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.
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 19th 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.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is another writer who for me can fight against the pain of death. His earnest belief in God and mankind, regardless of one’s own spiritual persuasions, is inspiring. His politics, however, is not.
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
Introduction: Hofmannsthal, the enfant terrible of
Vienna
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is perhaps the greatest claimant to
the title of the German enfant terrible, placing him alongside Mikhail
Lermontov in Russia and, most famously of all, Arthur Rimbaud in France in the
German canon. Like those two poets Hofmannsthal displayed precocious talents at
a young age – in his case he frequented a literary salon from the age of about
fifteen with his father accompanying him since he was too young to go alone.
And like Rimbaud, Hofmannsthal also ceased writing poetry suddenly to
concentrate on other parts of his life. The reason usually identified by the
critics is that he lost his belief in language as a tool to convey thought and
the reality he saw around him. This crisis is memorably expressed in his
fictional “Lord Chandos Letter” to Francis Bacon, in which the former man (a
surrogate for Hofmannsthal) explains how language has failed him.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). Don’t let his dates fool you – he wrote almost all of his poetry before the turn of the century, before settling down into gloom and reactionary politics.
I am no Hofmannsthal expert, but I have read through his
small poetic corpus a few times and want to share two aspects of his poetry that
make him an interesting poet to me. Though the crisis that ultimately turns him
away from poetry appears to be a linguistic one, I think there are more
tensions lying under the surface of his perfectly tuned poesy than just ones of
language. As ever, unmarked translations are mine.
Language Dies with a Whimper
By the time Hofmannsthal in 1902 actually penned his imaginary
letter complaining of his inability to write it was long since he had written
anything substantial. In my copy of his poems there are collected those poems
he did not see worth publishing in his 1922 Gedichte. Some of these aren’t
very good, but interestingly enough as 1895/6 – the apogee of his talents –
passed he began to write several little couplets, which are scarcely poems at all.
Instead, they seem a halfway point between the faith in language expressed poems
like “A Dream of Great Magic” and the collapse of that faith expressed in the “Lord
Chandos Letter”. At only two lines long, they seem positively Beckettian in attitude
– the attempt to salvage some kind of meaning from the gigantic void that
language’s failure has left. Some of them are, though bitter, thought-provoking
and beautiful. Hopefully my translations are too!
Names
“Visp’s the name of a frothing brook; another name is Goethe. There came the name from the thing; but here the bearer created its clang.”
This poem is written by a poet who is very aware of words
and their effects; but not only that these effects exist but how they have the
capacity to be created and remade by a sufficiently talented person, like a
Goethe.
Words
“There are some words that hit like hammers. But others You swallow like hooks and swim on and do not yet know it.”
I love this one. It captures one of those inarticulable
feelings you get when you read something truly superb. You know that the best
works and their words will stay with you, but Hofmannsthal puts his finger on
an image for how they do it. “Words”, here, is more specifically phrases, but I
think that’s clear enough from the context and of little importance anyway. That
title sounds better to my ear than “phrases” would.
The Art of the Storyteller
“Do you wish to depict the murder? Well show me the hound in the yard: / Now show me at the same time in the eye of the dog the shadows of the killing.”
I think in this one the scepticism about language’s ability
to reflect reality is clearly manifest. It was even clearer when I accidentally
misread “murder” for “world” in the German because I wasn’t being careful. Nonetheless,
Hofmannsthal is challenging our ability to depict the world in any meaningful
way. Meaning here is removed by the successive impulse to get into smaller and
smaller parts of reality – first the dog, then his eye, and then the shadows of
the killing itself. It becomes too much, too detailed. We’re overloaded with
information we cannot possibly manage to represent, and so representation
itself becomes suspect. While the modernist fiction writers tried to go further
and further into the subconscious, Hofmannsthal is expressing a feeling of futility
in such an idea. It will never not fail at showing everything we are. This is
the poem of one who will shortly give up on poetry.
Hofmannsthal’s Poetical (and Political) Guilt and Doubt
Late in life Hofmannsthal, the Austrian aristocrat, became a
great reactionary. The loss the empire over which he and his fellow Viennese had
ruled through military failure in the First World War was too much to bear for
a soul like his, one already inclined by birth towards that which is conservative
and noble in temperament. But we ought to give him his due – he was young once.
And in his poems, there is more a tension between an artistic temperament that
seeks to live creating art-for-art’s-sake, channelling a certain strand of
Nietzsche, and an awareness of the responsibilities that he has for his people
as a result of his position in society. A sense of his duty as a human being
fighting against his sense of his duty as an artist. I think it is this tension
that produces one of his most well-known poems, “Manche Freilich…”/”Some, of
course…”:
Some, of course…
Some, of course, will have to die below, Where the heavy rudders of the ship are striving; Others live at the helm above, And know the birds’ flights and the stars’ lands.
Some have to lie down with heavy limbs Among the roots of tortured lives; Others find they've seats arranged Up by the Sibyls and the queens, And there they sit as if at home, With easy bodies and easy hands.
But a shadow falls up from that life Into the other life above, And the easy are bound to the heavy Just as they’re bound to earth and air:
I can’t remove forgotten tragedies That plagued past peoples from my eyes; Nor keep my frightened soul safe from The silent fall of far-off stars.
Many fates are woven beside my own And through them all a presence plays; And my part is more than just this life’s Slightest flame or slender lyre.
I’m not entirely sure what this poem means, but I’ve learned
it and had it going around in my head for a few months, so I’ve at the very
least been thinking about it. The sticking point, critically speaking, is in
the first line: “Some, of course, will have to die below”/”Manche freilich müssen
drunten sterben”. It’s hard to know what tone this is written in. It seems at
first to indicate a resigned attitude towards equality and social progress and,
if not an endorsement of existing hierarchies, then at the very least a
suggestion that the hierarchies ought not to be tampered with. But it could be
read as anything from complete support to a more insidious, ironic tone. I, at
least, can’t read it without hearing irony. The description of the ship is
designed to show inequality, without being so political as to start demanding
solutions.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born at almost the same time as Hofmannsthal, and into even more luxury. But unlike Hofmannsthal, whose “Some, of course” shows hesitation before action, Wittgenstein’s life contains many heroic attempts to connect with his fellow men and women.
Instead, the focus seems to be on the existence of inequality
and the need, not for solutions so much as for understanding and a sense of personal
responsibility. Hofmannsthal here is trying to feel what anybody in his
position as an aristocrat, and indeed anybody in a position of relative wealth,
can easily forget to feel – a sense of awareness of, and compassion and responsibility
towards those who luck and other circumstances have not left as well-off as
they have themselves. It is easy enough, I know from experience, to ignore the
plight of others as being almost unreal, to dismiss the homeless as somehow deserving
of their fate, and criminals as being exclusively bad people. Of course, there
are bad people among the criminals, just as there are dangerous people among
the homeless, but that cannot be justification to look away and hide from the
obligation to pay attention.
Interconnectedness as solution
Hofmannsthal is keenly aware that he does not need to take
any part in society whatsoever, except, if he wants, as an artist. A life of
aesthetic and creative pleasure lies open to him in a way that it is for almost
nobody else. He can, in the language of the poem, look at the birds and the
stars, and sit and feast well into the early morning. But this life becomes, in
contemplation of the reality facing him as a conscientious human being, inadequate
– “my part is more than just this life’s slightest flame or slender lyre” – the
lines reject making that life of luxuriant aestheticism the entirety of his
world. Not only do the fruits of that life seem to be unworthy, Hofmannsthal also
appears to feel a kind of guilt from it, suggested by “I can’t remove forgotten
tragedies / That plagued past peoples from my eyes”.
He begins to see being fully aware of “the presence” / “Dasein” that runs through all things as the goal of his life. With that there comes a view of the world that sees all life as valuable for being a reflection of this central idea of its very existence. It’s not a religious idea per se, so much as the idea of our interconnectedness made clearer. Instead of seeing himself as isolated from other people because of his social status, Hofmannsthal here reworks his understanding of his position to allow himself the ability to feel keenly the value of other people, even as he doesn’t let it become a political statement. He disestablishes the hierarchies of his mind, instead of concerning himself with destroying the hierarchies of the world. In essence, he adds compassion to his conservatism. It is, I think, a somewhat heroic gesture.
Conclusion – Reasons to read Hofmannsthal
Hofmannsthal is a pretty cool poet. What I like the most about his poetry is how little there is of it, and how good what there is is. No matter how productively-minded you may be, there’s enough time to go back and reread things, and think about what they have to say. The German is attractive to the ear, and the topics that he deals with are usually interesting enough. That sounds like a lukewarm recommendation, and perhaps it is, but I think it’s difficult to capture a sense of beauty when you recommend something anyway. His poetry is beautiful and filled with pleasant turns and wondrous images. He is neither a great thinker nor a great soul in his poetry, but for a young man who stopped writing his poems only a year or two older than I am now, it’s amazing what he did achieve. Check him out.
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.
Nevsky Prospekt as it would have been shortly before Gogol was writing his Petersburg Tales
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.
The hero of “Notes of a Madman”, as imagined by Ilya Repin, the Russian painter
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.”
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.
