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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
This article analyzes the role of Russia's changing readership and incipient print culture in Dead Souls. Though Nikolai Gogol' was received in salon society, his primary allegiance was to print and the broad (and thus unsophisticated) readership that was beginning to buy and read printed texts. Like other of Gogol“s works (“On the Development of Periodical Literature in 1834 and 1835,” “The Portrait”), Dead Souls reflects the author's awareness of the severe limitations of this audience, especially their desire for conventional plot devices and their eagerness for characters with whom to identify. Although Dead Souls invites readers' participation, it also reflects Gogol“s growing skepticism about inexperienced readers' attempts to create meaning, his disdain for their judgment, and his desire to assert total control over the meaning of his art. Lounsbery considers Dead Souls' reception and situates Gogol“s work in the context of the appearance of Library for Reading in 1834 and other writers' approaches to the problem of Russia's reading public (notably Faddei Bulgarin and Osip Senkovskii).
1. N. V. Gogol', Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow, 1937-52), 6:221, hereafter PSS. Although the translations are my own, I have consulted the newly reissued translation of Dead Souls by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, revised and edited by Susanne Fusso (New Haven, 1996). In quotations, ellipsis points enclosed in square brackets […] indicate passages I have omitted from the original text; unenclosed ellipsis points … indicate ellipses in the original.
2. For my purposes the most useful study of this process is that of William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). For information on the history of the book in Russia, see Grits, T., Trenin, V., Nikitin, M., Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia (knizhnaia lavka A. F. Smirdina) (Moscow, 1929)Google Scholar; Vatsuro, V. E. and Gillel'son, M. I., Skvoz’ “umstvennye plotiny“: Iz istorii knigi i pressy pushkinskoi pory (Moscow, 1972)Google Scholar; Kufaev, M. N., Istoriia russkoi knigi v XlXveke (Leningrad, 1927).Google Scholar
3. Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 69.
4. On Gogol“s relationship to salon culture, see Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, esp. 170-77.
5. PSS, 8:343. This is Gogol“s quote in and concerning Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.
6. Throughout this paper I use the male pronoun advisedly, since I am generally speaking with Gogol“s own view of the author—always male—in mind. Gogol“s implied reader, and certainly his ideal reader, are also male. A passage from an early redaction of Dead Souls (PSS, 6:644) emphasizes the point: the narrator claims never to have created anything “at the ladies’ behest” (po vnusheniiu damskomu) and confesses to feeling uncomfortable when a lady happens to lean on his desk. In fact, the narrator averts his eyes from her and turns them instead toward the portraits of great (male) artists hanging above his desk—William Shakespeare, Ludovico Ariosto, Henry Fielding, Miguel de Cervantes, Aleksandr Pushkin—who thus seem to replace the woman as both inspiration and audience. Susanne Fusso describes Gogol“s rejection of the feminine tastes and conventions of early romanticism, pointing out that while Vasilii Zhukovskii, for example, took feminine taste seriously and found in women “model, subject, and audience,” Gogol’ identifies women's (ladies’) language with “euphemism and periphrasis” and thus with creative impotence. Fusso, Susanne, Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford, 1993), 78–80.Google Scholar
7. Fanger, Donald, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 272n56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8. PSS, 8:162.
9. Quoted in N. K. Kozmin, Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin: Zhizn’ i nauchno-literaturnaia deiatel'nost’ 1804-1836, in Zapiski istoriko-filologicheskogofakul'teta Imperaterskogo S.-Peterburgskogo Universiteta (St. Petersburg, 1912), 3:453
10. Nor was Russia's literary deficit explained as a shortage of good texts. Rather, it was more often thought to reside in the absence of a literary tradition, that is, a set of texts organically related to each other, to earlier texts, and to the culture at large. Vissarion Belinskii makes this point repeatedly. In his “Literaturnye mechtaniia” of 1834, for example, he concedes that if a national literature is merely a body of texts, or even if it is a number of exquisite creations, then Russia might be said to possess a literature. But Belinskii insists that in reality a literature is a tradition, a set of works inextricably related to the culture of an entire people. This, he claims, is what Russia lacks. Belinskii, V. G., “Literaturnye mechtaniia (Elegiiav prose),” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1953), 1:22–25.Google Scholar
11. PSS, 1:103.
12. Ibid., 8:165, 8:172, 8:157.
13. Ibid., 6:205, 6:199. Bruce Holl has recently observed that in reading the Kopeikin tale, “we not only read Dead Souls but also observe its readers [that is, ourselves] in the personages of the postmaster and the townspeople as they mull over ‘The Tale of Captain Kopeikin.'” We laugh at the townspeople's naive reception of the story, but in doing so we laugh at “our [own] proxies.” Thus the postmaster's narrative parodies not only the values of Chichikov and his society but also those of Gogol“s real-world readers, “who would presume to pass judgment on those values. […] In short, if the ‘readers’ of ‘The Tale of Captain Kopeikin’ represent the readers of Dead Souls, then we are inexorably linked with those readers’ many failings.” Holl, Bruce T., “Gogol's Captain Kopeikin and Cervantes’ Captive Captain: A Case of Metaparody,” Russian Review 55, no. 4 (October 1996): 687-88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Holl draws on Gary Saul Morson's concept of “metaparody” as Morson outlines it in “Parody, History, and Metaparody,” in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston, 1989). He is also expanding on Fanger's astute point that the Kopeikin tale “parodically mirrors the larger text of which it is a part.” See Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 178. Holl's reading of the Kopeikin tale is focused on the phenomenon of metaparody and Gogol“s engagement with a similarly metaparodic text interpolated into Don Quixote. My interpretation is more historically focused in that it places more emphasis on the specific audience for whom Gogol’ was writing and the ways in which his text responds to the particular limitations of this audience.
14. PSS, 6:9, 6:20. Petrushka is not the only one of Gogol“s characters who reads as others might play solitaire or crack their knuckles. His reading habits recall those of Ivan Fiodorovich Shponka in Dikanka, who does not actually like to read, but who enjoys moving his eyes repeatedly over the words of the same text (PSS, 1:288). Both characters recall the Russian readers whom Gogol’ describes in an unpublished book review of 1836, those who peruse books “without the slightest attention to content,” chiefly in order to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are capable of reading (PSS, 8:201).
15. PSS, 6:20, 6:179. “In the department of… but I had better not say in which department. There is nothing more touchy than any sort of department. […] These days every private individual thinks that all society is being insulted in his person.” PSS, 3 141
16. Ibid., 6:29, 6:25, 6:156-57.
17. Ibid., 6:210,6:241,6:243.
18. Ibid., 6:243. These words might also be read as part of a dialogue with the censor. However, an address to the censor certainly does not preclude an address to a more general reader as well, since, as Fanger points out, state censorship practices “reflected a common (and persisting) Russian attitude toward literature that sees the printed word as a kind of untested drug, from whose possible side effects the public stands in need of protection. In this sense the censorship […] could well represent the judgment of a significant part of that public.” Fanger adduces quotes by Gogol“s contemporaries (censors and other readers) to demonstrate how the “censorial attitude thus spread well beyond the censor himself. […] The censor in this respect represented ‘the necessary reader,’ only too typical in his philistinism.” Fanger, Donald, “Gogol and His Reader,” in Todd, William Mills III, ed., Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914 (Stanford, 1978), 71–74.Google Scholar
19. Bulgarin, Faddei, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1843), 5: no page number.Google Scholar
20. Akimova, N. N., “Bulgarin i Gogol': Massovoe i elitarnoe v russkoi literature: Problema avtora i chitatelei,” Russkaia literatura, 1996, no. 2:3.Google Scholar
21. Ibid.; Reitblat, A. I., “F. V. Bulgarin i ego chitateli,” in Reitblat, A. I., ed., Chtenie v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Moscow, 1991), 57.Google Scholar
22. Akimova, “Bulgarin i Gogol',” 13-14.
23. Ibid., 12, 13-14; Reitblat, “F. V. Bulgarin i ego chitateli,” 62.
24. Review of Mirgorod, signed “A.v.m.l.,” Literaturnye pribavleniia k Russkomu invalidu, 1835, no. 33:262.
25. V. G. Belinskii, review of Dead Souls, Otechestvennye zapiski, vol. 23(1842): 9 (under “VI: Bibliograficheskaia khronika“). This charge is amusingly substantiated by the obtuse review of Dead Souls that K, P. Masalskii published in Syn otechestva. Masalskii, unable to reconcile himself to Gogol“s belated and somewhat cursory attention to Chichikov's personal history, begins his summary of the novel with Chichikov's biography, opening with the words, “To some poor nobleman a son was born.” From there Masalskii goes on to condemn the novel's “poverty of content” (bednost’ soderzhaniia, which might also be translated as poverty of plot) and to tally the number of pages devoted to events that fail to advance the plot, that is, virtually the entire narrative. Certainly Gogol“s novel has correcdy anticipated this particular reviewer's preoccupation with plot. Review of Dead Souls, Syn otechestva, 1842, no.6:6, 11, 10.
26. Gogof's letter to S. T Aksakov on 18 August 1842. PSS, 12:91. For more on this point, see Popkin, Cathy, “Distended Discourse: Gogol, Jean Paul, and the Poetics of Elaboration,” in Fusso, Susanne and Meyer, Priscilla, eds., Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word (Evanston, 1992), 189.Google Scholar
27. PSS, 6:182,6:183.
28. Ibid., 6:183,6:191,6:189.
29. Ibid., 6:199, 6:189-90.
30. Ibid., 6:205, 6:206, 6:207.
31. Bulgarin, Faddei, “O tsenzure v Rossii i o knigoopechatanii voobshche,” Russkaia starina, 1900, no. 9:580-82.Google Scholar Bulgarin's report was prepared in the aftermath of the Decembrist uprising and was confidentially presented to the government official Aleksei Nikolaevich Potapov in 1826.
32. Bulgarin, “O tsenzure v Rossii,” 579.
33. Reitblat, “F. V Bulgarin i ego chitateli,” 62-63.
34. To take one of many possible examples of Bulgarin's tendency to represent readers as arbiters, in his “Letter on Russian Literature” in the 1833 issue of Syn otechestva, he calls upon the reader, his “kind friend,” to ‘judge [sudit], criticize, analyze, praise, or condemn [osuzhdaf].” Bulgarin, “Pis'mo o russkoi literature,” Syn otechestva i severnyi arkhiv 33, no. 1 (1833): 52.
35. Bulgarin, Faddei, Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1836), pt. 2, 397.Google Scholar
36. Anon, review of Sochineniia Nikolaia Gogolia, Biblioteka dlia chteniia, 1843, no. 57:23.
37. PSS, 6:134.
38. Ibid., 6:134, 6:21.
39. Ibid., 11:78.
40. For a discussion of this change, see Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, esp. 145-63. Iurii Mann tends to associate this transformation with Gogol“s “crisis” of 1840; see, for example, his V poiskakh zhivoi dushi: “Mertvye dushi.“Pisatel'—Kritika—chitatel’ (Moscow, 1984), 74-78.
41. Bulgarin, “Predislovie k vtoromu izdaniiu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1843), 5:ii (signed 17 March 1830).
42. For his privileging of the oral over the written, see, for example, Maguire, Robert, Exploring Gogol (Stanford, 1994), 230, 239.Google Scholar
43. Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 23.Google Scholar The author writes convincingly on the ways in which this model of author-audience interaction shaped Pushkin's relationship with his reader.
44. PSS, 8:158-59,8:140.
45. Ibid., 3:422, 3:421.
46. Judith Robey has recently noted that “for Gogol’ images of viewers looking at paintings are a means of commenting on the potential power of art over the human soul” and that such images, taken together, can be read as a “conversion tale in which reading is portrayed as a process that can lead to redemption and salvation.” Although Robey's article is aimed at casting light on the mute scene in Revizor (The inspector general), her argument that Gogol’ wanted art to foster sobornost’ (an Orthodox ideal of unity, described by Sergei Bulgakov as “a unanimity, a synthesis of authority“) is suggestive for my reading of Dead Souls, a text that reveals a similar impulse to unify divided readership—by force if necessary. See Robey, Judith, “Modelling the Reading Act: Gogol“s Mute Scene and Its Intertexts,” Slavic Review 56, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 233-50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
47. PSS, 6:165, 6:164.
48. Ibid., 6:242, 6:134-35.
49. Quoted in Mann, Vpoiskakh zhivoi dushi, 32; on Gogol“s secretiveness, see also 38, 77. For evidence suggesting that Dead Souls is not the only work-in-progress that Gogol’ thought of in this way, see Karpuk, Paul A., “Reconstructing Gogol's Destroyed Tragedy on a Theme from the History of Zaporozhe,” Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 580–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Karpuk remarks on Gogol“s “persistent and superstitious fear of referring to [the play] directly, perhaps because he thought of it as a kind of ‘surprise’ with which he intended to suddenly redeem himself in dramatic fashion” (587). Karpuk argues that Gogol’ is referring to the tragedy in an 1840 letter (PSS, 11:316) that Iurii Oksman took to refer to Dead Souls (586). In this letter Gogol’ writes to Pogodin, “I thought that this year the thing would already be ready which would with one stroke redeem me, lift from me the burdens that lie on my unscrupulous conscience” (PSS, 11:316, my translation and emphasis). Whether this statement applies to the tragedy or to Dead Souls, it is further evidence that Gogol’ saw surprise as a crucial component of his ability to affect his audience.
50. Lotman, Iu. M., “Istoki ‘Tolstovskogo napravleniia’ v russkoi literature 1830-kh godov,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, vol. 5 (1962): 60 (my emphasis).Google Scholar
51. PSS, 11:78,6:221.
52. Ibid., 6:587, 6:588.
53. Mann, Vpoiskakh zhivoi dushi, 242.
54. PSS, 6:589,6:588.
55. Mann, Vpoiskakh zhivoi dushi, 242.
56. Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 120.
57. PSS, 6:589,6:588.
58. Ibid., 6:215, 6:210, 6:247.
59. Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 99.
60. PSS, 6:207.
61. Mann, Vpoiskakh zhivoi dushi, 202-3.
62. For more on this collaborative ideal, see Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, chap. 1 (“The Romantic Fragment: A Genealogy,” 19-55).
63. Ibid., 23-24.
64. Ibid., 23, 24 (emphasis in original).
65. This distinction is key to understanding Pushkin's stance toward his audience, and arguments tfiat neglect it run the risk of overstating, or misrepresenting, Pushkin's commitment to literary “professionalism.” “Egyptian Nights,” for example, has recently been read as evidence of Pushkin's struggle to make “the crowd and the profit motive […] not merely acceptable, but actually a constructive part of the creative process.” See Herman, David, “A Requiem for Aristocratic Art: Pushkin's ‘Egyptian Nights,'” Russian Review, vol. 55, no. 4 (October 1996): 668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 330-40, for a somewhat similar argument. But in fact, Pushkin's story represents the “crowd” only in the guise of worldly society, a drawing room full of socialites who listen to oral performances as part of an evening's entertainment. The story never directly addresses the far more disturbing prospect of the truly broad and truly unsophisticated audience that Gogol'was deciding to pursue, the audience of published books.
66. PSS, 6:19,6:241,6:242.
67. The title's combination of adjective and noun seems to have been entirely novel in 1842. See Smirnova-Chikina, E. S., Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi“: Kommentarii (Leningrad, 1974), 27.Google Scholar
68. Iurii Samarin, diary entry, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 1952, no. 58:580. Although this entry is undated, it appears to have been written in late 1839 and refers to the period when Gogol’ was reading excerpts from Dead Souls in Moscow salons.
69. K. S. Aksakov, letter to Iu. F. Samarin, May 1842, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 624.
70. Anon. [O. I. Senkovskii], review of Dead Souls, Biblioteka dlia chteniia, 1842, no.53: 24-54. The review is unsigned but is attributed to Senkovskii by Paul Debreczeny in “Nikolay Gogol and His Contemporary Critics,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 56, pt. 3 (1966): 31.
71. Anon. [Senkovskii], review of Dead Souls, 24.
72. Ibid., 25.
73. See Aksakov's, K. A. (anonymous) pamphlet Neskol'ko slov opoeme Gogolia “Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova Hi Mertvye dushi” (Moscow, 1842).Google Scholar By declaring that Gogol“s only equals in world literature were Homer and Shakespeare, Aksakov provided Gogol“s rivals, and even supporters like Belinskii, with a particularly easy target.
74. Anon. [Senkovskii], review of Dead Souls, 24-25.
75. Ibid., 49.
76. Ibid., 27.
77. Aksakov, I. S., “Neskol'ko slov o Gogole,” Moskovskii sbornik, vol. 1 (1842): vii, viii.Google Scholar
78. PSS, 6:247. Furthermore, as Mann discusses (Vpoiskakh zhivoi dushi, 288), Aksakov here transforms both Gogof's tormented life and his destruction of the long-awaited manuscript into a work of art: “Gogol“s entire life, his entire artistic feat, all his sincere suffer ings, and finally the artist's own burning of the work over which he had labored so long and so torturously, this terrible, solemn night of burning and the ensuing death, all represent a great, awful poema, the meaning of which will long remain unresolved.” I. S. Aksakov, “Neskol'ko slov o Gogole,” ix.
79. “Otvet zhelal on naiti i sebe i obshchestvu, trebovavshemu ot nego razresheniia voprosu, zadannomu Mertvymi dushami“; “ne doskazav svoego slova.” I have translated slovo as “word,” but of course it could also be rendered as discourse, sermon, or speech. I. S. Aksakov, “Neskol'ko slov o Gogole,” viii, xi.
