Nikolai Gogol ‘not only has a modern character, he is universal

By abolishing the classicist order of the arts, the last reflection of the Ptolemaic cosmos and the ancien régime society, nineteenth-century romanticism favored that mixture of high and low, comic and tragic whose most representative fruit remains the prose of the novel. He then breathed a new air of freedom; but its price was an almost intolerable instability, a lack of foundations which threatened to silence the most aware artists. If in the twentieth century, when the game will now be played entirely within the literary sphere, a Beckett will be able to indulge in the motto “I’ll try again, I’ll make a better mistake”, touching the threshold of silence to each work but continuing to elude it, a century earlier the great writers exposed themselves to a real failure, one that leads outside the aesthetic field.

Not only did the poets understand that their art had lost its authority; even those who composed novelsclaiming, however, to enclose the entire physical and metaphysical universe of the old sacred poems, he felt he was working without legitimacy, in the midst of a shapeless chaos. In this way he was sometimes followed by an attempt to abjure, and perhaps he would protect himself from instability by taking refuge in a religion that was too narrow. Think of the paths of Manzoni and Gogol ‘. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the most tragic fate has befallen the most comic writer, the inventor of noses posing as high officials and the grotesque swindler Cicikov, who between one census and another of serfs proposes to the owners of the Russian campaign to sell him the “dead souls” but not yet struck off the lists to obtain a bank credit.

Despite the Manzonian repudiation, The betrothed they went around the world finished and finished; of the romance poem on which the mature Gogol had staked everything, instead we have only the “infernal” part: the others, a purgatory and an edifying paradise, have been burned several times by the author, demonstrating that the modern can not stand the description of the Good (Don Abbondio is immortal, Borromeo remains a cloying santino). “Dead souls” cuts the Gogolian biography in two. Giovanni Maccari reminds us of this today, introducing his Nikolaj Gogol ‘with a prose of elegant naturalness in the memories of those who knew him published by Quodlibet. Maccari figures as the editor of this humorous book, but in reality he is the author, in the sense in which the Enzensberger of the Colloquia with Marx and Engels is: an author who, instead of fictionalizing a life, chooses the technique of a very intelligent montage.

So in 1842, when the adventures of Cicikov come out, the thirty-year-old Gogol seems to be at the peak of his career, while it is precisely then that he begins to repress a talent too daring for his “fragile psychology”. He will die ten years later without apparent cause, gogolianamente tortured by doctors, after having devoted himself to the devout and reactionary writings censored by a famous letter from Belinsky. Destiny is strange, and the man mysterious. So Maccari tries to decipher it “through eyewitnesses, that is by placing a series of camera trajectories on his trajectories”, as is done with certain animals, “in the hope of surprising him when he does not know he is being seen”.

Thus he makes the anecdotes and opinions expressed about Gogol by actors, doctors, noblewomen, servants, painters, malicious writers, and even admirers ready to forgive him any whim, like the writer Aksakov, parade before our eyes. The result is a portrait of a guy who, since he was a boy, when in the guise of a Ukrainian provincial he had to deal with a more aristocratic environment, defended himself with disguise and simulation. Angelic and demonic, Nikolaj is a histrion who is constantly changing as if he had no identity of his own, a mocking incarnation of the “negative capability” theorized by Keats; and on the page this trait translates into a style so impassive that it can mirror both the projects of the realists and those of the moralists or disengaged humorists, as well as the claims of the Westernists and those of the Slavophiles.

Lying on the sofa of a hospitable home, the vampire-writer is always waiting for someone (a friend, homeland, Providence) to offer him the idea capable of rescuing him from inertia, inspiring his skills as a medium: and not by chance Pushkin provided the plot of his major works, the Souls and the Reviser. According to the painter Iordan, Gogol ‘was at his ease when “he could do what he needed (…) without giving up anything of himself”. Also because perhaps he did not have a solid and lasting “himself”: to another painter who wants to portray him he says that it is difficult, because “I have a different face every day”.

Failed actor and prodigious entertainer in Belli’s Rome, absentee employee and improbable professor, prosaically ugly man and at the same time fabulously incorporeal, author of masterpieces and writer of more than sloppy writings, never tired and intellectual traveler suffering from scandalous laziness, Gogol ‘is from every point of view ambiguous, indefinable, oblique. But in its manifestations there is a constant: escape from the duties of adult life. The Gogolian biography is a story of continuous avoidance, in which the protagonist, with the most various hypochondriac tricks, keeps the world at a distance while exploiting it as a place of irresponsible leisure, or rather the counterpart of a rigorous poetic work to the point of obsession. Hence the ghostly aspect of him, even inhuman; hence his public and sentimental dryness.

In the modernity that mixes the registers, the comedian is no longer convivial and carefree: he seems nailed to a forced, tragic grimace, to a metaphysical and sulphurous rictus. But in Gogol there is something more universal than the modern character. And I think he would have been pleased to know that a century after his death, Elsa Morante compared Cicikov to a hero of Homeric Greece for her sonorous way of blowing her nose.