Which is the true Gogol? The humane critic of the social condition hoping to evoke our outrage and sympathy for the downtrodden, or the comical humorist laughing with us and at us and our human vanity? How does one reconcile the author of both of these stories?
Just for a change of pace -limit yourself to a MAXIMUM of 250 words!!! Please!!!
The first thing I noticed about Gogol was that he is very aware of the literary process in 19th century Russia – that is, that everything he writes must be cleared by a censor, that certain audiences with influence will be sensitive to his criticism, and that by writing these stories he is entering into a kind of relationship with the reader. Whew. Being aware of these elements means that Gogol can – and does – shamelessly play with the system in place, so he constantly makes jabs at the censors, the bureaucracy and the reader. For example, rather than naming a department and letting it be removed from the manuscript, Gogol launches on the following tirade: ‘In the department of…but it is better not to name the department. There is nothing more irritable than…every branch of public service. Each separate man nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person (pg. 79).’
I am inclined to believe that the author is more of a ‘humane critic’ than a simple humorist trying to get a laugh: his laughs come sometimes at odd moments, and his situations are both dramatic and absurd. The Nose concerns mostly the question of ‘what sort of man am I?’ while The Overcoat asks ‘what kind of government is this?’ Even though the situations are strange the realities they expose are real and very serious. Perhaps Gogol likes using humor as a tool, but by the end of his stories I wasn’t really laughing.
I think Gogol is a little bit of both. In both stories he pokes fun at all the characters. He even pokes fun at himself at the end of “The Nose” for choosing such a ridiculous story to write about. Akakii Akakievich who is the character we are supposed to empathize with in “The Overcoat” is described in a humorous way. Kovalyov’s vanity is portrayed in such a hyperbolic way, that you cannot help but laugh at him and all the other characters. However, I feel like this humor is simply trying to distract the censors and inattentive readers from the serious criticisms he makes about the bureaucracy and the system of ranks that has spread throughout society. Gogol shows himself to be an acute critic of how society is ordered. Kovalyov, for example, is absorbed with his own problems and disregards everyone else, unless they happen to be of higher rank than him; he beats the coach driver in his dream, and is suspicious of all the people he knows of lower rank than him. Gogol manages to make this society with its stratified social structure seem so unjust, even as he pokes fun at everyone and everything. He shows the people who are downtrodden, trying to inspire feelings of sympathy in the reader and outrage at the social conditions that exacerbate these problems.
Gogol, in The Nose, ridicules the superficial and materialistic tendencies of human culture. The major is so ridiculously dependant on his looks that afterwards, “Eternally in good humor, smiling”. In The Overcoat, Gogol points out how self-interested and heartless people can be. In both these stories, Gogol depicts the ridiculous extremes of our lives and twists them to his design. Akaki is such a pitiful but heart-warming character that the readers universally feel sorry for him. However, both these stories have elements of humor and an appeal for the downtrodden, but Gogol definitely has a purpose behind his stories. Whether comic or heart-wrenching doesn’t matter, behind Gogol’s jokes and extreme personalities, he was trying to evoke rage and sympathy. Gogol hides his outrage under layers of satire and drama. The Nose may be funny, but it also pointed out how ridiculous the culture of the Russian officers has become. The Overcoat more directly attacks the society in an appeal for the Russian Poor. Both of these literary styles are nothing more than a median for Gogol, a way to criticize authority. In this sense, the author is one and the same in both of these stories. However, like Ali, I don’t wasn’t actually that amused at the end, the problems pointed out by these stories are still prevalent today and kind of make me sick.
In “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” Gogol shows that he is able to comment on all strata of society, but in comparing the two it appears that he is not altogether detached, as perhaps was Pushkin, from the society that he creates in his writing. Gogol can be seen as a populist critic indeed, but one whose populism can be obscured by his pessimism. The populism is apparent through the way in which the narrator shapes the story around each protagonist: While in “The Nose” there is a sarcastic emphasis on the fact that the aristocratic Kovalev cannot be seen by any of his important lady-friends, Akaky Akakievich is painted as a diligent and undervalued worker who prefers frugality and simplicity. We see this contrast especially when the protagonists deal with formal institutions. There is a sense of offensive jest in Gogol’s writing as Kovalev is disregarded by the clerk at the newspaper office, forcing him to reveal where his face is “smooth, like a just-made pancake” (313 Pevear and Volokhonsky). However, when Akaky is turned away from the authorities, Gogol conveys genuine sympathy for the man, who is derided even by fate as he must once again wear his old coat. Gogol, then, sides with the common man, but the fact that he ends the stories as he does shows that, despite rooting for the downtrodden, he cannot bring himself to believe in a just world. Though humorous, his fiction is thus realist at least at some level.
I think that Gogol employs the comedy to communicate his outrage at human imperfections and bureaucratic issues of his time. As Ali mentioned, writing was highly censored in 19th century Russia. In my opinion, Gogol’s subtle undertones of protest are actually more effective than blatant complaints about the state of affairs in Russia at the time would be.
The infusion of humor only serves further this purpose. Gogol acknowledges at the end of “The Nose” that the subject matter is fairly outrageous, but he maintains that “there really is something in all this” (78). The outlandish walking, talking “nose” official and Kovalyov’s attempt to submit an advertisement for a missing nose both highlight how ridiculous the bureaucratic system actually is. Gogol seems to protest vanity, snobbery and incompetence that were running rampant in the Russian officials at the time.
In “The Overcoat”, Gogol creates a character who would capture any feeling reader’s heart. Akakii’s story, however, remains almost childish in the level of its fantasy. “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” can almost be considered masterful fairy tales, infused with meaning, humor and outrage.
In “The Overcoat,” the narrator says that “there exist such riddles in the world,” while a similar musing in “The Nose” asks: “are there not incongruities everywhere?” In trying to reconcile the satirist Gogol with the humane critic, I think these quotes show how Gogol can go about the same purpose in two quite different manners: both stories ask the reader to examine what is real and what is imagined or dreamed, and maybe what we choose to believe. The tale of a nose running around the city in a carriage is bizarre in and of itself, but Kovalev also asks himself whether he is drunk or dreaming when he realizes that his nose has vanished. He blames it on witchcraft, but when it reappears, what is the reader supposed to think? When Akaky Akakievich dies from being yelled at, and stays as a ghost to take the coat from the certain important person, what is the reader supposed to think? Referring back to our discussion in class, that Russian does not have a word for ghost in the same sense as English, I think it shows Gogol in a certain light. Russian has words for a ghost that is imagined, just like it has different words for a dream that is imagined versus a dream had while sleeping. The religious references in “The Nose” also add a certain dimension to the idea that Gogol is pointing out the incongruities of what we believe.
I would have to agree with Ben in the overall messages in both stories of “The Overcoat” and “The Nose”. With “The Nose” a literary term that came up for me was Magic Realism. We know that in this world, a nose could not come off of a person’s face and wander the city, pray at a cathedral and dress as a State Councillor, which is the aspect of magic realism. Even if Gogol ends with, “Say what you like, but such things do happen- not often, but they do happen” I am left with the impression that this never happens, unless it is a dream. One thing that Prof. Beyer had discussed with us previously in beginner Russian was that the word for dream (сон) is actually nose (нос) spelled backwards. Thus Gogol could be alluding to certain things with word play.
As Erik mentioned, Gogol is a bit of both. In “The Nose” I would say there is more of a comical aspect, a man who loses his confidence with women and can’t function because he’s lost his nose. As for “The Overcoat”, I feel Gogol more as a humane critic because we feel bad for Akaky and what we went through. Both stories give the feeling of material importance to us. In the first story, Kovalyov couldn’t function without his nose where as the overcoat in the second story helped Akaky become extroverted and less introverted. I can definitely sense as well the satire for example of Gogol trying to allude to things without actually pointing directly to them.
Whether it is a nose that departs from a man’s face or a lowly titular counselor consumed utterly by his relationship with his overcoat, Gogol’s mocking humor shines through to inform the reader of the ridiculousness of the Russian society and in many cases the universal absurdities that rest the human conscious from sound reasoning and allow us to be tortured by the inanity of minor and trivial events. Gogol without the comic elements would be terribly trite and overly sentimental, so it is indeed his humor that maintains his relevance and secures his position as one of the preeminent writers of Russian culture. As mentioned above, Gogol has much to say about petty materialism and its futility as a code for existence: Akakiy Akakievitch’s soul does not rest until the injustice of his stolen coat goes unsolved, thusly pointing out the tragedy of a life that can be defined by an article of clothing in a distinctly comic/absurd manner. Akakiy Akakievitch is a victim of fate and trademark human tendencies yet he is readable due to the comically disproportionate downtrodden aspect of his existence.
To me, “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” while obviously different in mood, have something of the same agenda. Both seem a little like fables: outlandish, exaggerated, but in the end illustrating very real principles. In “The Nose” Gogol takes on vanity and social conventions, while in “The Overcoat” he turns his attention to poverty and the power of the human spirit, quite literally in the end. The two stories’ tacks are very different, but Gogol’s equal skill at comedy and sentimentality, here in two different stories, reminds me of Dostoevsky, and to some extent Tolstoy. I don’t feel as if, like Karamzin, Gogol is aiming for undiluted sentimentality, or that he is ridiculing the whole world, including me, like Pushkin. Gogol proves here that he can do both, but it’s the balance that makes the stories so compelling.
It does not seem to me that Gogol is trying to make the reader feel any specific emotion regarding a group of actual people, but rather to make the reader step back and analyze the structure of the society in which he lived. First, I think wrong to think of the heroes of these stories as representative of a group larger than the group of their cohorts in rank. Second, It is clear that Gogol sees the civil service institutions of Russia as inefficient and ludicrous and he uses jokes and exaggerations to persuade the reader of this. And honestly, as a reader, I found it hard to get beyond this aspect of his writing in order to find anything of a more universal nature. During J-term we discussed the applicability of 20th century Russian literature to today. We more or less reached the conclusion that although the novels we read provide an interesting insight into Russian life at the time, they are rapidly diminishing in importance since the problems they addressed are now nonexistent. I think that these stories are very similar. I almost began to sympathize with Akakii’s plight, but I found myself immediately thinking, “but it’s not like that anymore.” What I see in Gogol is a witty wordsmith and, even more than Pushkin, a man who, as he sat down to write, must have been thinking, “I am so much more clever than you could ever hope to be.”
However, I find these stories endlessly fascinating and useful given my Russophile tendencies.
In both the “Overcoat” and “The Nose“ Gogol is quite clearly mocking society. He does so by creating extreme characters. There is Kovalyov who is extraordinarily vain and self-important, the kind of government worker nobody would ever like to need to work with. On the other hand there is Akakievich another person one would not like to meet as minds only his business and takes pride in his poverty and lack of interest in anything that goes beyond what is his. These caricatures of human characters make people laugh and at the same time maybe find something of them in themselves or people they know.
While I don’t think that Gogol wanted to create empathy for certain kinds of people or necessarily encourage his audience to act against social misconditions, his mockeries of the same are most certainly a social commentary that raises awareness of them. However the stories are balanced enough in both so that the decision of what in the end it is, that they ought to achieve, lies with the reader.
Based on “The Nose”, “The Overcoat”, Dead Souls and a few Russian articles of literary criticism I have read, I find it hard to believe that Gogol is a kind of Russian Jonathan Swift. Akaky Akyevich and Ivan Yakovlevich are certainly downtrodden and certainly Gogol expects the reader to sympathize with them. However, the strangeness of these tales does not really incite outrage in the reader (especially the modern reader); rather, their plights seem ridiculous. A bureaucrat in an altogether unfamiliar hierarchy chases his somewhat superior nose about the capital city. An OCD clerk purchases and obsesses over a new overcoat, which is subsequently stolen and a characteristic bureaucratic exchange follows. Furthermore, in the end each hero gets some sort of redemption – Akaky is haunts the bridge and Ivan wakes up with his nose reattached – not exactly outrageous (though “The Overcoat” is certainly more sinister. On the whole, it seems like Gogol’s ideas lie somewhere apart from social justice.
I see Gogol as closer to the comical humorist than the social commentator. If he is indeed a human critic of the social condition he covers it with his extremely sarcastic façade from which he pokes fun at his characters. At the end of “The Nose” he steps out of his narrating to comment on the story as a whole “But the strangest, the most incomprehensible thing of all, is how authors can choose such subjects” (78). Certainly, Gogol is poking fun at his own story, wishing to cast himself in the role of witty author, who is in a way placing himself above his own story.
Gogol does something similar in “The Overcoat.” By recognizing that Akakii Akakievich is a ridiculous name, or as he acknowledges “it may strike the reader as rather singular and far-fetched” (80). In this, he is attempting to lend his story more legitimacy by showing the reader that even he can poke fun at it. In fact, the whole business in the second half of the story about the “prominent personage” is Gogol having fun. He writes, poking fun at his own title for the character, that this “prominent personage had but recently become a prominent personage, but up to that time he had been an insignificant person” (95). While there may be some constructive criticisms, he seems to be mainly content poking fun at the system and at people – writing in a humorous manner without necessarily demanding change.
On the surface, these two stories seem to be written by two different authors. The author of “The Nose” is a comic who is laughing at the frivolity of life; the author of “The Overcoat” is an emotional storyteller trying to evoke sympathy. However, on a deeper examination, we can connect these seemingly disparate authors as the same man. Both stories speak around the problem they are addressing, the general shortcomings that Gogol sees in Russian society. He sees the both people who are extremely pre-occupied with themselves (Kovalyov in “The Nose”) and people who are kind and helpful but ignored (Akakii in “The Overcoat”). Kovalyov represents the aspects of society that Gogol sees as silly. They are caught up in their own self-images and do not care to help others. Akakii represents the people who make society function; the people who do their work and respect others, but are often taken advantage of. Combined, they show the way in which Gogol views the Russian spirit. Gogol’s concept of the Russian people is as a people who can work hard and accomplish much, but are often caught up in too much self-examination. The Russians should not be concerned with what others think of them (Kovalyov worrying about his appearance), but should take delight in what they have (Akakii’s love of his coat).
It’s amazing how you can imagine Gogol telling this story with a completely straight face. The delivery of “the Nose” is exactly like any other story of the time, and yet the content is ridiculous beyond belief. Here is obviously a true satirist at work. If the goal was to make fun of every level of Russian society, these two stories in combination certainly achieved that. In “the Nose” the portrayal of the Major as a character is hardly less comical than his unorthodox situation. Gogol’s way of pointing out the flaws of the Russian civil servant ranking class is down with all the subtlety of the bull in a china shop. I don’t think these works were meant to evoke emotion, but only to entertain (though I’d be curious to learn who is not targeted and therefore would find this humorous and not offensive).
I see him more as the humorist who points out the importance of appearance, even as he makes fun of our vanity. Though superficial, appearance and presentation gains acceptance an approval.
Appearance is extremely important to both the Major and Akaki. We don’t know that the major does anything substantial, but he brags about his title all the time, and presents himself in such a positive and attractive light that Madame Pedtochina offers her daughter’s hand. However, when he loses his nose, he is afraid to meet anyone, and his main desire to find his nose has to do with meeting the different women in society. I think we can say that he’s done pretty well for himself in society just through talking; on the other hand, we have Akaki, a diligent worker bee whose accomplishments that no one notices because he keeps to himself and wears an old coat. Akaki doesn’t gain any recognition from his superiors until he has a new coat.
For me, the moral of the story is: it’s not just about hard work and honesty – you also have to present yourself. Donald Trump said in his book “How to Get Rich” something along the lines of: “if you’ve put in the time to do something and you think it’s great, let people know!”
Having read “The Nose” right before “The Overcoat”, any form of ridicule or satire in the latter was embellished for me, so in my opinion, Gogol is a comical humorist laughing with us and (mostly) at us, and at everyone else. In “The Nose”, he sets up a completely unrealistic story that we at once classify as unrealistic, yet he feels the need to clarify to the reader that he himself also sees the absurdity in the story. Gogol takes his power as the writer to the fullest by feeding us what we think to be complete nonsense, and emphasizes this by using lines such as “absolutely nothing is known of what happened next.” He is almost boasting that he can tell us as much or as little of anything as he wants.
At other points, however, Gogol puts himself at the same level of ignorance as the reader, as in “The Overcoat”, where he writes “our memory is beginning to fail us… and everything… has become so blurred and mixed up in our head…” The reader knows (or thinks) that at least s/he is not the only one being left out. In this story the reader takes a ride on an emotional roller coaster; s/he pities Akaky Akakyevich (whose shitty life is reflected in his name) throughout the story and feels great when he is finally able to buy a new overcoat, then feels sorry for him again when the overcoat is stolen, but is then happy at the end when the ghost of Akaky gets his revenge!
I really enjoy Gogol’s literary aesthetic, and believe he is one of the more modern writers we’ve read in that sense. While both stories are structured differently, I believe they function in similar ways. The author’s absurd satire, “The Nose,” creates a humorous dialectic in which Gogol infuses his commentary regarding the superficial focus of society, while the more openly critical “The Overcoat” approaches the issue of class and human kindness or lack thereof. Either way, the author attempts to examine and re-imagine Russian culture and social constructs of the time. As Patrick stated, Gogol’s stories do not seek to establish a paradigm of social justice, nor do they redeem or uplift. Rather, issues are presented in original, amusing contexts in which our commentator is, actually, able to poke fun at their existence and triviality. After all, as the critic himself noted, “Utterly nonsensical things happen in this world. Sometimes there is absolutely no rhyme or reason in them…”
Gogol is a great Russian writer because he breaks the mold and doesnt keep with the established norm. Seeing as he was one of the earliest major Russian writer he managed to influence a whole breed of Russian authors over the following generations. Gogol is neither a social critic or humorist. He pushes the envelope, by writing ridiculous stories about noses and akaki akakievich. If Akaki was a likeable character perhaps the Overcoat would be a social commentary in the vein of championing the little guy against the big social machine, but he isnt even likeable! come on, he’s described as having a hemorrhoidal complexion.
I entirely agree with Joannas assessment – ‘issues are presented in original, amusing contexts in which our commentator is, actually, able to poke fun at their existence and triviality. After all, as the critic himself noted, “Utterly nonsensical things happen in this world. Sometimes there is absolutely no rhyme or reason in them…”
I would reconcile the implied writers of these two stories by claiming that they represent two halves of the same bureaucratic life and critique. “The Nose,” for example, seems somewhat akin to a biography of those higher-positioned officials in “The Overcoat:” Gogol is pointing out the ridiculousness (with its accordant comicality) of incompetent, self-concerned bureaucrats, who interact condescendingly and intolerably with their inferiors. I see Gogol’s two tones as quite appropriate, since his surreal, mocking account of Kovalyev deserves a ludicrous construction, to highlight or remind the reader of the absurdity of Kovalyev’s and other bureaucrats’ pretensions, whereas Akakii’s plight requires a humbling, dignified, naturalistic telling to underscore and evoke empathy for the outrageousness of his predicament. Gogol’s very different, irreverent (especially in “The Nose,” but also present in Akakii’s ghostly return), and apparently mutually exclusive styles work well to elevate those whose social conditions warrant it, plus bring down or make laughable those whose positions and vanities should be challenged. The reader, wherever he places on this scale of officialdom, is critiqued accordingly; or as Professor Beyer puts it: Gogol brings the reader’s “human vanity” to bear in both cases, insofar as he or she is led to sympathize with either an absurd personage, or one whose role has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged.
Everyone’s posts were great today )I don’t know how much more I can really add), but what was interesting to me was the ways that fantasy played into to both the Nose and the Overcoat, and how that informs the way that we might reconcile Gogol as a writer. In the Nose, though the fact that there is a nose walking around is completely absurd, it is set in the context of the seemingly mundane. This establishes a cognitive dissonance that, I think, allows Gogol to poke fun at the vanity of humans. In the Overcoat, the narrative feels realistic until the very end, went Akakii is haunting St. Petersburg as an overcoat-stealing corpse. What this does, I think, is bring us out of the pathos that we feel for the downtrodden protagonist and forces the reader to understand the way that this situation might impact the rest of the characters in the short story, and especially the prominent personage Bashmachkin. We can reconcile Gogol because, though he situates fantastical situations in different ways in these two stories, they are always amidst trivialities and true suffering, possibly in order to highlight those things as the focus of people’s lives.