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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
On Sunday, February 24, 1852, the epilogue to the tragicomedy which was N. V. Gogol's life was played out in the University Chapel in Moscow. Curiosity seekers, government officials, members of high society—“people who had not wanted to know Gogol during his lifetime,” Khomiakov bitterly remarked later—thronged the final rites performed over the writer’s emaciated body. Among the crowd in the chapel was Gogol's old acquaintance, N. F. Pavlov (1803-64), a former serf, actor, university student, law clerk, and journalist who had made his way into Moscow’s beau monde and had married a wealthy heiress.
I am grateful to the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, for research support and financial aid in the preparation of this paper.
1. Barsukov, N. P., Zhizn’ i trudy M. P. Pogodina, 22 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1888), 11 : 538.Google Scholar
2. The poetess Karolina Jaenisch Pavlova (1807-93).
3. Pavlov is speaking of the crowd outside the chapel.
4. Barsukov, Zhizn' i trudy Pogodina, 11 : 538. Cited from a document preserved in the Semeinyi arkhiv M. A. Venevitinova.
5. N. V. Gogol to A. S. Pushkin, Oct. 7, 1835, in Gogol, N. V., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937-52), 10 : 375 Google Scholar. See also Gogol’s letter to M. P. Pogodin, Mar. 23, 1835, ibid., p. 358.
6. The minister of public education, S. S. Uvarov, brought Three Stories to the attention of Tsar Nicholas I, who issued an order forbidding republication of the book. It was not until 1922 that the full text of any of Pavlov’s stories was reprinted in Russia.
7. N. A. Trifonov, “Pervyi perevodchik Bal'zaka v Rossii, ” Nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly : Filologicheskie nauki, 2 (1960) : 99-112.
8. S. P. Shevyrev, “Tri povesti N. Pavlova, ” Moskovskii nabliudatel', 1, no. 1-2 (1835) : 126.
9. Belinsky, V. G., “O russkoi povesti i povestiakh g. Gogolia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols. (Moscow, 1953-56), 1 : 283.Google Scholar
10. Ibid., pp. 259-307 passim. This article should be seen in the light of the following considerations. In the spring of 1835, Shevyrev had rejected Gogol’s “The Nose” for publication in Moskovskii nabliudatel', and had reviewed Mirgorod in a way which could only have alienated Belinsky. At the same time, O. I. Senkovsky reviewed the two writers’ books, placing his favorable Pavlov review before his less enthusiastic Gogol review. See Biblioteka dlia chteniia, vol. 9 (1835). Belinsky apparently responded by failing to review Pavlov’s book separately, noting it instead in the laudatory article on Gogol.
11. Pavlov, N. F., Povesti i stikhi (Moscow, 1957), p. 169 Google Scholar. All further references will be taken from this edition and will be noted in the text.
12. See A. P. Chekhov’s comic story “Anna on the Neck” (1895) for a variant of this situation. There is no evidence that Chekhov knew Pavlov’s stories.
13. Belinsky, PSS, 1 : 98.
14. Concerning the development of the chinovnik story see A. G. Tseitlin, Povesti o bednom chinovnike Dostoevskogo (Istoriio siuzheta) (Moscow, 1923), pp. 1—45. Tseitlin is the first modern scholar to call attention to “The Demon, ” which he terms an “excellent” and “unjustly forgotten” story (p. 5).
15. Belkina, M. A., “‘Svetskaia povest1" 30-kh godov i ‘Kniaginia Ligovskaia’ Lermontova,” Zhisn' i tvorchestvo M. Iu. Lermontova (Moscow, 1941), p. 533.Google Scholar
16. Pushkin's poema was written in 1833, but except for its opening invocation to the city (Biblioteka dlia chteniia, 1834), it was not published until the spring of 1837 (Sovremennik, vol. 5). Pavlov’s treatment of the Petersburg motifs in “The Demon” may reflect his recent reading of that work.
17. The following discussion of the textology of “The Overcoat” is based on commentary by the editors of the Academy edition of Gogol’s PSS, 3 : 675-90.
18. Annenkov, P. V., Literaturnye vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1928), pp. 61–62 Google Scholar. As recounted by Annenkov, the anecdote concerns a “poor chinovnik” who is a passionate hunter. By extraordinary economies he manages to save two hundred rubles and buy a magnificent rifle. The first time he goes hunting, however, the rifle falls from his boat and is lost. The chinovnik takes to his bed in a high fever but is “restored to life” when his coworkers take up a collection and buy him another rifle.
19. Gogol, PSS, 3 : 676. This suggestion is based on Pogodin’s account of his stay in Marienbad in his travel diary, God v chuzhikh kraiakh (1839) : Doroshnyi dnevnik M. Pogodina, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1844), 3 : 75-79.
20. Gogol, PSS, 10 : 170.
21. This is what Gogol called him in a note to Pogodin in 1849. Gogol and Pavlov probably met for the first time in 1832, in Moscow. Pavlov was an intimate of Aksakov and Pogodin, Gogol’s closest Moscow friends, and in 1838 the three men sent money to Gogol, who was ill and penniless in Italy. See Aksakov, S. T., “Istoriia moego znakomstva s Gogolem,” Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow, 1966), 3 : 155 Google Scholar. The fact that Pavlov had been trained as an actor must have appealed to Gogol, and in 1846 he advised an actor in “The Inspector General” to model his elocution on Pavlov’s (Gogol, PSS, 13 : 118).
22. Pogodin read the stories in December 1838, while traveling to St. Petersburg with Pavlov, who was taking them to the capital for submission to the censor (Barsukov, Zhizn' i trudy Pogodina, 5 : 204-5).
23. Public sale of the book in Moscow was delayed, perhaps owing to the distributor’s ill will toward Pavlov. See N. F. Pavlov to A. A. Kraevsky, Dec. 25, 1839, Russkii arkhiv, 1 (1897) : 457. However, Pavlov and his friends had received copies of the book by mail from the capital in July.
24. Aksakov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 : 168-70. “The third draft began to take shape in November-December 1839, in Petersburg …” (Gogol, PSS, 3 : 685). Work on the story was set aside when Gogol left for Moscow in the winter of 1840, and was not renewed until March-April 1841, when he completed it in Rome.
25. There is, of course, an interesting parallel between the roles of the wife in “The Demon” and of the overcoat itself.
26. “How many storms had he sat out there on one and the same chair ! A tempest from the Gulf of Finland had carried off chiefs of the department over his head, but he hadn’t flinched, he had kept on copying. Writers of rough drafts came and went above him—what business was it of his? The writings remained the same. Today he returned from there, tomorrow he would go back there….“
27. “No matter how many directors and various chiefs came and went, he could always be seen at one and the same place, in the same attitude, in the same job, just the same copy clerk, so that in time the belief came to be held that he must have been born into the world already completely fitted out, in a uniform and with a bald spot on his head.” Gogol, “Shinel', ” PSS, 3 : 141-74. All further references will be taken from this edition.
28. “ … the moon stood watch in the sky … . and at this late hour all the clerks in the whole wide world have long since ceased copying, but you go on copying… . In vain your pen becomes blunt, your reason clouds, and you bury yourself in the paper with the question : My Lord, are there truly such lands and such people in the world? There are. … and all in order to set you to copying, for why shouldn’t you? Isn’t that why Petersburg was built? Isn’t that why the sun shines in the daytime, and the moon at night?”
29. “Even at those hours when the gray Petersburg sky grows completely dark, and the whole clerkly fraternity has eaten its fill … Akakii Akakievich did not give himself up to any kind of entertainment… . After copying to his heart's content, he went to bed, smiling in anticipation at the thought of the morrow : what would the Lord send to be copied tomorrow?“
30. D. S. Merezhkovsky, in his Gogol' i chort (Moscow, 1906), offers the first major investigation of the problem of good and evil in Gogol’s works, but Tschižewskij is the first to discuss the role of the devil in “The Overcoat.” See Čyževskyj, D., “Zur Komposition von Gogol’s ‘Mantel, ’” Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, 14, no. 1-2 (1937) : 63-94 and esp. 88-90.Google Scholar
31. In which Pavlov outwardly maintained a neutral position through the early 1840s. But in 1847 Pavlov’s three letters to Gogol (published in Moskovskie vedomosti and Sovremennik) criticizing Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends made it clear that he would side, however moderately, with the Westernizers. Pavlov’s letters were hailed by Belinsky (PSS, 12 : 351-52, and 3 : 358), who shortly thereafter wrote his famous “Letter to Gogol.”
32. Ibid., 11 : 422.
33. Merezhkovsky, Gogol' i chort, p. 98.
34. S. P., Shevyrev, “Peterburgskii sbornik,” Moskvitianin, 1, no. 2 (1846) : 166.Google Scholar
35. For an interesting hypothesis relating to this point see John, Schillinger, “Gogol"s ‘The Overcoat’ as a Travesty of Hagiography,” Slavic and East European Journal, 16, no. 1 (Spring 1972) : 36–41 Google Scholar. The parallel between “The Overcoat” and the Life of Saint Acacius of Sinai was noted earlier by F. C. Driessen in his Gogol as a Short-Story Writer (The Hague, 1965), p. 194.
36. In an article written in 1918 Boris Eikhenbaum averred that the pathetic element in “The Overcoat” had been greatly exaggerated. Eikhenbaum called attention to ambiguities in Gogol’s treatment of his clerk-protagonist which undercut the story’s philanthropic aspect. This view has gained wide currency in contemporary criticism, especially in the West. See Boris, Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel” Gogolia,” Skvoz, ' literaturu (Leningrad, 1924), pp. 171–95 Google Scholar.
37. Grigor'ev, Apollon, Literaturnaia kritika (Moscow, 1967), pp. 195–96 Google Scholar, italics added. Grigor'ev’s remarks were originally published in 1859.
38. The assumptions underlying this line of attack are implicit in Belinsky’s comment that in “The Overcoat” Gogol “managed to find the tragic not in the comic but in the positive commonplaceness of life. Here is where, it seems to us, one must look to find the essential distinctiveness of Gogol’s talent. It is not solely the gift of clearly depicting life’s commonplaceness, but something more—the gift of depicting life’s phenomena in the fulness of their reality and truthfulness” (Belinsky, PSS, 10 : 44).