Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov

Abstract

‘The English don’t have to know they know Shakespeare — he is in their blood.’ With this quotation from Mansfield Park John Bayley introduces the proposition that the Russians don’t have to know they know Pushkin: he is in their blood.1 The same statement could with equal justice be made of the Russians and three of Pushkin’s contemporaries — not only Pushkin but also Griboyedov, Lermontov and Gogol, the classic beginnings of the classic century. A Russian does not have to know he knows Gogol: he is in the blood. Valery Bryusov in his article on Gogol of 1909, ‘Burnt to Ashes’, can make the assumption that, ‘In school we all learned by heart the passage from A Terrible Vengeance that begins: “Enchanting is the Dnieper in tranquil weather”’2 Vladimir Nabokov, talking of the early Gogol of Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka and Mirgorod, asserts the same familiarity from a different perspective: ‘It was this kind of stuff, the juvenilia of the false humorist Gogol, that teachers in Russian schools crammed down a fellow’s throat.’3 It is safe, therefore, to assume that Bulgakov enjoyed or underwent a similar literary education at school. From this point of view it becomes more understandable that, when Bulgakov’s library was catalogued in 1969 (he died in 1940), among the eighty-two remaining items there was no Gogol and there was no Pushkin.4