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The Devil in Mufti: The Märchenwelt in Gogol's Short Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James M. Holquist*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn

Extract

Everything that is profound loves the mask. … I could imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green, heavily-hooped wine cask. … Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustable in evasion of communication, desires and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends.

Beyond Good and Evil

These words of Nietzsche say much about Gogol. They suggest his keg-like belly, the contradictions and evasions of his letters, his cunning and depth, and above all, those “ gaps and black holes in the texture of his style” which Nobokov describes in his study, in a chapter called, “Apotheosis of a Mask.” But he had other ways to hide his fragile gift—there is a certain dissimulation in the very generes he chose: his greatest comedy ends in “living statues” and he calls his novel a poema.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 352 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 352 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York, 1944), p. 143.

Note 2 in page 352 It may have been an awareness of this lack of fixity in his personal life that led Gogol in his last years to the unnatural rigidity of his intellectual, religious, and ultimately actual rigor mortis.

Note 3 in page 352 For a description of the early development of the genre in Germany see Richard Benz, Märchen-Dichtung der Romantiker (Gotha, 1908), pp. 1–82. For later developments see Dorothea Bäuerle, Das nach-romantische Kunstmärchen in der deutschen Dichtung (Würzburg, 1937).

Note 4 in page 352 The titles of two such studies should suffice to make the point: B. M. Sokolov, Gogol the Ethnographer (Gogol-Etnograf) (Petersburg, 1910); and S. Mashinsky, Gogol and the Folk Historico-poelic Tradition (Gogol i narodnaya poeti-cheskaya Traditsiya) (Moscow, 1938). The investigation of true folk motifs in Gogol's stories is, of course, legitimate, and even interesting; but what Gogol did with these elements is even more interesting.

Note 5 in page 352 In Pushkin (New York, 1963), p. 205.

Note 6 in page 352 And at least one Soviet critic, Z. Serapionova (sic), “Hoffmannesque Motifs in Gogol's Petersburg Stories,” Literary Studies (Literaturnaya uchyoba), No. 8–9 (August–September 1939).

Note 7 in page 353 Ad. Stender-Petersen, “Gogol und die deutsche Romantik,” Euphorion, xxiv, iii, 628–653.

Note 8 in page 353 Michael Gorlin, N. V. Gogol und E. T. A. Hoffmann (Teildruck) (inaug. diss., Berlin, 1933). Two other studies devoted to the same problem are: Jeanette Eyre, “Gogol and German Romanticism” (Susan Anthony Potter prize essay in Comparative Literature, Radcliffe Coll., 1937, unpub.); Norman W. Ingham, “Hoffmann in Russia, 1822–1845” (unpub. diss., Harvard, 1963). F. C. Driessen (Gogol as a Short-Story Writer, tr. Ian F. Finlay, The Hague, 1965) gives the tales an intelligent psychological reading; but, while observing that, “Gogol' treats borrowed material arbitrarily” (p. 215), he introduces some comparative notes in connection with the Dikanka cycle, as, for instance, his contrast of Tieck's “Liebeszauber” and “St. John's Eve.” Stender-Petersen (p. 651) sees “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Nose” as parodies of romanticism, emphasizing even further Gogol's break with his literary past.

Note 9 in page 353 The restrictions against using the Russian term noted above by Mirsky are, with some reservations, equally valid when applied to “fairy tale” in this context.

Note 10 in page 353 M. I. Jehle, Das deutsche Kunstmärchen von der Romantik zum Naturalismus (Urbana, 1935), Illinois Studies in Lang, and Lit., xix, i–ii, 9–10.

Note 11 in page 353 Olga Reimann, Das Märchen bei E. T. A. Hof mann (inaug. diss., München, 1926).

Note 12 in page 354 Marianne Thalmann, Das Märchen und das Moderne: zum Begriff der Surrealität im Märchen der Romantik (Stuttgart, 1961). Trans, as The Romantic Fairy Tale: Seeds of Surrealism by Mary B. Corcoran (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964).

Two tales from Hoffmann can serve as examples of this specificity and the way in which good does not always triumph over evil: “Der goldene Topf” is subtitled “Ein Märchen der neuen Zeit,” and takes place in Dresden; while Veronica seems, like Anselmus, to possess a feeling for the magic of the world, the fact that he is rumored soon to be made a Hofrat is what convinces her she must become his wife. “Der Sandmann,” it is true, ends in a marriage, but it is only an afterthought, occurring as it does just a few sentences below the scene in which the innocent Nathanael jumps to his death under the evil spell of Coppelius, who gets off scot free.

Note 13 in page 354 A choice example of this arbitrariness would be the almost gratuitous ending to Hoffmann's “Klein Zaches.” In the last chapter the narrator says, “Eigentlich hätte die Geschichte mit dem tragischen Tode des kleinen Zinnober schliessen Können. Doch ist es nicht anmutiger, wenn statt eines traurigen Leichenbegängnisses eine fröhliche Hochzeit am Ende steht? So werde denn noch Kürzlich der holden Candida und des glücklichen Balthasars gedacht.”

Note 14 in page 354 An example in which each goes into the world of the other is provided by Tieck's “Die Elfen.”

Note 15 in page 354 Ruth Lorbe in her article “Spuren: Elemente der Lyrik im Kinderreim,” Akzente, iii, iii (1954), 280–291, uses this point to suggest a relationship between the sound-motivated illogic of nursery rhymes and certain aspects of the modern in the lyrics of Eliot, Celan, and others—another example of the relevance to belles-lettres of what is often dismissed as below the dignity of the critic to investigate.

Note 16 in page 354 And as Stith Thompson has pointed out: “Of all folklore, it is the folktale that holds most significance for the serious student of literature.” “Folklore and Literature,” PMLA, lv (1940), 874.

Note 17 in page 354 That Gogol knew the work of both these authors is, of course, undoubted, as the studies of Stender-Petersen and Gorlin cited above show. Further evidence of Tieck's popularity in Russia is found in the pilgrimages to Tieck of such figures as Küchelbecker and Zhukovsky. See Percy Matenko, “Tieck's Russian Friends,” PMLA, lv (1940), 1129–45. Further evidence of Hoffmann's popularity in Russia is found in two books by Charles Passage: Dosloevsky the Adaptor (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1954), and The Russian Hoffmannists (The Hague, 1963).

Note 18 in page 355 As is well known, Gogol, in his letters to his mother, continually pleaded for details of Ukrainian life and folklore; this suggests that his knowledge of such topics was no more profound than the specious “scholarship” displayed in the Arabesques essays. Further, when the second volume of Evenings appeared, a Ukrainian reader published a long letter in one of the leading journals of the day objecting to Gogol's more blatant departures from Ukrainian life. Letter of Andry Tsarinny, Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva), 1832, Vol. xxv (cited in Paul Debreczeny, “Nikolay Gogol and his Contemporary Critics,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S., lvi, iii [1966], 6).

Note 19 in page 355 N. V. Gogol, Works in Six Volumes (Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh) (Moskva, 1959), i, 45. All citations will be to this edition, hereafter referred to by volume and page numbers.

Note 20 in page 355 Antti Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (Helsingfors, 1910). This classic was revised in 1928, and in 1961 it was again revised (and translated) by Stith Thompson: The Types of the Folktale, a Classification and Bibliography, Communications of the Finnish Academy, No. 184 (Helsinki, 1961).

Note 21 in page 358 See, e.g., Alice M. Killen, Le Roman terrifiant ou roman “noir” de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe (Paris, 1920), Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle (London, 1927), and Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London, 1938).

Note 22 in page 358 In this respect Russia is like the America Henry James was complaining about in his monograph on Hawthorne, when he lists among other elements of European life missing in the U. S. “no castles … nor ivied ruins.” It is probably significant in this regard that Beztuzhev-Marlinsky's knightly tales (Fortress Eisen, The Tournament in Revel) are set in Livonia.

Note 23 in page 358 Notebook entry (23 February 1893) quoted in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (New York, London, 1959), p. 58.

Note 24 in page 359 It is this ability of the great Russian novelists to use so exhaustively the facts of lived experience, without devolving into sterile reportage or deterministic naturalism, that has led Iris Murdoch to name them “masters of the contingent.” See “Against Dryness,” Encounter (January 1961), p. 20.

Note 25 in page 359 The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961).

Note 26 in page 359 Quoted in J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens, the World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. xv. An article published after this paper was submitted makes some of the same points raised here with regard to Dickens. See Harry Stone, “The Novel as Fairy Tale: Dickens' Dombey and Son,” English Studies, XLVii, (Feb. 1966), 1–27. Kathleen Tillotson also speaks of “the mysterious simplicities of the fairy tale” in connection with Dombey and Son in a book Stone fails to cite in his article. See Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford, 1956 [first pub. 1954]), p. 174.

Note 27 in page 359 Quoted as an epigraph to Barbara Hardy, The Appropriate Form (London, 1964).

Note 28 in page 360 J. R. R. Tolkien, the British historian and philologist who is himself author of several volumes of fairy tales, has this to say on the subject of dreams as motivation for fantastic happenings: “I would also exclude, or rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of marvels.” “On Fairy Stories,” Tree and Leaf (Boston, 1965), p. 13.

Note 29 in page 361 Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol's Overcoat Was Made,” Through Literature (Skvoz Literaturu) (Leningrad, 1924).

Note 30 in page 362 “Gogol' and Kafka,” For Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1956), p. 107.

Note 31 in page 362 Idris Parry, “Kafka, Gogol, and Nathanael West,” Kafka, ed. Ronald Gray (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962).

Note 32 in page 362 Parry, p. 87.