The Poet of Laughter

Recently, Russian Life Executive Editor Mikhail Ivanov discussed Gogol’s art with literary scholar Igor Zolotussky, a long-time writer at the prestigious Literaturnaya Gazeta and author of a biography on Nikolai Gogol in the famous series Life of Eminent People.

Russian Life: Igor Petrovich, you cite a letter in your book where Gogol tells a friend to take life easy. But did Gogol manage to take his life easy?

Igor Zolotussky: You know, this letter was written by the young Gogol. Unfortunately, Gogol proved to be a very serious man from early childhood, though he did know how to have a good laugh, to poke fun and joke. His young years were a happy enough time. He was to some extent taking life easy too — he would write and then burn his young writings in the oven, just like that. But the finale of his life is very dramatic.

RL: Then why do you think he chose the genre “comedy of life” and satire? Many people take up satire because they have an unhappy life? And, as you write in your book, Gogol suffered from his parent’s lack of attention; other students teased him at the gymnasium in Nezhin; and he had complexes because his family was not really well-off ...

IZ: Well, I can’t say his family was really poor, though of course, if you compare him with Pushkin, who came from a rather well-off family of nobles ... Pushkin’s family could afford French wines while Gogol was drinking kvas made of pears ... But Gogol possessed what Pushkin called “an invaluable and healthy gift — the gift of joy.” Gogol’s gift of joy was made somber in the Soviet epoch, when critics made him only a writer of satire. Remember how they used to chant like a prayer that “he  exposed,” “he stigmatized?” By the way, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recently said about Gogol that he exterminated us all, he deviated us all from the right path, he forced us to see Russia only as a vile, bad, good-for-nothing, abominable country and all that. This is an egregious error by Solzhenitsyn. Gogol has never exterminated anybody, he has never persecuted or exposed anyone. His laughter had, at times, a melancholy character. When you watch The Inspector General,  you laugh from the bottom of your heart. You are having fun, aren’t you? Khlestyakov is just a good-hearted baby when he is taking bribes. In fact he doesn’t know he is taking bribes; he believes he will give it all back tomorrow. And even in Dead Souls there are a whole bunch of characters who are, in the first place, funny.

RL: So, you mean he was more a master of humor than satire?

IZ: Your archetypal satire writer is the Roman satirist Juvenal. But Gogol’s writing is the laughter mixed with a sense of goodness, like Cervantes. There is so much healthy childishness in Gogol. You wouldn’t believe how much funnier the first version of The Inspector General was. For there were four versions in all. Pushkin simply rolled with laughter when he heard it ... Gogol’s laughter in The Inspector General is purifying and clean like rain. It’s not like you watch the play and, upon leaving the theater, you think: “Oh, My God, what an odious  country Russia is.” This laughter heals us.

RL: Only today do we hear critics call Gogol the poet of laughter. Do you explain the Soviet interpretation of Gogol as a satirist, a critic of Russian vices as ideologically based?

IZ: Absolutely. Back then, they attempted to make him an opponent of serfdom, an opponent of a regime based on serfdom, etc., etc.

RL: But his father had 400 serfs ...

IZ: Three hundred to be more exact. But then, excuse me, Pushkin was selling his serfs and losing them at cards. Let’s keep this in mind. But, more importantly, such a narrow view of Gogol as simply a satirist was not limited to Soviet critics. [The émigré poet Dmitri] Merezhkovsky wrote that Gogol was destroying everything in his path. This is a late symbolist point of view typical at the turn of century. The characteristic interpretation back then was: Gogol portrayed the devil, then was corrupted by the devil, and then became a devil himself. And when Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Inspector General in the early 1920s, Khlestyakov was portrayed as a devil. Come on, what kind of devil is Khlestyakov?! He is just a boy. Director Georgy Tovstonogov in Leningrad’s famous theater took the right tone. In his version, bureaucrats give bribes to Khlestyakov and then cuddle him like a baby.

RL: One of Gogol’s best and most touching works, Old World Landowners, used to be cited by Soviet literary critics as the archetype of petty bourgeois life, whereas it is exactly this type of quiet family life we all want to live, no? Don’t we find the same characters in, say, a remote town in prosperous America, where they have their quiet barbecues on weekends just like Gogol’s elderly characters, who gobble up their home-made jams and pickles?

IZ: You are absolutely right ... What is wrong with this [type of quiet life]? These two elderly people love each other. And we used to expose these two elderly heroes because their “thoughts didn’t go beyond their fence,” because they keep eating homemade stuff from dawn do dusk, because this is a “shallow life.” But no ... Gogol, by the way, of all he wrote, said he loved this short novel best.

RL: Is it true that his babushka was the model for Pulkheria Ivanovna [the old woman in Old World Landowners]?

IZ: Yes, and his grandfather too. Pushkin wrote that “this is an idyll which makes us cry.” The story has funny passages: remember how the old husband is racking his brains, asking his spouse about what else he could eat? And then there is the tragic theme: how the cat comes and the wife sees this as a bad omen and soon dies. Gogol also portrayed the love of his parents in this novel. For, after the death of her husband, Gogol’s mother didn’t want to live anymore; she refused to take food (just like Gogol did during his last days) and she was ready to die.

Even [the liberal critic] Belinsky sympathized with these heroes and his famous words “comedy of life” were uttered in respect to this literary work. Life begins, then we have love, then we nurture some hopes, but it all ends in a grave ... This novel is not about serfdom. It’s about the irony of our life, that we all die in the end, as if someone in the heavens is laughing at us. He gives us life, gives a try, and it is all interrupted.

RL: Today we have complete freedom in satire writing. But it doesn’t make us smile anymore. We have developed a sort of immunity to satire. Our TV can make any comment on Yeltsin and his retinue. But we don’t react anymore. Is it because we are thick-skinned or that we don’t have a satirist on the scale of Gogol?

IZ: You know, the basis of each satire writer is his love for people. Gogol’s laughter comes from love, as he himself put it. What we see today is malicious pleasure in poking fun, nothing more. There is this condescension towards those they are poking fun at. There is no compassion. Gogol loves his heroes just like Cervantes loves his hapless Don Quixote.

RL: Our TV satire programs are especially tough on our old and sick president. They don’t mince their words ...

IZ: This makes me feel indignant. I have just written an article called “Yeltsin’s Heart.”

RL: And what is in it?

IZ: The notion that is everything in Yeltsin’s heart. There is perfidy and naiveté at the same time in Yeltsin. He scares people off and at the  same time there is something childish about him.

RL: What would Gogol write about Yeltsin’s Russia?

RL: I think he would approach Yeltsin’s Russia with compassion, because Yeltsin has paid with his heart. All these guys who are dancing around his moribund corpse, they are doing well at his expense, at the expense of his ailing heart. And when there will be no Yeltsin, what are they going to do, where are they going to find themselves, I wonder?! They are the ones because of whom Russia is perishing, and these guys look so healthy and prosperous. They don’t pay anything for it. In the first place, I mean today’s communists. So I think that Gogol would see in Yeltsin a tragedy of a man who was overwhelmed with all these responsibilities. He’s got the character, he’s got the will, he’s got the tenacity. There is the manly side of him too, but this is not enough.

All this crisis can be explained in the first place by the lowering of our religious conscience. This is what Gogol warned us against. Remember his book Selected Excerpts from Correspondence with Friends? This loss of religious conscience caused the revolution. It didn’t happen because the Russian people are slaves, as some love to write today, but because of the falling mores.

RL: Isn’t this then the most topical and pertinent book for today’s Russia? A book where Gogol began by criticizing himself? Contemporary Russians all love to criticize the government, the bureaucracy, stupid tax inspectors, the venal privatization system, etc. But no one begins with oneself. Didn’t Gogol set the right tone for us all?

IZ: Yes, indeed. The criticism of this book targets the author himself. Think of it! Who he was criticizing? The author of Dead Souls!  He was already a great man by then, a man who had the right to condemn us all. But no, he said – I am bad myself. By the way, this is a normal Christian approach.

RL: Who amongst contemporary writers could do this?

IZ: I have recently written a long article on Solzhenitsyn. I do appreciate his works and respect him. I value his historical merit and all. But it’s amazing. This man totally lacks a critical attitude towards himself. Yet Russian writers did criticize themselves. Tolstoy wrote in his diaries: “I am bad, I am bad.” And he writes this sincerely. Or take Chekhov. There was this permanent discontent and dissatisfaction with oneself ... Gogol probably felt this repentance much earlier than everybody else. And that’s exactly why they poked fun at him. They proclaimed him insane ... Tolstoy wrote Diary of Madman when the birth of a new Tolstoy was beginning, a birth which ended with his departure from home ... the repetition of Gogol’s path. It’s not surprising that Tolstoy wanted to write a rebuttal to Belinsky’s criticism of Gogol’s Excerpts.

RL: Why did Belinsky criticize Gogol’s book so sharply? Was it that Gogol betrayed himself and was touting anti-democratic ideals?

IZ: Well, don’t forget that Belinsky wrote this article when he was dying from tuberculosis. It’s because Belinsky at the end of his life was obsessed by this social idea – that’s why he rejected Dostoyevksy as soon as the latter went deeper into man’s nature.

RL: Back to Gogol’s most famous book, Dead Souls. In your work, you characterize Chichikov as a romantic businessman who is just forced to play by local rules.

IZ: Sure, that’s why Chichikov always fails at his undertakings. Because he is trying to acquire these dead souls in a typical Russian style, with some sort of romantic attitude toward his own schemes: “Hey, let me grab one million at once, all in one shot!” But then I can by no means compare contemporary Newly Rich Russians with Chichikov. Chichikov is a good-hearted man, while a contemporary Russian businessman would never reveal the secret of his business to a Nozdrev [as Chichikov does, leading to his downfall]. So, in this  sense, Chichikov is a purely Russian buyer so to speak.

RL: But don’t contemporary Russian businessmen share the same passion – to earn lots of quick money and transfer it all abroad?! And Gogol’s famous quote, “Which Russians don’t love fast riding?” seems to have been written about the newly rich Russians ...

IZ: But are they Russians? That is the question ... They are semi-Soviet, that is what. It is all former party nomenklatura...

RL: Their tricks with government T-bills looks quite similar to Chichikov’s scheme of buying up dead souls ...

IZ: Chichikov is cunning and smart and shrewd, but he is also very humane. This is the real Chichikov of Gogol ... He is a dreamer, he can suddenly fall in love with a woman. I would never compare him to [Russia’s] contemporary oligarchs. Remember how he lost it all? Because he fell in love with the governor’s daughter, which led all the local women to turn against him.

RL: So you are saying that contemporary “buyers of dead souls” are more cynical, less romantic?

IZ: ... And they passed through this moral sieve of the Soviet period.

RL: Hence the opinion that our post-Soviet businessman is even tougher than those in the West?

IZ: Oh yes, absolutely. More merciless, more cynical, more cruel.

RL: Remember in the Soviet times, after Stalin’s acolyte Georgi Malenkov stressed the need to have “contemporary Saltykov-Schedrins and Gogols,” someone came up with a funny paraphrase: “we need the kind of Gogols that would not focus on us”?

IZ: Yes, that was Yuri Blagov. He is still alive, by the way.

RL: And what kind of Gogols do we need today?

IZ: Let me quote Nabokov on this respect. Remember how two of his heroes, one of them being Nabokov himself, were reviewing the whole of Russian literature, deciding what to pick from each writer for modern times? They said about Gogol, “we will take everything of his.” So, I think we need Gogol in his entirety, from the Nights at a Farm near Dikanka, up to and including Selected Excerpts. Especially now that everyone sees in Russia only its bad side, only nihilism, only its destructive side. Now that we sit on the debris of our country, we need what Gogol wrote in his Selected Excerpts ... that he would keep loving the people even after he dies ... There is also this side in the Russian people, isn’t there?

RL: There are many sides in the Russian people ...

IZ: Oh yes, I agree. There is the murderer and the cheat and the lazybone. But there is also this side, right? So everybody thinks Gogol just poked fun at the Russian people, but no ... So when they say to me, “where are positive people in Russian literature?” I respond, excuse me, but who was Gogol? When he,  already a genius, author of the famous Inspector General and idolized by all of Russia, says all of a sudden: “I am worse than anybody else.” ... Gogol indeed depicted the dark sides of man, but his laughter begins with the brighter side of human beings. His laughter cures and heals. Once you read him, you feel relieved in your soul ...

RL: In light of this Gogol anniversary, I can’t help thinking of this conflict between Russia and Ukraine over the city of Sevastopol. You know Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov still regards it as a Russian city ...

IZ: If you want to know my personal opinion, I think it’s a Russian city, just like Crimea ...

As far as Luzhkov goes ... I visited him recently ... I told him it’s a shame that we still don’t have a proper Gogol museum in  Moscow. We spoke at length; he put me through to the right people. There is still a long way to go, but nevertheless he “solved this issue” as they say in their office parlance. He is not the type of guy to invite you just to chat and  philosophize. This museum needs to be on the Nikitsky boulevard in Moscow (where Gogol lived and died), where there is a library now. But the very room where Gogol died is full of technical literature ... Isn’t it a shame for Russia?! I told Luzhkov that Gogol is as homeless after his death as he was during his lifetime. Remember, he lost his resting place after they sacrilegiously transferred his ashes from the Danilovsky cemetery to Novodevichy? And what’s with this shameful replacement of his monument?

RL: ??!

IZ: His first monument in Moscow, by Nikolai Andreev, was erected for Gogol’s 100th anniversary (in 1919). But later, Stalin said Gogol’s face looked too sad – we need a different Gogol. So they erected the monument, by the sculptor Tomsky, which we see today on Gogolevsky boulevard (see page 45), for the 100th anniversary of his death in 1952. And Andreev’s monument – built with people’s donations, mind you – was dismantled and hidden in a remote corner of the courtyard on Nikitsky boulevard. In Tomsky’s version, Gogol  looks like a self-assured head of a directorate, no less.

By the way, when I arrived for the first time in Dikanka [in Ukraine], there was a monument to Gogol with a notebook. It was on a square in front of the regional communist party committee building. It was situated right opposite another monument: the one to Lenin. In  typical fashion, he was sculptured with his hand aloft, as if he were giving orders. So it looked like the Gogol directly opposite was taking note of Lenin’s advice ...

RL: Maybe it should have been be the other way around?

IZ: Yes ... The history of Gogol’s art and life is strewn with such grotesque, paradoxical incongruities.  RL