Dead Souls Among the Devils

Abstract

The fact that the writings of Gogol exerted formative influence on those of Dostoevsky is an obvious commonplace. It is the nature and extent of this influence that remains question.1 It has often been concluded that Dostoevsky had essentially cast aside the mantle of Gogol by the time that he began his major novels the mid- 1860s, if not earlier. Not that Gogol was ever forgotten: references to him, his writings and his fictional characters continued to punctuate Dostoevsky's writings, both fictional and otherwise, to the end of his life. But the creative impetus, it is usually held, comes now from elsewhere. Nevertheless, number of reverberations from Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls) may be heard echoing Besy (The Devils) particular; and this article serves as an experiment to test, measure and define those echoes. It begins, then, by enumerating direct allusions The Devils to Dead Souls, and then addresses questions of tone, atmosphere and genre, and also of character-types. Gogol is mentioned by name more than once the text of The Devils: once on the lips of Lebiadkin alluding to his Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz'iami (Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends), once the plural alongside Pushkins, Molieres and Voltaires, and four times group of references to Belinskii's famous letter to Gogol [209; 69; 33-34].2 In addition, there are at least three more possible allusions to the Selected Passages; and the drafts Peter Verkhovenskii is likened to Khlestakov [200-03]. But these general references are outnumbered by the more specific references to Dead Souls. Stepan Verkhovenskii calls Drozdova a type, Gogol's immortal Korobochka, but wicked, provocative Korobochka, an infinitely magnified form (which allows the narrator to make pun), and few minutes later he comments on how much poison there is in this Korobochka [97-98]. At the end of the fete one woman is simply called a Korobochka [392]. Similarly, Stepan Verkhovenskii characterizes Turgenev's Bazarov as some kind of vague cross between Nozdrev and Byron [171]; 3 and it is again Nozdrev who is mentioned by Shatov when he recalls cynical comment by Stavrogin on religious belief that refers to Nozdrev's wanting to catch hare by its hind legs; Stavrogin duly corrects him by saying that Nozdrev did not just want to catch hare by its hind legs but claimed to have done it [200; cf Gogol, 85], 4 Shatov alludes to chapter 7 of Dead Souls (although he uses different words) when he denies that here are any tears invisible to the world beneath any visible laughter [111; cf. Gogol, 157]. Mentioned the run-up to the fete are the landowners Tentetnikov [354], who are derived from Part 11 of Dead Souls. A more doubtful allusion to the cap of police-captain Dead Souls has also been perceived the name of Captain Kartuzov [Gogol, 182; Dostoevsky, 30].5 Five separate references to three of the characters of Dead Souls constitute series of definite echoes The Devils. But the more pervasive, if less resonant, echoes are set up by something that is less definable about the tone or atmosphere of the two novels. In spite of what both authors say, there is each of the novels pronounced element of unreality, at least of exaggeration and caricature; moreover, each novel this element of unreality reaches climax at the turning-point where many of their characters suffer peripeteia, namely at public festivity mounted by the governor. Similarly, spite of Dostoevsky's use of dramatized narrator that is eschewed by Gogol, the narrative tone of both novels embraces by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) the unreal, nightmarish grotesque and hilarious comedy verging on slapstick. At the same time both authors apparently want to express through their fiction something that they consider very serious, significant and vital for the historical development of their nation, if not of the whole world. …