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 19th 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 3rd…,” then the next entry, etc, but by the end it collapses into gibberish – “Marchtober 86th, 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.”
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?