O, don’t trust that Nevsky Prospect! … It’s all deceit, all dreams, it’s all not what it seems! … For God’s sake, get away from the street lamp! And walk by as fast as you can. You’ll be lucky if it does nothing more than spill its noisome oil on your elegant coat. Everything else besides the street lamp breathes deceit. It lies all the time, that Nevsky Prospect, but especially when night thickens upon it, separating the white and pale walls of the houses, when the entire city turns into thunder and sparkle, myriads of carriages falling from the bridges, postilions shouting and leaping on horses, and when the demon himself lights the lamps only so that he can show things in their not real form.
As a beginning writer, Gogol roamed the clean, orderly streets of Petersburg—the emperor was fixated on cleanliness and hygiene—which were filled with grand ceremonial proceedings of all kinds. In his personal life Nicholas I was ascetic and moderate, rising at dawn and working eighteen hours a day. But he understood the need for public rituals that underscored the solidity of the empire and of his divine right to rule.
Petersburg was the city of the court and of an enormous garrison. It was filled with a multitude of clerks; ordinary people did not jam its streets. The rabble, as it was called then, behaved with care when they came to Petersburg. With a vigilant eye, the capital’s self-important police (immortalized by Gogol in
They would arrive to the strains of a polonaise followed by his retinue in full dress, as the light from thousands of candles flooded the huge reception room. Nicholas kindly but coolly spoke with “his” people, as he walked among these coachmen, servants, and craftsmen. At the end, the guests left satisfied and sober. Nothing was stolen—not a dish or a utensil. The law and order so dear to the emperor’s heart prevailed.
For high society the balls at the Winter Palace were naturally much more luxurious, with succulent dinners for a thousand guests seated in the shade of orange trees. The empress adored masquerades and wanted the women of the court to appear there in their fanciest dresses—velvet and lace, gold, pearls, and diamonds. “The empress would rest her gaze on a beautiful new gown, having turned her disappointed eyes from a less fashionable dress. And as the empress’s gaze was law, the women dressed up, and the men grew bankrupt, and sometimes stole, in order to dress their wives,” a rather puritanical lady of the court indignantly fumed in reminiscence. At these masquerade balls, Nicholas I paid especial attention to lovely young debutantes.
It was the persistent demands of the court entourage that led to Pushkin’s death. Pushkin’s wife, the beautiful Natalie, who was so much in demand at these balls, was the hub of love affairs, gossip, and intrigues. This atmosphere of real and imagined affairs led to the poet’s tragic duel. One can easily see how Pushkin’s ambivalence toward the court and the emperor caused him a lot of pain. But Gogol, the untitled, poor, and extremely ambitious outsider, did not interest Nicholas in the least, and so suffered even more.
That gave even greater passion to Gogol’s alternative mythos of Petersburg. In literature he justifiably felt like a mighty monarch, not simply juggling verbal worlds with blinding virtuosity, but, as he truly believed, influencing the course of life itself through his writer’s magic. Gogol juxtaposed the brilliant balls and posh receptions that were beyond his reach to his own obsessive vision of the capital. In revenge, he built a monster Petersburg inhabited by caricatures, a mirage Petersburg, and finally, a deserted, ghostly Petersburg. Balzac wrote about Paris this way and Dickens about London. But Gogol’s mystical Petersburg is much more the fruit of his fevered imagination, far removed from the reality of the city.
The constant themes of Gogol’s eccentric, intriguing, highly comic, sentimental, wildly romantic, distorted, and ultimately overpowering Petersburg tales are fog, darkness, cold reflecting surfaces, and fear of vast open spaces. Every one of these themes is totally exaggerated and taken to extremes. Gogol’s Petersburg, in the words of his delighted fan Vladimir Nabokov, is turned into “a reflection in a blurred mirror, an eerie medley of objects put to the wrong use, things going backwards the faster they moved forward, pale gray nights instead of ordinary black ones, and black days.”19
