Crisis 22
Russian Souls
A Cunning Plan - The Russian Soul - Belinsky
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July, 2024
A Cunning Plan
Gogol’s narrator says that Chichikov’s plan to make money from buying dead souls is nonsense. Yet there is a mad logic to it. Chichikov wants to accumulate a long list of serfs so that he can use them at the bank to get a big loan and then become wealthy. The government census of serfs is not done very often, so there are always serfs on a landowner’s list that are dead yet for whom the landowner still has to pay taxes. Chichikov aims to buy the dead yet still registered serfs — also referred to as souls — from landowners, pointing out to them that by doing so he saves them from paying taxes on non-existent workers.
His plan is essentially a scam, so Chichikov gives all kinds of reasons for why he wants to buy the souls — just as Putin gives all kinds of reasons for why he needs to invade Ukraine. Chichikov’s journey from landowner to landowner to buy souls forms the structural backbone of the novel, which in many ways resembles a picaresque journey — especially since it seems unlikely that Chichikov can really change his selfish character, despite all the sermonizing we hear in the final pages of Part II. (One characteristic of the picaresque novel is that the protagonist is a rogue who remains essentially the same throughout the novel). Likewise, it’s not clear if Putin will ever change, despite all his claims to moral principles. If you invade another country, and bomb it mercilessly for years, it’s very hard to maintain even the spectre of morality.
While Gogol’s depiction of the way Chichikov sells his plan to landowners is at times uproariously funny — as I illustrate in 💰 Selling the Scheme (not yet online). In ✒️ Literature & Subversion I’ll focus on some of the more nefarious parallels to Putin’s war in Ukraine, on the problem of the term Russian soul, and on Gogol’s place in relation to European literature and Bulgakov.
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While Chichikov is initially successful at buying souls, his plan is exposed publicly and the townsfolk of N. start to understand that he’s been running a scam. One might liken the way Chichikov’s plan dawns slowly and uncertainly on the locals to the way Russians might at some point (hopefully) see through Putin’s mad logic:
only later, after their initial stupefaction, did they begin to sort things out, make distinctions, demand an accounting and get angry when they perceived that the whole business simply defied explanation. […] If only there were some sense to it. Still and all, they spread it, and so there must be some reason for it, mustn't there? But what was the reason for the dead souls? No reason at all. So it turns out that it was all just blather, rot, nonsense, balderdash, poppycock. It was simply — the Devil take it! (Chapter 9)
The same disconnect between understanding and reality seems to haunt Russian acceptance of Putin’s special operation to ‘liberate Ukraine from Nazis and to counter Western aggression.’ When will Russians see through the scam? More crucially, when will they unveil and oppose the system which allows for such a scam? Russians in 1842 had a hard time seeing beyond the imperialist czar & serf system; Russians in 2024 struggle to see through the imperialist autocrat & voter system. Their lack of real, systemic political engagement leads them to condone a president who silences (and kills) his political opponents, who runs an undemocratic system of FSB agents and oligarchs, and who wages war on his Slavic brothers.
One might contrast the long slow struggle in 19th-20th century England toward a full democracy to the history of 19th and 20th century Russia, which banned serfdom in 1861 yet failed to establish a solid democratic system. They almost established a working parliament at the beginning of the 20th century, but then came World War I, civil war, and the communist takeover. Perhaps this history of democratic failure is the reason Russians are so slow to understand how they’re being scammed, and so quick to support an imperialistic system which includes a dictator, oligarchs, pseudo-democracy, a pseudo-free press, and a war of expansion that makes no moral sense.
The only way that the Kremlin’s system and Putin’s war make sense is from the point of view of authoritarianism, colonialism, and imperialism. This of course runs counter to Putin’s rhetoric, in which the West is thrown back in time and is projected as the colonial and imperialistic enemy of free nations. To see through this projection may be a painful awakening. Piercing through the manipulations and lies, Russians may experience a shocking cognitive dissonance in which they see themselves to be the opposite of what they thought they were.
For whatever combination of reasons, few Russians are able to understand, expose, and confront the destruction that’s being done in the name of their country. As I write this paragraph, on July 8, 2024, Russia has just hit a children’s hospital in Kiev with a KH-101 cruise missile. Instead of opposing such atrocities, Russians listen to denials and distortions, wrapped in nonsense and poppycock about Mother Russia, Nazis in the Ukrainian government, NATO encroachment, the greatness of the Russian people, a Jewish Nazi president, etc.
In Chapter 11, the narrator says of Chickikov, who might also be Putin,
What weighs on me, however, is not that people will be dissatisfied with the hero, but that in my soul lives the unshakable conviction that readers might have been satisfied with the very same hero, the very same Chichikov, if the author had not looked so deeply into his soul, had not stirred up at its very bottom that which slips away and hides itself from the light, had not exposed his most secret thoughts, which no man confides to any another.
When the townsfolk see how they’ve been gulled into Chichikov’s immoral and illegal plan, he flees the town. Chichikov orders his carriage driver to drive speedily across the Russian countryside. This occurs at the very end of Part I, which is often considered the end of the novel, since Part II is unfinished and of lower quality. Part I also stands up admirably all by itself, especially since the final images are so striking and full of meaning: the troika, the horses, and its inhabitants fly ever-faster into the expansive beauty of the Russian countryside, becoming en route a symbol for the direction of Russia itself …
And you, Russia of mine-are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, struck with the portent, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds? Surely the winds themselves must abide in their manes, and every vein in their bodies be an ear stretched to catch the celestial message which bids them, with irongirded breasts, and hooves which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission of God? Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes-only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!
Chichikov’s fantastic trajectory is worth comparing to the all-too-real trajectory of Putin. Former US ambassador Jake Sullivan describes the latter in a recent interview (in which he also discusses his 2024 book, Midnight in Moscow):
I was often asked as ambassador, you know, what are Putin's off-ramps, short of that victory, victory on his terms, denazifying and demilitarizing Ukraine. And I joked, I said, there are no off-ramps. It's like in the United States, there's a famous highway, the New Jersey Turnpike. It's like being on the Jersey Turnpike. There are rest areas. They're named on the New Jersey Turnpike famously. You take a rest area to refit and regroup. But there's no off-ramp. He's on the highway to victory in Kiev. (podcast interview on Ukraine: The Latest, October 10, 2024)
The overall scheme Chichikov tries to sell to landowners is a fraud, as is the special military operation to save Ukraine from Nazis. We see this especially in the details, which I’ll go into on the next page, 💰 Selling the Scheme. On the rest of this page, and on the next page, I’ll continue with a broader look at Gogol, especially in regard to the notion of a Russian soul and to the place of Gogol in Russian and global literature.
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The Russian Soul
One of the most helpful things we find in Gogol’s fiction is the simultaneous articulation and annihilation of the bizarre notion of a special Russian soul. Critics, beginning with Belinsky’s take on Dead Souls, often attribute this notion to the writings of Gogol and Dostoevsky. Yet I’d argue that Gogol’s fiction simply allows us to see yet another version of the pompous, proud, precious, ridiculous, self-deluded humanity we see in the writings of Juvenal & Molière, Chaucer & Swift, Shakespeare & Vonnegut, Balzac & Dickens, Rabelais & Rushdie, etc. Every culture obviously has its own manners and forms of being, yet to posit a Russian soul, as distinct in essence from the souls of other societies, is just nonsense, balderdash, and poppycock.
We can see this type of nonsense in the opening paragraph of Gogol’s short story, “The Overcoat.” The paragraph is at once comic and depressing, yet it’s general rather than particular, and it’s universal rather than exceptional. It applies to almost any society — the bureaucratic China of the Qing Dynasty, the imperial Russia of the czars, the Soviet Union of the apparatchiks, the infamous slowness of German, French, Italian, and Indian bureaucracies, etc.
In the department of — but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service. Each individual attached to them nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person. Quite recently a complaint was received from a justice of the peace, in which he plainly demonstrated that all the imperial institutions were going to the dogs, and that the Czar’s sacred name was being taken in vain; and in proof he appended to the complaint a romance in which the justice of the peace is made to appear about once every ten lines, and sometimes in a drunken condition. Therefore, in order to avoid all unpleasantness, it will be better to describe the department in question only as a certain department.
What’s here presented in a very particular Russian context is a general human problem called bureaucratic or institutional pride.
Chapter 3 of Dead Souls gives us a clear instance of human traits being presented as exceptionally Russian. The narrator explains how Russians are unique in the varied way they address people of different social standing. Whether one detects notes of pride or irony in the following, the notion that Russians are special is clear:
It must be said that in this Rus of ours, if we have not yet kept pace with foreigners in this or that respect, then we have far outstripped them in our knowledge of the proper way to behave. It is impossible to enumerate all the shadings and subtleties of our behaviour. The Frenchman or the German will never grasp or comprehend all its peculiarities and distinctions: he will start speaking in almost the same tone of voice and the same language to a millionaire and to a humble pedlar of tobacco, although, of course, in his heart he will duly fawn on the former.
Anyone who has learned French and doubts when to use the informal tu or the formal vous may find this reference to the French a tad simplistic (which isn’t helped by the fact that you often have to be invited to use tu, and that there’s even a verb, tutoyer, for this intimate form of address!). And what of the Japanese, who have forms of address which go up and down, in subtle gradation, the scales of social interaction? And what of the English, with their linguistic and class distinctions? And what of Hindus, with their endless caste categories? Does a brahmin talk to a kshatriya in the same way he talks to a brahmin? Does he talk to his mother like he talks to his wife, or like he talks to his daughter? In what way can’t non-Russians understand the Russians for having an exaggerated version of what everyone has?
And yet Gogol insists (in a later portion of the same long paragraph) on the special nature of Russian social norms, even lifting the whole special concept into the heights of Greek mythology:
With us it's different: we have men so wise that with a landowner who has two hundred souls they will speak in an altogether different way than with one who has three hundred, and with one who has three hundred they will, again, speak otherwise than with one who has five hundred, and with one who has five hundred, again it will be otherwise than with one who has eight hundred; in a word, you can get up to a million, and shadings will still be found. Let's suppose, for instance, that there exists a chancellery, not here, but in some never-never land, and in this chancellery, let's suppose, there exists a director of the chancellery. I invite you to have a look at him when he is sitting among his subordinates - why, you'd be too scared to breathe a word! Pride and nobility and who knows what else is expressed on his face? Just pick up your brush and start painting: a Prometheus, a veritable Prometheus! He has the gaze of an a eagle, and a stride that's smooth and measured. But this very same eagle, as soon as he leaves his room and approaches his superior's office, scurries along, papers tucked under his arm, like such a partridge that there's no enduring it. In society and at an evening party, if all present are not of any great rank, Prometheus will simply remain Prometheus, but the moment anyone slightly higher than himself appears, Prometheus will undergo a metamorphosis such as even Ovid couldn't invent: he's a fly, even less than a fly, he's reduced to a grain of sand!
When the narrator says, “With us it's different: we have men so wise” he’s clearly mocking the Russian obsession with social gradation. When he uses hyperbole — the eagle and the fly — he’s also mocking the pretensions of Russians, much in the mock epic manner of Alexander Pope. Yet he’s also maintaining an essential difference between Russians and everyone else, a tendency which takes on a spiritual dimension if we cling too closely to a simplistic application of Belinsky’s notion of the Russian soul.
For Belinsky himself loved the writer who showed the complex absurdity and the self-inflicted despair in Russian life — a spiritual plight that seemed to him especially Russian — yet he didn’t think this special form of suffering warranted a nationalistic, militaristic, religious glorification. In a letter to Gogol, he writes:
The title of poet, the profession of letters has thrown into the shade the glitter of epaulettes and gaudy uniforms. This is why, especially amongst us, universal attention is paid to every manifestation of any so-called liberal trend, no matter how poor the writer's gifts, while great poets who sincerely or insincerely sell their gifts to serve Orthodoxy, autocracy and the national way of life quickly lose their popularity […] And in this the public is right. It sees in Russian writers its only leaders, defenders, and saviours from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy and the national way of life.
Belinsky’s letter to Gogol is a powerful one, and deserves a section to itself.
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Belinsky
In Russian Thinkers (1978, revised 2008), Isaiah Berlin skillfully frames a key section of Belinsky’s letter to Gogol. He notes that the letter is in response to Gogol’s apparent shift from liberal artist to conservative dogmatist. We see this shift in Dead Souls: Part I dramatizes and satirizes the Russian character, whereas Part II tries to reform this character and ends with what might be described as a religious and nationalistic sermon. One might go so far as to call the Gogol of Part II, Gogol 2.0, with the understanding that in this case, as in the case of Microsoft Windows, later doesn’t mean better.
In the quote from Berlin below, I’ll leave out some of his quotations from Belinsky’s letter, so as to get more easily at Berlin’s framing of Belinsky’s response to Gogol’s born-again nationalistic and religious zeal. Again (lest my reader miss my overriding point), much of what’s said about Gogol 2.0 also applies to Putin:
In 1847 Gogol, whose genius Belinsky had acclaimed, published a violently anti-liberal and anti-Western tract, calling for a return to ancient patriarchal ways, a spiritually regenerated land of serfs, landlords, the tsar. The cup brimmed over. In a letter written from abroad Belinsky, in the last stages of his wasting disease, accused Gogol of betraying the light:
[…] one cannot be silent when, under cover of religion, backed by the whip, falsehood and immorality are preached as truth and virtue.
Yes, I loved you, with all the passion with which a man tied by ties of blood to his country loves its hope, its honour, its glory, one of its great leaders along the path of consciousness, development and progress [...] Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism or aestheticism, or piety, but in the achievements of education, civilisation and humane culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, lost for so many ages in mud and filth. It needs laws and rights in accordance not with the teachings of the Church, but with those of common sense and justice [...] Instead of which she offers the terrible spectacle of a land where men buy and sell other men without even the cant of the American planters, who say that Negroes are not human beings, a country [...] where there are no guarantees of personal security or honour or property; not even a police State, only huge corporations of official thieves and robbers [...]
Preacher of the whip, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and black reaction, defender of a Tatar way of life — what are you doing? ... Look at the ground beneath your feet. You are standing on the edge of an abyss. You found your teachings upon the Orthodox Church, and that I understand, for the Church has always favoured whips, it has always grovelled to despotism. But what has this to do with Christ? [...]
[Belinsky] read this letter to his friends in Paris. 'This is a work of genius,' Herzen said in a low voice to Annenkov, who records the scene, and I think his last will and testament.' This celebrated document became the bible of Russian revolutionaries. Indeed it is for reading it to an illicit discussion circle that Dostoevsky was condemned to death, then sent to Siberia.
While the Russian soul may seem appealing in literature, perhaps even Romantic in a nationalistic or mystical sort of way, it’s a form of nationalism that’s liable to lead backward — not progressively forward in the manner of Byron, but rather nostalgically backward in a way that links Putin to the type of Romanticism Heinrich Heine parodied in his 1844 poem, “Germany: A Winter’s Tale.” In reading the following two stanzas, I suggest changing Heine’s Holy Roman Empire to Soviet Empire, the collapse of which Putin says was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century:
Restore the old Holy Roman Empire,
As it was, whole and immense.
Bring back all its musty junk,
And all its foolish nonsense.
The Middle Ages I’ll endure,
If you bring back the genuine item;
Just rescue us from this bastard state,
And from its farcical system […]
As the liberal critic Belinsky wrote to Gogol in 1847, dwelling on nationalized mystical identity only takes people back to a militaristic and autocratic society in which people are slaves to a pseudo-religious ideal that’s long past it’s expiry date. In our modern world, it can lead to scenes like this:
Link to photo in The Moscow Times.
Unfortunately, the cultural or spiritual notion of nationalistic specialness can fuse with the imperial notion of exceptionalism. Just as we ought to see Gogol’s characters and his attacks on cold and hierarchical institutions not in light of a unique spirituality or Russian soul, but rather in light of other literary figures (such as Balzac or Bulgakov), so we ought to see the national character of Russians not as some special mystico-nationalistic breed that deserves a sphere of influence, but as equals in a global community.
Respect for sovereignty is the most basic expression of equality among nations. By showing extreme disrespect for equality — that is, by attempting to erase Ukraine from the face of the Earth — Putin fractures whatever Russian priests and writers might have ever imagined about a unified Slavic soul.
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The concept of a Russian soul is quite fascinating on the levels of aesthetics, character, and symbolism, yet it’s deeply problematic on religious and political levels. On the religious level, no major religion today nationalizes the concept of soul. Rather, religions assert that everyone has the same essentialist airy stuff that constitutes a soul, and that it’s our manners and culture that makes us see this soul differently. This implies a sort of spiritual democracy, one that transcends sect and caste, for sect and caste are external labels, paths or veils to a grace that everyone can partake of equally. In other words, we are all more and more like each other, and our particular cultures and selves are less and less important, the closer we get to Infinity or God.
On the political level, I find the concept of a special soul unhelpful because it leads the way for all sorts of nationalistic nonsense, including (in the most extreme cases) the type of exceptionalism that sets itself above international norms and courts. It also allows religion to be yoked to politics — and, in the worst case, to politics which allow killing in the name of God. In this sense the strange idea of a Russian soul might be seen as having huge consequences — when, that is, it’s combined with talk about the destiny and greatness of Russia. This greatness can easily come into conflict with American notions of destiny and greatness. Both suggest a national exceptionalism which trumps international courts and which allocates to itself control over special geopolitical spheres of influence. When the Venn diagram of these spheres intersect, this leads to major conflict, whether it’s in Vietnam or Ukraine.
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