26 Books

Oh, this is a wonderful, wonderful book. It’s split into two distinct parts – the first contains tales from the Ukraine (Gogol was not Russian, but Ukrainian), while the second is full of tales mainly set in Petersburg. Husband and wife translation team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky here give us, again, the definitive translation of a masterwork of Russian literature (Gogol may have been from the Ukraine, but he wrote in Russian). It’s published by Granta in a beautifully designed paperback.

The highlight of the Ukrainian Tales is The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich, which brings us two friends, inseparable in everything until one calls the other ‘a goose’. What follows is a lifetime of litigation and acrimony. Gogol’s voice is unique: at once affectionate and mocking. He knows that there is universal truth in every one of his characters, and yet each has their own distinctive local colour. The other stories are all magnificent and are infused with a strange Ukrainian mysticism.

It’s difficult to pick a favourite from the Petersburg Tales, although if pushed, it would probably be The Nose, the surreal (but not surrealist) story of collegiate assessor Kovalev who wakes to find that his nose has been replaced with an entirely smooth but flat piece of skin. (Gogol seems to have been obsessed with noses: the protagonist of his masterwork, Dead Souls has a name which is derived from the word ’sneeze’ for example.) Kovalev sets off around Petersburg in search of his nose, only to see it go into a church in the uniform of a civil servant. When confronted, the nose insists that Kovalev has it mistaken for someone else.

A friend of mine and I shared a very amusing time not so long ago in which we consumed a good deal of red wine, and spent a large part of the evening competing to see who could praise these stories the highest. In my drunken stupor, I don’t know who outdid who, but I do know that there can be no praise high enough for these wonderful miniatures. Throughout the evening we kept returning to The Nose: saying “But when he confronts the nose he says ‘nah, mate, you’ve got me confused with some else!’” and cackling loudly. Gogol is even better when you’re pissed!

There are other gems here. The Diary of a Madman is the story of a titular councillor (many of Gogol’s characters seem to have middling positions in the labyrinthine Russian Civil Service) who solves the problem of the vacant Spanish throne by realising that he is, himself, the King of Spain. There’s The Overcoat in which a clerk, Akaky Akakievich, is forced to buy himself a new overcoat since his old one is beyond repair. He denies himself every luxury, never goes out and even stops eating in the evenings until eventually he has enough to buy his wonderful new garment. He’s promptly robbed of it and tries in vain to get anyone to do anything about it before he is driven mad and to his death by his obsession with recovering the coat.

A lot of Gogol’s ironic tone consists in repetition. He often repeats his civil servants’ titles several times in a sentence, which has the effect of making these positions seem ludicrous, without knowing the slightest thing about what a titular councillor or a collegiate assessor might be. Not a single character is safe from his insatiable desire for taking the piss.

There’s just too much here to even begin to do justice to the fantastic, playful, melancholic world of Gogol’s tales. This is the most wonderful book I’ve read for a long time. I urge everyone to read it immediately, to keep it with them at all times and to press it upon everyone they meet. These are works of singular genius.

Possibly related posts:

1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (Shane’s book 25, 2009)