Category: Russian Literature

The Magic and Mystery of Gogol’s “The Nose”

“The Nose”: Introduction – Not just a Strange Idea

What an odd idea it is to write a story about a man who loses his nose! After all, no one has ever woken up to find theirs has vanished unless I am much mistaken. But this is precisely the starting point for Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose”. In this piece I’d like to share a summary and interpretation of Gogol’s story, and my own thoughts on why it’s absolutely worth reading.

A daguerreotype of Gogol, showing his magnificent nose
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), writer of strange tales of Saint Petersburg, and himself a bearer of a fantastic nose!

“The Nose” does have a strange premise. The completely surreal idea of losing one’s nose reminds me a little bit of the sort of modern art that we foolishly claim our children could have painted. Anybody can come up with a strange idea – that’s ultimately not hard that hard if you’re sleep deprived or have access to drugs – and even writing about such an idea doesn’t take too much doing. The challenge, and the sheer genius of Gogol, lies in taking a strange and simple idea and extending it, through understanding it and its implications fully, into a full story. The spark of genius is not a good metaphor here – rather the spark is the strange idea, and Gogol’s talent is all the wood he is able to gather together for the fire. Though it’s a story about a nose, “The Nose” has a lot of depth and flavour to it.

Translations from the Russian are all my own.

The Story of “The Nose”

Part I: Ivan Yakovlevich

One morning the barber Ivan Yakovlevich wakes up and has his breakfast as usual. However, to his great surprise, he finds that in the middle of the loaf of bread he has just cut there is a nose. “A nose, that was exactly what it was! And what was more, it seemed to belong to someone he knew…” Already the initial strangeness of finding the nose is compounded by the absurd logic of Gogol’s world, where a man can recognise the nose of another with such certainty. (In much the same way, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” begins with a strange event, but the true strangeness comes in the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s relatives).

The nose belongs to a civil servant, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, whose whiskers Ivan Yakovlevich trims a few times each week. Threatened with the police by his wife, Ivan runs outside and throws the nose in the river, only to be caught anyway by a passing policeman. At this point the narrator intervenes to say: “But at this moment the whole matter was completely covered in fog, and I have absolutely no idea what happened next”. Thus ends the first part of the story.

Part II: Collegiate Assessor Kovalev

Next we wake up with the man with the missing nose, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev. After noticing a small spot on his nose the night before, he now discovers the whole thing is missing. After a brief detour into social status in Imperial Russia, Gogol then takes us and Kovalev out onto the street, where he has to cover his face to avoid being recognised by his acquaintances – since, as we learn, nothing is more embarrassing for a man of society than being seen without his nose either by women or by co-workers. But then he sees on the street ahead none other than his own nose! One thing that must be mentioned here is that we never learn what a walking nose looks like – Gogol only talks about the uniform of the organ. But to Kovalev’s dismay the nose has a higher rank in the civil service than he does.

Still, he needs his nose, so he goes up to “him” inside a cathedral where “he” has gone to pray. Very awkwardly, Kovalev approaches and begins to speak. “It’s awfully strange, my dear sir… but it seems to me… you should know your place. Suddenly I find you here, and where else but a church? You must agree…” In spite of a few pages all about Kovalev’s rank and pride, everything collapses into gibberish in front of a superior. Funnier still, are the puns Gogol sprinkles around the dialogue. “You should know your place” appears to refer to the nose’s place on his face, but it is just what would be said by a superior to an inferior too. The nose, naturally, is unimpressed by Kovalev, and furrows its brows before departing in a hurry. Once again, Gogol plays with our idea of what the nose must look like.

A picture of Kazan Cathdral's interior. In "The Nose" Kovalev meets his missing nose here.
Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. It is here that Kovalev and his nose have their main encounter. One thing to think about in Gogol’s works is always the role of religion, and especially the devil. What does it mean for “The Nose” that the nose itself is pious?

Kovalev is left alone, and now he tries to find some way of tracking down the nose again. He tries the police, he tries to place an advertisement in a newspaper. This last one is particularly funny, as Kovalev’s pride demands that he cannot let his name go into the paper. Instead, he falls back onto his acquaintances. “Look, a lot of people know me: Chekhtareva, wife of the state councillor; and Palagea Grigorievna Podtochina, wife of staff officer Podtochin. If they find out about this, God help me!” Which leaves the public to identify the nose without even knowing whose it is, and thus what it looks like. Another absurd moment. Kovalev goes home, writes a mad letter to a woman whose daughter he’d been flirting with, accusing her of using witchcraft to remove his nose, though naturally he has no evidence for it.

But just when all hope seems lost, the policeman from Part I arrives to say that the nose has been apprehended. What was the nose doing? It had been trying to flee the city and escape to Riga. As you do. The mad suggestion that the nose would flee Petersburg is first suggested by Kovalev’s addled mind a few pages earlier, and most readers (like me) will probably dismiss it as ridiculous. But this is just further evidence that Gogol’s world does not run on the same logic as yours or mine. The rest of Part II consists of Kovalev trying to reattach his nose, but to no avail.

Part III: Back to Normal?

And then one morning, April 7th to be precise, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev wakes up and his nose is reattached. That’s it. It reattaches itself just as magically as it vanished. Kovalev is overjoyed, and heads out into town, determined to do all of the things his nose’s absence had prevented – flirting and performing his duties as a civil servant.

The story ends with the narrator having a brief commentary on the theme of his own story. “Whatever you may say, such things do take place – not too often, but they do”. Is Gogol having one final laugh at the reader? Absolutely. Almost every story is a little ridiculous, a little unbelievable, a little too reliant on coincidences. But most are at the very least possible. “The Nose” is not, and the veneer of factuality given by its use of dates – because we’re also told at the beginning of Part I, reasonably enough, that the story begins on March 25th – is just teasing. But who are we to say what’s real and not real, possible and impossible?

That’s the story of “The Nose”. Now for a few suggestions as to what this all means – because it has to mean something, right?

Magic, Mystery and Meaning: The Themes of “The Nose”

Clothes and Respectability

For a story that is from its title onwards apparently concerned with our bodies Gogol’s focus in much of “The Nose” is oddly enough not on our skin and blood but on the things we use to cover them up. Clothes are at the centre of social rank in early 19th Century Saint Petersburg, and Gogol satirises that in his story. By dealing so much with clothes, Gogol shows how vapid and superficial people were in their interactions – they don’t care to reach the person beneath the suit. This is played with most in the case of the nose itself. Kovalev encounters his nose, but the only physical description is of what the nose is wearing, not what the thing itself looks like.

The deliberate confusion as to what exactly a nose looks like is further played up when the nose is caught by a short-sighted policeman who only recognises that it is a nose and not a man once he has put is glasses on – otherwise, he says, he would have let him pass out of the city and escape to Riga without a hitch. People are overly willing, in Gogol’s world and perhaps our own, to look no further than the rank and respectability indicated by our clothing when interacting with others. Decorum is an important part of society, but we should be wary of letting it absorb all of our attention, lest we and others become nothing more than the clothing we are wearing.

A picture of an early version of the Table of Ranks. In "The Nose" social class plays a big role
The Russian Table of Ranks created by Peter the Great is indirectly a cause of much woe in Gogol’s stories. In “The Nose” Kovalev’s anxiety about approaching his nose is in part due to the fact that it appears to be of a higher rank than him.

Women and Sex

One of the most infamous works of Gogol criticism is Simon Karlinsky’s The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which goes through Gogol’s works and finds that the key to understanding them is his repressed homosexuality. I’m not sure how far I agree with Karlinsky, but I think that thinking of “The Nose” as being about sex can prove fruitful. First of all, consider the object itself. Human noses are generally phallic in shape, and in Russian the word “nos/нос” is a masculine noun. The uses of noses, both smell and taste, are also important parts of sex. Furthermore, it’s also worth mentioning that in his correspondence Gogol regularly notes his awkwardness over the size and shape of his own. The shame that Kovalev feels at having a missing nose is directly connected with a much-reduced desire to flirt and see women. So perhaps it’s not a stretch, after all.

The Narrator and The Reading Public

It’s hard to avoid the narrator in “The Nose”. He’s a cheeky one, always appearing at the most inconvenient times with a wink. When Ivan Yakovlevich heads to the bridge the narrator decides to stop the action and tell us a little about him. The same thing happens, a few pages on, with Kovalev. And then there is the matter of the use of dates in “The Nose”. I think one layer to the story’s meaning is satirising the reading public’s demands for what a story must look like. After all, the public like prose narratives to have an element of factuality to them, in contrast to the more explicitly artistic verse narrative also popular then in Russia.

Gogol provides us with the outward appearance of veracity – clear dating, lots of unnecessary details about characters – while contrasting it with a clearly fantastic and absurd tale. Furthermore, at key moments he reveals the inadequacy of this factual veneer, such as when discussing the nose’s independent life – we learn a lot about what he wears and what rank he has, but as to what the thing actually looks like we are left completely in the dark. Gogol is poking fun at us here, and what we need to think of a story as “real”. Simply representing reality as we see it, “The Nose” seems to say, doesn’t get to the heart of things. We never learn why the nose disappears, no matter how much detail Gogol gives us – some mysteries go deeper.

Body Positivity

What I think is the most convincing overall interpretation of “The Nose”, though, is that it is about making us value our bodies more. A nose is something we can live without, but Gogol is keen to show that that doesn’t mean it is worthless. Throughout the story there are descriptions of food, flowers, and snuff – all of which we know Kovalev is unable to enjoy because of his absent nose. Furthermore, a lot of the language centres around our bodies. For example, the introduction of Kovalev – “Collegiate Assessor Kovalev woke up rather early and made a “brrr…” noise with his lips” – shows that from the moment we wake up our bodies are important to our character. When one of Kovalev’s attempts to track down his nose fails, the rejection is felt “not like a hit in the brow, but one right in the eye”.

We don’t think about our bodies until they begin to fail us, or until one morning we wake up and find a part of them has gone missing. Gogol’s story, at least to me, seems to bear the message that we ought to care about them and be grateful for them the whole time. They do a lot of good things for us.

Conclusion

The magic and mystery of “The Nose” lies in the fact that the story is so strange that, like with Kafka’s tales, it’s very hard to find an interpretation that rules out every other one. The more time we spend thinking about it, the more ideas come into our heads for what exactly the whole thing means. Ultimately though, that’s not a reason to read the story – the best reason is that it’s actually quite funny, and completely absurd. It’s short too. Give it a go.

Here’s a translation of “The Nose”. I might make my own in due course too. For more strangeness, I’ve translated Kafka’s “Before the Law” here.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions and (Less Strong) Arguments

One Big Misunderstanding

I recently finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, a collection of the author’s interviews, essays, and letters-to-the-editor. Since the pieces were all short and written with some degree of accessibility in mind, it became my bedtime reading for a few days. The first thing of his that I read was “Lolita”, which stumbled through aged fourteen without understanding a word and thus thinking for most of it that Lo was having the time of her life.

Following that magnificent misunderstanding of Lolita, Nabokov’s interviews in isolation were what I read next. I was at an age and in an environment where I was wholly convinced of the sanctity of the Canon while at the same time not really able to say what exactly it was. I was open, in a sense, to an authoritarian or at the very least authoritative figure who seemingly knew what was what and wasn’t shy about letting me know. It’s probably for the same reason that Harold Bloom appealed at that point, even though I didn’t understand him either when I actually tried reading him. Nabokov in these sits on his great-writerly throne dispensing fireballs and lightning and very, very occasionally, a glimmer of praise.

Back then that all was very attractive – it gave me opinions so that I didn’t need to bother forming my own, and it told me what was worth reading so that I didn’t have to read either. But now, having read other writers’ (and critics’) essays, binged the back issues of the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction”, and done a little growing up, the book that had I read it six or seven years ago might have seemed the masterwork of an assured genius, now appears in a much less pleasant light.

Structure

As I mentioned above, the book is made of interviews, letters-to-the-editor, and a few essays. The former make up most of the book, and stretch from immediately after the publication of Lolita until Ada’s own completion. The letters meanwhile include such banalities as Nabokov’s witticisms on the moon landings. While Lolita, being the most popular and enduring of his novels, takes up the main part of the interviews even long after it has been published, the essays that end the book are concerned with another book of Nabokov’s – his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The collection, it is important to note here, is one organised by Nabokov during his own lifetime – each interview, for instance, is introduced by his comments explaining the circumstances of each meeting – and for that reason it’s fair also to say that these two works are what he considers to be his primary legacy, and indeed he says as much. I’ll tackle both the interviews and essays in turn.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Great Writer, sure. But here we’re after his personality.

The Interviews

These were on the whole pretty fun, and what I was here for. Though I had read a few before, I scarcely remembered them. It also doesn’t help that Nabokov repeats himself. He has a number of metaphors and images that he uses again and again for two reasons. The first of these is that as with the rest of us, the things that are at the forefront of his mind are often similar from year to year, even if his vocabulary is undoubtedly marvellous (I quite wanted to go through it again just noting down every new and exciting word of his), and so when they are stacked side by side these interviews become a little like paintings at an art gallery. What beauty and power they have individually becomes blurred and dulled by company of equals. The same is true of Nabokov’s metaphors.

The other problem, though, is that these aren’t interviews in the strictest sense. Nabokov admits in his preface that “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child” (was there ever a more blatant instance of praising with faint damning?) and so what he does instead of speak unprompted is get his questions in advance and prepare answers to them on flashcards. It means that the whole selection has a slightly odd feeling of unreality to it – this is obviously not who Nabokov actually is in speech, but nor is he entirely who he is in his fiction either. It has an uncomfortable artificiality to it.

The Interviews: Humour and Judgement

But they are fun, and by this term I mean that they appeal in a few different ways. One of those is that the interviews are actually pretty funny. I love the hilariously awful punning of things like “I differ from Joseph Conradically” or my personal favourite “Off the Nabocuff” – things that if I said them in person I would be met with a sigh and awkward smile but when written down Nabokov almost seems to get away with. Beyond the puns there is the casual tone, such as when he calls himself “the shuttlecock above the Atlantic”, or talks of the indifferent audience he has to face whenever he lectures. All this is simple and mindless, but things become a lot more complicated when the humour is derived from his judgements about others – and it is regarding his judgements of others that the centre of my distaste for the book lies.

I imagine at least a few people read this book to know what Nabokov thinks of other writers. It’s certainly why I read the interviews all those years ago, and it remains an almost unacknowledged reason for why I still read a lot of things by other writers, especially ones that I admire. I want the literary gossip – who’s in, and who’s out. Nabokov is very good at deciding who is passé and out of style. Conrad is obliterated whenever there is a chance – “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés” – and anybody who writes any fiction occupied by ideas is doomed to disdain. Hemingway is merely the author of “something about bells, balls, and bulls”, though Nabokov admits to liking “the wonderful fish story”. The authors of the Soviet period are also crushed by Nabokov’s own iron fist.

Praise is left for Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, among others. But the greater part of the interviews are concerned with criticism of fellow writers, and here it goes hand in hand with witticism rather than analysis, much to its own discredit. Aside from comments about Conrad’s childishness and sentimentality there is very little explanation of why Nabokov didn’t actually like him. Meanwhile, when praise is given it is rarely a simple matter either: Nabokov’s desire to belittle Hemingway’s output is made clear through his language (and since he wrote everything for these conversations down beforehand, Nabokov’s language is absolutely worth a little close reading) – instead of naming The Old Man and the Sea or Fiesta, Nabokov refers to them by their topics, suggesting that their names were not good enough to remain in his memory. This is in contrast to somebody like Kafka, whose “Metamorphosis” (which Nabokov refers to as “The Transformation”, a little closer to the German “Verwandlung” original) is named, or Joyce’s Ulysses. Where praise comes, it is carefully and cunningly formulated so that Nabokov never seems to be praising outright anybody he wouldn’t consider to be his equal (thus Kafka and Joyce are worthy in his mind, whatever he may state in faux-humility elsewhere). We get little from reading these parts except for a list of literary friends and enemies.

Of course, perhaps you can say that it’s wrong to expect analysis from an interview – I’d grant that. But mere witticisms are far less helpful than even the pithiest of analytical comments.

The Interviews: the Nabokov Show

For those people interested in Nabokov himself, these interviews admittedly do contain a wealth of information. On his compositional methods: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well-sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” He includes a detailed description of his daily routine too, but for those who seek the secrets of success there is likely only disappointment: Nabokov spends a lot of time walking, drinking tea, and playing Russian Scrabble.

We also learn what he read as a child, and what has fallen in and out of fashion with him as he has aged: “Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok” are his childhood’s occupation, while “Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin” gain ascendency once he is into his twenties, thirties, and forties. We are told that Lolita only survived being incinerated after an intervention by his wife, Vera, and a little bit about his life in Berlin and France before he reached America. Biographical details, simply put, but nonetheless interesting if that is to your taste.

The Interviews: A Cutting Edge

Nabokov wrote, by common admission, pretty good fiction, and when he wants to in these interviews he can well deploy that power of insight which contributes a great deal towards his reputation, just rarely. It is here too, that his strong opinions are most useful, for they allow him to say boldly what others might not. He is at his most interesting when discussing themes also addressed in his novels and stories. When discussing how we view reality he imagines it in a series of steps: “reality is a very subjective affair… a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist”. He also talks about memory, the ways that the past changes as we grow older and begin to focus on different aspects of it – “The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is”. Less interesting is his dismissal of Soviet fiction in its entirety as mere banality – though much of it was, his answer lacks a lot of nuance and could conceal from a reader the value of what was produced in the Soviet Union in terms of writing. One thing I did agree with though was his statement about Osip Mandel’shtam, the Russian poet, whose death in the camps Nabokov states makes his poetry look better now than it would do otherwise, good as it is. This is close to my own experience of him too, but I’m keeping my mind open since I’ve not read as much as I’d have liked to.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), whose novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin details the tragically aimless life of its eponymous hero.

The Onegin Affair – Introduction and Background

The interviews at their best are a collection of witticisms and occasional insights into their author’s talent and creative process; at their worst they are rude an unfounded criticisms of others with nary an analysis in sight. The majority of the essays in the second half of the book deal with Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, and unfortunately they are much oftener similar to the bad interviews than to the good ones. Nabokov’s version of Pushkin’s novel in verse was first published in 1964, and included as an appendix a section on prosody differences between English and Russian – for both works (“Notes on Prosody” was published separately later) he met with fierce opposition, and responded equally fiercely. His own translation was written in accordance with his own views on the act of translation, expounded among the interviews and in the essays too. That view was one of extreme literalism. Nabokov wanted every word to be translated exactly according to its meaning, so that works translated from a foreign language ought to sound strange, precisely because they are not being adapted or smoothed over for their new audience. It makes them clunky but according to Nabokov also much more correct. It’s not a debate to get into here, but needless to say the style of his version of Pushkin’s work raised a few hackles among academia and the wider public.

The Onegin Affair – the Nature of the Defence

Nabokov, way back when, used to be good friends with the literary critic Edmund Wilson. During the course of the affair things between them got a little heated, and a sort of mangled retelling of all this is possible by looking through the essays and following up a few of the references within them. The key essay is the fourth one, “Reply to my Critics”, which is “a magazine article of explanation, retaliation, and protest” but mostly the latter two. Nabokov takes to task a huge number of minor denizens of the academy who have been critical of him, before rounding on Mr Wilson in particular. Wilson, in his own article, had begun by stating that he and Nabokov were old friends, but ones whose affection was “sometimes chilled by exasperation.” Nabokov, nonetheless, rounds on him. Where Wilson suggests he has “an addiction to rare and unfamiliar words” Nabokov arrogantly responds that “it does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey”. Elsewhere, he compares him to “some seventeenth-century pedant discoursing on high and low style”.

But beyond these criticisms of tone and personality, Nabokov also states that Wilson has no right to complain about his writing because Wilson is actually bad at Russian – which as a language learner is among the most offensive things you can be told. Nabokov acts in such a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation – he says himself that “my facts are objective and irrefutable” even as they are simply more and more opinions disguised as facts by a grandiose prose style. He is rude and, if not often wrong, then at least far less “right” than he seems to think he is. When Wilson tried to make things good again between them, saying that his article was “more damaging” than he had intended, Nabokov, instead of accepting the apology merely rubbed salt in the wounds by saying “his article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation”. In one of the letters-to-the-editor written later, Nabokov once more dismisses the possibility of making up with his old friend, writing “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honour the latter wins.” The very next year Wilson was dead.

This may all sound ridiculous. In a sense, after all, I’m just criticising Nabokov’s personality. But when we read interviews and essays, at least outside of an academic context, part of their appeal comes from the way they somehow contain the essence of their authors. Nabokov’s personality does not appeal to me – I would even go so far as to say that he should little appeal to anybody. He is cruel, insistently so, and arrogant beyond all measure. He may well have assembled this collection hoping to impress his readers, but anyone with unclouded vision will instead see whatever idol they’ve constructed for him crumble with each passing page. We rarely read fiction for the personality of a work’s creator (excepting, for example, the Beats) because the text is rarely so autobiographical that we cannot move beyond the author’s experience, if the work is good enough, into something exciting and more universal. But here Nabokov’s personality is overwhelming, and overwhelmingly toxic. Other essays just take aim at differing people who have annoyed him over the years, such as Robert Lowell and Maurice Girodias, and are just as tiresome.

Montreux in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his later years.

Rays of Light

For that reason, the best parts of the book are where Nabokov is doing something similar to telling a story and his own person takes a back seat. One of the letters-to-the-editor recounts the death of his father shortly after the family had arrived in Berlin. At the end of the book Nabokov details some expeditions in search of rare butterflies. In both instances we can enjoy the texts as independent of the personality created them. Another time where the book takes a turn for the better, and for me the most frustrating moment, is in the article on the Russian poet Vladimir Hodasevich (Khodasevich). It is a rare incidence of praise, and the only essay here that he translated from the original Russian work he did before coming to America. It includes the line “even genius does not save one in Russia; in exile, one is saved by genius alone”, which sounds rather good if nothing else. But it is annoying because essays like this, where Nabokov turns your eyes towards writers you hadn’t considered or even heard of, are almost non-existent here. In one of the interviews he famously declares Andrei Bely’s Petersburg as one of the four great masterpieces of the 20th century, which almost singlehandedly brought about that book’s revival and appreciation in the West. But again, that’s two new authors after a whole book’s worth of vitriol.

Conclusion

It is not easy to do, by any stretch of the imagination, but once one tears oneself away from the fancy prose style and the enchantments of his undoubtedly beautiful and charming language, the book offers far less than perhaps might be expected, based on Nabokov’s colossal reputation. The revelations are few and far between, and not even the sparkling of nice words can disguise the insipid cruelty of which he gives every indication of being proud. We may read criticism to watch our literary temples be torn down as much as we want to see them be built up, but Nabokov rarely undermines the foundations of what he attacks – instead he simply slings mud and insults at them until the walls are stained brown, but ultimately left easy enough to wipe clean. Rarely do we learn why things are bad, only that Mr Nabokov thinks they are. We do get the odd bit of insight into Nabokov’s life and times, but that’s not enough to redeem the book. It is a failure underneath the prose.

If you are after analysis, take a look at his lectures or book on Gogol’. If you are after style and an entertaining story that is not dripping with nastiness, he wrote plenty of fiction to keep you busy. But this… this is just a disappointment. Better to stay away.

For Nabokov in a much more enjoyable guise, I have a piece on Pnin, over here.

Picture of Vladimir Nabokov by Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers) is in the public domain.

Portrait of Alexander Pushkin is by Orest Kiprensky and in the public domain

Photo of Montreux is by Nserrano and used under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

A Righteous Man by Nikolai Leskov

Since I finished reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, which I discuss here, I have been meaning to read some Leskov, and translate it as well if it weren’t too hard. I’m not sure whether the piece I chose was necessarily the best introduction, but I found it very funny, and hope I conveyed that a little in the translation. A few comments of my own follow the main text.

A Righteous Man – Nikolai Leskov

A Vision at Midnight

I have heard it said often and indeed several times read it too: that he has “vanished” – “the righteous man” has vanished, and he has vanished not only completely without a trace, but also without any hope of ever finding him again in Russia. This is grave news, and at the same time one didn’t quite want to believe it. Perhaps, though, the matter depends more on those people who are seeking him: they are looking even though they don’t know how to find such a “righteous man”. All this makes me remember the old vaudeville “A Peaceful Night in Sherbakovii Lane”. There, if I remember right, there was a couplet, going thus:

“And even on Sherbakovii Lane

You could find a goodly soul.”

What that means is that the author of this piece knew how to find “a good man” even in such a small and dirty lane as that one. And so, how could it be the case that there cannot be found in all of Russia but one “righteous man”? And what sort of justness are we expecting from this “righteous man” anyway? That he “in the face of social injustice finds within himself courage and determination to say publicly to the people: “You are making a mistake and are going on the path of error – but look: here is the path to righteousness”?”

I am citing this from an article I found in one public news organ whose name I feel no need to mention. I can vouch but one thing: that these printed words I have just repeated seemed to a great many to be deeply true. But I remained biased against them. I believed that a righteous man still survived, somewhere out there, and that I would soon meet him – and indeed I did. I saw him in a battle with the whole of society, which he strove to defeat on his own and without fear. This is how it happened.

It was the summer that has just passed by. I had left Petersburg with one rather devout friend, who had enticed me to have a look at a big religious celebration out in the country. The way there wasn’t particularly long or tiresome: one cool evening we sat down in a carriage in Petersburg, and the next morning we were already at the place. And within half an hour of crossing the threshold my religious friend had already quarrelled with some church sexton or other! (He had apparently said something disrespectful to him).

When evening came it found both of us in our room and my fellow traveller sitting and busily writing a letter of complaint back to the capital about this poor man, so I went down to breathe some fresh air and also have a look at what exactly it was that people got up to out here. I was accompanying an easy-going artist I had met who said he’d come here to “read his scenes” to the public.

At such an hour back home in Petersburg all respectable people are busy, as is well known, out in restaurant gardens eating, and here it turned out that people were doing just the same. It thus happened, then, that we landed without any misunderstandings right in the public garden, where my acquaintance, the artist, was supposed to be showing off his talents.

He wasn’t a newcomer like me – he knew a lot of people here, and they knew him too.

The garden, into which we had arrived, was rather large for a provincial town, though it was rather similar to a mere boulevard from my perspective. In any case, to the left there were entrances to the place where this evening there happened to be a paid concert going on, as a result everything was closed off. The paying public went through a single middle way, shaped like a concave semicircle. Around the gates were placed plank booths for selling tickets, and a number of policemen and idlers were standing there too, the latter having no chance of getting through to the garden due to lacking the necessary funds.

In front of this entrance to the main garden there was a small front garden, but I couldn’t tell what it was growing or why it was here and fenced round in the first place. Its relation to the larger garden was like that of a waiting room in a bathhouse to the baths themselves.

The artist went through according to his “special right”, while I bought a ticket, and we entered through the gates to the accompaniment of the Skobelevskii March[1], after which there were cheers of “hoorah” and new demands for the exact same thing again.  

The public were out in great numbers, and all of them were pressed together on a small lawn, in the corner of which there was a wooden restaurant, made to look like a pagan temple. On one side of it a summer theatre had been erected from wood panels, and this was where the performance was now taking place and where a little while later my Petersburg orator ought to be doing his readings. Meanwhile, on the other side there was the “shell” where the military band was located and busy playing the march.

The society here clearly belonged to several different ranks: there were petty councillors, officers from the army, merchants and the “grey people” of the petty bourgeoisie. In the more obvious places were packed the traders, while in a far corner a regimental clerk and a certain sort of woman were hanging around.

Decrepit little tables covered by dirty cloths had been haphazardly thrown about, all inconveniently near to one another and all of them occupied. The people cheerfully gave me a public demonstration of what exactly it was they did here. In great demand it seemed was tea, beer, and vodka, although they called the latter “Simple person’s wine”, as if it would sound more respectable that way. Only in one place did I notice someone who was managing himself in a way suggestive of greater wealth: before him stood a bottle of champagne and cognac, and a teapot with boiling water for making punch. There were rather a lot of empty glasses around him, but he was at that moment sitting alone.

This guest had a remarkable appearance which soon thrust itself upon one’s sight. For one, he was gigantic, with a thicket of thick hair which already had flashes of grey in it among the black. His dress was extraordinarily elaborate, colourful, and tasteless. He was wearing a bright and deep blue linen shirt with a high upturned and starched collar. On his neck a white foulard with brown spots was carelessly hung, and over his shoulders was slung a jacket in the Manchester style. Then, on his chest was an extraordinarily massive golden chain with a diamond and a great number of dangling pendants. Even in terms of his footwear he was extremely original: he had on his feet such low boots that one might sooner have taken them for slippers, and between them and his pantaloons flashed bright stripped red cotton socks, just as if he had scratched his legs until they bled.

He was sitting at the biggest table, which was placed in the very best location – just beneath a large old lime tree for shade – and it seemed that he was in a state of nervous agitation.

The artist, who had accompanied me thus far, as soon as he saw this most original specimen squeezed my hand quietly and murmured to me:

“Well, well, well. Now this is something unexpected!”

“Who is he?”

“This, my dear friend, is a subject[2] of the finest sort.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that he is extremely curious. This is Martin Ivanich – a nobleman, merchant, and extremely prosperous fellow and an absolute nutcase to boot. In common parlance among our people he is often known as “Martin the righteous”, because he loves to tell everyone the truth. His fame, just like that of Ersha Ershovich[3], has spread along every river and port of our dear Russia. And he is not without an education either – he knows a lot of Pushkin and Griboedov[4] by heart, and if you get him to have a drink he’ll start to draw upon “Woe from Wit” or something from Gogol. Indeed, it looks as though he’s already started with his spree – he’s already sitting without his hat.”

“Well, it has gotten hot.”

“No – he always brings another bottle with him hidden under his hat, just in case they refuse to give him any more at the buffet.”

The artist stopped a lackey, just at that minute going past, and asked: “Has Martin Ivanovich got a bottle underneath his hat?”

“Sir… I don’t know what you mean…”

“Well, that means he’s ready,” the artist turned back to me, “and soon we two will witness a righteous performance of the most unexpected and noblest sort. We ought to go and have a chat with him.”

The artist went towards Martin Ivanovich and I trudged after him, stopping close by so as to observe their meeting.

The artist stopped in front of Martin and, after taking off his own hat, with a smile said: “I bow to your honour.”

Martin Ivanovich in response to this extended a hand to him and immediately brought him down onto the empty chair next to him, then answered:

“”I beg you to join me” – this said Sobakevich[5]”

“But I don’t want to,” Uttered my friend, but at that moment a glass of punch was already sitting before him, and Martin once more repeated the quote.

“I beg you to join me” – said Sobakevich.”

“No, truly I cannot. I have to go and read now.”

Martin poured out the punch onto the ground and muttered some unpleasantry or other befitting a Nozdrev[6].

I didn’t much like this – I understood why everybody ran away from this antique. As an original he certainly was an original, but it seemed to me that within him was contained not only the character of Sobakevich, but also Konstantin Konstandzhoglo[7], who boiled fish with their skins still on. Only, this Konstandzhoglo now had drunk a little more and in an even less pleasant mood he began to slag off the whole of society. He talked of how they “all are wretches and scoundrels”; and when the public once again demanded the Skobelevskii March he suddenly stood up without a cause and shushed the lot of them.

“Why’d he do that?” I asked my friend as he fled the vicinity.

“Because he is now going to cast a little righteousness in their direction. But anyway, we should head into the theatre.”

I left with my friend and made myself comfortable in his dressing room. We sang, read, and once more went out into the garden.

The spectacle was finished. The public had markedly thinned out and, as they were leaving, once more demanded the same Skobelevskii March. Without difficulty we found ourselves a table, but luckily or unluckily we had ended up right next to our Martin Ivanovich again. He, while we had been away, had managed to increase his sensibility still further, and his sense of justice, it appeared, now demanded a vocal stand from him. He now no longer sat, but stood and declaimed not poetry, but a prose excerpt which really made you admit that he was very well-read for someone of his milieu. He was rolling off from memory phrases from the praised word of Zakharov[8] to Catherine, which was located in “Considerations on the Matter of New and Old Style”.

“”Suvorov[9], so spoke Catherine, show us! He rose like a tumultuous whirlpool and he blasted the Turks from their guarded borders; like a hawk he fell upon his prey. Whoever he saw he sent to flight; whoever he met he conquered; and to whomever he brought his thunder he annihilated. There were none who escaped. Europa herself was left trembling… and…””  

But just at that moment the public once more demanded the Skobelevskii March, and once the orchestra had started fulfilling this request it was no longer possible to discern whatever Martin Ivanovich was declaiming. Only when the march had finished did his words reach us again:

““-Thus, must we honour our forebears and never think too highly of our own poor selves!””

What is this man trying to get at?” I asked my friend.

“Verily, verily, my good fellow, he is trying to achieve his justice.”

“What does he want it for now?”

“For him it is essential: the man is righteous, and you can see it on his face. Look look…” The storyteller finished, and I saw that Martin Ivanovich had suddenly stood up from his place and with rapid if tipsy steps had gone after an older man in military uniform who at that moment just happened to be walking past.

Martin Ivanovich caught up with this stranger (who happened to be the bandmaster of the orchestra), grabbed him from behind by the collar and shouted: “”No, no, you shan’t get away from me” – so said Nozdrev”.

The bandmaster smiled with a look of embarrassment but asked that he be released.

“No, I shall not let you go,” Answered Martin Ivanovich. “You are tormenting me!” And he forced him down towards the table and shouted again: “Drink to the insult to our affronted forebears and the darkness now covering our future descendants!”

“Who did I insult?”

“Who? Me, Suvorov, and all the righteous people of our land!”

“I didn’t think I… I wasn’t suggesting to…”

“Then for what in God’s name were you playing that itch of a march for the entire evening long?”

“The public requested it.”

“You are tormenting me with this injustice.”

“The public requested it.”

“Despise the public, then, if they are unjust!”

“What is this injustice you are going on about?”

“Why aren’t you playing Suvorov’s March, eh?”

“The public did not request it.”

“I suggest you clear up the matter with them. Play the Skobelevskii March once, then Suvorov’s March twice, because he waged war more than him. Yes! Now I shall let you go – head back right at this moment and play Suvorov’s March!”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no such thing as Suvorov’s March.”

“How could there be no march for Suvorov? “Suvorov, spoke Catherine, show us how it’s done! He blew things up, swooped down upon them, destroyed them, conquered them, gave a shake to Europa!…” and you’re saying he doesn’t have a march?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The public hasn’t requested one.”

“Aha! Well, I will show them what’s what!”

And Martin Ivanovich suddenly let go of the bandmaster, stood up on top of the table and cried out: “You public! You are unfair, and what’s more, you are a pig!”[10]

Everything suddenly grew noisy and people started moving about, while near the table where Martin Ivanovich the Righteous was continuing his speech a policeman had appeared and was now demanding that the orator lower himself back to the ground. Martin did not comply. He defended himself by kicking about with his legs and loudly continued to reproach everyone for their injustice towards Suvorov. He finished with a challenge for a duel, throwing down one of his shoes instead of a glove. A couple of townsfolk who had come to the rescue grabbed at his legs, but they couldn’t put an end to the mayhem: into the air there flew yet another boot, the entire table flipped over, and the sounds of smashing cutlery could be heard alongside the splashing of water and cognac… in a word, it was a right mess… at the buffet table for some reason the lights all momentarily went out and a everyone began a stampede towards the exit, while on their platform the musicians decided have a go playing their finale: “Only Gloried is our God in Zion.”[11]

My friend and I joined the handful of curious ones who had not rushed to leave and were now awaiting the denouement. We were all tightly packed in that place were the police were trying to restrain Martin Ivanovich, who was still managing to keep them off him and all the time was heroically defending the matter, crying: “Catherine spoke: Suvorov, show us… Explosions, swooping, annihilation, shaking!”

And then he was silent, either because he was tired or because something had finally managed to interrupt him.

In the darkness that now followed it was hard to see who had a hold of whom, but then the voice of the righteous man resounded anew: “Stop strangling me: I am on the side of righteousness!”

“There isn’t any justice here” Said the policeman.

“I am not speaking to you, but to the whole of society!”

“Maybe if you just go over here…”

“And I will go – but only get your hands off – come on! I’m going… hands off! No need to embrace me.”

“Gentlemen, please move out of the way.”

“I am not scared… Why is there no march for Suvorov?”

“Go complain to the justice of the peace.”

“And I will complain! Suvorov conquered more!”

“The justice will decide the matter.”

“The justice is an idiot! Where is that devil of a man to learn about it?”

“Well just wait and see!… it’s all in the protocol.”

“Well I’m not scared of your justice. I’m going!” Martin shouted. He threw off the arms of the policemen and went with big steps towards the exit. He was still not wearing any shoes – he was walking with only those multicoloured socks…

The police didn’t keep off and tried to encircle him.

From among the rows of the public who were still there someone cried out: “Martin Ivanovich, go and find your shoes… you need to put something on your feet.”

He stopped for a moment, but then he waved his hands and carried on, shouting: “It’s nothing… if I am a righteous man then I should be walking like this. Justice always walks without boots.”

At the gates they forced Martin into a carriage with a policeman and then they drove off.

The public then went off to wherever each of them needed to be.

“Well, all things considered, his reasoning was just,” Said one stranger to another as they overtook us.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just like he said – Suvorov conquered more than Skobolev after all – why shouldn’t they have played his march?”

“There isn’t an arrangement.”

“So that’s your injustice right there.”

“Eh, shut up. It’s not for us to bother with it. Maybe the justice of the peace will have to worry about it, but not you. Who cares about being just or not?”

My friend took me by the arm and whispered: “If you want to know – this is the real truth.”

While I was getting undressed in my room I heard two people going along the corridor, quietly discussing something. They decided to part ways by the entrance to the room next door and finished with the following: “Well, however you want to look at it, in his drunken state there was some justice alright.”

“Yes, well, maybe you’re right, but the devil was in it too.”

And they wished each other good night.

[1] Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev (1843-1882), recently deceased at the time the story takes place, had been a successful general during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

[2] The Russian has “suzhekt” a pun on “sub’ekt” meaning a subject, and “syuzhet”, meaning a plot.

[3] Ersha Ershovich was a character in a popular satire of the 17th Century

[4] Pushkin is the most famous Russian writer, equivalent in stature to Shakespeare in English. Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov (1795-1829) was a diplomat, poet, and dramatist. His comedy “Woe from Wit” is extremely popular in Russia and has had a huge influence on literature ever since its publication.

[5] A character in Gogol’s Dead Souls.

[6] Nozdrev is a character in Dead Souls as well. He is two-faced and superficial.

[7] See note 5

[8] I. S. Zakharov was a famously good stylist according to the work mentioned

[9] A V Suvorov was general under Catherine, and among the most well-known generals of the Imperial period altogether. Far more important that Skobelevskii.

[10] “You are swine” is another translation, but I thought using pig was more funny. In the Russian he is speaking to the public as if it were an individual, including using the second-person singular form of “you”.

[11] A religious hymn by M. M. Kheraskov

Comments and (brief) Analysis

As I mentioned above, this is the first Leskov piece I’ve read, so there’s only so much I can say about it. He’s not a particularly well-known writer outside of his homeland, and then only for “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk”. He writes simply, and that gives me an advantage translating the piece, because I have less recourse to the dictionary or my Russian friends. Still, I hadn’t anticipated Martin Ivanovich’s quotes when I started reading, and they were a bit trickier to translate – I did need help for those, because the Russian is much older than what I’m used to, being as it was from the 18th century.

Nikolai Leskov around the time this story was written. Doesn’t he look like a man with plenty of yarns to spin?

More useful, probably, is to explain a few of the ways the story connects to Benjamin’s ideas of storytelling.

For one, the story is recounted as if it were a story from real life – and indeed, Leskov is recounting a largely real event, according to the notes in his collected works. The narrator explains how they heard about the story then tells the story itself, which is simply an event. He also tries to frame it, in the beginning, within moral questions. That is, the story has a moral – another key element for Benjamin. It is trying to tell us something, most obviously that there are still righteous people out there, though they may seem strange to us.

The story is also written simply. The language is of a low register, and indeed in recounting the speech of people the narrator even veers into coarse day-to-day language of the time. He doesn’t try to explain actions, or provide justifications – he lets the characters speak for themselves, and then the reader find their moral. Because of the lack of a psychological level – another distinguishing characteristic of stories as opposed to novels – there is a layer of ambiguity. Are we to treat Martin Ivanovich as a truly righteous person, or is there more irony involved? These questions depend on how the story is told – with each retelling, a narrator could focus on one or the other.

Though it is true that this is a story in a book, and thus it lacks some of the other traits that oral stories would, it nonetheless serves as a kind of base, which through real-life retellings, could be shaped and moulded into a truer story. Perhaps you, reader, could pass it off as one of your own experiences, the next time you find yourself enjoying an evening with your friends, and see what they think. 🙂