Crisis 22
Two Novels and an Overcoat
Dead Souls & Year - The Overcoat
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Dead Souls & Year
The Year of Living Dangerously and Dead Souls contain multiple perspectives and narrative angles, although they differ in subject matter and atmosphere. Koch’s Year is global, political, cross-cultural, and apocalyptic. Gogol’s Dead Souls is comic, intra-cultural, and intimate — as if you were at a party and Gogol’s narrator was pressing you into a shabby corner, trying to get you to say what you think of the stain on your sweater, or what you feel about the lustrous moustache of the man talking to your wife.
By contrast, Koch’s narrator is sitting in Jakarta in a bar called The Wayang. Stick-puppets of the Wayang theatre hang on the wall, sneering at you and the other Western journalists. Between sips of beer, the narrator asks you what on earth you think is happening behind the scenes in Suharto’s Palace and in the embassies of China and Russia? What of your assistant: do you think he’s a communist spy? What of Suharto and the Muslim generals? And where are the Americans in all of this?
The two novels also differ in their spatial journeys. Dead Souls is like Cervantes’ picaresque novel Don Quixote: the protagonist (Chichikov) travels from one location to the next in a quest to get landowners to sell him their dead souls (deceased serfs). Dead Souls is also like Dante’s The Divine Comedy in that the narrative is structured along the line of the different people Chichikov meets along the way.
Year on the other hand is centred in a bar and the action radiates out from there. The narrative isn’t structured so much along a line of different locations or along a line of people encountered by the protagonist (Hamilton), but rather along the radiating circles of affection and understanding, as well as the radiating influence or control one person (or one group) has over another. Dead Souls emphasizes a line, and the accumulation of wealth and ideas along that line, whereas Year emphasizes circles and layers, as well as the larger understanding of the intersection of circles and the relation between layers.
Year and Dead Souls do however have several things in common. Both take disturbing deep dives into the nature of individual morality, and into the relation of the individual to social milieu, culture, and the State. Both also have relatable narrators: Gogol’s is a fairly conventional trusty observer who has a personality but no name; Koch’s narrator has both a personality and a name (Cookie). Cookie is at once closer to, and further from, the events he describes: he’s a journalist colleague of the protagonist, sitting next to him in the bar, yet he puts his lengthy account of 1965 Indonesia into a global, even cosmic framework. Cookie is similar to, yet distinct from, the author (Koch), and he takes his reader from the shanties of Jakarta to the magical hills of Bandung, from the head offices of Sydney to the intergalactic spaces of Hindu astronomy.
While Gogol’s narrator is often comic, Cookie is often cosmic. Still, both narrators are friendly and easy to relate to; they have personalities and aren’t detachedly omniscient. They’re also insightful in regard to complex meanings and ambiguities; they help us understand the histories and idiosyncrasies of Russia and Indonesia, as well as their complexities and ambiguities, their paradoxes and conundrums. Finally, the two narrators are metafictional, that is, they let us see the thinking and organization behind their stories. They comment on how the stories are managed, and on how they might have been managed otherwise.
Koch’s narrator goes furthest in suggesting how things might have been recounted otherwise. Cookie refuses to make final comments on things he doesn’t know: at the end of the novel he takes his reader from the sound of the gas-lamp which illuminates a Wayang play in the hills of Bandung to the hissing of a gas lamp in the hills of Australia (where he writes his account). This hissing then becomes the sound of akasha, the endless interstellar space of Hindu philosophy. The hissing is then connected back to the gas-lamp of the dalang, or puppet-master, who operates the stick puppets, organizes the action on stage, and comments on its meaning, both in the mythic context of the play and in the social and political life of Indonesia.
Koch thus suggests that our knowledge of this world is like our knowledge of the infinite sky: uncertain and immeasurable. And yet, there might be some form of connection, one can’t be sure. By contrast, Gogol had a definite and unified ending in store for Dead Souls: after his immoral hero careens madly into a vague Russia at the end of Part I, Gogol intended to redeem his hero in Part II, to set him back on the via destra of a Godly existence. However, this plan didn’t work out well: Part II remains unfinished. It’s also of such inferior quality that many consider the novel to end with the mad carriage ride that concludes Part I. If Gogol left the reader with the image of Chichikov’s careening carriage — and above it a giant question mark about the trajectory of Russia — his novel’s trajectory would be much closer to that of Year, which ends with a thin line of sound that stretches into the endless dark space of the universe.
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Of the two novels, Dead Souls is more obviously relevant to the Ukraine crisis, since it was written by a Ukrainian and taken by Russians as if it were their own (no comment required there). Gogol’s novel has become part of Russian literary culture, although as the translator Robert Maguire notes, “not a drop of Russian blood flowed through [Gogol’s] veins”;
He lived in a foreign city, Rome, when he was writing about a provincial and rural Russia where he had never lived. He drew heavily on the mind and work of the eighteenth century and the Romantic movement, but created fictions with so many features of 'modernism' and even 'postmodernism' that we respond to him as to a contemporary.
Some even say that Russian literature came out of Gogol’s overcoat, by which they mean that its particular flavour is influenced by the sensibility and style of Gogol’s short story, “The Overcoat,” which was published in 1842.
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The Overcoat
I wonder what the overcoat of Russian literature holds within it today, 182 years later. You can of course find all sorts of wonderful and beautiful things in Russia today. For example, one might stroll around Patriarch’s Pond in central Moscow and and stumble upon three smart pretty girls — as at 4:15 minutes into this video:
I like this video because it shows the beauty of Moscow and also because they go into a restaurant called Margarita. No comment is made about the name Margarita, although I imagine it could be the name of some woman called Margarita, the name of the famous Mexican cocktail, and/or a reference to the opening episode in Bulgakov’s Soviet-era novel The Master and Margarita, the opening scene of which occurs at Patriarch’s Pond.
(I should intimate here the complicated history of Bulgakov’s novel. It was written between 1928 and 1940, yet because Stalin wouldn’t allow Bulgakov to leave Russia, and because the State censored (and punished) writers, the novel was published in secret and in part during Bulgakov’s lifetime. The novel finally came out in its entirety in Frankfurt in 1969.)
Mikhail Bulgakov is among the slyest and most powerful Russian critics of authoritarian control and manipulation. He’s especially good at dramatizing how appearances cover realities, at how propaganda and ideology restrict and distort our understanding of life’s complexity.
With Bulgakov in mind, the restaurant in the video above makes me think less about how beautiful Moscow or Saint Petersburg can be, and more about how they might have been depicted by Bulgakov. He would have appreciated the beauties of Russia yet he would also have looked deeply, comically and tragically, into the authoritarian powers that lie in the background, behind the peaceful beauty of an idyllic place like Patriarch’s Pond.
The wonderful little tour of Patriarch’s Pond in the video omits any mention of life in Mariupol or Kharkiv, the bombing of apartments and hospitals across Ukraine, the elimination of Russian journalists and opposition members, etc. For this other point of view, it’s worth looking at this video:
In regard to Gogol’s 1842 and the history of democracy in Russia, the old lady makes a blunt and terrifying point: “People were serfs and now they’re slaves.”
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Keeping in mind the perspectives of Bulgakov & the old lady (which would make a good novel title), I wonder what the overcoat of Russian literature holds within it today, 182 years after the publication of “The Overcoat.” Would it have a hidden pocket, at the very bottom of which, slipping away and hiding from the light, is the manuscript of a play called REVOLT? Or would it be stuffed with PUTIN ‘24 buttons and grainy screen shots of Russian TV personalities like Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonya, who call for nuclear bombs to rain down on London and Paris?
I imagine the owner of the overcoat on some dingy corner in a shady part of town, far from Patriarch’s Pond. He opens his overcoat to show you shiny trinkets of Empire, glossy pamphlets reading MOTHER RUSSIA WANTS YOU!, a half-drunk bottle of vodka, and some magazines about women and donkeys. He ties to sell you these while he looks at you very closely. After standing your ground for ten minutes, assuring him that you have the Internet and aren’t in need of magazines about women and donkeys, he reaches into the very bottom of the secret pocket, and pulls out a wad of papers, stitched together by hand.
The owner of the overcoat says it’s a novel called The Master and Mariupol. Beneath the title is a hand-drawn black cat named Behemoth, and the following dialogue:
"You're not Dostoevsky," said the citizen, who was getting muddled by Lavrov.
"Well, who knows, who knows," he replied.
"Dostoevsky's dead," said the citizen, but somehow not very confidently.
"I protest!" Behemoth exclaimed hotly. "Dostoevsky is immortal!"
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Next: 😵💫 Russian Souls