So I'm going to look at the Gogol Petersburg tale, "Nevsky Prospect."
In tiny letters at the bottom it says Nevsky Prospect. Believe me. It does.
I took a class on Gogol and Dostoevsky in my junior year at Mac, with the inimitable Gitta Hammarberg, and after finishing this story this morning and furrowing my brow over every single thing I had underlined or bracketed or otherwise highlighted within the text, I have come to the conclusion: I did not really read this story. I can't have done. I literally remembered nothing about what happened in the plot, nothing about what stood out in the writing.
And there was a whole page dedicated to the beautiful minutiae of facial hair: I would remember that.
Once I read the short story "Monster" by Kelly Link, and then forgot all about it. A year or so later, I finally read the book the story was collected in, and reading it again, had no recollection of ever having done so before. It was as horrifying as if I was reading it for the first time, and only five or ten minutes after I finished reading it did I realize that yes, yes I did remember reading it before. Evidently I have a kick-ass brain, tamping down the horror after the first time around so effectively that it stayed tamped until I had forced myself through it again.
Shaun Tan's illustration for "Monster," the quote which accompanies it in the book being, "After awhile, everyone had become a zombie. So they went for a swim."
"Nevsky Prospect" was not like that. I have yet to have the moment of revelation where I realize, yes, yes I did read that. And I have an entire page of notes about the story. Details. Obviously from in-class discussion, because it also includes the requisite Gitta-isms that I would always try to record whenever they stood out (such example being, of course, the title of this very post).
All the same, I volunteered to lead the discussion on this story in our Petersburg class tomorrow – and, yes, I did think I would be a couple steps ahead, having read it before, but at least I do have some extra notes to draw from, if not, alas, my memories.
So let's see. "Nevsky Prospect."
Author: Nikolai Gogol, obviously. His life should be its own story; his mother thought the sun rose and set on him, and fervently believed he invented the railroad. He was afraid of women. He tried to go to America, but only ever made just over the border without "coming down" with some serious malady and having to return. He was an inveterate burner of his own books (which was funny at first, but entirely too tragic in his last years). I have in my notes from Gitta's class:
"- decides to be historian, applied to be professor @ St. Petersburg Univ.
- not historian"
Which, if I remember correctly, did not mean that he did NOT get the job, just that he was a terrible historian. I recall a predilection for wearing a toothache-kerchief around his head while lecturing. I think that was a thing.
Don't you just want to pinch his little cheeks?
What stands out about Gogol's biography in terms of "Nevsky Prospect" and its fellow Petersburg tales ("The Nose," "Diary of a Madman," "The Carriage," "The Portrait," and "The Overcoat"), however, is the fact that Gogol himself was Ukrainian, and though he wrote in Russian, only moved to Petersburg after his formative years. The dual aspect of country bumpkin and city-dweller is a theme that runs through the narration of the Petersburg tales, with the inclusion of a more oral, "skaz"-style (сказ) narrative constantly being juxtaposed with a lofty one, the combination of literary and anecdotal, the "combining of uncombinables" (Eikhenbaum) making his stories stylistically grotesque (the grotestque being one of Gogol's main thematic tools).
As Richard Pevear notes in the Preface to his (and Larissa Volkhonsky's) newest translation of Gogol's short fiction:
The road that brought Gogol from the depths of Little Russia intersected with Nevsky Prospect, "all-powerful Nevsky Prospect," in the heart of the capital. His art was born at that crossroads. It had the provinces in its blood, as Andrei Sinyavsky puts it, in two sense: because Little Russia supplied the setting and material for more than half of his tales, and, more profoundly, because even in Petersburg, Gogol preserved a provincial's "naive, external, astonished and envious outlook." He did not write from within Ukrainian popular tradition, he wrote looking back at it. Yet he also never entered into the life of the capital, the life he saw flashing by on Nevsky Prospect, where "the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks." – this enforced, official reality of ministries and ranks remained impenetrable to him. Being on the outside of both worlds, Gogol seems to have been destined to become a "pure writer" in a peculiarly modern sense.
Date of publication: 1835, as part of of the collection Arabesques, which included articles reflecting Petersburg life, as well as "Diary of a Madman" and the first version of "The Portrait." As a note, 1836 was the height of his fame, the middle of his greatest stream of publication and critical and public praise. After the 1842 publication of Dead Souls, he went abroad and became enmeshed in religious fanaticism, and his creative career was all but over.
Principal characters: Really, Petersburg – with Nevsky Prospect serving as a kind of metonymy in and of itself, the street representing Petersburg as a whole, and in so doing, representing the ills and vagaries of Russia's contemporary urban/capital culture.
But aside from meta-level characterization, the other people-characters are:
- Piskarëv, the childlike, obsessive artist, who follows the brunette down Nevsky Prospect one evening, and after discovering she is a fallen woman, a woman of depravity, sinks into a depression so fierce that his dream world becomes his only reality, and he even resorts to opium use in order to have more successful dream states. In his dreams, the depraved beauty appears in turn as varying ideals of chaste Russian women, and from this he convinces himself that he should offer the real-life girl his hand in marriage. He does so, she laughs at him, and he returns to his room and cuts his throat. No one mourns him, and the only people at his graveside are those fallen so low in the social order they have nothing better to do.
- Pirogov, or, as Gitta so glibly put it, "pastry dude." A lieutenant who is overly proud of his position in society, and feels more than entitled due to it, he follows a little blonde on the same night he sends Piskarev (who he is patron of) after the brunette. He pursues the woman even though she does not speak Russian, repeatedly runs from his advances, and happens to be married to a big German tinsmith. He is beaten by the German and his friends at the end, feels outraged enough that he plans to file a complaint against the artisan with his superiors, then instead goes to a coffee shop, eats a couple pastries, and goes off to some party and dances beautifully. He does not attend Piskarev's funeral.
- Schiller, the German artisan (but "not the Schiller who wrote Wilhelm Tell and the History of the Thirty Years' War, but the well-known Schiller, the tinsmith on Meschanskaya Street") and his stupid little blonde wife. Schiller drinks a lot, is very set in his very German аккурантые ways, and has very German friends (including Hoffman, but "not the writer Hoffman, but a rather good cobbler from Ofitserskaya Street").
- The Narrator, who is unnamed and undescribed, but who nonetheless breaks the fourth wall on a few occasions, and ends the story by explaining why the two examples of Piskarev and Pirogov serve to explain why he hates Nevsky Prospect, and why he shies away from lit streetlamps and the gazes of ladies from under the brims of their hats. He perfectly demonstrates the tightrope Gogol (and Gogol's prose) walked in Petersburg in the 20s and 30s, trying to put a provincial sensibility in line with those of the Russian cultural and political capital.
According to Caryl (because I think it worked so well last time): And I really did. But apparently she has nothing to say about "Nevsky Prospect." So instead, I will turn to the Pevear Preface...
According to Richard: The phantasmal Petersburg of later Russian literature – of Dostoevsky, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely – made its first appearance in "Nevsky Prospect," the idea for which came to Gogol as early as 1831, when he wrote down some sketches of the Petersburg landscape. It is a landscape of mists, pale colors, dim light, the opposite of his native province, and peopled mainly by government officials of various ranks, among whom Gogol singled out a certain type of petty clerk, the "eternal titular councillor" – Mr. Poprishchin of "The Diary of a Madman," Akaky Akakievich of "The Overcoat" – a type that became as perennial in Russian literature as the phantasmal city that somehow exudes him but will not house him.
Nothing stands still on Nevsky Prospect. People of various ranks appear, disappear, reappear in other guises, changing constantly with the light. "The deceptive nature of reality," as Sinyavsky notes, "is nowhere so openly and declaredly expressed by Gogol as in 'Nevsky Prospect.' It is not by chance that 'Nevsky Prospect' sets the tone for the other Petersburg tales." The unusual structure of the tale underscores the theme, framing two opposite cases of deception with a more general evocation of the city's atmosphere. Interestingly, in a note published in The Contemporary, Pushkin (who did not live to read "The Overcoat") called "Nevsky Prospect" the fullest, the most complete of Gogol's tales.
Takeaway message: Gogol is crazy. And great. And Petersburg is weird. Let's none of us get obsessed enough over a depraved girl to "go down the opium trail."
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