The Arabesques : A Search for a New Beginning

Chapter five from Gogol's Art : A Search for Identity by 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.

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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 Five --

The Arabesques : A Search for a New Beginning

Looking, nevertheless, at the Arabesques, the unbiased reader will find that Gogol is the same man here as in his fiction: there is no difference in the ideas of the writer of the generally recognized fictional works and of Gogol the theoretician.

Like his previous collections, the Arabesques are organized into two parts.This apparently unimportant fact becomes an organizational principle in Gogol's works which is to mark his later Dead Souls. In each there are nine sections: in Volume One these are preceded by a Foreword which is followed by seven essays and two stories, "The Portrait" and the fragment, "A Chapter from an Historical Novel"; Volume Two includes six essays and three fictions, "The Nevsky Prospect ", a fragment from "An historical novel ", "The Prisoner ", and finally, "Notes of a Madman " . As any reader of Gogol realizes even on first glance, three fictional pieces ("The Portrait", "The Nevsky Prospect" and "Notes of a Madman" ) deserve their fame. The remaining essays have been swallowed up by oblivion.

A discussion of Gogol's complete works must necessarily deal with both the fictional and the non-fictional pieces in the Arabesques, and it is especially useful to take a fresh look at the non-fiction in order to gain a better understanding of some of Gogol's later enigmatic pronouncements.

In the Introduction, Gogol explains that he wrote the pieces at different times, without any particular publication in mind, and that "They were suggested by my soul, and I chose as their subject-matter only those things which had strongly interested me." ³ Just as in the introductory notes to "Hanz Kuekhelgarten ", Gogol is apologetic; he pretends to have published this volume with the educational purpose of enlightening "young readers" this, coming from a man himself only 25 to 26 years old! On the other hand, he hopes to offer "two, three untold truths" which will justify their publication. Finally, the Introduction closes with yet another excuse: Gogol realizes the unevenness of the writing, but he has had no time to make improvements or corrections, and therefore asks the reader's indulgence. Here we see the familiar technique of playing hide-and-seek: a mixture of half-truths, pretensions and an expectation that the perfection of the two or three untold truths will overshadow and excuse the imperfections of the rest of the volume.

The first essay, dealing with a general consideration of the meaning, aesthetic merits and historical place of different art forms, advances the idea that sculpture, painting and music exist, not side by side, but in historical sequence. In the same exalted, overblown language of Romanticism of such uncollected early writings as "The Woman ", Gogol promotes the idea that historically, sculpture was the first art form to have been developed by mankind, especially by the Greeks. Greek sculptures have created not only an ideal of beauty, but also a world in which ".the entire religion consisted of beauty, the beauty of the human form in the god-like beauty of woman."⁴ Sculpture and the Pagan world were born together, and they have died together. Christian culture could not domesticate this art form: "It was in vain, he says "that one tried to express through sculpture the high ideals of Christianity: it removed itself from the world in the same way as did pagan religion."⁵

Therefore, according to Gogol, Christianity created a new art form for itself in painting. A distinguishing characteristic of painting is that the onlooker is overcome with a "feeling of enjoyment not of this world."⁶ Further, painting is not "the achievement of some nation or other -- No! you, painting, are something higher: You express all that is contained in the mysterious, elevated spirit of Christianity."⁷ In further comparisons between sculpture and painting, Gogol proclaims that sculpture expresses the pagan world's feeling of self-reliance which leads to enjoyment of the part of the onlooker, while painting opens the way to suffering: "Suffering is expressed with greater force and it leads to compassion and all it brings about is pity and not enjoyment."

Music has an even greater spiritual content: it produces neither enjoyment nor compassion, but such a high degree of understanding of suffering that the listener himself becomes a part of the suffering. In so doing, it tears Man away from the earth and transports him to a different world. Thus the three sisters "are different chronologically and also in their effect upon Man." Sculpture, sensuous, captivating, leads to enjoyment; painting creates a quiet excitement and lifts the soul into a dream-like state; while music is pure passion and agitation of the soul. And Gogol exclaims, "Music is ours! Music belongs to our world!" "When all art has disappeared, music will yet remain ! " and Gogol prays, "O music! Be our guardian angel and our Savior! Do not leave us!"

Next, he formulates an ars poetica, familiar to us from his earlier writings, which will remain a permanent feature of his later works, his vision of the utilitarian importance of art. Art has the function of improving Man. Under the impact of art, especially of music, the thief will be tormented by his conscience, the speculator will be reminded of the shame of his greed, and the ordinary man will be made aware of his divine origin. Some of these ideas will figure in the Selected Passages as well.

Last, Gogol speaks of architecture, which he considers also to be of divine origin, since Man transforms lifeless material in the same way that God created the universe. But the most elevated art form for the 19th Century remains music, which is God's self-revelation to Man. Yet Gogol ends on a questioning, somewhat pessimistic note: "But what if music were also to leave us, what will then happen to world?"⁸

Gogol's theories on art are remarkable for his time: the thesis that different historical ages have created different art forms may be open to question, but nonetheless it has an internal logic. The presentation of the Three Ages of Mankind as corresponding to three different forms of art is interesting as a Romantic idea. But following this logic, Gogol still remains unclear as to the fate of the Christian age. If the pagan age developed sculpture, and with its disappearance sculpture also disappeared, then the fact that painting developed with the rise of the Christian world and has now disappeared seems to imply that Christianity as a religion, like the pagan religions before it, has also reached its end. And does music have to do with a new paganism or with the birth of a post-Christian ideology? Must music also abandon Man as an expression of another change in world history? These speculations are raised, implicitly, but remain unanswered in Gogol's essay. But as later works indicate, Gogol seriously questioned the validity of the Christian underpinnings of the existing world. His theorizing led him both to despair and to a search for a new religious foundation, and also to his "spiritual crisis".⁹

Surprisingly, literature is not mentioned in this survey of the different art forms in mankind's history. Was Gogol merely forgetful, or was he having doubts as to the validity of writing as an art? We do not know. But the fact that literature is not mentioned at all may indicate that Gogol was not yet completely committed to his chosen path, that his "own place " was not yet clearly established.

Another essay from the Arabesques following immediately on "Sculpture, Painting and Music " introduces Gogol not as a writer of fiction or a critic, but as an historian. For a single semester, he had in 1834-35 tried his hand at teaching Medieval history at the University of St. Petersburg, a position to which he had been appointed through Pletnyov's friendly intercession. The inaugural lecture is an essay "On the Middle Ages ", delivered in the presence of friends and admirers, Pushkin and Zhukovsky among them. The lecture was a moderate success. His audience found it a somewhat strange performance for an academic: it was long on nebulous Romantic ideas about history, but short on facts, and indeed, Gogol was not able to sustain the interest of his listeners -- nor even his own, during the balance of the semester, and after a year of painful pretensions, he left the University without regret. His reasons for leaving are best summed up by Gogol himself: "The University and I spat at each other and I am again a free Cossack."¹⁰The lecture is nevertheless interesting for our purpose, since if formulates some of his pet theories of history. The central thesis that the Middle Ages represent a Golden Age is familiar from our readings of the "historical" tales of medieval Ukraine. Now he expands the same view for his audience. He considers the Middle Ages as having replaced the classical world with a new era, followed by still another age whose art is less admirable than the tremendous values engendered by the Middle Ages. Alas, the golden Age has been supplanted by the cheerless Iron Age -- as we saw in the Mirgorod.

The organization of the lecture is logical and consistent, by no means rambling or without structure. First he states his central thesis: "In the Middle Ages the great transformation of the world took place: they are the connecting link between the old world and the new one; in the history of mankind they can occupy the same place as the heart occupies in the human body, from where all veins are distributed, and to which all blood returns." ¹¹ Dealing with the various characteristic features of the age, Gogol spends considerable time on the history of the Papacy, which he considers as the unifying force of the Christian world. (This preoccupation with the Papacy will gain in importance in his later fiction, especially in "The Overcoat", as we shall see.) He even maintains that "the history of the Papacy is the history of the Middle Ages." ¹² It was the centralized force of Papal power which allowed for the growth of a united Christian Europe without which the individual states would probably have been overrun by their eastern enemies, especially the Moslems. Gogol's ideas about the Moslem world are worth mentioning, as they will resurface, especially in the "Diary of a Madman ". Later in the lecture, he speaks of the Crusades as reflecting the age of youthful enthusiasm and the burgeoning new faith. Just as a young man rushes into adventure and hardship for the sake of an idea, so youthful Christianity rushed into the excitement of the Crusades.

After discussing these general tendencies in the development of the Middle Ages, Gogol takes a look at individual factors in such different geographical areas as Asia, Scandinavia and Venice. This section is perhaps the least interesting and least "scientific", indicating the shaky ground and shallowness of Gogol's information. Nevertheless, he makes some interesting points which indicate his understanding of the vast differences between Europe and Russia. He dwells extensively on the idea of chivalry. Taras Bul'ba will have suggested a Ukrainian perception of the subject, but there is an equivalent Russian concept. He also considers the position of women in the chivalric world. "The Woman of the Middle Ages," he pronounces, "is a godlike creature..." for he deduces the refinement of European culture from this guiding principle of chivalry: "The entire nobility of the European character is the result of chivalry" ¹³ he insists. As to the Inquisition, he does not condone it, but considers it a dreadful aberration, though he assures his audience that the resistance of the soul is stronger than the fear of physical suffering: "It has proven the great truth that even if the physical nature of man can be broken by tortures and may bring about the silencing of the voice of his soul, still in general in the majority of mankind the soul is always victorious over the body." ¹⁴ Finally, he turns his attention to the waning of the Middle Ages, a product of the declining power of the Papacy, the discovery of America, the technical revolution of book-publishing and the discovery of a new military technology in the manufacture of canons and of gun-powder which undermined the fabric of the Middle Ages despite its cultural and spiritual achievements.

Another article dealing with history, "About the Teaching of World History " is a curious expose´ , a course syllabus and a working hypothesis for Gogol the Professor of History. In ten well-organized chapters, he presents a plan for a course in World History, for its methodology and for the results that should be expected. Even though many of the ideas are commonplace or naive, since he was a novice in a field where he did not feel very secure, still they are his own. In many cases, Gogol the writer of fiction whom we know, comes through or, conversely, develops certain stylistic mannerisms, here devoted to ideology, which translate into his fiction.

In searching to define the subject matter appropriate to such a course in world history, Gogol proposes that it be no less than the development of mankind, completely different from a mere historical and geographical catalog. The aim of the historian must be "to create one glorious and complete poem.ÊIn other words, he claims that there has never been a difference between artistic and historical depiction of reality. The logical result of an historian's investigation is inevitably a poem.

From here it follows that the delivery has to be entertaining so that the reader or the listener cannot tear himself away. But to achieve this end, the historian has to dig through mountains of "boring books and documents". In so doing, he is performing a useful task , sparing his readers and listeners the boredom of such investigations. This "useful" pragmatism recurs repeatedly in Gogol's work and is the source of later disagreements with his fellow-countrymen. Do his claims result from naivete´,or from the bad conscience of a pretender, a fictionalizer, or both ? The answer does not come easily and certainly divides students of his work into different camps.

Next, Gogol turns to another pet idea: an historian should know geography. Even though most people would not quarrel with the argument, Gogol's reasoning is startling. He proposes that geography affects a people's history, and even their form of government: "...it( geography ) - affected the mores, customs, political leadership and the laws. Here they [the listeners] should also see how governments are formed, that they are not formed by people at all, but in an unobtrusive way the very situation of the geography of earth sets them up and develops them, for which reason these forms are holy and changing them would inadvertently bring about the unhappiness of the people." ¹⁵ The logic is as strange as the conservatism of the idea.

Further on, Gogol insists that the professor of history should focus upon "great events",since they are "the lighthouses of general histor " whose entire structure they support as "the skeleton supports an animal's body." He then spends a chapter on the personal methodology of a successful professor, reiterating that lectures should be interesting. ¹⁶ This formulation not only is indicative of Gogol's thinking at the time of his professional activity, but is one that will return -- as a parody, for instance, in " The Inspector General " wherein the professor of history will be mocked as a fiery, irrational monkey who leaps about during his lectures, breaking chairs, and for whom the much-quoted sentence about Alexander the Great, " who was of course great but why should one break the chairs to prove it ? " became something of a proverb. ¹⁷

He is also mortally afraid of digressions, since if the professor loses the interest of his audience, terrible consequences may follow: "What, then...if the young, developing mind of his audience begins to understand more than he does, and they learn to despise him?...loyalty to Religion, attachment to the Fatherland and to the Sovereign become for them meaningless concepts." ¹⁸ One does not know what is more surprising, the nonsequiturs of a logical salto mortale, as it were, or the statement's extraordinary conservativism. If on the other hand, the professor follows his suggestions, Gogol assures him that he will be able to turn the enthusiasm of his listeners in a positive pedagogical direction: he will teach them all that is "sublime and beautiful" ,in key words from the aesthetic tenets of romanticism. Gogol's recommendation is that every lecture should have a complete unity and should remain in the memory of the listeners as "a well turned poem" .

Finally, after these methodological considerations, Gogol embarks on his outline of world history. This begins with the East, where patriarchal habits dominated society; moves over to ancient Greece, with an emphasis especially on the time of Alexander the Great and the development of an ancient civilization in Alexandria; and on to the Roman Empire and the expansion of its borders all the way to England -- as Gogol visualizes, "Roman eagles on the rocks of Albion." In so doing, he achieves a fairly good survey of the main trends and events of ancient history. Sometimes he arrives at original formulations, for example, when he notes that the Roman Empire swallowed up so many peoples and nations that finally ... "everybody was a Roman, but there were few true Romans." Moving to the Middle Ages, Gogol pays particular attention to the development of Papal power and the way the religious institution turned into a political one. He describes how it fought against the Moslems, among them the Algerian pirates. These ideas will be important in Gogol's later fiction, especially in "Diary of a Madman " and in "The Overcoat". The interconnection between Christianity and statehood is another issue to which he turns considerable attention as he presents generally familiar out-line of the history of medieval Europe. The discovery of America is also treated as vital, changing and reducing, as it did, the significance of many European-centered events, especially the role of the Mediterranean states. He reviews the onset of the Reformation, the resulting struggle for orthodoxy within the Church, the establishment of the Inquisition (a salient question in the "Diary of a Madman "). Gogol also has an interest in noticing how such technological innovations as the printing press and the manufacture of gun-powder, and the resulting large-scale application of artillery changed the old hierarchies. He follows the history of the 19th Century all the way to the Napoleonic wars, pays his dues to Russia's victory over Napoleon, and ends the chapter with a glorification of Christianity which has spread over the entire globe. Finally, he repeats his conviction that the teaching of history should cultivate the minds of young people so that they will become better subjects of "the Great Sovereign" .

The first of the fictions in the Arabesques is a fragment, "A Chapter from the Historical Novel, Hetman ".Gogol's footnote is interesting: "This is from the novel called The Hetman. Its first part was written and then burned because the author did not like it. Two chapters which first appeared in magazines are here published in this volume." ¹⁹ In other words, burning his manuscripts was not confined to the beginning and end of his career as a writer, but was a regular practice. Nevertheless, one might be permitted to suspect that such footnotes are a literary device, for Gogol alone knows what purpose.

The fragment concerns a Cossack messenger sent by the Polish king Kasimir to the Cossack Hetman Glecik, during the "times of the troubles". We do not know why, but we find the messenger on horseback, making his way through a forest in the middle of the night in a fairly dangerous region: nobody knows who is an enemy and who is not, and it is inadvisable to strike up a conversation with strangers under these circumstances. But a conversation is inevitable: the rider chances upon a group of old men, Cossacks, Malororssijan, that is, Ukrainian, who are leading some ox carts. Their talk is a little gem, circling round and round the actual topic of interest and saying nothing in a great many words. The rider does not want to tell his chance companions where he is going, while the leader of the group does not want to give the directions he desires. We find similar conversations in other works. He must have been very fond of these examples of pleasant slyness, as he reports many, like the opening conversation in Dead Souls between the two peasants leaning against a gate post and talking about Chichikov's carriage, or the nonsensical directions given in "Ivan Sponka " as to how to find one's way around the Ukrainian countryside. This peasant slyness is a well-thumbed item in Gogol's repertoire of the grotesque. Here the conversation continues for ten pages; only after the rider accepts the old man's offer of hospitality for the night does he discover that this peasant is actually the very man he has been seeking. His astonishment is expressed in the same kind of silent scene which figures at the end of the play," The Inspector General", where the announcement of the appearance of the "real " Inspector freezes the entire company. The story's main line had been apparently moving in a different direction, narrating a magical event that had occurred long before and which was now bit by bit being retold by the old man as they were moving through the forest, interlacing the tale with carefully devised disinformation as to his own identity -- Does not this device remind us of Gogol's traveling incognito, with collar turned up, devising fictitious names for himself like Mogel or Gogel when asked his name?

The magical features of the story could almost have been taken from "Vii ". It concerns a cruel Polish pan, or noble, who once upon a time had been the ruler of this area until one day he overplayed his hand and had a Cossack priest arrested, mocked and tortured in his mansion, which formerly happened to lie in the very area through which the travelers were now making their way. Now, of course, the mansion is gone; only a single fir tree indicates the place where the tragedy occurred. It stands, charred and frightening, in the middle of a swamp, though at the time of the Polish pan 's atrocities, the tree stood on the other side. The Cossack priest was hanged on that tree, but during the night the tree's branches, dripping blood, forced their way into the mansion, terrifying the Polish pan almost to death and destroying his house. Axes could not chop the tree down, and no matter how many times the Poles tried to get away from it by moving it to a different location, the tree always found them and wrecked havoc on them. Finally, the pan became a monk and said fifty-two funeral prayers for the priest he had tortured. Thereupon, he simply disappeared and nobody knows what happened to him. But ever since, the fir tree drips blood three days before Ivan Kupala (the St. John's Eve on June 14 of the Dikanka cycle) and old women can see the Devil himself in the forest, wearing a red jacket.

What happened to the messenger, once he reached the Hetman's house, we do not know, as the fragment ends here. It is clear, however, that this is a piece left over from the Dikanka cycle which Gogol had not included for reasons of his own. Also noteworthy, to use a musical analogy, is a kind of practicing of scales in a development of the patterns of conversation and a working out of various devices which will reemerge in Gogol's later fiction in a more refined form.

Of particular importance in the first volume is "The Portrait".The story falls into two chronologically divers parts, a device which is becoming a basic structural principle. The first is narrated in the "present" while the second takes place fifty years earlier and serves as an explanation of the mysterious events narrated in the first section. Here a poor art student, a painter named Chertkov lives in the poor section of St. Petersburg, not unlike his famous literary relative, Rodion Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky' Crime and Punishment. His name has a fateful etymology as it comes from the Russian name for the Devil (chort ). Indeed, we discover in the second part that he is the son of a man who once had dealings with the Devil. This is Gogol's earliest story about artists, the topic so much beloved by German Romantics, and represents a new direction: Gogol is no longer writing of Cossacks nor of the Ukrainian countryside, but of the city of St. Petersburg with all its attendant enchantments and blandishments. Chertkov is the standard bohemian, hungering for art's sake and hoping to become both successful financially and recognized artistically. But the two aims prove mutually contradictory, and while Chertkov is drawing his classical Greek models, his economic situation is worse than precarious. Gogol gives a realistic picture of the poor sections of the city and of the life of the lower classes which include the poor. resentful intellectuals and artists living there.

A sudden change in this hopeless life is effected by a miraculous incident. Going through discarded pictures at a junk dealer's shop, Chertkov is struck by a picture that strangely draws his attention. It is the portrait of an old man, with a "southern" facial expression, who looks oriental. The portrait's eyes, especially, were arresting. From then on everything becomes mysterious and foreboding, just as in the other miracle-laden stories, especially in "Vii" . Chertkov wants to offer ten rubles for the picture, but hears himself offering eleven, just to be on the safe side. He is about to take it home, when a mysterious person appears and offers more. Almost as if in a dream, Chertkov keeps upping the bid higher and higher until he finally reaches fifty rubles, all the money he has in the world. He is so upset by the picture's impression on him that he leaves the store without taking it with him. To his astonishment, when he gets home, the picture has receded him. The eyes of the portrait continue to haunt him: "They were not painted, they were living human eyes." ²⁰ Fruitlessly, Chertkov tries to hide the picture, yet the eyes follow him everywhere. At night Chertkov undergoes an experience very similar to Khoma Brut's when he watches over the lifeless body of the Polish pannochka. Indeed, a parallel can easily be drawn: in the case of the pannochka, Khoma Brut was enticed into looking up and facing the enchantress, thus ultimately bringing about his ruin. Here, in "The Portrait ", the road is somewhat longer, but again, the eyes lead to Chertkov's ruin. Now better developed, the process still relies on the Romantic fascination with the Faustian motif, and the means by which the Devil entices an artist to give up his sacred profession and serve him. The Devil promises success and the temptation of material opulence to an artist who is starving: but ultimately, of course, he will exact his price. He will ruin the artist both spiritually and physically, will destroy his ability to be truthful, faithful to the sacred principles of high art.

The scheme itself is not new. We have seen its origins in the Dikanka stories, where the Devil tried unsuccessfully to destroy an artist, as in the case of Vakula. Gogol will return to it repeatedly in different versions throughout his life as a writer. Here we see the first full-blown depiction of the inevitable path -- the artist's temptation, success, and final perdition as a result of the machinations of the Devil.

At the end of a nightmarish night, the old man's picture comes alive (very much as in "Vii "). He comes to the bed where Chertkov lies sleeping and explains that he must change his artistic style. It is not art that is important, but money: "Throw away your silly ideas! Everything on earth is done for profit. Quick, take your brush and paint portraits from the entire city!" ²¹ The old man promises immediate success: "I love you, and this is why I'm giving you this advice. I'll also give you money, you have only to follow me." Indeed, matters change in no time. After painting the portrait of a fashionable society lady, Chertkov become famous and prospers as a sought-after portrait painter.

His first portrait is of a young woman of eighteen -- she is a variant of the pannochka, of course. In order to paint her picture, Chertkov reworks an unfinished painting of Psyche, the Greek goddess of love of the soul ,thus profaning his search for ideal beauty and non-earthly love for the sake of his first financial success.

His subject matter is now the fashionable world of St. Petersburg. As we shall learn, Gogol considers painting a sacred profession, as it once was in the Middle Ages. Painting portraits of the "World" is thus a profanation of that profession, and as such can only be condemned by the divine Spirit -- or by true artists, who listen to divine inspiration rather than the call of lucre. Chertkov's fame has been bought at the terrible price of his own dissatisfaction with his work. His downfall is realistically portrayed: He begins to exploit manneristic short-cuts in order to speed up production. Next, he realizes that by repeating the same formulae, he has robbed himself of inspiration as well as of technical development. He is then invited to judge some paintings recently received by the Academy of Art from Italy. These are by a Russian who has been ekeing out a penniless existence and working hard on his art. Chertkov immediately recognizes its quality, and confronted with divinely inspired art, the falsehood of his own activity turns against him, and becomes a huge accusation. As a result, Chertkov undergoes a process of gradual disintegration: First he tries to paint "real" pictures -- curiously he wants to paint a fallen Angel, since the topic is closest to his spiritual condition,²² but to his horror, he is unable to recover his lost creativity. Then, in order to prevent comparisons with his own work, he starts to buy up and destroy every painting he can lay his hands on . Finally, exhausted, he lies down, mortally ill, and in his final delirium takes everyone he sees for the original portrait which started him on his path to damnation.

The story leaves us with many unanswered questions which are "solved" in the second part, as they were in "The Terrible Vengeance ". This takes place chronologically fifty years before the tale of Chertkov's downfall. (Interestingly, the number fifty also appeared in the first part as the sum Chertkov paid for the picture which haunted him.) The new narrator, whose name is never revealed, is a middle-aged man who is present at the auction of Chertkov's property. Recognizing the fateful portrait: "Oh, it is he ! "he exclaimed, greatly agitated, fixing his eyes on the portrait." Much as in the first section, the story focuses on a description of the Kolumna, a poor section of St. Petersburg where the heroes of the new story live: an "oriental"-looking man, "maybe a Greek, maybe an Armenian, maybe a Moldovian", a pawn-broker who became the most famous and feared in the area. The etymology of his name, Petromikhali, is a compound of the two names, Peter, probably in a reference to the Apostle Peter, the first Pope and representative of Christ on earth, and Mixail, from the Greek, or rather, the old Hebrew Mikhael, "God-like" (in Russian Orthodox terms :Khristopodobnyj .) For this reason, the early Church Patriarchs took the name: the first Russian Patriarch (died 998) who baptized the Kievan Prince Vladimir was called Mikhail. Gogol never explains the etymology, but the very fact that he exploits it in later works -- as in "The Overcoat", where a tailor's name is Grigory Petrovic, that is, Grigory, son of Peter, indicates that the underlying religious idea is as important for Gogol as the Romantic narrative. A consideration of the names's implications makes clear that both parts refer to tow of the first holy names in Christianity, Peter as the Rock on which the Church was founded, and Mikhail in reference to Christianity's Russian branch. The fact that these holy names are now being usurped by an unholy man who is pursuing a most un-Christian profession points to a permanent feature of Gogol's religious concerns, the working of the Anti-Christ in this world. The Anti-Christ, in the person of the Devil, pretends to be the "real" Christ, the Savior, though on a lower, non-spiritual plane. In providing money for the needy -- for a certain percentage of interest, of course, --Petromikhali "saves" them temporarily, but at great peril to those who have turned to him in their despair. His role here as the destroyer of art is of paramount concern.

In the detailed description of this strange man, of his living in secrecy and apparent poverty amid an accumulation of junk accepted as pledges from the local inhabitants, Gogol creates the prototype for Plyuskin the more famous character in Dead Souls. He shares common features with yet another, more infernal, character, the tailor Grigori Petrovic in "The Overcoat":"This strange creature sat there with legs tucked under, on a blackened sofa, receiving the visitors immovably..." ²³ Petromikhali charges the usual percentages for his pawnbrokering, but sometimes he gives money away, though he asks a different price: "There were some rumors around that sometimes he was loaning money free, not asking for a return; however, he suggested such conditions that all of the creditors ran from him in terror. And those who were bold enough to accept the gift of money started to fade, got sick and finally died, without daring to expose the secret."²⁴

This is the man whose fate has crossed the hero's. He turns out to be the narrator's father, a painter. Not just any sort of painter, but a painter of religious icons. "His life was most turbulent. He was a modest religious painter, the sort that had lived during the religious times of the Middle Ages." ²⁵ He was decorating Churches with all kinds of religious paintings and not making a great deal of money. In desperation he was ready to visit the Greek money-lender when a strange call came, inviting him to go there. Petromikhali has sent for him to paint his portrait. The situation is not unlike Khoma Brut's being asked to come and pray for the sick pannocka. In other words, the painter has been chosen. This "calling" is an important element in Gogol's work: the artist, or the protagonist, is approached by the Evil Spirit himself (or herself, as the case may be), in a parody of Christ's calling his disciples.

Gogol portrays the hero's feelings on entering the house of the money-lender as if he were descending into Hell. Petromikhali then makes a strange request of him, namely that he paint the portrait of a man who is visibly sick and dying. The artist wants to refuse, thinking that a dying man should think about his soul, not sit for a portrait. Thus the religious view that a man's body is transitory and therefore should not be preserved in paint or stone for eternity, is posed against a second, that as there is nothing to a man but his body, it should be immortalized. When the painter finally gives in to Petromikhali's insistence and begins to paint, he thinks: "The idea that later on he could use this face in a picture in which he wanted to show a man possessed by Demons who are expelled by the mighty Word of the Savior, this was the idea that made him redouble his efforts." At first, Petromikhali's eyes seemed wonderfully lifelike, but on examining them, the painter was unable to continue, even when enticed by a whole heap of gold. There follows another bribe: Petromikhali confides a secret: if the portrait is not finished before he dies, he will have to go "somewhere where I do not want to go" -- that is, of course, to Hell. On the hand, if the portrait is completed, "I can still for a long time avoid going there to Him, as long as our earth is still alive, provided you finish my portrait." ²⁶ He offers a reason for the portrait's importance: "I have found out that half of my life will be continued in my portrait, provided it is done by a good artist. As you see, part of my life is in the eyes already there. It will be so in all my other features if you just finish the picture. And even if my body is to perish, half of my life will remain here on earth, and I will be able to avoid suffering for a long while. Finish it, finish it, finish it!" When the revelation of this secret proves ineffective, Petromikhali makes a third and final offer: "So, take my portrait yourself. I'm giving it to you as a gift." Whereupon, the money-lender dies and the painter is left in great confusion of mind. Next, another parallel situation develops: The portrait miraculously appears at the painter's apartment. Not only does it appear, but the painter cannot get rid of it though he burns it so that "finally only a heap of ashes remained from its existence." ²⁷ The painter's first attempt has been to get rid of the picture and it is clear that he will be as unsuccessful as his counterpart in the first section. Indeed, the portrait brings on one fatality after another: The painter's wife dies in agony after accidentally swallowing a bunch of needles. Their child falls out of a window, again accidentally, and dies; finally, in desperation, the beleaguered painter leaves St.Petersburg and becomes a monk. As a monk, bearing the new monastic name of Grigori, he is still persecuted by the eyes, but his healing comes about on his returning to religious art at the urging of the elder in the Monastery. He is transformed again into the very image of the religious artist: "One should have seen his profound religious humility as he was working, in strict observance of fasting, in profound contemplation and withdrawal of his soul and in preparing himself for his great victory." (podvig.)

This last sentence could have been spoken of Gogol's own last years which brought him to his final "victory" and suicide by starvation.

In presenting the individual details of the paintings, Gogol shows a great understanding and admiration for the principles of sacred art, important to our understanding of his later so-called religious crisis. As the story develops, Father Grigori has spent the rest of his life in the monastery. He has been visited by his adult son, the present narrator. At this meeting, father Grigori tells his son the secret of the money-lender. He says that Petromikhali is the Devil, the Anti-Christ, and that his Second Coming is to be expected unless someone can stop him by revealing to all his true identity. Gogol's world-view is now crystal clear. He is certain of the coming of the Anti-Christ. Hence the tremendous and immediate urgency of his unmasking: "soon, very soon, the time will come when the Tempter of the human race will be born into this world. That time will be terrible; it will come before the end of the world. He will ride on a gigantic horse, and those who remain faithful to Christ will suffer greatly." ²⁸ The expectation of the Second Coming of Satan is bad enough --as K. Mochulski pointed out in his book on Gogol: "Gogol's world view is medieval" when it comes to questions of Heaven and Hell. Further details as to this Second Coming indicate that Gogol's view on the cosmic battle between Good and Evil is consistent and leads him to serious doubts about the basic tenets of Christianity. Here we may have put our finger on the sources of his upcoming crisis of religious belief.

The painter, now a monk, tells his son about the appearance of Satan; "Listen, my son, [he says] the Antichrist has been wanting to be born for a long time, but he cannot because he has to be born unnaturally; in our world everything is prepared by the Almighty in such a fashion that everything is accomplished only in a natural way. Therefore, my son there is no force that can help Him to burst into the world. On the other hand, our earth is dust in the eyes of our Creator. According to the Creator's laws, it has come to its final destruction and with each day the laws of Nature grow weaker and the borders keeping out the supernatural more penetrable." ²⁹

This interesting theological argument will have important ramifications in Gogol's own approach to Christianity, or rather, in his later spiritual crisis. If Satan, by whatever name he appears as the representation of Evil in Gogol's works, cannot break into this world, which is based on natural laws, it follows that he must avail himself of unnatural ways. The idea can be applied to another unnatural phenomenon, the unnatural or "immaculate" birth of Christ.In a few years down the road, Gogol will publish his famous "The Overcoat" and "The Nose " which will tackle this supremely heretical idea.

Evil in this world does appear, therefore, as the result of the unnatural ways which accomplish the weakening of the fiber of the natural universe. The Devil can appear only through the recruitment of disciples, "from whom, from the very moment of their birth, the Angel was frightened away, and they are tainted by a horrible hatred of people and of everything else which is God's creation." The money lender was one of these. "It was he, my son, the Antichrist himself!" ³⁰ cries Father Grigori. He tells his son that he was vouchsafed a vision of the Virgin Mary in reward for his return to religious art. In this vision the Virgin told him that the evil which was eternalized by his painting could be undone if fifty years later someone were to unmask it by a public confession. The time has now arrived and with it the opportunity to announce the history of the money-lender's portrait to the public. At that very moment, the portrait disappears and in its place there hangs a harmless landscape.

This version of the story was written in 1834 and published as part of the Arabesques. Almost ten years later, Gogol reworked it in Rome. The revised version came to be known as "The Portrait ". A comparison of the two versions makes clear that Gogol left the basic story of the appearance and effect of the picture unchanged. Changes appear mainly in the second part in an extension of the prehistory of the painting's development. Here Gogol dropped many of the explicitly demonic references which perhaps reflect the influence of the German, Hoffman. So, for example the explanation of the portrait's appearance in the painter's house is that it was sent by the pawn-broker's servant, or of the way the portrait was making a greater round among people, is that it was like the red jacket in "The Fair at Sorocincts ". The new version gives vent to a more elaborate and more numerous spate of discourses on the meaning of art, especially religious art, thus making clear that in talking about the portrait, Gogol really wanted to use the different term, icon. Yet Gogol is here indulging in his favorite method of hiding ideas too precious or too controversial to him behind synonyms and other metaphors. The word icon, of course, connotes a pictorial representation of transcendental phenomena which Gogol has hidden behind the synonym of the word, portrait. He was painfully aware that societal pieties manifest in the rules and regulations of the worldly and in religious censorship would be outraged by even a hint of the heretical thought that a painting of the Devil could be conceived as an icon.

In the new version, probably for the same reason, he drops the name of the pawn-broker with all its heretical and parodist implications, and changes the name of the protagonist from the too-obvious Chertkov to Chartkov, in a more veiled reference to its etymology in the word for Devil. But ultimately the story is still about the same issues: the temptation of the artist by the Devil to give up the sacred profession of serving God for service in the name of the Devil instead. This second version includes further references to the world's great artists who probably had become more familiar to Gogol during the seven or eight years after the publication of the first -- Correggio, Raphael, Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari, Moliere and Dante , all are called upon in support of Gogol's theory of art.

Further exercises in history follow after the fiction in "An Overview of the Development of Little Russia ". These are exactly what the title announces, a general introduction into the historical development of the Ukraine, known as Little Russia within greater Russia. The title thus indicates that Gogol is talking from the point of view of a Russian, and not of a Ukrainian, though the two increasingly merge into one in his mind. In nine brief chapters (the attention he pays to structural considerations is really remarkable!) he portrays the history of the Ukraine from the 13th to the 19th Century. The survey is not very detailed; rather, it is a Romantic picture, as is usual in Gogol's fiction as well. It was intended as a general pedagogical article, even though Gogol remarks that it was designed as Chapter 1 Volume 1 for a History of the Ukraine which, however, he never wrote. Gogol may have imagined that this promise should arouse the reader's interest in its vivid depiction of living history. Setting off with the 13th Century, he emphasizes the absence of statehood among the different Slavic tribes and the way this lack led to constant fratricidal struggle. He compares the chaos among these tribes to the centrally organized statehood in Western European countries, where Papal power created a unity among them. The Mongol invasion changed this situation when the warring tribes all came under Tartar-Mongol rule: the result was a two-century long exclusion of Russia from the Western world. Since the situation was different with the Slavic tribes to the South, where the Mongol occupation was not so total as in the North, the Ukraine began to take shape. Christian faith easily merged with pagan values, while the weaker Mongolian influence was balanced by another foreign influence: The Pagan Lithuanians occupied Kiev and a greater part of the Southern lands. Gogol provides colorful descriptions of the pagan Lithuanians and of their leader, a certain Gedimin; he tells how Gedimin and all his servants and animals, like Attila the Hun, were burried by fire. The two foreign influences created different customs, laws and attitudes, reinforced also by the different geography of the area. Here again Gogol emphasizes the role of geography on historical events. The geography of the Ukraine is given in great detail, with its rivers -- especially the Don -- its steppes, and its other salient features, thus reinforcing Gogol's view that such historical circumstances as the Tartar and Lithuanian occupation as well as geographical differences created a vastly different mentality in the inhabitants, even though Ukrainians and the Russians still both speak a Slavic tongue. Gogol is especially interested in the development of the Ukrainian Cossacks as a separate tribe. As he saw it, the Cossacks came from the indigenous population in the area and intermingled with the refugees from either Tartar, Lithuanian or even native oppressors. In the Cossacks, Gogol portrays a free and proud tribe, united by the single common desire to be free of domination.

As such, they would follow anyone willing to accept their minimum ideological requirement, the religion of Greek Orthodoxy. Gogol closes the article with the following words: "And thus a nation evolved which, according to its geographical location and its religion, belonged to Europe, but simultaneously, according to its way of life, its customs, and dress was completely Asian, a nation in which two contradictory parts of the world were colliding so strangely. European cautiousness and Asian carelessness, good-natured simplicity and duplicity, a strong urge for activity and the greatest laziness and passivity,a striving for development and perfection, and at the same time a desire to appear contemptuous of every perfection." These words contribute to our understanding of the fictional portrayal of such Cossacks as Taras Bul'ba and his Zaporozh'e Cossacks. It is also clear that Gogol well understood that the Cossacks' Orthodox faith was far from being an expression of piety but that it is an aspect of a national ideology which cemented relations between otherwise disparate tribes.

Another article, also written around 1832 but prepared for publication only in 1834, "A Few Words about Pushkin ", purports to be a review of Pushkin but turns out to be in actuality a paean in praise of the master of Russian letters who was Gogol's mentor at the time. Like the historical survey for the Ukraine, the article lacks concrete details and presents a highly impressionistic view of Pushkin's art. Gogol's only concreted statement is that Pushkin is a national poet, and that the very spirit of the Russian people finds its expression in his work. The fact that Gogol applies this Romantic concept of the poet as a folkspoet is noteworthy, since Pushkin,the aristocrat,was hardly of the "folk" in 19th Century terms. Gogol praises Pushkin's language for its "richness,forcefulness and flexibility" . He also advances the idea that the period of his Caucasion exile liberated Pushkin from the limitations of being a poet of St. Petersburg only and turned him into a full-blown national spokesman. His descriptions of the Caucasian scenes made him into an exciting poet, with a magical narrative power; Pushkin is"grandeur, simplicity and forcefulness".Gogol realizes that his ars poetica may not be to everyone's taste, but he feels that his own poetics come close to Pushkin's. He sees that Pushkin distinguishes between the fashionable artists who follow the dictates of general opinion ( chern' in Pushkin's term) and the real artists who follow only the dictates of art, no matter how isolated and unappreciated their integrity makes them. Yet as an example of popular opinion and its worth, Gogol quotes a youthful experience which in view of his interest in painting constitutes a confessional statement: "I have always had a weakness for painting. [Once] I was greatly occupied by one of my landscapes which in the foreground depicted a dead tree. At that time I lived in the village, and my critics and judges were my neighbors from the area. One of them, looking at the picture, shook his head and said, 'A good painter would have picked a different tree, a well-grown one, on which the leaves would have been fresh, nicely grown, not dry.'"³¹ The comment illustrates Gogol's scorn for such criticism. A real artist, and Gogol counts Pushkin among them, obviously is not going to take opinions of that nature seriously.

Another article, this time on architecture, adds to our understanding of Gogol's preoccupation with various aspects of art. The essay is dated 1831, when Gogol was 22, but in a footnote Gogol adds that ".the essay had been written long ago." Perhaps this is another example of Gogol's penchant for obfuscation, though some of his statements later turned out to contain more truth than critics have been willing to concede.

"On Contemporary Architecture "is a fairly lengthy discourse on the history of architecture and on some practical recommendations from improving contemporary Russian architecture. The general survey begins with the statement that most of the architecture of modern Russian cities is boring: "The [architects] were trying to give to all the buildings in the towns an absolutely simple and flat appearance. The houses were made to be as much like each other as possible, but they more resemble shacks and barracks than the happy domiciles of people ... we were boasting not long ago of that sort of architecture as the perfection of taste, and we built whole towns in this fashion." ³² Gogol's words could almost have been taken straight out of 20th-Century periodicals complaining abut the devastating effect of the prefabricated concrete boxes of the Soviet period.

Next, Gogol contrasts this ugliness with European architecture (as in Medieval German towns ),which surprise the visitor with their variety and the loveliness of their buildings. He also emphasizes the beauty of such religious architecture, pointing out, however, that with the passing of the Middle ages, the religious content of architecture has waned: the Cologne cathedral cannot be built again. He then surveys the architecture of other cultures, Byzantine, Oriental, Mohammedan. Much of what he say is startling for his time and harmonizes with his views on other aspects of art. Thus he complains tat the contemporary city planners aim for a uniform appearance of buildings on the city landscape. This sameness he finds wrong: "It is as if a genius were to restrain himself from [expressing] the original and the unusual, so that ordinary people will not appear to be too small and unimportant." ³³ Gogol suggests instead very definite innovations, especially the introduction of high towers as well as borrowing from different cultures and periods in an effort at variety. These suggestions are very revealing of Gogol's own mentality. Some of these features we have already observed in earlier works , as, for example, in his desire to be useful and to give practical advice. The tall buildings, he says, could serve not only as an aesthetic improvement of the general appearance of the city, but also as guides for strangers who could orient themselves on them. Also, building entire cities in a variety of architectural styles would be useful in presenting a "living history" of architecture, so that people "would not have to resort to reading heavy books." These and similar statements remind one of Manilov in Dead Souls, who will send endless hours in devising ideal model buildings and other architectural improvements.

Another observation can be made concerning Gogol's interest in Eastern architecture and in the details of Arab culture which the title Arabesques underlines. This may be taken as an underlying insistence of the sacred nature of art there repeatedly discussed. The collection's title thus indicates not so much "meaningless decoration" (which is one of the readings of the word), as the devout tradition wherein Arabic writers hide the name of God in the decorative hieroglyph of their script. What appears to be mere embellishment to the uninitiated the initiated understands as a sacred expression of prayer. The question will resurface in another section, "Al-Mamun ", as well as in the second volume in the" Diary of a Madman ". Further, Gogol observes that though Oriental houses intended for human habitation are usually very poor, the architectural monuments dedicated to religion are magnificent: "This is an oriental architecture," he says, "an architecture which has been created by an oriental, a burning, a magical imagination dressed in hyperboles and allegories, which surpassed life and its prosaic needs ... everywhere, where this massive and potent luxury penetrated [life], or the wild enthusiasm of their ancient religion, everywhere monuments appeared ..."³⁴ The observations are similar to his comments on the religious architecture, painting and literature of the Christian Middle Ages.

If matters were indeed as unsatisfactory as Gogol portrays them, is there a hope that they will get better in the future? He answers in the affirmative: He foresees a new architecture to be produced by new architects who will understand that everything is art around us, even utilitarian buildings. Insisting on the need for a new ars poetica in architecture, he concludes: "An architect is a creator and a poet." ³⁵ This final remark, together with a footnote, reveals the occasion for which the essay was written; it is a review of the work of the architect Bryullov "whose buildings are constructed with taste and original ideas ." ³⁶ This is the same Bryullov whose painting of "The Last Days of Pompeii "Gogol reviewed in the second volume of this collection.

The final essay in Volume One is a lecture on history which he delivered at the University and to which he invited Pushkin and Zukovsky. Another Arabic piece, it is entitled : "Al-Mamun, an Historical Overview " .It relates the change of fortune in the history of the Arab empire led by Abdulah-al-Mamun, Caliph of Baghdad, (786-833), successor to Harun al Rashid (788-809), the empire-builder and prototype of the fabulous fictional character in the Thousand and One Nights. Essentially, Gogol's argument is that Al-Mamun, following on the heels of a great military leader, became an enlightened despot who greatly contributed to the flowering of Arab culture at a time when Europe was in the Dark Ages. Whatever his sources of information (there are no indications of sources, no references to other research), Gogol was able to give an impressive description of the times and the personality of the ruler. Al-Mamun, he says, was a progressive ruler, educated in the spirit of neo-Platonism, who had the best interests of his people in mind. But he made the fatal mistake of going too fast and too far. In trying to emulate the best from other cultures, he insulted the primitive religious zealotry of his people and ended his rule in complete failure. In introducing poets and philosophers into his government, he misjudged their capabilities and the possibilities inherent in these branches of human activity with tragic results. Poets and philosophers are not good as practical politicians because they are prophets and priests, but not pragmatic statesmen. Finally he died, "not understanding his nation, and misunderstood by his nation." ³⁷

Gogol's appraisal of the failure of an enlightened oriental despot rings true even today, some hundred and fifty years later, in the age of the Ayatollah Khomeni. But these considerations aside, the essay breathes the fascination Arabic culture held out for him. Again, the implications of the title, Arabesques points still more clearly to Gogol's view of these Arab studies as not merely decorative exercises, but as deeply serious investigations. It also makes clear his profound skepticism and his understanding of the tragi-comedy that results when well-intentioned reforms turn terrible dictators though they face ultimate defeat in their struggle against the despotism of national habits and the fanaticism of traditional customs. The "inconsistency of the human condition -"die unzulaenglichkeit menschlicher Verhaeltnisse " - to quote Berthold Brecht again .This insight is basic to Gogol's vision of the history of human behavior which was already apparent in Taras Bul'ba . Poets and philosophers understand this, but they are powerless in the political struggles of their nations. They have a different job to do. Gogol,in his later work,the Selected Passages... will turn away from this fatalistic understanding of the dilemma of" poets and philosophers" .

Volume Two of the Arabesques opens with an historical sketch called "Life" , a description of the five stages of human history in the ancient Mediterranean, Egypt, Greece, "iron" Rome, and of early Christianity. Its highly lyrical prose could almost be taken for a prose poem, which returns to the Romantic view that Gogol expounded in the youthful poem , the " Hanz Kukhelgarten ": "The poor son of the desert had a dream: The great Mediterranean Sea lay sprawling, surveyed on three sides by the burning shores of Africa, with her slender palms, the bare deserts of Syria and the densely populated shores of Europe, eroded by the sea." ³⁸ Thus the text is not an accurate historical account, but reads like a medieval Russian text, that is, like the rhythmic "isocolic" prose of Russian religious ceremonies.

Gogol explains that each of the historical cultures created certain characteristic features: Egypt was the period of immobility, symbolized by the pyramids; Greece was its opposite, the joyous celebration of movement; while Rome was the age of imperialist expansion. But all these cultures came to an end and were replaced by the new age of Christianity: "The earth is as stone: the nation is despised, the underpopulated village has turned toward the bare hills which are occasionally and unevenly shaded by the withered fig tree. Behind the low, tumble-down wall stands a she-ass. In the wooden cradle lies the Child; over him stoops his virginal mother, gazing at him with tear-filled eyes. High above him in the sky, a star hovers and the world is bathed in wondrous light."

The final paragraph -- or stanza -- refers again to the entire ancient world as it watches the birth of the new age. Not until the onset of symbolist poetry shall we see any similar allegory and not until Pasternak's Doctor Zivago shall we be offered such a panorama of world history in which the birth of Christ is presented as the beginning of a new age, the advent of the history of the individual as opposed to the primacy of nations and their rulers.

A more prosaic essay reviews three historians, Schloezer, Mueller and Herder. They are arranged in an order which repeats Gogol's views on the importance of studying history. Schloezer, he says was not really an historian, he was rather more like a botanist: "He analyzed both the extinct and the extant nations of the world, but did not describe them; he dissected the whole world with a scalpel, he cut it up and divided it into huge chunks, arranged and separated nations in the same manner as botanists arranged plants according to their known characteristics."1 Mueller is a "completely different sort": his keen insight into world history is "that people will achieve happiness only when they religiously preserve the customs of their country, their own manners and independence." Herder commands Gogol's complete admiration: "He is a sage in terms of his knowledge of the ideal man and of mankind, but a mere youth in his knowledge of men, in keeping with the natural course of things, just as a sage is always great in the realm of ideas but totally ignorant of the minutiae of life. As a poet he is superior to Schloezer and Mueller." This conclusion is surprising: the historian has been praised as a poet. Indeed, Gogol goes even further and explains how a poet deals with facts, or rather how the work of an historian and a poet can be parallel: "Like a poet he creates everything, then digests it, isolated in his study, brimming over with his important discovery, choosing only the beautiful and lofty, as these are already appurtenances of his pure, lofty soul. But the lofty and the beautiful often erupt out of low and despised life..." ³⁹ The "lofty and the beautiful" these key words of the Romantic age still sound a meaningful note and the times when Dostoyevsky will ridicule them are still some thirty years ahead down history's road. But quite apart from them, in Gogol's concept of history, neither the study of sources nor the research necessary to arrive at new and independent conclusions seems important.

The first of the two fictional pieces in Volume Two is "The Nevsky Prospect " .In many ways a great masterpiece, it marks a new direction in Gogol's Romantic portrayal of the St. Petersburg which has become his new reality. The story is well structured: it begins with a description of the main showpiece of the inner city of St. Petersburg, The Nevsky Prospect (or Avenue). An exciting place for young men and women, it is a showcase for a Russian Vanity Fair. At different times of the day it appears differently: until noon, it is a utilitarian thoroughfare for people of the lower classes as they run about their business. After noon, it becomes the place where foreign tutors take their pupils for a walk, a model of pursuit of education. We are reminded of Pushkin's lines about Onegin's being taken by his tutor to the Letni Sad , the Summer Garden, in what is clearly the same kind of educational experience. At two in the afternoon, the pupils' parents appear with a number of higher ranking civil servants, among them the pompous Foreign Office clerks. At this juncture, Gogol interrupts the strict accounting of schedules in order to introduce the clothing people wear: the individual sartorial items will impersonate the people in waistlines, lady's sleeves, and so forth. At three, the lower rank of Civil Servants show up after leaving their offices. After four, the street becomes deserted except for some chance passersby hurrying to their various destinations. But then comes the main attraction, and the real significance of the street, life at dusk, a mysterious time when people seem to be intent on purposely running back and forth, when some "notes appear in the lower parts of shop windows" which during the daylight could not be displayed -- Obviously, prostitution is an important motif in the city landscape -- Less than twenty years later, Dostoyevsky's prostitutes will have had not only their real life counterparts, but also their literary predecessors.

After an introduction to the city, the two protagonists are introduced: Army Lieutenant Pirogov and his companion Piskarev, a painter. Not unlike Chertkov, Pirogov appears to be one of Piskarov's customers and is sitting to him for his portrait. The etymology of the names is again interesting: Pirogov comes from the Russian word for meatpie ( pirog ) while Piskarev can be related to "sqeak ", "scribble " (piskat' ). Thus Gogol who in "The Portrait " had already returned repeatedly to the subject of painters, may be presenting himself in the guise of a scribbler, an artist like Piskarev. The main body of the narration is a wonderful comedy of errors despite the tragedy of Piskarev's fate; it would have made a perfect plot for the puppet theater of the day. Pirogov and Piskarev follow two women on Nevsky Avenue; one is a dark-haired beauty whose connections with art, especially with painting, are immediately made clear when she is referred to as the ideal image of a Bianca by Perugino; the other is a blond who seems to be the very image of the "light" woman, or prostitute. Yet the roles will characteristically be reversed: The dark-hired angelic beauty is the prostitute, while the blonde is merely a brave German housewife out on some errands for her German craftsman husband.

Piragov, the idealist, pays court to the dark-haired beauty. We have seen her before in the person of the Governor's daughter, the pannocka in a new guise. And Piskarev is another Khoma Brut, or Andrei Bul'ba, drawn to this mysterious beauty and ultimately to his own destruction though the destruction is here less demonic than in the other tales. It happens quite simply, indeed, as a suicide out of disappointment and despair over the difference between illusion and reality. Reality soon strikes Piskarev as he follows after the dark-haired beauty. He comes to a place which he recognizes as a brothel, a "den of iniquity". Brothels exist, according to Gogol, for three reasons: the existence of pitiful vice, its engendering by a "tawdry education", and last, the terrible overcrowding in the city. Gogol presents a realistic picture of the brothel's interior. One wonders where the suspected homosexual would have access to such intimate details -- and then works out the contrast between the idealistic, virginal artist and the cynical, street-wise prostitute. It is important to the Romantic portrayal of the situation that the male character be the dreamer, the alienated idealist who does not behave like everybody else, while the prostitute is the jaded, matter-of-fact practitioner of her "art". Unable to accept the fact that she is a prostitute, Piskarev runs away, finding himself at home close to midnight.

Readers of Russian literature will recognize the resurfacing of this duo later in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Undoubtedly, Gogol was the founding father of this Romantic tradition in the literary canon of St. Petersburg.

Piskarev's inability to come to grips with reality turns him into another Romantic character typical of the St. Petersburg tradition. He lives in dreams -- first merely under the impact of the experience, but later, he becomes Russian literature's first drug-addict,addicted to opium, which he has secured (in another Oriental touch) from a Persian cloth merchant living in the neighborhood. The price of the opium is Piskarev's promise to paint for him the portrait of a beautiful woman as a houri, an angel in Mohammedan tradition, and, lying next to her, the Persian cloth merchant himself, smoking a pipe. The Madonna is corrupted in this icon of beauty -- the temptation is like Chertkov's when he used his portrait of Psyche for the picture of the society lady's daughter.

Piskarev never gets to the painting for he is progressively hooked on his opium-induced dreams until he loses his hold on reality altogether. Surprisingly, it suddenly occurs to him that he should go and rescue the dark-eyed beauty from prostitution. In his resolve we see another favorite topic of the Romantics and the later revolutionaries: the rescue by a noble male of a prostitute who is a victim of society. In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Nikolai Levin does just that; or again, in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, the narrator is almost redeemed by the prostitute Liza after he promises to save her. Gogol was the first to set up the parameters of the theme in Piskarev's naive enthusiasm, his offer to marry the prostitute, and her answer, "I'm nobody's washerwoman or seamstress to be made to work!" Chernyshevskiy's utopia is similarly fractured in What's to Be Done? as it is in Nekrasov's Petersburg Tales about reformed prostitutes,despite his hero's offer to resolve the inequities of society.

But what is Piskarev to do? If he cannot accept the corruption inherent in reality, no more can he change it. His suicide is the next inevitable step. We recall Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, who says that he cannot accept the imperfection of God's world, and is therefore ready to "respectfully return his ticket." Thus Russian literature's Romantic suicides have their origin in their artist brother, Piskarev. Of course, there are other solutions besides suicide to the problem of "overstepping the limits" ( prestuplenie ), in Dostoyevsky's formulation of the dilemma . Going mad is one, as will be demonstrated in the "Diary of a Madman " which follows. Becoming a self-denying saint, with its attendant problems, is another,or as in the case of Dostoyevsky's later heroes, turning on society and becoming destructive revolutionaries.

But with Piskarev's death Gogol could fix his attention on his Romantic double, Pirogov ("the son of a Meatpie"). Where Piskarev's experience is tragic, Pirogov's is a hilarious comic counterpart. The brave, blonde German Hausfrau leads Pirogov to her house, a shopkeeper's place, where he not only has no chance for the success of his amorous designs, but where in the end he gets a good beating at the hands of the brave German husband and his friends. Humorous or no, the scene provides a profound psychological insight into the national characteristics of the two nations which were living in uneasy cooperation: to Russians, the Germans were despicably meticulous, serving their Russian hosts with barely disguised contempt whom they considered lazy, stupid and extremely unreliable. There is no other description in Russian literature as comical, or as "real" as in this tale, of the unbridgeable differences in the national psychology of the two nations.

Yet it is these Germans who were the teachers for the Russians not just of technology, but also of literature. Gogol has tremendous fun in displaying his understanding that the Germans are always Germans be it in trade or in literature. The story is tantamount to a declaration of independence from the German Romantics at the same time that Piskarev is directly descended from them.

On entering the German's shop, Pirogov sees " in front of him... Schiller, not the Schiller who wrote William Tell , and A History of the Thirty Years War, but the famous Schiller, the master tinsmith of Mescanskaya Street. Near Schiller stood Hoffmann -- not the writer Hoffmann, but the better-than-average cobbler from Officerskaya Street, Schiller's staunch friend." Willy nilly, the reader sees in the "famous" German tradesmen not just the odd correspondence of their names with the names of the greatest representatives of the German Romantic movement in literature, but also Gogol's unspoken thought: Schiller the tinsmith shares the psychology of Schiller the poet. And Hoffmann, the better-than-average cobbler, has much in common with his famous namesake.

And what is it that they are doing? They are in the process of cutting off Schiller's nose because it costs Schiller too much money to keep it supplied with snuff. Hoffman, the cobbler, has his knife in position as Pirogov enters. We are witness to the victory of rationalism over reason or, for that matter, over human nature. The nose, the costliness of tobacco and other such details are, as we have seen, basic symbols in Gogol's fiction, where tobacco is equated with manliness, while the nose is, of course, a thinly disguised sexual stand-in for a more obvious manly attribute. Nothing could be clearer than that Gogol viewed the Germans as a people whose rationalism is both inhuman and irrational.

The same can be said of their drinking habits: Sober-minded on workdays, propriety dictates that they get drunk on weekends: "Schiller was a typical German in the fullest sense of the word. From the age of twenty, from that happy time when Russians lived in a happy-go-lucky manner, Schiller had already planned out his life and he made no changes whatever in those plans. He made it a rule to get up at seven o'clock, to dine at two, to be exacting in everything and to get drunk on Sundays." ⁴⁰His wife's friend Pirogov's fate is not very interesting, for he tries to push his luck with the blond Hausfrau only to earn a good beating from Schiller, Hoffmann and their friend Kuntz (whose name is similar to the German word for art!). Ready to turn the world upside down after this insult, Pirogov nevertheless quiets down quickly after he has had some pirogi in a pastry shop and spent a nice evening in the society of other Petersburg officers and their ladies. No tragedy here: tragedy is traditionally for outsiders, for those who despair over the "inconsistency of the human condition". Your average poslyak ,the vulgarian, the self-satisfied mediocrity (according to Nabokov's translation of the word), is not the right stuff of tragedy. Consoled easily, the average man does not despair over the imperfection of God's world, over the suffering of the innocents or other perplexing philosophical problems and he lives happily ever after.

But not their author! The story closes with asides in the form of philosophical musings about the strangeness of this world, and of the world of his own creation: "How amazingly our world is arranged," I thought, walking along the Nevsky Prospect the day before yesterday and recalling these two events. "How strangely, how inscrutably Fate plays with us! ⁴¹ Do we ever get what we desire? Do we achieve what our abilities seem especially suited for? Everything turns out contrary to expectations. Those who have been given fine horses by Fate ride about on them unaware of their beauty, while another, whose heart burns with a passion for horses, goes about on foot, and has to be content with merely clicking his tongue when a fine trotter is led past him. One has a marvelous cook, but unfortunately, has such a small mouth that he cannot eat more than two morsels; another has a mouth the size of the Headquarters' arch, but alas! He must be content with some German dinner made from potatoes. How strangely our Fate plays with us." Such melancholic asides are to become the backbone of Gogol's fictional world, and their bitter-sweet melancholy the very essence of Gogol's insight into the strangeness of the human condition.

The story's cadenza returns to the opening theme: the strangeness of the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg. Gogol cannot help but close with a Romantic exclamation: "Oh, never believe the Nevsky Prospect! ... It's all an illusion, it's all a dream, nothing is what is seems." He asks, is there a way to defend oneself against this new game of the Devil? Yes -- one must stay away. As the narrator says, "I always wrap my cloak around me more tightly when walking along it, and I try not to look at the things I see there." One has to be especially careful with the ladies: "God preserve you from peeking under ladies' hats. However much a beautiful lady's cape may flutter in the distance, nothing would induce me to take a peek out of curiosity." ⁴²

A further essay in this volume is "The Songs of the Ukraine ", again purporting to be a review. His school-friend Maximovic had recently published a collection of these songs; as Gogol explains in a footnote, "Lovers of music and poetry can take some comfort: recently a beautiful collection has been published by Maximovic, together with words by Alyabev." The review turns into an enthusiastic homage to Ukrainian folksongs, ever a topic Gogol loved. Contemporaries have reminisced about Gogol's passionate interest in these songs and about how he loved to foregather with his former school fellows and sing Ukrainian folksongs for hours on end.

In confessing his love of the songs, Gogol remarks that they are not everybody's favorites, especially in the circles of high society where they have remained relatively unknown: "Until recently," he says, "only their enchanting music was carried over occasionally into the higher circles; the words remained unnoticed and awakened curiosity in hardly anybody." Gogol nevertheless stresses their real significance: "They are the vibrant, clear, colorful, truthful history of a nation, revealing the whole life of the people." ⁴³ In portraying the variety of their subject-matter, Gogol speaks of their presentation of the nation's history as all-important. He summarizes their histories: they are remarkably similar in content to his Cossack stories, like Taras Bul'ba and " The Hetman ", as well as some of the other fragments. Clearly he sees them as the life-blood of Ukrainian life, especially of its history. Indeed, in order to impress the Russian reader, he quotes some of the songs in Ukrainian, and provides a Russian translation of a longer historical ballad.

He also expands on songs about life in general, especially on their religious references: "When the thoughts expressed in them touch on religion, they become extraordinarily poetic. They are not amazed by the colossal creation of the Eternal Creator: this astonishment belongs to someone who has already climbed to a higher rung of self-awareness; but their faith is just as innocentThey address God as children address their father; they often introduce Him into their every-day life with such pure innocence that their artless image of Him becomes majestic in its very innocence. Thus, the most ordinary objects in their songs assume the form of ineffable poetry, and are the remnants of the rites of ancient Slavic mythology which they have made subordinate to Christianity."⁴⁴ These words are not only highly accurate descriptions of this aspect of folksongs, but they also explain the genesis of Gogol's own art. So, for example, his distinction between naive folk belief and a more intellectual contemplative attitude toward religion indicates his awareness of the intellectual problems inherent in embracing a set of religious principles and sheds light on the nature of his up-coming spiritual crisis. His later remarks as to the intermingling of Christian ideas practices and pagan Slavic concepts and rites in the religious beliefs of the Ukrainian people, on their double allegiance ( dvoeverie ), for example, make clear already in the early 1830's when the Dikanka stories and this article were written, that Gogol was consciously applying his insight to his own creation.

Gogol also has a keen eye for observing technical details as to the way in which folksongs function. So, he tells us, "It is impossible to find anywhere ... the repeated sentence: "It was evening", but instead of repeating this, they [the folksongs] describe what happens in the evening:

The cows were coming home from the leafy glades

and the lambs from the fields.

The brown eyes began to weep,

standing next to her beloved."

He adds, "Because of this, many people mistakenly consider such turns of speech senseless." ⁴⁵ Obviously, Gogol is not one of these.

Further on, he also observes that in the creation of the folksongs, emotions, subconscious notices and artistic inspiration play a far more important role than in the conscious creation of "artificial" songs. "A song is not composed with a pen in one's hand, or on paper, or by strict calculations, but in a whirlwind, in oblivion, when the soul rings out and every part of the body, breaking its normal, indifferent attitude, becomes freer; the hands freely flay the air, and wild waves of enjoyment transport one away from everything worldly." ⁴⁶ That such a poetic inspiration is a precondition to creativity, Gogol has no doubt: "This can be noted even in the most doleful songs whose heartrending sounds bring sadness to one's heart. they could never flow from a man's soul under normal conditions, when he is observing an object."

This analysis of the creative process reveals Gogol's own ars poetica, wherein not everything can be analyzed from a rational, or normal, logical point of view because,as he says in closing, "The poetry of ideas is more comprehensible to anyone than the poetry of sounds, or rather, the poetry of poetry."

Finally, Gogol also remarks on the meters and rhymes, revealing his precise technical understanding of these matters and his ability to analyze poetry from a technical point of view. Also, he gives a fairly detailed description of the various tunes to which the songs are sung. For instance, about a certain type of dance music he comments: "The dancer feels like a giant: his soul and all his being expand, only to strike it with his gleaming toe-caps, then to rise once more into the air." He concludes, "Nothing can be stronger than national music. "

Next comes " Thoughts on Geography ", a youthful exercise, written in 1829 and published in 1831 for the first time as an article in The Literary Gazette under the original family name of G. Yanov. It also has a subtitle, " For Children ", which seems to indicate Gogol's desire not to enter the field of the professional geographers, but rather to be allowed to participate in these ideas as an outsider in search of "one's own place".

Gogol recommends the study of Geography because he feels it is a subject which ".is a great and amazing [one]Where can one find objects which appeal more to the youthful imagination? What other science could be more beautiful for children or quicker to arouse the poetry of their young souls?" ⁴⁷ His understanding goes beyond utilitarian considerations". He wants to appeal to the excitement of discovery: "Surely," he exclaims, "the great Humboldt and those brave explorers who brought so much knowledge to the realm of science and who deciphered the wonderful hieroglyph which can be seen all over the world cannot be comprehensible to only a small number of scientists!" ⁴⁸

But Gogol cannot help but offer some practical advice as to how geography lessons should be structured or how maps should be colored, just as he did for architecture. Further, geography appears to him in much the same way as anthropology, or cultural history does to us in the 20th Century. He suggests, for example, that geography should be studied from the point of view of evolution: "to follow the gradual development of Man, together, of course, with the gradual discovery of the world." ⁴⁹ The discovery of the world, on the other hand, evokes vivid pictures in his mind: ".The Bedouin dashes over the desert like a whirlwind, where faith develops into fanaticism and the whole country is a country of creeds which have spread out from here over the whole world." Gogol also suggests that Geography include the description of such major natural wonders as earthquakes, as well as man-made wonders, great cities -- here he provides a memorable picture of Rome -- the final result of such teaching would be an awakening of the enthusiasm of one's pupils. Gogol's ideas on pedagogy sound quite modern, and extraordinarily perceptive for a young man of twenty. If students are not motivated to study, the responsibility lies with the teacher: "Laziness and obtuseness in a pupil," he insists, "are the fault of the teacher and are nothing more than the signs of his own negligence. He must have been neither capable nor desirous of holding the attention of his young audience; he must have forced them to take his revolting, bitter pill." ⁵⁰ He cites as an example the way children "thought of being incapable of anything" listen to horror stories. "Surely," he adds, "it would not be impossible to coax such an imagination to be of use to science." Interestingly, his representation of school life, as in " Ivan Spon'ka " or " The Inspector General " is always of a dreadful, useless waste of time, and he blames the teachers for the students' behavior.

Karl Pavlovic Bryullov (1799-1852), whose architecture inspired Gogol to an enthusiastic review, now merits a second, this time not from an architectural point of view, but from a painter's. For the first time we see Gogol functioning as truly an art critic, presenting his views about painting and the work of a painter in a full-blown article. The occasion for the article, written in 1834, was an exhibit of Bryullov's pictures in the Hermitage in August of that year. Beginning with an overview of certain trends in 18th Century art, Gogol notes that a fragmentation of artistic dogmas has taken place towards the end of the century, while " the beginning of the 19th Century has produced nothing complete or colossal in art...it broke up into numerous atoms and parts." As usual, aside from artistic and philosophical trends, he focuses on technical details. He thinks that the new age has produced better techniques, especially in the field of shadings, contours, and motive considerations: "And side by side with all this sharpness what luxurious tenderness there is, and what mysterious music is noted in ordinary, insensitive objects." ⁵¹ He concludes: "One may say that the 19th Century is the century of effects." Gogol then turns to Bryullov's pictures, which to him precisely represent new trends in painting: "Within its limits it captures diversity to an extent which nobody previously had managed to capture. The underlying thought corresponds exactly to the style of our century, which, generally speaking, seems aware of its own terrible process of disintegration and is striving to unite all genres into general groups and selects the violent crises experienced by the vast masses of the population" ⁵² for its subject matter.

A discussion of several pictures dealing with the tragic events of classical antiquity, "The Destruction of Ninevah ", and "Belshazzar's Vision ", serves as a preliminary for his comments on the main picture of the exhibit, "The Last Days of Pompeii". Everywhere Gogol emphasizes the unity of the painter's artistic vision, which focuses not so much on the disasters themselves as on Man--though not exactly Man himself. As he puts it, "Man does not appear in his works, only his passions. Man appears in Bryullov's work, however, in order to display his beauty and the extreme elegance of his nature ." ⁵³ In the very midst of destruction, Gogol maintains, Bryullov was able to present "Man at his most beautiful, his woman breathes with all that is best in the world. Her eyes are as bright as stars, her naked breasts, which heave voluptuously and powerfully, promise the luxury of ecstasy. And this beautiful woman, this crown of creation, this ideal of the earth, must perish in the universal destruction along with the last contemptible creation. Tears, fear, sobbing -- they all seem beautiful to her."

Gogol's conclusion is also interesting as it indicates his striving for "universality": He proposes that "The Last Days of Pompeii", for its extraordinary scope and its gathering of all that is beautiful, may be compared with an opera -- since opera, indeed, unifies the triple world of art: painting, poetry and music." The tone of the article, as in other sections of the Arabesques, its references to other artists like Raphael and Michelangelo, confirm that Gogol was seriously interested in the art of painting, as, for instance, in "The Portrait." Thus, when Gogol left for Rome two years later, and moved in with a Russian who painted religious subjects, a certain Ivanov, the move appears logical as a manifestation of his passionate involvement, rather than as a search for a homosexual lover as Karlinsky suggests. Indeed, the rhapsody over the beauty of the figure of the woman in Bryullov's picture renders the theory of Gogol's so-called homosexuality both thin and far-fetched.

Concluding the second volume are a lecture on history and the well-known story, " Diary of a Madman ". " On the Movement of Nations at the End of the Fifth Century " is an extended essay on history, parts of which Gogol had read as his second lecture at the University of St. Petersburg in September of 1834. This is a fairly lengthy survey of the great migration that occurred in Asia and Europe at the end of the Fifth Century as a result of the fall of Rome: Gogol quotes Schlegel and Miller in support of his theses about the migration of the Germanic tribes from Asia. He presents the German pagan traditions with their customary picturesque details and we are not mistaken in seeing in them a variant of his Cossacks, though they speak in a different tongue. In contrast to the southern Romans, he sees that the Germans personified the new breed which became the hallmark of the new world. Their religion, their style of living, their temperament, the prototypical elements of their character, distinguished them entirely from the enlightened nations of the day." ⁵⁴ Gogol's view of these migrations is typically Romantic and consistent with his earlier notions about the importance of geography to the development of national character. ".The whole of Asia," he says, "was always ruled by the worship of the sun and the heavenly bodies. As they moved into Europe, the nations seldom saw the sun. The dense, majestic darkness of the European forests struck their primitive imagination with great force." Following Tacitus (whom, by the way, he never mentions), he supplies a wealth of details from the Germans' every day life, religion, and military habits. He has an eye for the place of women in this society: "The women, then and there, in the midst of battle, sucked their husbands' wounds, treated them and even carried them on their shoulders." He is as attentive to the life of other peoples in the general migration which contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire. Attila the Hun appears in colorful detail: his sack of Acquilea, his arrival at the walls of Rome, and the manner of his death and burial are all vividly described.

The wealth of details, the footnotes (which until now have not figured in Gogol's essays on history), the references to the work of other scholars and publications tell us that Gogol must have leaned heavily on readily available contemporary source material for his abridgments of general history. The vivid details are the hallmark of his insistence that history is less a science than it is a living picture of human life.

The Arabesques conclude with the celebrated "Diary of a Madman "(or,to be more precise,"Notes of a Madman "; since the "Diary of a Madman " is the accepted title in English, we retain it here.)

Not only does the story mark a departure from the tales of artistes that comprised "The Portrait " and "The Nevsky Prospect ", but the newly acquired theme of St. Petersburg is further developed. The hero winds up in "Spain" -- actually the place he imagines in his madness.This "Spain" is unique in Gogol's fiction, never to reappear. An investigation as to its genesis may prove illuminating.

The story concerns a middle-aged civil servant (chinovnik ) who, at the age of forty two , has barely reached the bottom rung of the Russian bureaucracy. Poor and maladjusted, he is a new kind of hero in Gogol's fiction, and will create a trend in Russian literature which will focus on the "little man" whose sad fate, according to Belinskii, became the predominant concern of the naturalist school's interest in philanthropy. Endless dissertations have been written on the sympathy that this genre is supposed to have created for "the insulted and the injured", to use Dostoyevsky's much-quoted phrase and for the "downtrodden" -- even Pushkin's poem, "Monument " , was to celebrate this trend. We do not deny the effect of the genre on the development of Russian social consciousness, or, for that matter, on literature in general indeed, in Dostoyevsky's work it is to play a crucial role; but our concern is with Gogol's own search for what he called "a new beginning" and his discovery of " Spain " as a suitable springboard.

The hero's name, Popryshchin can be derived from the etymology of the Russian word for " one's field or occupation," (poprishche ). Popryscin is the " professional " ( cinovnik ), a petty civil servant in the great bureaucracy of St. Petersburg. We first see him sulking in the Director's office, where he is sharpening quills. This is indeed a nonsensical occupation for a man of his age and pretensions. Pretensions, or rather ambitions, he has more than he needs: He imagines himself as better than anyone else who occupies a similar office; he is also convinced that he is still at the threshold of a splendid career, and that the future is still wide open for him.

At this juncture, the unexpected happens: he falls in love with the Director's daughter. She is, unsurprisingly, a new version of the pannocka, the " Polish governor's daughter" , the unattainable ideal as well as the source of his downfall. Splendid passages belabor her ethereal quality and her barely earthly appearance.

The story is written in the form of a diary (hence the title) whose entries are divided into three separate parts. The first, from October 3 to December 8, follows the accepted calendar. The second begins on April 43 in the year 2,000 and moves on in four entries to a date called "I don't remember". The third section is dated "the First" and ends four entries later on the 349th of February. ⁵⁵

The structure of the diary entries clearly indicates that something has happened to Popryscin between October 3 and December 8, after which he leaps into the year 2,000, which may be the new millennium. From here a completely different and unfamiliar calendrical system takes over. The diary falls thus into three distinct parts: the time when Popryscin is still inhabiting the old existing reality, though he is in the process of leaving it; the transition; and the "New Reality".

The old reality was characterized by the developing split in Popryscin's consciousness generated by his realization of the painful incongruity of his social situation. He is a tenth-grade official, forty-two years old, penniless, balding. He is divided by an ocean of social and generational differences from the Director's daughter with whom he is falling in love. His social aspirations seem hopeless.

Popryscin's dissatisfaction with existing reality becomes intolerable and he is on the lookout to change everything that blocks his advance. A highly unusual event in Gogol's fiction occurs: On the street he overhears two dogs talking. They are discussing him and his predicament over the Director's daughter. Driven by curiosity, Popryscin goes to visit the dogs, but his efforts to talk with them are unavailing. Instead he finds the dogs' correspondence and reads it, quoting. He learns the devastating news that Sophie, for that is the young lady's name, is betrothed, that a wedding has been planned by her parents, and that his chances of winning her hand are therefore nil.

At this point, a much-quoted, bitter monologue formulates his realization of his inadequacy, or, indeed, of the inconsistency of the human condition: "Why am I a titular councillor," he asks, "and for what reason am I a titular councillor? Perhaps I don't know what I am. " ( As Juliet insisted as she pondered Romeo's identity as her enemy, "A rose by any other name would be as sweet." ) In Gogol's formulation, the very foundations of one's existence are in question since there is no basis for differences in social status; once these differences become the source of despair,the very order of the world upon which they are based seems unjust and intolerable.

Now Popryscin does what Romantic heroes do when they discover the stifling determinism of reality: if they cannot change reality, they must change it in their mind and create a New Reality. Indeed, once he has understood that he is not necessarily a 10th-grade, middle-aged, balding civil servant, but perhaps a general in disguise, who can say that he is not what he has imagined himself to be?

The second and third parts of the diary demonstrate the way this New Reality functions and what happens to the hero once he steps out of the old. Predictably, nothing good. The first step is to discover who he now really is. Popryscin makes this discovery by chance when he reads the newspaper accounts of political events, especially the information that the Spanish throne is vacant. (There was, in fact, a crisis in the Spanish succession at the time Gogol wrote this story.) After some deliberation, it dawns on him that he, Popryscin, and everybody else, has been blinded by a misconception that he is a low-grade civil servant instead of recognizing the "truth", that he is the missing heir to the throne of Spain.

The second part of the diary deals with the effect of this discovery on his personality. He makes himself a royal mantle out of his overcoat; next, he refuses to go to the office and work there in his old capacity. The third part shows society's reaction to this discovery, for they declare him mad, take him to an insane asylum and there try to beat some sense into his head and persuade him that he is not the King of Spain. Popryscin cannot accept their well-intentioned version of the facts, since doing so would mean an admission of the failure of his new reality. Thus, being denied, Popryscin's madness intensifies and leads at last to acute physical and mental agony.

It is generally assumed that this plot, unusual in Gogol's oeuvre, had its genesis in his readings about the crisis of succession to the Spanish throne in Russian newspapers of the day. Though this explanation seems to be widely accepted and plausible, especially in criticism emanating from the Soviet Academy's edition (1938) of Gogol's Collected Works, ⁵⁶ it leaves the critical reader with a number of unanswered questions which demand a further inquiry into the origins of the Spanish elements in the tale. A fresh look at the title of the collection, Arabesques which is neither a Russian nor a Ukrainian word, never again to appear in Gogol's work, arouses speculation. In Russian, it is a loan-word which entered the language in the 18th Century in the poems of Derzavin. ⁵⁷ In Italian, German and Spanish, the adaptation occurred sooner, some time in the 18th Century, as a result of the growing Turkish influence in European political affairs, and especially of the extensive influence of things Moorish in Spanish culture. ⁵⁸

The most common definition of the word "arabesque" as it is applied to architecture, music, dance, and literature, denotes a type of decoration relying on pseudo-Arabic hieroglyphs, a repetitiveness of geometrical patterns and stylized ornamental design. The word also means trifles, or small, decorative notes , or also delicate elaborations on a Romantic theme. In what sense was Gogol using the word? In the introduction to Volume One he seems to indicate that he means merely a "trifle" but we are familiar enough now with his deviousness and delight in playing hide-and-seek and suspect that we might do well not to accept this definition at face value.

A search of Gogoliana has produced slim results and reveals only one contemporary instance of the use of the word: when Gogol's sister mentions in her memoirs a visit Gogol made to the family estate in June of 1832 around the time of the Arabesques' publication, she tells us that her brother actively participated in redecorating the house. He even painted a room and decorated the ceiling with "arabeski ", ⁵⁹ that is, with arabesques. So the word may, in Gogol's mind, have connoted a specific type of decoration rather than mere trifles or doodlings.

An incident from much later in Gogol's life may also be pertinent here: After the furor over the publication of the Selected Passages from the Correspondence with Friends, Gogol, defending himself against accusations hat they represented a harmful departure from his traditional concerns, picked up a copy of the Arabesques and held it up to Ivan Turgenev as proof that he had already been saying many of the same things in the Arabesques. The episode indicates that -- whether at the time of publication, or only later in retrospect, he regarded the Arabesques as more significant than mere doodling.

The number of Arabic motifs in the Arabesques suggests that the Spanish theme is closely linked to two important features of Cufic (Arabic) script: First, despite the common perception of its qualities as being merely decorative, at least in the mind of non-Arabic critics, Cufic is deeply ingrained with the concept of the holiness of every art form, including writing, which obliges the artist to exercise his profession for the sole purpose of praising the Holy Name. Further, Islam prohibits any pictorial representation of God. Frequently, therefore, "arabesques" are not so much meaningless decorative elements but, instead, hieroglyphs for the most Holy Name whose intent is to induce worshipful devotion, as is the case with more representational Christian icons. ⁶⁰

Gogol's ars poetica in the Arabesques comes very close to these religious principles. "The Nevsky Prospect " and "The Portrait " certainly testify to his seriousness. It seems clear that Gogol has adopted the term "arabesques " to suggest the "chosen" nature of the artist, the sacredness of his profession, which nevertheless should be kept secret from the uninitiated in its resultant disguise in the garb of trifles.

Another aspect of the Spanish motif in the "Diary " can be traced back to Pushkin and Zhukovsky, with whom the beginning writer Gogol had developed a fruitful literary relationship. ⁶¹ Important in this regard is Pushkin's knowledge of Spanish literature and his influence on Gogol. Pushkin knew several foreign languages and was well versed in Western literature, though he was a late-comer to Spanish. His discovery of Don Quixote had a great impact on him as did Cervantes' short stories, the Novellas Exemplares. By the time of Pushkin's death, there were two Russian translations of the Novellas available, both of which were in Pushkin's library. We also know that Pushkin, desiring to read Cervantes in the original, set out to learn Spanish in the 1830's, and that one of Cervantes' novellas, "The Gypsy Girl", served him as a teaching text.⁶² He made a translation of it and it may have served him as an inspiration for his poem, "The Gypsies ". We also know from Gogol himself in his "Confession of an Author" ⁶³, that Pushkin had suggested that he read Cervantes, indeed, that he should emulate the Spanish master. According to Gogol, Pushkin talked of the Novellas Exemplares in glowing terms and extolled them as great literature, though he suggested that they would not have been enough to establish Cervantes' fame had he not written Don Quixote as well. Gogol said that this advice marked the beginning of his interest in writing a similar novel, the novel which was to be Dead Souls.

This being the case, it can safely be assumed that Pushkin and Gogol had discussed Cervantes and perhaps Spanish literature in general, and that Pushkin's advice to Gogol may have resulted in the Spanish motif in "Diary of a Madman ".

Zhukovsky's name may also be significant in this regard, since Zhukovsky was the Russian translator of Don Quixote, the first edition of which appeared in Russian in 1815. There, is, nevertheless no evidence in literary history of his influence upon Gogol aside from Gogol's enthusiastic review in the Selected Passages of Zhukovsky's translation of the Iliad.

Contemporary interest in things Spanish, on the other hand, was not limited to Zhukovsky's translation of Don Quixote. Pushkin, or Gogol, at the time participated in a veritable discovery of the golden age of Spanish literature. Lope de Vega, Calderon and Cervantes especially, were exalted by Romantic writers all over Europe as their historical progenitors. The Russian Romantics shared the enthusiasm having borrowed it from the Germans. In this respect, the critic Edward Glaser has observed : "such is the indebtedness of German Romantics to Miguel Cervantes Saavedra that he can rightly be termed the master from whom they received their literary education. .. While formerly the emphasis had been placed either on Don Quixote's being a satire of an outmoded literary fashion or an unwarranted attack against the ideals of Knight errantly, the German Romantics held that a deeper significance lay in the divergence between Don Quixote's world and that of his squire. When they discovered that it mirrored the conflict between ideal and reality, they radically changed European thinking with regard to Spain's greatest novel, and initiated a new era in Cervantes studies." ⁶⁴

It does seem likely that the Spanish elements in the "Diary of a Madman " may have resulted more from this literary influence than from Gogol's reading of newspaper accounts of contemporary Spanish political events.

The present title of the story in Russian, "Notes of a Madman ", was not the original one. The available MS indicates the Gogol first tried two variants: "The Notes of a Mad Musician "and later, "Fragments (Shreds) from the Notes of a Madman ". It seems significant that the evolution of the title points to an impetus which gave birth to the story and also solves a mystery which has been the source of some guesswork among critics. The issue here is the identity of the "musician", or of the "madman " himself.

Conventional explanation relies on an interest on the part of Russian Romantics in the " Kuenstlerroman ", or novel about artists and musicians who, as slightly or completely mad, became favorite heroes in all kinds of literary exercises. Gogol probably intended to make his hero a musician, but later changed his mind so that the protagonist became a typical Russian bureaucrat or "small man". This change of title is significant, as it reflects Gogol's indebtedness to the great Romantic writer, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann had at the time an enormous impact on Russian literature; the "Russian Hoffmannists" wrote under the spell both of his works and, perhaps more important, of his colorful personality as well.

Two points suggest themselves in deciphering the puzzle of the title's genesis. First, the "mad musician" of the original title probably refers not to the hero of the final version, Popryscin, as is usually assumed, but rather to Hoffmann himself, whose biography as well as some of whose fictional characters coincide remarkably with the main outline of the first part of Gogol's story, that is, with Popryscin's unhappy love-affair up to the emergence of its Spanish elements. In 1809, Hoffmann had an unhappy love affair which become for him a source of fictional inspiration for many years to come. Hoffmann was thirty-two at the time, and eked out a living as a starving music teacher. He fell in love with one of his pupils, the fifteen year-old Julia Marc who was the daughter of a highly respected, aristocratic family in the city of Bramberg. Age and social differences separated the aspiring lovers. Hoffmann recorded the sad details in his diaries, whose intensity and despair come very close to the high-pitched emotions that characterize Popryscin's"diary". Hoffmann's life story had been published in Gogol's day and, aside from these biographies, Hoffmann himself had popularized many colorful details in his own fiction, notably in the short story with the remarkable title,"Report on the Latest Fortunes of the Dog Berganza " ⁶⁵

One of Hoffmann's American biographers, Hewett-Thayer, writes that "the experience never entirely faded (from Hoffmann's consciousness) but took on a new meaning. In almost immediate reminiscence, conceived as a kind of poetic farewell, he wrote the little sketch "Sombra Adorata ", one of the Kreisleriana..." Ombra Adorata" are the first words of an aria in a forgotten opera on the theme of Romeo and Juliet. The symbolism of the title is obvious. Soon Hoffmann presented the experience more at length and in a radically different mood in "Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza. " Hoffmann linked his narrative to one of Cervantes' Novellas Exemplars, the " El Casement anginas " (The Deceitful Marriage ) ,to which there is attached a long conversation between two dogs, Scape and Berganza. In later tales this devotion, at the time seemingly unrewarded, reappears with ever changing gusto and receives its final form and culmination, in the unfinished novel Kater Murr. The poet's dream, the artist's ideal, is incorporated in the person of his loved one, but the object: an endless quest, for the goal of longing must never be attained, since the vision would fade away into the light of the common day." ⁶⁶ It seems clear therefore that Gogol's original intention with regard to a mad musician affected by an unhappy love affair can be understood as his transformation of the details of Hoffmann's sad biography.

It also seems clear that Hoffmann's interest in Cervantes corroborated Pushkin's advice to emulate the tales of the Spanish master. Certainly, Gogol's talking dogs can be traced first to Hoffmann and from there to Cervantes, from whose work Hoffmann himself had borrowed. Indeed, Cervantes' talking dogs seem to have been popular among the romantics. Thus, for example, the Austrian writer Christof Kuffner, himself a great admirer of Hoffmann, published a short story in 1821 with the interesting, if cumbersome, title, "A Historic-Aesthetic Talk of a Learned Grandson of the Dog Berganza Dealing with the Great Characteristics and Artistic Talent of the Nation of Dogs". ⁶⁷

Gogol's story reworks both Cervantes' and Hoffmann's plots. His portrayal of the unhappy love affair of a middle-aged man carefully observes his pining away over the socially unattainable maiden in such details as his age, the unhappy consequences of this affliction, his madness and the delusion that he is the King of Spain. It might also be useful as further substantiation to take a look at both Cervantes' and Hoffmann's stories. Cervantes deals with the tale of Alfarez Campuzano, a brave soldier, Ensign in the Spanish forces, who was bitterly deceived by a certain Don~a Estefania de Caycedo. The mysterious Estefania turns out to be a shrewd, highly sophisticated prostitute, who "marries" the amorous officer just to fleece him of all of his possessions -- within one short week and then disappears as if she had never existed. What is left behind besides bitter memories, is a highly virulent case of venereal disease Campuzano has contracted as a result of the affair.

The story of his deception is told by him after a long time spent in the municipal hospital in Valladolid where he barely survived. In the hospital, the incredible happened: he overheard two dogs talking. About this experience he later says to a companion, "Many times, indeed, since I heard them, I have been disposed not to believe myself, but to regard [it] as a dream .The matters, they [the dogs] talked of were various and weighty, such as might rather have been discussed by learned men than by the mouths of dogs; so that, since I could not have invented them out of my own head, I have come, in spite of myself, to believe that I did not dream, and that the dogs did talk."

In Hoffmann's story, the narrator on his way home one night from a party chances upon a large black dog which is hiding in the bushes in the town park. This black dog turns out to be the reincarnation of Cervantes' dog Berganza. Only one dog figures in Hoffmann's tale since his companion has not been "resurrected", so that Berganza converses with the narrator himself rather than with a fellow canine. The story the dog narrates is familiar to the narrator, since it is about him, the musician Johannes Keppler.It is, of course, the story of the unhappy love affair between Keppler and the young lady Cecilia, in whose house the dog Berganza used to live before he was chased out in the same manner as the unhappy musician. Hoffmann's reincarnation of the original Berganza turns out to be a learned character who delivers authoritative judgments about the affairs of society, art, literature, especially the theories on art of the Romantics.

For our purposes, the most relevant parts of the story concern the appearance of a rival, a dashing, socially acceptable young officer who wins the competition with Keppler for Cecilia's hand. The dog Berganza witnesses Keppler's downfall, his humiliation by his rival, and the consummation of the marriage in the bedroom on the wedding night. (The dog's letters in Gogol's story by the way, daringly include sexually insinuating comments about Popryscin's beloved and her officer lover.)

It seems more than plausible, therefore, that Gogol was familiar with Hoffmann's adaptation of Cervantes' story and that together they inspired him to rework the topic with an additional twist or two of his own. The first part of his narrative relies on Hoffmann's version and deals with Popryscin's dissatisfaction with his social position and his unrequited love for the Director's daughter. Gogol also retains Cervantes' version of the conversation as between two dogs, not between one dog and the narrator. He also keeps the epistolary form, perhaps emulating the diary form of Hoffmann's biography. ⁶⁸ The conversation of the dogs, on the other hand, loses much of its sophisticated, philosophical content and changes to a typically Gogolian poslost' about food, and their dog-like preferences for other dogs. From the tale of unrequited love Gogol retains the basic motivation of both versions in an inferior social status and the protagonist's position as imposter: Cervantes' Campuzeno pretends to wealth and a higher social standing than he actually has, while Hoffmann's Keppler, the poor music teacher, also assumes that high society will accept him once they have employed him as a teacher of a young woman of rank. The difference in age also plays a significant role in both prototypes, as it does in Gogol's tale. Having exhausted the similarities of the "Diary of a Madman " with Cervantes' and Hoffmann's fictions, it maybe well to have a look at Gogol's exploitation of the Spanish motif in Popryscin's discovering his "real" identity as the King of Spain. Cervantes seems to provide the key to our inquiry: in the "Exemplary Tales "there is a story of a "Ricentiate Vidriera, or Doctor Glass Case",who may have served as the prototype of Popryscin's remarkable metamorphosis into a Spanish king. It concerns a certain vagabond, a young man who calls himself Tomas Rodaja, though his real identity is as unknown to him as it is to the reader. "Tomas" becomes the servant of a student much like Cervantes himself, and as such is able to receive a University education, thus rising in social degree. His new position becomes ambiguous when his master graduates, and leaves behind not just the University, but also Tomas, as an unemployed, overeducated vagabond.The situation is typical for Cervantes' fiction: the uneasy of a person who finds himself in a social milieu to which he aspires but which will not admit him on a permanent basis.Gogol's pretenders suffer acutely from the same foredoomed pretensions.

Tomas' further adventures roughly repeat Cervantes' own life: he becomes a soldier of fortune, participates in campaigns in Italy, and after many tribulations returns to Spain, where misfortune reaches out again to make his life miserable. A fashionable young lady falls in love with him, and when he spurns her advances, she makes him drink a "magic" potion. The result is not as anticipated; instead of falling in love with the young lady, he falls ill just like Sancho Panza, who fell ill from Don Quixote's wonder-working potion. Barely recovering from this illness, Tomas finds that his body may have recovered, but his mind has been transformed. He imagines himself as being made of glass, highly fragile on contact with anything terrestrial. Simultaneously, he discovers that his new condition enables him to see the "real" meaning of the world in much the same way that Gogol's Popryscin discovers himself to be the Spanish king. ⁶⁹

Gogol's borrowings from Cervantes are now clear. Popryscin becomes the King of Spain in tribute to the Spanish King of Literature, Cervantes. Just as the first part of the story constituted a tribute to Hoffmann, the second, Spanish, part marks an integration of Cervantes' life and his fiction into Gogol's own fictional world. As for newspaper reports about the question of the Spanish succession, the abdication of Ferdinand II, the nomination of Isabella in his place and the resulting chaos in Spanish political affairs, they have merely added another dimension to Gogol's exploitation of the Spanish motif.Indeed, we can discover still further echoes of Cervantes' 16th Century Spain, with its kings, its Inquisition, and especially, with its Grand Inquisitor ⁷⁰ , as well as more direct borrowings from the political troubles of Gogol's own time.

References to16th Century Spain reveal not only the confusion in Popryscin's mind as conventional interpreters would have it, but also the revelation that Gogol, as narrator of things Spanish, stands in the same relation as Hoffmann's to the Spanish genius, just as Hoffmann was an imitator and descendant as well as literary equal to the great creator of madmen, and heralds a new force in Russian literature.

Cervantes' life story was available to Gogol's contemporaries in Russian translation. ⁷¹ Gogol must have known its details. Such knowledge would certainly explain Popryscin's choice of Spain as his refuge in an invented reality: From the dismal facts of his life as a Russian scribe he has been delivered to the haven of an insane asylum in the guise of the King of Spain. But this was not the final station in his flight. Unable to flee asylum physically, he makes his escape through a mental leap, landing on an imaginary troika on its way to Italy, where Gogol was himself to land shortly after the story's publication -- to the sea which ' lies close to Russia', and the ultimate reverse flight of all misunderstood souls, back to his mother and the womb. We arrive at last to one of the most bewildering moments in the final sentence which closes the narration: "And do you know that the Dey of Algiers has a boil just under his nose?" ⁷²

A reconstruction of the successive stages of Popryscin's flight from reality offers the following picture: His initial escape leads him to a fictive Spain, prompted by newspaper reports about actual political events of the 19th Century, though it carries him still further back in time to the 16th Century of Philip II and to the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor's tortures force the hero to fall farther, first away from Russia to Italy, and from there to an imaginary Russia, where the "Mother" lives. And then comes the sentence about the Dey of Algiers. What until now was a logical progression dissolves in the final words about the Algerian Dey which seem to make no sense. An attempt at unraveling the genesis of this mysterious remark must first consider the ambiguous position of the sentence in Gogol's MS. Studying the history of the censorship of this story, researchers have uncovered the fact that this particular sentence was tampered with by the censors. According to these studies, Gogol's original sentence was not about the Dey of Algiers, but about the French King. But the logic still eludes us -- why this substitution? There seems today to be little enough difference between the two, if we assume that the genesis of the story lies only in contemporary newspaper reports about the political turmoil in Spain, and that the Spanish motif is only intended to illuminate the growing derangement of Popryscin's mind. Certainly, there is no apparent difference in quality between the Dey of Algiers and the French King as far as Popryscin's delusions go, since the sentence makes no sense either way and apparently is indicative only of the instability of Popryscin's mind, which in his grief cannot fix on a single subject for any appreciable length of time.

On the other hand, since it is clear that the Spanish borrowings constitute Gogol's tribute to Cervantes, the mystery can be cleared. Had Gogol indeed used the expression,"the French King", in his original version, then it would have indicated the actual political references in the story to newspaper reports of events of the period, however irrelevant. The King of France was not to be ridiculed in any Russian literary journal of the day , since Russia, as an ally of the France, could not allow disrespectful references. For this reason, it is argued, the censors provided the substitution of the Algerian Dey (or Bey, in other version). It is, of course, entirely possible that censorship, which Gogolhimself curses in a letter to Pushkin ⁷³, is responsible for the manipulation of the final sentence and of other parts of the story as well. On the other hand, there are a number of indications that the " Algerian Dey" must have been in Gogol's original reading. For one thing , it was with this phrase that the story was published in all three editions of Gogol's works during his lifetime. ⁷⁴ By 1848, and especially by 1851, the actual political sensibilities of official Russia would not have prohibited Gogol from changing the text back to its presume original "French King", relying on the Aksaakov copy book, the earliest extant MS version of the story. ⁷⁵ (It should be noted that the actual, original MS is not extant, as the version is from a copy made by Akasakov, but the first published version presents the Algerian Dey variant.)

If our interpretation of Gogol's interest in the Spanish motif is correct, then it really begins with the title, Arabesques, and ends in a straightforward,logical manner with the final sentence, that is, with the reference to the Algerian Dey.

The "French King" version strips the narration of its internal logic and relegates the Spanish theme to the superficial level of actual political reference. The "Algerian Dey", on the other hand, points to the hidden idea central to the story and to the entire collection as well, to Gogol's literary agenda and to his later Confessions. ⁷⁶ At any rate, this sentence indicates Gogol's familiarity with certain details of Cervantes' life, since the latter spent some five years as a captive of the pirates of Algiers.

After the Battle of Lepanto in 1575, where Cervantes lost his left hand, the ship taking him back from Italy to Spain was intercepted by pirates of the Algerian Dey, and Cervantes, whom the pirates of the Dey considered to be some important person , a shishka , in colloquial Russian, was kept prisoner for five long years in Algiers. Cervantes tried to escape at least five times, but was captured each time, until he was finally ransomed by the Brothers of the Trinitarian Order. This bitter experience of captivity, his losing hope of ever being able to escape, and of ever being able to return to Spain, provided the subject matter for a number of his plays,poetry, and especially the long narrative poem," The Captive" . Does it not, therefore make logical sense to assume that Gogol remained consistent in his story to the very end, and that Popryscin's final sentence refers hermetically back to the progenitor of the Spanish motif, to the great predecessor whose life and fiction dealt with the same concerns as Gogol's, with the themes of madness and captivity and of ultimate deliverance? Would it not make eminent sense to see in Popryscin a continuation of the literary and biographical prototype created by Cervantes, now in Russian garb: a new Spanish King, persecuted by the Inquisition of Philip II, who makes a desperate attempt to flee to Italy, at least within the prison of his mind, and then reverts back to his Mother, though he ultimately lands as captive of the Algerian Dey?

But what about the nose of the Algerian Dey, irritated by that bump (shishka )?In discussing this last sentence, English-speaking critics who must read the story in translation, are considerably misled by the resulting loss of an ambiguity conveyed by the Russian original. The word shishka is usually translated as a boil, a bump, or an irritation; it can also be taken for a slang expression for "an important person" or a bigwig (the Italian pezzo grosso ). The original Russian sentence thus may suggest the ambiguity of a double-entendre unsustainable in translation. Hence the "boil" under the nose of the Algerian Dey of English translations, while the Russian sentence also means, there is a bigwig, an important person, under the very nose of the Algerian. Were a double translation possible, it would certainly support the understanding that Gogol had not just a "boil" in mind, but that it was Cervantes, there under the nose of the Algerian Dey, and, that it would convey the notion that his presence was the source of irritation to the very nose of the Algerian Dey.⁷⁷

Finally, this interpretation allows us to see a parallel in the story to Gogol's own predicament: His attempt to escape Russian -- and by extension, Ukrainian reality by becoming first a Hoffmann, and then a Cervantes, inevitably leads his hero to confinement in an insane asylum as a captive, like Cervantes, of the barbarians, or,to use his own term,of the "traitors of Christ",khristoprodavtsy . It was important to him that the story remain open-ended, rather than closing on a bitter, insane note or a prophecy of permanent captivity. Instead, Gogol achieved a note of hope for escape and spiritual liberation in remembrance of his great predessor, whose eventual escape from his Algerian captors is happily a matter of record.

The Spanish borrowings thus emerge as a crucial signpost in the development of Gogol's ars poetica. ⁷⁸ In search of models to emulate, he found Hoffmann and Cervantes, and as he followed in their footsteps, especially those of Cervantes, he added the dimension to things Spanish of the Moorish concept of arabesques , wherein he both revealed and concealed himself to the world at large. But with his identification came also his realization that neither the 16th nor the 19th Century world had much use for madmen or their creators. No wonder that less than a year after the publication of the Arabesques and the tremendous success of his play," The Inspector General" , Gogol escaped Russia to follow his idol and literary progenitor, Cervantes.

Footnotes to Chapter Five

1. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) St. Ptbg. t. 1. str. 118-377. . .All references to the Russian text in this chapter refer to this edition. Here quoted as N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. ( 1898 ).The complete English translation is available in N.Gogol:Arabesques. Tr.A.Tulloch, Intr.C.Proffer. Ardis, 1982. Here quoted as Arabesques.

2. Arabesques.p.3

3. Arabesques, p.5.

4. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) t. 1. str. 119. My translation.L.T.

5. ibid.p.120.

6. ibid.p.121.

7. ibid.p.121.

8. ibid p.123.

9. The "spiritual crisis" - as is frequently mentioned in criticism - refers to Gogol's guilt feelings about his doublts concerning the basic validity of religion.

10. V.V. Veresayev: Gogol' v zhizni, op. cit. p. 168.

11. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 124.

12. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 127.

13. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 127.

14. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 132.

15. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 135

16. ibid.

17. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 152.

18. ibid.

19. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 153.

20. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 154; also in Ehre: op. cit. p. 59

21. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 154; also in Ehre: op. cit. p. 59

22. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 185.

23. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 186.

24. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 186.

25. ibid. p. 189

26. ibid.

27. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 189.

28. ibid. p. 200

29. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 200.

30. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 202.

31. ibid. p. 203

32. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 204.

33. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 307.

34. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 229.

35. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 238.

36. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 245.

37.N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 254.

38. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 254.

39. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 261.

40. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 265.

41. N.V. Gogol': Sobr. Soch. (1898) str. 266; Arabesques, Ardis, p. 145.

42. ibid.

43. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 149.

44. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 176.

45. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 181.

46. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 184.

47. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 185.

48. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 186.

49. Ibid.

50. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 190.

51. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 191.

52. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 191.

53. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 192.

54. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 194.

55. ibid

56. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 197

57. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 200

58. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 203

59. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 204

60. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 205

61. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 207

62. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 210

63. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 214

64. Arabesques, Ardis, p. 217

65. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (1938) t. 3. str. 65. English: Gogol: The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. tr. and intr. by Ronald Wilks, Penguin Books, 1972. p. 42. In some cases I preferred Wilks' translation to L. Kent's. The references to the Wilks' translation are given as: Wilks tr. op. cit. My own translation are indicated by my initials (L.T.)

66. My own translation (L.T.)

67. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (1938) Isd. A.N. SSSR. t. 1

68. Slovar' russkogo yazyka, Imp. A.N. St. Ptbg. 1895. t. 1. str. 59. also: M. Vassmer: Russisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch, Hedileberg, 1953. p. 75.

69. Dictionaire Etymologique (Larousse), p. 58. See also: Joan Coromonas: Dictionarie Etimologica, Madrid, p. 87 (Arabesco: 1567. Del. it. arbesco, id. deriv. de arabo por ser este adorno caracteristico de arte del mululman, que no admite representacion de imageries.)

70. V.V. Verasayev: Gogol' v zhizni. op. cit. str. 436

71. S.A.A. Maududi: Fundametnals of Islam. Islamic Publications, Lahore (Pakistan), 1976. p. 62. Interesting to note, that one of the pieces of the Arabesques: Life, served as a "calligraphy exercise for Gogol". Arabesques, Ardis, p. 26. Note also, that Akakii Akakievich in the Overcoat was also fond of calligraphy. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (1938) Isd. A.N. SSSR. t. 1 str. 145-46.

72. G.P. Makogonenko: Gogol' i Pushkin. Sov. Pisatel', L. 1985.

73. L. B. Turkevic: Cervantes in Russia. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1950. p. 47-50. also: L.B. Turkevic: Spanish Literature in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1735-1964. Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, NJ, 1967. p. 36-37. Also Ocherki istorii ispano-russkikh literaturnykh otnosheniy XVI-XIX vv. Isd. Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1964. str. 159. Servantes i vsemirnaya literatura. pod. red. I.Sh. Balashova, A.D. Mikhaylova, I.A. Teteryan, Isd. Hauka, M.-L. 1969. str. 184-195.

74. N.V. Gogol': Poln. Sobr. Soch. (1938). t. VII, Avtoskaya Ispoved', str. 439-440

75. Edward Glaser: An Austrian Romatic's View of Cervantes' Captivity in Algiers. in Alanes Cervantinos, tomo IV p. 101-102. Institute Miguel de Cervantes.

76. Norman W. Ingham: E.T.A. Hoffmann's REception in Russia. Jal Verlag. Wuerzburg, 1974

77. Biographies of Hoffman were published in Russia as early as 1830. See: Ingham. op. cit. p. 281. also: Posledniye dni zhizni i smerti Gofmana, Syn Otechestva i Severnyy Arkhiv. 1831, No. 4. str. 217-236; Kratkoye Zhizneopisaniye Zhizni Gofmana, Raduga. 1832. kn. 3 str. 214-215

78. E.T.A. Hoffman: Dictungen und Schriften. Gesammtausgabe in 14 Bd. Weimar, 1924. Bd. XIII. Die Vier Grossen Gespraeche..." Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza"

79. Harvey W. Hewett: Hoffmann: Author of Tales, Princeton University Press, Princeton, JH 1948.

80. "Historisch aesthetische Rede eines gelehrten Urenkels des Hundres Berganza ueber die grossen Eigenschaften un Kusnttalente des Hundegeschlectes:. Hewett-Thayer: op. cit. p. 40-41.

81. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Three Exemplary Novels, tr. S. Putnam. Cassel & Col, Ltd. London, 1952. p. 25.

82. Hoffman, op. cit. p. 6.

83. For an interconnection between Hoffmann's diaries and his fiction, especially his use of the Berganza story see: Hewett-Thayer op. cit. p. 15

84. The Portable Cervantes, tr. and ed. by S. Putnam. The Viking Portale Library, p. 114.

85. N.V. Gogol; op. cit., str. 208.' "Teper' peredo mnoy vse otkryto, teper' ya vizhu vse kak no padone". ("Everything ahs become clear now before me. I see Everything as if on the palm of my hand." My translation L.T.)

86. The Arabesques has different places, where many of these issues are dealt with, so i.e. the Inquisition is dealt with briefly in the essays: On the Middle Ages p. 39-40, Ardis The Arbavic cultural influences in the Mediterranean area in Al Marmun p. 134-145 ibid. also in The Movements of Nations after the End of the 15-th c. p. 211, passim, ibid. The schoolmasterly interpretations of history remind one of Poprishchin's ravings about the nature of history, the moon, etc. He is, in a way, a caricature of the "scholarly" Gogol.

87. Bibliographiya russkikh perevodov i kriticheskoy literatury na russkom yazykye, 1763-1957. Isd. Vcesoyuznoy knizhnoy palaty. M. 1959. str. 12-13. (zh. I. Pavlovskiy).

88. N.V. Gogol': op. cit.str. 260.

89. Laurie Ash: Censorship in N. Gogol's Diary of Mandman. RLT No. 14 (Winter). 1976. Ash presents a good account of the history of censorship pertaining to Gogol's story, especially to this final sentence. See also: N.V. Gogol': op. cit. p. 698, 704. also, vol. VI, p. 533, where the earliest version of the MS is described onlya s "MS extant" (doshedshaya do nas pukopis'), and is dated as Sept.-Oct. 1834

90. N.V. Gogol': op. cit. p. 697.

91. ibid. passim

92. see biographical notes by B. I. Shenrok in Soch. N.V. Gogolya, izd. 15-oye. red. N.S. Tikhonravova. t. 1. 1898, str. V-VI

93. N.V. Gogol': op. cit. p. 700.

94. William Byron: Cervantes: A Biography. Doubleday, 1978. -. 200 passim.

95. N.V. Gogol': op. cit.: "A znaete li, chto u alzhirskogo deya pod samym nosom shishka." p. 57

96. D. Fanger: op. cit. p. 260 ("Almost all of Gogol's writing is in some important sense about literature.")

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

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