"Terrible Vengeance" by Nikolai Gogol

"Terrible Vengeance" by Nikolai Gogol (1832, 40 pages)

Gogol Goes Gothic

The Classic Circuit Schedule for Early Gothic Tales

"Terrible Vengeance" (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and included in their The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol) is a story about very evil spirits culminating with the Anti-Christ.   When I first saw that there was going to be a classic circuit event centering on early Gothic literary works I was not sure what I wanted to post about.   My reading and other schedule is too full now to fit in a large scale work so I was happy to see that the very hard working hosts for The Classics Circuit had provided a very good list of suggestions, among them two short stories by Nikolai Gogol (1804 to 1850).

The story opens at a Cossack wedding.   Cossacks had a special place in the Russian psyche.    They were often used as "shock troops" by the Czarist interests and in return for this they were given a large measure of cultural freedom to retain very old folk believes.   They were mostly Christians but they maintained many older views about evil spirits, sorcerers, and curses.  

Two holy icons are brought into the wedding festival.   At the sight of it, one of the guests who had been dancing wildly, turned into a very scary looking creature still in the form of a man but with a sharp chin, green eyes, a beak, and claws.   He then just vanishes from sight.   Of course the guests at the wedding and the wedding family members all see this as a terrible omen.   The action in the story is pretty fast and a little confusing.   Corpses start to come out of the ground.   

The plot line is really strange.   Before it is over people make the mistake off looking in the window of a strange castle only to see the father of one of the groom's best friends preforming strange rituals in which he is commanding his own daughter to marry him.    The plot gets weirder from here but I have told enough to give you the feel for it without spoiling the ending.

I have read the excellent posts from others in the circuit.   No other work reviewed so far seems as strange as this one.

Mel u

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol (1842)

A Very Funny Play

Prior Posts on Nikolai Gogol

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol (1809 to 1852-Russia-author of Dead Souls) is a  funny drama.   It was a very enjoyable read, easy to follow with sharp  characterizations.  (The version of the play I read -on Dailylit.com-was translated by Thomas Seltzer.   Seltzer -1875 to 1943-was  an American born in Russia who  immigrated along with his parents while he was a young child.    He was a highly regarded translator and founded a publishing company that is credited with introducing the work of D. H. Lawrence to the USA for which he was attacked by puritanical groups.)


The plot is pretty simple.   The mayor and other officials in a small Russian town are thrown into a state of panic when they get an anonymous tip that an inspector general has been sent to do a secret investigation of how the town and the surrounding area are governed.   


The find out that two weeks ago a stranger from St. Petersburg has checked into a local hotel.   They at once assume he is the dreaded Czarist inspector general.   A bad word from him could mean Siberia!    We quickly learn the stranger at the inn is not the inspector general.  He  is just a civil servant with a wild imagination.   All of the officials, especially the mayor and the governor, begin making up to the alleged inspector.   At first the man, Khlestatov,  is so conceited that he thinks it is all because he is just such a quality person.   The mayor and the governor both explain they are very honest men, just taking the minimum bribes so as not to offend anyone.   Khlestatov moves into the house of the mayor.    He begins to request large loans from the mayor and other officials.   He even begins a romance with the mayor's daughter after he moves into his house.   The false inspector decides on the advise of his valet, that he needs to leave town.   The mayor chases after him convinced once his daughter marries the inspector general he will be untouchable.   


I will leave the rest of the plot untold.  


There was a 1949 movie starring Danny Kaye based on this play.   It has been a while since I have seen it but I recall it as funny but overacted.   I would like to see it again now.   


In October I will be posting on two earlier short works of fiction by Gogol for The Classics Circuit.  


I enjoyed this a lot.   This is not a "heavy" thinking type of drama where people launch into 30 sentence long speeches about the nature of God or such.   It is fun and whatever else you get  from it is your bonus.   


Mel u

How The Two Ivans Quarrelled by Nikolai Gogol

How The Two Ivans Quarrelled by Nikolai Gogol (1834, 75 pages)

A Marvelous Comic Story by the

author of Dead Souls

Prior Gogol Post

Russian Literature 

How The Two Ivans Quarrelled is the lead story in a wonderfully done collection of short 19th Century Russian comic stories How The Two Ivans Quarrelled and Other Russian Comic Tales (translated by and with introductory notes by Guy Daniels) published by One World Classics.


I have previously posted on stories by two new to me writers whose stories I really like, Ivan Krylov and Mikhail Saltykov, included in this book.    I hope to read more of their stories.    Krylov's collection of fables and short stories sold more copies than any book in 19th century Russia besides The Bible.   Saltykov wrote very funny and biting satires on Russian society, he was one funny high level Czarist tax collection officer!   I also read and posted on Tolstoy's Ivan the Fool.


In his very interesting and educational essay Guy Daniels says Gogol (1809 to 1852-there is some back ground information in my prior three posts on Gogol) is was one of the inventors of the comic short story and that Why The Two Ivans Quarrelled is "perhaps the best, and certainly the first, masterpiece of its kind".  


I really liked How The Two Ivans Quarrelled.   The two Ivans start the story as best of old friends.   They own adjoining estates in rural Russia.  Both are small land holders and own a few serfs but they still do work on their estates themselves.   


I really liked how Gogol made use of small details to bring the characters to life.    One of the Ivans is single and in a semi scandal he has a woman that comes and visits him periodically and stays a long time.   I thought OK he has his younger beautiful girl friend but no she is a woman his age shaped like a barrel that keeps him totally in line.   


One day the two Ivans are visiting and one of them offers to buy the other's shotgun.   The fall out terribly in negotiations over the price of the shotgun.   The falling out is so bad that one of the Ivans, in an hilarious scene, sneaks over on the others properties and destroys one the buildings.   The two men end up filing formal complaints on each other with the magistrate.   One Ivan even brings a complaint on a pig owned by the other.   It turns out the complaint is for a capital crime and if found guilty the pig can be sentenced to death.   At first the owner says his pig is innocent and he will never allow him to be  killed.   The judge in a move worthy of Solomon says "why don't you just solve the problem by turning the pig into hams and could you give me a few of those wonderful sausages your lady friend is famous for making?"


The more serious of  the complaints of the Ivans drags on in the courts for years.   In the mean time the Ivans get older and all of the pleasure seems to go our of their lives.   What they really enjoyed doing was just hanging out with each other and enjoining the  pleasures of life as a small landowner  in rural Russia.    Both men have lost the most important, maybe the only important, relationship in their lives but both are too stubborn to make the first move even though everyone urges them to make up.


I really enjoyed read this story.   Recently I saw the classic movie by Roman Polanski (with Sharon Tate)  The Fearless Vampire Killers.   The atmosphere of that movie seems very like that of the story.  


I commend totally One World Classics for publishing How the Two Ivans Quarrelled and Other Comic Tales.   It is well produced on quality paper with a crisp easily readable font.   


In the interest of full disclosure, I was given a copy of this and other books by the publisher


The next Gogol I read will be his drama The Inspector General (on which the Danny Kaye movie of that name was based on).






Mel u

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842, 402 pages, translated by Richard Prevear and Larissa Volokonsky, 1998)

Dead Souls  by Nikolai Gogol (1809 to 1852, Russia) is a book I have known I should have read by now for a long time.   (It is funny, it seems the more you read, the more books there are that you should have read by now!)    I first heard of it as a young very bookish boy in Clifton Fadiman's  Life Time Reading Plan.     Dead Souls is a very high canon status novel.    Its influence is simply tremendous.    Think of all the novels about a lead figure on a journey through a mad land.     Dead Souls looks back to Don Quixote.   There is a big difference though.   In Don Quixote it is the quester who is insane,  in Dead Souls it is the world.  

As the novel opens, we are on a journey through the provinces of Russia with Chichikov.   We stop at small inns and meet people of all sorts.   I loved the descriptions of the inns and the foods and people in them.    I get the feeling Gogol loved to feast on a giant Russian sturgeon.     The rich descriptions reminded me of Dickens at his best.    Even the most minor people in the story are brought totally to life.    I was glad to see Chichikov was a lover of the reading life.

Chichikov is on an odd quest.    In Russia every year land owners are taxed on the serfs the census says they own.   Censuses are very irregular and can be years apart.   The problem is if a serf dies in 1830 and there is no new census until 1838, the landowner has to pay taxes on the "Dead Soul" all those years.   Chichikov offers to purchase dead souls from all the land owners he meets.   Everyone is very confused as to why he wants to do this.   The different reactions of land owners to this proposal are brilliantly handled.     For a long time we are kept in suspense as to why he wants them but once we find out it makes perfect sense.

Dead Souls is an unfinished book but in a way that is almost a good thing!    The unclosed nature of the book mirrors the world it depicts.    Parts of it are very funny.    The sections in the inns are simply a great wonder.     I really felt I was along for the ride through darkest Russia.     Somehow it seems a prediction of a walk through a world whose total destruction is near.     I could at times feel the vast darkness of the Russian night.

Somehow I see Dickens looking at the misery of the poor in England and creating a world of sympathy and I see Gogol looking at the poor in Russian and letting us seem them as real people.   I love Dickens but I would only say now that Dickens weeps and Gogol laughs.     One is divine tears the other laughter.   Maybe we need both.

Dead Souls is not a hard, difficult to follow book.   It really only has one central character.    I found it fun to read, not a chore to get done so I could check it off a lifetime list.    Maybe I need to read it again soon or read Nabokov's commentary, but I liked part one better than part two.   I think maybe you should read his "The Overcoat" first as a kind of Gogolian (imagine that said in the accent of old St Petersburg)  training ground.   Actually I think "The Overcoat" belongs as firmly on a canon list as Dead Souls.   


Dead Souls is kind of like a great salt lake, it is easy to swim along the top but very hard to get to the bottom!
It would make a good first Russian novel also, I think.    All the Russian masters genuflected to him.

Amateur Reader  and all, do you still regard this as the best novel written from 1800 to 1850?    In my limited reading, I can see only the two big novels of Stendhal as challengers.    If pushed to vote I would put Stendhal first most days but on days when the world seems too absurd for words I would pick Gogol.    Gogol will probably speak to more people than Stendhal.  


Mel u

"The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol-The Reading Life Version of a part of The March of Literarture

"The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol ( 1842, 26 pages, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky from Russian)

In March this year I read Nikolai Gogol's (1808-1852-Russian) short story, "The Overcoat", also written in 1842.     "The Overcoat" is listed on most "top short stories of all times" lists.    Vladimir Nabokov comes close to saying it is the best work of literature ever produced.    (I recently listened to some videos on Youtube relating to the lectures of Nabokov and I could not help but imagine him refering to "The Nose" as a purely "Gogolian" work.)  

"The Nose" is the story of a nose that somehow falls off the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov (also known as "Major Kovalyov").  Gogol writes a lot about sort of mid-level civil servant types.    As the story opens a barber finds a nose on the floor of his shop and is horrified to see it is the nose of one of his regular customers.    Perhaps fearing he may have accidentally cut the nose off while shaving Kovalyov the barber tries to throw the nose in the river but is caught by the police who of course see it as hiding the evidence of foul play, maybe even murder.     Now the story takes on the elements of a dream.    Kovalyou awakes to see his nose is missing and there is just a smooth place on his face where his nose once was.     He goes out looking for his nose and he finds the nose in front of the local cathedral.    However the nose has now taken on a life of its own and has a higher rank in the civil service than Kovalyov himself.

Then story  at this point takes some twists.  There is more to the plot but the story is a lot of fun and just plain crazy so I will not say more of the action.   It opens itself up to a diverse range of interpretations.    We wonder if it has all been a dream brought on by the anxieties of Kovalyov in the face of a marriage he is being pressured into.    Some have said it is about male anxieties.  

"The Nose" is a powerful work.     Maybe it gets overlooked because "The Overcoat" is the Gogol story taught in schools world wide and the one on "best story ever lists".    

In addition to reading the translation by Pevear and Volokhovsky (1998) I also read the first page of an older translation now in the public domain (trans. name not given).     Of course I cannot judge the veracity of the translations but the new one was a much more enjoyable read.  

In The March of Literature  Ford Madox Ford makes no mention of Gogol or Kafka.     Here is a very simplified march of literature just for fun -Gogol to Kafka-then we branch from Kafka into several splits-in Continental  Europe we get much of  modern Literature including so called existential novelists and thinkers-in South America the lineage turns into Magic Realism,  the works of Borges and the novels of the absurd such as those of Bolano-in post war Japan the writers and thinkers find the means for coping with the destruction of their culture and world view in the thoughts of French heirs to Kafka and their  vision of an absurd society.    In Russia it is said that all Russian literature flows from "The Overcoat",  Tolstoy being an exception.     In the contemporary Filipino novel the influences are very clear.    In England and the USA the story is too big to encapsulate but it is there.   In Rushdie's use of magical reality to cope with the nightmare like history of India we also see it.   Gogol is a writer of aloneness just as Kafka was.  

Here is a  break down to give an example of the influence of this trend in Japanese literature:

Gogol to

Kafka to

Sarte-Camus to

Kobe and Oe-(Oe wrote a dissertation on Sarte), Murakami to

21th century Japanese literature- abounds in depictions of a culture without root values-the Japanese writers found no  comfort in their own culture for  dealing with their defeat in WWII and turned to European models.

I know this is hyperbolic and is not meant entirely seriously and I invite others to give their own March of Literature.    

Mel u

"The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol

"The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol 1842-translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1999)-Published in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol-30 pages

After having finished Villette and with some ambitious reading projects coming in April ( Parade's End Read Along, the Read Along of the Brothers Karamazov being hosted by Dolce Bellezzza, and a commitment to post on Zola's Germinal for the Classics Circuit) I decided I would try to read some short odds and ends in the next week or so.  


I began to look over my shelves to see what I had on hand that might work.    I have seen some very lauding posts on Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol recently.     Vladimir Nabokov is often used as an authority figure on literary excellence.   Here is what he says about "The Overcoat" in his Lectures on Russian Literature

Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent. When, as in the immortal The Overcoat, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.

Nabokov is very nearly or is in fact saying "The Overcoat" is the best Russian literary work ever produced and by extension the best ever produced at all.  

"The Overcoat" is set in St Petersburg (called Petersburg in the story) Russian in the early 1840s.    The story centers on  minor government clerk,  Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a copier of documents.    (It is hard for us to relate but there was a vast amount of work to be done in copying government documents in the days before Xerox.   Those who did this work were called Scriviners.    Melville wrote about them in his incredible story, "Bartleby the Scriviner" and  the father in Dickens A Christmas Carol was one.).    The work was very boring and thankless.   Akaky seems to be in his forty's around, he has no wife or children, no friends, and he lives in a room in a modest boarding house in a run down part of St Petersburg.    Gogol does a superb job bringing him fully to life for us in just a few paragraphs.   (Akaky if alive today would be sitting in a cubicle working for a giant corporation, doing work he hated for people that had contempt for him.)   One very cold day he decides he wants an overcoat, keeping in mind he lives in a horribly cold place where a good coat could mean the difference between life and death.    He goes to the shop of a very good tailor near him.     As he walks the streets Gogol describes for us the conditions that exist.   "The Overcoat" is very attuned to the class differences in Czarist Russia and the economic disparities of the times.   Akaky finds out the coat he wants costs an amount equal to about twenty five percent of his annual pay.    He has been saving money a little bit at a time for years by eating cheap meals and not really heating his room so he has half of the money saved up.     He knows he is getting his annual bonus at work and that will almost cover the cost of the coat.    We feel his sense of excitement as he orders the coat and also his fear in spending all his savings on an overcoat.    The overcoat is way above the quality of coat a man of his station should have.  (It is as if the lowest paid worker at a huge firm came to work in his own private limo, almost).   Everyone at his work is in awe of his new overcoat and we must assume under their masks of happiness for him that most are terribly jealous.    His supervisor decides to throw a party for him in honor of the new coat.    Akaky is not a social person at all and he feels very out of place and awkward at the party.    On his way home from the party he is mugged and his coat is stolen.     Akaky is given the name of a high ranking general by one of his coworkers and told to go to this man and tell him what happened.     The general is a man with a very bloated sense of his imnportance, a strict believer in formalities.    Akaky has never been in the presence of such an exalted personage before and he does not know how to act.    The general is outraged that Akaky has brought this to him petty matter to his attention rather than to a person way down in the ranks who would possibly refer it up the ladder for review.     The general explodes in an enraged diatribe of abuse on Akaky for daring to waste his time and Akaky runs out feeling lucky not to receive a beating.    Shortly after this, I imagined it brought on by wandering the streets without a cold in the Russian winter, he catches some sort of illness and shortly after dies.    Other than by his land lady clearing out his room he is forgotten.   Gogol's account of the items left in Akaky's room are very poignant and at least match anything in Dickens for summing up a life in a few artifacts.     His ghost begins to roam the streets, creating a lot of fear among the local population as he steals overcoats from a lot of people.    I will tell no more of  the plot but the ending is kind of a satisfactory one and revenge of a sort is acheived.

I really liked this story and I do find it difficult to explain its real power.   It takes us deeply into the minds of the people we encounter.   We know exactly how Akaky feels.    He is anyone who has ever tried to deal with a mindless government, to figure out how to live on just enough money to get along barely.   "The Overcoat" is a forerunner of "magic realism".    There is no one to admire in this tale.    It has the humor of a grim, cold, nasty world where your life can be lost over nothing.    It is really a vicious attack on society in Russia in the 1840s.   There are no noble peasants in this work.    There no are reflections on the great ideas of life, no revelations achieved.     "The Overcoat" is funny in the asides, the small observations of the self-conscious narrator and in the social satire.    In a post on a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakimi I said that I found short stories somehow unsatisfying as they do not construct complete alternative worlds for the reader to enter into.    In "The Overcoat" there is a complete world.   We know what it is like to walk the streets on the poor side of St Petersburg.   We can get inside the mind of the characters in this book.    A lot of readers feel the central character is them in a meaningless job in a world without values.   Nabokov admired literature that took us out of our comfort zone, that plays with notions of reality, and that has the power to change how we see the world.      I


I am reading this in conjuction with the LuAnn's Spring into Short Stories Reading Challenge.    I am planning to periodically do posts on short stories and am open for suggestions as to the world's best short stories.