Gogol labored more over "The Portrait" than over any of his other tales. The expanded second version was published seven years after the first, in the Collected Works of 1842. Belinsky considered it a total failure and thought he knew how it should have been written. He would have purified Gogol's "realism" of what he considered its alien admixture of the fantastic, "a childish fantas-magoria that could fascinate or frighten people only in the ignorant Middle Ages, but for us is neither amusing nor frightening, but simply ridiculous and boring." He goes on to explain:
No, such a realization of the story would do no particular credit to the most insignificant talent. But the thought of the story would be excellent if the poet had understood it in a contemporary spirit: in Chartkov he wanted to portray a gifted artist who ruined his talent, and consequently himself, through greed for money and the fascination of petty fame. And the realization of this thought should have been simple, without fantastic whimsies, grounded in everyday reality: then Gogol, given his talent, would have created something great.
Belinsky's suggestion amounts to the negation of the artist Gogol and his replacement by a "critical realist" of the dullest sort, a useful chicken instead of a bird of paradise. The contemporary spirit that Belinsky called for was of no interest at all to the author of "The Portrait." (A century later, in his little book on Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, though no disciple of Belinsky, offered a similarly rationalizing reduction of Gogol's work, rejecting all the fantastic tales as juvenilia and allowing as the real Gogol only "The Overcoat," The Inspector General, and the first part of Dead Souls. His criterion was not social utility, however, but artistic idiosyncrasy, an appeal to "that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.") Gogol had a different understanding of the artist's task and of his temptation. The fantastic and the diabolical were always essential dimensions of his world, never more so than in "The Portrait."
He toiled over "The Portrait" because it involved a judgment of his own work and its central question tormented him personally. It was not a question of the harmful influence of money or fame, but something more primitive and essentiaclass="underline" the ambiguous power of the artistic image itself. And the more lifelike the image, the more perplexing the question. The ambition to achieve a perfect likeness might go beyond the artist's control and bring into the world something he never intended. Thus the portrait in Gogol's tale looks back at its viewers, looks back with the eyes of the Antichrist whose life it has magically prolonged. The corrupting power of the gold it bestows on its new purchaser, the painter Chartkov, is only a secondary effect, an extension of the evil present in the painted image itself. The question the tale explores is whether art is sacramental or sacrilegious, godlike or diabolical, and at what point it may change from one to the other. Some years later, in 1847, Gogol wrote a letter to his father confessor in which he declared himself "guilty and cursed" not only for having portrayed the devil, which he had done with the intention of mocking him, and not only for having painted nothing but grotesque images, being unable to describe a positive character properly, but first of all for having attemped to re-create each thing "as alive as a painter from life." In "The Portrait," the terms of this self-condemnation were already embodied dramatically.
Nature is always doubled by the supernatural in Gogol's tales, and the ordinary is always open to the assaults of the extraordinary. The reality of the capital is a closed fiction, an unrelieved banality, but filled with gigantic, unexpected forces, like the huge fist "the size of a clerk s head" that suddenly comes at Akaky Akakievich out of the darkness. If Akaky Akakievich transgressed the order of things by desiring a new overcoat (by desiring anything at all), and is punished most terribly for it in the phantasmal world of Petersburg, he also returns as a phantom himself and has his revenge. He momentarily becomes one of those unexpected forces, robs the important person of his overcoat, frightens a policeman away with "such a fist… as is not to be found even among the living," and, having grown much taller, vanishes completely into the darkness of night.
Gogol was made uneasy by his works. They detached themselves from him and lived on their own, producing effects he had not foreseen and that sometimes dismayed him. He would write commentaries after the fact, trying to reduce them to more commonplace and acceptable dimensions. But their initial freedom stayed with them. It was inherent in his method of composition, and in his astonishing artistic gift-astonishing first of all to himself.
Richard Pevear
TRANSLATORS' NOTE
Th is translation has been made from the Russian text of the six-volume Khudozhestvennaya Literatura edition (Moscow,
1952-53).
We have arranged the tales in the order of their composition. They include four of the eight tales from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-32): "St. John's Eve" from the first volume, and "The Night Before Christmas," "The Terrible Vengeance," and "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt" from the second. We have eliminated the forewords of the beekeeper Rusty Panko, but kept his footnotes, as well as the author's, for individual stories. We include three of the four tales from the two volumes of Mirgorod (1835), omitting only "Taras Bulba." Of the Petersburg tales (1835- 42; the collective title is not Gogol's but has become traditional), we include all except "Rome." "The Carriage" is a slight anomaly in this group but belongs to the same period. We give the expanded 1842 version of "The Portrait."
The question of rank is of central importance to the Petersburg tales. The following is the table of the civil service ranks as established by the emperor Peter the Great in 1722, with their military equivalents:
Chancellor
Commander in Chief
Actual Privy Councillor
General
Privy Councillor