Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe;
I was not offended.
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
George Clinton, “Maggot Brain,” 1971

It’s hard to say whether this kind of thing—making a case for a dead writer, I mean—was easier in the past than it is now. My guess is that it was. Easier, that is. It’s not so much that the critics of the past had more on their plate so much as they were eating more or less the same meal at more or less the same time. And when they wrote on this dead writer or on that dead writer, the question, voiced or silent, would rarely be of the Gospel of John, or Juvenal, or even Joyce up until a few decades ago, were worth chewing up, but rather of how he should be chewed up. But now we can eat whatever we like, at whatever hour of the day, or night, we please, and if you should like cucumbers but not onions and I onions but not cucumbers, that’s alright. But if you happen to write an essay on cucumbers and I one on onions, it’s quite clear we’re not from the same planet. My interest in the texture of those little frecklish lumps, your interest in the way the peeled skin holds the light: they’re not nothing, but they’re also not something. And of course the point of essays like these is to explain our enthusiasms to the world at large, to entice one another into indulging in the other’s tastes. But say we try everything that’s recommended to us; then say we say because it can’t be done. Even if weekends were as long as months and hours long as weekends, it’s simply not in us to take everything in.
But that’s beside the point. The point’s actually a problem. And the problem isn’t that composing an essay on Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is hard because he’s dead, or that he needs an introduction. It’s in how the nature of his art works directly against the form of the review essay, which takes finitude as its basic premise: because our time on earth is limited, and our minds unsuited to take everything in, we have to make choices with regards to what art we, to put it crudely, consume. Though we live in an age when matters of taste have become almost completely individualized, and though today’s reviews may be more inarticulate with regards to appreciating art, they remain as grounded in a notion of circumscribed time as when Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold trod the English earth. For interesting reasons that would be interesting to explore (but do we have the time?), nowadays we tend towards evaluating films and albums numerically rather than verbally, be it through top ten lists, a four star scale, a ten point scale, or that all-too-familiar hundred point system masked by five letters of the alphabet and two adverbs, plus and minus. Perhaps we don’t judge anymore, but we compensate by grading everything relentlessly: restaurants, songs, professors, internet videos, news articles, microwave ovens, human beings: you name it and we’ve got numbers for it. And though you could argue that at least the fine arts and literature remain exempt from the rest of the creative world, it only takes a field trip to an art auction and to the Amazon website to realize just how far we’ve come in transforming even high cultural aesthetics and criticism into statistics, econometrics, arithmetic: finite figures.
So it’s not hard to imagine problems arising when we try to decipher Gogol, whose central essence, as far as I can tell, consists precisely (or imprecisely, as the case may be), of a linguistic infinity overwriting (or devouring) an infinite reality. Our fixation on numbers as the measure of all things hides, I think, a fantasy of unbiased perception and communication: Gogol’s language is unlimited precisely because it delights in the functions of speech that have nothing to do with making statements clear, the likes and ums and you knows and I don’t knows that form—and this is Gogol’s insight—the wheat of our everyday language, and not, as we’d prefer to think, its chaff. In opposition to the idea that literature clarifies, delineates, selects, and above all fixes reality, Gogol presents a spectacular universe lying between all categories but belonging to none. Instead of our familiar either/or he offers a nebulous neither/nor: he brackets things with what they aren’t and refuses to affirm what they are. It’s no accident that most of the dramatic action in Gogol’s short stories takes place at night, when the distinctions of the mind cave in. when things cease to be and begin to suggest. But though Gogol’s sheer profusion of descriptive material invites all manners of interpretation, in the end it’s a mistake to try to grasp Gogol using concepts: all his works seem to take place in those strange states of mind which are defined precisely by their lack of metaphysical content: certain of the provincial stories in The Collected Tales as well as his final masterpiece Dead Souls feel as if they were composed solely in that thoughtless stupor that follows a tremendous meal, and the more obviously fantastic tales, such as the inexplicable “The Nose,” in which the titular organ of a petty official comes to life and begins a civic career of his own, have all the fluid incongruity of dreams. If realism thinks of words as a fence, Gogol sees them as paths, as “roads…crawling in all directions like caught crayfish dumped out of a sack,” to borrow one of Dead Souls’ weirder metaphors. Like rain and orbits, the road’s a noun defined by motion: one of the things Gogol retains an especial fondness for throughout his writings is movement. His descriptive passages swiftly flash from image to image, as in for example the Ukrainian (Gogol was an Ukraininan) pastoral described in the tale “A Terrible Vengeance”:

Fair is the sight from the midst of the Dnieper of the high hills, the broad meadows, and the green forest! Those hills are not hills: they have no foot; they are sharp-peaked at both bottom and top; on the slopes are not woods; they are hair growing on the shaggy head of the old man of the forest. Under it his beard washes in the water, and under his beard and over his hair – the tall sky. Those meadows are not meadows: they are a green belt tied in the middle of the round sky, and the moon strolls about in both the upper and the lower half.

Or take the famed passage on driving near the end of the first book of Dead Souls:

The horses got moving and pulled the light britzka along like a bit of fluff. Selifan just kept brandishing and shouting “Hup! hup! hup!” bouncing smoothly on his box, as the troika now flew up and now rushed full-tilt down a hummock, such as were scattered the whole length of the high road, which ran down a barely noticeable slope. Chichikov just smiled, jouncing slightly on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get in a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: “Devil take it all!”—how can his soul not love it? Not love it when something ecstatically wondrous is felt in it? It seems  an unknown force has taken you on its wing, and you are flying, and everything is flying: milestones go flying by, merchants come flying at you on the boxes of their kibitkas, the forest on both sides is flying by with its dark tanks of firs and pines, with axes chopping and crows cawaing, the whole road is flying off no one knows where into the vanishing distance, and there is something terrible in this quick flashing, in which the vanishing object has no time to fix itself—only the sky overhead, and the light clouds, and the moon trying to break through, they alone seem motionless.

In some sense all of Gogol’s language seems to be written in italics , in speech tilted and transformed by some invisible and omnipresent force, or else all underlined as if the words themselves were horses galloping. Or even all struck through, as if to say mistakes and hesitations can be rejected, but never erased . Nothing is illuminated, but everything gets emphasized, obfuscated, warped, sung. For Gogol, there is neither a single thing nor a single human being in the universe that deserves to waste away unspoken, and it’s not too much to claim that the ridiculous splendor of Russian prose in the rest of the 19th century would have been impossible if Gogol had not offered before it his vision of a literature founded on comprehensive and uncompromising love . Tolstoy’s luminous, absolute, and  unbounded scrutiny, Dostoevsky’s hallucinogenic images and his compassion for outcasts, the absurdist speech of Chekhov’s plays and the subterranean mysticism of his stories: it all would have been diminished, restrained, and impoverished without Gogol’s impatience with literary form and his hunger   for material of every kind, be it physical or verbal, provincial or urban, alive or dead, animal, vegetable, or mineral, interesting or banal, tasteful or not.
And it’s precisely this bold and undiscriminating passion that, I think, makes Gogol especially valuable for us. The democratization of taste that began in the 1960s opened up for us tremendous horizons in terms of what stuff we could like and dislike, but what it failed to abolish was the squeamishness upon which the idea of taste ultimately derives—in fact, it allowed that squeamishness to balloon: without a language to express and explain aesthetic preferences, the sheer assertion of contrary taste or distaste takes on a terrifying valence from which we can’t help but shy away. We withdraw into cliques, or into ourselves, or both, giving up the great world out of fear, and this takes place not only in art, but also in our everyday lives, in our politics. There’s a Gogol tale, “Viy,” in which a young man, Khoma is forced to spend three nights in a church with the dead body of a beautiful witch. Swarmed by dark spirits, he somehow survives two nights, but when the spirits call out the monster Viy on the third night, he looks into its eyes and dies right away. Khoma, a young philosopher, spends most of the story running away from everything, first from the university, then from the witch, then from her father, a Cossack chief. By the time he’s trapped in a closed space by all his fears (incidentally Viy is the Russian pronoun for “you”), it’s too late to face them all. His fears are strong enough to destroy him. Convinced of his strange literary creations, Gogol died of guilt and starvation in 1852. Sixty-five years later, after countless procrastinations of reform, the czarist system whose stagnation Gogol described so vividly in Dead Souls would die as well. It’s too early to tell precisely how well our own society will hold up, but one of the many reasons we might read Gogol, and I think read literature as a whole, is that in reading we’ll find out what to do before it’s too late.

1. Interestingly enough, Gogol lived for a long while in Rome, having fled Russia after the success of his story collections: Dead Souls, his most ambitious and most “Russian” work, was mostly composed a thousand miles from home.

2. Incidentally enough, Gogol published all of his writing in the space of something like a dozen years: he spent the last years of his life convinced that his power of writing was something diabolic: the reason Dead Souls’ second book comes down to us only in fragments is not only because Gogol gave up on it, but because he burned his manuscript of the text. Of course, everything published before then had become, in a very real sense, public property: pretty much all of the characters in Dead Souls became pretty much instantly proverbial; and decades later the city of St. Petersburg commissioned a sculpture of a giant nose in homage to Gogol’s tale.

3. Love here used in a more mystic sense: as far as actual women went, Gogol was something of a complete failure.

4. Apparently.

5.  Like several of the main characters in Dead Souls, Gogol devoured food with a passion. It’s not too hard to make the connection between his passion for food and his passion for language: in both cases once-living matter is rendered dead and then begins to reenter life through motions of the mouth.