Pathetic Giant

NIKOLAI GOGOL (174 pp.)--Janko Lavrin--Macmillan ($2.50).

Nikolai Gogol was obsessed by the image of a ladder. "God," he wrote in one of his earliest stories, "has a ladder reaching from heaven right down to earth. The holy archangels put it up ... and as soon as God steps on the first rung of it, all the evil spirits fall headlong and sink in heaps down to hell." Gogol spent 33 years reaching, as he believed, the bottom rung. Worn out, he thought he heard God's angry foot above, and slid back into the pit of madness. Yet in the years of reaching he had done as much as any man to lay out the pattern of the Russian novel, and had written the comic masterpiece Dead Souls.

Gogol died 100 years ago last month, and for the occasion Janko Lavrin, professor of Slavic languages at Nottingham University, has told the story of the pathetic giant in a capable, straightforward short biography.

The Sly Ukrainian. Gogol was a sickly child with "pus oozing from his ears." His mother, a woefully superstitious and self-deluded Ukrainian girl, pampered and played with him like a doll, working on his sensitive feelings with love and terror until the boy was a nervous wreck. In self-defense, he developed an outrageous egotism. At school he spent his time dreaming of future greatness, mimicking his classmates with the cruel comic talent which was his genius, but consciously preparing himself to be "a benefactor to humanity."

Humanity was not quite ready when, at 19, Gogol went to St. Petersburg. It wouldn't even give him a job and scoffed mercilessly at his first writings. Shaken, the young scamp cheered himself up by touring Germany on 1,450 rubles embezzled from his family. At 22, after some time spent as tutor to a highborn halfwit, Gogol published a book of stories about the Ukraine. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka made him a celebrity overnight. The famous critic, Vissarion Belinsky, compared the rural magic of Gogol's tales to that of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Pushkin himself called them "new in our literature . . . delightful."

Gogol's ego became even more swollen. He took to motley waistcoats, kiss-curls and a fashionable hypochondria. He wrote crawling letters to celebrities. To the Poet Zhukovsky: "Oh, with what enthusiasm I would then wipe the dust off your shoes with the hair of my head, would lie down at the feet of Your Excellency and catch with my greedy ear the sweet nectar from your mouth."

After Mirgorod, another volume of Ukrainian stories, Gogol was received everywhere as a writer second only to Pushkin. The great poet called him friend, at least to his face; in private, Pushkin referred to him as "that sly Ukrainian, capable of robbing you before you have time to cry for help."

Robbing Pushkin of literary ideas became a major occupation with Gogol. He got the idea for The Inspector General, his first play and the greatest of Russian satirical comedies, from his friend. The play was such a huge success that Gogol found it advisable to leave Russia--the official world was alarmed at the antibureaucratic passions aroused in the audiences.

Dealer in Dead Souls. For twelve years Gogol traveled restlessly about the Continent, from Germany to France, to Italy, to Switzerland, to France again, and always back to Rome--his favorite city. ("Europe exists in order to watch," he said, "and Italy in order to live.") All the while, Gogol worked at his novel, Dead Souls, also based on one of Pushkin's ideas. In 1842 it was published and, as the Journalist-Historian Alexander Herzen records, "shook the whole of Russia."

The story concerns one Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant, who travels around Russia buying up the names of "dead souls"--serfs who have died since the last census. Once he has accumulated a large enough roster of these imaginary people, Chichikov intends to raise a huge mortgage on them, invest the money somehow or other and make himself a rich man. It is at once an uproariously funny story and a sulphuric satire on Russian society. Gogol was able to sound the deepest and most secret of men's motives as surehandedly as a peasant pawing up his potato crop.

Yet for all he knew about other people, Gogol knew nothing about himself. After the tremendous success of Dead Souls, he had a vision of "Russia . . . turning upon me eyes full of expectation." He felt a sudden strength, and a longing to "climb that ladder." In his exaltation he began to wonder if his "great task" was not, after all, to save his generation. He took up a sequel to Dead Souls, in which he sought to illumine good as in the first volume he had exposed evil. His feet had left the ground; he could not push the work to completion.

Bellows & Fire. Next, he put his thought into a religious and social tract a book which he assured his friends was "needed by all." When it was published a pious and disjointed tirade, his friends turned on him with angry reproaches. Gogol, whose bravado was the thinnest garment of self-loathing, broke and piteously begged forgiveness. "One drop of your pity," was all he asked. Few gave it Gogol lost his grip on the ladder.

He fell into the ministry of a fanatical Orthodox priest, Father Konstantinovsky who called him a "swine," and plied the bellows to Gogol's visions of hell fire. Poor Gogol was always chilly now, a twisted little man with a long fox nose, big close-set eyes, a loose little mouth full of bad teeth. For two years before his death, he was often without the power of connected thought. One day he burned most of the manuscript of Part II of Dead Souls. Then he refused to eat. On March 4, 1852, at the age of 43, he died of exhaustion, gasping, "Give me a ladder, a ladder!"

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