St Petersburg полностью

In the popular newspaper Severnaya pchela (Northern Bee), Gogol could read about literary news, in which he was desperately interested, as well as about government postings, robberies, and suicides. The paper allotted a lot of space to reports and discussion of fires—a subject always topical in Petersburg. And, of course, there were constant predictions of another feature of life in the capital—floods.

In politics, both foreign and domestic, Severnaya pchela cultivated the greatest caution and unbounded loyalty to the emperor. The careerist editor, Faddei Bulgarin, who did not mind stooping to denounce his colleagues to the secret police, strictly obeyed the orders given him from above by the chief of the gendarmerie, who was also chief censor: “Theater, exhibitions, shopping mall, flea market, inns, pastry shops—that’s your field and don’t take a single step beyond it.”

In the evenings foppish Gogol headed for the theater, “my best pleasure.” The streets of Petersburg were illuminated by thousands of oil lamps and the recent innovation, gaslights. The combination of light, darkness, and fog gave the city a spectral appearance. Expensive carriages pulled by teams of six horses drove up to theater entrances. Dandies escorted well-dressed ladies, mysterious and, to the young provincial, seemingly inaccessible; laughter and bits of gallant compliments in French melted into the damp air. Mounted police helped the drivers park the numerous coaches blocking the square.

On the stage of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater Vassily Karatygin, a six-foot giant with a roaring baritone and majestic gestures, stunned audiences with his Hamlet. Like all authors in Russia, Shakespeare was subjected to strict censorship. Nicholas personally made sure that no political allusions or even curse words as gentle as “devil take it” were spoken on stage.

Gogol was delighted by Karatygin’s acting. Later he recalled that the great actor “grabs you up in a heap and carries you off, so that you don’t have time to realize what’s happening.”18 Nicholas, too, was well disposed toward the actor, who resembled him physically. Once the emperor, accompanied by an aide, dropped by the actor’s dressing room.

“They tell me you portray me well,” he said to the actor. “Show me.”

“I don’t dare, Your Imperial Majesty!”

“I’m ordering you!”

Karatygin pulled himself together, grew visibly taller, his eyes took on a steely, hypnotizing hue, and he barked at the adjutant, “Listen, dear boy, make sure that actor fellow Karatygin receives a case of champagne!”

Nicholas burst out laughing and the next morning a case of champagne was delivered to the actor’s house.

With stories like these, it is no wonder Gogol began to set his sights on a great Petersburg career including an attempt to join the imperial theater as an actor. A calamity. Then he tried to become a painter, then a bureaucrat, and, finally, a teacher. Gogol thought he was ascending the ladder of success and wealth, but he was stuck every time on the bottom rung. Petersburg persistently refused to recognize him; and Gogol, in turn, came to hate Petersburg. The city would remain forever alien to him: inviting but hostile, a world he could never conquer. And when Gogol began writing, the grotesque and alienated image of Petersburg quickly became the center of his prose.

Gogol’s first Petersburg novellas appeared in 1835—Nevsky Prospect, Diary of a Madman, and Portrait; then came The Nose, which Pushkin published in 1836, shortly before his death, in his journal Sovremennik; and then in 1842, the most famous work of this cycle was published, The Overcoat.

Gogol, and through him all later imagery of Petersburg, was heavily influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann; even a hundred years later, in her Poem Without a Hero, Akhmatova curses the “Petersburg devils” and calls them “midnight Hoffmanniana.”

Like Hoffmann, Gogol combines the oppressively quotidian with unrestrained fantasy. A beautiful stranger met on Nevsky Prospect turns out to be a cheap prostitute. A mysterious portrait has fatal powers. A smug bureaucrat’s nose escapes from his face and assumes an independent personality.

These incredible events could take place only in Gogol’s Petersburg—a terrifying and demonically captivating city, seen through the wide eyes of a young southern provincial, scared of life. Gogol’s early febrile impressions of the city, stirred by the pen of a literary genius, pour out in a passionate kaleidoscope of romantic monologue, a colorful phantasmagoric picture worthy of Chagall, describing the central and most famous street in the capital: