LITERATURE NOTES: Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol), 1809-1852 (04/10/05)

LITERATURE NOTES: Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol), 1809-1852

by Eugene Melnitchenko and Helena Lysyj Melnitchenko

The great bard, Taras Shevchenko, respected his genius and wrote a poem to him in 1842, calling Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol) "my great friend." They were contemporaries - two Ukrainians living in St. Petersburg, though they did not know each other personally. A controversial figure, some Ukrainians have branded Hohol a renegade and a "katsap" (a derogatory term for a Russian). The Russian literati did not accept him fully, either. Alexander Pushkin, called him a tricky khakhol (derogatory term for a Ukrainian). "He does not have a Russian heart," Count Tolstoy stated categorically.

Shevchenko, with his modest beginnings chose to write in Ukrainian, while Hohol coming from a family of landowners and trained in Russian at the Nizhen secondary school wrote in Russian, or a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian.

He was born on March 31, 1809, in Velyki Sorochyntsi, Poltava province, to Vasyl Hohol, a writer of Ukrainian comedies in the style of Ivan Kotliarevsky, and Maria Kosarovsky, whose roots stemmed from Hetmans Doroshenko and Skoropadsky.

Hohol believed that his great mission in life was to right the injustices in the world and to deliver man from his own moral degradation. He went to St. Petersburg to find a job in the Department of Justice, where he believed he would become a great public servant and could accomplish that mission. Having soon found out that that was unrealistic, he turned to writing.

He published his first poem in 1829, "Hans Kuchelgarten," on a German theme under the pseudonym of B. Alov, in Russian, which was reviewed unfavorably. He collected all copies of the work and destroyed it.

After some introspection, he realized that he needed to return to his roots and write about things he knew. He asked his mother to send him his father's comedies and his own material on Ukrainian customs: dress, village life, beliefs, superstitions, legends, anecdotes, songs, history - everything that would be "extraordinarily interesting to him." These materials were handwritten in his personal notebook - his "Handy Encyclopedia," which he started at the gymnasium in Nizhen.

Hohol's works can be classified into three cycles: the Ukrainian cycle, consisting of "Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka" (1831) and "Mirgorod" (Myrhorod) (1835); St Petersburg stories, which include "The Diary of a Madman," "The Overcoat" and "The Inspector General"; and the third period consisting of the single work, "Dead Souls" (1842). In the first group, he made heavy use of his Ukrainian material and frequently used the Ukrainian language.

This mixture of the two languages is perhaps most visible in his masterpiece "Taras Bulba" (1835-1842), where he used not only individual Ukrainian words but also phrases and expressions. Although fictional, based on Ukrainian songs and ballads, "Taras Bulba" depicts the Ukrainian historical effort to rid itself of its occupiers. Hohol's use of "Ukrainianisms" is documented in Ostap Stromecky's book on Hohol, published by Svit (Lviv) in 1994.

Although criticized by his Russian contemporaries for butchering the Russian language, his genius and talented use of the two languages created Hohol's unique style, which is heavily based on Ukrainian historical folklore and wisdom.

While to his Russian contemporaries, including Pushkin, Ryleev and Tolstoy, Hohol was always a "khakhol," everything Ukrainian to him was beautiful, vibrant and colorful, while things Russian were not. In "Taras Bulba" his characters are virile, their costumes and speech are full of color, they are recklessly brave, violent and generous, primitive, but poetic.

"Taras Bulba" was made into a movie in the 1960s, starring Yul Brynner as Taras and Tony Curtis as Andrij, who did a commendable job in portraying their characters. However, as with most of Hohol's translations, many of his Ukrainian nuances were lost, and Hollywood changed the original story's ending. In Hohol's story, while escaping from the Poles, Taras goes back to retrieve his pipe, is caught and tied to a burning tree. But, even as he is dying, he sees the rest of his Kozaks escaping on the Dnister River, and his eyes sparkle with joy. "Farewell, comrades," he shouts to them. "Remember me sometimes, and, when spring comes, come back here and have a damn good time!"

In the second group of his stories, titled "Arabesques," Hohol wrote about life in St. Petersburg. Although it is about all levels of the city's society, his major heroes were "little men." He saw the world through their eyes, but used hyperbole to transform ordinary and trivial things into the grandiose and the magnificent. Even before Kafka, he had a keen eye for the bizarre.

While in these stories, he used "Ukrainianisms" less, he painted St. Petersburg through his Ukrainian eyes. In contrast to Ukraine's, St. Petersburg's society is presented as non-caring, indifferent, gray and without conscience. His characters are lonely figures, without families, who live alone in their furnished rooms and have no social ties. The hero of "The Overcoat," perhaps the best known of his stories, is a low-level government clerk Akakii Akakievich Bashmachkin, a copier of government documents. Though the life of this aging man is lonely, he performs his functions well and even finds delight in copying some of the more interesting documents.

Twice a day Akakii has to walk a few blocks during the cold winter months to work and home, exposing himself to the fierce cold wind and blizzards of the northern city. He has an old threadbare overcoat that needs mending. When he is told that the coat cannot be mended, he is forced to skrimp and save for a new one. The new overcoat not only keeps him warm, but also improves his image among his co-workers and friends, and he is invited to a party by one of his superiors. It gives him higher stature in society. On the way home, Akakii is robbed of his beloved coat and when he complains to the police and to an "important personage," no one is willing to help him. He dies from a cold.

After his death, street robberies occur nightly in St. Petersburg and the rumors are that it is Akakii's ghost that's behind them. The robberies end when the "important personage's" overcoat is robbed, and Akakii posthumously finds redress for his injustice. But when a policeman tries to stop the ghost, a tall and mustached bandit, the same one who robbed Akakii's overcoat, hits him with his huge fist in the face, thus bringing the story back to reality. Hohol was a master of magic-realism, purposely mixing realism with romanticism, naturalism and surrealism to reflect his themes effectively.

Hohol's "The Inspector General" created a storm during its time. Although probably the best drama ever written in Russian, and still performed on stage, it was thought to be an attack on Imperial Russia. Fearing for his life, in 1936 Hohol departed and for 12 years lived abroad, mostly in Italy, where he finished "Dead Souls," the third part of his stories. He worked on it, with some interruptions, for almost 17 years. While here he used the Russian language, it is saturated with the vocabulary of the "common people." Its main character, Chichikov, is a swindler, a traveling merchant who moves in his carriage through vast areas buying dead souls. He is Hohol's typical man of no distinction, "not handsome, but also not bad in appearance; not fat, but also not thin; not young, but also not old." His travels through vast areas gave the author the opportunity to examine various types of characters and their motivations at all levels of Russian society.

The author portrays Russian society as being banal, pretentious, arrogant, pompous, vulgar and trite with a vegetable-like existence, which he called "poshlost." His characters are mere puppets, going through their vegetable-like existence in pursuit of their illusions. Some pursue wealth for the sake of wealth; others, human souls for a few pieces of silver - going through life with self-satisfaction to the point where all change and progress within and around them becomes impossible. They start their early stages of life with some control, but then events take over and assume a life of their own, leading them to their ultimate destruction. Chichikov's sins are unforgivable; they are beyond the level of repentance, and lead him to nothingness. His world dissolves and disintegrates into nothing. Hohol portrays this disintegration and metamorphoses so vividly and graphically, and in such bright colors that the reader can visualize the process.

Hohol contrasts this man-made Russian society with the natural state of events, which he described in his Ukrainian cycle of stories. After the destruction of Zaporozhian Sich by Catherine II in 1775, the country became defenseless and Catherine introduced serfdom into Ukraine. Soon afterwards colonizers from all parts of the Russian empire began arriving in Ukraine, enslaving its population and bringing their society's "poshlost" with them, destroying what to Hohol was natural and beautiful.

Because of the outrage that "Dead Souls" created in Russia, Hohol was encouraged to write its second sequel, in which he made Chichikov repent. But then, to the dismay of his admirers and friends, he burned it 10 days before dying, believing that Chichikov's sins were beyond redemption. Hohol died in February 1852 from self-starvation, initially from rigorous fasting and then by refusing all nourishment.

After he became an established writer, Hohol's interest turned to history. He planned to write the history of Ukraine, which he hoped would be most comprehensive and on a world level. He taught history for three years at a girl's school, The Patriotic Institute, and was appointed adjunct professor of history at the University of St. Petersburg. He published several articles on history during that time, some of which were on Ukrainian songs, showing their importance to historians. He thought they were particularly relevant because they reflected real life. Unfortunately, his plan to write history did not materialize.

Hohol saw the comic and tragic sense of human existence and transformed it into his writing. He thought that the soul and not the mind was the core of a person. Although controversial, he was one of the most original, creative and brilliantly innovative writers of the 19th century. He had a profound effect on Russian and Western literature. His works greatly influenced Dostoyevsky's writing and are still amazingly modern. He was the father of the short story and literary critics praised him as the father of Russian realism.

Whatever the reasons behind his decision to write in Russian, through his writing and correspondence with his friends, it is clear that Hohol was proud to be Ukrainian. He raised Ukrainian consciousness among his contemporaries and in the world. In that sense, his contribution to the rebirth of Ukrainian consciousness is on a similar level to that of Kotliarevsky, Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka and Ivan Franko. Though he wrote in Russian, he communicated to the world his concept of Ukraine, its people and their history.

Now that Ukraine has reclaimed its country, it is time to reclaim one of its most original and talented writers, a player on the world stage, a giant in world literature - Mykola Hohol.

Eugene Melnitchenko and Helena Lysyj Melnitchenko are freelance writers from Owings, Md. After years of studying Western literature and philosophy they are revisting Ukrainian literature.

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