 |
A poll tax of souls Nikolai Gogol was a wildly inventive writer. Robert A Maguire's translation of Dead Souls is a revelation for AS Byatt The Guardian Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol translated by Robert A Maguire 512pp, Penguin, £8.99 Dead Souls is, was, one of my entries for Humiliation, the game David Lodge invented about confessing great books you've never read. I had a mental image of it, compounded from criticism I'd read of other Russian works. I imagined it as a gloomy, socially critical, profound book about Russianness, expansive as the steppes. I have just read it because I am excited by Penguin's powerful new Russian translations, and because of a lively email correspondence I have been having with two Russians. It was nothing like I had imagined. Moreover, it was one of those masterpieces that change the way you see other books, forever. It could be described as a linguistic phantasmagoria - full of people and things with a hallucinatory reality that rushes into the surreal. Nabokov, in a great, dogmatic essay on it, saw the book as a phenomenon of a peculiar "life-generating syntax", in which Gogol's sentences called up a world which could be capriciously developed or abandoned. Gogol called Dead Souls a "poem", and in some ways the English work it is nearest to is The Canterbury Tales, where rhyme and rhythm add to, even create, the satisfactory unexpectedness of the detail of people and things. Gogol also resembles Dickens in the
way in which everything
he started to imagine transformed itself and began to wriggle with
life. This
is hard to assess in translation, but Robert Maguire has made a text
which
corresponds to Nabokov's excitement - from the moment when we meet
Chichikov,
"not overly fat, not overly thin" entering his room in a hostelry,
"with cockroaches peeping out like prunes from every corner". He is
accompanied by his servant Petruska, who brought in with his greatcoat
"a
special odour all his own that had also been imparted to the next thing
he
brought in, a sack containing the sundries of a manservant's toilet". I
admire the way in which Maguire has kept his own brilliantly variegated
vocabulary away from 20th-century phrases, without ever looking parodic
or
antiquarian. The title, Dead Souls, must be one of the most evocative titles ever. It is to do on a superficial level (and superficies matter in this text) with the possibility in Tsarist Russia of owning "souls", which is how the ownership of serfs is described. Landowners were taxed on their payroll of serfs, which included those who had died between tax-assessments. Chichikov has formed the ingenious
plan of buying the dead
souls of various landowners in order to use his list of fictive slaves
to buy
real land to "resettle" them and to become a landowner himself.
Chichikov himself is also of course, a dead soul, a man self-designed
to be
unremarkable, agreeable and acceptable, a smiling confidence-trickster
whose
plots, as Nabokov points out, are neither very clever nor very
coherent. Gogol
wrote an ironic apostrophe to the unpraised writer who observes "the
dreadful appalling mass of trifles that mires our lives, all that lies
deep
inside the cold, fragmented quotidian characters with which our
earthly, at
times bitter and tedious path swarms..." "Equally wondrous", he
claims, "are the lenses that survey suns, and those that convey the
movements of imperceptible insects." An example of Gogol's method might be the casual creation of an indefinite table-guest: "...It was hard to say definitely who she was, a married lady or a spinster, a relative, the housekeeper or a woman simply living in the house - something without a cap, about 30, and wearing a multicoloured shawl. There are people that exist on this earth not as objects in themselves, but as extraneous specks or tiny spots on objects. They sit in the same place, they hold their heads in the same way and you are almost ready to take them for a piece of furniture..." But, he adds slyly, you should hear
them in the maids' room
or the pantry. Chichikov consists of his plumpness,
his nice clothes, his
britzska, his plans. He has a travelling box and a snuff box. He has
his own
Gogol-like reflections on human absurdity - at a ball, which he thinks
of as an
un-Russian thing, he imagines "an adult, a full-grown man suddenly
leaps
out all in black, plucked like a bird and wrapped up tight like a
little devil,
and then starts pumping his legs up and down." Chichikov wonders what a
writer would make of this phenomenon. "Even in a book it would be just
as
senseless as in real life. What exactly is it? Moral? Immoral? The
devil only
knows what it is. You'd spit in disgust and then just close the book." The authorial voice, asking the same question about the hero - what is he, is he moral or immoral? - answers with a terrifying metaphor: "Everything undergoes a rapid transformation in man. Before you know it, a dreadful worm has grown within him, and tyrannically sucked off all the vital juices for itself." The living Chichikov is inhabited by such a worm. One of his most human moments is when he reads the list of the names of dead souls he has acquired. The reading briefly brings back the dead to life. The written names of the dead souls are people. "When he looked at those sheets of
paper, at the
muzhiks who had in fact once been muzhiks, who had worked, ploughed,
got drunk,
driven wagons, deceived their masters, or maybe had simply been good
muzhiks,
he was possessed by a strange feeling that he himself did not
understand." He starts turning the dead into live
stories - unable, like
Gogol, not to embroider, not to breathe life into the inanimate. He
finds a
muzhik with an unconsciably long name: "Oh, what a long one, he's
sprawled
all over the line! Were you a master-craftsman or just a muzhik, and
what sort
of death carried you off? Was it in a pothouse or did some lumbering
string of
carts run over you while you were sleeping in the middle of the road?"
These reflections sprout into full-blown imaginary people and
life-stories to
Chichikov's irritated horror. Gogol's own story is as strange and
uncanny as his tales.
Another reason why I never read Dead Souls is that I am reluctant to
embark on
unfinished works - I like closure. I've never attempted Edwin Drood or
The Man
Without Qualities. At the end of part one, Gogol leaves Chichikov, in a
famous
and much-quoted lyrical description, rushing out in his troika into the
magical
and endless space that is "Rus", the spiritual home of Russians who
all love fast driving. Part one was written not in While unable to finish - or to start
on - part two, he wrote
and published Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends. In
these
extraordinarily pompous documents he gives moralising advice to
everyone. A
governor's wife must not pay visits but must find out all the unsavoury
secrets
of her husband's civil servants' wives, convert and chastise them. I
had
assumed in my ignorance that a novel called Dead Souls about the system
of
slave-owning was going to be a satirical criticism of it. But in his
letter To
a Russian Landowner Gogol tells him that he must tell the peasants to
work
because God commanded them to work in the sweat of their brows, and
gives
instructions on how to punish them, and the pointlessness of teaching
them to
read. (They will be too exhausted by good, hard work anyway.) Gogol became very religious, and
concerned for the safety of
his own soul and the burden of his sins. Urged on by a spiritual
advisor called
Father Matthew, and by Count Alexey Tolstoi, he made a burned offering
of his
remaining manuscripts in his stove. He then starved himself to death,
having
lost the drive to live. He ended his life in agony, festooned with
leeches and
soaked in cold water. Dead Souls has that free and joyful
energy of a work of art
that is the first of its kind, with no real models to fear or emulate
(like
Chaucer again, Shakespeare, or Sterne, whom Gogol admired). Without
Gogol's
imagination Dostoevsky would have been quite different, and Bulgakov
less
wildly inventive, perhaps. Chekhov and Turgenev owed him subtler
things.
Nabokov was right about his greatness, and right to point out that he
was a
creator of a new reality. · AS Byatt's The Little Black Book of Stories is published by Chatto & Windus |