Heterogeneity of the Sacred in Gogol’s Dikan’ka Stories

Abstract

Turning away from genre transition and literary periodization, recent scholarship has sought to bridge stylistic variance between Gogol's Ukrainian stories and his later works by reading an overarching epistemological project into author's oeuvre. Such a project, as has been argued by Gary Saul Morson in reference to Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls), directly challenges processes of explanation and understanding by staging doomed attempts to evaluate worth of without substance and to ascertain identity of a man without qualities.1 Morson's suggestion that Gogol treats the possibility, or rather impossibility, of explanation2 can be applied more broadly to writer's fictional prose, though not without some qualification. What differentiates varyingly absurd accounts of valueless goods and a featureless hero in Dead Souls from mysterious appearance of an infernal red shirt and similarly unaccountable events in Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka) is, in latter case, intervention, real or imagined, by an unknowable force or factor. This factor is not reducible to haphazard workings of fantastic or to a Hoffinannesque sense of uncanny which wielded such a strong influence on prose efforts of Vladimir Odoevskii and Antonii Pogorel'skii (Aleksei Perovskii), in addition to Gogol's own. Like linguistic nonsense of Dead Souls, unknowable never itself becomes object of query or explanation in world of Dikan'ka. Its presence is, nonetheless, consistently felt in disorder and transformation it relentlessly generates. One attempt at schematizing workings of unknowable in Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka is John Kopper's Kantian reading.3 Kopper suggests that participation of supernatural in natural in Dikan'ka stories draws on epistemological opposition noumenon/phenomenon. While initially appearing to challenge Kant's denial of a knowable content for noumena, such participation increasingly gives way to a breakdown in communication between noumenological and phenomenological realms, extending a zone of exclusion around thing-in-itself' (das Ding an sich). The impossibility of encounter with unknowable thing-in-itself in world of Dikan'ka foregrounds futility of trying to perceive an underlying order, or knowable content, for suprasensible reality and, indeed, challenges proposition that such an order exists. In a broader literary-historical sense, Gogol thus destabilizes premise of Romantic (Schellingian) philosophy, current in his day, that Absolute can be intuitively known through medium of art. The Dikan'ka stories do, however, bear witness to fleeting glimpses into unknowable, apprehension of which has dire existential consequences. Prominent instances are abyss into which sorcerer is cast in Strashnaia mest' (A Terrible Vengeance) and Petro's recollection of his nocturnal excursion in Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala (Saint John's Eve). Like those Biblical figures who look upon face of God without authorization,4 sorcerer and Petro do not survive experience, nor is object of experience made known. Instead, encounter with unknowable thing-in-itself, marked in Dikan'ka stories as fathomless and terrible sublime, is attended in both cases by a common effect of perception, namely, a combination of profound terror and violent laughter. In A Terrible Vengeance, it erupts at sorcerer's encounter with equestrian avenger Ivan: Like thunder, wild laughter billowed out over mountains and resounded in sorcerer's heart, shaking everything inside him. He felt as though someone powerful had entered him and was walking around inside him, striking hammers against his heart and sinews... so terrifyingly did that laughter reverberate within him! (278)5 Similarly, in Saint John's Eve: Suddenly, his whole being trembled, as if on executioner's block, his hair stood on end. …