First Literary Attempts :Poetry: "Ode to Italy","Hanz Kuekhelgarten"

Chapter one from Gogol's Art : A Search for Identity by Laszlo Tikos

Copyright © 1996 Laszlo Tikos

Gogol's Art was published in paperback in 1997 by Bati Publishers, PO Box 263, Leverett, MA 01054. (Price $15). You can reach the author at that address or by email at Tikos@slavic.umass.edu.

Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this text for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved.

The book CD "Gogol and Russian Literature" is built around Gogol's Art: a Search for Identity by Laszlo Tikos, the best book ever written about Russia's most enigmatic and intriguing author. Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) created a new direction in Russian letters, which was further developed in the 19th century by writers like Dostoyevsky and Rozanov, and in the 20th century by Bely, Bulgakov and Sinyavsky. In addition to Gogol's Art, this CD includes the full text of Dead Souls, Tara Bulba, The Inspector General, and St. John's Eve by Gogol, plus great books by Dostoeyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Andreyev, Gorky, Kuprin, and Lermontov, plus works on Russian history, plus two "Country Studies" -- Russia and Belarus (birthplace of Gogol) -- which were originally published as printed books by the Library of Congress between 1987 and 1995. For details, see our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/russian.html

Chapter One --

 First Literary Attempts :Poetry: "Ode to Italy","Hanz Kuekhelgarten"The "creation " of Nikolay Gogol 1 as a writer did not start with his first published works. Already in secondary school Gogol tried his hand at writing, especially poetry. The subject was taught in school, both as part of the standard curriculum on Literature and in essay writing. Judging by the extant texts, Gogol's was not an exceptional poetic talent, even though some of his attempts indicate a certain technical aptitude, a fairly well-developed poetic insight and a generally happy choice of words (even if traces of oddity and awkwardness can be detected throughout),and a certain talent for adapting traditional forms of diction, form and content to his own purposes.

In judging Gogol's early attempts, consideration should also be given to family tradition. His father, Vasiliy Afanasyevic Gogol, was known in local circles as a poet of some standing and as an accomplished playwright. We know of the Gogol family's' fascination with the theatrical events organized at the neighboring Troscinsky estate where Vasily Gogol frequently participated as both playwright and actor. 2 This family tradition was, of course, another source of Nikolai Gogol's interest in literature in general and in the theater in particular, and was carried over into Gogol's school years: Gogol himself participated with great gusto in school theatricals, and in some instances, he was recognized as having an unusual comic talent. 3

In school, Gogol was, if not necessarily an eager, at least, an interested reader of the poetry of standard fare. We also know that young Gogol spent the extravagant sum of 40 rubles for the collected works of the German Romantic poet Schiller. Whether he actually read Schiller and how far he got with his reading is a matter of guesswork.

A further consideration in the history of his intellectual development is also the literature and poetry with which Gogol may have been acquainted. In the general curriculum of the school, 18th Century poetry seems to have been a most important concern. Kantemir, Derzhavin, and Zhukovski were the staple reading, while contemporary writers were kept on a short list. Pushkin, particularly, was thought to be a dangerous influence, because of his "scandalous" thinking, his "pornographic", revolutionary and other kinds of subversive poetry, as well as for his personal life style that must have contributed to his exile from St. Petersburg during Gogol's school years. But forbidden fruit is always the most desired, and as contemporary sources tell us, Pushkin was the idol of the young pupils interested in poetry. Pushkin's poems circulating either in handwritten form (the "samizdat " of the time), or in periodicals not necessarily recommended as school reading by the school authorities, were the source of information while submitting Pushkin's poems as their own exercises in creative writing was one of the favorite pranks recorded.

Further, Gogol was not Russian by birth. He was Ukrainian, a "little Russian", as they were called by the Russians' proper, and Ukrainian was his native tongue. Even though Ukrainian and Russian are closely related languages, just as Dutch and English still are, Russian was not Gogol's native tongue 4 but an acquired language. This fact is frequently overlooked in critical works dealing with Gogol, though it may account for some strange choices of vocabulary, especially in the poetry of his youth, and perhaps also some awkwardness of expression.

It goes without saying that the poetical attempts of young man in his mid and late teens are frequently derivative, especially if inspiration does not come directly from personal experience. Love lyrics are completely missing from Gogol's early poetry, thus giving rise to conjectures as to Gogol's lack of interest in sex as a youth as well as to speculations about homosexuality.

Whatever the case, the poetry that we have available indicates that Gogol's interest was not in love but in imitating the great poetical achievements of the past which deal with lofty topics, with classical subjects in an appropriately elevated style.

A long "Ode to Italy" 5 his first published work, March, 1892, provides a typical example of an infatuation with a classical subject in its five eight-line stanzas, its rhyme pattern of a,b,a,b,a,b,b,b written in five-foot iambic lines. Gogol extols an Italy which is both a paradise in the present and the birthplace of Western civilization in the past. It is the place to which the young poet's soul is drawn:
Italy, the beautiful country
my soul is longing and pining for her. 6 A description of the beauty of Italy follows in conventional images and in the final stanza Gogol (or rather, his poetic alter ego) delivers a confession which foreshadows an escapist tendency which was to surface in later work: his desire to get away to this wonderful country, where:
Rafael and Torquato are still alive [there]
Will I ever see you [Italy]
I am full of expectations
My soul is in radiance and my mind resounds.
I am drawn to you and I am burnt by your spirit
I am in heaven, full of sounds and trembling! 7 The poem is very likely an imitation -- perhaps of Goethe's Italian poems -- and as such is not remarkable, but the biographical implications are uncanny. Italy is the land to which some sixteen years later Gogol was to depart, leaving Russia in disappointment. In Italy, in Rome particularly, he was to find a spiritual homeland, "his own place" (svoe mesto ) for more than a decade. According to contemporaries who knew him in Rome, Gogol developed a real and profound love for that city, for antiquity, for Italy in general, and he became a proud guide and escort to visiting Russian friends.

The declamatory style -- the poet addressing a country and talking to it as if on equal terms -- remains characteristic of Gogol, and foreshadows the famous' "Troika" passage from the end of the first volume of Dead Souls .

Two artists,Torquato Tasso and Rafael are also significant as points of reference. Though we do not know how much Gogol knew about them, the very fact that one of them was a painter and the other an epic poet exerted an uncanny, fated significance for Gogol's life. Painting both as appreciation and actual practice remained a secret passion during his entire life, and many of his references to painting (as in "The Portrait ") offer an important internal guideline to understanding Gogol's mind. Tasso's work, on the other hand, would ultimately serve as one of the great examples of how to write an epic poem when Gogol came to face the artistic problem of formulating his Dead Souls.

"The Ode to Italy" is not merely derivative, it also contains a number of awkward turns of vocabulary and metaphor. It also shows Gogol's ability to sustain a lyrical presentation over four stanzas (32 lines) and bring the poem to a pointed conclusion: a confessional de«nouement which justifies the ultimate rationale of its lyrical nature and geographical descriptions, echoing the poet's desire to identify with the beloved object.

Thus we can say that Gogol's first published effort remains undistinguished as poetry but is important as the subconscious recognition or revelation to the poet himself of his "own place" and thus, "one's own fate".

The same could also be said of the long narrative poem "Hanz Kuekhelgarten". 8 The story is an idyll of young Romantic love between Hanz Kuekhelgarten, a young man in his late teens in Wissmar, an imaginary German town, and the young Luiza who lives next door. They grow up together and in due time, their friendship turns into romantic love. Their parents and neighbors approve of this tender relationship and expect that they will marry one day and live happily ever after. This future happiness is interrupted, however, by an unexpected event: a strange "disease" causes Hanz to become more and more moody and depressed, and the reader realizes that he is suffering from the fashionable ailment of the day known as "Weltschmerz " to German Romantics, as "spleen" in Byron's English and as "toska " in Russian Romanticism. The first symptom of this "disease" is his turning away from his beloved Luiza to the dead letter of books, especially books on History:
 


As an illustration of those "ancient times", Gogol presents his "Ode to the Ancient World", namely Greek and Latin antiquity. The meter changes from four-foot iambic lines in the basic narration to six-foot iambic meters, and show off Gogol's entire repertoire of Classical references, probably acquired in school:
 


As the poem progresses, the "Ode to Athens" is supplemented by another, an Ode to that other ancient civilization, Israel. Both of these Odes, presented as Hanz's daydreams, have the strength to tear him away from the idyllic happiness and domestic coziness of his relations with his beloved Luiza. His departure takes place in secret: he sneaks away from the happy village of Lunensdorf and is appropriately delayed by his own foreboding as to the fated nature of his impending journey. These events are delivered in eight Songs (in six-line, four-foot iambic stanzas). Here, for instance is "Song I":
 


Appropriately, the last stanza of the eight songs is devoted to a farewell to Luiza and the promise of a speedy return. "How could Hanz forget you?" he proclaims.

Gogol shows considerable skill in the following cantos by delaying the climax of the action -- there are echoes here of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, of Tatyana's dream and the nightmare before Onegin turns up at Olga's name-day party. So, for example, after Hanz's mysterious departure, Luiza's family tries to figure out what happened to Hanz, and, in a parallel to Pushkin's Tatyana, Luiza visits Hanz's empty room to search for clues to his departure. She finds all the books that Hanz has been reading, just as Tatyana finds the books after his departure in Onegin's study. Luiza finds Plato, Schiller (described as "capricious ") Petrarch, Tieck, Aristophanes and the "forgotten" Winckelmann. 12

Luiza has three nightmarish visions before we see Hanz arriving at Athens, his desired goal (Canto XIII). But instead of the expected elation, both Hanz and the reader are gravely disappointed:
 

This line is twice repeated in the Canto, underlining the leitmotif of the experience. Hanz finds the long row of lifeless ruins meaningless. Gogol in his own voice will two decades later have nothing to say about his visit to Palestine, the intensely desired Holy Land:
  The traveler has discovered the difference between dream and reality -- in the basic insight of the Romantics -- and finds that things can be adored only from a "beautifying distance". He turns around and after two years finds his way home to Lunensdorf, only to face the realization that time has not stood still there, either. The pastor, an old friend of the family, has died and Hanz's visit to his grave presents the author with an opportunity to produce some "graveyard" poetry which reflects upon the vanity of earthly existence.

Luiza, on the other hand, has done nothing but dutifully and mournfully await the return of her beloved. Hanz has to admit his mistake, but he justifies his wandering -- his "Wanderlust" ,in true Romantic style, claiming that his journey has served a higher aim, and achieved unspecified "greater glory". (The same staple Romantic concept is formulated in Griboedov's play: Woe comes from Wit ) 15

Hanz's remorse is followed by a "Duma" or, to use a free translation, a "Philosophical Thought", another form of the Ode, on the happiness of those who have found their "own place":
 

This "highest goal" of existence is finding "one's own place", one's vocation, one's occupation:
  After his presentation of the eternal quest for "one's own place", Hanz moves on and wraps up the loose ends of the story, and Luiza's faithfulness is rewarded by the return of her remorseful lover:
  The family and neighbors throw a party and prepare what is understood to be Hanz's and Luiza's wedding, or at least their celebration of eternal love.

Now Hanz says good-bye forever to his " Wanderlust ":
 

But then a strange thing happens: having renounced his search as an illusion for the greater happiness of love and family, the returned wanderer is suddenly saddened. A long and somewhat confused simile follows, in which Gogol describes Hanz's sadness for his lost friends in school:
  Thus, the unexpected ending of the idyll is not that they lived happily ever after, but rather a new round of sadness, an "ennui" which is compared unfavorably to losing one's school friends. Some of Gogol's later works, for example, some of the short stories from the Dikanka cycle, reflect the same baffling ending.( "The Fair at Sorochints "ends with a wedding, but with an unanticipated feeling of evil foreboding.)

The Epilogue of the " Ode to Italy" presents another non sequitur as an apotheosis of Germany, foreshadowing the apotheosis of Russia at the end of Dead Souls in Vol. I -- in both cases, geographical identification symbolizes the poet's spiritual homeland of the Holy Grail, the never-attainable " svoe mesto ".

"One's own place" -- and nothing else. This non-sequitur becomes an important artistic device in Gogol's works, beginning with Hanz's adoration of Germany and followed by a similar adoration of the Ukraine, by Popryscin's desire to move to his "beloved" Spain, and last, but not least, to Gogol's pathetic writings on Russia and the Russian troika at the end of the first volume of Dead Souls.

Thus the youthful but ambitious Gogol ends his poetic exercise with an apotheosis to Germany, the "spiritual homeland", and, in a sudden twist, informs us that Germany is important because the great poet Goethe lived there and Goethe's spirit is evoked as the guiding spirit in the creation of this poem.

Footnotes for Chapter One.

1. D.Fanger: op. cit.pp.3-23. Chapter I.:The Gogol Problem: Perspectives from Absence

2. L. Kent: The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Vol. 1-2.. See also : V.V. Veresayev: Gogol' v Zhizni, Ardis. (Reprint). 1983

3. Milton Ehre, ed.: The Theater of Nikolay Gogol, Introduction.p. X . The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

4. V.V. Veresayev: Gogol' v Zhizni, Ardis. (Reprint). 1983 p.58 passim.

5. N.V. Gogol': Sochineniya (izd. 14-oye, St. Ptbg. 1898). t. 1. str. 49.

6. ibid.p.49.
Italiya - roskoshnaya strana
Po ney dusha i stonet i toskuet

7. ibid.p.49.
yeshchye zhivut Rafael' i Torkvat
uzryu l' tebya ya, i polnyy ozhidaniy
Dusha v puchakh i dumy govoryat
Menya vletchet i zhzhet tvoye dykhaniye
Ya v nebesakh ves' zvuk i trepetaniye...

8. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (A.N. SSSR. 937-52) t. 1. str. 61-99. The English translations are mine. L.T. A complete English translation is available with notes and critical commentaries in Nikolai Gogol :Hanz Kuechelgarten, Leaving the Theater& Other Works, ed. Ronald Meyer, Ardis, Ann Arbor. 1990

9. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (A.N. SSSR. 1937-52) t. 1. str. 68.
On lyubit bukvy v ney nemyye
Glagolyat v nikh veka sedyye
I slovo divnoye gremit

10. ibid.p.69.
Zemlya klassicheskikh, prekrasnykh sozidaniy
I slavnykh del, i vol'nosti zemlya
Afiny, k vam, v zharu chudesnykh trepetaniy
Dushoy prikovyvayus' ya.

11. ibid.p.78.

12. svoenravny. Petrarca, Francesco ( 1304-74), Italian poet; Ludwig Tieck ( 1773-1853), German Romantic poet, critic, translator; Aristophanes ( 444-380 ), Greek drama writer; Jochann-Joachim Winkelmann ( 1717-1768 ); German art critic, historian.

13. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (A.N. SSSR. 1937-52) t. 1. str. 89.
Pechal'ny drevnosti Afiny

14. ibid.p.89.
Nevyrazymaya Pechal'
Mgnovenno putnika ob'yemlet
...........
Yemu i goryestno i zhal'
Zachem on put' syuda napravil.

15. A.S. Griboyedov: Gorye ot uma. (Goslitizdat) M-L. 1961, str. 49. Okhota stranstvovat' napala na nego (The lust for peregrination has seized him )

16. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (A.N. SSSR. 1937-52) t. 1 str. 95.
Blagosloven tot divnyy mig,
Kogda v poru samopoznan'ya,
B porye moguchikh sil svoikh
Tot, nebom izbrannyy, postig
Tsel' vysshuyu sushchestvovaniya

17. ibid. p. 95
No mysl' i krepka, i bodgra
Yego trudam velikim uchit
Dya nikh on zhizni ne shchadit

18. ibid. p.99.
I spal stradaniy tyazh son
s yego dushi zhivoy i spokoynoy,
Pererodilcya snova on.

19. ibid. p.99.
I vas, kovarnyye mechty,
Blagotvorit uzh on ne stanet
zemnoy poklonnik krasoty.

20. ibid. p.99.
I razmyshyayet on i stonet
I s nerazryvnoyu toskoy
Slezu nevol'nuyu uronit.

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Epilogue, Bibliography

The book CD "Gogol and Russian Literature" is built around Gogol's Art: a Search for Identity by Laszlo Tikos, the best book ever written about Russia's most enigmatic and intriguing author. Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) created a new direction in Russian letters, which was further developed in the 19th century by writers like Dostoyevsky and Rozanov, and in the 20th century by Bely, Bulgakov and Sinyavsky. In addition to Gogol's Art, this CD includes the full text of Dead Souls, Tara Bulba, The Inspector General, and St. John's Eve by Gogol, plus great books by Dostoeyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Andreyev, Gorky, Kuprin, and Lermontov, plus works on Russian history, plus two "Country Studies" -- Russia and Belarus (birthplace of Gogol) -- which were originally published as printed books by the Library of Congress between 1987 and 1995. For details, see our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/russian.html

What do Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Gogol, Machiavelli, Tasso, Luther, Ibsen, and Goethe have in common? They are all on the same World Literature CD with over 600 books, in plain text, with software that lets you listen as well as read.

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