Nabakov’s Poshlust: the crack through which the Devil, in the form of a seedy, worn-out member of the gentry, a Westernized Russian, insinuates himself into your identity, puffing you up with pipe dreams, hot air, and bogus pretentiousness while shriveling your soul: Khlestakov mistaken as the Government Inspector. Kovalyov in The Nose;

Gogol is funny but terrifying. He looked around himself in St. Petersburg during Nicholas I’s reign and saw an entire society living a ridiculous lie. Modernization, instead of bringing enlightened government and free thought to Russia, brought a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy, an iron clamp on dissent. The nobility engaged in competition for the Tsar’s favor while hunger and misery continued to torment the masses. The literary elite had surrendered whatever its real identity had once been, and the upper class appeared in Gogol’s imagination as puffed up, preening buffoons, grotesquely aping foreign fashions and babbling effete French witticisms as they promenaded on the Nevsky Prospect. As flamboyant and affected as these outer selves appeared to be, Gogol recognized their essential fatuousness. Within, their souls had shriveled into puny insignificance.

Cut loose from its traditional moorings, Russia teetered on the brink of absolute absurdity. St. Petersburg appeared to him a weird phantasmagoria inhabited by spectral half selves. It is his vision of Hell. How did they get there? In his stories, Gogol describes the moral catastrophe occurring around him. Bit by bit, people surrender real ideas, real responses, all their spontaneity and common sense, even their Russian grossness and physicality. In the place of these authentic characteristics nothing remains but aped gestures, borrowed ideas, and expensive, tasteless fashions. St. Petersburg is inauthentic. Russia’s intense, national inferiority complex threatens to precipitate a complete nervous breakdown.

1. Gogol, the son of a Ukranian folk story teller and puppeteer.

2. We are programmed (by society or by nature?) to perform a particular routine.

3. Akaky runs his routine and propagates his own universe. Russia, too, has been propagated by centuries of Akaky Akakyavichs. He is impervious to the Western influences transforming the world above him and preserves his innate Russian humility and simplicity.

4. Gogol’s insight into the Western v. Slavophile debate: Peter’s attempt to Westernize the government has jumbled Russia’s programming. Without the constraint of a social fabric (orthodox church and tsar), the character runs the risk of losing contact with stable self. Even the Akakys of the city can be touched by this spectral

…

5. The surrender of liberty will only limit the number of possibilities.

Tschizewskij, Dmitrij, "The Composition of Gogol's 'Overcoat'," in Gogol's 'Overcoat': An Anthology of Critical Essays, ed. Elizabeth Trahan, Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1982, pp. 37-60

Eikhenbaum, Boris, "How Gogol's 'Overcoat' is Made," in Gogol's 'Overcoat': An Anthology of Critical Essays, ed. Elizabeth Trahan, Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1982, pp. 21-36

Holquist, Michael, "The Tyranny of Difference: Gogol and the Sacred," in Gogol: Exploring Absence, ed. Sven Spieker, Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 1999, pp.125-37 (RES)


Epshtein, Mikhail N., "The Irony of Style: The Demonic Element in Gogol's Concept of Russia," in Gogol: Exploring Absence, ed. Sven Spieker, Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 1999, pp.55-71 (RES)