opened, and Schiller and Hoffmann and the joiner Kuntz entered. All of these worthy craftsmen were drunk as old boots.

And I will leave it to the reader to imagine the displeasure and wrath of Schiller.”

Pirogov’s story concludes exactly as might be predicted. He gets beaten up, goes home, but unlike Piskarev he finds solace in reading, and eventually moves on.

Nevsky Prospekt – Conclusion

What is Nevsky Prospekt? Gogol’s goal in this story appears to be to show that the place is more than a road. It is something magical, with more than a hint of the demonic about it too. But that magic manifests itself in tired tropes of overly seductive women with no personalities, which doesn’t, in this day and age, make for particularly interesting reading. There are exciting, thought-provoking things going on here: there is the way that a place like Nevsky Prospekt can contain within itself a huge number of potential associations and powers; there is also in Piskarev’s story an entertaining reversal of his unfounded hopes for the beautiful woman’s beautiful mind. And most importantly, these stories are funny. But ultimately, since I go down the street almost every day now, I can’t help but feel a sense of missed opportunity. There is so much more here than girls.

I do like the title though. It puts location in pride of place as opposed to the other Petersburg Tales where objects seem to be the main receptacles for magic and the demonic.

Notes of a Madman

This one is strange. In fact, though it’s the funniest of the Petersburg Tales it’s probably also the most uninteresting of the them – the impression I got while reading it was that it could have been written by anybody with sufficient talents, not just Gogol. There was something missing, or rather, there was too much there. Too much strangeness is always the danger in these kinds of stories and in this one Gogol sort of overdoes it. His narrator goes from being odd to being completely mad. At the time of its writing this story may well have seemed pretty novel, but by now it feels somewhat like a collection of tropes. For example, the use of the diary format. At first everything is organised “October 3^rd…,” then the next entry, etc, but by the end it collapses into gibberish – “Marchtober 86^th, between day and night”.

The story follows another down-and-out civil servant. He is in love with the daughter of one of his superiors, a man whose pens the servant is in charge of cleaning – a role he sees as evidence of favouritism, though he is mistaken. As with the other stories, here too the main character struggles with money, and is overly aware of class divisions. Underlying the text there is the same thread about the importance of human life that can be found elsewhere. When the diarist heads onto the streets we are told “On the streets there was nobody; just old women, hiding from the rain inside their dresses, and Russian merchants under umbrellas, and couriers came into my field of view”. “Nobody” means nobody well born – our narrator is a complete and utter snob, no matter how little reason he has to feel superior.

Dog Days

I wonder if Mikhail Bulgakov was inspired by “The Notes of a Madman” to create “The Heart of a Dog”. In Gogol’s story, too, we have dogs communicating. The narrator, in the first real sign of his madness, hears his love’s dog communicating with another dog, and is, naturally, amazed. I too was amazed, and had to check I hadn’t forgotten how to read Russian – but the translation I found confirmed my suspicions about the meaning. Eventually the narrator decides to use the dogs, who are apparently writing letters to each other, as a way of finding out more about his superior’s daughter and her life. He follows the second dog home and is stopped by the dog’s owner. The following is funny enough to translate at length.

“What can I do for you?” The girl asked. “I need to speak with your dog!” I said. She was a stupid one, all right! I understood just at that moment that she was not right in the head! But then the dog appeared, barking away; I wanted to grab it but – the bitch – it almost clamped its teeth around my nose. Just then I saw, however, its lair in the corner. Aha! – that’s what I needed. I went over, tore up the straw bedding in its wooden cage and, to my great pleasure, drew out a bundle of scraps of paper. The dreadful bitch, seeing this, first bit my thigh, and then, when it smelled that I’d stolen its paper, began to wail and hang onto me. “No, my dear, farewell” – and I ran off.”

I like this extract. It made me laugh when I first read it. It makes little sense and is hilariously slapstick. I think that’s the thing I like most about “The Notes of a Madman” – it’s actually pretty funny.

Madness à la Quixote

But it’s all not very original or inspired. The initial delusions of the narrator become full-blown madness once he discovers, having read the dogs’ letters – themselves highly funny and not particularly sane, that the daughter he is hoping to marry is in fact betrothed to another. The news leads to a complete collapse in the man’s identity, out of the ashes of which he decides to remake himself as the King of Spain. This is the first key hint towards the big literary influence on the story: Don Quixote. The narrator hopes to persuade the girl to marry him instead by believing that, as the King of Spain, she wouldn’t be able to refuse him. When he is eventually thrown out of his house, and even taken to prison, like the hero of Cervantes’ novel, our narrator chooses to interpret everything according to his imagination. The prison becomes “Spain.”

An engraving of Don Quixote — Don Quixote seems to be a big model for “The Notes of a Madman”. Both stories have main characters whose madness allows them to repurpose the world in such a way as to prevent it from doing them harm.

Cervantes’ influence is just too great here. The story is funny, but that’s not enough to elevate it up to “The Overcoat” or even “The Nose” in importance; meanwhile the decline into madness is something we’ve seen plenty of times in more modern culture, so it doesn’t have nearly as strong an impact as it probably did back when Gogol was writing. The story is good, but it’s just nothing special next to some of the other Petersburg Tales.

Conclusion

If you want to read these stories, you’ll end up getting a copy of Gogol’s collected stories, or a copy of the Petersburg Tales specifically. Either way, my recommendation isn’t that much use here. “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” are both fantastic stories that are worth reading again and again, and worth the price of admission. These other stories are good, and give you something else to look at, but I wouldn’t rush out to buy them if they were sold on their own. The one remaining story, “The Portrait”, is the longest of the bunch and also, I think, one of the most exciting. In a few weeks I hope to have a piece on it up here too.

A translation of “The Notes of a Madman” can be found here. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a translation of “Nevsky Prospekt” in the public domain.

Have you read these two lesser-known Petersburg Tales? What did you think of them?