The word translated as "banality" here is the Russian poshlost. For a full comprehension of the meaning of poshlost (pronounced "POSHlust"), readers are referred to Vladimir Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol (1944), which contains a twelve-page disquisition on the subject. Poshlost isa well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal or animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness. It is an ideal subject for Gogolian treatment, a "gape in mankind," as he calls Plyushkin, an absence he can bring to enormous presence by filling it with verbal matter. Gogol's portrayal of poshlost goes far beyond topical satire or a denunciation of social evils. His characters are not time bound; they inhabit an indefinitely expanded time in which they lose the sharply negative features of vice and wickedness and instead become wildly funny. They also have no psychology, no "inner nature." Nabokov thinks they are "bloated dead souls" themselves, and that inside "a poshlyak [a male embodiment of poshlost even of Chichikov's colossal dimensions" one can see "the worm, the little shriveled fool that lies huddled up in the depth of the posh lost-painted vacuum." But he is not quite right. There is no worm or shriveled fool inside Gogol's characters; they are all external, like landscapes. The process of "growing wild" that has happened to Plyushkin's garden has also happened to Plyushkin himself. At the end of her chapter, Korobochka almost blends back into her barnyard. Everything around Sobakevich says, "I, too, am Sobakevich." Their very lack of inner life gives Gogol's characters a monumental stature, an almost mythical dimension.
But who has ever seen mythical figures of this sort? Looking at them, we may hear ourselves repeating the question Manilov puts to Chichikov: "Here, it may be . . . something else is concealed ... ?" Yet it is all simply poshlost. But the more often Gogol repeats that everything he is describing is "all too familiar" and "the same everywhere," the more exuberant is his verbal invention. He provokes a mutation in the scale of artistic values, as Sinyavsky says, an "ostentation of language" grown out of the commonplace:
As a result, the everyday and the commonplace look somehow extraordinary in Gogol, owing already to the fact that the author, for no apparent reason, has turned his fixed attention on them. Things seem to hide or hold something in themselves, unreal in their real aspect, so wholly familiar that you cannot imagine they are just simply and causelessly standing there without signifying anything, though it is precisely their ordinary being before us and signifying nothing that constitutes their lot and their unsolved mystery.
The unsolved mystery of banality is the lining of the extraordinary behind it. It is Chichikov's chest with its double bottom, in which he stores all sorts of meaningless trash, but from which his "dead souls" also emerge in procession and move across all Russia. It is the renewal and futurity inherent in the road, which Gogol celebrates. It is the sense of promise contained in laughter itself.
Richard Pevear Translators' Note Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father's first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic. A shortened form of the patronymic is sometimes used in conversation between acquaintances; thus Platon Mikhailovich Platonov, in the second volume of Dead Souls, is most often called Platon Mikhalych. Virtually all the names Gogol uses are perfectly plausible in Russian. Some of them, however, also have specific meanings or a more general suggestiveness. (In the following list, accented syllables are given in italics.)
Chichikov,Pavel Ivanovich: echoic of birds chirping and scissors snipping, it is a flighty, frivolous-sounding name, in apparent contrast to the hero's plumpness and practicality.
Manilov(no first name or patronymic): comes from manit, "to lure, to beckon." In sound it is moist-lipped, soft, and gooey.
Korobochka, Nastasya Petrovna: her family name means "little box."
Nozdryov (no first name or patronymic): comes from noz-drya, "nostril," and is suggestive of all sorts of holes and porosities.
Sobakevich, Mikhail Semyonovich: comes from sobaka, "dog."
Mikhail, Mikhailo, and the diminutives Misha and Mishka are common Russian names for bears. Plyushkin,Stepan (no patronymic): seems, on the other hand, to have no specific connotations.
