Nikolai Gogol

Ten years ago, I happened to attend a conference on the literature of this country whose name has been slightly amended since 1993.  One of the conference’s more spirited speakers, an ethnic Ukrainian, recalled a conversation he had had with a famous Russian–born writer at a cocktail party years before.  After the usual small talk on wind and weather, the Russian became curious:

Writer: You have an accent in English.  Are you from Europe?
Ukrainian: I’m from Ukraine.
Writer: From Urania?   [walks away]

Whether such an exchange ever occurred (the joke has the bitter flavor of truth) is not as interesting as the context.  Contempt for Ukrainian literature and the concept of Ukraine as a cultural and political entity independent of both Poland and Russia is still widespread, owing largely to its lack of famous men and women of letters.  Although the founder of the modern language was a poet and artist whose balding head, handlebar moustache, and resigned chin (to the fate of his native tongue, some would say) are engraved into numerous monuments worldwide, his existence is practically unacknowledged outside Slavic departments.  Even in those hallowed halls enthusiasts tend, after Russian, to study Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian before knitting their brows at the oddities of the Ukrainian alphabet, Cyrillic with a sprinkling of one–eyes and two–eyes.  Most Ukrainian writers, history regrets to inform us, chose other mediums in which to express themselves.  And none was weirder and more brilliant than this small dainty man, the subject of one of the English language's most succulent literary biographies.              

 

Succulent thanks to the slow, effortless circles which the biographer, himself one of the finest craftsman in both Russian and English, sketches around young Gogol.  We begin with Gogol’s death and end with his birth, and in–between we find that our long–standing impressions of nineteenth–century Russia owe much to his handiwork:

Symbolism with him [Gogol] took on a physiological aspect, in this case optical.  The mutterings of passers–by were again symbolic, this time an auditory effect which was meant to render the hectic loneliness of a poor man in an opulent crowd.  Gogol, and Gogol alone, spoke to himself as he walked, but the monologue was echoed and multiplied by the shadows of his mind.  Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament, St. Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century, losing it when it ceased to be the capital of an empire.

This is very much the oddness of Petersburg that pervades Russian literature from Pushkin to Bely, the incongruity of traditional European architecture and customs against the thoughts and rapturous originality of its natives.  I have not been to Petersburg in a few years, but little has changed.  Thirty years passed between Nabokov’s last spring in his hometown and the passage above, which, fifty years later felt like it had been culled from the evening edition of Argumenty i fakty.  The point is that Gogol, and Gogol alone, changed Russian literature both for its creators and its admirers, domestic and otherwise.  With the possible exception of Pushkin, he is more responsible than any author for how Slavic literary scholars have evaluated the last two hundred years.  

He did not, however, come about this brilliance by living the simple and successful life of an academically–minded writer who spends days in a library and nights behind his desk.  A soft, effeminate man, Gogol was completely impractical in mind and body: he was constantly impecunious, ill, or both; he loved to fib and exaggerate because, like all great writers, fiction was far richer than the worries of a mortal; he listened to no one but himself, fled from creditors and would–be benefactors alike, and traveled alone and aimlessly in Europe for years as if trying to absorb its culture by sponging its streets with his boots.  The results were few (Gogol would die, we are told immediately, in his early forties after an abortive leeching cure) but magnificent and his modest corpus is still studied with avidity by Russianists everywhere.  Nabokov demolishes some previous attempts at rendering Gogol’s eccentric prose (so badly, in fact, that I don’t think any publisher would have ever hired these poor dead souls ever again) and supplies his own passages, which display his own mastery and wit and swell and ebb with the same unmistakable rhythm of Nabokov’s discursive writings.  All of which, I may add, could probably not be written any more clearly or concisely, nor with more passion and understanding for his subject.

Yet Gogol’s most significant contribution may well be his obsession with a rather untranslatable word, poshlost’, about which Nabokov digresses for over twenty pages.  Poshlost’ has no precise English synonym (the German Kitsch is probably the closest, although this latter is strictly speaking an aesthetic term), but might be explained as the "the belief in or propagation of superficial, sentimental and populist values as true culture."  Examples would be pop and paparazzi shows and magazines or any Hollywood love or war story, but with a modicum of discipline these can be ignored.  Much more egregious offenders are books which might portray an earnest young man who, in an effort to "make it in the world," befriends some multicultural characters, falls in love with sunsets, dogs and soft jazz, repeats to himself that life is really not about the pursuit of material wealth — although he doesn't quite convince the reader of that — and, at the end of his "journey," metaphorically envisions humanity's fate in the hands of the scattered few around him.  Most books, as it were, fall into this disreputable category.  The word itself is in very common usage in modern Russian, and has come to signify the unshakeable twitch that surfaces upon hearing or seeing something so absolutely false and so infuriatingly pandering to common thought and common happiness that even pacifists like myself want to smack someone in the vicinity.  To Russians' great credit, the word is extremely old and consistently applied; and to Gogol’s credit, he is in every way the opposite of it, just like Tomas is a “monster in the kingdom of kitsch” in this novel.

And to Nabokov’s credit, he restrains himself for the most part from overtaking his beloved forerunner.  Yes, it is Nabokov’s show; but if you are familiar with his work, you know that he cannot share a stage to save his life and that his imprint is indelibly left on everything he touches.   He even has time to tell us about his deepest fears:

In his Dikanka and Taras Bulba phase .... Gogol was skirting a very dreadful precipice.  He almost became the writer of Ukrainian folklore tales and ‘colorful romances.’  We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost.  When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dneipr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

This alternative reality may sound terrifying to Gogol connoisseurs, but some Ukrainians probably would not have minded.  And they would have deeply resented any comments on their status as a minor literature just as much as crude puns, of which Nabokov was particularly fond.   Pity that young Ukrainian writer could only remember Nabokov's last two comments.

This Craft of Verse

A marvelous writer once stated with regard to a lesser writer (I shall spare you both their identities) that "self-conscious eclectic literariness" was the genuine sign of postmodernism, that dreadful beast that has Grendeled our beautiful world.  That designation is only true by virtue of the inclusion of "self–conscious," the hallmark of the modern mind who thinks so much about himself that he either forgets that other people’s opinions may be superior to his, or so much about others’ opinions that he fails to see his own genius.  Another marvelous writer — at times, the most marvelous — had a lovely observation on this fact:

I think that one of the sins of modern literature is that it is too self–conscious.  For example, I think of French literature as being one of the great literatures in the world (I don’t suppose anyone could doubt this).  Yet I have been made to feel that French authors are generally too self–conscious.  A French writer begins by defining himself before he quite knows what he is going to write.  He says: What should (for example) a Catholic born in such–and–such province, and being a bit of a socialist, write?  Or: How should we write after the Second World War?  I suppose there are many people all over the world who labor under those illusory problems.

Far too many, but their number is no longer legion.  We are returning, little by little, to a world with values — eternal, moral values, the only type that resists all movements, waves, and so–called revolutions.  People are growing sick and tired of relativism, or hearing how whatever one throws on a defenseless canvas or page must be deemed equal to the great masterpieces of all our centuries.  What the proponents of the smears and bangs that compose modern “art” perhaps do not know is that there has been inferior stuff floating about in every century; there have been puppets and pantomimes and infantile attempts at significance that make anyone with a drachma of aesthetic taste shudder; but history has wisely chosen to obliterate them.  True art defies all these mindless categories and rises above them to a greater arena: that of the morally admirable.  And of all twentieth–century writers, perhaps no one is as morally admirable as Jorge Luis Borges.   

If you have never read Borges, this short collection of six lectures he gave from memory at this renowned institution of higher learning forty years ago will readily impart the bones and twigs of his fortress.  For those of us who read Borges every week, we get a rare opportunity at seeing himself present his ideas orally and, most interestingly, in English (Borges, owing to familial diversity, was bilingual from an early age).  Borges is obsessed — and all great writers are obsessed — with certain works, lines, authors, periods of language (Old Norse and Anglo–Saxon, for example) but not really with big, bland ideas, the fodder for the literary criticism he so shunned.  His lectures, he claims, are about poetry, but then he adds prose and verse are "all one."  He postulates some ideas about translation, a field in which he often exceeded the work he rendered into Spanish, then quickly retracts them.  He retracts any idea pursued to too great a length for the simple reason that he wishes it to remain a hint or suggestion and not to become an argument:

As I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down.  Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.  Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody.  They convince nobody because they are arguments .... But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination.

This explanation, coupled with Borges’s admission that he does not write novels out of laziness (only half–true) and owing to novels’ inherent padding (movement from scene to scene, continuity, etc.), gives us the core belief of his world: that poetry, even poetry expressed in prose, remains the only way in which anything of any substance can be conveyed.  When we think back on our lives, we want our memories to be poetic, we want each last promise, farewell, or ecstasy to suggest more than it could say explicitly.  We want a world of hints, allegations, and mystery, because that way we remain at least partially undiscovered, still waiting for the perfect soul to understand us.  Like any good poem or novel waits patiently for its perfect reader.

Since these lectures are given from memory (Borges was almost completely blind at the time), there are repetitions that may lead the casual reader to think Borges the type of older gentlemen ensnared in a handful of trivial detail that he likes to inflict upon younger generations as his contribution to the world of Truth.  Borges surely loved detail and does have certain favorite themes and authors, but he was far too careful a speaker and interviewee to allow himself to get more than superficially embroiled in a dispute that could only be resolved in writing.  For the purpose of his talks, he limits himself to literary moments where he finds real poetic insight, including lines or phrases from Keats ("thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"), the Ode of Brunanburh, Lugones, Chesterton, Stevenson, Carlyle, Frost (especially his pre–sleep miles), and an obscure quote ("a rose–red city, half as old as Time," referring to this city, one of the Seven New Wonders of the World) from an obscure writer whose name even Borges cannot recall.  An amazing fact if one believes the story that Borges still remembered in 1976 an eight–stanza poem recited to him by a Romanian refugee in 1916, although Borges himself never spoke Romanian.

The web of these notions (to borrow Stevenson’s metaphor) comprises what one thinks of when asked to define poetry, which Borges calls, very tentatively, "the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together."  He and his readers all know that this definition is insufficient because poetry defines itself by expanding its reach over what we find poetic.  Over time and many pages, we come to understand the difference between what is vulgar, platitudinous and morally indefensible, and what is just, poetic and moral.  Whether morality itself is inherently poetic may be a matter of scrutiny and perhaps even of taste, but as Borges warns all frivolous relativists: "if a reader thinks that you have a moral defect, there is no reason whatever why he should admire you or put up with you."  And not having any moral defect at all is the divine word itself, from poet or god, that he so worships.      

Anticipating the Original of Laura

Is there a greater thrill for a bibliophile than the publication of a newly discovered work by a deceased author he admires?  All literary criticism, bad and good, feels much more comfortable with the dead than with the living, and not only because the dead cannot tell them how foolish and misbegotten their analyses are.  There is, inevitably, a wholeness (especially if the writer reached a decent old age) to the oeuvre of a writer which mimics life’s own swerves and shapes.  From the brash and roguish writings of youth to more pensive middle age, to silver–haired masterpieces, to the last recounting of a long journey into night, a writer’s oeuvre is his photo album, diary, résumé, and testament.  Unless his time on earth was engulfed by extraordinary savageness or sensationalism (and we know the adage on that point), he will only be remembered for the papers he chose to engrave.  Once he is no longer around, his next life, that of a literary figure, may truly commence.    

As such, there has been more than a bit of idle chatter regarding the unpublished manuscript of this great polyglot, none of it, alas, conclusive.  After the same argument is repeated in paraphrase about a dozen times, it is then for some reason suggested that the best justification for adhering to the author’s final wishes to burn The Original of Laura would be that the half–work might endure undeserved critical silliness (as if, we suppose, his other works do merit such scrutiny).  If Nabokov, a fastidious mastermind, got as far as is claimed — roughly thirty normal pages, so maybe about twelve or thirteen thousand words, although this remains pure speculation — one can be sure that the quality of the production will be at the same standards as readers have come to expect.  The only foreseeable drop–off would be in structure, those artificial beams and bridges that often do not materialize until all pertinent details have been mapped.  Yet Nabokov was just as accomplished an architect as he was a portrait painter, a rarity in our age of overspecialization.  And although he famously claimed to have rewritten everything he had ever published at least a hundred times, his clarity of phrasing is evident even in his correspondence and discursive writings.  If anyone were to be protected by the fortress of his own talents and unable to tarnish his image with any posthumous palimpsests, Nabokov would be among the most likely to survive unscathed.

Nevertheless, if these recent rumors are well–founded, his son, translator, and literary executor Dmitri appears to be engaging in a game of handy–dandy.  Encumbered by a number of burdens, not the least of which is the maintenance of his father’s artistic integrity in the face of shifting critical winds, the younger (73–year–old) Nabokov would have burned the document by now if he had really wanted to do so.  After all, July marked the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s death.  Clearly, waters have to be tested, and maybe a bit of creative padding needs to be inserted before we get to see the semi–finished product (a few years ago, some impatient scholars decided to get a jump on the competition).  Having spent a decade working in Nabokovia, my understanding is that we will see the pink elephant in the end, although it will still be dripping with distemper.  Nabokov conceded that he would be remembered primarily for his unorthodox translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (which he justified by Chateaubriand’s rendering of this most sublime of all human creations), and this notorious novel which first brought him censure then worldwide and everlasting glory.  Since soothsayers seem to think that Laura and Dolores Haze are cousins or at least distantly related, a literary executor steeped in the riches and diversity of his father’s works might chafe at the prospect of further Lolitology.  Such is the price of fame and, of course, of original genius.

*Note: The work in question has indeed been published.  You can find a review on these pages.

The Riddle of the Sands

When fiction decides to prognosticate about reality, the future of mankind and so forth, it usually does so in the guise of either some apocalyptic vision or natural progression of technology.  There are names for these types of books, the latter normally being dubbed science fiction (an odd couple, to say the least, but less bumptious than “technological fiction”), and the former treading near the subcategories of religious literature or prophecy.  Prophecy: knowing the future before it happens and having the good sense to enlighten the less clairvoyant.  When fiction prophesies and its artifices become newspaper headlines, then one speaks of a visionary.  This is rare, however, among artistic writers because the future is hardly their medium: they are interested either in the past (Romantics come to mind) or the present (like Modernists, those happiest of citizens).  The future is left to the wizards of machines and moons, starships and inexplicable forces of cosmic calamity.  Just writing that last sentence tells me why the future should probably remain undisturbed and given a generous head start.

 

Occasionally, a talented writer with primarily artistic ends in mind will gaze into a crystal ball, or perhaps an empty bottle or ashtray, and see something he knows will occur.  It may be good or bad, but it cannot be that he will leave his job, his wife, or his homeland, because these actions will only become his future if and when he so wishes.  No, he sees something greater than he is, something that will affect not only his small microcosm of existence but also the lives and fates of many others.  This is how a blind Argentine dreamed up a global library and a wealthy overeducated Dane wallowed presciently in the selfish neurosis of postwar Europe.  Dreams and desires certainly have a lot to do with what you see, and they can be delusive; but they can also allow you to catch a glimpse of something others might not even recognize.   

 

You may have not heard of Erskine Childers, but you have appreciated his labors for more than a century.  He is often credited with establishing this genre of popular fiction, and his 1903 work (his only novel amidst a dozen military histories) still gets published and read and praised.  The novel has also been featured on lists of this kind of literature, which may sound like Armageddon and Extraterrestrial Wars rolled into one large adamantine asteroid, but was actually the product of an era in which British global power began to endure sizable losses.  An earlier, even more seminal work by another Irishman is also included, because it allegedly showcases the frightening prospects of foreign supremacy and, to be twenty–first century about it, retrocolonization (a term of which your search engine is unaware but which may indeed become a headline in the next decade or so).  It was at this time that Childers, an avid sailor during school and university holidays, conceived of a most fantastic fear: the Germans attacking Britain from the North Sea.            

Our hero is not Childers, but Carruthers, a bored young diplomat who is invited by an old chum called Davies on a yachting and duck hunting trip around the Baltic.  Of course Davies does not actually have a yacht; he does have, however, another purpose to the ambitious tour in his small boat (named after a song by this composer) and the two Britons are soon embroiled in a plot to foil, it seems, all of Prussia.  In a slow narrative typical of a prolific nineteenth–century man of letters where clues and red herrings are revealed in equal quantity and very gradually, Carruthers comes to see why making maps of the East Frisian Islands for the British Navy may avert some kind of invasion.  There is also a shady German named Dollmann, his lovely daughter, and the distinct possibility of a double agent abetting the Germans in their insidious scheme.  

For reasons I am in no position to investigate, the book has been universally lauded by those in the sailing industry as being spot–on about all things nautical.  The warnings of the novel were also apparently just as accurate, since in response the British government is reputed to have established new naval outposts all along its shoreline and no invasion of any kind was ever documented.  Thus The Riddle of the Sands has that rare quality among prophecies of having been considered and acted upon before hazardous consequences could arise (and we may ponder that eternal conundrum as to whether a prophecy can only be given validity if it is fulfilled).  We might call Childers a prophet in his own country if he were not actually from another country, one that elected him to its Parliament and executed him by its firing squads, then elected his son fifty years later as its fourth President.  A remarkable end to a man who peered into the future of Europe but could not possibly have imagined his own.

The Italian Secretary

Although widely and justly considered second–rate works, the library of this legendary sleuth's  further adventures has been growing by leaps and even greater leaps the last forty–odd years.  A staggering number of these books, of course, wallow in that corner of chilly obscurity especially reserved for epigones.  Even an authoritative collection penned by Arthur Conan Doyle's youngest son and Agatha Christie's most heralded contemporary and based on unsolved Holmes cases never fleshed out in print suffers from the ingenious self–limitation of recycling actual Doylean plot lines.  Thus, if you are more than superficially acquainted with the original stories, you will see the guilty party marching towards you from the other end of Baker street.

Not so with the American author Caleb Carr, who comes up with an entirely new adventure and one not remiss in its Holmesian eccentricities.  Carr is the author of this other bestselling novel, which I cannot recommend, as well as a noted military historian.  His training in that field must definitely have imbued the villain's weapon of mass devastation (I shall not describe it further) with a certain  authenticity, although that is again not my business to judge.  What I may say, however, is that the historian finds Victorian dialogue to be a rather delightful affair and, while generally refraining from archaic constructions, dispatches a convincing Watson (no story is complete without him) to lead the reader from room to darkened room in search of, well, a ghost.  The ghost has been biding its time for a while now:  the Italian secretary in question is none other than this murdered gentleman, once a member of the court of  Mary, Queen of Scots, and now still very much bounding about this old palace.

Mycroft, Holmes's older brother always described by Sherlock as having the better brain of the two, if beset by irreparable indolence, summons the dynamic pair to Scotland to investigate the evisceration of an architect and a mason.  Along the way, a few belligerent Scottish terrorists decide to ventilate the train that the two visitors happen to be riding.  We are to gather that this small piece of action will be a foretaste of the revolt awaiting the detectives in the North, although the extreme violence of the novel (a very modern addition) is tempered by the cozy whispers of ghosts and goblin–like baddies from every crevice and crack of  Holyrood.  Once there, the usual chain of events ensues: Holmes becomes moody and finds the whole operation either tedious or hilarious, while Watson drifts from one shady character to another, inspecting each of them with severe medical thoroughness.  Holmes of course knows exactly what's going on and just has to test out a few of his theories to substantiate his peerless intuition; Watson, on the other hand, is tasked to play the role of the silly goat.  This thankless assignment involves irrational fears of the supernatural, excessive politeness (especially to the fairest and most distressed of Europe's damsels), and an unerring tendency for absurd deductions based on a hint or a sniff of a clue (or the hint of a sniff of a clue).  This is both the trademark of the Holmes stories and its cardinal shortcoming, and Carr smartly chooses not to tamper with a proven product.

I cannot say I like the end of The Italian Secretary, neither what happens nor how and why it happens.  The history of Rizzio's murder is a nice backdrop, but how many Holmesian solutions do we have that truly involve the otherworldly?  Despite this obvious straw–man, on most pages Carr offers a flattering and sincere imitation of Watson's unique cadence.  More impressively, the reader's attention is held even though the vast majority of the novel are lengthy dialogues: Holmes and his foil, or the Brothers Holmes, or Watson and the young woman he finds wandering the castle.  Yes, it's always Watson who finds the woman.  Holmes found a woman once, in this, his first short story.  Conan Doyle immediately recognized the schmaltzy path that his beloved creation would be taking if he continued in this vein and wisely concluded that some artists should remain monks, or at least keep bees instead of grandchildren.  Had he not, it would have been one of the most disastrous decisions in literary history.  But perhaps still not as bad as this one.