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  “Yes—but I do not know,” said his hostess diffidently. “You see, never before have I sold dead souls.”

  “Quite so. It would be a surprising thing if you had. But surely you do not think that these dead souls are in the least worth keeping?”

  “Oh no, indeed! Why should they be worth keeping? I am sure they are not so. The only thing which troubles me is the fact that they are dead.”

  “She seems a truly obstinate old woman!” was Chichikov’s inward comment. “Look here, madam,” he added aloud. “You reason well, but you are simply ruining yourself by continuing to pay the tax upon dead souls as though they were still alive.”

  “Oh, good sir, do not speak of it!” the lady exclaimed. “Three weeks ago I took a hundred and fifty roubles to the Assessor, and buttered him up, and—”

  “Then you see how it is, do you not? Remember that, according to my plan, you will never again have to butter up the Assessor, seeing that it will be I who will be paying for those peasants—I, not you, for I shall have taken over the dues upon them, and have transferred them to myself as so many bona fide serfs. Do you understand at last?”

  However, the old lady still communed with herself. She could see that the transaction would be to her advantage, yet it was one of such a novel and unprecedented nature that she was beginning to fear lest this purchaser of souls intended to cheat her. Certainly he had come from God only knew where, and at the dead of night, too!

  “Let us shake hands over it,” advised Chichikov.

  “But, sir, I have never in my life sold dead folk—only living ones. Three years ago I transferred two wenches to Protopopov for a hundred roubles apiece, and he thanked me kindly, for they turned out splendid workers—able to make napkins or anything else.”

  “Yes, but with the living we have nothing to do, damn it! I am asking you only about dead folk.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. But at first sight I felt afraid lest I should be incurring a loss—lest you should be wishing to outwit me, good sir. You see, the dead souls are worth rather more than you have offered for them.”

  “See here, madam. (What a woman it is!) How could they be worth more? Think for yourself. They are so much loss to you—so much loss, do you understand? Take any worthless, rubbishly article you like—a piece of old rag, for example. That rag will yet fetch its price, for it can be bought for paper-making. But these dead souls are good for nothing at all. Can you name anything that they are good for?”

  “True, true—they are good for nothing. But what troubles me is the fact that they are dead.”

  “What a blockhead of a creature!” said Chichikov to himself, for he was beginning to lose patience. “Bless her heart, I may as well be going. She has thrown me into a perfect sweat, the cursed old shrew!”

  In the main—and here it is like Gil Blas again—Dead Souls is a collection of genre portraits; it is a sort of provincial social anatomy of Russia based on universal types—the foolish credulous couple whose kisses are so long that you “could smoke a small cigar before they had finished”; the town liar, the gambler, the drunkard, the miser, the crafty man, the jack-in-office, the settled official and the soldier.

  The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths. Gogol’s humour has not only the eye for the comic particularity, the ridiculous situation, but is based on a genius for humorous generalising. His generalisations are not facetious nor strained. They convey not fantastifications of life, but the full easy feeling of life itself, as though his humour was its breath, blood and natural condition and not a spectator’s witty convulsions. Gogol’s gallery is short of women to whom he was in life little attached; but this lack of experience or distaste for the subject is turned very cunningly to advantage by his generalising faculty. He is describing the ladies of N—:

  … I should need to say a great deal about the ladies themselves and to describe in most vivid of colours their social intercourse and spiritual qualities. Yet this would be a difficult thing for me to do since, on the one hand, I should be hampered by my boundless respect for the womenfolk of all Civil Service officials, and, on the other hand—well, simply by the innate arduousness of the task. The ladies of N—were—But no, I cannot do it. My heart has already failed me. Come, come! The ladies of N—were distinguished for—But it’s no use; somehow my pen seems to refuse to move over the paper—it seems to be weighted as with a plummet of lead. Very well. That being so I will merely say a word or two concerning the most prominent tints of the feminine pallette of N—merely a word or two concerning the outward appearance of its ladies…. The ladies of N—were pre-eminently “presentable”.

  And further on:

  In addition, I may say, like most of the female world of St. Petersburg, the ladies of N—were careful and refined in their choice of words and phrases. Never did a lady say “I blew my nose”, or “I perspired”, or “I spat”. No, it had to be “I relieved my nose through the expedient of wiping it with my handkerchief” and so forth. Again, to say “This glass, or this plate, smells badly” was forbidden. Rather, the proper phrase in such a case was “This glass, or this plate, is not behaving very well”—or some such formula. In fact, to refine the Russian tongue the more thoroughly something like half the words in it were cut out: which circumstance necessitated very frequent recourse to the tongue of France, since the same words, if spoken in French, were another matter altogether, and one could use even blunter ones than the ones originally objected to.

  (This is from D. J. Hogarth’s translation in Everyman: Mrs. Garnett’s rendering, which I have not by me as I write, is, I remember, far more spirited and fluent.) Gogol’s generalisations, which link up the points of action, are never flat; some touch in them, like the comic personal reluctance of the first passage or a physical phrase like “I blew my nose”, in the end gives a human relief. They are the solid residue of a detailed observation of society. Gogol has selected the bold outline and essentials from a full notebook. He is writing about a town, a body of people. He is laughing at the Russian situation of the time. The book has significance beyond its laughter and yet laughter and pity engulf that significance too. There are two very moving passages—and Gogol is always surprising the reader by his changes of mood as well as by the changes of the antics of his characters—one when Chichikov takes home the list of “dead peasants” and studies first the manner in which each landowner has written his list, this one casually, another with precision and remarks, and then meditates, Hamletlike, on the fates and habits of the dead serfs. This passage deepens the joke until it touches the seriousness of men’s lives and directs our eyes from the laughter of the moment to the irony of eternity. The other passage is the apostrophe to Russia and her mission in the world. From Gogol onwards this nostalgia for spiritual greatness is one of the most moving things in Russian literature. We are moved by it because of the strangeness of meeting a nationalism rooted not in pride but in humility. This humility and this disinterestedness have given the Russian novel its supreme place in European literature.

  Dead Souls belongs to that group of novels which most novelists dream of writing. I mean the picaresque or novel of travel, in which the episodic adventures of a single character open up the world. Given the brilliant idea the task, it seems, should be easy. Yet has there been such a novel of any quality since, say, David Copperfield? I can think of none. It seems that the appearance of the picaresque literature depends on the existence of disorder in society. In Pickwick, we remember, “boilers were busting and the minds of coachmen were unsettled”; in the Spain of Cervantes, the new gold wealth of the Spanish Empire had destroyed the value of money and had brought misery. In the Russia of Dead Souls tyranny was struggling to hold down the unrest of hope and vision which had followed the Napoleonic wars. What is necessary to this kind of novelist is a time of lethargy
, cynicism and low comedy, a time when romantic idealism would be thwarted and when wry laughter at the roguery and fatuousness of people would be the only outlet. Our own society has been too prosperous for this kind of book, for a prosperous society is without humour or pity. Is that an explanation of the decline in the picaresque novel? Or is it simply that the kind has been done too often and is now exhausted?

  A Hero of Our Own Time

  In the February of 1848 Turgenev left Brussels for Paris where he joined Bakunin. They had come to see a revolution. Five months later, namely in the sultry afternoon of the 26th of July, Turgenev was out in the streets watching the revolution collapse. He watched, he noted, he deplored. When it was over he did not, for all his love of Liberty, share that sense of personal tragedy which overcame the Herzen circle. Herzen wished now that he had taken a rifle which a workman had offered him and had died upon the barricades. “I would then”, he said, “have taken with me to the grave one or two beliefs.” But Turgenev, who believed in “the homeopathy of science and education”, shrugged his shoulders. “What is history, then? Providence, chance, irony or fatality?” he asked Pauline Viardot. He paid Bakunin his allowance, he made jokes to break the gloom of the Herzen household. The dogmas and violence of active politicians had little attraction for Turgenev though he liked to think that his Sportsman’s Sketches had popularised the idea of freeing the serfs in Russian society.

  But it was impossible in that decade for a Russian writer to escape from politics, and seven years later, when his lethargic nature stirred and he sat down to write his first political novel, Turgenev turned again to those sultry days in Paris. Always in doubt about his characters, subject to all the waverings of sensibility, running round to his friends for advice because he had no confidence in his own judgment, Turgenev managed, at last, and like a naturalist, to pin his hero to the paper. In his memory Turgenev saw once more the Faubourg St. Antoine, the barricades and the broken revolutionaries dribbling away from them in furtive groups. As a line battalion came up and the last workmen ran for their lives, he imagined a solitary figure rising up on the barricade. He was “a tall man in an old overcoat, with a red sash and a straw hat on his grey, dishevelled hair. In one hand he held a red flag, in the other a blunt curved sabre, and as he scrambled up he shouted something in a shrill, strained voice, waving his flag and sabre. A Viennese shooter took aim at him—fired.” The tall man fell with a bullet in his heart.

  “‘Tiens!’” said one of the escaping revolutionaries to another, “‘on vient de tuer le polonais.’” So, with an ineptitude for his epitaph, died the Russian Dimitri Rudin. He had died, cutting a figure on a foreign barricade for a cause not his own, futile to the end.

  I first read Rudin during the Spanish Civil War. It was a good moment. For years we had been talking about the problem of the intellectual for whom society has no use—that is to say we had been talking about all the English intellectuals who had grown up since 1914—for years we had argued the reasons for this isolation, its effects upon their minds and had speculated upon their future. The figure of Rudin seemed to crystallise the case. And when one more angry friend from Bloomsbury packed up his books and his chequered love affairs and went out to be killed in the Spanish war, we could picture the scene at once and swear we heard some Spanish soldier revise Rudin’s insulting epitaph once more, with a “God, they’ve killed the German”. The English have always been Germans in Spain.

  It was thought at first that Bakunin had been Turgenev’s model for Rudin, and Turgenev encouraged the belief; but Herzen observed that there was a good deal of Turgenev himself in this minor Hamlet. In fact, Rudin was drawn from several models. He was Bakunin on the barricades and luckier than his original in dying there; he was any gifted young Russian whom political tyranny at home had reduced to futility: and he was Turgenev in love. Perhaps Turgenev was getting the Bakunin family out of his system and all the philosophy of his German period too, for there are unflattering resemblances between Turgenev’s affair with Bakunin’s sister and Rudin’s cold-hearted experiments with the heart of Natalya. There are really two Rudins in the book and the critic must decide for himself whether he is dealing with two irreconcilable beings, the idealist and the cad, or whether Turgenev is showing an eye for the variety and inconsistency of human nature. One thing is plain, as it always is when social types are analysed in fiction, that Turgenev had a theory. We must not ask why Rudin appeared in Russia, one of the characters says, one must merely examine him; but Turgenev leaves one in little doubt about the social and political reasons for his existence.

  It is often assumed that tyranny can conquer everything except the intelligence, but the briefest glance at history shows that this residue of optimism is without foundation. The aim and effect of tyranny is to break up the normal social relations between people and to ensure that the only permitted social relationship shall be with the tyrant. Our duty is not to our neighbour, but to the leader, the tyrant, the ruling oligarchy, and this duty isolates us from each other whether we think of ourselves as individuals or as groups. Once isolated like this the mind degenerates, faculties stray and purpose falls to pieces. Upon the intelligence the effect is immediate, for the intellectual man, who seems to be so independent of the mass of mankind because of his brains, in fact needs the moral background of normal social relations more strongly than anyone else. Without them he is like a sculptor who, deprived of stone, is obliged to carve in the air. We see this plainly enough in the lives of the exiles from German and Italian Fascism; we shall see it again if we consider the isolation of the English intellectuals in the Big Business tyranny which impoverished the material, spiritual and intellectual life of England in the years leading up to the present war. There was a choice between two evils: the futility of exile, the futility of a life at home which had been carefully unco-ordinated. In the Russia of the ’forties despotism had driven the active into exile; those who would not or could not leave were obliged to preserve their ideas in a vacuum or to while away their time on mere personal speculation which grew more and more esoteric.

  When Rudin arrives at Darya Mihailovna’s country house, he is a man of 35. He is shy at first, sizing up his company. Soon he is drawn into argument with one of those strutting, professional sceptics who hide a general lack of information under the disguise of being plain, downright fellows who say, ‘To hell with principles, give me the facts’. Rudin-Turgenev has not been a philosopher for nothing; he wipes the floor with this eccentric. Rudin’s polish, his heart and his eloquence arouse a generous response in the company and in the reader. We are delighted with him. But he stays on with Darya Mihailovna, and as he stays we get to know him better. A longer acquaintance does not confirm the first favourable impression. Those glorious words of Rudin’s, for example, were not his own; that passionate idealism has no recognisable earthly objective. He can settle to nothing. The enthusiasm which would be admirable in a man of 20 is suspect in a man of 35 who ought to have built up some stability. Bassistoff, the young tutor, cries out that Rudin is a natural genius. “Genius very likely he has,” replies Lezhnyov, “but as for being natural—that’s just his misfortune, that there’s nothing natural in him….” He is a mere oracle of the boudoir and a fake.

  In the next phase Turgenev strikes nearer home: Rudin is far too expert in the egoism of romantic love. He knows the whole keyboard from the evocation of “pure souls” to the effectiveness of a melancholy hint at incurable fate:

  “Look,” began Rudin with a gesture towards the window, “do you see that apple tree? It is broken by the weight and abundance of its own fruit. True emblem of genius.”

  Rudin is as cold as ice and he will do nothing unless his vanity is aroused; then he behaves like a pompous and meddlesome idiot and discovers he has done so half an hour too late. For he is introspective. Philosophy—we have exchanged it for psycho-analysis—has got into his blood and he is interested only in the doomed course of his own development. And this coldness of Rudin
which leads him skilfully to awaken the feeling of inexperienced women and particularly those very young ones whose feeling is maternal, and then to take fright before their dullness, is of long-standing. He had been too much adored by his mother.

  The Rudin of our generation would have had more to say about this mother. The Russian Rudin says little or nothing, and Turgenev tells only that the cold youth dropped her, as he dropped all his friends. Did he hate her? Turgenev does not say. That field, so fruitful to our contemporaries, is neglected. We know simply that Rudin’s lack of means and career is an excellent excuse for running away from marriage, and we can only guess at a deeper dread of reproducing the pattern that made him. Rudin is homeless politically and emotionally, and if he had had a career and a place in society, he would have had to retreat into more complex justifications—as nowadays the Rudin in us does.

  But if he tortures others Rudin tortures himself, too. After the affair with Natalya, there is an interlude of desperate farce. Philosophy (to which he has retired) tells him he should allow himself to fall really in love and so wipe out his guilt, and in Germany he tries out a passion to order with a French dress-maker. Alas, the old Adam remains. Seated in a boat Rudin gazes at the lady, pats her gently on the head—and tells her he feels like a father to her. He had been a brother to Natalya.

  And now Rudin is nothing but a cad, Turgenev makes his severest critic, the mature and decent Lezhnyov, take everything back. This is the most exciting point in the novel. This new Rudin is not as vivid as the old one, he has the weakness—perhaps it is due to Turgenev’s old-fashioned, hearsay technique as a story teller—of being a point of view and an afterthought. But a warmth is put into the old outline and the figure is at last taken out of the psychologist’s bottle and related to his environment: