Russian Literature Archives - Page 6 of 9

Sympathy, Sadness, and Disappointment in Dostoevsky’s The Double

It was through Dostoevsky that I first came to Russian literature, after a winter reading The Brothers Karamazov that changed my world and the course of my life. And for a while he was my favourite writer and the only person I could say I’d read nearly everything of. But once my own Russian skills were good enough to read him in the original, the disappointment was crushing. In English, with the kind help of a translator or, in some cases, two, Dostoevsky’s Russian can be hammered into a vaguely readable shape. But in the original, there is no such help, and the truth of it is that Dostoevsky is among the worst stylists ever to be elevated to the Canon. Random words, commas, ellipses – Dostoevsky’s writing in The Double is as mad as his subject matter, the mysterious (apparent) duplication of a civil servant.

A drawing of Fyodor Dostoevsky while he was younger. — A young Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double was written and published in 1846 – before Dostoevsky suffered the imprisonment and exile that changed his life and made him the author we know today

The Double is not Dostoevsky’s best book, by any stretch, unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov (and he’s not the best judge anyway). It was also written before his mock-execution and years of imprisonment which led to the spiritual conversation that we have to thank for his mature work. Still, it’s on my Cambridge reading list because it’s shamelessly derivative of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, which I’ve looked at here (“The Nose”) and here (“Notes of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospekt”). Though Dostoevsky is very much influenced by Gogol – “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’” is a famous quote attributed to him – The Double is also Dostoevsky’s own work, and bears his own stamps too. In this case it doesn’t make for a good book, but it does at least make for an interesting one.

Translations from the Russian are my own.

A Brief and Rough Summary of the Plot

The Double tells the story of a few days in the life of one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a poor civil servant in early 19^th century Saint Petersburg. On the day the story begins he decides to spend most of his savings on hiring a fancy carriage and a serious livery for his servant Petrushka, all so that he might look better off than he actually is. He then visits his new doctor, who he had already visited earlier that week for an unspecified illness. This doctor suggests that Golyadkin, who is introverted and has paranoia – even within the first chapter he feels he’s being watched – go out and socialize and thus prevent himself having a breakdown. Golyadkin, however, doesn’t leave until he has gone on an unprovoked rant about the “enemies” who conspire against him.

The extravagant spending is because Golyadkin is going, that evening, to the birthday party of Klara, the daughter of a more senior civil servant. But when he arrives, he is unable to enter the main hall – he’s too scared, and ends up just watching from a hiding spot until someone approaches and his cover is blown. He goes up to Klara, but finds himself tongue-tied, and she is led away from him – it is not the first time he’s bothered her. Ashamed, Golyadkin heads home in a snowstorm, and it is only then – a third of the way through The Double – that we actually meet the double himself, also called Golyadkin, first glimpsed as a figure in the night. Both of them are heading to Golyadkin’s house, and the hero offers to let the other Golyadkin stay over.

The next day at work Golyadkin begins to feel a great deal of confusion, because he is the only person who recognises the double as being his double, in name and figure. Every other worker doesn’t notice the complete copying of him. That evening Golyadkin and the double, who appears meek and embarrassed, have a long and heartfelt chat over tea – though only Golyadkin senior appears to actually speak at length – and then they go to bed, having sworn eternal brotherhood. But by the next day things are going terribly wrong for the kind-hearted Golyadkin. At work he finds the double is finding all sorts of official favour, and all of his old colleagues are turning against him. And what is worst of all, the double himself scarcely acknowledges the kindness that Golyadkin had rendered him the night before. Isolated, Golyadkin leaves in shame.

Next begins a flurry of letter writing, miscommunications – Golyadkin struggles to say anything in plain language and has various annoying verbal tics – and brief but painful meetings with the double. Nightmares keep Golyadkin from sleeping, but the next day he “discovers” in his pocket a letter from Klara, where she claims that only he can save her from her family, and that he must meet her outside her house at around 2am that day. Buoyant, Golyadkin has another meeting with his double, then eventually winds up outside Klara’s house, where a grand ball is ongoing. Though he tries again to hide, he is discovered, and his double comes and asks him to come inside. There he meets the doctor again, and is whisked away into the night, heading for an asylum.

Dostoevsky’s Touch – Sympathy in The Double

What Gogol manages in forty or so pages Dostoevsky needs almost two hundred in The Double for, and the reason for this, charitably speaking, is that Dostoevsky cares about Golyadkin, and wishes we did too. That is to say, the extra pages are all designed to make him deserve our sympathy, and have absolutely nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s uncontrollable verbiage… In considering Golyadkin as sympathetically portrayed, it’s best to compare him with Gogol’s best known Petersburg hero, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin of “The Overcoat”. In that story, there is a moment where poor Akaky Akakievich is being teased by his coworkers, only for one of them to have a sudden epiphany, in which they recognise for the first time that Akaky Akakievich is their “brother”. But this is just one moment, and for the rest of the story Akaky Akakievich is more the butt of a joke than sympathetic.

Dostoevsky takes us much more into poor Golyadkin’s head. We may not learn about his family, but we learn about the state of his soul. We are taken around endless laps of his repetitive thinking, eavesdrop on conversations he hopes will happen but never do, and hear again and again his various tics, notably the Russian “deskat’”, which means “well,” or “I guess” or nothing really whatsoever. By taking us into his head, we also get a better sense of the challenges he faces in life. When Akaky Akakievich has melon rinds thrown at him we can’t help but laugh, but in The Double we are too close to Golyadkin to idly watch as he suffers. His anxiety becomes, strangely, ours, just as his enemies become our own. And when his madness takes over we feel we’re mad too.

A painting of Nikolai Gogol — Nikolai Gogol, whose influence is found throughout *The Double*. His Petersburg Tales are in my view much more fun to read than Dostoevsky’s novel, but that’s not to say *The Double doesn’t have things going for it. Dostoevsky’s sympathy for Golyadkin is one such thing. Gogol didn’t care as much.*

Gogol’s Influence – Varieties of Madness

The Double is marked by strangeness right from the very first page, where Golyadkin’s room seems oddly filled with red and green objects. I read green as indicating envy here – for not only does it mark valuable objects, it notably is the colour of the briefcase belonging to Golyadkin’s superior which the double carries around important documents in. Golyadkin’s envy, perhaps, turns the case green. The Double also enjoys focusing on time. Golyadkin is always asking what time it is, but much as with Gogol’s Madman in the story of the same name his grasp of time soon collapses. Once he has received his letter from Klara and is standing outside in the snow, waiting for her, he has a moment of crisis:

“And what was more, maybe it was the case that the letter was written yesterday, and that it just didn’t reach me on time, and it didn’t reach me precisely because Petrushka – and what a rogue he is! – got into a mix. Or perhaps it was written tomorrow, which is to say, that I… that tomorrow I will need to have done everything, that is to say I should be waiting with the carriage then…”

The letter, of course, is also imagined, for it disappears from Golyadkin’s pockets as soon as he’s read it, much as with the “letters” exchanged between the dogs of “Notes of a Madman”. We also have Gogol to thank for the linguistic madness of Golyadkin – the way, that is, that he just keeps talking and talking, yet can never seem to convey anything akin to sense to those who are listening. I suppose it is similar to one whose brain is being destroyed by dementia or cancer and can no longer realise that what they are saying has no meaning.

And somewhere within this all there is a religious madness too. Dostoevsky takes from Gogol a number of small untranslatable signs indicating the presence of the devil through the whole text – for example, in both the Russian word for “black” (chyorniy) and for “four” (“chetyre”) there are most of the letters for the Russian word “Chyort”, meaning a devil. Meanwhile, Golyadkin sees himself a heroic figure, a saviour (like Christ) in contrast to the evil double, who he calls “Judas” and “treacherous” several times. And this ties in with the theme of sympathy too, for we alone pity Golyadkin in his delusion while the rest of society casts him out as a lunatic. Unfortunately for Golyadkin, his own truth and view of things is not one he, linguistically, is capable of sharing, and as language fails him ever more, his delusions only get worse and worse.

Modernity in The Double

But the thing that I’ve found most interesting, reading through The Double this time round, is the way that it predicts a lot of the tensions and difficulties faced by the average office worker (and, I should add, the average student) in this day and age. I do not mean that Golyadkin has to deal with the printer not working so much as the challenges of a hostile bureaucracy, inexplicable social codes and endless humiliating grovelling before his superiors, and so on. His anxiety is in a large part the anxiety of one suffering from imposter syndrome – he’s frightened that people are watching him – and, indeed, one of the things that the double does to further unhinge him is tell Golyadkin that his paperwork is covered with stains (and thus embarrassing). The double himself appears to embody Golyadkin’s fears of his own inadequacy – he is popular, talkative, and successful.

But he is also young. In the narrative he is often referred to as Golyadkin-the-younger, and the way he completely replaces – including in the minds of his former friends – Golyadkin-the-elder I think expresses a frightening (for some) truth of the modern workplace – that loyalty and time count for less than they once used to, and that now all that matters is being talented at sucking-up and appearing to be organised. What Golyadkin-the-elder witnesses is a collapse of his worldview, as the simple values of working hard by which he had lived are proved inadequate for reaching his goal – Klara and positive attention from his superiors. Reality as he had understood it thus collapses, and with it Golyadkin’s sanity does too.

In connection with this I also can’t help but find that Golyadkin’s attachment to his work, as is the case with Gogol’s protagonists, is a major reason for the ease of his collapse. We find a man with “no life”, someone without real friends, who sees love as a miraculous escape, fall into madness the moment he is rejected by that love and his accompanying delusions about the value of his labours shatter. I suppose Golyadkin and these other characters serve as warnings to those of us who invest too much of ourselves into one thing, because the moment those hopes and dreams fail, our entire identity can too. So there’s certainly room for a Marxist critique around here.

A copy of my Russian version of the Double — My Russian copy of *The Double*. I wanted to enjoy this book as much as I’d enjoyed Gogol’s stories in the original. But, man, Dostoevsky’s style just doesn’t make for fun reading.

Conclusion – Problems and “Problems” in The Double

Some problems within a work can make it interesting for the critics who come afterwards, keen to carve out an interpretation of their own using its ambiguities; other problems make the work unenjoyable and leave people unwilling to pick it up again once they’ve finished. The Double has plenty of the former type, but a disappointing number of the latter sort too. It is far too long, for one thing – Gogol could pack into stories of thirty or forty pages what Dostoevsky has managed here in nearly two hundred. And then there is the language… I’ve read this in English, I’ve read this in Russian, and at neither time have I enjoyed it. Repetitions, confusions, illogic – madness does not make for fun reading.

I can forgive Dostoevsky’s style when it is conveying passionate belief, whether Ivan Karamazov’s or Ippolit’s or Raskolnikov’s – there, it seems to represent a kind of unrestrained self-belief worth admiring. But here Golyadkin is pitiable only. It’s hard to enjoy the way the text makes us aware of that. Still, there’s lots of cool stuff going on, which at the very least mean it shouldn’t be too painful to write an essay on The Double. My feeling now that I’ve been through the whole of the so-called Petersburg Tales is that one of the most interesting things uniting them is their early hostility to industrialisation and bureaucratization in Russia. All of these protagonists, working dead-end jobs under abstruse rules and regulations, eerily prophecy the challenges many of us face in the modern workplace and university. It’s hard not to feel there’s a bit of Golyadkin in all of us.

Literature in the Face of Death and Mourning

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

Medicine

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

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

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

Wonder

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

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

Dreams and Levin’s Brother

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

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

Conclusion: Narratives against Death

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

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

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

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

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

Nevsky Prospekt

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

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

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

Piskarev’s story – the first of the beautiful women

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

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

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

In search of the dream girl

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

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

Pirogov’s Story – yet another beauty

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

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

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

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

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

Nevsky Prospekt – Conclusion

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

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

Notes of a Madman

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

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

Dog Days

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

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

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

Madness à la Quixote

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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