Economies of Feeling

Northwestern University Press

Studies in Russian Literature and Theory

Series Editors
Caryl Emerson
Gary Saul Morson
William Mills Todd III
Andrew Wachtel
Justin Weir
Economies of Feeling

Russian Literature under Nicholas I

Jillian Porter

northwestern university press / evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights

reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Porter, Jillian, author.

Title: Economies of feeling : Russian literature under Nicholas I / Jillian Porter.
Other titles: Studies in Russian literature and theory.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series:
Northwestern University Press studies in Russian literature and theory |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056336 | ISBN 9780810135451 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780810135444 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135468 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature— 19th century— History and criticism. |
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821– 1881— Criticism and interpretation. | Gogol’,
Nikolaı̆ Vasil’evich, 1809– 1852— Criticism and interpretation. | Pushkin,
Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799– 1837— Criticism and interpretation. | Ambition
in literature. | Economics in literature.
Classification: LCC PG3012 .P67 2017 | DDC 891.709355309034— dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov /2016056336
 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Note on the Text xi

Introduction 3

Chapter One Mad Ambition 21

Chapter Two Gogol’s Gift 55

Chapter Three Dostoevsky’s Money 89

Chapter Four The Miser Never Dies 109

Appendix 143

Notes 147

Works Cited 177

Index 195
 Illustrations

Figure 1 (a, b) Silver ruble (issued 1836) commemorating Alexander I’s

victory over Napoleon 6
Figure 2 (a, b) Copper kopeck featuring Nicholas I’s first initial and
ordinal, 1840 9
Figure 3 The Mad Man of Ambition at the Bicêtre Hospital
(Le fou ambitieux à l’Hospice de Bicêtre), 1825 33
Figure 4 Honoré Daumier, Ministerial Charenton: Various
Monomanias of Political Madmen (Le Charenton
ministériel: Différentes monomanies des aliénés
politiques), 1832 35
Figure 5 Caricature of Nikolai Gogol in the home of Zinaida
Volkonskaya in Rome (attributed to Fedor Bruni),
late 1830s 54
Figure 6 Orest Kiprensky, Jupiter and Mercury Visit Philemon
and Baucis (Iupiter s Merkuriem poseshchaiut
Filemona i Bavkidu), 1802 74
Figure 7 Fake twenty-five-ruble assignatsiia printed in France
and circulated by Napoleon’s army in Russia, early
1800s 88
Figure 8 Twenty-five-ruble assignatsiia, 1818 95
Figure 9 Twenty-five-ruble credit bill, 1843 96
Figure 10 (a, b) Silver ruble, 1846 105
Figure 11 J. J. Grandville, The Miser Who Lost His Treasure
(L’Avare qui a perdu son trésor), 1838 108
Figure 12 Hieronymus Bosch, Death and the Miser, circa 1500 112

vii
 Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to Harsha Ram, who advised my doctoral dissertation at

the University of California, Berkeley, and whose dazzling verbal gifts have
inspired me and enriched my work on this book at every stage. As an ex-
ceptional teacher and a reader of my dissertation, Irina Paperno modeled a
scholarly rigor to which I will always aspire. Luba Golburt and Victoria Bonell
introduced me to theoretical paradigms that became central to the disserta-
tion and my subsequent engagements with Russian literature and culture.
Other faculty members at Berkeley responded generously to seminar papers
and presentations that evolved into parts of this book; these include Anne
Nesbet, Eric Naiman, Olga Matich, and Viktor Zhivov. Throughout the writ-
ing process, I also benefited from my fellow graduate students’ reactions to
my drafts: Alyson Tapp, Boris Maslov, Victoria Somoff, Molly Brunson, and
especially Chloë Kitzinger all made many more excellent suggestions for re-
vision than I have been able to take.
Much of chapter 3 appeared previously in an article published by
the Slavic and East European Journal; I am grateful to Irene Delic, Helen
Halva, and the anonymous reviewers at SEEJ for sharing their editorial and
critical expertise. I also thank Mike Levine and the entire Studies in Rus-
sian Literature and Theory staff at Northwestern University Press for their
supreme efficiency and professionalism, and the anonymous reviewers of
this manuscript for their thoughtful reading and very helpful suggestions for
improvement.
My research for this book has been funded by the University of Okla-
homa, the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University
(ASU), and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard
University. My colleagues at the University of Oklahoma offered much-
needed counsel during my transition from graduate student to professional
scholar. Emily Johnson did more than anyone in this area, and she also took
extra work upon herself so that I might pursue opportunities to write at
ASU and Harvard. Julia Abramson read the whole manuscript and helped
me to see— and to strengthen— the connections between its parts. At ASU,

ix
 Acknowledgments

Victoria E. Thompson read chapter 1 and shared her very welcome insight
as a historian of Revolutionary France, and my assiduous research assistant,
Heather Ackerman, saved me much time and trouble by helping to compile
my final bibliography. The Davis Center was an energizing venue in which
to complete this manuscript while beginning a new one. There I received
helpful critiques of the introduction and chapter 2 from the other fellows
and visiting scholars, especially Andrea Zink, and I was fortunate to find an-
other outstanding research assistant in Christine Jacobson, who helped ob-
tain many of the illustrations featured throughout this book. Molly Brunson,
Yuri Boyko, and many congenial archive and museum staff members also
helped make the inclusion of these images possible.
Melissa Frazier taught me to speak Russian at Sarah Lawrence College
and pointed me to Berkeley; it is a pleasure to thank her here for her early
encouragement and continued critical engagement with my work. Also at
Sarah Lawrence, Gil Perez first turned my attention to Russia with his thrill-
ing lectures on Soviet cinema; Danny Kaiser got me hooked on Dostoevsky;
and Frank Roosevelt nurtured my interest in economics. During a semester
at Reed College, Lena Lencek’s captivating course on Russian short fiction
trained my gaze on many of the authors and themes I address in this book.
I never would have had the opportunity to learn from these and other fine
teachers had it not been for the anonymous donor who made it possible for
me to transfer to Fountain Valley School in 1995. I remain joyfully in debt
to that person for enabling my academic development. I am also grateful
to Jack Wilson, whose Foundation for International Professional Exchange
funded my first trip to Russia; to Igor Tolochin, who helped make that trip
a success; and to Valentina Petrovna Gettmanskaya, who shared her home,
her friends, and a northern winter’s worth of good tea and conversation in
Sablino.
Throughout everything, my family has been the greatest source of
motivation and support. My parents, Julie and Bob Porter, convinced me
that education would be my surest key to happiness, and they have always
made me feel I could achieve anything if I worked hard enough. My grand-
parents, Lucille and Herb Beeman and Jean and Ed Porter, have shared
immeasurable warmth and wisdom. My in-laws, Patricia and Michael Freed-
Thall, have sheltered me on many a writing retreat. I met their daughter,
Hannah Freed-Thall, when I was first embarking on the research that would
ultimately produce this book. I owe her more thanks than I can ever express
for her companionship, her fine-tuned criticism of my drafts, and, most re-
cently, for Leo, whose arrival as I was finishing this book turned its ending
into a wondrous new beginning.

x
 Note on the Text

Russia followed the Julian calendar until 1918, when it adopted the Grego-
rian. Unless labeled Old Style (O.S.), dates are presented according to the
Gregorian calendar.
When quoting from older Russian texts, I have made minor changes
consistent with modern orthography: I have changed “iat’” to “е” and “i” to
“и,” and have removed hard signs from the ends of words.
When transliterating, I follow the Library of Congress guidelines,
however, omitting most diacritics. In the case of Russian names likely to be
familiar to most readers in another spelling (e.g., Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai
Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky), I adopt the more familiar variant through-
out the text but follow the LOC system in citations.
Citations from the following collections will appear parenthetically
throughout the text, with volume number followed by page number, divided
by a colon:

Dostoevskii, Fedor. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad:

Nauka, 1972– 1990.
Gogol’, Nikolai. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhest-
vennaia literatura, 1976– 1979.
Pushkin, Aleksandr. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v shestnadtsati tomakh. Len-
ingrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1937– 1959.

When referencing the above collections in the notes, I abbreviate as follows:

Dostoevskii, PSS; Gogol’, SS; and Pushkin, PSS.
When citing from works central to my study, I provide page references
for the original Russian texts and, whenever possible, published English
translations. Page references for the original texts precede those for transla-
tions, divided by a semicolon. When it is crucial to my analysis, I occasionally
modify translations, marking such changes in the notes. Uncredited transla-
tions are my own.

xi
Economies of Feeling
 Introduction

Theocritus and Homer bored him, Бранил Гомера, Феокрита;

But reading Adam Smith restored him,
And economics he knew well;
Which is to say that he could tell
The ways in which a state progresses—
The actual things that make it thrive,
And why for gold it need not strive,
When simple product it possesses.
His father never understood
And mortgaged all the land he could.
— Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
За то читал Адама Смита,
И был глубокой эконом,
То есть, умел судить о том,
Как государство богатеет,
И чем живет, и почему
Не нужно золота ему,
Когда простой продукт имеет.
Отец понять его не мог
И земли отдавал в залог.

E U G E N E ’ S FAT H E R WA S N ’ T the only one who didn’t

understand his son’s gloss on political economy. Commentators on the above
passage from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825– 32) have long
debated the meaning of the “simple product” the hero values more highly
than gold (6:8; 8).1 Italicized as though designating some cherished Smithian
principle, this term has never been traced to the economist’s writings. From
Marx and Engels to Nabokov and Lotman, scholars have interpreted it vari-
ously as “commodity,” “raw material,” “surplus,” or, furthest afield yet most
commonly posited in literary commentaries, as the “net product” (produit
net) described by Smith’s precursors in France, the Physiocrats.2 For the pur-
poses of this book, the apparent absence of the term in the corpus of classical
political economy is precisely what gives it meaning: this “simple product”
exemplifies the creative misappropriation of foreign economic vocabulary
that shaped seminal works of nineteenth-century Russian literature. If Adam
Smith’s lessons struck landowners like the elder Onegin as impenetrable,
their very ambiguity became poetry for writers like Pushkin.
In this passage, Pushkin is playing with the supposed opposition
between economics and poetry. As the modern European discourses of
political economy and aesthetics solidified in opposition to one another at
the end of the eighteenth century, the antinomy between economic and aes-
thetic value emerged as a central tenet of each.3 By the early nineteenth

3
 Introduction

century, political economy had gained a reputation as a science of reason,

founded on the principle that rational individuals in pursuit of their own best
“interest” are the primary agents of economic activity.4 Aesthetics, mean-
while, had been cordoned off as the science of feeling-based, purportedly
“disinterested” experience and judgment.5 While at first glance, Eugene’s
preference for Smith over Theocritus and Homer might seem to bolster this
antinomy, in fact the hero’s interest in economics is artful and affectively
laden: it is as fashionable as the young dandy’s toilette, and it supports his
performance of Byronic boredom.6 In Eugene, we see Russianized Euro-
pean discourses of economics, aesthetics, and the emotions converge.
Pushkin’s poeticization of political economy gets at the heart of this
book. The chapters that follow investigate the transformation of European
economic and emotional paradigms in nineteenth-century Russian litera-
ture. I view such tropes as spending, saving, and giving, as well as plots of
mad or blocked ambition, in the context of Russian economic history and in
relation to the importation of economic discourse and literary conventions
from abroad. My analysis brings the insights of the literary critical movement
known as New Economic Criticism together with the perspectives of literary
scholars, sociologists, and historians whose works have contributed to the
recent “affective turn” in the humanities.7 What I draw from these bodies of
scholarship is, first, awareness of the material and discursive imbrication of
economics and the emotions, and, second, appreciation for the myriad ways
in which literary form both registers and shapes economic and emotional ex-
perience.8 Charting the intersections between commerce and gift exchange,
and tracing shifting cultural conceptions of ambition, generosity, and avarice,
I demonstrate that nonmonetary and nonproductive exchanges and affects
commonly overlooked in economic criticism are inextricably linked to social
and economic structures.9
The book is framed historically by the reign of Nicholas I (1825– 55), a
time of strict censorship and economic uncertainty that witnessed a flourish-
ing of Russian literature. Commerce spread during these years, eroding the
foundations of Russia’s agrarian economy: money joined the serf as a primary
unit of value; cash-hungry landowners mortgaged their estates to the trea-
sury; and the government printed so much paper money that the currency
collapsed. At the same time, accounts of the sweeping economic changes un-
derway in post-Napoleonic Europe reached readers through journalism and
literature, and the question of whether Russia should follow foreign trends
of political and economic reform became the most urgent social issue of the
age.10 In this atmosphere of shifting values, Russian authors seized on the
literariness and fiction-producing potential of economics. They refurbished
the post-Revolutionary French plot of ambition, the character type of the

4
 Introduction

miser, and other literary models that were grounded in the realities and mas-
ter narratives of bourgeois Europe but seemed strangely out of place in tales
of Russia’s autocratic and serf-based society. Such foreign models clashed
with the ideology of social stratification and the ideals of generosity and rural
indolence that were routinely invoked in contemporary articulations of Rus-
sian national identity. Economies of Feeling shows how this clash helped to
produce some of the most remarkable features of nineteenth-century Rus-
sian literature— from the perpetually impeded progress of ambition plots to
the jarring discord of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s polyphony.11
During Nicholas I’s reign, Russian literature underwent profound
transformation and growth: these years encompassed Alexander Pushkin’s
maturity as a writer, the full breadth of Nikolai Gogol’s and Mikhail Lermon-
tov’s careers, and the celebrated debuts of Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and
Leo Tolstoy; prose supplanted poetry as the dominant literary form; literary
criticism emerged as a major force in public intellectual life; and literary
institutions were gradually transformed— from patronage and the close-knit
culture of the poetic salon to the expansion of the reading public, advances
in book distribution and sales, and increasing possibilities for writers and
publishers to profit from literary enterprise.12 This book explores these mo-
mentous and widely acknowledged changes in a new framework. Existing
studies of nineteenth-century Russian literature frequently articulate periods
with reference to its first great figure (the Age of Pushkin), cultural myths of
origin and renewal (the Golden and Silver Ages), literary movements (Ro-
manticism, Realism, Symbolism), or the development of particular forms
(prose, the novel). I propose instead that the rising sense of uncertainty and
the increasingly heated public debates regarding Russia’s political and eco-
nomic future marked the literature of Nicholas I’s reign with a thematic and
formal coherence that cuts across styles and genres. Moreover, while most
economic criticism on Russian literature concentrates on authors’ and edi-
tors’ participation in literary institutions and literary commerce, I assert that
other aspects of the economy that were not narrowly confined to the literary
domain exerted an equally formative influence on literature.13
One of my central claims is that the challenges facing Russia’s serf-
based economy in its final decades proved especially productive as narra-
tive paradigms. Some of these challenges were palpably material— such as
the prodigal spending that accelerated the decline of the nobility and the
high inflation that devastated the paper ruble— while others were more con-
ceptual or emotional— such as changing social attitudes toward economic
passions and sentiments including ambition, avarice, and generosity.14 Yet
another challenge to social and economic stability in Russia took a textual
form: an influx of European news and literature describing political revo-

5
 Figure 1a. Silver ruble commemorating Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon and
Nicholas I’s 1834 dedication of the Alexander Column on St. Petersburg’s Palace
Square. Issued 1836. Obverse: Portrait of Alexander I with text, “Alexander the
First [by the] G[race of] G[od] Emperor of All Russ[ia].” Photograph courtesy
of the National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced by permission of the Smithsonian Institution.

Figure 1b. Silver ruble commemorating Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon and
Nicholas I’s 1834 dedication of the Alexander Column on St. Petersburg’s Palace
Square. Issued 1836. Reverse: Alexander Column with text, “To Alexander the
First from Grateful Russia. 1834. 1. Ruble.” Photograph courtesy of the National
Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian
Institution. Reproduced by permission of the Smithsonian Institution.
 Introduction

lutions on the Continent as well as astonishing developments in commerce

and industry abroad offered new ways of thinking, feeling, and writing about
economics. The authors I examine incorporated perceptibly unstable and
seemingly ill-suited foreign economic vocabularies in works dealing with
contemporary Russian society. As seen in the epigraph from Eugene Onegin
cited above, these authors did not simply attempt a mimetic representation
of local economic conditions, but reflected playfully on their own adaptation
of European models. The disjuncture between foreign and domestic eco-
nomic circumstances became a wellspring of Russian poetics.15
An axiom of my study is that there are no tenable boundaries between
the objects, words, and feelings that circulate through material and textual
economies. A coin is an apt emblem of this axiom: a piece of metal functions
as money only when it is stamped with an official declaration of value and
invested with desire. Consider the limited-edition silver ruble shown in fig-
ures 1a and 1b. Issued in 1836, this doubly commemorative coin celebrates
Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 and Nicholas I’s dedi-
cation of the Alexander Column on St. Petersburg’s Palace Square in 1834.
Confirming that governments seek to direct the emotional as well as the
economic lives of citizens from the mint, the coin literally tells Russians how
to feel: “grateful” (blagodarnaia). The inscription, “To Alexander the First
from Grateful Russia,” is a citation from the base of the Alexander Column
itself, an impressive architectural achievement that remains one of the high-
est triumphal columns in the world. As a monument to a monument, the
coin celebrates a cultural-technological as well as a military victory, interpo-
lating Russians as “grateful” to the present and the past ruler alike. Notably,
this language of gratitude turns money into a gift, and as a portable souvenir
of successive tsars’ generosity, the coin extends the memorial space of Pal-
ace Square to the far reaches of the empire. Meanwhile, the abbreviation
“B. M.” for “Bozh’ei milost’iu” (“by the Grace of God”) sanctifies the tsar’s
power to regale his people with minted money.
Despite the plainly patriotic intent of its design, this coin stages a con-
test of desires that is characteristic of its time. The Neoclassical aesthetic
of both the portrait of and the monument to Nicholas I’s predecessor pre-
sents Nicholas himself as the latest and most powerful inheritor of Euro-
pean imperial tradition, but it also unwittingly acknowledges the continued
supremacy of French cultural paradigms in Russia: both Neoclassicism as a
movement and the architect of the Alexander Column came to Russia from
France.16 The coin shows that while Napoleon might have been vanquished,
French cultural influence had not. As we shall see, this tension between
Nicholas I’s nationalist/imperialist politics and the aesthetic legacies of state-
sponsored Frenchification in the eighteenth century was formative for the
literature of his reign.

7
 Introduction

The 1840 copper kopeck shown in figures 2a and 2b testifies to an-

other productive tension between economics and aesthetics— this time in
the arena of use. Minted at a time of acute financial instability, when old
monetary standards and forms of currency were being replaced by new ones,
the coin deploys the obverse image of a crown hovering above Nicholas I’s
first initial and regnal numeral to reassure bearers of its value and to en-
list them in the enactment— through monetary exchange— of political and
economic order. And yet, the coin also empowers bearers to palpate and,
ultimately, deface this token of royal authority. The worn down letter at the
very center of the reverse— the “iat” in the word “kopeck” (kopeika)— offers
a possible answer to the intriguing question of why Nicholas I never permit-
ted his own portrait to enter circulation on the coins of his reign. Inevitably,
the values coins assert come into friction with the agents and circumstances
of their circulation, and it is a combined force of makers, handlers, and ele-
ments that determines their final reading. Becoming ever harder to recog-
nize and to credit, such values as coins display resemble words, which simi-
larly come under pressure through exchange and feel quite different to their
users over time.
The later history of both the Alexander ruble and the Nicholas ko-
peck further attests to the transformations of meaning that mark coins as
well as words. However differently they may have initially been used, both
the limited-edition commemorative ruble and the ordinary, mass-produced
kopeck eventually found their way into the hands of Grand Duke Georgii
Mikhailovich (1863– 1919), the great numismatist who amassed the world’s
largest collection of Russian coins before falling victim to the same Revo-
lutionary forces that would replace tsars with stars on the currency and pull
the weathered “iat” out of circulation. The grand duke’s passion for collect-
ing gave old coins new value and new use— as curiosities, works of art, and
historical artifacts to be treasured and displayed.
This book similarly treasures currencies at once monetary, aesthetic,
and emotional. The emphasis here, however, is not only on the interconnect-
edness of these forms of value in Russia, but also on their traffic with values
minted elsewhere. Take the definition of the word “economy” (ekonomiia) in
the New Dictionary (Novyi slovotolkovatel’, 1803– 6). Published to explain
words of foreign origin that had entered the Russian lexicon but remained
unfamiliar to many Russian readers, this dictionary directs its normative ex-
plication of “economy” at members of the landowning nobility:

Economy, understood as the wise direction of an estate, is one of the first

qualities one must instill in children in a timely fashion. It is one of the main
foundations of their glory and well-being, and it consists in the arrangement
of one’s affairs in such a way that expenditure corresponds to income, and

8
 Figure 2a. Copper kopeck. 1840. Obverse: Crown with Nicholas I’s initial and
ordinal: “N. I.” Photograph courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced by
permission of the Smithsonian Institution.

Figure 2b. Copper kopeck. 1840. Reverse: “1 kopeck in silver. 1840. [By the] G[race
of ] G[od].” Photograph courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, National
Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced by permission
of the Smithsonian Institution.
 Introduction

there is no excess. . . . However, observing the rules of reasonable economy,

one must take care not to fall into shameful miserliness, a vice that more
often infects old men. Economy can only be considered a virtue when it occu-
pies a middling place between prodigality and miserliness.

The economic ideal set forth here is one of harmonious balance between ex-
penditure and income, and between the emotional tendencies toward prodi-
gality (rastochitel’nost’) and miserliness (skupost’).
Importantly, this ideal has nothing to do with profit. Advocating for
the absence of all “excess,” the author leaves room for neither debt nor sav-
ings. Nevertheless, by acknowledging elsewhere in the entry that Russian
noblemen incline more to “profligacy” (motovstv[o]) than to the “shameful
miserliness” censured here, the author makes it clear that excessive spend-
ing, while more socially acceptable, poses a greater material threat in early
nineteenth-century Russia. Miserliness, by contrast, appears not so much a
reality of Russian estate economics as a discursive construct: by consigning
it to “old men,” the author invokes the classic character type of the miser,
whose passion for money is among the most frequently represented vices in
European literature. Drawing on Russian cultural as well as European liter-
ary tradition, this definition demonstrates the extent to which ideas about
economics— and economic practices as well— are shaped by moral, emo-
tional, and aesthetic norms at home and abroad.
The economic norms on display in the New Dictionary received in-
creasing literary scrutiny throughout Nicholas I’s reign. Pushkin highlights
the prevalence of prodigality among the gentry in his portrayal of Eugene’s
father:

An honest man who’d served sincerely,

His father ran up debts galore:
He gave a ball some three times yearly,
Until he had no means for more. (6:6; 16)

Young Onegin follows his father’s lead in reckless spending. His dressing
room is stocked with foreign luxury goods:

Whatever clever London offers,

To those with lavish whims and coffers
And ships to us by Baltic seas
In trade for tallow and for trees;
Whatever Paris, seeking treasure,
Devises to attract the sight,

10
 Introduction

Or manufactures for delight,

For luxury, for modish pleasure—
All this adorned his dressing room
Our sage of eighteen summers’ bloom. (6:14; 24)

Along with the sort of ruinous hospitality that Eugene’s father practices, the
purchase of a steadily increasing supply of European commodities had been
contributing to the impoverishment of the Russian nobility since the late
eighteenth century.17 Seeking to increase cash flow so as to keep pace with
rising standards of consumption, yet rarely committing to the task of improv-
ing production on their estates, the gentry did precisely what Onegin, senior,
does: they mortgaged their lands to the treasury. As a result, by the middle
of the nineteenth century, more than half of all gentry-owned lands were
held by the state.18 Upon an indebted landowner’s death, the heir would
either take on the burden of paying what was owed, or, less honorably but
not uncommonly, forfeit the property.19 In choosing this latter option, Eu-
gene embodies the historical process whereby the gentry gradually lost both
their lands and their traditional social role. Whatever the “simple product”
he had extolled to his father might be, it is the culture of noble Russian ex-
travagance, not any principles of Adam Smith, that determines his approach
to economics.
When the first chapter of Eugene Onegin appeared in February 1825,
no one could have guessed its power to address historical events that would
shake Russia in the months and years ahead. Only after an elite group of
officers inspired partly by the writings of Adam Smith attempted to block
Nicholas I’s ascension to the throne on December 26 could Pushkin’s read-
ers mentally enlist his bored “economist” (ekonom), if not in the rebels’
ranks, then at least in their circle of friends.20 Retroactively associated with
the Decembrists’ failed coup, Onegin would mature in the decades follow-
ing the novel’s publication into a symbol of noble Russian impotence. What
Pushkin first presented as a fashion statement— a disaffection expressing not
a commitment to reform but a vogue for all things English— would become
for Lermontov a cruel cynicism born of the post-Decembrist foreclosure of
masculine agency in A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1840).
In subsequent years the economic consequences of noble inactivity came
into sharper focus. In Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1849– 59), an idle young
landowner ignores and imperils his estate, destabilizing his own social role in
agrarian Russia and helping to push the national economy ever further out
of step with the industrializing West. By the time Ivan Turgenev’s Diary of
a Superfluous Man (Dnevnik lishnego cheloveka, 1850) bestowed the diag-
nosis of superfluity upon a generation of noblemen with scant opportunity

11
 Introduction

for meaningful employment or self-expression, Onegin’s progeny had set the

nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition on a course divergent from—
yet persistently entangled with— the European novel.
This book tells a new story about that entanglement. I focus not on
Eugene or the other genteel and “superfluous” men I have just invoked, but
rather on their awkward doubles— those middling men of action and ambi-
tion who stubbornly cropped up in their midst, despite— or indeed precisely
because of— the improbability of any scheme for self-determination in post-
Decembrist Russia.21 Whereas Peter Brooks has suggested that “it may in
fact be a defining characteristic of the modern novel (as of bourgeois society)
that it takes aspiration, getting ahead, seriously, rather than simply as the
object of satire,” nineteenth-century Russian literature stands out not only
for its superfluous men who lack ambition, but also for its fascination with
forms of ambition that cannot be taken seriously.22
Unlike “superfluousness,” ambition has yet to receive adequate treat-
ment in the scholarship on the literature of Nicholas I’s reign: sustained in-
vestigation of the passion that drives such foundational texts as Alexander
Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” (“Pikovaia dama,” 1834), Nikolai Gogol’s
“Diary of a Madman” (“Zapiski sumasshedshego,” 1835) and Dead Souls
(Mertvye dushi, 1842), and Dostoevsky’s The Double (Dvoinik, 1846) is long
overdue. But even though he shall be left behind in the pages to follow, the
superfluous man offers an essential point of departure for this book. It is
against the background of Eugene Onegin and subsequent stories of noble
inaction that my heroes’ mad ambitions come into sharpest relief. Likewise,
this study of ambition plots clarifies the origins of the idleness plots pub-
lished in the same period, suggesting that the allure of both stemmed as
much from an ongoing cultural reappraisal of social and economic striving as
from the limits to personal agency in an autocratic regime.
In the decades I examine, Russian authors’ interest in ambition was
partly inspired by Napoleon and the proliferation of French novels whose
heroes fashioned themselves after his image. The native obsession with rank
and title and the expanding opportunities for social mobility through edu-
cation and service to the state also made ambition increasingly topical in
Nicholaevan Russia. Yet noble prejudice against those of low birth as well
as the religious condemnation of worldly pursuits by the Russian Orthodox
Church supported an entrenched disparagement of attempts at social ele-
vation, whether through service to the state or through the accumulation
of wealth. Furthermore, because the primary avenues to advancement re-
mained military or civil service, ambition appeared unsavory from the per-
spective of the nascent oppositional intelligentsia, a group with mixed class
origins who might otherwise have been expected to help legitimate it. In
addition to these contemporary attitudes, the cultural phenomenon of “pre-

12
 Introduction

tendership” (samozvanstvo), which had haunted the Russian throne since

the reign of the False Dmitry (1605– 6), charged ambition with a narrative
potential at once heretical, revolutionary, and carnivalesque.23
What happens, then, when the post-Napoleonic French plot of middle-
class ambition is imported to post-Decembrist Russia? Where might ambi-
tion lead, and what might it feel like to the characters and readers who are
caught in its pull? A survey of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” Gogol’s “The
Diary of a Madman,” and Dostoevsky’s The Double yields one potential an-
swer to the question of where Russian ambition leads: to the madhouse. And
yet, tempting though it may be to ascribe this outcome to the considerable
restrictions placed on ambition or its perceived degeneracy in Russia at this
time, such an explanation is incomplete. In fact, Russian writers imported
the notion of ambition as a cause of madness from France, where early psy-
chiatrists diagnosed “ambitious monomania” (monomanie ambitieuse) as the
dominant psychological disorder of the post-Revolutionary era.24
In contrast to the French authors who in the 1830s moved away from
the clinical understanding of ambition as a dangerous passional imbalance,
Russian writers kept pathological ambition alive as late as the 1860s. As the
story of a monomaniac so bent on being like Napoleon that he commits mur-
der and theft only to collapse in feverish delirium, Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) exemplifies both the charac-
teristically negative appraisal of ambition in nineteenth-century Russia and
its conceptual dependence on French literary and cultural models. The
Napoleonic pretensions of Dostoevsky’s hero nevertheless make Crime and
Punishment an anomaly in the Russian novelistic tradition. So productive as
a motor of plot in the European bildungsroman, social ambition is mainly
confined to shorter forms in Russian literature, where it is more apt to de-
stroy character than to form it. Representing ambition as a dangerous desire
to be rejected and overcome, Crime and Punishment also marks a departure
from Dostoevsky’s early writings, which, like the ambition tales of Pushkin
and Gogol that preceded them, treat this passion with ironic ambivalence.
The present work sheds new light on that treatment and its implications for
literary form.
Beginning with a comparative conceptual history of Russian and
French ambition, chapter 1 explains how French clinical and literary dis-
course on ambition as a dangerous passional imbalance shaped nineteenth-
century Russian representations of social striving. I first locate an openness
to the French pathological model of ambition, and a firm resistance to the
subsequent French normalization of it, on the level of the Russian language.
I then trace the spread of French clinical understandings of ambition to Rus-
sian literature in the periodical press of the 1820s and 1830s and examine
the Russian patients suffering from this disorder in Faddei Bulgarin’s “Three

13
 Introduction

Pages from the Madhouse” (“Tri listka iz doma sumasshedshego,” 1834), Go-
gol’s “The Diary of a Madman,” and Dostoevsky’s The Double. The ultimate
aim of the chapter is to show how the dissonance between French and Rus-
sian cultural understandings of ambition produced the discordant narrative
tonalities of both Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s tales.
Chapter 2 analyzes what ambition is up against in Gogol’s Dead Souls.
In this novel, Gogol both props up and erodes the distinction, cherished in
the Romantic era and ever since, between the apparently foreign impulse
to acquire and the purportedly Russian imperative to give. No writer has
been cited more frequently than Gogol to support the idea that the gener-
ous reception of guests is a crucial component of Russian national identity,
and yet Dead Souls actually presents a more distasteful— and more nakedly
economic— view of hospitality than has commonly been acknowledged. As
the ambitious hero travels around the countryside buying the deeds to dead
serfs from the landowners who host him, Gogol spoils each offering of the
proverbial “bread and salt” with a poetics of disgust. He embeds Russian
generosity in an unsavory economy of the body that comprises both the de-
caying institution of serfdom and the forced labors of the gastrointestinal
tract. This famously truncated novel appears as the culmination of Gogol’s
narrative hospitality: his penchant for positioning himself with respect to
readers in terms of a host-guest relationship. As a comparison of Gogol’s
early Ukrainian tales to Dead Souls makes clear, this relationship grew in-
creasingly strained over the course of the author’s career, rendering Gogol’s
gift ever more difficult to give— and ever more unsettling to take.
Chapter 3 returns to Dostoevsky’s The Double, shifting attention from
the hero’s ambition to the primary tool he employs in pursuit of it: money.
What is most immediately striking about money in this work is that the
ambitious hero does not try to obtain it, but squanders it instead. Dosto-
evsky makes vivid the competing imperatives facing a government clerk of
middling rank who needs money precisely so as to make a show of spending
it. Even more importantly, the ambiguous cultural value of money in this text
is compounded by its conspicuously uncertain economic value, as the hero’s
manipulation of suspect currency erodes the distinctions between all signs
of value and their counterfeits. Considering the destabilization of monetary
standards during the imperial financial reforms of 1839– 43 alongside the es-
tablishment of Realism as the new aesthetic standard in the 1840s, I propose
that the material history of Russian currency fostered Dostoevsky’s aesthetic
of fantastic Realism.
Chapter 4 ponders the surprising vitality of the classic character type
of the miser at a time when ambition had replaced avarice as the quintessen-
tial economic passion, and nationally and socially specific types had replaced
universal ones as the means and ends of literary representation. Confirm-

14
 Introduction

ing the perceived inappropriateness of the desire to accumulate money for

anyone wishing to rise in the sphere of noble Russian society, in Pushkin’s
The Covetous Knight (Skupoi rytsar’, 1836), Gogol’s Dead Souls, and Dosto-
evsky’s “Mr. Prokharchin” (“Gospodin Prokharchin,” 1846), avarice appears
antithetical to social ambition. These works draw on long-standing— and
markedly precapitalist— literary tradition in representing misers as eccen-
trics who deliberately isolate themselves from society. They depart from
this tradition, however, in foregoing the satirical mockery or overt moral
condemnation of avarice that had been essential components of miser tales
since antiquity. Interrogating the changing cultural significance of the desire
for money in Russia’s gradually commercializing society, Pushkin, Gogol, and
Dostoevsky are less concerned with the moral status of greed than they are
with the literary status of the miser as a well-worn character type embodying
a perceptibly outmoded understanding of the passions. These authors rely
on the miser as a meta-typical type with which to test out and reflect upon
new methods of character animation.
While focusing on texts published in Russia between 1825 and 1855, I
view the temporal as well as the spatial boundaries of this or any literary cor-
pus as permeable. Much like literary trends, feelings respond to and shape
historical events, but they do not arrive or depart on schedule, and they just
as often evade as succumb to political pressures. They are inchoate in some
periods, and develop more fully or fall away in others. Frequently they persist
as echoes of the past or register contemporary events taking place elsewhere
and under entirely different conditions. As Raymond Williams has argued,
literature is especially apt to register those “structures of feeling” that form
part of social consciousness in the present, but which available vocabular-
ies cannot define and official dogmas do not determine.25 I therefore seek
a record of such feelings not only in the changing connotations of Russian
words for “ambition” (chestoliubie, ambitsiia), “hospitality” (gostepriimstvo,
khlebosol’stvo), and “miserliness” (skupost’), but also in those “characteristic
elements of impulse, restraint, and tone” which, according to Williams, mark
the literature of a period or generation with a particular “style.” The works I
study are united most obviously by the impulses their characters and authors
display, differing more sharply in matters of restraint and tone. For instance,
even as they take up similar themes (mad ambition, miserliness, Franco-
Russian literary exchange), Pushkin and Dostoevsky stake out opposite ends
of the spectrums from concision to logomania and from harmony to discord.
Nevertheless, a primary benefit of treating Nicholas I’s reign as a period in
literary history is that it allows us to study these two authors’ works in con-
cert. Pushkin’s polite equipoise and Dostoevsky’s orientation to the excessive
and the awkward should be read as mutually illuminating modes of response
to the economic and emotional conditions prevailing under Nicholas I.

15
 Introduction

I make no attempt at a comprehensive analysis of all significant works

published between 1825 and 1855. Certainly, my focus on the passionate
pursuit of social elevation or wealth yields a picture in which women and
non-noble men play but minor roles. Noblemen not only dominated the lit-
erary scene and hence left the most ample records of their own emotional
experience, but were also in the best social and legal position to attempt the
economic schemes I investigate. In particular, it was men of the impover-
ished or petty nobility, or those who had achieved nobility through service
to the state, who appear as the principal social strivers in the literature of
Nicholas I’s reign. With limited access to education or employment, women’s
main avenue to upward social mobility in this period was marriage, and even
in this domain, their decision-making power was considerably proscribed.
Similarly marginalized in my account are peasants, who were even less well
represented among the writing and reading public, and had few chances of
moving out of the estate into which they were born. Even as the economic
fact of serfdom and the mounting insecurity about its stability or moral legiti-
macy are central to the cultural mythology of Russian hospitality I analyze in
chapter 2, serfs and their emotions are kept mostly out of sight by, or remain
largely illegible to, Gogol and the other writers I explore. The partial view
of Russian society that emerges from this study confirms the extent to which
feelings and their expression are subject to the politics of gender and class.
The history of Russian economic thought may help to explain why
authors were so focused on articulating these and other material bases of
the emotions during Nicholas I’s reign. Whereas literary critical tradition ex-
plicitly assigned literature the task of expressing, theorizing, and cultivating
feelings, political conditions in Russia funneled discussion of economic mat-
ters into literature as well. Literature was in fact a primary arena in which
Russian ideas about economics were formed, and historians of Russian eco-
nomic thought in this period have frequent recourse to literary material. To
be sure, the political implications of any discussion of the economy, which
inevitably raised questions about property rights and the rule of law, meant
that it had always been risky to write about economics in autocratic Russia.26
As Heinrich von Storch (1766– 1835), personal tutor in political economy
to the Grand Duke (and later Emperor) Nicholas I and his brother, puts
it somewhat nervously in the preface to his Course in Political Economy,
or, Exposition of the Principles That Determine the Prosperity of Nations
(Cours d’économie politique ou exposition des principes qui déterminent la
prospérité des nations, 1815): “Political economy at times stirs up delicate
questions” (L’économie politique agite quelquefois des questions délicates).27
Borrowing directly (at times plagiarizing) from the writings of Smith and
Jean-Baptiste Say, Storch was faced with the “delicate” task of presenting
the tsar with such founding principles of classical political economy as the

16
 Introduction

benefits of free enterprise between free persons and the crucial importance
of fair and efficient courts capable of adjudicating property disputes. Neither
serfdom nor the undeveloped justice system in Russia could be reconciled
with these tenets of political economy, which, having entered the Russian
academy at the turn of the nineteenth century and gained in status through-
out the reign of Alexander I (1801– 25), came under the new emperor’s offi-
cial suspicion after 1825. The actions of the Decembrists even led Nicholas I
to consider eliminating the academic discipline of political economy from
Moscow University.28
Although it was not ultimately cut, the growth of the discipline in sub-
sequent decades was nevertheless curtailed, with only one new textbook on
political economy issued during Nicholas I’s reign: Aleksandr Butovskii’s
(1817– 1890) Study of National Wealth, or, On the Foundations of Political
Economy (Opyt o narodnom bogatsve, ili O nachalakh politicheskoi eko-
nomii, 1847).29 Like most other writers on Russian economics before him,
Butovskii borrows heavily from Western sources, yet his work also displays
what has been identified as a hallmark of Russian economic as well as reli-
gious thought— namely, an unwillingness to separate the notions of material
and spiritual well-being.30 In Butovskii’s account, literature itself takes part
in the economy, not only as an object of trade, but as one of those “immate-
rial goods” (neveshchestvennye blaga) which, together with “material goods,”
comprise a nation’s wealth.31 Paralleling this attentiveness to immaterial
values in Russian academic economics, Russian literature commonly articu-
lates Russian national identity in spiritual and emotional terms, and in direct
opposition to what it presents as Western materialism. And so the separa-
tion between discourses of economics and the emotions that was effected
in nineteenth-century British and French economic thought did not take
place to the same extent in Russia. It did, however, provide a sounding board
against which Russian writers sought to articulate their national specificity.
In tracing these writers’ alternately earnest and ironic attempts at Rus-
sian self-definition, I hope to expand the vocabulary available for describing
the relationship between Russian literature and its European counterparts.
Each of the subsequent chapters highlights a figure— at once economic and
emotional— for Russia’s literary encounters with the West. In chapter 1, the
figure is contagion, in chapter 2, hospitality, chapter 3, counterfeiting, and in
chapter 4, hoarding.32 This list is by no means exhaustive. Indeed, scholars of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have already deployed a range
of effective terms to describe Russian engagements with European literature
and culture: from “international literary exchange” and “cultural import” to
“syncretism,” “impersonat[ion],” “dialogue,” and “distillation.”33 The assem-
blage of new terms I offer is meant to complement those posited previously,
suggesting the diversity of approaches Russian authors took to the task of

17
 Introduction

answering European literature with their own, and accenting the economic
and emotional tropes they mobilized in that endeavor.
My goal is not to explain what emotions are or how they form, but
rather to put their conceptual history in service to the project of elucidating
literary texts. I therefore use such contemporary English terms as “emotion,”
“affect,” and “feeling,” as well as the adjectival forms “emotional” and “affec-
tive,” for the most part interchangeably. Of the distinctions recently drawn
between these terms in the field of affect studies, the most useful for the
present study is that of emotion as a named concept (fear, shame, and so
on) and affect as that which, like Williams’s “structures of feeling,” exceeds
the confines of concepts and the words that designate them.34 While in my
discussions of such concepts as ambition and avarice, I generally prefer “pas-
sion” to “emotion,” I do tend toward “affect” when I wish to highlight psy-
chological or physical sensations that established terminology fails to convey.
The inadequacy of words and concepts to render such sensations is particu-
larly conspicuous in Russian literary representations of ambition, which are
marked by a tension between French understandings of ambition and the
meanings of its nearest Russian equivalents. For my purposes, “feeling” is
useful as a general term that encompasses both psychological and physical
sensations that may or may not find adequate verbal expression.
Of greater importance to the present study than the distinctions
between contemporary English terms are those between the primary emo-
tional keywords from the period in question: “passion” (strast’) and “senti-
ment” (chuvstvo). I use these terms deliberately, and, when translating Rus-
sian texts, as I have just indicated. By passion, I mean the centuries-old idea
of a strong and potentially uncontrollable emotion, commonly associated
with the body and with fixations that persist for a considerable length of time.
By sentiment, I mean the generically and historically marked, eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century notion of a kind of emotion cultivated through
education, comprised partly of self-reflexive judgment, and frequently taking
the form of sympathy for another’s misfortune. In the case of the Russian
word chuvstvo, which, in addition to the meaning of sentiment it acquired
during the age of Sentimentalism, could also have the more general meaning
of feeling, I will adopt this latter translation if the surrounding passage does
not imply cultivation.
Taking the economic and emotional lexicon of early nineteenth-century
Russian literature as a primary object of study, this book reveals the energy
with which writers engaged a diverse array of developing European and Rus-
sian theories about the nature and origin of the emotions and their role in
economic life. Perhaps most strikingly, in their treatment of ambition, acqui-
sition, generosity, and miserliness, the texts I explore manifest understand-
ings of economics and the emotions rooted in the body— understandings

18
 Introduction

that were subsequently lost and have only recently begun to be recovered in
scholarship.35 The ground for this recovery has been cleared by the veritable
explosion of interest in the emotions, and in particular in the eighteenth-
century science and culture of sensibility.36 Thus together with the recent
boom in economically oriented criticism, the affective turn in the humanities
has helped make it possible to discover what was there all along in founding
texts of Russian literature— their economies of feeling.

19
 Chapter One

Mad Ambition

Example is contagious.
— Alibert, Physiology of the Passions

A M B I T I O N H A S great narrative potential. Stemming from

the Latin ambire— to go round, or more specifically, to go round canvassing
for votes— it propels movement through space and time. Seminal texts of
the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition harness this dynamism only
to curtail it. In Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” a young officer
seeks his fortune through gambling and magic. In Nikolai Gogol’s “The Diary
of a Madman” and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, middle-aged clerks
long for promotion in the civil service. In each case, the hero not only fails
to achieve his goals, but is ultimately expelled from society and carted off to
an insane asylum. These tales of mad ambition articulate evolving cultural
understandings of the desire for upward social mobility and exemplify the
transnational literary borrowing so essential to the flourishing of nineteenth-
century Russian prose. Responding to foreign accounts of the upsurge of
ambition in post-Napoleonic Europe, Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky test
out the narrative avenues open to this passion in post-Decembrist Russia.
What is most immediately at stake in Russian tales of social striving
from the reign of Nicholas I is the elusive meaning of the words chesto-
liubie and ambitsiia, the nearest Russian equivalents to English “ambition”
or French ambition. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
these Russian words came under pressure from changing social structures
and cultural norms both at home and abroad. Political upheavals and literary
developments in France had an especially profound impact on Russian liter-
ary representations of ambition. Comparing dictionary definitions of ambi-
tion, chestoliubie, and ambitsiia, and considering their usage in genres rang-
ing from short stories and novels to psychiatric literature and church ser-
mons, this chapter begins with a comparative conceptual history of French
and Russian ambition. I then trace the spread of contagious French clini-
cal and literary discourses on ambition to Russia in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. It was in this period that Russian and French
understandings of the desire for social elevation came into closest contact,

21
 Chapter One

prompting a series of self-consciously transnational ambition narratives that

helped set the Russian prose tradition in motion. Highlighting the transmis-
sion of French discourse on mad ambition to Russia in the post-Decembrist
periodical press and Russian cases of the disorder in stories about ambitious
civil servants, I focus on Faddei Bulgarin’s “Three Pages from a Madhouse,
or the Psychological Healing of an Incurable Disease (The First Extract
from the Notes of an Old Doctor)” (“Tri listka iz doma sumasshedshikh, ili
Psikhicheskoe istselenie neizlechimoi bolezni [Pervoe izvlechenie iz Zapisok
starogo vracha],” 1834), Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman,” and Dostoevsky’s
The Double. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to account for the peculiar
narrative tonalities that register the dissonance between conflicting social
attitudes toward ambition in Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s tales.

C ON CEP T UA L H I S T O RY: A MB I TI ON , CHE ST OLI UB I E ,

A N D A MB I T S I I A

Ambition entered the French language in the thirteenth century with the
meaning of “passionate desire for honors and dignities.”1 In the context of
medieval court society, ambition was thus closely associated with the pas-
sions, those unruly emotions long considered to arise from the flow of hu-
mors inside the body, and with honor, the highest social value of the age.
In this understanding, ambition fuses the individual human body with the
social collective. By the late eighteenth century, the relationship between
ambition, the body, and society would become a topic of pressing concern
in early French psychiatric literature. While European theorists of the emo-
tions had long focused on avarice as the most pernicious economic passion,
the social upheavals of the Revolutionary era and Napoleon’s spectacular rise
from obscurity to the heights of power inspired a major wave of ambition
in young men, bringing greater attention to the threats this feeling might
pose to individuals and society as a whole. As historian Jan Goldstein has
shown, ambition and the ambitieux (ambitious man) were ubiquitous in the
psychiatric literature of early nineteenth-century France. Noting the high
numbers of “lunatics by ambition” in the post-Revolutionary and especially
the post-Napoleonic years, pioneers of the French psychiatric profession
went so far as to identify “ambitious monomania” (monomanie ambitieuse)
as the dominant psychological disorder of the age. The apparent prevalence
of pathological ambition among middle-class men in this period led early
French psychiatrists such as Philippe Pinel (1745– 1826) and Jean-Étienne
Dominique Esquirol (1772– 1840) to argue that the passions and their imbal-
ances are subject to social determination.2 Class, gender, and political struc-
tures were seen to foster certain passions while discouraging others. Women,

22
 Mad Ambition

for instance, were said to have relatively little ambition because they had few
opportunities to pursue careers or participate in public life.3 By linking the
clinical focus on ambition to doctors’ efforts to establish the modern science
of psychiatry, Goldstein shows that ambition occupied a special place in the
history of that field. What female hysteria would be for psychiatrists in the
second half of the nineteenth century— namely, a central object of study
around which the profession coalesced— male ambition was in the first half.
Nineteenth-century French literature helped to normalize ambition.
In such novels as Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le noir,
1830) and Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues, 1837– 43),
ambition is not a delusion of grandeur but a plan of action. Although they
contain traces of the earlier clinical discourse on “ambitious monomania,”
these works present ambition as a pervasive force governing the everyday
course of events in post-Napoleonic France.4 As Peter Brooks has pointed
out, Stendhal’s and Balzac’s plots take shape as the ambitious heroes pursue
their goals, and this narrative structure legitimizes ambition by inviting read-
ers to share in the desire for success.5 This is not to say that Stendhal, Balzac,
and other French writers explicitly glorify ambition; in fact, their heroes’ be-
havior often appears morally unsavory, and as often as not they fail to achieve
their dreams. And yet in contrast to the Russian works they helped to in-
spire, French novels of ambition distinguish themselves by their readiness
to entertain— over many hundreds of pages— the possibility that this pas-
sion might be rewarded. Despite the complexity of its treatment of ambition,
French literature ushered this passion out of the madhouse and onto the
streets, and it placed readers in a position to hope for its realization.
Comparative analysis of French dictionary definitions of ambition
confirms the gradual process of conceptual change that literature helped to
effect, whereby a feeling initially considered pernicious was normalized and
ultimately celebrated. As seen in the definitional Appendix at the end of this
volume, the Dictionary of the French Academy (Dictionnaire de L’Académie
française) first defined ambition as “excessive desire for honor and grandeur”
(1694), then as an “immoderate desire for honor, glory, elevation, distinc-
tion” (1798, 1832), and by the late nineteenth century as simply “desire for
honor, glory, elevation, distinction” (1878). Having lost its negative conno-
tation of excess, by the early twentieth century ambition also took on the
more active character of a “desire or seeking of honors, glory, elevation, dis-
tinction” (1932). In the context of late twentieth-century French consumer
capitalism, the once-debilitating ambition had come to be seen as natural
and vibrant, as a “lively desire to elevate oneself so as to realize all the pos-
sibilities of one’s nature” (1986).
In sharp contrast to the successive transformations of French legal and
social institutions from 1789 to 1830, which both facilitated and were facili-

23
 Chapter One

tated by increasing social mobility, Russia witnessed the state repression of

French-inspired liberalism in these and subsequent decades. Catherine II
was alarmed by the French Revolution and reacted against the radicalization
of French Enlightenment ideals. After driving the invading French army out
of Russia— and blocking the ambitions of Napoleon himself— Alexander I
grew increasingly conservative over the course of his reign. Made cautious
by the 1825 Decembrist uprising that was largely inspired by French re-
form movements, and further unsettled by France’s 1830 July Revolution,
Nicholas I instituted a series of laws that were fundamentally hostile to am-
bition. For instance, the new Digest of Laws, which was codified in 1832,
reinforced the estate-based (rather than class-based) structure of Russian
society more firmly than did any other codex in Russian history. Similarly,
in the 1840s the government raised the requirements for entry to both the
nonhereditary and the hereditary nobility for the first time since Peter the
Great established the Table of Ranks.6
And yet the military and civil service did provide significant numbers
of men of lower-class origin the means for upward social mobility in the
1830s and 1840s. In fact, the government was unable to curb the number of
people who attained nobility because increasing numbers entered secondary
schools, the officer corps, and the civil service, each of which offered a po-
tential ladder to that highest of social estates.7 Clearly this period saw a rising
contradiction between the real possibility of social mobility and the govern-
ment’s attempts to hinder it. Rendering ambition still more contradictory
was the circulation of competing foreign and domestic understandings of it.
Even as Nicholas I’s government tried to ward off social unrest by censoring
publications dealing with antimonarchic political movements abroad, new
ideas about social transformation crept into Russia through periodicals and
novels. Contemporary French literature in particular, with its depiction of
men of lowly origin refashioning themselves and their country, was viewed
with official suspicion but was in wide circulation among Russian readers.8
Still, there was no strong middle class in Russia that could legitimate or cele-
brate ambition on a national scale, and such bourgeois values as individual-
ism and parsimony were at odds with Russian cultural ideals like the humil-
ity so crucial to Russian Orthodox Christianity and the prodigal generosity
that was a source of pride among the nobility.
These conflicting attitudes toward ambition can be glimpsed in Rus-
sian dictionary definitions of chestoliubie, ambitsiia, and related words.
Chestoliubie appeared in the eighteenth century as a secularized form of
the Church Slavic liubochestie, from which it inherited contrasting connota-
tions rooted in Orthodox Christian and aristocratic values. Combining Slavic
roots for love (liub-) and honor (chest-), liubochestie had been introduced
as a calque from the Greek ϕιλοτιμια (love of honor) in Slavic editions of

24
 Mad Ambition

the scriptures.9 This older form continued to be used in religious contexts,

where it designated a sinful desire for worldly honor, until well into the nine-
teenth century.10 In secular contexts, the meaning of liubochestie was often,
but not always, colored by the religious notion of its sinfulness.11 It could also
be used in statements designed to uphold noble values, designating a praise-
worthy desire to obtain honor for oneself or to confer honor upon others. In
this latter meaning, liubochestie comes into close proximity with such noble
values as generosity and hospitality: liubochestie could motivate lavish recep-
tions of important guests, for instance. Yet if the appearance of chestoliubie
in the eighteenth century indicates a perceived need at this time to liber-
ate the concept of seeking honor from the religious condemnation it had
long suffered, the original editors of the Dictionary of the Russian Academy
(Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 1789– 94) evidently were not among those who
felt this need. They roundly condemn chestoliubie as “a weakness of spirit
leading a person to seek in external means and signs the respect and consid-
eration from others that he does not have for himself.”12
Vladimir Dal’s mid-nineteenth-century Dictionary of the Living Rus-
sian Language (Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo russkogo iakyka, 1863– 66) softens
the Academic dictionary’s pointed criticism of chestoliubie, defining it as
“pursuit of outward respect, esteem, honors.” Dal nevertheless confirms the
orientation of chestoliubie to “outward” appearances and superficial mark-
ers of favor. This orientation is even more apparent in his definition of a
chestoliubets (man with chestoliubie) as someone “passionate about ranks,
distinctions, glory, praise and therefore acting not by moral conviction but
by the appearance of it.” In subsequent decades chestoliubie would not keep
pace with the increasingly positive reconceptualization of French ambition.
Indeed, following the 1917 Revolution, official emphasis on the collective
rendered desire for individual social advancement highly problematic, and
over the course of the Soviet period, dictionaries portrayed chestoliubie in an
increasingly negative light. Whereas the first edition of the Short Academic
Dictionary (Malyi akademicheskii slovar’, 1957– 61) explains it as a “strong
desire to occupy a high, honored position, [or] to have power; striving for
honors,” the second edition of the same dictionary (1981– 84) describes it
as “striving to attain a high, honored position, thirst for fame, glory.” With
its rhetoric of “thirst” (zhazhda), the late Soviet definition suggests not a
“lively desire” for personal fulfillment but a physical need for recognition
from others.
To be sure, dictionary definitions give but a partial view of a word’s
history. This is especially true in the case of the highly normative Diction-
ary of the Russian Academy, which judges chestoliubie rather than account-
ing for its various connotations. The explicitly normative treatment of this
word attests to the energy with which its moral legitimacy was debated in

25
 Chapter One

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What dictionaries fail to show, but
literature makes clear, is that in this period chestoliubie became closely asso-
ciated with the Table of Ranks, the system of state-sanctioned signs of social
value introduced by Peter I. Establishing a stratified hierarchy of noble civil
servants with corresponding ranks in the civilian administration, the military,
and at court, the Table of Ranks theoretically afforded men of low birth the
possibility to achieve nobility through zealous service to the state. In prac-
tice, it also created a series of barriers between men of various ranks, bar-
riers most easily overcome through social connections rather than merit. The
legally enshrined administrative designations set forth in the Table of Ranks,
an all-pervasive feature of early nineteenth-century Russian society, explains
why the state apparatus is more implicated in Russian literary representa-
tions of social striving than in French works on the same theme. Whereas
Balzac’s and Stendhal’s ambitious heroes seek success in nongovernmental
spheres such as the salons (in The Wild Ass’s Skin), the priesthood (in The
Red and the Black), or the literary profession (in Lost Illusions), the heroes
of Bulgarin’s “Three Pages from a Madhouse,” Gogol’s “The Diary of a Mad-
man,” and Dostoevsky’s The Double all desire promotion in the government
service. In “The Queen of Spades,” too, the hero is an officer, and therefore
in service to the state.
The understanding of ambition as the passionate pursuit of rank in-
flects literary representations of chestoliubie with a particularly complex
ideological valence. On one hand, the operations of the government actually
depended to a large extent on men’s active striving for promotion. On the
other hand, if sufficiently widespread, the desire for elevation could threaten
the stability of Russia’s highly stratified society. As we shall see in the case
of Bulgarin’s “Three Pages from the Madhouse,” the words chestoliubie and
chestoliubets, when used to describe persons of lower rank, could serve the
reactionary purpose of casting a negative moral light on the desire for social
elevation. As Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman” will show, however, when
used by persons of lower rank to describe their superiors, the same terms
could question the merit and patriotic feeling of those in power. Evidently,
an accusation of chestoliubie could be made to support or undermine the
legitimacy of the social hierarchy.
The semantic trajectory of the foreign loanword ambitsiia has wobbled
more than that of chestoliubie, at times drawing close to French ambition,
and at other times diverging sharply from it. Ambitsiia entered the Russian
lexicon in the early eighteenth century— fittingly, it would seem, during the
ambitious times of Peter the Great. According to Vasmer’s Etymological Dic-
tionary of the Russian Language (Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka,
1964), ambitsiia came to Russian via the Polish ambicja, but other major
dictionaries— such as that of Dal and The Great Academic Dictionary of

26
 Mad Ambition

the Russian Language (Bol’shoi akademicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka)—

consider it a borrowing from French. In any case, by the late eighteenth
century, ambitsiia was gaining in prominence while retaining a perceptibly
foreign feel. It receives no entry in the first or second edition of the Dic-
tionary of the Russian Academy, but it does make an appearance— albeit
in a nonstandard form— in Alexander Radishchev’s incendiary Sentimen-
talist travelogue, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz
Peterburga v Moskvu, 1790). At one point, Radishchev’s narrator witnesses
a father urging his sons to resist the cultural norm of visiting their social
superiors at home:

Once you have entered the world, you will soon learn that in society it is the
custom to call upon distinguished personages on holiday mornings: a miser-
able, senseless custom which betrays a spirit of timidity in the caller, a spirit
of conceit and a weak intellect in the personage visited. The Romans had
a similar custom, which they called ambitsio, that is, “seeking,” or “going
around”; and from this the seeking of honors [liubochestie] came to be called
ambitsio, because, in calling on great personages, ambitious young men
sought for themselves a road to honors and preferment.13

Radishchev’s spelling of ambitsio, with an -o- on the end, rather than the now
current -ia-, is apparently a transliteration from the Latin. This suggests that
the form ambitsiia was not yet fixed in Russian at the end of the eighteenth
century. What makes this passage of particular interest for the present dis-
cussion of Russian ambition words is that it shows Radishchev comparing
Russian and Western (in this case, Roman) forms of social striving. The com-
parison seems designed not only to criticize the behavior of those pursuing
social elevation, but also to define a new word— ambitsio/ambitsiia— that
was provoking discussion at the time.
Including ambitsiia in its catalog of foreign borrowings that remained
in need of explication at the turn of the nineteenth century, the New Dic-
tionary defines it as “love of glory, haughtiness, love of honor, extreme and
inordinate desire for wealth, titles, honor.” This is as close as ambitsiia would
come to French ambition in the nineteenth century, as the latter sense of de-
sire for social elevation— so crucial to the French word— weakened and then
dropped out of ambitsiia’s later definitions. In Dal’s Explanatory Dictionary,
ambitsiia is “a feeling of honor, nobility; pride, arrogance, conceit; demand
for external signs of respect, esteem.” Here, ambitsiia appears the sole prop-
erty of the nobility, and it pertains more to evaluation than to elevation of the
self. Depending on the perspective of the person ascribing ambitsiia to him
or herself or to someone else, this feeling might be viewed positively as a
feeling of pride proper to a nobleman, or negatively as “haughtiness.”

27
 Chapter One

Alexander Pushkin provides an example of the positive evaluation of

ambitsiia as “noble pride” in his only recorded usage of the word. In an 1825
letter to his friend Prince Viazemskii, Pushkin writes that he is willing to
contribute poems to the journal The Moscow Telegraph (Moskovskii telegraf,
1825– 34), but that his ambitsiia makes him refuse to be named among its
editors: “If he needs my verses, then send him whatever you like (other than
Onegin), if he needs my name as a collaborator, then I won’t agree out of
noble pride, i.e. ambitsiia [blagorodnoi gordosti, t.e. ambitsii; emphasis in
the original]: The Telegraph is an orderly and honest man— but a liar and
an ignoramus; and the lies and ignorance of the journal are shared among
its publishers; I do not intend to go into that group.”14 Explaining ambitsiia
as his “noble pride,” Pushkin— a member of the gentry— links ambitsiia to
his inherited social status. Although in the 1820s Pushkin published his own
works in The Moscow Telegraph, by the end of that decade he would distance
himself from the journal and its editor, Nikolai Polevoi, a self-made man
who came to be viewed by members of Pushkin’s elite circle as a representa-
tive of the commercialization of Russian letters.15 As a feeling of pride that
prompts him to avoid being associated with the “lies and ignorance”— and
presumably also the commercial interests— of the editors of The Moscow
Telegraph, Pushkin’s ambitsiia is aimed not at a progressive change in class
position (a member of the lower class rising up), but rather at a conservative
preservation of noble distinction and privilege. In this account, ambitsiia is a
defensive form of desire opposed to the market forces of commercialization
and democratization.
Like Radishchev’s handling of ambitsio in A Journey from St. Peters-
burg to Moscow, Pushkin’s usage of ambitsiia is somewhat tentative. Whereas
Radishchev provides a historical commentary on the origin of ambitsio and
explains that this word is synonymous with liubochestie, Pushkin prefaces
ambitsiia with the definition “noble pride.” This may indicate that Pushkin
is considering but is not entirely confident about the equivalency of the con-
cepts of “noble pride” and ambitsiia, or else that he does not trust that Via-
zemskii would understand his meaning if he simply used ambitsiia without
explaining it. Intriguingly, the popular writer and journalist Faddei Bulgarin
makes a similar statement in his Memoirs (Vospominaniia, 1846– 49), refer-
ring at one point to his “innate noble pride (that which we call ambitsiia)”
(vrozhdennaia blagorodnaia gordost’ [to, chto my nazyvaem ambitsiei], em-
phasis in the original).16 Whether condemned or claimed, in the writings of
Radishchev, Pushkin, and Bulgarin, ambitsiia stands out as a concept Rus-
sian writers are eager to qualify.
In the twentieth century, this class-based feeling of pride evolved in
keeping with political transformations. Following the Revolution, the oblit-
eration of the nobility and the official suppression of class distinction ren-

28
 Mad Ambition

dered ambitsiia increasingly obnoxious, albeit newly available to all. The

first edition of the Dictionary of the Russian Language (1957– 61) severs its
earlier associations with nobility as well as with the active pursuit of social
elevation, defining it as “pride, a feeling of personal worth, also exaggerated
pride, conceit.” The negative understanding of ambitsiia as an egotistical
overvaluation of the self grows sharper still in the second edition of the same
dictionary (1981– 84), which explains the word as “acute pride, excessively
exaggerated sense of personal worth.” Meanwhile, the most recent edition of
the Great Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (2004– ) hints at a
further alteration. In this post-Soviet reference guide, ambitsiia has become:
“1. Pride, heightened sense of self-worth. 2. Inordinately high opinion of
one’s self; arrogance, conceit. Pretensions to something, stimulated by confi-
dence in oneself, one’s powers, possibilities; ambitious ideas.” Though cast in
a more negative light than contemporary French ambition, the understand-
ing of ambitsiia as “Pretensions to something” founded on “confidence” in
one’s “powers” and “possibilities” approaches ambition (and English “ambi-
tion”) in its reorientation away from overblown self-esteem and toward fan-
tasies of self-realization. Indeed, the idea of ambitsiia as an active desire for
social advancement is on the rise in post-Soviet Russia. Only barely apparent
in recent dictionary definitions, this change is the subject of a 2006 article
by Irina Levontina, who observes: “The following usages are a clear sign of
our times: skill center ‘Ambition’ (Ambitsiia, an employment agency), 11th
conference ‘Administration in Russia: a time of ambitious (ambitsioznykh)
goals.’ And here from a job listing: “We need yet another ambitious (am-
bitsioznyi) and purposeful coworker.’”17 This ongoing transformation of am-
bitsiia provides a contemporary example of how the desire for social eleva-
tion, and the related notions of pride, self-worth, and self-realization, have
been subject to foreign influence and have been in a state of ideologically
charged fluctuation throughout modern Russian history.

C ULT UR A L CO NTA G I O N

If the rise of entrepreneurial attitudes and the spread of the English lan-
guage in post-Soviet Russia are responsible for the reconceptualization of
ambitsiia in recent years, the influx of French literature and thought was at
least partly responsible for the proliferation of Russian narratives that invoke
chestoliubie and ambitsiia to signify a pathological desire for upward social
mobility in the early nineteenth century. French discourse on overweening
ambition as a cause of madness had already begun spreading to Russia by
the late eighteenth century, when, in the absence of a developed tradition of
Russian clinical literature, doctors relied on French understandings of men-

29
 Chapter One

tal illness. As Ilya Vinitsky has shown, following the French Revolution, the
French provenance of psychiatric discourse led Catherine II to view men-
tal illness itself with official suspicion. The empress was especially wary of
melancholia (melankholiia, an excess of black bile), which she considered
a kind of French ideological infection.18 One example Vinitsky provides of
Catherine’s association of melancholy with “political and moral disorder” that
is especially relevant to the present study of Russian ambition is her written
reaction to Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.19
The empress explains Radishchev’s attack on the Russian social order
as the result of his pathological ambition: “It is probable that he was born
with unbounded ambition [s ne obuzdannoi ambitsii (sic)], to have prepared
himself for the highest offices, but since he has not yet attained them, the
gall of his impatience has poured out over everything established, and has
produced this philosophizing. But it is drawn from sundry semi-sophists of
the present time, such as Rousseau, the Abbé Raynal, and similar hypochon-
driacs.”20 At this time, hypochondria, which Catherine II ascribes to the En-
lightenment thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Guillaume Raynal (1713–
1796), was understood as a form of melancholia resulting from the improper
functioning of the hypochondriac, or upper abdominal, region of the body.21
Showing uncertainty as to whether Radishchev’s radical views are a symptom
of inborn ambition gone awry or a result of his reading habits, the empress
works through precisely the sort of questions that early French psychiatrists
were posing in this period about the origin of the passions and their im-
balances in human and sociopolitical bodies. Paradoxically, she invokes the
principles of French medicine to defend her regime against what she views
as French-inspired attacks.
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, French clinical dis-
course on pathological ambition was reaching Russian readers through the
periodical press. In his discussion of the literary historical context from
which “The Diary of a Madman” emerged— a context in which Romantic
tales of mental illness à la Hoffmann were in vogue— Vasilii Gippius notes
the publication of several French and Russian stories treating the theme of
mad ambition in the years leading up to Gogol’s work on the story.22 The
two French texts Gippius mentions were published anonymously, and both
their sources and their rootedness in the broader French clinical discourse
on ambitious monomania remained unknown to him. This French discursive
tradition merits further study as a crucial source of nineteenth-century Rus-
sian literary representations of ambition.
In 1826, a story called “The Mad Man of Ambition” (“Sumasshedshii
chestoliubets”) appeared in Polevoi’s Moscow Telegraph.23 The most widely
read Russian journal of its day, the Telegraph regularly published foreign
as well as Russian literature and articles on the arts, sciences, and society

30
 Mad Ambition

abroad and at home. The editors of the journal explain “The Madman of
Ambition” as a translation from French but omit further source information.
In fact, the text offers a direct translation of a story by the French physi-
cian Jean-Louis Alibert (1768– 1837), who included it in his 1825 treatise,
Physiology of the Passions (Physiologie des passions).24 Alibert was a promi-
nent figure in the field that historian Elizabeth A. Williams has dubbed “an-
thropological medicine,” but which was known to its practitioners as the
“science of man.” As Williams has shown, the science of man had roots in
early eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalism, reached its peak in the Revo-
lutionary years, and continued to exercise influence on French medicine for
decades to come. Initially setting out to study the relationships between “the
physical, the mental, and the passional” elements of human life, by the late
eighteenth century those exploring the science of man formulated the object
of their study as the relationships between “the physical and the moral.”25
Today the field is most closely associated with Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis
(1757– 1808) and his study, On the Relations between the Physical and Moral
Aspects of Man (Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, 1802). Al-
though he is best known for propounding the view that all aspects of mental
and emotional life— including mental illnesses— are physiological in origin,
Cabanis also argued that environmental, social factors could contribute to
the development of mental illnesses, and, contrarily, aid in their cure. An-
other leading figure in the science of man was Philippe Pinel, whose Medico-
Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation, or Mania (Traité médicophilos-
ophique sur l’aliénation mentale, ou la manie, 1801) popularized the idea
that insanity has “moral” as well as physical causes and must be countered
with “moral treatment” (traitement moral). For instance, at one point in the
Treatise, Pinel suggests that those suffering from “stifled ambition” (ambi-
tion rentreé) should be given some job or cause to which they might direct
their energies, and he relates a case study about a man who is successfully
treated this way.26
Though his work in the science of man was less groundbreaking than
that of Cabanis or Pinel, Alibert was nevertheless an influential figure whose
career spanned the Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Restoration eras. Hav-
ing first gained attention for his Discourse on the Relations between Medi-
cine and the Physical and Moral Sciences (Discours sur les rapports de la
médecine avec les sciences physiques et morales, 1798), he enjoyed repeated
literary successes and held prestigious appointments as personal physician
to Louis XVIII (reigned 1815– 24) and Charles X (reigned 1824– 30). While
today he is best remembered as a founder of French dermatology, during
his life he attained an international reputation for his Physiology of the Pas-
sions, which was translated into several European languages and reissued
multiple times in the first decade after its publication. Its central tenet is

31
 Chapter One

that the passions derive from natural instincts, which normally operate in ac-
cordance with the laws of “animal economy,” but which can destroy physical,
psychological, and social harmony if they become hyperactive.27 In the case
of ambition, Alibert asserts that it derives from the natural instinct of “imi-
tation,” which drives all living beings to shape themselves after the pattern of
their predecessors.28 “Example is contagious,” Alibert proclaims, in a state-
ment that presages the spread of his theories to Russia, and which I have
excerpted as an epigraph to this chapter.29 It is as support for this theoretical
discussion of ambition that Alibert includes the story he calls “The Mad Man
of Ambition, or the History of Anselm, Called Diogenes” (“L’ambitieux fou,
ou l’Histoire d’Anselme, dit Diogen”).30
Adopting a tone at once scientific and sensationalizing, Alibert begins
his story with the claim, “Among the countless causes that contribute to the
loss of human reason, none is at once more frequent and more energetic
than ambition.” Though he considers the desire to rise above one’s current
social station to be a natural instinct, he also asserts that certain sociopolitical
environments are especially apt to foster it: “This phenomenon is observed
primarily in those circumstances in which great political interests stir every-
one’s soul. For example, there were never so many madmen of this type in
Bicêtre as there were at that time when all of France was agitating for the
establishment of new rights and laws.”31 As seen here in the reference to
“political interests,” ambition is glossed in this story as a thirst for political
power. Alibert identifies the madman’s deluded identification with a royal
or other high-ranking military or government personage as the most com-
mon form of mad ambition. The tendency of ambitious madmen to entertain
such self-aggrandizing delusions confirms the influence of Napoleon— the
ambitieux par excellence— on the discourse of ambition in the period. If the
story of Napoleon inspired countless people of low rank, “The Mad Man of
Ambition” works against that democratizing trend by portraying Napoleonic
ambition as insane.
Alibert presents “The Mad Man of Ambition” as a true account of his
observations while studying under Pinel at the Bicêtre hospital. Yet Alibert
puts mad ambition to different use than Pinel had, shifting emphasis away
from the question of how to treat it to that of the diverse and politically sub-
versive forms it might take. Against the background of many cases of mad
ambition at Bicêtre, “The Mad Man of Ambition” focuses on one in par-
ticular, that of a melancholic, would-be Napoleon named Anselm, who first
dreams of military glory, then of recognition as a political philosopher. When
his youthful dreams of rapid promotion in the military come to nothing, An-
selm renounces the world and adopts the pose of a modern-day Diogenes,
the Greek philosopher famous for his criticism of society and considered
by many to have inspired the school of Cynicism. The main thrust of “The

32
 Mad Ambition

Figure 3. The Mad Man of Ambition at the Bicêtre Hospital (Le fou ambitieux à
l’Hospice de Bicêtre). Illustration. Reproduced from Jean-Louis Alibert, Physiologie
des passions, ou Nouvelle doctrine des sentimens moraux; par J. L. Alibert (Paris:
Béchet jeune, 1825). M 1112.3. Countway Medicine Rare Books, Harvard
University.

Mad Man of Ambition” is to show that even though Anselm believes he has
rejected worldly ambition, his desire to criticize the current French gov-
ernment and to participate in its reform is in fact a symptom of that same
pernicious passion. At night, Anselm dreams that he is a king or an emperor;
during the daytime, as though following Napoleon’s example of restructur-
ing the French legal system, he writes new legal codes and sends them to
various heads of state for adoption. When his projects are not implemented,
he dies of despair and a heart attack.32 An illustration that accompanies the
story depicts Anselm as a frustrated philosopher locked up in the courtyard
at Bicêtre. (See figure 3.) Another patient wearing a crown and wielding a
scepter in the background provides a visual representation of the broader
context of French clinical discourse on pathological ambition that informs
Alibert’s story.
If Alibert’s reactionary depiction of reformist ambitions as a kind of
fatal wasting disease makes plain the close connection between medicine

33
 Chapter One

and the crown in Restoration France, his inclusion of morality tales like “The
Mad Man of Ambition” in Physiology of the Passions showcases the inter-
dependence between clinical discourse and literature in these years. The
boundary between the case history and the Romantic tale of madness was
permeable, indeed. So, too, was the boundary between French and Russian
letters. Abstracting “The Mad Man of Ambition” from its original source
and translating it into Russian, the editors of The Moscow Telegraph placed
the post-Napoleonic French discourse on ambitious monomania in the fresh
context of a post-Decembrist Russian periodical. In this new context, An-
selm’s crushed dreams of political reform would have resonated with the De-
cembrists’ recent attempt to bring about a constitutional monarchy. The sen-
sitivity of this subject matter in 1826 Russia may help to explain the differ-
ence between the first sentence of the original French text of “The Mad Man
of Ambition” and its translation in The Moscow Telegraph. Whereas Alibert
describes ambition as “more frequent and more energetic” (plus fréquente et
plus énergique) than any other cause of madness, the Russian text presents
ambition (chestoliubie) as “stronger and more debilitating” (sil’nee . . . i . . .
bolee porazitel’naia).33 Whether the Russian translator wished to distance
himself as much as possible from the ambitious madmen in the story, or
simply considered the revision more captivating, in the Russian version, am-
bition appears less common and more dangerous.
In 1829, a story entitled “Madhouse at Charenton (Fragment from a
Traveler’s Notes)” (“Dom sumasshedshikh v Sharantone [Otryvok iz zapisok
odnogo puteshestvennika]”) appeared anonymously in the short-lived jour-
nal The Butterfly (Babochka, 1829– 31).34 Like “A Mad Man of Ambition,”
“Madhouse at Charenton” describes a French mental institution thronging
with ambitious madmen and sane men curious about them and eager to nar-
rate their stories. In this case the setting is the French mental hospital at
Charenton, where Pinel’s student and collaborator Jean-Étienne Dominique
Esquirol served as chief physician from 1825 to 1840. Holding the rapid
succession of new rulers during the post-Revolutionary period responsible
for the common occurrence of that form of monomania that led individu-
als to “believe themselves emperors or kings, empresses or queens,” Esqui-
rol argued that mental illnesses were subject to the national Zeitgeist. 35
The increasing popularity of the view that excessive ambition was a prevail-
ing force in the current French political climate can be glimpsed from an
1832 caricature by Honoré Daumier, entitled Ministerial Charenton: Vari-
ous Monomanias of Political Madmen (Le Charenton ministériel: Différentes
monomanies des aliénés politiques). (See figure 4.) Representing contempo-
rary French politicians as afflicted with diverse mental illnesses, the cartoon
includes images of men wearing makeshift crowns, robes, and, in one case, a
hat resembling Napoleon’s iconic bicorn.

34
 Mad Ambition

Figure 4. Honoré Daumier, Ministerial Charenton: Various Monomanias of Political

Madmen (Le Charenton ministériel: Différentes monomanies des aliénés politiques).
First published in La Caricature, May 31, 1832. Hand-colored lithograph, 19.5
× 50.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. The William H. Helfand
Collection, 1988-102-70.

In “Madhouse at Charenton,” the narrator is a traveler who visits

the hospital at Charenton and encounters several patients who suffer from
precisely the sort of delusions Esquirol had studied. The first is an artillery
officer who believes he is the king of Spain. His misplaced confidence in his
own authority bolsters him as he plans to reform the hospital and write a new
constitution.36 Omitting any source information, the editors of The Butterfly
simply state that “Madhouse at Charenton” was “communicated” (soobsh-
cheno). The setting of the story and its clear resonance with French clinical
literature on ambitious monomania strongly suggest that it was translated
or adapted from a French source. In fact, most of the material published in
The Butterfly was translated from French journals. For instance, two articles
from the issue that includes “Madhouse” are said to be taken from the news-
paper The Thief (Le Voleur), which may have served as a model for The But-
terfly as a whole in that it culled its material from a wide array of French pe-
riodicals. Providing a possible source for “Madhouse at Charenton,” an 1828
issue of The Thief includes an article entitled “A Visit to the Mental Institu-
tion at Charenton,” credited to one F. D., and said to have been published
previously in a journal dedicated to matters of law, the Tribunal Courier (Le
Courrier des Tribunaux).
The narrator of “A Visit” is a man of science who describes the vari-
ous types of insanity he encountered during a recent stop at Charenton.
He points out that those suffering from mental illness are especially apt to
develop fixations on “riches and grandeur,” and he claims that doctors rec-
ognize the “madness of ambition” (folie de l’ambition) to be an especially
strong, hopelessly incurable disorder.37 “Madhouse at Charenton” is not a

35
 Chapter One

direct translation of “A Visit to the Mental Hospital at Charenton.” Both

works share the basic narrative framework of a visit to Charenton, however,
and in each, the narrator shows a special interest in ambition. Whether the
editors of The Butterfly adapted the premise of “A Visit” into “Madhouse”
or drew on some other sources, it is clear that French tales of mad ambition
provided contagious examples that spread to Russia through periodicals. It
is also clear that the political ambitions such tales may be seen to caricature
appeared increasingly subversive in Russia in the wake of both the Decem-
brist uprising at home and the July Revolution in France. Notably, the editor
of The Butterfly, Vladimir Sergeevich Filimonov, who was also a well-to-do
provincial governor, was himself arrested in 1831 on charges of association
with the underground Moscow society known as the Sungurovtsy, and was
found guilty of reformist ambitions: drafts for a Russian constitution were
discovered among his papers.38 As a result, Filimonov was stripped of all
titles and sent into exile, and The Butterfly ceased publication.
The ambiguity of origin and the free-floating quality of the French dis-
course on mad ambition that was presented in Russian periodicals contrast
sharply with the original rootedness of that discourse in specific social and
historical conditions. Whereas psychiatrists had asserted that monomanie
ambitieuse was a mental disorder particular to post-Revolutionary France,
periodicals carried the discourse on mad ambition to Russia, making it avail-
able for use by Russian authors who, for their part, show what this socially
determined passional imbalance might look like in a very different social
milieu.

A MB I T I O N I N T HE P R O - G O V ERNMENT P RESS:
B UL G A R I N’ S “ T H R EE PA G ES F R OM A MA D H OUSE”

In his 1834 story, “Three Pages from a Madhouse, or the Psychological Heal-

ing of an Incurable Disease (The First Extract from the Notes of an Old Doc-
tor),” Faddei Bulgarin repurposes the French rhetoric of mad ambition to
present chestoliubie as a physical and moral illness, and also to prescribe its
cure.39 Imbuing his work with scientific authority, Bulgarin begins with an ep-
igraph from the physiologist and materialist philosopher Pierre-Jean-Georges
Cabanis, whose contributions to the “science of man” I have referenced above.
The epigraph Bulgarin selects as a starting point for his tale is the conclusion
Cabanis reaches at the end of the first volume of his influential treatise, On
the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man (1802): “Ob-
servation and experience have led us to discover the means to combat, often
enough with success, the state of illness; the art that employs these means
can then modify and perfect the operations of intelligence and the habits of

36
 Mad Ambition

the will.”40 Together with the French epigraph, the Russian subtitle of Bulga-
rin’s story— “The Psychological Healing of an Incurable Disease”— suggests
that the rapidly developing French science of man can be effectively inte-
grated into Russian medical and literary practice so as to cure even the most
stubborn psychological disorders. Subsequently, Bulgarin’s story models how
this process might work for the benefit of individual Russian subjects and
society as a whole.
As Bulgarin’s excerpt from Cabanis makes clear, “observation” was
crucial to the French doctor’s methods of diagnosis and treatment. In fact,
the emphasis Cabanis and other practitioners of the science of man laid on
observation was among their most important contributions to French medi-
cine.41 In “Three Pages,” this medical principle serves Bulgarin as a tech-
nique of characterization and a source of narrative interest. The narrator is
a doctor, and the story begins when he responds to a sick young man’s call
for help and attempts to diagnose his illness through observation. Study-
ing the patient’s physiognomy and noting his “pale and dry” skin, “yellow”
cheeks, and “lifeless” eyes, the doctor first diagnoses him with “hypochon-
dria” (gipokhondriia), the same form of melancholia Catherine II ascribes to
Rousseau and Raynal in her notes on Radishchev’s A Journey from Peters-
burg to Moscow. Further observation is needed, however, before the doctor
can identify the roots of the disease.
Echoing the historical process whereby ambition made the social con-
ditioning of the passions apparent to early French psychiatrists, Bulgarin
leads his doctor-narrator to the eventual discovery that the origin of the pa-
tient’s illness is not physiological but social. One day the doctor observes the
young man reading and responding violently to the news of promotions and
decorations in the official government newspaper, the St. Petersburg Sen-
ate News (Sankt-Peterburgskie senatskie vedomosti, 1811– 1917): “His eyes
were bloodshot, his cheeks burned, and one minute he was squirming on
his chair, the next he was jumping up, striking the table with his fists.” While
“gasping and shaking the page” (zadykhaias’ i potriasaia listom) of the news-
paper, the patient protests the promotion of those he considers less worthy
than himself: “I know all these people as well as myself, people who don’t
have as much brains and ability in their noggins as I have in my pinky! These
people— they’re machines! . . And here one is made into the manager of a
section, another the director, a third the chief of the chancellery, a fourth
governor! . . They’re all decorated with orders! . . And I . . . I . . . !” Confirm-
ing Cabanis’s assertion that observation is the key to diagnosis, the patient’s
outraged reading renders him legible to the doctor: “Finally, I was able to
look into his soul, and I saw a worm nesting in it, gnawing at it tirelessly. . . .
The worm, gnawing the soul of my patient was called ambition [chestoliubie,
emphasis in the original].”42 In this scene, external appearance and behavior

37
 Chapter One

provide evidence of interior psychic life, and reading habits turn out be both
a cause and a symptom of moral disorder.
As in the Russian translation of “The Mad Man of Ambition,” ambition
here appears in the lexical form of chestoliubie, but in Bulgarin’s story the
word is colored by its traditional Russian connotation of sinfulness, and it is
embedded in the specifically Russian cultural context of the St. Petersburg
bureaucracy. Even as it recalls the rhetoric of ambition as a parasitic wast-
ing disease in Alibert’s “The Mad Man of Ambition,” Bulgarin’s figuration
of ambition as a “worm” that is “gnawing” at the young man’s soul adds a
religious connotation to that rhetoric by bringing to mind the biblical “worm
of doubt” (cherv’ somneniia) that corrodes faith in God.43 As a manifestation
of pride, itself a grave sin in Orthodox doctrine, ambition is spiritually, physi-
cally, and socially parasitic: it acts as a “worm of doubt” that corrodes the
patient’s faith in the Russian social order.
The doctor holds this “spiritual and mental illness” (bolezn’ dushi i
bolezn’ uma) responsible for the young man’s protests against the arbitrari-
ness of the Table of Ranks and also for his inability to render service in the
bureaucracy: “My patient, looking for speedy elevation and a superior who
might recognize his extraordinary abilities, continuously changed places and
was finally left with no place at all, in the expectation of an extraordinary
chance at promotion. Time, passing uselessly by, and taking with it the possi-
bility of attaining seniority through service, fell upon his heart like drop after
drop of molten steel, rendering his sores incurable.”44 With its depiction of
the ambitious man’s restless movement from one “place” in the bureaucracy
to another, this passage introduces readers to what will become a distin-
guishing feature of all texts in the Petersburg mad ambition tradition: the
madman’s predicament of being perpetually out of place as he indulges in a
frenzied search around the capital for a change in social status. But whereas
subsequent works by Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky bring readers along
with the ambitious heroes who rove the city streets in search of new and
higher “places,” in “Three Pages” the time of ambition has already passed,
and its blockage has already paralyzed its victim, before the story begins.
Here ambition produces a narrative not of social striving, but of diagnosis
and cure. Because ambition leads the young man to question the opera-
tions of the state, curing the disease appears tantamount to quelling an anti-
government protest.
The cure Bulgarin’s doctor-narrator concocts for mad ambition turns
out to be a strange mixture of Russian and French moral medicine. Using
storytelling as a form of treatment, he tells his patient about another man
he once cured “in one of the European capitals.” Though his nationality
is not named, the doctor’s former patient resembles the Frenchmen in “A

38
 Mad Ambition

Mad Man of Ambition” and “Madhouse at Charenton” with his delusions of

political authority: “He ceaselessly occupied himself with writing, imagining
that he was running a government. He wrote orders, projects, distributed
jobs and ranks, gave out millions, made reprimands.” Like Anselm in “The
Mad Man of Ambition,” this former patient eventually wasted away and died
from ambition. He left the doctor his diary, however, which consists of the
eponymous “three pages from a madhouse.” In the diary, which the doc-
tor shares with his present patient, the foreign madman gives a fantastical
account of his ambitious past. He claims to have lived three lives, one of
which is described in each of the “three pages.”
In his first life he was an ambitious misanthrope who became a famous
millionaire. Mysteriously reborn after a hundred years, he learned that de-
spite his previous fame and fortune, no one remembered him, and so he
devoted this second life to the “common good”: he got married, had chil-
dren, and lived the life of a generous provincial landowner, taking good care
of his peasants, and helping those in need. In his third life, he found his
descendants and the descendants of his peasants thriving and remember-
ing what a good man he had been. Yet somehow he failed to learn from
his past experience and again fell under the deadly sway of ambition. The
diary presents the doctor’s current patient with multiple examples of how
to feel about ambition and makes it clear which one is best. Reading this
morality tale effectively cures the young man of his own mad ambition. Years
after his recovery, he tells the doctor the diary prompted him to move to the
countryside, take good care of his serfs, and— most significantly— read the
Senate News only for the ukases, not for the promotions.45 While both the di-
agnosis of mad ambition and its cure rely on European models, the doctor
uses these  models to prescribe an idealized life of a Russian serf-holding
landowner.
If ambition is a challenge to individual physical health as well as to
the existing social structure, then Bulgarin portrays its renunciation as es-
sential to the healthy operations of both the body and the state. Much like
the European madman’s “three pages,” Bulgarin presents his own story as
moral medicine. The diary form of the framed narrative, which consists of
three pages from three separate days, models the form of Bulgarin’s story, an
“Extract from the Notes of an Old Doctor” printed on multiple days— and
on multiple “pages”— in the newspaper Bulgarin edited, The Northern Bee
(Severnaia pchela, 1825– 64). Whereas the European diary gives a cyclical
account of several lives lived and offers a new perspective on ambition in
each page, Bulgarin’s story implies that if readers keep coming back to his
newspaper for a daily dose of moral treatment, they will not only be enter-
tained, but will be generally happier and healthier for it. In other words,

39
 Chapter One

reading the pages of The Northern Bee can keep Russians from madly “gasp-
ing and shaking the page” on which the promotions are printed in the Sen-
ate News.
And yet whatever solutions it proposes, Bulgarin’s story reveals the
conflicting cues readers of Russian periodicals were receiving about ambi-
tion at this time. By celebrating promotions and decorations, the Senate
News encouraged readers to desire such honors, thereby inciting the very
ambition Bulgarin’s story depicts as a potential threat to the social order.
“Three Pages” points to a larger tension between the Table of Ranks and the
state. On one hand, the government both encouraged and rewarded mili-
tary and civil service with promotions advertised in the Senate News. On the
other hand, as seen in Bulgarin’s story, the conspicuous favoritism that so
often determined decisions about promotion could inspire resentment and
undermine the official discourse (including the language of rank and title)
that conferred authority and privilege. Given the government’s own simul-
taneous encouragement and restriction of ambition, it is no wonder that the
patient in Bulgarin’s story overcomes his obsession with rank only by escap-
ing St. Petersburg— as if there is no room in the capital for a person to live
in health and harmony with all edicts of the state.
Bulgarin’s treatment of ambition in “Three Pages” appears even more
complex when viewed in the broader context of The Northern Bee. As the
only nongovernment periodical permitted to print political news in Russia
in the 1830s, The Northern Bee was a semiofficial commercial newspaper
that occupied a somewhat awkward position in the market, publishing Euro-
pean news to boost sales, but shaping its coverage so as to promote pro-
government Russian ideals.46 For instance, throughout the early 1830s, The
Northern Bee covered an ongoing insurrection in Spain led by Carlos, the
brother of the recently deceased King Ferdinand VII (reigned 1808, 1814–
33). Carlos’s attempt to claim the Spanish throne from Ferdinand VII’s
daughter Isabella II (reigned 1833– 68) offered Russian readers a captivat-
ing tale of politically subversive ambition.47 Even as Bulgarin purported to
provide an antidote to mad ambition in “Three Pages,” his coverage of the
Spanish insurrection in the very same issues of The Northern Bee arguably
spread the disease.

C ULT U R A L DI S CO R D : G O G O L’ S “ TH E D I A RY OF
A   MA D M A N”

Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman” shows what happens when Russian read-
ers are confronted with the competing foreign and domestic assessments
of ambition circulating through Russian print culture of the 1830s.48 The

40
 Mad Ambition

story tells of Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin, a titular councilor whose frus-

trated desire to be promoted and marry his superior’s daughter propels his
descent into madness, culminating in his erroneous belief that he is the king
of Spain. As several critics have noted, the madman’s symptoms essentially
amount to a protest against the bureaucracy, and his delusions of royalty can
be seen as an attempted escape from the social position he occupies as a
copy clerk of middling rank.49 It has also been pointed out that Poprishchin
is an avid reader of The Northern Bee and learns from its pages about the
ongoing disputes over the Spanish throne.50 Yet existing critical appraisals
may still benefit from a consideration of how French discourse on patho-
logical ambition and the periodicals that transmitted it to Russia helped to
shape Gogol’s tale of social failure and imaginative triumph. The cultural
and ideological heterogeneity of the periodicals’ representations of ambition
underlies Gogol’s treatment of this passion as in and out of place in post-
Decembrist Russia.
The French understanding of pathological ambition as a delusion of
royal authority reached Gogol indirectly through Bulgarin’s “Three Pages.”
Following Bulgarin’s example, Gogol combines this notion with the Russian
understanding of chestoliubie as an excessive desire for promotion in the
civil service. Yet Gogol also departs from the precedent set by Bulgarin and
the French writers of mad ambition tales before him: unlike these authors,
Gogol does not treat pathological ambition as an exotic phenomenon that
readers can view with epistemological and emotional detachment. With the
exception of his story’s title, Gogol eliminates the narrative perspective of a
doctor or some other presumably sane observer. Instead, he presents the text
as the “notes” of the ambitious madman himself, thereby bringing readers
into an intimate relation with the character who experiences ambition first-
hand. Unlike the “three pages” from the madman’s diary in Bulgarin’s story,
the “notes” (zapiski) of Gogol’s narrator offer readers neither a remedy for
excessive ambition nor any easily discernable answer as to how to appraise
it. Furthermore, whereas the overly ambitious characters in “The Mad Man
of Ambition,” “Madhouse at Charenton,” and “Three Pages” have already
been confined in mental asylums or become otherwise isolated from society
before these stories begin, Gogol’s “Diary” follows its ambitious protagonist
around Petersburg on a narrative journey that ends with his confinement.
In this way, Gogol combines the diagnosis of pathological obsession with
rank found in “Three Pages” with the open-ended temporality of the Spanish
insurrection covered by The Northern Bee. What results is a profoundly am-
bivalent account of ambition that shows it to be neither entirely normal nor
clearly pathological— neither a feeling readers can comfortably entertain,
nor a psychological disorder from which they can easily distance themselves.
At the beginning of “The Diary,” Poprishchin states his ambitions and

41
 Chapter One

shows he is still hoping for their realization. His social ambitions are inextri-
cably linked to erotic desire: he explains that his wish to get to close to his
director’s daughter, Sophie, motivates his desire for promotion. Interestingly,
Poprishchin internalizes the perspective of others who would deem these
goals unreasonable. At one point, he quotes his section chief, who chastised
him for daring to think he might be a suitable beau for Sophie: “You’re dan-
gling after the director’s daughter! Well, take a look at yourself, only think,
what are you? You’re a zero, nothing more. You haven’t got a kopeck to your
name” (3:161; 283).51 The ostensibly monologic form of the diary becomes
increasingly dialogic as Poprishchin protests the section chief’s appraisal of
his ambition: “I’m a nobleman. So I, too, can earn rank. I’m only forty-two—
the age at which service just seriously begins. Wait, friend! we, too, will be-
come a colonel and, God willing, maybe something even higher.  .  .  . No
income, that’s the trouble” (3:161; 283). Here, Poprishchin’s attempt at self-
justification turns into an affirmation of the other man’s view, as he acknowl-
edges the insurmountable obstacles he faces. Without money, he cannot live
the lifestyle appropriate to those who might be promoted, but without get-
ting promoted, he will never have that money. While Poprishchin’s ambition
is very much alive, motivating him and driving the plot of Gogol’s story, its
object is shown to be unreachable from the start.
Aside from the title of the story, the earliest and clearest evidence that
Poprishchin’s ambition is a form of insanity, and that the narrative journey
it propels will not lead to ambition’s realization, comes near the beginning
when Poprishchin’s belief that dogs can speak and write Russian leads him to
follow one around town. The dog in question belongs to Sophie, and Poprish-
chin’s interest in the little canine stems from his wild idea that she is carrying
on an epistolary correspondence with another dog, and that their letters may
give him clues about how to get close to his beloved. Poprishchin’s encounter
with speaking and writing dogs reveals the complexity of Gogol’s treatment
of ambition. In a line that was cut by the censors in the 1835 Arabesques
text of “The Diary” but was restored according to the manuscript by later
editors, Poprishchin voices his initial unwillingness to believe that dogs can
write: “Never yet in my life have I heard of a dog being able to write. Only
a gentleman can write correctly. Of course, there are sometimes merchants’
clerks and even certain serfs who can write a bit; but their writing is mostly
mechanical— no commas, no periods, no style” (3:159; 281).52 On the one
hand, this passage presents Poprishchin’s thought process as comically delu-
sional: it shows him conflating the biological difference between humans and
dogs and the social distinction between nobles and non-nobles, and reveals
his own mechanical reduction of style to punctuation: “no commas, no pe-
riods.” On the other hand, the passage threatens the nobility’s monopoly on
culture by suggesting that style, like literacy, can be learned. What attitude,

42
 Mad Ambition

then, do Gogol’s words convey? Do they mock the ambitious madman, the
Russian social hierarchy, or both?
While striking this passage for its implicit attack on the nobility, the
censors allowed other, seemingly more seditious sections of the story to be
printed, as when Poprishchin learns that Sophie is to marry a kammerjunker
and launches a tirade against the Table of Ranks: “So what if he’s a kammer-
junker. It’s nothing more than a dignity; it’s not anything visible that you can
take in your hands. . . . Several times already I’ve tried to figure out where all
these differences come from. What makes me a titular councillor, and why
on earth am I a titular councillor? Maybe I’m some sort of count or general
and only seem to be a titular councillor? Maybe I myself don’t know who I
am” (3:168; 292). Such a bold questioning of the social order during an era
of strict government censorship was only possible when couched in pathol-
ogy. By this point in the story, Poprishchin has already revealed his insanity
by expressing his belief that dogs can speak and write. The incoherence of
his ideas is further confirmed by the way he mistakes social classifications for
inherent properties even as he objects to their being treated as such: coun-
tering his own argument that rank is superficial rather than innate, he claims
he might unknowingly— and inherently— be a count or general.
Neutralizing Poprishchin’s critique of social stratification by present-
ing it as both pathological and hypocritical, Gogol was able to incorporate
material from a comedy he began but abandoned in 1833: The Order of St.
Vladimir, Third Class (Vladimir tret’ei stepeni). From the fragments that
remain of this comedy and accounts by Gogol’s contemporaries, it is clear
that The Order of St. Vladimir would have been a work in the mad ambi-
tion tradition. It tells of a high-ranking civil servant who so fervently desires
to receive the “order” mentioned in the title that he finally loses his mind,
imagining that he himself is that very order.53 In a letter to Pogodin in Feb-
ruary 1833, Gogol writes that he is utterly engrossed in— even a little mad
about— this comedy, but that he has already abandoned it because it could
never be passed by the censors: “I’ve lost my head over a comedy. . . . The
Order of St. Vladimir, Third Class— and how much malice, laughter and pi-
quancy! . . But suddenly I stopped, seeing that my pen was hitting up against
such places as the censors would in no way allow.”54 Indeed, the strict cen-
sorship of the time— evidenced by the many cuts made to the text of “The
Diary of a Madman”— would not likely have permitted publication of a work
suggesting that pathological ambition, rather than patriotic zeal, might be
motivating the service of high-ranking members of society.
Whereas Poprishchin has the modest rank of titular councilor, “The
Diary” does include a high-ranking man who dreams of receiving a decora-
tion, an echo of the principal character from The Order of St. Vladimir. This
figure is Poprishchin’s director and Sophie’s father. When Poprishchin inter-

43
 Chapter One

cepts (or believes he intercepts) the letters of Sophie’s dog, Medji, he learns
that the director has been waiting impatiently for a decoration, muttering to
himself and the dog repeatedly, “Will I get it or won’t I?” (3:165; 288). When
the director finally does receive the decoration, he not only shows it off to
his friends and acquaintances, but holds it up to Medji for her admiration.
Poprishchin quotes Medji’s account of the ribbon and responds to it in the
following way:

“I saw some little ribbon. I sniffed it but found decidedly no aroma; finally I
licked it on the sly: it was a bit salty.”
Hm! This little dog seems to me to be much too  .  .  . she ought to be
whipped! Ah! So he’s an ambitious man [tak on chestoliubets]. That must be
taken into consideration. (3:165; 288)55

Poprishchin’s response, which begins with the exclamation “Hm!,” reveals his
contradictory understanding of ambition. His rejection of Medji’s remarks
as inappropriate to her low station suggests his commitment to the status
quo: he believes the little dog should know and stay in her place.56 Yet even
as he identifies his director as an “ambitious man,” by suggesting the direc-
tor’s ambition “must be taken into account,” Poprishchin alludes to his own
ambitious plot to use that man to elevate himself in society. What is more,
Gogol uses the device of the dog’s letter to obfuscate his own attitude toward
ambition: even as Medji’s lack of respect for the decoration effectively be-
littles the director, Poprishchin’s fantasy of the dog’s letter-writing subjects
him to ridicule as well. Gogol makes it impossible for readers to separate the
ambitious from the unambitious and the judgment of ambition from ambi-
tion itself.
In another excursus on the desire for social elevation, Poprishchin of-
fers a pseudo-clinical explanation of the cause of pathological ambition that
would seem to parody the doctor-narrator’s assessment of the disorder in
Bulgarin’s “Three Pages from a Madhouse”: “It’s all ambition [chestoliubie],
and ambition is caused by a little blister under the tongue with a little worm
in it the size of a pinhead, and it’s all the doing of some barber who lives in
Gorokhovaya Street” (3:172; 295– 96). Poprishchin’s absurd diagnosis echoes
the image of the parasitic “worm” in “Three Pages.” But whereas Bulgarin
presents his narrator’s etiology of mad ambition as a serious clinical discus-
sion, Gogol presents the diagnosis as a symptom of the disease. Bulgarin’s
“Three Pages” would have showed Gogol he could publish a story about am-
bition, and could even include some of the ideas from his abandoned com-
edy The Order of St. Vladimir, as long as he ascribed its manifestation— and
any social critique it might entail— to a low-ranking, clinically insane char-

44
 Mad Ambition

acter. It is probable that Gogol’s reading of Bulgarin’s story and the contents
of the Northern Bee for the year 1834 were at least partially responsible for
his decision to alter his plan for “The Diary of a Madman”— the original
title of which was to be “Notes of a Mad Musician” (“Zapiski sumasshed-
shego muzykanta”).57 Shifting the focus of his story away from the theme of
mad artistic genius found in the Hoffmannesque tradition of kunstlernovel-
len, which was popularized in Russia by Vladimir Odoevskii, Gogol com-
posed “The Diary of a Madman” as if in response to “Three Pages” and The
Northern Bee.
Gogol not only makes his borrowing from Bulgarin’s newspaper ex-
plicit, but also implicates the newspaper in Poprishchin’s insanity. The hero
is unable to clarify the pertinence of what he reads in “the papers” to his own
life. For instance, although Poprishchin is initially alarmed to hear two dogs
speaking Russian, he accepts this odd occurrence because he recalls reading
about similar cases: “Actually, there have already been many such examples
in the world. . . . I also read in the papers about two cows that came to a
grocer’s and asked for a pound of tea” (3:159; 281). Elsewhere, Poprishchin
mentions The Northern Bee by name and alludes to the jumbled mixture
therein of material about France and Russia: “I read the little Bee [Pchelku].
What fools these Frenchmen are! So, what is it they want? By God, I’d take
the lot of them and give them a good birching! I also read a very pleasant
portrayal of a ball there, described by a Kursk landowner. Kursk landown-
ers are good writers” (3:160; 282). Here, Poprishchin demonstrates both the
social conservatism and the middlebrow literary taste that make him an ideal
reader of The Northern Bee: he attacks the democratizing French and deems
Russian landowners from Kursk— certainly not a notable center of Russian
literary production— to be good writers. Even more importantly, by shift-
ing rapidly from France to provincial Russia, Poprishchin shows how news-
papers like The Northern Bee could erase the imaginative borders between
radically disparate spatial and historical contexts, opening the way for Rus-
sian readers to feel as though foreign news and literature might relate closely
to their own lives.
The imaginative leap that newspaper reading facilitates is precisely
what leads to Poprishchin’s ambitious delusion that he is not a titular coun-
cilor but rather the king of Spain. One morning, Poprishchin reads that
Spain is without a king:

I spent the whole morning today reading the newspapers. There are strange
doings in Spain. I couldn’t even make them out properly. They write that the
throne is vacant and that the officials are in a difficult position about the se-
lection of an heir, which is causing disturbances. This seems terribly strange

45
 Chapter One

to me. How can a throne be vacant? They say some doña should ascend the
throne. A doña cannot ascend the throne. Simply cannot. There should be a
king on the throne. . . . A state cannot be without a king. There is a king, only
he’s somewhere unknown. (3:169; 293)

Poprishchin’s discussion of the succession crisis in Spain strongly suggests

that he is reading The Northern Bee, which covered that story in the issues
that included Bulgarin’s “Three Pages.” While Poprishchin’s belief in patri-
lineal succession demonstrates a conservative ideological orientation not un-
like that underlying Bulgarin’s own writings, the madman’s reaction to Span-
ish events highlights the essential instability of post-Napoleonic Europe that
confronted readers of The Northern Bee. In Gogol’s “Diary,” this particular
news story leads Poprishchin to conclude that he too, could be a monarch.
Bombarded with foreign news and unable to distinguish between European
and Russian places, times, and historical personages, Poprishchin conflates
his readings with his own life.
On a day he lists as “Year 2000 April 43rd” (God 2000 aprelia 43 chisla),
Poprishchin places himself in a position analogous to the insurrectionary
Carlos and writes: “This day— is a day of the greatest solemnity! Spain has a
king. He has been found. I am that king” (3:170; 294). Here, Poprishchin’s
mental processes are shaped by the semiofficial rhetoric of political report-
age and the spatiotemporal logic of the newspaper, which brings together
stories rooted in diverse places and times, uniting them in the space of the
daily page.58 The newspaper makes Poprishchin imagine he can be like a
reporter who announces an official government celebration, like Carlos, who
recently declared himself king of Spain, and like a European in the tradi-
tion of Napoleon, whose humble social position did not preclude a meteoric
rise to power. Following the newspaper’s example in presenting conflicting
perspectives on ambition, Poprishchin thinks he can be all these things at
once, even if they are at odds with one another: in his mind the principle of
inherited power can be reconciled with its random usurpation.
As a Russian reader struggling to understand the “strange affairs”
going on abroad, and at times conflating those affairs with his own, Poprish-
chin speaks not only for readers puzzled by the piecemeal importation of
foreign news to Russia in the early nineteenth century, but for Russian litera-
ture itself in this period. The mad confusion about ambition in Poprishchin’s
mind points to the broader mixture of Russian and European literary and
cultural models presented in the periodicals. Gogol makes productive use of
this mixture, turning it into both the subject and the substance of his story.
Borrowing the central theme of Bulgarin’s “Three Pages,” he simultaneously
parodies the moralism of that work, mocks low- as well as high-ranking offi-

46
 Mad Ambition

cials for their ambition, questions the social order, and undercuts that cri-
tique by presenting it as mad fantasy. The point here is not that Gogol uses
madness to obscure what is really a satirical condemnation of Bulgarin, am-
bition, or Russian society, but rather that he highlights the plurality of con-
temporary Russian and foreign discourses on ambition— discourses that not
only contradicted one another, but which were in some cases as internally
inconsistent as Gogol’s own story.
One of the most striking things about Gogol’s dialogic treatment of
ambition is that he achieves that treatment in an ostensibly monologic form:
a first-person narration. The presence of dissonant voices speaking in unison
gives the “Diary” its strangely ambivalent tone, leaving readers unsure as
to how they are meant to feel about Poprishchin and his ambition. In Vis-
sarion Belinsky’s formulation, “you [i.e., the reader] are still laughing at the
simpleton, but already your laughter is turning to bitterness; this is laughter
at a madman, whose delusion both amuses and awakens sympathy.”59 Even
as Poprishchin’s outrageous delusions invite readers to laugh at him, his first-
person account delivers a critique of rigid social hierarchies that cannot be
laughed away. Because Gogol does not grant narrative authority to anyone
other than Poprishchin, the questions the hero poses about the legitimacy of
the Table of Ranks (“Why do they make all these distinctions?” and “Why
am I a titular councillor?”) are left open. Moreover, once Poprishchin has
completely lost his mind, imagining that the mental institution where he has
been locked up is the Spanish court, the harsh physical treatment he receives
for his ambition (beatings and cold baths) and the despair he expresses make
this comic story increasingly unsettling (3:175; 299).
In the final paragraph, Gogol presents readers with a musical image
that aptly conveys the ambivalent tone of his text and the difficulty readers
face in interpreting the ambition it represents. Crying out desperately to be
freed from the asylum and then imagining that he has actually escaped, Po-
prishchin speaks of the terrain he believes he is covering in a speeding troika:
“Here is the sky billowing before me; a little star shines in the distance; a for-
est races by with dark trees and a crescent moon; blue mist spreads under my
feet; a string twangs [struna zvenit] in the mist; on one side the sea, on the
other Italy; and there I see some Russian huts. Is that my house blue in the
distance?” (3:176; 300). Using European social and geographic designations
(Spanish king, Italian landscape) to reimagine himself and his surroundings,
Poprishchin gives free rein to the ambitions that have been so resolutely
blocked in St. Petersburg. Seeking a place for himself somewhere between
Europe and Russia, however, Poprishchin cannot tell if he has found one:
“Is that my house?” he asks. Similar questions remain for readers: What is
ambition’s rightful place— inside or outside of the asylum, in Europe or in

47
 Chapter One

Russia? Who is entitled to express it, and where exactly might it lead? Gogol
does not answer these questions but registers them with the sound of the
string in the mist— a strange twang of cultural discord.

TH E EM BA R R A S S M ENT O F A M B I TI ON: D OSTOEVSKY’ S

THE D O UB L E

Dostoevsky raises the dissonance between competing understandings of

ambition to an even more discomfiting pitch in his fantastic doppelgänger
novella, The Double. Like “The Diary of a Madman,” The Double retains
the originally French clinical treatment of ambition as a cause of madness
while also deploying this passion as a motor of plot and a generator of desire.
The hero of the work is Iakov Petrovich Goliadkin, a middle-aged titular
councilor who follows Poprishchin’s precedent in chasing unfounded dreams
of promotion and romance around the capital until he is forcibly confined.
Developing Gogol’s association of ambition with an overactive imagination,
Dostoevsky portrays it as a fantastical force conjuring multiple versions of
the self.
The Double is the first major Russian work to focus on ambitsiia, rather
than chestoliubie, as a desire for social elevation. Critics have already noted
the fascination ambitsiia held for the young Dostoevsky. Indeed, Iurii Mann
has argued that Dostoevsky’s focus on this subject is what most distinguishes
his early works from previous writings of the Natural School.60 Discussing
Dostoevsky’s first published work, Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846), Mann
rightly asserts that the ambitsiia so cherished by the impoverished protago-
nist, Makar Devushkin, is a feeling of “pride” (samoliubie)— not the sinful
form of pride known as gordost’, but rather an “awareness and affirmation
of his own human ‘dignity.’” While noting that Dostoevsky’s presentation of
Devushkin as a man with ambitsiia is part of what makes the author’s treat-
ment of the poor democratic, Mann also highlights Dostoevsky’s paradoxical
treatment of this feeling: for in fact, Devushkin’s ambitsiia is a sign of his
own conservatism, as he “relies on the official categories of the law and the
state for his idea of himself.”61 In my view, this paradox derives from ambit-
siia’s class background: as a word that in the early nineteenth century desig-
nated a feeling of specifically noble pride, ambitsiia was conservative at its
core. Only by attaining nobility through service to the state was Devushkin
able to claim this feeling for himself. Unlike French ambition, that force of
desire that spurs Balzac’s and Stendhal’s heroes to elevate themselves, De-
vushkin’s ambitsiia is a feeling of self-worth he is in danger of losing when he
falls into poverty and disgrace.
Ambitsiia takes on new significance in The Double, as Dostoevsky fo-

48
 Mad Ambition

cuses precisely on the discrepancy between the Russian ambitsiia he fea-

tured in Poor Folk and the ambition on display in the French novels he was
reading at the time. As an avid reader (and one-time translator) of Balzac,
Dostoevsky was surely familiar with the contemporary French meaning of
ambition, which exerts considerable pressure on ambitsiia in The Double.62
In fact, I suggest that The Double may be productively read not only as an
homage to Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman” and Dead Souls, but also as
an inversion of Balzac’s Lost Illusions. This inversion is most perceptible in
Dostoevsky’s description of Goliadkin as a “rag with ambitsiia” (vetoshka . . .
s ambitsiei [1:168; 86]).63 While in Lost Illusions, the ambitious young hero
Lucien is determined not to become a “social rag” (un haillon social), by
which he means an old man “without position or reputation,” the middle-
aged Goliadkin is precisely such a man.64 Lucien experiences a brief rise in
society only to fall again, approximating the career of Napoleon as French
novelistic ambitieux from this period frequently do. For his part, Goliadkin
enjoys no temporary elevation but falls further with every step he takes. By
the end of the novel he has sunk so low in his own and others’ estimation
of him that he concedes he would even “allow himself to be dirtied like an
old rag for wiping muddy boots” (1:168; 85). And yet, Dostoevsky’s narrator
adds, as though relating the perspective of Goliadkin himself, even if Goliad-
kin would allow himself to be used as a rag, he would nonetheless be “a rag
with ambitsiia, . . . a rag with animation and feelings— unrequited ambitsiia
and unrequited feelings, hidden deep within the dirty folds of this rag, but
feelings all the same” (1:168; 86).65
Because of its multiple contemporary meanings as noble pride, haugh-
tiness, or, less commonly, a desire for social elevation, ambitsiia poses sig-
nificant difficulty for anyone wishing to translate The Double into English.
In accordance with the polyvalence of the word, in their translation of The
Double, Pevear and Volokhonsky render ambitsiia at times as “ambition”
and at other times as “pride” or “vanity.” For instance, they translate “ve-
toshka . . . s ambitsiei” as “rag with ambition,” and yet they use “vanity” when
Goliadkin chastises himself for his own ambitsiia: “Fool that I am, galloping
away with my vanity! There’s where I got with my vanity! That’s vanity for
you, you scoundrel, that’s vanity!” (Rasskakalsia, duralei, ia s ambitsiei! Tuda
zhe polez za ambitsiei! Vot tebe i ambitsiia, podlets ty etakoi, vot i ambitsiia!
[1:178; 99]). Given the inference of personal humiliation in the comparison
of Goliadkin to a boot-rag with ambitsiia, and that of movement in his dis-
cussion of “galloping away” with ambitsiia, it would seem “pride” might be a
more apt translation in the first instance, and “ambition” in the second. But
what matters most is that throughout The Double, Dostoevsky actually pits
these various meanings of ambitsiia against each other.
Opposing Goliadkin’s desire for elevation to his attempts to maintain

49
 Chapter One

self-esteem in a society that disparages social striving, The Double explores

how ambitsiia feels to the internally conflicted hero who both prizes and
denies it. Whereas Goliadkin frequently admits that he has ambitsiia in the
sense of a feeling of self-worth, he routinely disavows his desire to rise up.
Both his ambition to rise, which involves the imaginary projection of a new
and different future self, and his denial of that ambition, which involves his
attempt to distance himself from the person he really is, are implicated in
the appearance of the double— Goliadkin’s less abashedly, and more suc-
cessfully, ambitious alter ego. The displacement of Goliadkin’s ambition onto
his double produces two simultaneous story lines: one of the double’s social
success, and the other of Goliadkin’s ruin. Whereas the double supplants
Goliadkin at work and is promoted in the office, by the end of the novel Go-
liadkin has lost his job, his servant, and even his home.
In addition to bifurcating the narrative, Goliadkin’s ambition propels
his frenetic, abortive, zigzag movements around St. Petersburg.66 For in-
stance, at the start of the novel, Goliadkin’s journey to a high-society ball
to which he has not been invited dramatizes his frustrated desire to attain a
higher social position. When he reaches the house, he walks up the stairs, is
refused entrance by the servant, walks back down, then back up a moment
later, and back down after the door has been slammed in his face. Finally,
he steals into the house by a back entrance, crouching and creeping his way
up the servants’ staircase and breaking into the party, only to be physically
thrown out onto the street. It is soon after this point that the double appears
and begins his own rise to higher social standing, and Goliadkin’s move-
ments, in turn, grow increasingly frantic as he chases this phantom represen-
tative of the ideal of upward social mobility around the capital.
The multi-linear, multidirectional plot that results from the blockage
of Goliadkin’s ambition consists of a series of awkward faux pas, and this,
in turn, contributes to the markedly embarrassing narrative tonality of The
Double. Sianne Ngai’s formulation of “feeling-tone” as “a literary text’s affec-
tive bearing, orientation, or ‘set toward’ its audience and world” is especially
illuminating for a reading of The Double because Goliadkin’s chief ambition
is to join the society of “good tone” (khoroshego tona [1:114– 15; 10– 11]).67
As a translation of the French bon ton, the “good tone” Goliadkin longs to
achieve is a foreign “affective bearing,” and his unconvincing pretensions to
it strain the “feeling-tone” of the text.
In Lost Illusions, Balzac describes the behavioral tone of high society
as “a harmonious whole, in which everything is so subtly blended that noth-
ing jars,” and in which a “single false note is, as in music, a negation of Art
itself.”68 Whereas the young Lucien initially makes blunders but eventually
proves capable of aestheticizing his behavior in accordance with the laws of
bon ton, Goliadkin is already past the learning stage, and while he tries des-

50
 Mad Ambition

perately to attain bon ton, he fails disastrously, striking one false note after
another. These failures set him apart not only from ambitieux like Lucien,
but from superfluous men like Eugene Onegin in Pushkin’s novel of that
name: unlike Pushkin’s cultivated hero, who has mastered the “high tone” of
society to such an extent that he can, along with Pushkin’s narrator, consider
it a “bore” (“Dovol’no skuchen vyshii ton”), Goliadkin is far too awkward to
be bored (6:22; 21).69
In The Double, the word “ton” appears about twenty-five times, most
often with the meaning of a style of life or behavior. Goliadkin is extremely
concerned— even obsessed— with achieving good tone. This concern with
tone begins to seem especially hysterical, and the text begins to seem espe-
cially meta-tonal, when one listens to Goliadkin stammering out the name of
his immediate supervisor, Anton Antonovich: “‘I thank God, Anton Antonov-
ich,’ Mr. Goliadkin said, faltering, ‘I’m perfectly well, Anton Antonovich; I’m
all right now, Anton Antonovich,’ he added hesitantly, still not quite trusting
the oft-mentioned Anton Antonovich” (1:147– 48; 56). If one counts all the
instances in which Goliadkin and the narrator repeat this man’s name, the
number of times ton appears in the text soars to around 200, making tone—
that elusive object of Goliadkin’s ambitions— resound through the novel like
a social death knell.
An article said to be a translation from French and published in The
Moscow Telegraph in 1825 gives a good indication of how impossible it
would be for Goliadkin to realize his ambition to achieve good tone. En-
titled “About High Society and Good Tone,” this article states that the most
important law of good tone is “To know one’s place in high society, to occupy
it perfectly, and not to cross over the boundaries even by a step . . . to put
oneself on an equal footing with others in the same place that you have been
assigned.”70 If good tone entails knowing one’s place and not moving out of it
“even by a step,” then ambition, which propels movement out of one’s place,
is decidedly bad tone. Caught between the paradoxical ambition to elevate
himself to the society of bon ton and the impropriety of that ambition, Goli-
adkin finds himself continuously out of place.
In his classic essay “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” the so-
ciologist Erving Goffman describes the causes of embarrassment in a man-
ner particularly well suited to capturing the predicament in which Goliadkin
finds himself in The Double.71 Goffman writes: “Everyday occasions of em-
barrassment arise when the self projected is somehow confronted with an-
other self which, though valid in other contexts, cannot be here sustained in
harmony with the first.”72 For Goffman as well as for Dostoevsky, embarrass-
ment is a tonal dissonance produced by social interactions in a hierarchically
stratified society: a key reason people project multiple selves is that they are
expected to behave differently with those in higher or lower social positions.

51
 Chapter One

Goffman’s theory of embarrassment can help us to account for the re-

lationship between ambition and the peculiar affective register, or literary
tone, of The Double. Dostoevsky is not only interested in where ambition
leads the hero; he also explores how embarrassing ambition can be. When
the mortified Goliadkin recalls having been ejected from Klara Olsufyevna’s
party and feels “one little worm . . . gnawing at his heart,” readers familiar
with the worm of ambition in Bulgarin’s and Gogol’s tales may recognize that
the emphasis has shifted here from the diagnosis (parodic or otherwise) of a
pathological desire to that desire’s damaging effects on personal pride (1:157;
69). Moreover, even without identifying with Goliadkin or knowing what
attitude to take in relation to his ambition, readers of The Double can experi-
ence something like the hero’s discomfort. This is because embarrassment is
extremely contagious. As Goffman notes, when it comes to embarrassment,
“ego boundaries seem especially weak.”73 As embarrassment is apt to spread,
it not only permeates the text, but also exceeds the textual boundaries in the
form of a feeling-tone that communicates itself to readers. And yet, if the
embarrassing social tone of Goliadkin’s behavior results from the disharmony
of his social selves in a highly stratified society and the thwarting of his inap-
propriate ambition, the embarrassing literary tone of The Double also results
from the strange and disorienting encounter between French ambition and
Russian ambitsiia.

This chapter has offered multiple complementary explanations for why ambi-
tion appears so persistently out of place in early nineteenth-century Russian
literature. At a time when ambition came to be seen as a defining emotional
experience of post-Napoleonic Europe, the spread of contagious French lit-
erary and clinical discourses to Russia impelled writers there to craft tales of
ambition that raise seemingly unanswerable questions about Russian social
organization and social mobility. Chief among these questions was whether
the desire for social elevation should be seen as normal, as it was increas-
ingly coming to be seen in post-Napoleonic Europe. Even as the Table of
Ranks was making social mobility theoretically possible for rising numbers
of Russian men, limitations placed on personal autonomy in an autocratic
state, cultural taboos against individualism or the pursuit of economic gain,
and even the Russian language itself— with its absence of a word that might
signify a legitimate desire for elevation— worked against the normalization
of ambition in Russia.
When Bulgarin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky followed the French prece-
dent of treating ambition as a curious form of madness, the exotic quality of
ambition was enhanced in their writings by the grafting of a European form
of madness onto a Russian milieu. This new milieu was marked by the recent
failure of the Decembrists’ reformist ambitions, on the one hand, and by the

52
 Mad Ambition

active circulation of contradictory assessments of social ambition in the peri-

odical press, on the other. Even the official government and semiofficial pro-
government periodicals simultaneously incited and censured ambition. Thus
the French discursive paradigm of pathological ambition remained produc-
tive in Russian literature after French writers like Balzac and Stendhal had
begun moving away from it. Indeed, the genealogy of mad ambition under-
taken in this chapter tells but the beginning of a story of transnational cul-
tural exchange in which the dynamic force of this French passion helped
propel the development of Russian prose. The story continues with a myste-
rious guest mistaken for Napoleon in chapter 2.

53
 Figure 5. Caricature of Nikolai Gogol in the home of Zinaida Volkonskaya in
Rome. Attributed to Fedor Bruni. Late 1830s. The girl is Volkonskaya’s daughter.
Reproduced from André Trofimoff, La Princesse Zénaïde Wolkonsky (Rome:
Staderini, 1966).
 Chapter Two

Gogol’s Gift

However dumb is a turkey cock; however

dumb is a Russian, having gone abroad and
regretting that with him there is no serf;
however dumb are a tail-coat and a full-dress
uniform— the two dumbest creations of the
nineteenth-century, still, all of them together
are hardly dumber than my head. I can dig
absolutely nothing out of it for you, Mar’ia
Aleksandrovna! The rot and rubbish in it are
such as in a Russian provincial capital, and it
is muddy as in the host’s room the day after
an evening party given by him, with which he
himself was not satisfied, at which the guests
railed to their satisfaction, and after which
there remained for him only broken china,
dirtiness on the floor, and the sleepy mugs of
his lackeys.
— Gogol, album entry

O N A N U N D AT E D P A G E in a lady’s album, Nikolai

Gogol compares his own head to a dirty room in which an unsuccessful party
took place the previous night. The owner of the album was Mar’ia Vlasova,
whose younger sister, Zinaida Volkonskaya, was among the most celebrated
Russian hostesses of the nineteenth century. Volkonskaya gained a reputa-
tion for the literary salon she hosted in Moscow in the late 1820s and contin-
ued to welcome members of the Russian cultural elite to her home after she
moved to Rome in the 1830s. Gogol was a frequent visitor to Volkonskaya’s
villa during the years he spent living and writing the first volume of Dead
Souls in Italy. Vlasova, who managed the house and oversaw the dinners, was
on friendly terms with him and apparently asked him at some point to write
in her album.1 Repaying her kindness with an elaborate refusal, the habitual
guest adopted the pose of a lousy host with nothing left to offer.
At one time, a humorous sketch attributed to Fedor Bruni could be

55
 Chapter Two

found on another of the album’s pages. (See figure 5.) The sketch offers a
graphic counterpart to Gogol’s album entry: shown here as a brooding guest
with a swollen head, Gogol stares vacantly at (or past) a newspaper, ignoring
a young girl who gazes toward him with interest. The girl is Volkonskaya’s
daughter, whom Gogol was at one point charged with tutoring.2 Gogol’s inat-
tention to her recalls the posture of refusal he so meticulously crafted in Vla-
sova’s album. Staging scenes of writing and reading in which Gogol appears
as a guest unable or unwilling to give back what is expected, these docu-
ments of the author’s life abroad encapsulate the bad hospitality, which, I
argue, structures Dead Souls.
Gogol’s novel takes shape as a string of botched hospitality encoun-
ters. As the ambitious hero, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, travels around the
Russian provinces buying “dead souls” (serfs who have died but are still
counted as living, and hence taxable, property), he moves between inns and
restaurants offering hospitality for hire and the homes of local officials and
landowners. With every threshold Chichikov crosses, he adapts himself to
the unwritten laws of a distinct emotional economy.3 Manipulating the local
terms of trade, the perpetual guest gorges himself at one table after another
and slowly amasses the deeds of serf ownership that grant him the status of
a wealthy host. And yet in every scene of culinary, emotional, and economic
exchange, something does not quite come off: feelings are hurt or appetites
ruined. Even when the characters’ expectations are met, Gogol’s readers are
left unsettled, as a poetics of disgust impedes the narrative flow of social en-
counter, digestive process, and economic advancement.
Dead Souls has long been recognized as a work that testifies to a con-
flict of values in Nicholaevan Russia. For Gogol’s friend and contemporary,
Stepan Shevyrev, the novel pits a new imperative to take against a traditional
imperative to give. In his influential 1842 review of the novel, Shevyrev iden-
tifies the “acquirer” Chichikov as a representative of modern life, noting that
the “passion for acquisition is the overruling passion of our time.” Shevyrev
contrasts this new economic passion to the inborn Russian “trait” that per-
sists in the landowners Chichikov visits: “their hospitality [gostepriimstvo],
that Russian cordiality [radushie] toward guests which lives in them and
holds on as though by national instinct.” And yet despite Shevyrev’s attempt
to oppose them to one another, taking and giving turn out to have something
in common: both are comparable to Gogol’s work on Dead Souls. For as
Shevyrev admits, “Chichikov is distinguished by an extraordinary poetic gift
[poeticheskim darom] in the invention of his means of acquisition.”4 Here,
Shevyrev draws the “poet of his business” in Dead Souls close to the one who
composed it, as character and writer alike transform commercial logic into
poetic material. And while in this sense Gogol resembles his greedy guest, in
another he resembles his generous hosts.
Celebrating the author’s expansive prose style as “hospitable”

56
 Gogol’s Gift

(khlebosol’n[aia], emphasis in the original), Shevyrev imagines Gogol as a

host who gives all he has: “Yes, there is a Russian generosity and largess
[shchedrost’ ili chivost’] verging on profligacy in the fantasy of our poet, a
quality expressed by the old saying: whatever is on the stove is meant for the
table.” As examples of this narrative hospitality, Shevyrev cites the “many
wonderfully complete pictures, brilliant similes, observations, episodes, and
sometimes even lightly but convincingly outlined characters Gogol gives you
just like that, gratis [darit vam Gogol’ tak, prosto, darom], as an addition
to the poem, over and above what necessarily pertains to its content.” In
Shevyrev’s account, this verbal copiousness is delectable: “One could com-
pare Gogol to a wealthy Russian host [khlebosol] who not only lays his abun-
dant table with a two-arshin sterlet, Arkhangelsk veal, and other solid dishes,
but also offers you a multitude of hors d’oeuvres, niblets, dips, and expensive
sauces, which are all additions to the immense feast and are all impercepti-
bly eaten up, even though they may be overshadowed by the main treasures
of generous Russian hospitality [khlebosol’stv(o)].”5
As a conservative nationalist, Shevyrev was keen to read what he con-
sidered the Russian “instinct” of hospitality as ultimately stronger and deeper
than the invading “passion” for acquisition. He is particularly impressed by
the persistence of hospitality in the miserly landowner Plyushkin, who in-
vites Chichikov to his table, however begrudgingly. Gogol’s narrator does
present hospitality as an engrained Russian value that triumphs over Plyush-
kin’s greed, noting that “hospitality is so much the thing with us that even a
niggard cannot transgress its laws” (5:115; 121).6 And yet what Shevyrev fails
to consider is the truly revolting character of Plyushkin’s offering: a crust
of rotten cake and some dusty, bug-ridden liqueur (5:118– 19; 125). In this
scene and elsewhere, Gogol’s narrative hospitality is far less appetizing than
Shevyrev and many subsequent critics would allow.
If modern taking and traditional giving are as distinct as Shevyerov
would maintain, how does Gogol’s prose perform both? How exactly do
the economies of acquisition and hospitality interact in Dead Souls? And
what is the significance of the revulsion Gogol’s gift so frequently provokes?
Scholars who have illuminated Chichikov’s acquisitive scam as a response to
the spread of commerce and the transformation of values in agrarian Russia
leave room for greater consideration of the value of hospitality in Gogol’s
narrative economy.7 Indeed, despite its centrality in the author’s life and
works, hospitality has received surprisingly little attention in Gogol scholar-
ship. The meals characters offer one another throughout Dead Souls and
the figurative one Gogol offers readers have generally been viewed through
the lens of gastronomy rather than that of hospitality or the gift.8 Attention
to the dynamics of social and biological reciprocity that Gogol mobilizes in
his food scenes reveals both the economic orientation and the nastier under-
side of his narrative “feasts.”

57
 Chapter Two

Extending the existing critical literature on commercialization and

gastronomy in Dead Souls, this chapter brings the economics of taking and
giving back into the close proximity in which we find them in Gogol’s novel.
After a brief consideration of hospitality’s place in the history and theory of
the gift, I consider its centrality in early and mid-nineteenth-century Russian
literary explorations of national identity and serfdom. Returning to Gogol, I
note the author’s reliance on hospitality and the related social institution of
patronage to advance his career, and I identify three distinct affective modes
hospitality generates in his works: the uncanny and nostalgia in his Ukrainian
tales, and disgust in Dead Souls. I read the latter novel as the culmination of
Gogol’s fascination with exchanges at once economic and affective, and show
that while at first glance he may appear to oppose commercial ambition and
hospitality as obeying distinct logics of “interest” and “feeling,” he in fact
confronts readers with their inseparability.
In his pursuit of dead souls, Chichikov takes advantage of the noble
hospitality that both depends upon and obscures the exploitation of peasant
labor. His desire for deeds attached to bodies in name only strikes his hosts
as strange, yet these hosts prove ready to accommodate him. It is only when
the officials who have ratified Chichikov’s falsified papers begin to fear they
may come under suspicion of the higher authorities that they reject him as
a crook and a foreigner. Based on his manipulation of paper signs of value,
some judge him a thief, a forger, or even “Napoleon in disguise.” This latter
suggestion hinges not only on Napoleon Bonaparte’s meteoric rise to infamy
but also on his practice of counterfeiting: during his invasion of Russia, his
army circulated thousands of false assignatsii (Russian banknotes). Render-
ing Chichikov’s ambition all the more exotic, the Napoleonic accusation
raises the specter of the Antichrist, a figure intimately associated with the
French emperor in the officials’ minds (5:184– 97; 195– 210).
One of the officials approaches the Chichikov question from quite an-
other angle: apparently inspired by Chichikov’s pursuit of gifts (food, shel-
ter, souls at a friendly discount), the postmaster posits that he may be one
Captain Kopeikin, a maimed veteran of the war against Napoleon who was
refused the Russian sovereign’s charity and turned to a life of brigandage
(5:190– 96; 203– 8). The other officials dismiss this outlandish theory be-
cause Chichikov does not fit the one-armed, one-legged Kopeikin’s physical
profile, but “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” contains a kernel of meaning I
wish to nurture here. Picking up where the postmaster leaves off, this chap-
ter develops his portrait of Chichikov as a seeker of state gifts. Chichikov’s
commercial ambition may be Napoleonic and demonic, but it relies on the
generosity of Russian serfdom, an institution that was founded on the sover-
eign’s gifts of land and serfs to the gentry, and which fostered the culture of
noble hospitality that Chichikov exploits.9

58
 Gogol’s Gift

The interdependence of taking and giving in Dead Souls can be seen

most clearly in the only explanation the narrator ever gives of Chichikov’s
actions:

It would be most correct to call him an owner, an acquirer [khoziain, prio-

bretatel’]. Acquisition is to blame for everything; because of it things have
been done which the world dubs not quite clean. True, there is something re-
pulsive in such a character, and the same reader who on his journey through
life would make friends with such a person, welcome him at his table [budet
vodit’ s nim khleb-sol’], and pass the time pleasantly, will look askance at him
once he becomes the hero of a drama or a poem. But he is wise who does
not scorn any character, but, fixing a piercing eye on him, searches out his
primary causes. Everything transforms quickly in man; before you can turn
around, a horrible worm has grown inside him, despotically drawing all life’s
juices to itself. (5:232; 247)

In this passage, the “worm” of ambition we met in Bulgarin’s and Gogol’s sto-
ries in chapter 1 reemerges as a worm of acquisition. Chichikov is ambitious,
to be sure, for he wishes to obtain wealth and status he does not initially have,
but neither the narrator nor the characters use chestoliubie or ambitsiia, the
closest Russian equivalents to “ambition,” to describe him.10 As chapter 1 has
shown, the early nineteenth-century meanings of these words had connota-
tions of noble honor and pride that were at odds with the culturally denigrated
acquisitive impulse. To perform nobility in this period was to spend money
freely, not to save it— to be open and generous, not calculating or stingy. As
Gogol’s narrator puts, acquisition’s reputation was “not quite clean.” Figuring
the national economy as a physiological one, Gogol presents ambition as an
acquisitive parasite nesting in the belly and demanding continuous feedings.
The narrator maintains that although such a character as Chichikov
may strike the reader as an inappropriate hero of a novel, the reader would
“welcome him at his table.” To welcome is to take in, feed, and so give life to
the other. It is also to reconstitute oneself in the exchange. In Russian, the
phrase Gogol uses to describe this process of welcome is marked with the
language of reciprocal feeding: “vodit’ s nim khleb-sol’” (to exchange bread
and salt with him) is a figure of speech that conveys the sense of maintaining
friendly relations through recurring, reciprocal visits. Moreover, by refer-
encing the traditional Slavic offering of “bread and salt,” Gogol portrays this
symbiotic relationship as a matter of national custom. Whereas both Gogol
and Shevyrev witness the passion to acquire spreading through the Russian
body, home, and state, what Shevyrev glosses over is that Gogol represents
receptiveness to this passion as Russian as well. The gift economy both feeds
and feeds on commerce in Dead Souls.

59
 Chapter Two

H OS P I TA L I T Y A S G I F T

Beginning with Marcel Mauss’s seminal Essay on the Gift, reciprocity has
been a key theme of twentieth- and twenty-first-century gift theory. The
main thrust of Mauss’s study is the revelation of the economic and aggressive
character of gift exchange: whereas they may seem selfless and free, gifts
are essentially self-serving and obligatory. Studying what he calls “primitive”
societies, Mauss concludes that the obligations to give, to receive, and to
reciprocate are essential to community formation and differentiation. As gift
exchange both binds and indebts people to one another, every gift places the
recipient in an unequal and inferior position, and to escape it he or she must
give back, starting the cycle of trade anew. To give consistently more than
others can reciprocate is to consolidate a position of power and prestige.
The Pacific Northwest hospitality ritual known as the potlatch, featuring the
host’s excessively generous transfer and even destruction of his own prop-
erty in order to secure social dominance, is Mauss’s primary example of the
competitive motives that lurk beneath the gift’s veneer of apparent goodwill
and care.11 Today the potlatch also exemplifies the dependence of the very
notion of the gift as Mauss formulates it on global commerce, for we now
know that the potlatch arose not prior to but as a result of the infiltration of
North America by European commodity markets.12 Commerce itself laid the
foundations on which the edifice of modern gift theory has been built.
While acknowledging the impossibility of a free and selfless gift in
practice, philosophers have proved less willing than anthropologists to let
the ideal of such a gift go. It is precisely the impossibility of realizing this
ideal that fascinated Derrida, for whom “Mauss speaks of everything but the
gift.”13 The gift of hospitality in particular stands out in Derrida’s writings
with its special ethical significance. Like all gift exchange, hospitality as tra-
ditionally understood (as precisely the opposite of what is now offered by the
“hospitality industry”) is distinct from commodity exchange in that it takes
place outside the realm of the market and the state. It is singular, however,
in that it involves an explicit opening of oneself to another, granting not only
one’s possessions, but one’s place— one’s very self— to the other. Accord-
ing to Derrida, this exchange can never truly occur because it presupposes
the structure of inequality and difference it would seek to annul: taking the
other in completely, making him or her absolutely at home, would altogether
abolish the roles of host and guest— and hence the act of hospitality itself.14
Derrida’s writings have inspired a wide range of interdisciplinary
scholarship on hospitality in recent decades, confirming the allure not only
of the ideal he called “absolute hospitality,” but of its unattainability as well.
In a formulation that is especially suggestive for the present discussion of
Gogol, Peter Melville has pointed out that “each failure of the hospitality

60
 Gogol’s Gift

event expresses itself within a unique set of historical, social, and psycho-
logical conditions,” and it is in these particularities that we must look for
hospitality’s meaning in a certain place, time, or text.15 For instance, scholars
investigating the modern European rhetoric of hospitality have been struck
by the tone of nostalgia that often pervades it, as though the very idea of
hospitality is that of a structure that has already collapsed.16 This nostalgia
is a symptom of the influence of commerce on the idea of hospitality in the
modern era, for it was the growth of a modern “hospitality industry” com-
prised of hotels and restaurants offering shelter and food in exchange for
money that simultaneously obviated the need for the traditional welcome
of strangers and fostered its mythologization.17 Hospitality became a sign of
the selflessness that commercial society had supposedly lost. As in the case
of Mauss’s theory of the gift, the modern idea of hospitality has been shot
through with commerce from the start.
This conceptual imbrication of hospitality and commerce is in fact not
unique to the modern era. The imperative to welcome strangers has been
bound up with practices of market trade since antiquity, as the strangers
who depended most on hospitality (and who had the most to offer in return
for it) were often merchants. The early commercial history of Russian hos-
pitality is on display in the name of St. Petersburg’s most famous shopping
center, Gostiny Dvor (Merchants’ Yard). As this name suggests, the Russian
word for “guest” (gost’) once had the additional meaning of “merchant.” In
Kievan Rus and pre-Petrine Russia, the gosti were an elite class of mer-
chants who conducted trade away from home: some of them were foreign-
ers, while others traveled abroad or simply around within the Kievan or Rus-
sian territories.18
The importance of trade in the history of hospitality may help to ex-
plain the intriguing fact that the English words “host” and “guest” both de-
rive from the Latin hostis, which could originally designate either.19 As Émile
Benveniste has explained, hostis named a reciprocal relationship without
differentiating between those involved. Whereas English “hospitality” com-
bines hostis with Latin pet or pot, meaning “master” (in this case, the mas-
ter of the house), Russian gostepriimstvo (hospitality) combines hostis with
priimstvo, thereby focusing attention on the act of taking in— the priem, or
reception— rather than on the mastery at stake in this encounter. This ac-
cent on intake further reinforces the sense of reciprocity, as the host receives
the guest, who in turn receives what the host offers. Although reciprocity
does not necessarily imply commerce (i.e., trade undertaken for profit, and
facilitated by the medium of money), it does convey the sense of giving in
return for something else, rather than for free.
Immediately raising questions about the nature and aims of a relation-
ship between self and other, both the gift in general and the gift of hospital-

61
 Chapter Two

ity in particular have been subject to intense reflection in times of social and
economic transition. In fact, the Russian Revolution served as a catalyst for
Mauss’s work on the subject: a committed socialist who felt that competi-
tive markets should be retained, Mauss wrote his Essay on the Gift against
the spirit of unchecked capitalism and Bolshevism as well.20 Meanwhile,
the heightened attention to this subject in recent decades may be seen as
a response to patterns of decolonization and increasing globalization.21 In
the case of early nineteenth-century Russian literature, it was the project of
consolidating a national identity at a time of ongoing and increasingly self-
reflexive reception of foreign cultural forms and growing uncertainty about
the moral and economic legitimacy of serfdom that fostered a wide-ranging
literary discourse on hospitality and its perpetual failures.

H OS P I TA L I T Y A S R U S S I A N

Hospitality answered some of the most urgent demands of Russian Romanti-

cism. In the 1820s, Russian intellectuals inspired by German Romantic phi-
losophy became increasingly concerned with the task of articulating Rus-
sian national identity. Coining the term narodnost’ as a translation of French
nationalité in 1819, the poet Petr Viazemskii provided writers, critics, and
statesmen with a word whose meaning they would hotly contest in the com-
ing decades.22 When in 1833 Emperor Nicholas I’s minister of public edu-
cation, Sergei Uvarov, enshrined narodnost’ as the third term in his formu-
lation of official ideology as Orthodoxy— Autocracy— Nationality, he gave
new urgency to the project of defining this word and the related narod (na-
tion, people). And yet, as Petr Chaadaev suggests in his “First Philosophical
Letter,” the energetic adoption of European cultural forms by Peter I and
his successors throughout the eighteenth century presented a challenge to
anyone wishing to delineate the features of Russian nationality in the nine-
teenth century. Written in the late 1820s and circulated in manuscript form
for several years before its publication in 1836, the letter charges Europe-
anization with dislodging the Russian nobility, turning them into visitors in
their own land: “We seem to camp in our houses, we behave like strangers in
our families; and in our cities we appear to be nomads” (Dans nos maisons,
nous avons l’air de camper; dans nos familles, nous avons l’air d’étrangers;
dans nos villes, nous avons l’air de nomades).23 If connection to one’s national
identity is a feeling of being at home, in nineteenth-century Russian lit-
erature, it is precisely this feeling— or, more frequently, its absence— that
scenes of hospitality are designed to deliver.
On the one hand, hospitality was a deeply engrained, frequently cele-
brated cultural value that offered an especially positive answer to the ques-
tion of what it meant to be Russian. On the other, hospitality stages encoun-

62
 Gogol’s Gift

ters that both uphold and contest the categories of domestic and foreign,
and it therefore provided a powerful set of tropes with which to interrogate
rather than affirm the concept of nationality. In early nineteenth-century
Russian literature, Russianness emerges not as some fixed, stable category,
but as a network of unequal and shifting relationships between Russia and
the Western European countries it had emulated throughout the eighteenth
century; between the noble minority and peasant majority of the ethnically
Russian population; between the intelligentsia and the state; and between
the central, ethnically Russian, and peripheral, multiethnic regions of the
Russian Empire. For writers negotiating these relationships, the discourse of
hospitality proved remarkably flexible in that it could simultaneously assert
that Russian identity had some specific content of its own and question that
very assertion. As a discourse with stabilizing and destabilizing effects, hospi-
tality presents Russian identity as distinctly open to its others.
In their representations of hospitality as a national trait, Russian writ-
ers were bolstered by its roots in both pagan Slavic and Orthodox Chris-
tian tradition. Nikolai Karamzin portrays his contemporaries’ generous re-
ception of guests as the continuation of Slavic custom in the first volume
of his History of the Russian State (1803– 26): “The chronicles univocally
praise the hospitality [gostepriimstvo] Slavs had in common, which was
rare in other lands and is still most ordinary in all the Slavic ones: thus the
traces of ancient customs are preserved over the course of many centuries.”
As Karamzin points out elsewhere in his History, the Slavic provenance of
Russian hospitality customs is on display in the “homegrown Russian word,
khlebosol’stvo.”24 Deriving from the words for bread and salt (khleb and sol’,
respectively), this term refers to the pagan ritual of presenting these highly
symbolic foods to guests as they crossed the threshold of the host’s home.25
The ritual magicalized both the moment of arrival and the space of passage,
blessing incoming news, gifts, debts, and friendships, and warding off poten-
tial threats. The Orthodox Church that supplanted paganism also sanctified
hospitality, urging its members to give shelter to travelers, religious pilgrims,
and holy fools.26
But Russian hospitality in Karamzin’s day had European sources as
well. Before publishing his History, Karamzin had stressed this European
character in his Letters of a Russian Traveler (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestven-
nika, 1791– 92). In the following passage, the eponymous traveler responds
to a list of questions purportedly sent him by a French noblewoman consid-
ering where to flee after the French Revolution:

Question: Are foreigners liked in Russia? Are they well received?

Answer: Hospitality is a virtue of the Russians. We are grateful to foreigners

for enlightenment, for a multitude of wise ideas and refined feelings which

63
 Chapter Two

were unknown to our forebears before their contact with other European
countries. By showering our guests with kindnesses, we like to show them
that the pupils are almost the peer of the masters in the social graces.27

Karamzin wrote his Letters during the reign of Catherine II, a period that
witnessed some of the most lavish hospitality in Russian history. It was in fact
Catherine’s imitation of European displays of power, enabled by her expan-
sion and formalization of serfdom, that shaped the noble culture of hospi-
tality during her reign.28 Following the example of Louis XIV, the empress
entertained in spectacular fashion, treating her loyal servitors to grand ban-
quets, processions, and theatrical performances.29 She also made it possible
for her favorites to host her in turn, granting them vast tracts of lands and
thousands of serfs, particularly in Ukraine. Recipients of these gifts spent
huge fortunes receiving her around the empire, sometimes constructing
houses, theaters, and pavilions for this purpose. Much as Catherine emulated
Louis XIV and her courtiers emulated her, lesser nobles emulated their bet-
ters, and lavish, even prodigal hospitality became a defining feature of Rus-
sian noble identity.30 While in the early nineteenth century writers frequently
described such hospitality as quintessentially Russian, it actually arose—
much like the potlatch— from encounters between domestic and foreign
forms of generosity, authority, and commerce.
Although its enactments were significantly shaped by the state’s own
displays of power, hospitality also provided a crucial forum for noble sociabil-
ity outside the purview of the state. This helps to explain its persistence even
after the flow of state gifts was curtailed. In the nineteenth century, grants
of land and serfs from the crown grew rare, while the availability of foreign
commodities and the credit that could be used to obtain them grew com-
mon. As wealthy landowners continued their practices of reckless spending
and giving, they drove themselves into ruinous debt. Many noblemen mort-
gaged their estates to the treasury and then defaulted on those loans, losing
their properties and, with them, the capacity to host. By the 1820s, the lav-
ish hospitality of the Catherinian era was coming to be seen as a disappear-
ing custom of “olden times” (starina), which nevertheless persisted in ves-
tigial form and was frequently invoked in discussions of noble and national
tradition.
Take Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. In St. Peters-
burg, the elder Onegin’s hospitality leads to financial ruin: “He gave some
three balls yearly, / Until he had no means for more” (6:6; 16). This prodigal
generosity seemingly ends with the old man’s death, as Eugene turns his fa-
ther’s house over to the creditors. He too spends money freely, but we never
see him treating anyone but himself. Even when Eugene inherits his uncle’s
country estate, he refuses the opportunity to play host: he settles on the estate

64
 Gogol’s Gift

for just one season, showing only fleeting interest in the property and overt
hostility to his neighbors. But if Eugene’s actions suggest that the lavish hos-
pitality of olden times is disappearing, the neighbors are keeping a quainter
version of it alive. Pushkin’s depiction of the Larin family’s yearly routine in
chapters 2 and 3 includes a catalog of the hospitality customs they observe,
and which demonstrate how connected they are to national tradition:

Amid this peaceful life they cherished,

They held all ancient customs dear
At Shrovetide feasts their table flourished
With Russian pancakes, Russian cheer;
. . . .
And at their table guests were served
By rank in turn as each deserved.

Они хранили в жизни мирной

Привычки милой старины;
У них на масленице жирной
Водились русские блины;
. . . .
И за столом у них гостям
Носили блюды по чинам. (6:47; 52)

The Larins’ hospitality fuses Russia’s pagan, Orthodox Christian, and Euro-
pean cultural inheritance. While the pancakes originally prepared by pagan
Slavs for a festival of the sun (maslenitsa) eventually came to mark the com-
ing of Lent in the Orthodox calendar, Peter I initiated the custom of serv-
ing guests by rank after adapting his Table of Ranks from a German model.
When it comes to traditional hospitality, for the Larins as for Pushkin, there
is no separating the homegrown from the imported.
Eugene’s visits to the Larins establish a pattern that would be followed
in later works of Russian literature: scenes of hospitality frequently stage
the incursion of exotic cultural paradigms. In the Larins’ home the modish
Eugene appears as an uncomfortable, ungrateful guest who is cut off from
local traditions, not because those traditions are purely “Russian” and Eu-
gene is thoroughly Europeanized— the Larins’ lives, too, are marked by the
legacy of Europeanization in Russia— but because Eugene presents a newer,
more cynical version of Europeanized Russian nobility. A similar dynamic is
at work in both Dead Souls and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children (Otsy
i deti, 1862), as provincial Russian landowners offer hospitality to guests who
infiltrate their homes with alarming new ideas. In Dead Souls, Chichikov
brings in new ways of doing business and measuring wealth. In Fathers and

65
 Chapter Two

Children, the “nihilist” Bazarov rejects all the values his hosts hold dear—
from liberalism to religion and poetry. In both of these novels, hospitality
dramatizes encounters between the culture of the landowning nobility and
the economic or ideological forces eroding it.
Together, Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Turgenev’s representations of hospi-
tality show that over the course of the nineteenth century, serfdom gradu-
ally came into focus as the material basis of noble Russian hospitality. In
Eugene Onegin, hospitality is associated exclusively with the nobility, and the
serf labor that makes it possible is left unspoken. The following incomplete
stanza from chapter 3 exemplifies this omission:

“Let’s go.”
And so the friends departed—
And on arrival duly meet
That sometimes heavy, but good-hearted,
Old-fashioned Russian welcome treat.
The social ritual never changes:
The hostess artfully arranges
On little dishes her preserves,
And on her covered table serves
A drink of lingonberry flavour.

Поедем.—
Поскакали други,
Явились; им расточены
Порой тяжелые услуги
Гостеприимной старины.
Обряд известный угощенья:
Несут на блюдечках варенья,
На столик ставят вощаной
Кувшин с брусничною водой.

. . . . (6:52; 58)

This stanza presents the end of a conversation Onegin is having with his
friend Lensky, in which the two men resolve and swiftly proceed to visit the
widow Larin and her daughters. The break after “Let’s go” that divides the
first line in two conveys the speed and simplicity with which Onegin and
Lensky will enter into the hospitality scene. They have received no specific
invitation for that day and give no notice of their visit, but simply drop in on
Madame Larin and her daughters as a matter of course. It is striking that in
a scene that might logically include some introductions, Pushkin uses nei-

66
 Gogol’s Gift

ther names nor general terms such as hostess, mother, lady, daughter, or ser-
vant, to describe who does what to receive the guests. In this regard, James
Falen’s translation, which I have cited above, departs from Pushkin’s original
in stating that “The hostess artfully arranges” the jam. In fact, Pushkin uses
an impersonal verb form— the third-person plural— to describe the domes-
tic work of presenting the food: “nesut” (they carry), “staviat” (they place).
Together with the ellipses that truncate the stanza, this impersonal-
ity and brevity suggest that what is happening is so well understood as to
require no elucidation. The omitted lines themselves, which were preserved
in Pushkin’s manuscript, reveal that what the final text leaves unstated is the
serf labor that underpins noble hospitality. The lines in the manuscript read
as follows:

With folded arms, along the hall,

The maids have gathered, one and all,
To glimpse the Larins’ brand new neighbour;
While in the yard their men reproach
Onegin’s taste in horse and coach.

Поджавши руки, у дверей

Сбежались девушки скорей
Взглянуть на нового соседа
И на дворе толпа людей
Критиковала их коней. (6:305; 57)

Excluding these serfs who had been crowding into the scene from the final
version of the stanza, Pushkin presents Russian hospitality on a provincial
landowner’s estate as a familiar ritual constituted in part by silence about
the economic conditions of its possibility. In Dead Souls, Gogol gives only
slightly more attention to the living peasants who support the noble exchange
of hospitality, but even more importantly, he foregrounds the violent margin-
alization of serfs in the title of his work: these “souls” are central precisely in
their deathly absence. While serfs themselves continue to play minor roles in
Fathers and Children, Turgenev’s novel takes place on the eve of the Eman-
cipation, and this impending change looms over the provincial landowners’
reception of two young men from the city.31
Alongside these representations of noble hospitality, those featuring
hospitable peasants became increasingly common as noble writers looked
to the narod (the people, the peasantry) for an image of Russianness. In
Mikhail Lermontov’s celebrated poem “My Native Land” (“Rodina,” 1841),
for instance, the speaker presents himself as a traveling nobleman who en-
joys taking temporary shelter in peasant villages:

67
 Chapter Two

Reclining in a cart and for a warm bed sighing,

I love to bump along a country road at night
And meet with drowsy eye, the shadowed dark defying
Of cheerless villages the lonely, trembling lights.

. . . .

Carved wooden shutters, roofs of thatch—

All, all within me rouse a feeling
Of joy. . . . And, too, I like to watch
The village dancers stamping wildly
And whistling of a Sunday, while
Drunk muzhiks, sitting nearby idly,
With talk night’s spun-out hours beguile.

Проселочным путем люблю скакать в телеге

И, взором медленным пронзая ночи тень,
Встречать по сторонам, вздыхая о ночлеге,
Дрожащие огни печальных деревень.

. . . .

С отрадой многим незнакомой

Я вижу полное гумно,
Избу, покрытую соломой,
С резными ставнями окно;
И в праздник, вечером росистым,
Смотреть до полночи готов
На пляску с топаньем и свистом
Под говор пьяных мужичков.32

It is as a guest of peasants that this nobleman discovers his love of his coun-
try. Notably, however, in Lermontov’s idealized vision of village life, the peas-
ants themselves are not individualized. They appear as a cluster of drunken
revelers, and their poet-guest does not mingle with them but observes them
at a distance. They whistle and dance, and he composes his poem.
By contrast, in Turgenev’s story “Khor and Kalinych” (1847), the nar-
rator is a noble hunter who is welcomed by the two highly individuated serfs
for whom the story is named. While the narrator’s host is technically Khor
and Kalinych’s master, on whose estate he is hunting, he prefers the serfs’
offerings (pickles, kvass, and the “simple, intelligent discourse of the Rus-
sian peasant”) to the Europeanized entertainments of the big house.33 Thus

68
 Gogol’s Gift

it is hospitality that first makes possible the close encounter with serfs that
Turgenev offers throughout his cycle, Notes of a Hunter (Zapiski okhotnika,
1852), of which “Khor and Kalinych” was the first published story. Mean-
while, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1865–69), the young noble-
woman Natasha discovers “all that was in  .  .  . every Russian woman and
man” after being fed by the serf, Anisya, and dancing in the home where the
latter lives as unofficial “wife” to a nobleman.34 For both Turgenev and Tol-
stoy, peasant hospitality invites noble men and women to question or even to
cross the divide between them and the servants who help make them feel at
home. Whereas Lermontov’s poetic speaker observes a spectacle of Russian-
ness, Tolstoy’s heroine herself becomes a participant in the spectacle.
In nineteenth-century Russian literature, hospitality appears as one of
the few cultural values the nobility and the peasantry share, and it stages
identity-forming encounters between and among representatives of both
groups. Even while stressing its antiquated status (as a legacy of the Cath-
erinian era or as folk inheritance), Russian writers in this period portray it as
remarkably enduring. And while some noble writers idealize the economic
relations that make hospitality possible, others present those relations as an
open secret or hold them up to reevaluation and critique.

MA K IN G T HE M Y T H

Gogol benefited directly from antiquated models of hospitality and the con-
temporary enthusiasm for them in Russian Romanticism. As a young man,
he and his family were frequent guests of their distant relation, Dmitry
Petrovich Troshchinskii, a former minister of justice and the wealthiest land-
owner in their home district of Poltava, Ukraine. After receiving multiple
estates and thousands of serfs from Catherine II, Troshchinskii gained local
renown for his own performances of generosity.35 According to V. I. Shenrok,
Troshchinskii’s Kibintsy estate was “more like a vast club or hotel than an or-
dinary domestic hearth. Everything was set up in grand style, everything was
abundant and everywhere there shone elegance and beauty. There were so
many guests at Kibintsy year round that the disappearance of some and the
appearance of others was almost imperceptible in that turbulent sea.” One
of the chief entertainments on the estate was Troshchinskii’s serf theater,
and it was there that Gogol’s playwright father frequently staged his plays.
Troshchinskii also helped Nikolai secure a place in the boarding school at
Nezhin, and when the young man set out for St. Petersburg with dreams of
distinguishing himself in 1828, he carried letters of introduction from Trosh-
chinskii.36 Armed with these letters, Gogol began making the rounds of high-
ranking Petersburg officials, visiting them in their homes and seeking their

69
 Chapter Two

support. Troshchinskii’s letters didn’t take Gogol as far as he had hoped: while
the great man’s nephew did give Gogol some money and helped him secure
a post in the Ministry of the Interior in the Department of Public Works,
the civil service was not to Gogol’s liking, and he continued his search for
friendly and profitable connections.37
Ultimately it was the hospitality and patronage of the poet Vasily Zhu-
kovsky that brought this young man from provincial Ukraine to the center
of the St. Petersburg literary elite. It is not known who wrote the letter that
gained Gogol access to Zhukovsky’s home, but from the day the poet took
him under his protection, the doors of the beau monde began to open to
him. As a regular guest at Zhukovsky’s Saturday gatherings in 1831, Gogol
had the chance to mingle with the likes of Pushkin, Prince Viazemskii, Count
M. Iu. Vielgorskii, N. I. Gnedich, and Ivan Krylov. Through Zhukovsky, he
also met P. A. Pletnev, who helped him to obtain a teaching position in the
Patriotic Institute for young women, appointments as private tutor in fami-
lies of good society, and paid work as a writer.38 In the years to come, Zhu-
kovsky would continue to foster Gogol’s literary career by helping him secure
grants, or in Gogol’s words, “gift[s],” from the tsar.39 Supporting Gogol in
his work on Dead Souls, these gifts were among the last examples of the
royal patronage that was in these years being replaced by an emerging liter-
ary marketplace as the primary source of remuneration for Russian writers.
Gogol’s experience navigating the mixed literary economy of commerce and
the gift in 1830s– 1840s Russia would shape his representation of hospitality
from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (Vechera na khutore bliz’ Dikan’ki,
vol. 1 1831, vol. 2 1832) to Dead Souls.
In Evenings, Gogol welcomes Russian readers to a stylized version of a
Ukrainian village, where the inhabitants spend long winter evenings treating
one another to scary stories and tasty foods. The preface to the first volume
of the collection is narrated by a peasant beekeeper named Rudy Panko, who
invites readers to visit him and sample these narrative and culinary delights:
“Just come, come quickly; and we’ll feed you so well that you’ll tell everybody
you meet about it” (Priezzhaite tol’ko, priezzhaite poskorei; a nakormim tak,
chto budete rasskazyvat’ i vstrechnomu i poperechnomu). The stories that
follow appear as the very treats that Panko promised. This structural device
of Ukrainian peasant hospitality enabled Gogol to meet what he rightly per-
ceived to be contemporary Russian readers’ demand for stories about the ex-
otic and supernatural as well as the national and the folksy. And yet even as the
deferential Panko presents himself as eager to please Russian readers, there is
something mildly unsettling about his offering. Take the glossary that follows
the preface, in which Panko translates the Ukrainian words used through-
out the collection into Russian. Many of these words designate food items,
including the “millet porridge” (“kutri[a]”) Panko offers his guests in the

70
 Gogol’s Gift

preface (1:11– 13). In this way, Gogol thematizes the Russian reception of his
Ukrainian tales, which, while consumable, require some aid to digestion.
In Evenings, Gogol deploys hospitality as a tool of the uncanny.40 In
the 1830s, Ukraine was a peripheral region of the empire that held spe-
cial significance in discussions of Russian identity. Because Russians typi-
cally claimed the history of Kievan Rus as their own national legacy, all the
while maintaining that contemporary Ukrainians were not exactly Russian,
Ukraine was a place Russians could consider almost— but not quite— their
own.41 This play of unstable Russian selves and their others, the homely and
the unhomely (unheimlich), establishes an uncanny feeling-tone that carries
forward from the first volume’s preface and throughout the individual sto-
ries, most of which offer variations on the theme of receiving the other.42 As
Valeria Sobol has shown, the uncanny was a productive topos in nineteenth-
century Russian narratives of empire, and Evenings is exemplary of this
broader trend.43 With his reliance on hospitality to both posit and trouble a
likeness between Russians and their ambiguously distinct Ukrainian others,
Gogol anticipates, for example, Mikhail Lermontov’s story “Taman,” which
was eventually included in the novel A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego
vremeni, 1840). In “Taman” the Russian officer Pechorin is forced to lodge
in an “unwholesome” house in a Crimean port town while waiting for trans-
port to the Caucasus. The uncanny feeling that pervades much of the story
arises in no small part from the ambiguity of his hosts’ ethnic identities: one
speaks Ukrainian in front of Pechorin, but Russian when he thinks the hero
isn’t listening.44
In Gogol’s collection, it is not just the Russian readers invited to par-
take of Ukrainian hospitality, but hospitality itself which comes into contact
with eerily similar others. From the reception of neighbors and unclean spir-
its in the home to the exchange of favors and foreign commodities, Gogol’s
tales enact a persistent slippage between multiple forms of gift and market
economy. Consider “The Night before Christmas” (“Noch’ pered rozhdest-
vom”), the lead story in the second volume of Evenings. This story begins
with villagers celebrating the originally pagan hospitality ritual known as
koliada, during which carolers move from home to home receiving “some
sausage or bread or a copper coin” from those inside (1:97; 19).45 By the
story’s end, new and increasingly fantastical forms of exchange proliferate.
Coal sacks stuffed with a witch’s suitors are mistaken for the carolers’ bags of
treats, and a Cossack rides a devil all the way from the village to St. Peters-
burg, where he receives a luxurious gift from Catherine II: a pair of her maj-
esty’s own gold-trimmed booties, which he brings back home to his sweet-
heart (1:97, 130– 33; 19, 54– 57). Together with Panko’s invitation to Russian
readers in the preface to Evenings, Catherine’s bestowal of this favor upon
a Cossack positions Ukraine with respect to Russia as a periphery bound to

71
 Chapter Two

its center through a process of ongoing and reciprocal, albeit uneven, gift
exchange. The move from koliada treats to the empress’s footgear in “The
Night before Christmas” is also an uncanny echo of the transformation of
an edible offering to an inedible one in Rudy Panko’s preface to Evenings.
Near the end of that preface, Panko tells readers to imagine the honeycomb
he’ll serve them, which is as “clean as a tear or an expensive crystal such as
one finds in earrings” (1:10). A honeycomb, a tear, and a crystal earring may
share certain visual properties (translucence, sparkle), and they may all be
traded as signs of feeling, but they are different in substance and purpose.
Eliding these distinctions, Panko promises Russian readers appetizing gifts,
which, on close inspection, threaten to stick in the throat.
Gogol’s narrative hospitality grew increasingly unsettling over the
course of his career. This change corresponds to his gradual assumption of
the role of a “Russian” writer, who wished not only to speak to, but along
with and even for, his Russian readers. The story “Old World Landowners”
(“Starosvetskie pomeshchiki”) shows Gogol moving in this direction and in
this respect appears as a hinge point between Evenings and Dead Souls.
“Old World Landowners” is the first story in the first volume of the collec-
tion Gogol called Mirgorod (1835). On this collection’s title page, Gogol
indicates that it should be understood as a continuation of Evenings. And
yet in place of any salutation from their one-time host, Rudy Panko, Gogol
presents readers with epigraphs ascribed to visitors who have come to Mir-
gorod before them. The first is an altered citation from the Russian acade-
mician E. F. Ziablovskii’s (1764– 1846) Geography of the Russian Empire
(Geografiia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1831), in which we read the following account
of Mirgorod’s industrial and agricultural development: “Mirgorod is an es-
pecially small town on the Khorol River. It has one cable factory, one brick
factory, four water mills and forty-five wind mills.”46 The second is a posi-
tive evaluation of the region’s cuisine purportedly excerpted from “a certain
traveler’s notes”: “Although in Mirgorod they make pretzels out of brown
dough, these are fairly tasty” (2:5). The traveler’s attestation to the tastiness
of the local pretzels recalls the menu Rudy Panko sets forth in Evenings, yet
it stands out sharply with its absence of any explanation as to whether the
traveler purchased these treats or was treated to them. Whereas Rudy Panko
describes a warm Ukrainian welcome that awaits Russian travelers, the Mir-
gorod epigraphs present this region of the empire as already well charted
and consumed.47
“Old World Landowners” turns the story of this consumption into a
marketable myth. The narrator occupies a position somewhere between
Rudy Panko and the travelers quoted in the Mirgorod epigraphs. Much like
Rudy, he begins his story in a highly personal manner, declaring his apprecia-
tion for the region and the people he is about to describe: “I like very much

72
 Gogol’s Gift

the modest life of those solitary proprietors of remote estates who in Little
Russia are usually known as the old world” (2:7; 132).48 Unlike Rudy, how-
ever, this narrator presents himself not as someone eager to host readers in
Ukraine, but as someone who was once a habitual guest there, and who at-
tests to the impossibility of making additional visits in the future. He laments
the demise of a couple of landowners, Afanasy and Pulkheria Tovstogub,
who frequently received him on their estate: “To this day I cannot forget
an old couple from times past, who, alas, are no more, yet my soul is still
filled with pity and my feelings are strangely wrung when I imagine myself
coming again some day to their former, now-deserted dwelling and seeing a
cluster of tumbledown cottages, an untended pond, an overgrown ditch in
the place where the little low house used to stand— and nothing more. Sad!
I feel sad beforehand! But let us turn to the story” (2:8; 133). The narra-
tor’s abrupt “turn” from painful memories to the business of storytelling con-
tains the arc of the whole story in miniature. His emotional account of the
Tovstogubs’ hospitality closes with an explanation of how, after the couple’s
death, their heir ruined the estate, troubling himself less with its operations
than with the purchase of various items priced no higher than “one ruble”
(2:28; 154). Much like the conversion of affection to an abstract monetary
value— effected through the move from “I like” in the opening line to “one
ruble” in the closing— the narrator’s nostalgia for the old couple’s hospitality
will become tradable currency in story form.
What Gogol is selling in “Old World Landowners” is the myth of hospi-
tality as a disappearing legacy of the pre-commercial past. The narrator liter-
ally frames the Tovstogubs’ hospitality as a myth for sale when he states: “If I
were a painter and wanted to portray Philemon and Baucis on canvas, I would
never choose any other original than them” (2:8; 133).49 Philemon and Bau-
cis are figures from Greek mythology whom Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicts
as an elderly couple welcoming a traveling Jupiter and Mercury into their
home. Although they are poor, Philemon and Baucis give the godly visitors
such food and shelter as they are able. In return, Jupiter grants their wish
to live out their remaining days as guardians of his temple and to die at the
same hour. The end of their human life is the beginning of their immortal-
ization, as they turn into a pair of trees near the entrance to the god’s temple.
Frequently represented in European lithographs and paintings, Phi-
lemon and Baucis’s hospitality was also the subject of an early work by the
Russian painter Orest Kiprensky. (See figure 6.) After completing the paint-
ing in 1802, Kiprensky won a gold medal for it from the Imperial Academy
of Arts. By the time Gogol arrived in St. Petersburg in 1829, the painting
had been purchased by Pavel Svin’in, who made it available for public view
as part of the collection of art and antiquities he called the “Russian Mu-
seum.” As the editor of the journal Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye

73
 Chapter Two

Figure 6. Orest Kiprensky, Jupiter and Mercury Visit Philemon and Baucis (Iupiter
s Merkuriem poseshchaiut Filemona i Bavkidu), 1802. Oil on canvas, 124.7 × 101.8
cm. Latvian National Museum of Art. Riga, Latvia.

zapiski, 1818– 84), which published one of Gogol’s stories in 1830, Svin’in
was certainly known to the author, and it is quite possible that Gogol visited
his collection at some point and saw the painting. As numerous apparent
references to the 1834 sale of Svin’in’s collection in Gogol’s writings suggest,
he might even have been present when Kiprensky’s painting and the other
items went up for auction in 1834.50

74
 Gogol’s Gift

Gogol’s story both recapitulates and dissolves the myth of Philemon

and Baucis. Recalling the god-given abundance that keeps the couple’s wine
vessels full in Ovid’s work, the Tovstogubs’ hospitality is made possible by the
“blessed” fertility of the earth:

However much the steward and the headman stole, however much everyone
in the household stuffed his face, from the housekeeper to the pigs, who con-
sumed a terrible quantity of plums and apples, and often shoved the trees with
their snouts to shake down a whole rain of fruit; however much the sparrows
and crows pecked up; however much all the household people took as pre-
sents to their kin in other villages, even stealing old linen and yarn from the
storerooms, all of which returned to the universal source, that is, the tavern;
however much visitors, their phlegmatic coachmen and the lackeys stole—
the blessed earth produced everything in such abundance, and Afanasy Iva-
novich and Pulkheria Ivanovna needed so little, that all this terrible plunder-
ing seemed to go entirely unnoticed in their management. (2:13– 14; 139)

This account of life on Afanasy and Pulkheria’s estate is a cross between

idyll and exposé. It is idyllic in that it glosses over the serfs’ labor, depicting
them as a burden on the estate rather than as its main producers. It seems
that God and “blessed” nature alone can be thanked for the bounty the land-
owners, their serfs, and guests consume. This depiction of the Tovstogubs’
household contrasts sharply with the story of Philemon and Baucis. Whereas
in Ovid’s work, the old couple has no servants, they are seen preparing food
only when the visitors arrive, and they offer the gods a humble meal, in Go-
gol’s story the Tovstogubs have a multitude of serfs and eat constantly and
copiously regardless of whether guests are present. Afanasy in particular
tends to eat so much that it gives him a stomachache, while Pulkheria’s re-
sponse to his pains is to give him even more to eat (2:14– 16; 140– 41). Even
though it tends to take the form of a multitude of small dishes and bites, the
overeating in this story is so hyperbolic as to be disconcerting.
Rendering the story still more unsettling, the narrator never places
himself firmly in any scene, be it at the Tovstogubs’ estate or in the Rus-
sian city to which he alludes. Despite his insistently subjective narration, he
never clarifies who he is, how or when he knew the old couple, or where he
is at the time of writing. His familiarity with the region and his friendship
with the old couple make it seem likely that he is Ukrainian, and his discus-
sions of the urban environment he considers less preferable imply that he
is now living in St. Petersburg. As a Ukrainian writer who left the region
for the capital, Gogol has a similar biography, suggesting that the narrator
should be taken as a figure for the author. Gogol ironically discourages such
an association, however, when the narrator mocks Ukrainians who move
to the capital and Russianize their names, for Gogol himself had done just

75
 Chapter Two

that.51 By refraining from any definite identification of— or with— the nar-
rator, Gogol leaves readers with a sense of uncertainty about his relationship
to them as well.
Together with the inordinate amount of food the characters consume
in the story, the narrator’s ceaseless movement through space and time pro-
duces a feeling of nausea that is inseparable from the story’s nostalgic tone.
“Old World Landowners” is the only one of Gogol’s works that confirms what
twenty-first-century commentators have described as the pervasive tone of
nostalgia in modern hospitality discourse. As Kevis Goodman has shown in
her research on the pathological history of nostalgia, however, this feeling
meant something quite different in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies than it does now. At that time it referred to a somatic disorder fre-
quently observed in sailors and soldiers far from home. Central to the disease
was not so much a longing for another time as a feeling of spatial displace-
ment. Nostalgia was a kind of “pathology of travel”— or motion sickness—
that arose in the context of colonial expansion and war.52 In the case of “Old
World Landowners” the feeling registers movements through space that is
temporally charged, between a hospitable Ukrainian past and a commercial
Russian present in which Ukraine and its past are called upon in support of
a national/imperial myth of Russian/Slavic hospitality.53 These movements
produce a dizzying uncertainty as to exactly where and when the characters,
the narrator, and the reader stand.
By referencing Philemon and Baucis, Gogol gives readers pause to
wonder whether the mythical past depicted in his story should be under-
stood in universal or national terms. To what extent does “Old World Land-
owners” represent the Ukrainian and/or the Russian past, as opposed to a
pre-commercial past more generally? The allusion also raises the question
of whether the narrator should be taken as a figure for one of Philemon and
Baucis’s godly visitors and, if so, whether Gogol’s reader should be under-
stood as filling the role of the other. As both a messenger of the gods and the
patron of merchants, Mercury has much in common with the narrator, who
both relays this mythical tale and makes it available for sale. The image of
Mercury in Kiprensky’s painting is especially akin to Gogol’s narrator in that
he hovers over the scene, both within and outside it; with his back turned to
the viewer, neither his identity nor his attitude can discerned. But how might
Jupiter be a figure for the reader, who seemingly receives this tale rather
than directing its development? Kiprensky’s painting offers yet another in-
triguing analogy here in its depiction of Jupiter, for unlike most previous
visualizations of this myth, this one stresses the power Jupiter wields over
Philemon, Baucis, and Hermes alike: having dropped the pose of a guest,
he now asserts himself as king of the gods and lord of the realm. In this
way, Kiprensky’s version of the myth calls to mind the lavish reception of the

76
 Gogol’s Gift

rulers by their beneficiaries I discussed above as a practice in the Catherin-

ian era. When viewed alongside “Old World Landowners,” it also hints at the
uneven power relations between Russia and Ukraine that Gogol’s narrative
hospitality simultaneously masks and lays bare. If landowners like the Tovs-
togubs are beholden to the Russian crown for past gifts of land and serfs,
then any vicarious welcome Gogol’s Russian readers might enjoy in their
home is predicated on the conditions of Russian imperial rule.

F ORC ING T H E G I F T

If hospitality produces an uncanny feel in Evenings and a nauseatingly nos-

talgic one in “Old World Landowners,” in Dead Souls it provokes outright
disgust. Every scene of welcome in Dead Souls is spoiled in some way, as
Gogol implicates the unsavory operations of commercial, agrarian, and bodily
economies in the gift economy of hospitality. In some scenes Gogol high-
lights the economic imperatives subtending the exchange of sentiment. In
others he alludes to the physiological processes that alternately drive or must
be managed for the sake of economic and emotional exchange. Exposing the
manual, gastric, and affective labor on which hospitality and its cultural my-
thology depend, Dead Souls revels in the economic character of gift exchange.
Chichikov’s arrival at an inn on the first page of Dead Souls mobilizes
the thematic cluster of travel, food, and the gift-for-sale that marks Evenings
and “Old World Landowners.” Gogol’s description of the inn transposes the
traditional signs of welcome. Whereas it had once been customary to present
a guest with bread and salt laid out on a towel, the floor boy greets Chichikov
with a “napkin” in his hand, but nothing more. Instead of a host or hostess
who might offer to put on the samovar, a man selling punch in a corner of the
inn resembles the very samovar he is using, confirming the thorough deper-
sonalization of his offering to guests. Gogol depicts commercial hospitality
as especially distasteful when he presents Chichikov and his servants with a
variety of dirty things metaphorized as food. For instance, he describes the inn
as one where “for two roubles a day the traveler is given a comfortable room,
with cockroaches peeking like prunes from every corner.” This comparison of
disease-carrying insects to high-fiber food initiates what will be a persistent
association between objects of appetite and revulsion throughout the novel.
A similar effect is achieved when Chichikov’s smelly servant Petrushka settles
himself into a closet with a mattress “as greasy as a pancake, which he had
managed to extort from the innkeeper.” Some of the food Chichikov is even-
tually served sounds only slightly more appealing. For instance, he receives
“puff pastry, preserved over many weeks purposely for travelers.” While
nothing indicates that Chichikov is displeased by what he eats, his habit of

77
 Chapter Two

blowing his nose “with exceeding loudness” throughout the meal brings the
mucus he expunges into mildly disgusting proximity with the edibles he in-
gests (5:8; 4– 5). Readers’ stomachs may turn even if Chichikov’s does not.
The hospitality Chichikov receives throughout Dead Souls is distaste-
ful even when he doesn’t pay for it. As in the scene at the inn, the imagery of
spoiled food is persistently associated with the economic motivations of gift
exchange. Gogol makes the economic character of hospitality explicit when
Chichikov spends his second day in N. “visiting all the town dignitaries” and
taking care “very artfully to flatter each of them.” Here, the ambitious Chi-
chikov takes advantage of the local notables’ hospitality to insinuate himself
into their company and advance his plot to accumulate dead souls. Recall-
ing Alexander Radishchev’s explication of ambitsio as both a Roman and a
Russian custom of visiting high-ranking personages to get ahead, which I
discussed in chapter 1, the narrator presents this as a standard procedure
Chichikov knows especially well: “alas, it is a bit difficult to remember all
the mighty of this world: but suffice it to say that the newcomer displayed an
extraordinary activity with regard to visiting” (5:12– 13; 8– 9). Gogol portrays
this custom as both sweet and sickening.54 During a party to which the gov-
ernor invites Chichikov, the narrator likens the governor’s tailcoat-sporting
guests to “flies” that “dart about a gleaming white sugar loaf in the hot sum-
mertime of July.” This simile sullies the sweetness of hospitality with a vision
of parasitic ambition.
Similar imagery spoils even those gifts in Dead Souls that appear least
tainted by economic calculus. For instance, the first of the estates Chichikov
visits is generically marked as a Sentimental economy of feeling, and the
owner, Manilov, is the most generous host in the novel. He spends most of
his time exchanging gifts and other signs of affection with his wife:

Though it was already eight years since their wedding, they would still bring
each other a little bit of apple, a piece of candy, or a nut, and say in a touch-
ingly tender voice expressive of perfect love: “Open up your little mouth,
sweetie, I’ll put this tidbit in for you.” Needless to say, the little mouth would
on these occasions be very gracefully opened. For birthdays, surprises were
prepared: some sort of bead-embroidered little toothbrush case. And quite
often, as they were sitting on the sofa, suddenly, for perfectly unknown rea-
sons, one would abandon his pipe, and the other her needlework, if she hap-
pened to be holding it in her hands at the moment, and they would plant
on each other’s lips such a long and languid kiss that one could easily have
smoked a small cheroot while it lasted. (5:24– 25; 22– 23)

Gogol cuts the sweetness of the couple’s kisses with an allusion to the
tooth decay resulting from their constant consumption of sugar: the “bead-

78
 Gogol’s Gift

embroidered toothbrush case” they so kindly trade is but an ornamental

covering for an ongoing battle against rot. The author further poisons these
kisses by measuring their duration with an inexpensive cigarette, or “cheroot”
(solomenn[aia] sigark[a]). Likewise, when Chichikov arrives unannounced
at their estate, the Manilovs are eager to regale him, but Gogol continu-
ously undermines their exchange of sentiment with suggestions of gross
materiality.
Manilov distinguishes himself as the only landowner in the novel who
grants Chichikov’s request for dead souls with no apparent thought of mate-
rial gain. He even offers to cover all costs associated with the transfer: “I, for
my part, will turn them over to you disinterestedly [bezynteresno] and take
the fees upon myself ” (5:35; 33). And yet Gogol does not glorify Manilov’s
generosity; the narrator states explicitly that the “agreeableness” on Ma-
nilov’s face has “too much sugar in it; his ways and manners had about them
a certain currying of favor and friendship” (5:23; 21). His expression is “not
merely sweet but cloying, like the mixture a shrewd society doctor sweetens
unmercifully, fancying it will please his patient” (5:28; 26). This comparison
of Manilov to a “shrewd” doctor peddling medicines alerts readers to an eco-
nomic calculus that underlies his exchange of gifts. While Manilov’s generos-
ity may not yield commercial profit, it does consolidate his position of noble
power and prestige. It is his possession of land and serfs that enables him to
give, and it is his cultivated sensibilities that impel him to do so.
For his part, Chichikov takes material advantage of the economic and
emotional norms prevailing at Manilov’s estate. Upon arriving, the guest
swiftly adopts his host’s sentimental tone, masking his commercial intentions
with the language of friendship. In one example, he declares: “‘Keep not
money, but keep good people’s company,’ the wise man said” (Ne imei deneg,
imei khoroshikh liudei dlia obrashcheniia [5:28; 26]). Here Chichikov trades
sentimental language as currency, as his words inspire Manilov’s gift of dead
souls. Gogol hints at the transactional character of Chichikov’s language with
the word “obrashchenie,” which might be translated literally as “communi-
cation,” or, in another meaning, “circulation.” Trading verbal signs of senti-
ment as conversational currency, Chihikov prompts Manilov to put people
themselves— albeit dead ones— into circulation.
Later, Chichikov turns physiological signs of feeling into currency as
well. In recompense for Manilov’s promise to give him dead souls, Chichikov
emits a “very profound sigh” and a show of tears:

It seemed he was in the mood for outpourings of the heart; not without feel-
ing and expression he finally uttered the following words: “If you only knew
what a service you have just rendered, with this ostensible trash, to a man
without kith or kin! Yes, really and truly, is there anything I have not suffered?

79
 Chapter Two

like some bark amidst the savage waves . . . How persecuted, how victimized
I have been, what grief I have tasted, and for what? for having observed the
truth, for being of pure conscience, for holding my hand out to the helpless
widow and the hapless orphan! . . .” At this point he even wiped away an im-
pending tear with his handkerchief. (5:36– 37; 34)

Thanking Manilov for his gift, Chichikov presents himself as a man who has
suffered much as a result of his own charitable acts. Thus Gogol portrays
expressions of generosity as self-serving performances, and he also highlights
the role bodies play in the spectacle.
Gogol’s treatment of human bodies during Chichikov’s visit to Ma-
nilov renders warm hospitality revolting. At times the source of this revul-
sion seems to be Chichikov’s commercial scam. For instance, after Chichikov
leaves the estate, Manilov is indulging in the fantasy of living with a friend
like Chichikov forever when “Chichikov’s strange request suddenly inter-
rupted all his reveries. The thought of it somehow especially refused to get
digested [osobenno ne varilos’] in his head: whichever way he turned it, he
simply could not explain it to himself” (5:38; 36). Here the idea of a trade in
dead souls is linked to indigestion. Yet at other moments, it is hospitality, and
not the commercial ambition that takes advantage of it, which produces dis-
gust. For instance, Manilov and his wife serve Chichikov, “after the Russian
custom, cabbage soup, but from the bottom of our hearts” (5:29; 27). This
Russian custom turns out to be distinctly unappetizing. When the hosts and
guest are seated at table, the Manilovs’ young son nearly drips snot in the
soup, and he is only prevented from doing so by the “lackey” who wipes his
nose (5:30; 28). This threat of unfortunate effusion, averted though it may
be, corrupts the gift of hospitality with a reminder of the peasant and noble
bodies that must be mastered to carry it out. Here it is the physical and eco-
nomic conditions of noble hospitality that make it unsavory. What is more,
the exchange of hospitality in this chapter and every other takes the bodies
of dead serfs as its foundation: without the explicitly rotting institution of
serfdom, there would be no gift in Dead Souls.
As Chichikov continues making his rounds of the local landowners’ es-
tates, Gogol drags the gift of hospitality ever further into the mire of material
interest. This mire takes a tangible form when, on Chichikov’s way to visit
another estate, his tipsy driver upsets their britzka in a storm and sends him
sprawling in the mud. Stopping in at the next house he comes upon, that of
Korobochka, the soiled hero is initially refused entrance by a servant who
informs him, “This isn’t an inn” (5:42; 41). When he is finally admitted on the
grounds of his being a nobleman, the hostess greets him with the observation
that his “back and sides are all muddy as a hog’s” (5:42, 44; 41, 44). Gogol
develops this porcine imagery in the pages that follow. For instance, the
next morning, Chichikov surveys Korobochka’s property and notices, among

80
 Gogol’s Gift

other signs of a thriving estate, a chicken yard full of countless chickens and
turkeys, a rooster, and a whole family of pigs. Disrupting the picturesque se-
renity of the scene is a sow “rooting in a heap of garbage,” which accidentally
eats a live “chick, and without noticing it,” goes on “gobbling up watermelon
rinds in good order” (5:46; 45). Recalling the muddy hog of the previous
night, this sow is suggestive of Chichikov’s own inattention to what exactly
he consumes. He displays such obliviousness at Korobochka’s table, eat-
ing the pie and pancakes she serves him without noticing the nature of the
meal. In fact, she only feeds him so well because he claims to be a govern-
ment contractor and she hopes that her hospitality may move him to buy her
produce (5:53; 53). Korobochka is an even cleverer home economist than
Chichikov realizes, and although she sells him her dead souls, she later ex-
poses his scheme to the townspeople of N. when she travels there to consult
with friends about whether she might have accepted too low a price (5:168–
69; 178– 79). As she rolls into N. in a carriage that resembles a “round, fat-
cheeked watermelon on wheels,” it is as though the text itself is regurgi-
tating the rind-strewn scene of her hospitality, revealing her gifts as less
palatable— and even more strangely alive— than they had initially seemed.
To speak of Gogol’s text as regurgitating itself is to follow the author’s
lead in deploying digestive metaphors for the writing and reading of litera-
ture. If in his published texts, he frequently compares literature to food, in
his private writings, he alternately compares it to food and excrement. All of
these metaphors work to present literature as part-gift and part-commodity.
For instance, in an 1842 letter to an unknown addressee, commercial hospi-
tality provides Gogol with an image of Dead Souls as an edible gift for sale:
likening himself to an “innkeeper in some European hotel,” he describes
his work as a table d’hôte laid with “some twenty dishes,” and he asks the
addressee to let him know which of the dishes he or she likes best. Personal-
izing this exchange of commercial hospitality, Gogol suggests that the ad-
dressee should offer this response to Dead Souls out of “gratitude” for some
service Gogol previously performed for him.55 In this account, the reader
may well have paid for the treat, but he is personally obligated to the gifted
author who prepared it.
Meanwhile, in an 1833 letter to Pogodin, it is Gogol’s comparison of
literature to excrement that negotiates the slippery boundaries of commerce
and the gift:

You ask me about Dikanka Evenings. To Hell with them! I won’t publish
them. And although monetary acquisitions would not be superfluous for me,
I cannot write, add tales, for that. I have absolutely no talent for speculations.
I had even forgotten that I was the creator of these Evenings, and only you
reminded me about it. However, Smirdin printed 150 copies of the first part,
because without the first no one was buying the second from him. I’m glad

81
 Chapter Two

there weren’t any more. And let them be doomed to obscurity until some-
thing weighty, great, artistic comes out of me. . . .
I don’t want anything shallow and I can’t invent anything great. In a
word— mental constipation [umstvennyi zapor]! Pity me and wish me well!
Let your word be more effective than an enema.56

Revealing his awareness of how well his previous works are selling even as he
claims he does not write for money, Gogol presents literature as both a com-
modity and a gift— an object for sale and a lofty undertaking serving some
purpose greater than profit. Remarkably, these competing visions of litera-
ture combine in the image of stool the writer cannot pass.
In an 1836 letter to Zhukovsky, Gogol deploys all of the related meta-
phors of literature as food, excrement, commodity, and the gift. Describing
his recent trip to Switzerland, he writes: “Every morning, in addition to my
breakfast, I added three pages to my epic poem, and I had enough laughter
from these pages to sweeten my solitary day.” Here Dead Souls appears as
a treat the author serves himself, producing an emotionally and physically
beneficial effect on his belly. This “sweet” image begins to sour when Gogol
attributes the inability to write he later experienced to hemorrhoids and “hy-
pochondria,” which kept him from writing. As we have seen in chapter 1,
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries “hypochondria” desig-
nated a problem at once physiological and emotional: it was a stomach ail-
ment associated with both melancholy and overweening ambition. Through-
out Gogol’s letters, he references this disorder frequently in connection with
hemorrhoids and the constipation he likens to writer’s block.
In his letter to Zhukovsky, Gogol attributes his difficulties with writing
and digestion to the absence of warm quarters and warm feelings. He ex-
plains that the cold room he was paying for made him remember how Zhu-
kovsky had received him in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1830– 31 (“when I
came to see you and you took me by the hand and were glad of my arrival”),
and the sharp contrast between that former welcome and the present one
made him melancholy. Perhaps hoping to inspire Zhukovsky to make further
intercessions on his behalf, Gogol presents patronage as precisely the kind
of spiritual and material nourishment he needs in order to write. Reporting
that he has since relocated to a cozy apartment he feels God personally as-
signed for him in Paris, he takes comfort in the “patronage” (pokrovitel’stvo)
of the Lord and is able to write again: “A holy trembling runs through me,”
he writes, and “the Dead Ones flow in a lively way, more freshly and briskly
[‘Mertvye’ tekut zhivo, svezhee i bodree] than in Vevey.”57
According to Gogol, the link between writing and excreting waste was
not just a metaphor. As the following 1837 letter to N. Ia. Prokopovich shows,
he blamed his own digestive problems for hindering his work on Dead Souls:

82
 Gogol’s Gift

My stomach is nasty to an impossible degree; and although I eat very moder-

ately now, it absolutely refuses to digest. After the departure from Rome my
hemorrhoidal constipation began again, and would you believe it, if I don’t go
to the toilet [ne skhozhu na dvor], during the whole day I feel as if my brain
had some kind of cap pulled over it, which befogs my thoughts and prevents
me from thinking. The waters didn’t help me at all, and now I see that they are
terrible rubbish; I just feel worse: my pockets are light and my stomach heavy.58

Gogol’s rhetorical substitution of capped brains for blocked bowels gives new
meaning to his apology for being unable to “dig anything” out of his dirty
head for Mar’ia Vlasova’s album, and also to Bruni’s humorous sketch of him
with an oversized head, both of which are included at the start of this chap-
ter. In those documents as in Gogol’s letters, the inability to give is a physi-
ological condition.
While in the letters just cited, Gogol does not explicitly invoke the
poetic trope of literature as a “gift,” in others he does. For instance, in an
1842 appeal to S. S. Uvarov for “patronage,” Gogol speaks of his hopes that
his “fellow countrymen would regard me with sympathy, value the gift [dar],
which, as much as his strength allows, every Russian strives to bring to his
fatherland.” And yet, much as in the letter to Pogodin cited above, Gogol
here acknowledges that his gifts are for sale: asking Uvarov to help speed the
censors’ review of Dead Souls, he laments, “the time is passing when a book
has a market and sells.”59
Sigmund Freud’s assertions that feces not only constitutes the first
“gift” a child gives to its parents, but also becomes associated in the psyche
with money may be useful by way of comparison with Gogol’s tendency to
figure his writing as both food and feces, commodity and gift.60 For Gogol as
for Freud, the body plays an active role in economic life. While Freud’s writ-
ings on excrement support his theory of how the repression of anality and
other “drives” produces economically oriented character traits like “parsi-
mony,” Gogol’s writing displays less interest in the repression or sublimation
of aberrant impulses than in the reciprocal relation of seemingly opposing
ones.61 Unlike Freud, Gogol associates feces and other disgusting matter
with food as well as with gifts and money. Freud’s work comes closest to Go-
gol’s when he marvels at the capacity of feces to generate symbolic systems.
Tracing a wide range of values and behaviors back to an originary interest in
feces, Freud exclaims: “I can scarcely detail for you all the things that resolve
themselves into excrement for me (a new Midas!).”62 As a substance arising
from the combination and conversion of disparate matter into a homogenous
mass, which, in turn, helps to generate newly differentiated living forms,
excrement indeed exemplifies Gogol’s merger of opposing categories into a
new form of value.

83
 Chapter Two

In Dead Souls as in Gogol’s private letters, food shades into excrement,

and generosity, gratitude, and “giftedness” are bound up with economic
interest. After Chichikov leaves Korobochka’s estate, the novel continues
to turn over— or digest— the previously staged encounters: the hero moves
between additional commercial establishments and the homes of landown-
ers and officials, eating incessantly, putting forth his same proposal to buy
the landowners’ dead souls, and receiving a range of responses that match
the varying forms and degrees of hospitality he is offered. Meanwhile, Go-
gol’s narrator adopts a position somewhere between that of host and guest:
he leads readers on a tour of the Russian provinces and serves them food-
laden prose, but he also associates himself with Chichikov as a traveler and
an eater. For example, when Chichikov follows his breakfast at Korobochka’s
with a suckling pig at the first tavern, the narrator remarks with admiration
on the hero’s prodigious appetite:

The author must admit that he is quite envious of the appetite and stomach of
this sort of people. . . . Gentlemen of the middling sort, those who order ham
at one station, suckling pig at another, a hunk of sturgeon or some baked sau-
sage with onions at a third, and then sit down to table as if nothing had hap-
pened, whenever you like, and a sterlet soup with burbot and soft roe hisses
and gurgles between their teeth, accompanied by a tart or pie with catfish
tails, so that even a vicarious appetite is piqued— now, these gentlemen in-
deed enjoy an enviable gift from heaven! (5:59; 59)

Readers familiar with Gogol’s own digestive problems may recognize an

echo of those in the narrator’s envy of Chichikov’s ability to eat. As someone
with a “worm” of acquisition that draws food unto itself and seemingly obvi-
ates the need for defecation, Chichikov could indeed have been an object of
envy for Gogol, who considered constipation a hindrance to his own autho-
rial ambitions. If for Chichikov, appetite is a “gift” that enables him to take
full advantage of the other characters’ hospitality, for Gogol, it was a curse
that frequently frustrated his attempts to regale his readers. But even with-
out intimate knowledge of Gogol’s constipation, readers presented with his
prose may experience something akin to it. After all, the effect of the narra-
tor’s disquisition on Chichikov’s appetite is actually to suggest that by some
standards the hero eats too much. As a result of this spectacle of endless
intake, a “vicarious appetite” is as likely to be lost as “piqued.”
Over the course of the novel, hospitality grows ever more unappetizing
as the generous hosts and their acquisitive guest resemble one another ever
more closely. At Nozdrev’s home, the host distinguishes himself as an even
greater swindler than his guest. The food he serves is prepared by a cook
who thows in “the first thing he laid his hands on . . .— in short, slapdash,
as long as it was hot, and some sort of taste was bound to result.” The wines

84
 Gogol’s Gift

of which Nozdrev is especially proud are an even more accurate gauge of

his character, as they are diluted, misidentified, and served liberally to the
guests while the host himself holds back, deliberately intoxicating his guests
and presumably plotting some scheme against them (5:73; 74– 75). In busi-
ness as at table, cheating is its own aim for Nozdrev, and he is the only one of
the landowners who refuses to transfer his dead souls to Chichikov. In fact,
the visit concludes with Nozdrev threatening Chichikov with physical vio-
lence, and the hero is only saved when this swindler of swindlers is arrested
by the district captain of police (5:84; 86).
Such unpleasantness does little to deter Chichikov, who continues in-
gesting whatever is offered at the home of Sobakevich. Here, nothing sug-
gests that the food is of poor quality, but Sobakevich steers the dinner conver-
sation in a decidedly “vile” direction, describing nasty things other people—
including enlightened Europeans— serve elsewhere (cats, rotten lamb, frogs,
and so on). Moreover, Sobakevich and the others at table eat so much that
they can hardly digest it: “After the rack of lamb came cheesecakes, each
much bigger than a plate, then a turkey the size of a calf, chock-full of all
sorts of good things: eggs, rice, livers, and whatnot else, all of which settled
in one lump in the stomach. With that the dinner ended, but when they
got up from the table, Chichikov felt himself a good ton heavier” (5:94– 95;
98). That Sobakevich’s presentation of this impressive quantity of food is not
motivated by any genuinely friendly feeling becomes clear when Chichikov
issues his request for dead souls. Sensing that the souls have some value for
Chichikov, Sobakevich demands an exorbitant sum for them. Although he
praises himself for his Russian hospitality, at one point explicitly contrasting
himself to the miserly landowner Plyushkin, Sobakevich, too, turns out to be
what Chichikov calls a “pinchfist” (5:94, 101; 98, 105).
The excessive consumption of the former chapters finds its poetic re-
lease in the home of Plyushkin. It is precisely Plyushkin’s stinginess that en-
ables him to give Chichikov more of what he wants than any of the other
landowners do, as the miser has starved scores of his people and driven many
more to run away. Collapsing any distinction between taking and giving, the
narrator comments on Plyushkin’s textual transfer of more than two hundred
dead or vanished persons to Chichikov in the following way: “Such an unex-
pected acquisition was a real gift” (5:124; 131). Much like the gifts of writing
Gogol’s letters show the author struggling to deliver, Plyushkin’s gift to Chi-
chikov is noticeably fecal. As Vladimir Golstein has pointed out, the “tear” lo-
cated below the back of Plyushkin’s housecoat, the “dung” (navoz) into which
he is allowing his produce to turn, and the decomposing pile of junk in his
house all associate Plyushkin with the anus (5:113– 14; 119).63 With Plyushkin
Gogol makes good on his word in an 1836 letter to Zhukovsky, in which he
promises that in his novel, “all of Russia will appear” in one “heap” (kucha).64
Like Plyushkin’s heap, the Russia of Dead Souls is both rotting and

85
 Chapter Two

becoming fecund. Indeed, Chichikov’s visit to Plyushkin does not end the
novel but leads to additional rounds of consumption and waste. Just when
it seems Chichikov has achieved his goal of accumulating a tidy number of
dead souls— just when he seems to have risen to the position he so desired,
his scam is exposed, and he is left with nothing but the feeling of a man
who has defiled a “beautifully polished shoe” in a “dirty, stinking, puddle”
(5:165; 174). Confirming the digestive structure of the narrative, Chichikov’s
departure from town prompts the narrator to rehash the hero’s past, and
that past is itself marked by cycles of accumulation and loss. This cyclicality
both frustrates the forward movement of Chichikov’s ambition and troubles
the notion of its novelty. The hero’s manipulation of paper signs of value
does point to the incursion of commerce in agrarian Russia, but his reliance
on hospitality as a means of getting ahead is routine. Chichikov’s hosts are
as self-serving as he is, and they in fact need his acquisition because it pro-
vides them with the occasion to give. Similarly, the spread of commerce and
the heightened attention to social ambition in Nicholaevan Russia provided
Gogol with the occasion to regale readers with an ironic reflection on his
contemporaries’ rejection of those values as abject and foreign.65 Ultimately,
Gogol invokes conceptual oppositions solidifying in his day only to destabi-
lize them: in his fictional universe, literature is gift and commodity, hospital-
ity is warm and rotten, and emotional and physical feelings both drive and
derail economic exchange.

As this chapter has shown, both the practice and the discourse of hospitality
were essential to Gogol’s art. From his entrance on the St. Petersburg liter-
ary scene at Zhukovsky’s parties to the years he spent writing in Rome and
his final months in Moscow, where he burned the draft of the second volume
of Dead Souls and starved himself to death in his friend Alexander Tolstoy’s
house, he spent his adult life and literary career as a perpetual guest. He
inhabited cities far from his family estate in Ukraine and received shelter,
monetary support, and other forms of patronage from powerful friends.
Meanwhile, hospitality became a privileged discourse through which he
worked out his relation to readers.66 He styled himself now as a host, now
a guest, now a shadowy figure somewhere between the two. Whereas in his
Ukrainian tales hospitality negotiates the relationship between an unknown
writer from Ukraine and an elite Russian readership, in Dead Souls it testi-
fies to the ultimately untenable position he claimed for himself as not just a
Russian writer but a prophet whose literary and spiritual gifts might save the
nation from moral squalor.
Frustrated in his desire to serve up a more spiritually nourishing image
of Russia than he had done in the first volume of Dead Souls, Gogol spent the
final years of his life preoccupied with the legacies he would leave. In a pas-
sage the author struck from the “Testament” included in his last published

86
 Gogol’s Gift

work, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Vybrannye

mesta iz perepis’ki s druz’iami, 1847), he makes a final attempt to present
himself as a gracious host— not of readers in his lifetime but of strangers
in need for years to come. In this passage, which he sent to his mother in a
letter, Gogol directs her, his sisters, and the servants to convert the family
home into a refuge for travelers after his death:

When I am dead, none of my household will have the right to be free; they
ought rather put themselves at the disposition of the afflicted, the suffer-
ing, and all those who have felt sorrow in life. Let their abode, their country
house, have more the air of a hotel and an asylum, than that of a landowner’s
property; let he who presents himself be received by them as a parent and a
friend of the heart, let them question him gently and be concerned about his
means of livelihood, in order to know if he does not need someone to come to
his aid, or at least to know how to comfort him and solace him, in order that
no one may leave his village without having been helped. If it is a question
of someone habitually on the road, used to a wretched life and rather embar-
rassed at being lodged in a bourgeois house, then let him be led to the house
of the most comfortable and best lodged peasant of the village, who besides
would have the most exemplary morals and could aid him by his good coun-
sel. He will also question his guest gently on the conditions of his way of life,
will comfort him, and will furnish him with a reasonable amount of provisions
for the road. (6:516; 11)67

It is difficult to fathom how the same writer who portrays hospitality as an

aggressive, excessive, and repugnant performance of noble identity in Dead
Souls could command the women and servants under his stewardship to for-
ever welome others in his name. Gone here is the irony with which Gogol
formerly treated the reception of guests as a practice inextricably linked to
displays of power and prestige. For even as he strives to offer something like
the “absolute hospitality” on which Derrida muses as an impossible ethical
ideal, he clings to his identity as master of the house. This passage points to
one of the great paradoxes of Gogol’s gift: the more fervently he wished it
might redeem Russia, the more closely it resembled one of his own objects
of parody.
Much like the promised second and third volumes of Dead Souls, the
“asylum” for travelers on Gogol’s estate never materialized. And yet if Gogol
ultimately failed to give as much as he had hoped, his legacy nevertheless
shaped Russian literature for centuries to come. Turning to an examina-
tion of money in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, the next chapter studies
one example of that legacy in the form of an ambitious hero who lacks Chi-
chikov’s social graces but outdoes him in the art of counterfeiting.

87
 Figure 7. Fake twenty-five-ruble assignatsiia printed in France and circulated
by Napoleon’s army in Russia. Obverse. The text reads: “To the bearer of this
governmend [sic] assignatsiia the Assignation Bank pays twenty-five rubles in
currend [sic] coin.” Two words are misspelled, with a Cyrillic “l” (л) appearing in
place of “d” (д) in “gosudarstvennoi” (government) and “khodiacheiu” (current).
The printed date of issue may not be authentic. Early 1800s. The black arrows
pointing to the errors were presumably attached by collector Michael Byckoff, in
whose album the bill is featured. Photograph courtesy of the Hoover Institution.
Michael Byckoff collection, Box 10, Hoover Institution Archives.
 Chapter Three

Dostoevsky’s Money

M O N E Y S P R E A D S like a connective tissue through the

pages of Dostoevsky’s fictions. From Poor Folk to The Brothers Karamazov
(Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1879– 80), it binds characters to one another and links
them to large-scale social and government institutions. Flowing as salary
from the state bureaucracy to its countless clerks, or as gifts, loans, or loot
among family members and neighbors, it is a state-issued object stashed on
the body or in the home. It mediates between public and private, material-
ity and abstraction, fantasy and the everyday. Dostoevsky’s complex treat-
ment of money anticipates key developments in twentieth-century sociology
of the everyday. Take for example the pioneering micro-sociologist Georg
Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900): for Simmel, money represents
“the most certain image and the clearest embodiment of the formula of all
being, according to which things receive their meaning through each other,
and have their being determined by their mutual relations.”1 Dostoevsky fre-
quently deploys money as precisely such a symbol of the interconnectedness
of meaning. But whereas Simmel treats money as an emblem of “pure quan-
tity” that is entirely “without qualities,” Dostoevsky is attuned to the multiple
physical forms money takes and the emotionally charged significance those
forms hold for individuals in particular places and times.
Dostoevsky embarked on his authorial career at a historical moment
marked by the proliferation of diverse currencies, as the high inflation and
rampant counterfeiting that had devalued the paper ruble assignatsiia
throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century culminated in the
overhaul of the monetary system during the imperial financial reforms of
1839– 43, leading to the replacement of the assignatsiia by the silver ruble as
the state’s main unit of currency and the issuance of the kreditnyi bilet as the
new bill of exchange. This historical situation may well have prompted Dos-
toevsky to explore what sociologist Viviana Zelizer terms, in her book of the
same name, The Social Meaning of Money (1994). Surveying such diverse
twentieth-century U.S. currencies as food stamps, gift cards, and women’s
“pin money,” Zelizer concludes, “Money is neither culturally neutral nor so-

89
 Chapter Three

cially anonymous. It may well ‘corrupt’ values and convert social ties into
numbers, but values and social relations reciprocally transmute money by
investing it with meaning.”2
We see Dostoevsky approaching this insight in his first three published
works: Poor Folk, The Double, and “Mr. Prokharchin.” In each of these texts,
money forms part of a distinct and generically marked emotional economy.
In Poor Folk, the kindly pooling together of small sums helps to structure a
Sentimentalist economy of gift exchange. In The Double, the spending of
devalued bills forms part of a fantastically uncertain economy of counterfeit-
ing. And in “Mr. Prokharchin,” the titular miser’s hoard of incommensurable
currencies models Dostoevsky’s experimentation with early Realist character
typology. By crossing the petty clerk tale so popular among writers of the
emerging Realist movement known as the Natural School with such forms
as Sentimentalist epistolary fiction, the fantastic tale, and the miser fable,
Dostoevsky shows how different the petty clerk, his money, and the social
relations money embodies might look and feel when evaluated according to
the terms of different semiotic systems. Thus alongside its social meanings,
in Dostoevsky’s early works money has metaliterary significance: it serves as
a means by which to reflect on the processes of writing and reading about
the social.
Scholars have probed Dostoevsky’s literary treatments of money in
relation to the author’s personal financial struggles; his social and religious
views; the professionalization of literature; the aesthetics of Realism; and the
temporal dynamics of plot.3 What remains to be fully acknowledged is the
historical specificity of the currency that animates Dostoevsky’s fictions. Tak-
ing The Double as a case study, this chapter proposes that the material history
of Russian money fostered Dostoevsky’s aesthetic of fantastic realism. In
particular, money enables what Malcolm Jones has identified as Dostoevsky’s
tendency “to challenge the reader’s (and the character’s) easy identification
of signifier with signified, sign with meaning, verisimilitude with reality.”4
This investigation of money in The Double complements the study
of ambition in that novella undertaken in chapter 1: money is the primary
instrument with which the hero pursues his ambition. Furthermore, while
Dostoevsky’s treatment of ambition reveals his interest in feelings that arise
from the discrepancy between Russian and foreign words, his handling of
money exposes the discrepancy between all words and the objects they
name. Like the early nineteenth-century French cultural model of mad am-
bition, early nineteenth-century Russian monetary history would continue to
shape Dostoevsky’s writings for years to come. Indeed, when he revised the
original text of The Double for republication in 1866, he not only left the role
of money essentially unchanged, but also transferred key elements of the
early novella’s poetic economy to such new works as Crime and Punishment,

90
 Dostoevsky’s Money

The Idiot (Idiot, 1868– 69), and The Demons (Besy, 1872– 73).5 I therefore
look to Russian monetary history of the 1830s and 1840s for a more com-
plete understanding of The Double and Dostoevsky’s later novels as well.
Viewing The Double as an oblique response to the imperial financial crisis
and reforms of 1839– 43, I argue that the volatility of the Russian monetary
sign aids Dostoevsky’s flight from Realist referentiality.

UN C E RTA I N WO RT H

From the opening pages, money helps to generate the “fantastic coloring”
(fantasticheskii kolorit) for which the contemporary critic Vissarion Belin-
sky famously faulted The Double.6 As Goliadkin awakens in his humble St.
Petersburg apartment and takes his savings of “750 rubles in banknotes [as-
signatsii]” out of a drawer, the narrator supposes that the bills return his
affectionate gaze: “Probably the wad of green, gray, blue, red, and multicol-
ored bits of paper also looked back quite affably and approvingly at Mr. Goli-
adkin” (Veroiatno, pachka zelenen’kikh, seren’kikh, sinen’kikh, krasnen’kikh
i raznykh pestren’kikh bumazhek tozhe ves’ma privetlivo i odobritel’no gli-
anula na gospodina Goliadkina [1:110; 4]).7 The apparent animation of the
bills, which the narrator does not confirm but rather qualifies with “prob-
ably,” is an early indication of money’s role in the production of fantastic
uncertainty: like the doppelgänger who appears later in the novella, money
resists narrative objectification.
While the narrator’s initial description of Goliadkin and his apartment
places The Double in the tradition of the petty clerk tales already familiar to
readers of the Natural School, money affords Goliadkin’s escape (by hired
carriage) from the apartment and the genre that typify him.8 For a titular
councilor like Goliadkin, 750 rubles in assignatsii would have been a sub-
stantial amount of money in the 1840s. According to Boris Mironov, in the
first half of the nineteenth century a typical family could enjoy a noble life-
style in the capital on an annual income of 450 to 800 silver rubles.9 Given
the prevailing exchange rate between the silver ruble and the assignat-
siia, 450 silver rubles equaled roughly 1,600 assignatsii in the early 1840s.
It therefore appears that Goliadkin’s savings would likely support a single
man like him for at least half a year. His possession of such a sum certainly
sets him apart from the similarly ranked but impoverished heroes of Nikolai
Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” (“Shinel’,” 1842) and Dostoevsky’s first novel,
Poor Folk. Unlike “The Overcoat” and Poor Folk, The Double takes shape
as a tale of spending rather than saving or seeking money. Goliadkin’s as-
signatsii fund the progression of the plot, and by its end, they have been
dissipated in tandem with the disintegration of his personality and the col-

91
 Chapter Three

lapse of the narrative credibility on which Realism depends. Whereas clas-

sic interpretations of The Double often describe Dostoevsky’s project as an
essentially Realist “naturalization,” “realization,” or “rationalization” of the
Romantic doppelgänger theme and explain its fantastic elements as symp-
toms of the hero’s madness, money’s movements through the novella un-
settle these claims to Realism.10
Goliadkin uses money as a tool of self-presentation, and this practice
is intimately linked to the novella’s central phenomenon of doubling. Money
first transforms the hero into another version of himself by enabling him to
don fancy clothes and new boots, dress his servant in a rented livery, and
hire a carriage (1:111; 5– 6). Parading down Nevsky Prospect in uncharac-
teristically high style, Goliadkin performs the split in his subjectivity that
later manifests itself in the appearance of the double. It is his effective use
of money to present himself in a new way that allows Goliadkin to conceive
of claiming that he is someone other than he is, saying, “It’s not me at all, not
me, and that’s that” (1:113; 8). Using money to conjure up a new version of
himself, Goliadkin sets the plot of The Double on a fantastic course.
Writing The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts just a year
before Dostoevsky composed The Double, Karl Marx also treated money’s
purchasing power in terms of self-multiplication: “That which is for me
through the medium of money— that for which I can pay (i.e., which money
can buy)— that am I, the possessor of the money” (emphasis in the original).
In this formulation, money creates doubles in the form of potential selves
that can be brought into being through the process of exchange. For Marx,
this transformative power is fantastical: “Money transforms the real essential
powers of man and nature into . . . tormenting chimeras— just as it trans-
forms real imperfections and chimeras . . . which exist only in the imagi-
nation of the individual— into real powers and faculties” (emphasis in the
original).11 Dostoevsky was certainly not familiar with Marx’s Manuscripts,
which were not published until the twentieth century. However, Marx’s
rhetoric is a useful reminder of money’s dark role in the literature of the
fantastic.
From Mephistopheles’s printing of paper currency in part 2 of Faust (a
work Marx himself references in the Manuscripts) to the frequent deals with
the devil in European and Russian Romanticism, money was commonly as-
sociated with the supernatural and the demonic. Notable Russian examples
of this fantastical treatment of money include Vassily Zhukovsky’s “Twelve
Sleeping Maidens, An Ancient Tale in Two Ballads” (“Dvenadtsat’ spiash-
chikh dev, Starinnaia povest’ v dvukh balladakh,” 1817), Alexander Pushkin’s
“The Queen of Spades,” and Nikolai Gogol’s “Portrait” (“Portret,” 1835, rev.
1842). In all of these works, characters make dangerous bargains with de-
mons and ghosts in their pursuit of wealth. Taking a cue from the landown-

92
 Dostoevsky’s Money

ers who explain Chichikov’s interest in false deeds of serf ownership as the
work of the devil in Gogol’s Dead Souls, many critics have also discerned
a demonic element in that novel, which explores the seemingly fantastical
monetization of agrarian values in early nineteenth-century Russia.12 For
Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Chichikov’s traffic in human souls makes him “the
Antichrist himself,” while in Nabokov’s formulation, the mediocre swindler
becomes “merely the ill-paid representative of the Devil, a traveling sales-
man from Hades.”13 As Dead Souls makes clear, in Russia, the demonization
of money extended to those who would attempt to substitute false signs of
value for legal tender. Indeed, both Dead Souls and The Double activate a
Russian cultural association between suspect currency and the usurpation
of the tsar’s divine authority by impostors, who were traditionally identified
with the devil.14 Gogol shows Chichikov treating false deeds as psuedo-cash,
and he likens this to Napoleon’s demonic production of counterfeit Russian
banknotes such as the one pictured in figure 7. For his part, Dostoevsky sug-
gests that even the most legitimate currency is a devilish illusion, and that
those who spend it are as guilty of misrepresentation as the False Dmitry.
Thus, in their early works, both Marx and Dostoevsky draw on literary
and cultural traditions linking money to supernatural forces. Whereas Marx’s
invocation of the chimerical powers of money forms part of his emerging
theory of capitalist alienation, Dostoevsky’s sense of the fantastical is rooted
in the life of Russia’s imperial capital. Existing critical interpretations of The
Double which rightly point to St. Petersburg as a city whose social and his-
torical contradictions proved particularly productive of fantastic literature
leave room for greater consideration of Russian monetary history.15 Russell
Scott Valentino has opened an exciting line of inquiry with his treatment
of Goliadkin’s government assignatsii as instruments of both personal and
collective fantasy. Especially suggestive is Valentino’s comparison of paper
money to the government documents which similarly emanated from the
capital and circulated throughout the empire: like the papers Goliadkin cop-
ies at work, the bills he spends around town both depend upon and uphold
societal belief in the authority and security of the state. Whereas Valentino
focuses on Dostoevsky’s reaction to the spread of modern commercial cul-
ture in nineteenth-century Russia, I am particularly concerned with the aes-
thetic implications of the material history of Russian money.16 This history
sheds light on Dostoevsky’s association of money with doubling and his crea-
tion of a narrative in which the hero’s frantic spending undermines the cred-
ibility of conventional signs of value— monetary, linguistic, and aesthetic.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Russian monetary sys-
tem was plagued by unwanted doubles. Beginning with Catherine II’s intro-
duction of the paper assignatsiia in 1769 and continuing through the first
decades of the nineteenth century, the government financed wars and paid

93
 Chapter Three

debts by repeatedly issuing more paper money than it could back with pre-
cious metals in the treasury. This practice caused high inflation and led to
the establishment of two monetary standards— the silver ruble and the as-
signatsiia. According to this double standard, the nominal worth of the paper
ruble was much higher than its worth in silver. As though taking inspiration
from the government’s assertion that its paper was more valuable than it was,
counterfeiters issued a great number of illegal assignatsii.17 The counterfeits
circulated by Napoleon’s army during its invasion of Russia offer but the
most spectacular example of this broader phenomenon.18 Together, the gov-
ernment’s own prodigal spending of paper money and the counterfeiters’
forgeries dramatically undermined the value of the assignatsiia, which fell to
just 27½ kopecks in silver from 1833 to 1843.19 Nevertheless, the assignatsiia
was officially the main unit of currency, and the government used it to pay
salaries and other domestic expenses, reserving silver mostly for foreign pay-
ments. Hence the main unit of currency in this period— the assignatsiia—
was a conspicuously fictional text whose inflated value was rendered all the
more suspect by the circulation of its more and less valuable doubles: the
silver ruble and the counterfeit.
The imperial financial reforms of 1839– 43, which took place during
Dostoevsky’s first decade in Petersburg, sought to eliminate these doubles.20
Establishing the silver ruble as the sole monetary standard, the government
declared the assignatsiia worthless, and the hundreds of thousands of assig-
natsii in circulation were recalled and destroyed. Issuing various new forms
of paper money during the reform years, the government eventually settled
on the kreditnyi bilet (credit bill) as the primary replacement for the as-
signatsiia. Although the kreditnyi bilet was to be redeemable for the silver
ruble at an equal exchange rate (until the Crimean War again prompted the
government to issue more paper money than it could back with silver), and
the St. Petersburg agency responsible for printing the bills implemented
new, anticounterfeiting design techniques (which did not prove as success-
ful as had been hoped), the reforms actually highlighted the unstable and
uncertain value of Russian money.21 According to Walter McKenzie Pintner,
the financial crisis and reforms were the economic issues most widely and
publicly discussed during Nicholas I’s reign.22 While the government was
better able to conceal other problems— such as the large debts it carried—
the transition to a new currency was a tangible reality for Russian subjects.
(See figures 8 and 9.)
The economic uncertainty resulting from the imperial financial re-
forms contributed to the epistemological uncertainty that permeates The
Double. In Tzvetan Todorov’s classic account, the reader of a fantastic tale is
confronted with apparently supernatural events and is never able to decide
whether the text affirms or denies their existence: “The fantastic occupies

94
 Figure 8. Twenty-five-ruble assignatsiia, 1818. Obverse. The text reads: “To the
bearer of this government assignatsiia the Assignation Bank pays twenty-five rubles
in current coin.” Photograph courtesy of the Hoover Institution. Michael Byckoff
collection, Box 10, Hoover Institution Archives.
 Figure 9. Twenty-five-ruble credit bill, 1843. Obverse. The text reads: “Upon
presentation of this bill the Exchange Banks of the Expedition of Credit Bills
promptly give twenty-five rubles in silver or gold coin.” 170 × 108 mm. The State
Hermitage Museum. St. Petersburg. Inv. no. ON-R-B-Ant.-46. Photograph © The
State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vasilyeva O. A.
 Dostoevsky’s Money

the duration of this uncertainty.”23 In 1845, the year Dostoevsky wrote The
Double, private citizens in St. Petersburg began exchanging their old assig-
natsii for the new kreditnye bilety.24 In this way, the public literally had a
hand in the financial reforms— handing in their old bills for new ones. This
would have brought the monetary crisis to the forefront of the public imagi-
nation, raising questions about the validity of government tender.

S PE N D I NG A ND S P EA KI NG

The currency reforms find a telling correspondence in Dostoevsky’s story

about a man who tries— and ultimately fails— to use money to assert his
personal worth. As a means of movement as well as self-fashioning, money
at first seems to offer Goliadkin the possibility of upward social mobility. The
hero himself praises the mobility his 750 paper rubles afford, announcing,
“A man can go far on such a sum” (Takaia summa mozhet daleko povesti che-
loveka [4; 110]).25 Indeed, the first thing Goliadkin pays for in the novella is
the carriage, which, for twenty-five rubles, takes him to a series of locations
where he attempts to present himself as a man of considerable fortune and
good society. As we have seen in chapter 1, however, Goliadkin’s plan to move
up in society backfires, and he discredits himself further with every step.
This is true even in his own home, where Goliadkin leads the double
soon after the latter’s appearance, and where the hero adopts the pose of
a magnanimous host offering “patronage” (pokrovitel’stvo) to his seemingly
unfortunate guest (1:153– 57; 64– 70). As demonstrated in chapter 2 by Chi-
chikov’s attempts to lure his hosts into illegal transactions in Dead Souls,
however, unfortunate guests may conceal dangerous ambitions of their own.
In fact, after treating the double to dinner and a few too many rounds of rum
punch, Goliadkin awakens the next day to realize that he has given more than
he intended: in particular, he has revealed secrets that the double will use to
besmirch his reputation. The abused host’s lament, “He ate my bread . . . ; he
availed himself of my hospitality,” does little to win back the respect he loses
at work and among friends (1:198; 126). Nevertheless, it does help readers
to understand the hero’s incessant spending as a failed performance of noble
largesse.
As Goliadkin’s quest for self-justification becomes ever more urgent,
he accelerates his expenditures around the city. Taking cabs “so as not to lose
time” Goliadkin pays for the rapid advancement of the multidirectional plot
(1:170; 88). His spending becomes increasingly prodigal and irrational. He
pays cabbies to wait for him only to dismiss them without taking rides, giv-
ing one driver extra money “even quite willingly” (dazhe s bol’shoiu okhotoiu
[1:223, 171; 161, 90]). At one point the narrator comments on Goliadkin’s

97
 Chapter Three

unusually profligate behavior: “Mr. Goliadkin had somehow become extraor-

dinarily generous” (1:177; 97). Even after a wild ride in a cab the double
hired, and out of which the double tries to throw him, Goliadkin dutifully
pays the driver before chasing his nemesis on foot: “Not forgetting to pay the
cabby, Mr. Goliadkin rushed out to the street” (1:206; 137).
Despite his unceasing movements and reckless spending, Goliadkin
does not reach a final destination or buy anything of tangible value by the
novella’s end. In this regard, both his movements and his spending are analo-
gous to his speech. Characterized by stuttering and ineffective circumlocu-
tion, as in the impressively vacuous string of phrases, “Thus and so, say . . .
that’s what . . .” (Tak i tak, deskat’ . . . vot kak . . .), Goliadkin’s speech con-
tinuously sidesteps meaning only to arrive back where it began (1:196; 124).
To put this in economic terms, Goliadkin squanders his words, spending
them unwisely and getting little or nothing (in terms of coherent meaning
or understanding by an interlocutor) in return.26 This is particularly true of
his verbal attempts to assert his own worth, as in his first conversation with
his doctor: “I was saying that you must excuse me, Krestyan Ivanovich, for
the fact that I, as it seems to me, am no master of fine speaking. . . . I am
unable to speak at length; I never studied how to beautify my style. Instead,
Krestyan Ivanovich, I act [ia deistvuiu]; I act instead, Krestyan Ivanovich!”
(1:116; 12). Interrupting himself with qualifications and repetitions, Goliad-
kin expresses little more than his own inarticulacy.
The verb deistvovat’, which Goliadkin uses emphatically to present
himself as a man of action and substance, undermines his claims to personal
merit. This word has the additional meanings of “work,” “function,” or “be
valid,” and it may refer to the validity of a bill, ticket, or token. Goliadkin’s
claim to “act” or “work” echoes a similar one made by the watermark on the
Russian assignatsii printed from 1769 to 1817: “Love for the fatherland /
Works to its [i.e., the fatherland’s] advantage [Deistvuet k pol’ze onogo].”27
The proliferation of paper currencies making similar claims of validity in the
1840s may help to explain why Krestyan Ivanovich gives Goliadkin a “strange,
mistrustful look” as he questions the hero’s use of this verb: “Hm . . . How is
it . . . that you act [vy deistvuete]?” (1:116; 12– 13).
In another echo of the watermark’s assertion that paper money brings
“advantage,” or, in an alternate translation, “use,” to the fatherland, Goliad-
kin imagines at one point how he might speak in such a way as to reveal the
double as a pretender to his personal legitimacy: “I’d say such and such—
thus and so, but for me, my good sir, with your permission, it’s neither here
nor there; say, things aren’t done this way, and imposture [samozvanstv(o)]
doesn’t get anywhere with us; an impostor [samozvanets], my good sir, is a
man who is— useless and of no use to the fatherland [bespoleznyi i pol’zy
otechestvu ne prinosiashchii].” And yet, Goliadkin never does utter these

98
 Dostoevsky’s Money

highly repetitive words out loud, but renounces them himself as the “bab-
bling [of] an utter fool” (1:212; 146). This is one of several instances in which
Goliadkin uses self-duplicating language of imposture to describe the double;
earlier in the novel, he compares the double directly to Grigory Otrepev,
a.k.a. the False Dmitry, who presented himself as the legitimate heir to the
Russian throne and reigned from 1605 to 1606: “And one doesn’t get ahead
in our age by imposture [samozvanstv(o)] and shamelessness, my dear sir.
Imposture and shamelessness, my dear sir, do not lead to any good, but end
in the noose. Grishka Otryepev alone got ahead by imposture, my good sir,
having deceived the blind people, and that not for long” (1:167– 68; 84). Go-
liadkin’s redundant comparisons of the double to a royal impostor perform
the very uselessness the hero would like to expose in the other man. Like
paper money devalued by its own proliferation, the hero’s words are great in
number, yet of little worth.
The shared functions of Goliadkin’s prodigal spending and speaking—
that of simultaneously making and undercutting claims of value— form the
basis of the analogy The Double posits between money and language. Re-
ceiving clearer elaboration later in the work, this analogy already suggests
itself in the opening description of Goliadkin’s 750 rubles in assignatsii. The
very word assignatsiia exhibits the semiotic character of money, deriving as
it does from the Latin signum. If the foreign origin of the Russian terms
assignatsiia and kreditnyi bilet renders the relationship between monetary
signs and values immediately problematic, the transitional character of Rus-
sian money in the 1840s, when the assignatsii were recalled and replaced
by kreditnye bilety, makes the assignatsiia an especially apt representative
of signs whose relationships to their referents are unstable. This transitional
character is evident in the colorful description of Goliadkin’s bills as “green,
gray, blue, red,” and “multicolored” (pestren’kikh). Historically, there were
red and blue (as well as white and beige) assignatsii, but there were no gray,
green, or properly “multicolored” bills of this kind. In fact, the narrator gives
a more accurate description of the bills that replaced the assignatsii— the
kreditnye bilety— which were issued in each of the colors cited. Goliadkin’s
money appears in hybrid form: it has an old name and a new look. While
the old name— assignatsiia— is a recently retracted sign of value, the new
name— kreditnyi bilet— has yet to acquire a stable place in the public lexi-
con. Coming right at the beginning of The Double, this colorful discrepancy
between the name stated and the thing named is the first of many instances
in which a lingering uncertainty about the kind and value of money raises
questions about the referential value of language.
Comparisons of money to language have a long history in Western
thought.28 A particularly well-known example is Ferdinand de Saussure’s
comparison of monetary and linguistic “value”:

99
 Chapter Three

It is not the metal in a piece of money that fixes its value. A coin nominally
worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will
vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside
or outside a political boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signi-
fier, which is not phonic but incorporeal— constituted not by its material sub-
stance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.29

De Saussure draws this analogy between money and language in order to ex-
plain that linguistic signs are differential, or acquire meaning only in relation
to other signs. His comparison of the linguistic sign to a coin also reinforces
his assertion that the former is arbitrary. Like a coin, a linguistic sign rep-
resents something— a concept— that is not inherent to it, but is rather as-
signed to it by social convention.
For de Saussure as for Dostoevsky, the analogy between monetary and
linguistic signs challenges the idea that words refer directly to preexisting
things. Asserting that language is a “system of pure values,” de Saussure does
not include a referent in his model of the linguistic sign, which consists only
of the “sound-image,” or signifier, and “concept,” or signified.30 Anticipat-
ing de Saussure’s destabilization of linguistic referentiality by more than a
half-century, Dostoevsky wrote The Double as though against the emerg-
ing aesthetics of Realism, the contemporary critical formulations of which
presupposed a direct correspondence between signs and referents. While
de Saussure compares the linguistic sign to a coin, Dostoevsky likens lan-
guage to paper money. Paper money in particular exemplifies the arbitrari-
ness and conventionality of signs. If coins have value as commodities made
(at least partially) of precious metals, paper money conspicuously lacks
inherent value. Moreover, in its increased vulnerability to counterfeiting,
paper money is a text of suspect, fragile value that embodies the generalized
anxieties of duplication in The Double. Associating paper money with false
promises and phantoms conjured up by speech, Dostoevsky highlights the
fiction-producing power that money and language share.
During a visit to the Gostiny Dvor shopping arcades, Goliadkin uses
paper money and lies to misrepresent himself as a wealthy man. In one ex-
ample, he exchanges his large bills for small ones in order to make his purse
look fuller: “On the way he dashed into the moneychanger’s shop and broke
all his big notes into smaller ones [razmenial vsiu svoiu krupnuiu bumagu na
melkuiu], and though he lost in the exchange, he broke them all the same,
and his wallet grew significantly fatter, which apparently afforded him great
pleasure” (1:122; 20). Goliadkin’s use of money in this scene is extremely
strange: he pays for nothing other than a semblance of wealth, as the prolif-
eration of bills results in a loss rather than a gain in value. As when he gazes
at his savings at the start of the novella, Goliadkin here experiences “great

100
 Dostoevsky’s Money

pleasure” looking at his bills, showing that he prizes them more for their
power to present a favorable image of him than for their actual purchasing
power. On the one hand, this instance of monetary inflation corroborates
Goliadkin’s misrepresentation of self: like the government’s repeated expan-
sion of the money supply, which devalued the assignatsii throughout the
early nineteenth century, Goliadkin’s artful manipulation of monetary signs
undermines the truth-value of his self-presentation. On the other hand, Go-
liadkin’s actions demonstrate both the fiction-producing potential of all signs
of value, and the “great pleasure” such fictions may afford.

FA L S E P R O M I S ES

Goliadkin commits verbal as well as visual acts of deception at Gostiny Dvor.

First, he visits a shop of gold and silver wares, where he puts on an elaborate
show of purchasing power but does not buy anything. He inquires about
the price of goods, bargains with the salesman, and promises to return later
that day or the next to pay a little over 1,500 assignatsii for a “dinner and tea
service” and the same amount for a “whimsically shaped cigar box and a full
silver shaving kit.” When the clerk asks for a deposit, Goliadkin “promised to
give him a little deposit in due time” (obeshchal v svoe vremia i zadatochek
[1:122; 21]). Despite his repeated assurances to the contrary, it is clear that
Goliadkin will not actually return to buy the goods: after all, readers know he
now has fewer than 750 rubles. In this scene, Goliadkin issues false promises
of convertibility like those printed on the assignatsiia: both Goliadkin and
the assignatsiia claim to be worth more precious metal than they are.
The transition to a new form of paper currency in the 1840s made plain
the promissory character of paper money. As seen in figure 8, the text of the
Russian assignatsiia printed between 1818 and 1843 reads as follows: “To
the bearer of this government assignatsiia the Assignation Bank pays twenty-
five rubles in current coin.” Though supposedly the assignatsii, too, could
be redeemed for “current [specifically, copper] coin,” over the years the bills
had ceased to be convertible.31 Consequently, the promise that assignatsii
could be traded for coins would not have inspired the confidence the gov-
ernment hoped to give its subjects in 1843 when it reworded the promise
of convertibility on the new kreditnyi bilet shown in figure 9: “Upon pre-
sentation of this bill the Exchange Banks of the Expedition of Credit Bills
promptly give twenty-five rubles in silver or gold coin.” Here, the govern-
ment makes the more specific promise to exchange the bills for an equal
amount of silver or gold. If the name of the old currency— the assignatsiia—
exhibits the semiotic character of money, the name of the new currency—
the kreditnyi bilet— points to the state’s attempt to reclaim credibility.

101
 Chapter Three

Throughout The Double, Goliadkin appears similarly anxious to show

that his words are convertible to a material value. In one of the shops he visits
at Gostiny Dvor, he promises to pay a deposit on “various women’s materials
[materii],” such as a bachelor preparing to marry might need (1:122; 21).32
This scene hints at the novella’s thwarted love story. Whether Goliadkin is
trying to seem like a wealthy lady’s suitor or actually believes that he is one,
no bride materializes for him. Instead, the mock-shopping spree at Gostiny
Dvor serves as a long preface to his disastrous appearance at the party for
Klara Olsufyevna, and the story ends with his failed attempt to elope with
her. Marriage is an exchange the hero is never able to make— a promise the
novella refuses to honor. At Gostiny Dvor and elsewhere, it is clear that Goli-
adkin’s words cannot sustain the claims they make on “materials.”
Though he does make a variety of small expenditures on transporta-
tion, snacks, and small articles of clothing, the hero’s conspicuously false
promises to pay are so frequent as to constitute a chronic feature of his per-
sonality. When he visits his doctor on the way to Gostiny Dvor, he alludes
to gossip among his colleagues that he failed to fulfill a promise to marry
his former landlady, Karolina Ivanovna, in lieu of paying his debts to her.
Here again, Goliadkin’s false promises are linked to the question of paper’s
value: according to the rumor, he “signed an agreement [podpisku]” to marry
the woman (1:121; 19). Though Goliadkin denies ever having issued such a
promise, the rumors about it circulate throughout the novella, undermining
the truth-value of his words. Indeed, Goliadkin’s false promises lead others
to call him a counterfeiter of speech. Referring to Goliadkin’s promise to
marry Karolina Ivanovna, Vakhrameev says Goliadkin is one of those people
whose “words are counterfeit” (slova ikh— fal’sh’), and whose “well-meaning
appearance is suspicious” (blagonamerennyi vid podozritelen).33 Since Vakh-
rameev has lost faith in Goliadkin’s promises, he demands immediate repay-
ment of a debt of “two silver roubles” (dva tselkovykh) Goliadkin has long
owed him (1:181; 103– 4). Vakhrameev’s letter challenges Goliadkin to prove
that the words he issued when promising to repay his friend are convertible
to a tangible value in silver. However, in his written response to Vakhrameev,
Goliadkin simply reissues his promise to pay the debt on some unknown
future date: “In conclusion I will say that I consider it my sacred duty to
repay the debt you mentioned, two silver roubles, in its entirety [vo vsei ego
tselosti (1:183; 106)].” Like the Russian assignatsiia, Goliadkin’s letter is but
a paper representation of value and a deferral of debt.

FA N TA S T I C CO U NT ER F EI T I NG

Of course, the greatest threat to Goliadkin’s reputation as an honest, sane,

and solvent man is his double. Like a bill devalued by the circulation of a

102
 Dostoevsky’s Money

counterfeit, Goliadkin is devalued by the double. Dostoevsky repeatedly de-

scribes the double in the language of counterfeiting. The double is the “use-
less and counterfeit” (bespoleznyi i fal’shivyi) and the “malformed and coun-
terfeit” [bezobrazn(yi) i poddel’n(yi)] Mr. Goliadkin (1:186; 110).34 Fal’shivyi
and poddel’nyi are the Russian adjectives used most frequently in reference
to counterfeit currency, as in phrases like fal’shivaia moneta (counterfeit
coin), or poddel’nye assignatsii (counterfeit assignatsii). At one point, the
narrator sums up the difficulty of distinguishing the genuine Goliadkin from
the false one: “So that if they had been taken and placed next to each other,
no one, decidedly no one, would have undertaken to determine precisely
which was the real Goliadkin and which was the counterfeit, which was the
old and which the new, which was the original and which the copy [koto-
ryi imenno nastoiashchii Goliadkin, a kotoryi poddel’nyi, kto staren’kii i kto
noven’kii, kto original i kto kopiia (1:147; 55)].” Just as it must have been dif-
ficult for people in Russia to sort out the various kinds of genuine and false,
old and new currencies during the 1839– 43 monetary reforms, so in The
Double it is impossible to tell who is the “real,” “counterfeit,” “old,” “new,”
“original,” or “copy” Goliadkin. While the hero tries desperately to assert
that he is the real Goliadkin and the double a false copy, he frequently uses
money and language to misrepresent his financial and personal worth; he too
is guilty of counterfeiting. This point is crucial: rather than fixing the double
with the stable allegorical status of counterfeit and Goliadkin with the status
of original, Dostoevsky sets these categories in unstoppable motion.
The Double suggests that there is a doubling, or counterfeiting, in-
volved in all spending. Several scenes of potential or actual payment involve
puns on the theme of doubling. In the scene at the gold and silver shop cited
above, Goliadkin’s offer of just over 1,500 rubles for a set of dishes roughly
doubles the original amount of his savings (750 rubles); then he doubles that
double-offer with another to pay the same amount for the cigar case and
shaving kit. He also promises to repay Vakhrameev two rubles. But while
these are examples of Goliadkin’s promissory use of words and paper (the
promise to pay paper money for metal goods at the shop, and the paper let-
ter in which he promises to pay back Vakhrameev in silver), the most striking
example of the associative link between doubling and spending occurs when
the hero actually makes a payment in silver.
After Goliadkin eats just one pastry in a café, the cashier charges him
for eleven. Though the number of pastries Goliadkin must pay for is spelled
out as a word— eleven (odinnadtsat’)— the graphic doubling that turns 1
into 11 haunts the scene of exchange. Not understanding why he is being
charged for eleven pastries, Goliadkin thinks to himself: “What is this, is
some kind of witchcraft being worked on me?” (Chto zh eto, koldovstvo, chto
l’ kakoe nado mnoi sovershaetsia?). Then, spotting the still-chewing double
in a doorway he had thought was a mirror, he realizes that he has indeed been

103
 Chapter Three

counterfeited through some kind of “witchcraft.” He concludes, “Supplanted

me, the scoundrel!” (Podmenil, podlets!). Here Goliadkin calls the double a
counterfeiter, as podmenit’ is a verb used to describe the illegal substitution
of false for genuine currency. When Goliadkin tries to affirm his integrity
by paying for the extra ten pastries with a silver ruble— the newly estab-
lished, single monetary standard of the empire— the coin radiates seemingly
infernal heat: “Goliadkin flung down the silver ruble as if it had burned his
fingers” (1:173– 74; 93). Though silver’s value as a commodity might make it
seem like a sign of “real” value, coins too are conventional signs. They contain
varying and frequently unknown amounts of the precious metals for which
they are named, and the value of those metals is secured by political decree
and social custom. Far from affirming any natural, “real” supremacy of metal
over paper money, Dostoevsky portrays the value of silver rubles such as the
one shown in figures 10a and 10b as the most devilish magic of all.

Standing in for something they are not, coins, bills, and words all double the
abstract or conceptual values they posit. As a universal equivalent, money
stands in for and so doubles exchange value; it also doubles things by giv-
ing them prices, and doubles people by bringing their potential selves into
being. For its part, language doubles things, people, and concepts by naming
them. Though the duplicating tendencies of money and language are not
unique to any one time or place, I contend that the checkered history of
Russian money in the 1830s and 1840s helped to inspire Dostoevsky’s fantas-
tic tale of spending and doubling.
The concern for promissory notes and counterfeit money Dostoevsky
first showed in The Double reappears in his later works, suggesting that the
young author’s experience with Russian monetary fluctuations was formative
for his whole oeuvre. Valentino has pointed out that Dostoevsky relies on a
promissory note as a narrative “catalyst” in Crime and Punishment and The
Brothers Karamazov as well as in The Double.35 Further attesting to Dos-
toevsky’s fascination with misrepresentations at once linguistic and mone-
tary, genuine and counterfeit promissory notes— as well as scandalous ac-
cusations about the failure to pay them— circulate through The Idiot and
The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875), and the link Dostoevsky originally posits
between counterfeiting and “pretendership” in The Double reappears in The
Demons.36
To be sure, the financial reforms of 1839– 43 and their aftermath com-
prise but one stage in a broader history of Russian currency that invites
continued exploration in relation to Dostoevsky’s art. As Leonid Grossman
has noted in an essay on Crime and Punishment, the 1860s witnessed yet
another acute financial crisis, during which prices skyrocketed, “paper to-
kens” flooded the money market, and the treasury was burdened by deficit.37

104
 Figure 10a. Silver ruble, 1846. Obverse: Double-headed eagle (emblem of the
Russian state) with text, “4 zolotniks 21 dolii of pure silver.” Photograph courtesy
of the National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced by permission of the Smithsonian Institution.

Figure 10b. Silver ruble, 1846. Reverse: “Ruble coin 1846.” Photograph courtesy
of the National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced by permission of the Smithsonian Institution.
 Chapter Three

Intriguing though it may be, the question of how exactly this 1860s finan-
cial crisis may have informed the mature Dostoevsky’s novels is beyond the
scope of the present study. What should be clear from this investigation of
The Double, however, is that the material history of Russian money may offer
additional, as yet insufficiently tested keys to Dostoevsky’s fantastic realism
and the “warped and weird” Petersburg modernity of which it is an expres-
sion.38 The collapse and overhaul of the Russian currency system at the very
dawn of Realism in Russia helped to trigger Dostoevsky’s inquiry into the
limits and possibilities of linguistic representation. In The Double, the circu-
lation of money and its doubles highlights the arbitrariness and artfulness of
all signs of value, undermining the credibility of any claim to represent the
world objectively in language. Troubling the mimetic ideal of Realism with
the specter of suspect currency, The Double issues a fantastic challenge to
the new aesthetic standard.

106
Figure 11. J. J. Grandville, The Miser Who Lost His Treasure (L’Avare qui a perdu
son trésor). Illustration. Reproduced from Jean de La Fontaine, Fables de La
Fontaine (Paris: H. Fournier Aine, 1838). Typ 815.38.5091. Houghton Library,
Harvard University.
 Chapter Four

The Miser Never Dies

This story has a moral for miserly men, and for

such as are of low birth but bent on getting a
name for wealth.
While digging up human bones, a dog came
upon a treasure and, because he had outraged
the spirits of the dead, he was put under the
spell of avarice, to the end that he might pay
the penalty due to respect for holy things. So it
happened that, as he guarded the gold without
thought of eating, he died of starvation.
Standing over him, a vulture is reported to
have said: “Dog, you deserve to lie here dead;
you have set your heart all at once on wealth
fit for a king, in spite of the fact that you were
begotten at a street-corner and raised on a
dunghill.”
— Phaedrus, “The Dog, the Treasure, and the
Vulture”

“Here I am dead now, but look, here, what

if— that is, perhaps it can’t be so— but I say
what if I’m not dead, what if I get up, do you
hear? What would happen then?”
— Dostoevsky, “Mr. Prokharchin”

A S R E A L I S M B E C A M E the new aesthetic standard, type

became its primary unit of currency. Like the bills and coins that materi-
alize exchange value, character types embody abstract meanings.1 More-
over, both money and type are subject to fluctuation and reform, and both
must contend with the history of their own production and use. As we have
seen in the previous chapter, the high inflation and rampant counterfeit-
ing that prompted the replacement of the assignatsiia by the “credit bill” in
the 1840s turned Russian money into an emblem of dubious abstraction— a

109
 Chapter Four

sign of value by no means assured. Similarly, the Romantic and early Realist
notions of national and social type (tip) that were imported to Russia from
Germany and France in 1830s and 1840s did not simply replace the Neoclas-
sical model of universal human types, but inherited the old model’s legacy.
Meanwhile, the native context of simultaneous financial and literary reform
exerted special pressures upon this foreign concept in Nicholaevan Russia,
as the conspicuously unstable Russian monetary sign cast a shadow over the
shining new example of literary abstraction that type was proclaimed to be.
In this Russian context, the ancient character type of the miser took on
heightened significance for writers experimenting with modern literary ty-
pology. With his purportedly timeless passion for money, the miser embodied
a perceptibly outmoded understanding of the emotions. Nevertheless, when
compared to one another, representations of the miser type created in dif-
ferent times and places revealed the changing cultural significance of money
and the people who cherish it. The miser thus attained the power to under-
mine the very theory of the passions he had been made to represent. In this
regard, the miser could support the efforts of the ambitieux, that supreme
type of early Realism whose apparent timeliness in the post-Napoleonic era
confirmed the social and historical contingency of the emotions. Neverthe-
less, as this chapter will show, the miser could also lurk behind the ambitieux
as a troublesome reminder of the self-referential literariness of all character
types. Much as the recently devalued assignatsiia called the silver-backed
credit bill that replaced it into question, in Alexander Pushkin’s play The
Covetous Knight (Skupoi rytsar’, 1830), Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls,
and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s story “Mr. Prokharchin” (“Gospodin Prokharchin,”
1846), the old miser haunts the new man of ambition like a ghost.

MIS ER A S M ETAT Y P E

The miser is the type par excellence. From antiquity to the modern era, no
type can compete with the miser in terms of the quantity of examples it has
produced— no type is more typical. The miser’s profile has been endlessly
retraced from the patterns of Greek and Roman fables, character studies,
and comedies.2 He abides in underground or otherwise tomb-like spaces,
guarding sacks or lockboxes full of money, clutching keys, and frequently
ending the story as a corpse. When this character appears in human form (as
opposed to the animals that sometimes figure him in fables), he is usually an
old man who has a good deal of money but is unwilling to spend it on food,
drink, clothing, or other daily necessities. He is a poor host, husband, and
father, as his perverse passions are directed away from social and familial ties

110
 The Miser Never Dies

to the money that saps his life energies, drawing him ever closer to death
and decay, and ultimately confirming the futility of his efforts to keep his
treasure— or, indeed, his own physical person— intact.
The miser seeks to privatize a public good and fails. Because he values
money as an end in itself, rather than as a means to obtain other ends, he
withdraws it from circulation in the local economy and stores it up in a
private place. As the value of his hoard increases, so too does his need for
privacy: he isolates himself from others, keeping secrets, refusing the emo-
tional, spiritual, and economic exchanges deemed normal in his society, and
manipulating signs so as to present himself as having no money to spare.3
Almost invariably, the miser’s secrets are made public; stolen or transferred
to an heir, his money reenters the circuit of exchange. Concluding with
the normative triumph of the collective over the individual, the miser tale
is constructed on a poetics of secrets exposed and savings dispersed. J. J.
Grandville’s 1838 illustration to La Fontaine’s fable, “The Miser Who Lost
His Treasure” (“L’Avare qui a perdu son trésor,” 1668), which pictures the
moment at the end of the fable when a passerby observes the miser’s discov-
ery that his buried hoard has been stolen, is an apt illustration of this type
and his perpetually repeated tale. (See figure 11.)
The miser retained a firm typological core even as social and economic
developments dramatically transformed the role he played in the European
cultural imagination. In post-classical Europe, literary representations of
misers took on the force of Christian allegory as the Catholic Church con-
demned avarice (in Latin, avaritia) as one of the seven deadly sins. This
treatment of avarice as sin (already visible in early church writings) was based
on the imperative to reject earthly for spiritual wealth.4 As in the fourth
circle of Dante’s Inferno (1308– 21), avarice is frequently depicted in litera-
ture and painting as leading to spiritual death and the torments of hell. This
fate threatens the miser of Hieronymous Bosch’s painting Death and the
Miser (c. 1500), in which a man is shown stowing money in a trunk crawling
with demons; in the background, the same man appears on his deathbed,
still reaching out for the money another demon hands him, even as an angel
tries to hold him back. (See figure 12.) According to the church, wealth was
not evil in itself, for it could be given as charity to the poor or to the church
itself.5 Avarice held the blame for abuse of wealth along with usury, and both
were reviled as sinful and unnatural. The ban on usury worked to stigmatize
Jews in particular, even as it went on unofficially and under hidden guises
among Christians.6
With the rise of capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, the desire
for money was gradually normalized in political discourse, taking the less
emotional, more rational, and purportedly innocuous form of “interest.”7

111
Figure 12. Hieronymus Bosch, Death and the Miser, circa 1500. Oil on panel, 93 ×
31 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
 The Miser Never Dies

The miser nevertheless continued to appear in literature as a challenge to

this apparent normalization. Whereas Marx is careful to note that the mi-
ser’s irrational hoarding of money makes him not a true capitalist but a
“capitalist gone mad,” writers frequently deployed the miser’s iconogra-
phy in their depictions of capitalists, transforming this precapitalist type
into a representative of the new order.8 The earlier conceptual distinction
between Christian avarice and Jewish usury also faded, and from Molière’s
Harpagon to Balzac’s Old Grandet and Gobseck and Dickens’s Ebenezer
Scrooge, the once risk-averse miser assumed the enterprising form of profit-
driven investor, moneylender, or banker who either keeps company with
Jews, is Jewish, or, at the least, has a name from the Old Testament and a
marked aversion to Christmas.9 This history of shifting moral and religious
censure (and bigotry) turns the miser, who was originally conceived as a
universal— albeit masculine— type, into a vivid reminder of how passions
and attitudes toward them change over time. Thus the miser gains special
force for any writer interested in questioning preconceived notions about
money, the type of person who is passionate about it, or the significance of
type itself.
The miser’s metatypical potential is compounded by his own passion-
ate accumulation of types.10 Stemming from Greek τύπος (a blow, a pressing,
a pattern), the word “type” originally referred to the action of imprinting
coins, or to the imprint resulting from that action. Likewise, the term “char-
acter” derives from the Greek χαρακτήρ, designating either a die for stamp-
ing or the stamp it produces. As both the means and the ends of production,
type and character transform metal into money and make that transforma-
tion legible. Highlighting a similar dynamic at work in the production of
literary personages, which both receive and convey meaning typographically,
Theophrastus (371– 287 b.c.) forever joined the language of monetary in-
scription and psychological writing in his highly influential collection, The
Characters.11 Each of the characters depicted therein represents a suppos-
edly universal human vice, and these abstract values in human form would
circulate for centuries in the semiotic economy of European literature. Fol-
lowing a particularly energetic reissue of these classical types in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, however, the model of the human
personality they disseminated began losing its currency.
We see this reappraisal of Classical types in Charles Nodier’s essay
“Types in Literature” (“Des types en littérature,” 1830), which transmitted
German Romantic understandings of type to both France and Russia. Nodier
begins by distinguishing Classicism and Romanticism on the basis of their
approaches to type: writers of the former school continuously reproduce
ancient types, while those of the latter discover modern ones. In Nodier’s
view, Shakespeare’s Hamlet embodies the passions and predicaments of the

113
 Chapter Four

Middle Ages; Goethe’s Werther is a monument to late eighteenth-century

European history; and the many types Rabelais discovered are “essentially
true personages, social monies of the mind [monnaies sociales au titre et au
coin de notre esprit], which pass through our hands every day, but which
Rabelais was the first to stamp.”12 Further developing the analogy of types
and currency posited here in reference to Rabelais, Nodier notes that be-
cause the characters of Rousseau stretch the imagination, they are not true
types but counterfeits: “Types that force one to imagine are not only de-
fective and incorrect, but false. These are not types, but specious tokens,
whose fictive value is annihilated at the first test of the assayer.”13 While ac-
knowledging that counterfeits exist, Nodier dismisses them as easy to dis-
cern. Importantly, in this account monetary value stands firm as an image of
recognizable truth. Passions and the types that personify them are as histori-
cally contingent as the coins issued in one realm or another, but for Nodier,
both this  contingency and the analogy to money it supports are a credit to
their value.
Adopting many of Nodier’s formulations in his early critical writings,
the leading advocate of type in Russian literature, Vissarion Belinsky, leaves
money out of the discussion. Like Nodier, Belinsky calls on writers to pres-
ent types that show how character is formed by national and social circum-
stance.14 As seen in his seminal article, “Literary Reveries” (“Literaturnye
mechtaniia,” 1834), Belinsky considered this task especially formidable
in Russia: “What is nationality in literature? The print [otpechatok] of the
national physiognomy, the type [tip] of national spirit and national life. But
do we have a national physiognomy? This question is difficult to answer.”
According to Belinsky, delineating the “national physiognomy” in Russian
literature is difficult because Europeanization has left the elite, the rightful
“head” of the national “body,” without a face.15 Nevertheless, Belinsky kept
faith in the existence of Russian nationality, and he soon found in Nikolai
Gogol’s works the proof that it could be articulated. In his 1835 essay on
Gogol, Belinsky hails the character of Pirogov from the story “Nevsky Pros-
pect” (1835) as a “type of types, archetype [pervoobraz] of archetypes,” and
sees him as a representative of “a whole caste [kasta], a whole people [narod],
a whole nation [natsiia].”16 Given the devaluation of Russian currency in the
second quarter of the century and Belinsky’s close association of type and
nationality, it is not surprising that he did not follow Nodier’s example in
equating type with money. Doing so would have undermined type and na-
tionality alike— two of the era’s most cherished, if elusive, cultural values.
Indeed, in their stories about misers, Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky em-
ploy money precisely as a means to interrogate type and its significance in
Russian literature.

114
 The Miser Never Dies

H OA RD I NG T Y P ES

Like the French clinical and narrative models of ambition analyzed in chap-
ter 1, the miser type was a foreign import that took on new significance in
Russia. While the desire for money does conflict with such Orthodox values as
asceticism and “self-giving” (vruchenie sebia), the Russian Orthodox Church
did not develop an equivalent to the seven deadly sins of Catholicism, and
there was no specific targeting of avarice (skupost’ or alchnost’) as a sin more
grave than others.17 As a literary type, the miser (skupets or skupoi) gained
currency in Russia only as (Neo)classical fables and comedies were translated
or adapted from Greek, Latin, French, and German in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.18 In the wake of multiple Russian translations of Aesop,
Phaedrus, and La Fontaine, the fable flourished as a genre of poetry in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.19 Multiple fables about misers are
present in the collections of most major Russian fabulists up to and including
Ivan Krylov. On stage, misers could be seen throughout the latter half of the
eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth in performances of
Molière’s The Miser (L’ Avare, 1668, first translated and performed in Rus-
sian in 1757) and the Russian comic opera of the same name (Skupoi, first
performed 1782, published 1787), with music by V. A. Pashkevich and li-
bretto by Ia. B. Kniazhnin.20 While the translation and adaptation of Western
European fables and comedies about misers exemplify the broader practices
of “cultural import” essential to Russian Neoclassicism, what distinguishes
the miser is the fascination this type would continue to hold for writers ex-
perimenting with Romantic and Realist typology in the nineteenth century.21
This fascination derives from the miser’s status as a hyper-exemplary type.
Neoclassical miser fables routinely thematize their exemplification
of ancient principles. In “The Miser Who Lost His Treasure,” La Fontaine
takes Aesop’s fable on the same theme as its example:

The man with the hidden treasure that Aesop puts before us
Will serve as an example of this.

L’homme au trésor caché qu’Esope nous propose,

Servira d’exemple à la chose.22

Here, La Fontaine alerts readers to the importance of the example to the

genre of the fable. Deriving from the rhetorical figure of the exemplum,
fables put forth fresh examples of general principles.23 These examples are
essentially metaphorical: readers are meant to understand that the people
or animals in the fable are like people outside of it, and that the principle

115
 Chapter Four

exemplified in the fable is also applicable to those people outside the text. In
his study of the Russian fabular tradition, N. L. Stepanov points out that the
fable’s ability to posit analogies between abstract ideas and concrete elements
of contemporary social reality is responsible for its proliferation in world lit-
erature: writers in any historical context can respond to existing fables with
new examples of the principles they posit.24 I would add that the fable’s ex-
emplary function may also explain why the miser has been so productive in
fable collections: the cross-cultural ubiquity of money generates ever more
examples of this type.
Russian fabulists push La Fontaine’s self-reflexive exemplification
to new extremes. In “Watchman of His Own Wealth” (“Storozh bogatsva
svoego,” 1762), the pioneer of the fable genre in Russia, Alexander Su-
marokov, likens his miser to not one but three previous examples of the type:

Anacreon said
That one collects riches in vain,
Who will die like a poor man anyway. . . .
Phaedrus has a fable: a fox digging a hole,
Dug down deep,
And delved deep into the earth:
He found a treasure guarded by a dragon,
Who like Molière’s Harpagon,
And my fool,
Lay on his side upon his gold.25

Referring to the poem “To a Miser” from the Greek collection known as the
Anacreontea, Phaedrus’s fable “The Fox and the Dragon,” and Molière’s The
Miser, Sumarokov makes his continuation of Western typological tradition
explicit.26 He also stresses the multitude of previous examples of the miser.
Following his compatriot’s lead, in his fable “The Miser” (“Skupoi,” 1767),
V.  I. Maikov adds Sumarokov to the list of authors who have offered ex-
amples of this type:

He is—
Like Molière’s Harpagon
Or like Phaedrus’ dragon,
Who sleeps on his riches,
And Sumarokov calls
That one a fool
And a watchman of his own property,
Who gets no joy from it.27

116
 The Miser Never Dies

As a durable type that facilitates imitation and comparison, the miser is a

recognizable form of literary currency that can be transferred from one
culture to another or newly minted in any place or time. Russian fabulists’
self-avowed stockpiling of this currency figures the development of Russian
literature as a process of accumulation. The miser becomes a figure for the
writer, and his hoard becomes the treasure of the text.
In the Russian fables just cited, the textual treasure is replete with
foreign values: the type of the miser itself, and the previous examples of that
type. While Sumarokov and Maikov posit a non-problematic correspondence
between these foreign values and the Russian ones to which they compare
them, in the nineteenth century Russian writers would use the miser to
question this comparison. As seen in Krylov’s “The Miser” (“Skupoi,” 1825),
this explicit reflection on the accumulation of foreign values in Russia yields
a new form of interest, as Russian literature begins to figure itself as tak-
ing shape in contested exchanges with, rather than in direct acquisition of,
foreign forms.28 Krylov’s fable tells of a wealthy domovoi (house spirit) who
tricks his miserly host into guarding his treasure. After leaving his money
with the miser for many years, the domovoi returns to the house to find
that, indeed, his host has behaved in accordance with European typological
tradition:

. . . The Miser, key in hand,

Lies starved to death upon the coffer, and—
The ducats all remain.

. . . Скупой с ключом в руке

От голода издох на сундуке—
И все червонцы целы.29

The image of the dead miser clutching his keys, having starved himself to
protect the gold coins (chervontsy) in his trunk, includes some of the most
important iconographic elements of the miser type: the perennial keys, the
starved corpse, and the exposed hoard that will be transferred to another
after the miser’s death.
As if death weren’t a clear enough warning to readers, fables about
miserliness typically provide a direct critique of the passion for money in the
promythium or epimythium (the initial or final lines that explain the prin-
ciple a fable exemplifies). This critique may be issued by the narrator or
another character, whose voice works as though in collaboration with that
of the narrator to deliver the meaning of the fable. For instance, Phaedrus’s
fable “The Dog, the Treasure, and the Vulture”— translated into Russian by

117
 Chapter Four

Ivan Barkov in 1764, and included as an epigraph to this chapter— tells of a

dog that starves to death guarding a treasure. The fable closes with the lines:
“Standing over him, a vulture is reported to have said: ‘Dog, you deserve
to live here dead; you set your heart all at once on wealth fit for a king, in
spite of the fact that you were begotten at a street-corner and raised on a
dunghill.”30
Krylov’s fable departs from this structural tradition of placing a non-
miserly character in the fable to collude with the narrator in criticizing mi-
serliness. The other character in Krylov’s fable— the domovoi— is himself
a miser who uses the main miser as a means to his own parsimonious ends.
If the domovoi is working together with the narrator or author of this fable,
then their project is one of narrative trickery— the “gay craftiness” (veseloe
lukavstvo uma) Pushkin praised in Krylov— rather than didacticism or social
satire.31 Krylov is known for the clever humor of his fables, and the humor
of this one partly results from its Russian manipulation of European cultural
values. The last lines read:

When, ’midst his gold, a miser will neither eat nor drink—
To keep for the House Spirit all his ducats does he think?

Когда у золота скупой не ест, не пьет,—

Не домовому ль он червонцы бережет?32

As a form of currency first minted by Peter I in imitation of the Dutch ducat,

the chervonets is an apt image for the foreign types Russian writers hoarded
up throughout the eighteenth century. The domovoi’s employment of a Eu-
ropean miser to facilitate his accumulation of such currency significantly al-
ters the miser fable’s meaning, however. Beyond raising its traditional ques-
tion of what purpose money has when it is kept hidden away, these final lines
slyly ask if the European miser might be understood with reference to, or
even outsmarted by, Russian folk wisdom.

A PA S S I O N F O R EQ U I VA L ENCE : P USH KI N’ S T HE
C OV E T O US KN I G H T

If Krylov’s “The Miser” pokes fun at the comparison between Russian and
European cultural forms, Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight turns the miser into
a figure of comparison itself. The full title of Pushkin’s play, The Covetous
Knight: Scenes from Shenstone’s Tragicomedy “The Covetous Knight” (Sku-
poi rytsar’: Stseny iz Chenstonovoi tragikomedii “The Covetous Knight”),

118
 The Miser Never Dies

foregrounds the Russian appropriation of European types (7:99; 305).33 Yet

because the English writer William Shenstone (1714– 1763) wrote noth-
ing like The Covetous Knight, Pushkin’s subtitle is generally recognized as
a “mystification.”34 The story, structure, and characters in the play do have
European sources, including Molière’s The Miser, Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice (c. 1598), and fables about misers, but by masking these real sources
and inventing another, Pushkin turns the hoarding of foreign types into liter-
ary content.
Indeed, the title’s rendering of “skupoi” as “covetous” problematizes
the very translation it posits. A more literal translation of the Russian adjec-
tive would be “miserly.” This would indicate more clearly the tradition of
the miser type on which Pushkin draws in his work. “Miserly” is also more
closely focused on money than “covetous” is, and it conveys the dual sense
of skupoi as not only acquisitive (greedy), but also retentive (stingy). The re-
tentive aspect of Russian skupost’ (miserliness) is crucial to its meaning. For
instance, the 1822 edition of the Dictionary of the Russian Academy defines
skupost’ as “excessive thrift” (izlishniaia berezhlivost’), and the now obsolete
adjectival form skupyi as “having a reprehensible attachment to stored-up
wealth; antonym of generous, liberal” (imeiushchii predosuditel’nuiu privi-
azannost’ k skoplennomy bogatstvu; protivopolagaetsia chivomu, torova-
tomu). The same Dictionary defines a skupets (miser) as “one who out of
greed does not want to make even the most necessary expenditures” (tot, kto
iz liubostiazhaniia neobkhodimo nuzhnykh izderzhek sdelat’ ne khochet).35
The desire to retain money is essential to Pushkin’s portrait of the miserly
baron, who values money precisely in its stored-up form. It is not the baron’s
desire for more money that creates the central narrative collision between
him and his ambitious son, Albert, but rather his refusal to give it to his son
to spend. Pushkin’s assertion that his play derives from The Covetous Knight
both issues and undermines a claim to equivalence.36
At one point, Pushkin considered beginning his play with an epigraph
that would have made yet another questionable comparison. The epigraph
was an excerpt from Gavrila Derzhavin’s poem “To Skopikhin” (“K Skopikh-
inu,” 1805).37 Derzhavin’s poem is an adaptation of Horace’s civic ode “On
the True Place of Money” (“Nullus argento color est avaris abdito terris,”
23 b.c.), and it also includes generic and thematic features of miser fables.38
It praises the example of N. P. Sheremetev and several other wealthy Rus-
sians for putting their money to charitable use and admonishes a man by the
name of Skopikhin for hoarding his. Stemming from the verb skopit’ (to save
up), the name Skopikhin typifies this man as a miser. Derzhavin situates him
even more firmly in this typological tradition by telling him not to be like the
miserly animals found in fables:

119
 Chapter Four

Stop your living in the cellars,

Like a mole in underground ravines,
And [stop] guarding the casks of silver
Hanging there on iron chains,
Before the glow of unctuous flames,
Or barking around the yard like a dog.

Престань и ты жить в погребах,

Как крот в ущельях подземельных,
И на чугунных там цепях
Стеречь, при блеске искр елейных,
Висящи бочки серебра
Иль лаять псом вокруг двора.39

After “To Skopikhin” was published, Derzhavin explained that he had a con-
temporary of his named Sobakin in mind when creating this character.40 Cu-
riously enough, this real name, too, has a miserly ring: approximating the
Russian word for “dog” (sobaka), it recalls the greedy canine in Phaedrus’s
“The Dog, the Treasure, and the Vulture,” which Derzhavin invokes in the
final line just cited. Not content with this one allusion to a miserly precedent
for his Skopikhin, however, Derzhavin follows Sumarokov and Maikov in
stressing the multitude of previous examples of the type: mention of the dog
comes only after that of a mole, which resembles the various underground
creatures that populate the miser fable tradition.
This mole nearly made it into an epigraph for The Covetous Knight. A
manuscript copy of the play begins with the first two lines of the stanza cited
above— precisely those that, more than any others in the poem, display Der-
zhavin’s reliance on the tradition of the miser fable: “Stop your living in the
cellars, / Like a mole in underground ravines.”41 Had Pushkin included these
lines at the head of the final version of The Covetous Knight, it might have
seemed that he wished to reiterate Derzhavin’s condemnation of greed. As
scholars have convincingly argued, however, Pushkin’s epigraphs frequently
point to conclusions other than those suggested by the texts they headline.42
Indeed, the early plan to use Derzhavin’s lines hints at Pushkin’s distortion
of both Derzhavin’s poem and the generic conventions of the fable. Whereas
Derzhavin compares a Russian historical personage to the misers in fables,
and does so with the explicitly didactic aim of condemning the unwillingness
to share one’s wealth with society, Pushkin forgoes didacticism and concerns
himself with the act of comparison itself.
Written at Boldino in 1830, The Covetous Knight is the first installment
in Pushkin’s collection of experiments in dramatic characterization known as
the “Little Tragedies” (“Malen’kie tragedii”).43 Scholars have pointed out that

120
 The Miser Never Dies

Pushkin focuses each of the “Little Tragedies” on the psychological makeup

of a character dominated by a particular passion.44 It has also been suggested
that by offering complex portrayals of recognizable literary types and his-
torical personages, Pushkin turns from Neoclassical to Romantic methods
of characterization.45 In Table Talk (1834), Pushkin clarifies his understand-
ing of these two modes by comparing the representations of miserliness in
Molière’s The Miser and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: “Characters
[Litsa] created by Shakespeare are not, like those of Molière, types of this
passion or that vice [tipy takoi-to strasti, takogo-to poroka], but rather liv-
ing creatures [sushchestva zhivye], full of many passions, many vices; cir-
cumstances unfold before the viewer their unique and multifaceted charac-
ters [kharaktery]. Molière’s miser is miserly— and that’s it [skupoi skup— i
tol’ko]; Shakespeare’s Shylock is miserly, vengeful, fatherly, witty” (12:159–
60).46 Pushkin does not appear to have adopted the Romantic understand-
ing of type promoted by Schelling and Nodier. For Pushkin, type remains
a fundamentally (Neo)classical— and lifeless— form of characterization,
and Shakespeare’s innovation was not so much the creation of new types for
his own age, but rather the replacement of types with characters whose life
inheres in their complex psychology. Although he wrote Table Talk several
years after The Covetous Knight, Pushkin’s explication of Shakespeare’s Shy-
lock as a “living” person with multiple contradictory emotional impulses is
often read as a programmatic statement of what he was aiming for in his
portrayal of the baron.47 Focusing on the baron’s conflicted character as a
miserly knight (who ought to value honor and duty to his lord and family
more than money, according to feudal social norms), and also on his self-
proclaimed moral conscience, critics have often noted that he has greater
psychological complexity than previous examples of the type.48
I would stress that while Pushkin mentions a few more passions later
in the same passage, it is significant that the miser is the first example he
chooses in his discussion of character types— just as he wrote The Covet-
ous Knight before the other “Little Tragedies.” The primacy of miserliness
in Pushkin’s reflections on character typology suggests that he perceived it
as a quintessential example of type. Given Pushkin’s understanding of type
as a lifeless form of characterization, the miser would therefore seem the
most lifeless type of all. Indeed, for centuries, the miser had been repre-
sented not so much as a living being but as the embodiment of an abstract
idea, and he had appeared in so many works that he had become palpa-
bly hackneyed. Furthermore, as a figure whose life is typically presented in
terms of spiritual death, and who literally dies at the end of many narratives,
only to be reanimated in later works, the miser hovers on the brink of life
and death, originality and cliché. The miser thus provided Pushkin with the
narrative opportunity to enliven an especially— yet never finally— dead type.

121
 Chapter Four

The most striking way in which Pushkin enlivens his miser is by grant-
ing him a poetic imagination. Whereas Pushkin usually employs figurative
language sparingly in his own poetry, the baron’s monologue is uncharac-
teristically rich in metaphors. As the first word— “Like” (Kak)— boldly an-
nounces, the dominant trope of the speech is the simile:

The way a youthful rake awaits a tryst

With some licentious harlot or, perhaps,
Some foolish girl that he’s seduced, so I
All day have marked the time till I might come
Down to my secret vault and trusty chests.
O happy day! This evening can I pour
In coffer number six (as yet unfilled)
Another gathered handful of my gold.

Как молодой повеса ждет свиданья

С какой-нибудь развратницей лукавой
Иль дурой, им обманутой, так я
Весь день минуты ждал, когда сойду
В подвал мой тайный, к верным сундукам.
Счастливый день! могу сегодня я
В шестой сундук (в сундук еще неполный)
Горсть золота накопленного всыпать. (7:110; 312)

In this extended simile, money transforms old into young, a private scene
into a lover’s tryst, and the filling of a coffer into a sexual act. The metaphori-
cal power of money is what facilitates such comparisons. While not all gold
takes the form of minted money, and in this passage the baron measures his
gold by the indeterminate “handful,” later he identifies one of the coins as
an “old doubloon” (dublon starinnii). Furthermore, one of Pushkin’s stage
directions reads: “he drops in the money” (vsypaet den’gi [7:111– 12; 313–
14]). As money, the gold functions as a universal equivalent and, hence, a
tool of comparison.
As Marx explains, a universal equivalent is a commodity that has been
set apart from all others so that they may “express their values” in it. Such
a medium makes “all commodities appear not only as qualitatively equal,
as values in general, but also as values of quantitatively comparable magni-
tude.”49 The doubloon in particular exemplifies the international compara-
tive function of money. Originally minted in sixteenth-century Spain with
gold from the New World, doubloons were exchanged as legal money in
several European countries and were a popular choice among those who

122
 The Miser Never Dies

wished to store wealth. Much like the character type of the miser, doubloons
were compared, traded, and stockpiled on a global scale.
Notably, the baron reveals that fables have trained him to exercise the
comparative faculty that money affords. As he adds coins to his hoard, he
explains his own actions with reference to a story he read about a king who
similarly increased his dominion “by handfuls”:

Not much, perhaps, but by such tiny drops

Do mighty treasures grow. I read somewhere
That once a king commanded all his troops
To gather dirt by handfuls in a heap,
And thus, in time, a mighty hill arose—
And from that summit could the king with joy
Survey his valleys, decked in gleaming tents,
And watch his great armada ply the sea.
Thus I, by offering in tiny bits
My customary tribute to this vault,
Have raised my hill as well— and from its height
I too survey the reach of my domain.
And who shall set its bounds? Like some great demon,
From here I can control and rule the world.

Не много, кажется, но понемногу

Сокровища растут. Читал я где-то,
Что царь однажды воинам своим
Велел снести земли по горсти в кучу,
И гордый холм возвысился— и царь
Мог с вышины с весельем озирать
И дол, покрытый белыми шатрами,
И море, где бежали корабли.
Так я, по горсти бедной принося
Привычну дань мою сюда в подвал,
Вознес мой холм— и с высоты его
Могу взирать на все, что мне подвластно.
Что не подвластно мне? как некий демон
Отселе править миром я могу. (7:110; 312)

This story takes the form of a whole fable inscribed within The Covetous
Knight. Explaining the fable’s central principle, the first one and a half lines
of the passage fulfill the function of the promythium. Rather than condemn-
ing miserliness, however, these lines celebrate patient accumulation.

123
 Chapter Four

The baron recognizes this fable as an allegorical model for his own
life. He attempts to follow the example it sets forth, mentally exercising his
money’s ability to make him like the fictional king. “Thus I” (Tak ia), he says,
his gold once again facilitating his comparison of himself to another person
who is disparately situated. Yet while his interpretation of the fable about
the king may demonstrate appropriate reading strategies for a work of that
genre, in fact the baron’s reading of his own situation is clearly mistaken. He
imagines that his sacks of gold elevate and empower him, yet in reality they
lure him to a lowly position in the feudal hierarchy of values. His passion
for gold conflicts with the values of honor, duty, and allegiance to his lord,
the duke, and it leads to his death in a disgraceful argument with his son at
the duke’s palace. It seems the baron could have benefited more from read-
ing such fables about misers as Derzhavin invokes in “To Skopikhin.” While
Derzhavin exhorts Skopikhin to heed the warning of miser fables, Pushkin
shows his miser misrecognizing himself in a fable on another theme.
The baron’s interpretation of the fable as an allegory of his own life
points to Pushkin’s more general tendency to posit partial equivalences
between his own texts and preexisting ones. We have already noted this ten-
dency in the title of Pushkin’s play and the epigraph he nearly gave to it.
Here, we encounter it as a scene of reading in which a character mistak-
enly believes that a literary text is applicable to his situation.50 But if in this
respect the baron seems like a figure for Pushkin’s reader, who may fail to
understand the meaning of his text, as the possessor of a poetic imagination
the baron draws nearer to Pushkin himself. Indeed, the miser’s valuation
of money for its power to make one thing like another resembles Pushkin’s
interest in the miser type as a standard by which to measure his text against
others. Similar to the way the baron loves to imagine that his gold could
be traded for objects, services, or power, but ultimately refuses to spend it,
Pushkin likes to suggest that his texts might be comparable to, or exchange-
able for, others, but withholds such a final purchase. Like the baron, Pushkin
has a passion for potential equivalence.
The balanced architectural structure of the play manifests this passion
on a formal level. The first scene takes place in a high tower (bashnia) where
the baron’s son Albert laments the lowering effect his need for money has on
his high ideals of courage and honor: he has ambitions to move up in court
society, but money is dragging him down. The second scene goes to the op-
posite vertical extreme, positioning the baron in an underground vault (pod-
val), where he mistakes his lowly money for lofty power. The third scene,
set on level ground at the duke’s palace (dvorets), shows both father and son
lowering themselves in the estimation of the duke, the highest political au-
thority in their region. In this way, Pushkin cancels the vertical extremes of
the first two scenes with the middle ground of the third. Within each space,

124
 The Miser Never Dies

money disrupts the feudal hierarchy of values. Pushkin’s task, however, is not
to correct the baron or his son’s confusion of high and low, but to perform a
creative balancing act— to measure competing values endlessly against each
other. Much like a scale never settling into balance, The Covetous Knight
maintains a stylistic poise at once dizzying and delicate.
Further demonstrating his passion for potential equivalence, Pushkin
presents his miser as a man of an ambiguously particular historical epoch.
As Grigorii Gukovskii has pointed out, Pushkin does not pin the action
of The Covetous Knight to a precise time or place but instead dramatizes
money’s destabilization of feudal values in “all of Europe.”51 While his as-
cription of the play to Shenstone might suggest that the action takes place
in England, the son’s name, Albert, appears in Pushkin’s text with French
pronunciation— Al’ber. The baron’s name— Philippe (Filipp)— is common
in multiple European languages. His ducats are almost as iconic as the
settings of the three scenes (tower, vault, and palace). Pushkin uses these
signs to conjure up an abstract image of European feudalism. The lack of
geographic specificity leaves the play open to the interpretation that it rep-
resents historical processes underway in Russia during Pushkin’s lifetime,
when, as S. M. Bondi notes, the spread of the money economy in Russia was
eroding the value system of the semifeudal Russian social structure, and, as
Svetlana Evdokimova proposes, the new emphasis on individuality in the
post-Napoleonic era made the miser’s egoistic project of self-empowerment
representative of the strivings of the modern self.52 For my part, I would sug-
gest that the indeterminacy of the play’s historical referent (feudal Europe?
early nineteenth-century Russia?) is also symptomatic of Pushkin’s treat-
ment of the miser and his money as representatives of unspent metaphorical
potential.
Pushkin’s incorporation of fabular elements both invites and under-
mines comparison of The Covetous Knight to early nineteenth-century Rus-
sian history. Aside from the lines from “To Skopikhin” Pushkin considered
using as an epigraph and the inscribed fable about the king in the baron’s
monologue, the strongest indications of the centrality of the fable to The
Covetous Knight are the baron’s death and the duke’s response to it in the
closing lines. Stage comedies about misers do not end with the miser’s death,
but fables often do. When the baron dies in scene 3, readers conditioned by
miser fables expect to recognize The Covetous Knight as an allegory for their
own time and to understand the principle it exemplifies. Yet this principle
remains elusive. Using his last breath to call out for the keys to his cellar—
“Where are the keys? / The keys, my keys!” (Gde kliuchi? / Kliuchi, kliuchi
moi!)— the baron expresses readers’ interpretive predicament: we are left
without a “key” to the text (7:113; 315). The baron’s words suggest there are
not one, but multiple, missing keys. Pushkin does not simply present readers

125
 Chapter Four

with a text that can be variously interpreted; instead, he uses the very signs
of the miser’s typical readability— his keys— to highlight the absence of a
single interpretive key to The Covetous Knight.
Similarly, the last lines of the work both rely on and disrupt the typical
structure of miser fables. Having witnessed the dishonorable argument
between the baron and his son that leads to the miser’s death, the duke
issues a final proclamation that distorts the last lines of many miser fables:

He’s dead. O God in Heaven!

What dreadful times are these, what dreadful hearts!

Он умер. Боже!
Ужасный век, ужасные сердца! (7:113; 315)

Whereas at the end of miser fables there is often a non-miserly character

that colludes with the narrator by voicing a condemnation of greed, in Push-
kin’s work the duke’s last lines actually restate the open-endedness of the
text. The miser is dead— that much is clear— but which “times” and whose
“hearts” are “dreadful”? Do the duke’s words refer only to the “times” of
European feudalism, or should readers understand them to refer allegori-
cally to contemporary Russia? Do they refer only to the “hearts” of misers
like the baron, ambitious sons like Albert, or both? The plural form of “times”
and “hearts” reinforces the sense that The Covetous Knight might be an al-
legorical narrative, like a fable. However, like the baron’s gold, whose value
increases with every new “handful” but is never finally exchanged for any-
thing, Pushkin’s text hoards metaphorical potential as the reader considers
alternative readings of it but can settle on none in particular. Moreover, by
adapting Cicero’s well-known phrase, “O tempora, o mores!” (O the times,
o the customs!), Pushkin closes his play with yet another instance of near-
equivalence. He replaces Cicero’s “customs” with the synecdoche “hearts,”
suggesting both his interest in how history shapes the passions, and his pen-
chant for presenting his texts as partly— but not completely— equivalent to
their precursors.
Pushkin responds to the Neoclassical tradition of didactic literature
about miserliness with an ambivalent text that leaves readers unsure of
whether the historically specific conflict between the value of money and
honor in late European feudalism is analogous to— and might provide les-
sons about— Russian cultural tensions in the early nineteenth century. He
seizes on the miser as a dead type with a predetermined meaning, giving it
new life capable of meaning many things. With the Duke’s pronouncement,
“He’s dead,” Pushkin kills not just the baron but the miser as a typically leg-

126
 The Miser Never Dies

ible type. He leaves readers not with a lesson about greed but with a task of
unending comparison.

TH E MIS ER ’ S M I S ER : P LY U S HKI N I N GOGOL’ S

DE A D  S O UL S

Whereas Pushkin and his miser are fascinated by gold’s symbolic status as
the supreme general equivalent, Gogol and his packrat, Plyushkin, energeti-
cally erode the distinctions on which evaluative judgments rely. In the first
half of the nineteenth century, the main unit of wealth in Russia was the serf,
and the value of a landowner’s property was calculated in terms of the num-
ber of serfs held. Under this system, value was a material, living, and rela-
tively immobile phenomenon: it was inseparable from human bodies and the
land to which they were tied. The expansion of the money economy and the
growing practice of mortgaging landed estates to the treasury that severed
this link between materiality and wealth created the narrative opportunity
that Gogol seizes in Dead Souls.53 Asking landowners to abstract the value of
serfs from bodies and land, Chichikov tries to use language— the words used
to name the dead serfs— as a money-like form of currency that he can ex-
change, accumulate, and transport.54 Chichikov’s visit to Plyushkin’s estate is
the novel’s culminating encounter between commercial and agrarian values,
and Gogol’s atypical treatment of the miser highlights the strangeness of
monetary logic— the logic of the general equivalent— in Russia’s serf-based
agricultural economy. Ultimately, Gogol refuses to grant any value the status
of general equivalent, and there is no available standard by which to assess
the meaning of his variegated narrative transactions.
Plyushkin is a gross caricature of the miser type.55 In a conversation
with Chichikov, the landowner Sobakevich cites Plyushkin as a typical ex-
ample of an extremely miserly person: “‘With me it’s not like with some
Plyushkin: he owns eight hundred souls, yet he lives and eats worse than
my shepherd!’ ‘Who is this Plyushkin?’ asked Chichikov. ‘A crook,’ replied
Sobakevich. ‘Such a niggard, it’s hard to imagine’” (5:94– 95; 98).56 Using
the phrase “some Plyushkin” (kakogo-nibud’ Pliushkina), Sobakevich inau-
gurates what has become a Russian tradition of using Plyushkin’s name to
refer to people with extremely miserly or hoarding tendencies. More than
any other character name in Dead Souls, Plyushkin has gained broad typo-
logical currency in the Russian language. According to the Great Dictionary
of the Russian Language (Bol’shoi tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka), the ap-
pellation “Pliushkin” is used to speak “about an extremely miserly, greedy
person” (O chrezmerno skupom, zhadnom cheloveke). Dostoevsky uses

127
 Chapter Four

Plyushkin’s name this way in Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose, calling
a man he read about in the newspaper who lived poorly until his death and
was discovered to have hoarded a great amount of money a “new Plyush-
kin” (19:72).57 In a rare instance of Russian cultural paradigms spreading
to the West, the phrase “Plyushkin syndrome” has even begun appearing
in English.58
The ability of Plyushkin’s name to become part of everyday language is
at least partly due to the fact that, unlike the other characters in Dead Souls,
Plyushkin belongs to an ancient typological tradition (that of the miser).59
The extremity of his hoarding impulse distinguishes him from previous ex-
amples of this type, however. Sobakevich indicates this extremity when he
calls Plyushkin a skriaga: this is a near synonym of the standard words for
miser, skupets and skupoi, with the difference being one of degree: a skriaga
is an extremely miserly person.60 Nevertheless, Sobakevich finds the extreme
connotations of skriaga insufficient to describe Plyushkin; he calls him “such
a niggard, it’s hard to imagine” (Takoi skriaga, kakogo voobrazit’ trudno).
This statement presents the paradox of Plyushkin’s typicality: his typicality is
so extreme that he becomes difficult for anyone— the other characters, the
narrator, and the readers of Gogol’s work— to imagine or understand. He is
so overdetermined that he becomes indeterminate.
Another indication of this indeterminacy is when Chichikov asks one
of Sobakevich’s serfs how to get to Plyushkin’s estate. The serf replies with a
coarse description of Plyushkin that the narrator censors and shortens to the
adjective “patchy” (zaplatannoi), having omitted the noun it was meant to
qualify. This leads directly to the narrator’s famous celebration of “the aptly
spoken Russian word” (metko skazannoe russkoe slovo [5:103– 4; 108– 9]).
While the lengthy discussion of the missing “word” in this passage is but
one instance of Gogol’s hoarding of signs at the expense of referents in Dead
Souls, it is notable that the missing referent here is a miser— Plyushkin—
whose own hoarding undermines the meaning of all signs of value.61 As is
evident when Chichikov first sees Plyushkin, the latter’s extreme miserliness
has obscured the very signs that identify him as a miser:

By one of the buildings Chichikov soon noticed some figure, who had begun
squabbling with the muzhik on the cart. For a long time he could not make
out the figure’s sex, male or female. It was dressed in something completely
indefinite, much like a woman’s housecoat, with a cap on its head such as
household serf wenches wear in the country, only the voice seemed to him
rather too husky for a woman. . . . By the keys hanging from her belt, and by
the fact that she was scolding the muzhik in rather abusive terms, Chichikov
concluded [zakliuchil] that this must be the housekeeper. (5:108– 9; 114)

128
 The Miser Never Dies

Appearing as “some figure” wearing “something completely indefinite,” Ply-

ushkin is of uncertain gender and class position, and is indeed “hard to imag-
ine.” He is also “patchy,” as Sobakevich’s serf put it: he is pieced together out
of feminine, masculine, peasant, landowner, housekeeper, and typical miser
scraps.
As an elderly man of considerable means who carries keys, Plyushkin
fits the description of the typical miser, but his unwillingness to spend or
let anything go has made him ready to wear anything and appear however
he may, rendering him illegible to Chichikov. Chichikov misreads the keys
that firmly establish Plyushkin as a miser, believing they signal his status as
a female housekeeper instead. Similarly, as Chichikov enters Plyushkin’s
house, the narrator compares it to an underground space: “He stepped into
the dark, wide front hall, from which cold air blew as from a cellar” (5:109;
114). Such a tomb-like abode befits a miser. Yet Plyushkin is a radically atypi-
cal example of this type in that he saves not money but a “various multitude
of things” (mnozhestvo vsiakoi vsiachiny [5:109; 151]):

[A] stack of papers written all over in a small hand, covered by a marble pa-
perweight, gone green, with a little egg on top of it, some ancient book in a
leather binding with red edges, a completely dried-up lemon no bigger than
a hazelnut, the broken-off arm of an armchair, a glass with some sort of liquid
and three flies in it, covered by a letter, a little piece of sealing wax, a little
piece of rag picked up somewhere, two ink-stained pens, dried up as if with
consumption, a toothpick, turned completely yellow, with which the master
had probably picked his teeth even before the invasion of Moscow by the
French. (5:109; 115)

Aside from its allusions to European imperial expansion (with a toothpick

that predates the Napoleonic campaign), Plyushkin’s hoard could not be
more different than the baron’s cache of New World ducats in The Covetous
Knight. While the baron fills sacks of gold— a universal equivalent of both
symbolic and monetary value— Plyushkin piles up trash.
As a miser whose interest is atypically unfocused on money, Plyush-
kin is a living embodiment of Gogol’s disruption of general equivalency. 62
It is Plyushkin’s practice of hoarding, rather than any single object that he
hoards, which renders other things equivalent. One of his piles is so dusty
that Chichikov cannot even determine what is in it: “Precisely what was
in this pile it was hard to tell, for there was such an abundance of dust on it
that the hands of anyone who touched it resembled gloves” (5:110; 115). The
pile does away with all distinctions: animate becomes inanimate; extrication
becomes integration. Miser narratives always explore what happens when

129
 Chapter Four

a means is valued as an end in itself, but what makes Gogol’s miser unique
is that for him, hoarding— not money— is the means that becomes an end.
As an indiscriminate hoarder, Plyushkin is a miser’s miser: his miserliness
becomes its own self-perpetuating, self-justifying rationale.63
Plyushkin’s hoarding of goods results in a loss of their value: his things
are breaking down and rotting. As the possessor of approximately eight hun-
dred serfs, he is the wealthiest of the landowners Chichikov meets, and his
storehouses and outbuildings are filled with produce and tools. Yet rather
than involving himself in estate management, Plyushkin takes daily walks
around his property, gathering everything he finds, even stealing his serfs’
belongings, and bringing all and sundry back to his house (5:112; 117). Un-
willing to let the most trivial object slip from his possession, he refuses to sell
his produce and lets it go to waste instead (5:113– 14; 119). This idiosyncratic
saving of things whose value decreases over time points to the confusion
Dead Souls effects between the logics of serf-based agrarian and money-
based commercial economies. What makes money able to serve as a univer-
sal equivalent is, first of all, its relative durability. Coins and, to a lesser but
still significant extent, bills are meant to maintain their value over time. Their
value may fall, but this usually has more to do with the workings of financial
institutions than with the material makeup of the money itself. Barring fluc-
tuations in price levels and the money supply, the value of money increases
in direct proportion to its quantity. The value of agricultural produce, by
contrast, will inevitably be rendered null if it is stored so long it begins to de-
compose. Whereas miser narratives typically represent hoarding money as a
wasteful activity that impoverishes the miser both spiritually and in terms of
quality of life, in Dead Souls, Plyushkin hoards goods as if they were money,
and this drains value from everyone and everything on his estate.
It might be tempting to consider Plyushkin not as a miser at all, but
simply as a different sort of character (a packrat, for instance), if it were not
for Gogol’s bestowal of so many recognizable elements of the miser type on
him. Almost as though wishing to clarify that Plyushkin really does derive
from this typological tradition, Gogol provides a short biography for him.
(None of the other landowners receive such treatment.) While many critics
believe Plyushkin’s life story humanizes and animates this otherwise deathly,
wasted person, I would stress that this biography presents him as strangely
human and inhuman, simultaneously dead and alive.64 Firmly establishing
Plyushkin as an extreme example of the miser type, the biography gives him
an insistently literary life he shares with previous human and animal incarna-
tions of the type.
Plyushkin’s biography makes it clear that he was once a “thrifty man-
ager” (berezhlivym khoziainom) whose “wise parsimony” (mudr[aia] sku-
post[’]) eventually turned into an extreme unwillingness to spend money

130
 The Miser Never Dies

or give it to his children. The narrator gives no clear explanation for why
Plyushkin developed such stinginess, but simply states that this took place
after Plyushkin’s wife died and passed the keys of the estate to him. Here
and elsewhere, the traditional signs of miserliness are presented as its cause.
In another example, the narrator recounts that Plyushkin’s miserliness grew
more acute as he aged and was abandoned by his children: “Solitary life gave
ample nourishment to his avarice [skupost(’)], which, as is known, has a wolf’s
appetite and grows more insatiable the more it devours” (5:112– 13; 118–
19). The comparison of Plyushkin to a wolf recalls the animal metaphors in
fables, associating his story with that most ancient form of miser narrative.
In another instance of creaturely comparison, the narrator likens Plyushkin’s
eyes to mice: “His small eyes were not yet dim and darted from under his
high arched eyebrows like mice when, poking their sharp little snouts from
their dark holes, pricking up their ears and twitching their whiskers, they
spy out whether there is a cat or a mischievous boy in hiding, and sniff the
very air suspiciously” (5:111; 516). Whereas misers in fables are frequently
depicted as animals occupying caves or digging holes, Plyushkin’s eyes are
themselves animals in holes. This animal metaphor run wild transforms the
character’s eyes into a reflection of his typological origin. If in The Covet-
ous Knight, Pushkin is interested in metaphorical exchanges that never quite
take place, Gogol is interested in metaphors that multiply and mutate.
As different as Plyushkin is from Pushkin’s baron, the two characters
converge in the illegibility that makes each one an atypical incarnation of
the miser type. Like the baron, Plyushkin challenges readers who seek a
moral message from the text. Indeed, far from capping the chapter on Ply-
ushkin with a lesson, the narrator shows Chichikov (who has profited from
the landowner’s ruinous hoarding) leaving Plyushkin “in the merriest of spir-
its,” and, upon returning to town, dining and falling asleep “the way that
they alone sleep who are so fortunate as to know nothing of hemorrhoids, or
fleas, or overly powerful mental abilities” (5:124– 26; 131– 32). Whereas in
fables, characters who observe misers provide readers with judgments about
them, Chichikov gives readers no indication of what they should think about
Plyushkin; instead, his behavior implies that not thinking too hard about the
miser’s meaning is the most pleasant course to take.
Intriguingly, Gogol’s notes and letters about Dead Souls suggest that he
did envision his novel as a work that could promote the moral betterment of
Russia, and at one point, Plyushkin figured chiefly in his plans to realize that
goal. In a letter addressed to N. M. Iazykov in Selected Passages from Cor-
respondence with Friends (Izbrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami, 1847),
he writes that the lyric poet must call to the “sleeping man”— that is, a man
without moral and spiritual awareness— in order to “save his poor soul.” He
alludes to a final message that Plyushkin is to deliver in the third volume of

131
 Chapter Four

Dead Souls as an example of what the lyric poet might say to this “sleep-
ing man,” who recalls the sleeping Chichikov after his visit to Plyushkin’s
estate: “Oh, if you could read to him what my Plyushkin will say, if (only) I
attain the third volume of Dead Souls!” (6:245– 46; 87).65 Apparently Gogol
saw Plyushkin as a poetic figure capable of expressing a special moral value.
And yet, like the censored noun Sobakevich’s serf attaches to “patchy,” these
words Gogol assigns to Plyushkin never do appear in print. With the rest of
the novel unfinished, and Plyushkin’s portrait remaining forever as it is in
the first volume, this miser’s miser is less apt to redeem readers than he is
to repel— or thrill— them with his grotesque destabilization of all distinct
forms of value.
Further allying Plyushkin with Pushkin’s baron, his treasure figures
the text in which it appears. In Plyushkin, the typical miser’s obsession with
details— the mikrologia of which Theophrastus wrote— serves not the proj-
ect of saving money, but of saving the details themselves. In this regard, his
hoard becomes a metaphor for the indiscriminate stockpiling of details in
early Realism. As Plyushkin makes clear, however, Gogol’s brand of Realism
is grotesque and fantastical. Apparently worthless details are heaped up for
their own sake, depleting one kind of value at the expense of another. In-
deed, as discussed in chapter 2, Plyushkin’s hoarding produces the linguistic
currency in which the novel deals: out of stinginess, Plyushkin is starving
his serfs to death, and he therefore has more names to sell Chichikov than
do any of the other landowners. His passionate accumulation of details pro-
duces a ghostly surplus; his materialism funds the immaterial exchanges of
Dead Souls.

RA IS I NG T HE DEA D: D O S T O EVSKY’ S
“MR.   P R O KHA R CHI N”

In “Mr. Prokharchin,” Dostoevsky inherits Pushkin’s and Gogol’s portrayals

of the miser as paradoxically poetic and illegible, strangely dead and alive.66
Like Pushkin and Gogol, Dostoevsky presents his miser as both a new ex-
ample of an old type and a spectral challenge to the concept of type itself.
In so doing, he follows the lead not only of Pushkin and Gogol, but also of
the literary critics of his day. Given the numismatic origins of the very word
“type,” the “craving for types” that Viktor Vinogradov has identified as a hall-
mark of the Natural School establishes an affinity between its proponents and
the miser.67 And indeed, we find traces of the miser’s hoarding in the critical
debates surrounding that literary movement. In his programmatic manifesto
for the Natural School, his review of the collection Physiology of Petersburg
(Fiziologiia Peterburga, 1845), Nikolai Nekrasov accumulates tropes for the
typical: “Before us there has suddenly appeared a most noble book . . . called

132
 The Miser Never Dies

“Physiology of Petersburg,” whose purpose is to uncover all the mysteries of

our social life, all the sources of the joyful and melancholy scenes of our do-
mestic routine, all the sources of what takes place on our streets; the current
and direction of our civic and moral education; the character [kharakter]
and method of our enjoyments; the typical traits [tipicheskie svoistva] of all
segments of our population.”68 Here Nekrasov proclaims that literature must
reveal the hidden “mysteries,” “sources,” “current,” and “character” of con-
temporary life. Much like the exposure of a miser’s hoard, such a discovery
would wrest a general meaning (an amount of money, a typical trait) from a
multitude of particulars.
In his introduction to the same collection, Belinsky champions an ac-
cumulative approach to Russian literature as a whole: he explains that the
“poverty” (bednost’) of Russian literature, which he had lamented in pre-
vious essays, consists not in the absence of great writers, but in an insuffi-
cient quantity of the average ones that could satisfy the reading public’s de-
mand for material.69 For Belinsky, Gogol’s works offer the supreme example
that other writers should try to follow in their efforts to uncover the typical
characteristics of contemporary Russian society. Yet he acknowledges that
few writers can achieve the Gogolian standard, and so he presents Physiol-
ogy of Petersburg as a humbler model for them to imitate. In so doing, he
recommends that Russian writers follow the example of their contemporary
French counterparts, who provide French readers with copious amounts of
material in the form of physiological sketches.70 Thus, the “poverty” of Rus-
sian literature is a problem of quantity to be redressed through an accumu-
lation of works patterned after the type of Gogol or, at the very least, the
French physiological sketch.71
Meanwhile, the Natural School’s valuation of typicality looked like
miserliness to such opponents as Faddei Bulgarin: in “All Kinds of Journal
Things” (“Zhurnal’naia vsiakaia vsiachina,” 1846), Bulgarin ridicules the
“treasures” (sokrovishcha) Natural School writers imagine they are “storing
up” (kopiat) in the “corners” of Petersburg.72 Whether they call for or con-
demn the accumulation of types, critics of the day invoke both the miser’s
desire to hoard signs of questionable value, and the authorial desire to ex-
pose private riches to public view.
In “Mr. Prokharchin,” Dostoevsky channels the poetics of accumula-
tion and exposure that shaped 1840s literary criticism into a highly metaliter-
ary miser narrative that thwarts the Natural School aesthetics of typification.
Revealing his petty clerk to be a miser with a secret treasure, Dostoevsky
complicates the process of abstraction whereby writers expose the typical
value of petty characters and details. The first lines of the story establish the
hero Prokharchin as a petty clerk in the tradition of Akaky Akakievich from
Gogol’s “The Overcoat”: “In the darkest and humblest corner of Ustinya Fy-
odorovna’s flat lived Semyon Ivanovitch Prohartchin, a well-meaning elderly

133
 Chapter Four

man who did not drink. Since Mr. Prohartchin was of a very humble grade in
the service, and received a salary strictly proportionate to his official capacity,
Ustinya Fyodorovna could not get more than five roubles a month from him
for his lodging” (1:240; 3).73 Prokharchin’s “humble” home in a “corner” of
Petersburg, his landlady, his “humble” (melk[ii]) rank, and his apparent pov-
erty and good behavior make him resemble not only Akaky Akakievich, but
also the countless petty clerks produced by Gogol’s imitators in the Natural
School.74
By the time Dostoevsky was writing his story, Russian literature had
accumulated so many examples of this type that it had become perceptibly
clichéd.75 In “Mr. Prokharchin,” Dostoevsky presents the petty clerk pre-
cisely as a cliché: “sitting in his seat with his mouth open and his pen in the
air, as though frozen or petrified, [he] looked more like the shadow of a
rational being than that rational being itself.” The clerk’s pen is emblematic
of his fate as a copyist who has been repeatedly copied, and it is this type’s
counterpart to the miser’s keys. Observing Prokharchin with his pen, the
other characters note that there is “a great deal that was fantastical about
him” (mnogo v nem fantasticheskogo [1:245; 11]). Prokharchin is a “fantasti-
cal” figure because he resembles Akaky Akakievich, who becomes a ghost at
the end of “The Overcoat,” and also because there were so many imitations
of Akaky floating around in Russian literature of the mid-1840s that they
may all be seen as shades of Gogol’s character. For Dostoevsky, conjuring
an image of a person out of typical iconography— abstracting an idea from
material and spiritual being— is a fantastical affair.
Dostoevsky’s characterization of Prokharchin both rehearses and foils
the fantastical process of typification. While it is clear from the beginning
that Prokharchin is a typical petty clerk, over the course of the story the other
characters and the reader come to realize that he is also a miser. This means
that all along he has nursed secrets— namely, money and a lively “imagi-
nation” (voobrazheni[e])— that had typically eluded the material and intel-
lectual reach of the petty clerk (1:241; 5). The revelation of Prokharchin’s
miserliness adds another typological layer to this character even as it de-
stabilizes our evaluation of him as a typical petty clerk. The evaluation and
reevaluation of the hero that happens within the fabula has its counterpart
in the dialogic style of narration, as Dostoevsky presents multiple, changing
perspectives on Prokharchin.76 Introducing himself near the beginning as
Prokharchin’s “biographer,” the narrator assembles a report of Prokharchin’s
life based on what the other lodgers in his apartment say about him after he
has died: “Such were the rumours [tolki] in circulation after Semyon Ivano-
vitch’s death” (1:242; 6).
The narrator explicitly relies on the other characters’ testimony in
order to typify Prokharchin as a miser. He writes, “The first thing they no-

134
 The Miser Never Dies

ticed was the unmistakable miserliness and niggardliness [skopidomstvo i

skarednost’] of Semyon Ivanovich. That was at once observed and noted.”
The narrator then explains the basis on which the other characters made this
calculation, describing at length the pains Prokharchin takes to avoid spend-
ing money on food, drink, or clothing. As in Gogol’s description of Plyush-
kin’s estate in Dead Souls, here the miser’s stinginess drives an early Realist
hoarding of petty details. Unlike Gogol’s narrator, however, Dostoevsky’s ex-
plicitly states that these details are valuable because they express the hero’s
typicality as a miser, reflecting “one dominant trait in the character [odna
gospodstvuiushchaia cherta v kharaktere] of the hero of the story.” Having
run through a catalog of Prokharchin’s efforts to scrimp and save, the narra-
tor now confirms the other lodgers’ earlier assessment of his behavior, saying
that it stems “from miserliness and excessive carefulness [iz skopidomstva
i izlishnei ostorozhnosti]: all this, however will be much clearer later on”
(1:241– 42; 5– 6). Here the narrator has put concrete particulars in service to
a preconceived notion, or type, and he promises more details that will fur-
ther clarify and confirm the hero’s typicality. In so doing, he follows the pat-
tern of miser fables and comedies, which are so often named “The Miser,”
thereby announcing from the start that the main character will exemplify a
preexisting type. The narrator also follows the precedent of miser tales in
saving the revelation of the miser’s hoard until the end of the story, despite
the fact that he knows from the beginning that such a hoard exists. The ex-
posure of the miser’s coins and corpse promises to be both the delivery of
the final narrative value, or meaning, of the story, and the culmination of the
process of typification.
Undermining the credibility of the narrator’s assessment of Prokhar-
chin, however, Dostoevsky does not portray his narrator as someone who
reports true facts. Instead, he calls attention to the shaky foundations— the
“rumours” cited above— on which the narrator bases his assessments. While
at times the narrator clearly identifies the sources of his knowledge about
Prokharchin, he also makes persistent use of free indirect discourse, pre-
senting the other characters’ biased views of Prokharchin as his own. For
instance, as cited above, in the beginning of the story the narrator claims
that it is due to Prokharchin’s “humble grade in the service” that “Ustinya
Fyodorovna could not get more than five roubles a month from him for his
lodging” (1:240; 3). This understanding of why Prokharchin does not pay a
higher rent must belong to the landlady herself, because, as we have seen,
the narrator knows from the beginning that Prokharchin has a great deal of
money.
Relying on Ustinya Fyodorovna’s misinterpretation of Prokharchin, the
narrator misrepresents the miser to readers. By the end of the story, Ustinya
Fyodorvna has learned that Prokharchin could have paid a great deal more

135
 Chapter Four

than she thought, and her complaint— “Ah the deceiver! He deceived me,
he cheated me”— is one the reader might level at the narrator as well (1:262;
37).77 Dostoevsky’s free indirect discourse both recalls and radically departs
from the narrative structure of miser fables. Whereas in fables, the narra-
tor often relies on a non-miserly character as a sort of mouthpiece within
the fabula, through which he can issue a judgment about miserliness that
presumably corresponds to the author’s view, in “Mr. Prokharchin,” there
are so many voices speaking about Prokharchin that it becomes impossible
to judge which one belongs to the characters or the narrator, and which, if
any, is speaking the truth. In “Mr. Prokharchin,” we see Dostoevsky training
his hallmark style of dialogic narration on a character type with an ancient
legacy of monologic interpretation.78
Working together as though in a polyphonic concert of typecasting, the
narrator and the other characters are not content to establish Prokharchin
as a petty clerk and a miser, but continuously endow him with additional
typological layers.79 Each new attribute ascribed to him has a dehumaniz-
ing effect, pushing him a step closer to death and ghostliness. At one point,
when Prokharchin is causing a disturbance in the apartment, and the other
lodgers forcibly carry him back into the tiny “corner” where he lives be-
hind a screen, the narrator compares him to a “Punch puppet” (Pul’chinel’)
that a street puppeteer has put into a box after a show (1:251– 52; 21). In
another instance, Prokharchin’s secretive, misanthropic behavior and his
anxiety about the possible collapse of the department where he works raise
the other lodgers’ suspicion that these details of his character reflect a more
ambitious typicality: one of the lodgers accuses Prokharchin of being a “Na-
poleon” (1:257; 29). Here typification appears as a form of violence, since
this accusation frightens Prokharchin so much that he suffers an emotional
and physical breakdown, crying out in terror and falling into fever and de-
lirium that lasts until the moment of his death. Having been typified as a
Napoleonic individualist who challenges political authority, Prokharchin suf-
fers a metaphorical execution: “His arms were stiff, and he seemed all to
pieces [ruki ego kosteneiut, a sam eli derzhitsia]. They stood over him, he
still faintly shuddered and trembled all over [drozhal i trepetal vsem telom],
made an effort to do something with his arms, could not utter a word, but
blinked his eyes as they say a still warm and bleeding, living head does when
it has just leapt away from the executioner’s axe” (1:258; 32).80 What is most
striking about this quote is the chiastic way in which Dostoevsky prolongs
the moment of Prokharchin’s death, presenting him as already dead while
still alive, and still alive while already dead. As a petty clerk, a miser, a Punch
puppet, and a Napoleon, Prokharchin is a monstrous composite of older and
newer clichés.

136
 The Miser Never Dies

Typification both violates and empowers Prokharchin. As the other

characters peer at his dying body, a coin drops out of the mattress on which
he is lying, signaling imminent decomposition. In this scene of spectacu-
lar exposure, the other characters, who have invaded Prokharchin’s private
space, breaking down the screen that cordoned it off from the rest of the
apartment, and rummaging through his belongings, begin to poke around at
his mattress, digging out and amassing a “steadily growing heap of silver and
all manner of other coins [serebra i vsiakhikh monet (1:260; 34)].”81 Strug-
gling to reveal the dead man’s hidden value, they pull the mattress out from
underneath him, jostling his corpse as they do so. Here typification entails an
intrusive, physical, and comical mockery of the miser, as his corpse is farci-
cally dragged and pushed about. Yet even as he is handled roughly, he some-
how escapes the grasp of the onlookers. Death by typification has stiffened
his body, objectified him, turning his legs into branches of a “charred tree,”
but it also reanimates him as particularly polite and cooperative. With “ha-
bitual civility,” his body rolls out of the way so the others can rifle through his
mattress. When he falls headfirst onto the floor, he appears skeletal— with
his “bony, emaciated, blue legs, sticking out”— and yet he remains capable
of what the other characters interpret as voluntary action: “As this was the
second time that morning that Mr. Prohartchin had poked his head under
his bed it at once aroused suspicion, and some of the lodgers . . . crept under
it, with the intention of seeing whether there were something hidden there
too” (1:260– 61; 35). Despite their searching, the narrator and the lodgers
still fail to understand who Prokharchin really is: calling him an “unsuspected
capitalist,” the narrator mistakes his miserly hoarding for capitalist saving.
Paradoxically mortifying yet reinvigorating the miser’s body, this scene
of typification parallels the subsequent appraisal of his hoard. When several
government clerks descend on the apartment to tally up and confiscate
his money, Dostoevsky focuses so closely on the material look and feel of
Prokharchin’s coins that their value— their typicality as representatives of
exchange value— becomes impossible to assess:

The heap of silver grew— and, my goodness, what a lot there was! . . . Noble
silver roubles, stout solid rouble and a half pieces, pretty half rouble coins,
plebeian quarter roubles, twenty kopeck pieces, even the unpromising old
crone’s small fry of ten and five kopeck silver pieces— all done up in separate
bits of paper in the most methodical and systematic way; there were curiosi-
ties also, two counters of some sort, one napoléon d’or, one very rare coin of
some unknown kind . . . Some of the roubles were of the greatest antiquity,
they were rubbed and hacked coins of Elizabeth, German kreutzers, coins of
Peter, of Catherine; there were, for instance, old fifteen-kopeck pieces, now

137
 Chapter Four

very rare, pierced for wearing as earrings, all much worn, yet with the requi-
site number of dots . . . there was even copper, but all of that was green and
tarnished. . . . They found one red note, but no more.

Серебряная куча росла— и боже! чего, чего не было тут . . . Благородные

целковики, солидные, крепкие полуторарублевики, хорошенькая монета
полтинник, плебеи четвертачки, двугривеннички, даже малообещающая,
старушечья мелюзга, гривенники и пятаки серебром,— всё в особых
бумажках, в самом методическом и солидном порядке. Были и редкости:
два какие-то жетона, один наполеондор, одна неизвестно какая, но только
очень редкая монетка  .  .  . Некоторые из рублевиков относились тоже к
глубокой древности; истертые и изрубленные елизаветинские, немецкие
крестовики, петровские монеты, екатерининские; были, например,
теперь весьма редкие монетки, старые пятиалтыннички, проколотые для
ношения в ушах, все совершенно истертые, но с законным количеством
точек; даже медь была, но вся уже зеленая, ржавая  .  .  . Нашли одну
красную бумажку— но более не было. (1:261; 35)

This treasure of descriptive details consists of no fewer than sixteen forms

of currency, of disparate and in some cases entirely uncertain value. There
are coins that are or were legal tender in Russia or abroad, tokens and coins
that are either not clearly pieces of money or have been defaced, poten-
tially changing their value, but in some unknown way, and one unidentifiable
coin— “of some unknown kind” (neizvestno kakaia). Some of these coins—
the rare ones or the pair made into earrings— might have value as collect-
ibles or ornaments, but it’s hard to imagine they might bear any exchange
value in 1840s Petersburg.
Moreover, from the beginning to the end of the passage, the logic
governing the store of money changes: at first, the contemporary Russian
coins that appear likely to be legal tender are described as neatly and sys-
tematically packaged, suggesting that Prokharchin has been counting them
up carefully because he values them above all for their exchange value. Next,
however, the narrator describes the “rarities” that would have aesthetic or
historical value for a collector. Finally, this logic of collection disintegrates,
as the last coins are of green and rusted copper that would have surely been
polished by a true numismatist. At this point Prokharchin’s collection begins
to look more like Plyushkin’s pile of junk in Gogol’s Dead Souls than the
baron’s sacks of gold coins in Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight, or the coin col-
lection Old Grandet gives his daughter in Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, a work
Dostoevsky translated in 1843– 44.82
Yet despite this minutely described diversity of currencies and types
of value, the government officials instantly— as if magically— count them

138
 The Miser Never Dies

up and proclaim their collective worth as “exactly 2497 roubles and a half”
(rovno dve tysiachi chetyresta devianosto sem’ rublei s poltinoiu [1:261; 36]).
Here the uniqueness of the coins and their values is effaced and converted
to one general equivalent. Intriguingly, the officials evaluate the money in
terms of the paper assignatsiia, despite the fact that it contains just one
bill, and as we have seen in chapter 3, by the time Dostoevsky wrote “Mr.
Prokharchin,” the silver ruble had already replaced the assignatsiia as the
main unit of currency, the kreditnyi bilet had already replaced the assig-
natsiia as the main bill of exchange, and the assignatsii were already being
recalled and destroyed. At this point in Russian monetary history, the assig-
natsiia was a ghostly type of currency: its death had already been announced,
yet it continues to haunt this scene of typical evaluation.
Dostoevsky accumulates character types and currencies so as to ren-
der Prokharchin multiply significant, rather than reducible to any one type.
Prokharchin himself suggests at one point that he saves money because he
fears that the department he works in might suddenly close, or that he might
otherwise lose his job, but that fear does not explain his treasure of rare,
foreign, and in some cases potentially valueless coins. What do all these
different types of money mean to Prokharchin? Is he saving, collecting, or
hoarding them? This miser’s treasure is emblematic of a complex psychol-
ogy, which is only partly exposed and confiscated by a narrative that seeks
to convert it to a general equivalent. Prokharchin’s coins and corpse remain
illegible, as no type can quite capture their value.
Like the magically efficient calculation of Prokharchin’s worth that the
government officials perform, the revelation of the hero’s typical miserli-
ness renders his individual value (or meaning) even more mysterious. The
lodgers, the narrator, and the reader struggle to understand this man after
his death. He takes on a “significant air [znachitel’nym vidom], of which
Semyon Ivanovitch during his lifetime had not been suspected of being
capable” (1:262; 38). Problematizing the other characters’ and readers’ at-
tempts to interpret Prokharchin, Dostoevsky scatters the signs of the mi-
ser’s traditional readability— his keys. Prokharchin’s death and the discov-
ery of his hoard come after a chaotic passage in which two other characters
(Zimoveykin and Remnev) are rumored (by another character, Okeanov)
to have entered Prokharchin’s bedroom at night. When the whole cast of
lodgers assembles and at last finds his money, it is not where one would
expect— in the locked trunk he guarded so anxiously throughout the story—
but rather in the mattress, where it seems to have been only recently stuffed.
The key to Prokharchin’s trunk, which was “lost that night,” turns up inexpli-
cably the next day in Zimoveykin’s pocket, suggesting that this character had
been hoping to rob Prokharchin (1:259– 60; 33– 34). Ultimately, however, it
remains unclear whether Zimoveykin had unlocked Prokharchin’s trunk and

139
 Chapter Four

transferred the money to the mattress or Prokharchin had been hiding it

there all along. This mysterious reconfiguration of the traditional signs of
miserliness frustrates the reader’s attempts to understand exactly how or why
Prokharchin has been saving, and it portrays his typification as a narrative
robbery that does not quite come off.
Whereas in the end of miser fables the narrator and the other char-
acters model the reader’s moral evaluation and condemnation of miserli-
ness, this story ends with all parties uncertain what to think or feel about
Prokharchin. Dostoevsky hints at his reliance on, and disruption of, the
tradition of the miser fable when the narrator compares Prokharchin to two
different kinds of birds: “The whole room, suddenly so still, might well have
been compared by a poet to the ruined nest of a swallow [razorennym gnez-
dom ‘domovitoi’ lastochki], broken down and torn to pieces by the storm, the
nestlings and their mother killed, and their warm little bed of fluff, feather
and flock scattered about them . . . Semyon Ivanovitch, however, looked
more like a conceited, thievish old cock-sparrow [staryi samoliubets i vorobei
(1:262; 37– 38)].” Although the narrator seems to believe that Prokharchin
could be more fittingly compared to a “thievish old cock-sparrow” than an
exposed and violated swallow, his inclusion of both metaphors leaves the
reader with multiple possible interpretations of the miser.
Dostoevsky closes his story not with the narrator’s or other characters’
judgments about Prokharchin, but with the words of the reanimated miser
himself. As seen in the second epigraph to this chapter, Prokharchin asks the
other characters and the readers if he might yet be alive: “Here I am dead
now, but look, here, what if— that is, perhaps it can’t be so— but I say what
if I’m not dead, what if I get up, do you hear? What would happen then?”
(Ono vot umer teper’; a nu kak etak, togo, to est’ ono, pozhalui, i ne mozhet
tak byt’, a nu kak etak, togo, i ne umer— slysh’ ty, vstanu, tak chto-to budet,
a? [1:263; 38]). By creating a miser who refuses to die and be judged as typo-
logical tradition dictates, Dostoevsky raises the question of just what typifica-
tion is and does to the human individual and the literary character: in “Mr.
Prokharchin,” the miser is simultaneously a physical, material being and an
abstract value, a stubbornly vital human and a ghostly cliché.

With his ancient lineage in the Classical system of character types, the
miser was an anachronism in Romantic and early Realist literature. Never-
theless, this figure remained stubbornly alive in Russian literature of the
1830s and 1840s. In addition to The Covetous Knight, Dead Souls, and “Mr.
Prokharchin,” works by Nikolai Nekrasov, Apollon Maikov, and a host of lesser
writers demonstrate a considerable interest in miserliness in these years.83 To
be sure, the expansion of the money economy throughout the traditionally

140
 The Miser Never Dies

agrarian Russian Empire and the even more spectacular rise of capitalist en-
terprise abroad offer a partial explanation of why the miser’s timeless greed
seemed suddenly timely. As this chapter has suggested, however, the instabil-
ity of the Russian monetary sign in this period of literary reform is even more
essential to an understanding of Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Dostoevsky’s experi-
ments with the miser. In their works, the miser’s passion for types of dubi-
ous abstraction calls the significance of type itself into question. Accounting
for the miser’s reincarnations in this period thus offers an alternative to the
more familiar narrative of Russian literary history in which Neoclassicism,
Romanticism, and Realism develop in smooth succession. For it is precisely
as Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky delve deeper into complex character
psychology and its embeddedness in the material world— precisely as they
become more Realist— that they mobilize Neoclassical precedent to trouble
type and typicality, Realism’s most cherished tools of literary representation.
The miser’s ability to both instantiate and interrogate the literary,
economic, and affective values of his day makes him a surprisingly fitting
conclusion to this study of ambition and its others in Russian literature of
Nicholas I’s reign. In some ways, the miser is an outlier in this narrative: un-
like the social strivers discussed in previous chapters, the miser is markedly
antisocial. His goal is to remove money from circulation— to take it from the
hands of others and keep it in his own, to obstruct exchange, to paralyze flow.
And yet in Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Dostoevsky’s works, miserliness and ambi-
tion both foster and dog one another. In The Covetous Knight, Albert’s medi-
eval ambition to win honor and glory at court is structurally opposed to the
baron’s miserliness, but it also benefits from it. Indeed, the play closes with
the young man poised to inherit the old one’s fortune. In Dead Souls, the en-
counter between the Napoleonic forger, Chichikov, and the miserly packrat,
Plyushkin, results in a transfer of ambiguous wealth that leaves both men
richer and poorer. And in “Mr. Prokharchin,” the miser himself is labeled a
Napoleon, and this accusation of French ambition is a death sentence that
brings a new life of heightened significance. Much like a coin or bill declared
worthless, an old type in a new context reveals the contingency of all signs
of value. This contingency was the miser’s lesson for writers in Nicholae-
van Russia, and we see them applying it in their representations of ambition
and hospitality as well. In all of the works under exploration throughout this
book, we find Russian writers trading incommensurate values and cherishing
the comparisons they facilitate. For authors negotiating transnational econo-
mies of feeling, the miser is, along with the ambitieux and the khlebosol, a
means most readily turned to an end.

141
 Appendix: Definitions of Ambition, Ambition,
Liubochestie, Chestoliubie, and Ambitsiia

I. A MB IT I O N (ENG L I S H )

A. Oxford English Dictionary (online edition, 2016):

The ardent (in early usage, inordinate) desire to rise to high position,
or to attain rank, influence, distinction or other preferment.

II. A M B I T I O N

A. Trésor de la langue Française (Treasure of the French Language,

1971– 94):
First instance: 1279, Désir passioné des honeurs, des dignités (Passion-
ate desire for honors, dignities).

B. Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 1st edition (Dictionary of the

French Academy, 1694):
Desir excessif d’honneur & de grandeur (Excessive desire for honor
and grandeur).

C. Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 5th and 6th editions (1798, 1832):

Désir immodéré d’honneur, de gloire, d’élévation, de distinction (Im-
moderate desire for honor, glory, elevation, or distinction).

D. Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 7th edition (1878):

Désir d’honneurs, de gloire, d’élévation, de distinction (Desire for
honor, glory, elevation, distinction).

E. Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 8th edition (1932):

Désir ou recherche d’honneurs, de gloire, d’élévation, de distinction
(Desire or seeking of honors, glory, elevation, distinction).

143
 Appendix

F. Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 9th edition (1986– ):

Vif désir de s’élever pour réaliser toutes les possibilités de sa nature;
recherche passionnée de la gloire, du pouvoir, de la réussite sociale (Lively
desire to elevate oneself so as to realize all the possibilities of one’s nature;
passionate pursuit of glory, power, social success).

III. Л Ю Б О Ч Е С Т И Е ( L I UB O CH E ST I E )

A. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI– XVII vekov (Dictionary of the Russian Lan-
guage of the Eleventh-Seventeenth Centuries, 1975– ):
1. Честолюбие. 2. Оказание почтение, почестей (1. Chestoliubie. 2.
Showing respect, honors).

B. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII-ogo veka (Dictionary of the Russian Lan-

guage of the Eighteenth Century, 1984– ):
Честолюбие, желание славы, почестей (Chestoliubie, desire for glory,
honors).

C. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi (Dictionary of the Russian Academy, 1st edi-

tion, 1789– 94):
Любление воздавать честь другому (Love of granting honor to another).

D. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 2nd edition (1806– 22):

Тоже что честолюбие (The same as chestoliubie).

IV. Ч Е С Т ОЛ Ю Б И Е (CH E S T O L I UB I E )

A. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII-ogo veka (1984– ): Volume forthcoming.

B. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 1st and 2nd editions (1789– 94, 1806– 22):
Слабость духа, по которой человек ищет в наружных знаках и
способах получить уважение и почтение от других, коих сам в себе не
имеет (A weakness of spirit leading a person to seek in external means and
signs the respect and consideration from others that he does not have for
himself).

C. Tol’kovyi slovar’ zhivogo russkogo iakyka (Explanatory Dictionary of the

Living Russian Language, 1863– 66):
Искательство внешней чести, уваженья, почета, почестей (Pursuit
of outward respect, esteem, honors).

144
 Appendix

D. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka v 4-i tomakh (Dictionary of the Russian Lan-

guage in Four Volumes, 1st edition, 1957– 61):
Сильное желание занимать высокого, почетное положение,
обладать властью; стремление к почестям, к славе (Strong desire to oc-
cupy a high, honored position, [or] to have power; striving for honors, for
glory).

E. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka v 4-i tomakh, 2nd edition (1981– 84):

Стремление добиться высокого, почетного положения, жажда
известности, славы (Striving to attain a high, honored position, thirst for
fame, glory).

F. Tol’kovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian

Language, 1999):
Жажда известности, почестей, стремление к почетному положению
(Thirst for fame, honor, seeking an honored position).

G. Bol’shoi akademicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Great Academic Diction-

ary of the Russian Language, 2004– ): Volume forthcoming

V. А М Б И Ц И Я (A MB I T S I I A )

A. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII-ogo veka (1984– ):

1. Домогательство власти, властолюбие. 2. Честолюбие, славолюбие.
3. Чувство собственного достоинства. Высокомерие, заносчивость (1. So-
licitation of power, lust for power. 2. Chestoliubie, love of glory. Feeling of
personal worth. Haughtiness, arrogance).

B. Novyi slovotolkovatel’ (New Dictionary, 1803– 6):

Славолюбие, высокомерие, любочестие, чрезвычайное и
непомерное желание к богатству, к достоинствам, к чести (Love of glory,
haughtiness, love of honor, extreme and inordinate desire for wealth, titles,
honor).

C. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 1st and 2nd editions (1789– 94, 1806– 22):
Not listed.

D. Tol’kovyi slovar’ zhivogo russkogo iakyka (1863– 66):

Чувство чести, благородства; самолюбие, спесь, чванство;
требование внешних знаков уважения, почета (A feeling of honor, nobil-
ity; pride, arrogance, conceit; need for external signs of respect, esteem).

145
 Appendix

E. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka v 4-i tomakh, 1st edition (1957– 61):

Сaмолюбие, чувство собственного достоинства, а также
преувеличенное самолюбие, чванство (Pride, a feeling of personal worth,
also exaggerated pride, conceit).

F. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka v 4-i tomakh, 2nd edition (1981– 84)

Обостренное самолюбие, чрезмерно преувеличенное чувство
собственного достоинства (Acute pride, excessively exaggerated sense of
personal worth).

G. Bol’shoi akademicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka (2004– ):

1. Гордость, обостренное чувство собственного достоинства. 2.
Чрезмерное самомнение, самолюбие; спесь, чванство. Притязания на
что л., вызванные уверенностью в себе, в своих силах, возможностях;
честолюбивые замыслы (1. Pride, heightened sense of self-worth. 2. Inordi-
nately high opinion of oneself; arrogance, conceit. Pretensions to something,
stimulated by confidence in oneself, one’s powers, possibilities; ambitious
ideas).

146
 Notes

IN TROD U CT I O N

1. The translation is from Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in

Verse, trans. James Falen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), transla-
tion modified.
2. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans.
Nahum Isaac Stone (Chicago: C.H. Kerr, 1911), 247; Friedrich Engels, “Foreign
Policy of Russian Czardom,” in The Russian Menace to Europe: A Collection of
Articles, Speeches, Letters, and News Dispatches by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, ed. P. W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, Ill.: Free, 1952), 38;
Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse, trans. with commentary
by Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 2:57;
Iu. M. Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin”: Kommentarii: Poso-
bie dlia uchitelia, in Pushkin: Biografiia pisatelia; Stat’i i zametki, 1960– 1990;
“Evgenii Onegin”: Kommentarii (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-Sankt-Peterburg,
1995), 558. Russian economist Andrei Anikin surveys these and other interpre-
tations of Pushkin’s “simple product” in his book Muza i mamona: Sotsial’no-
ekonomicheskie motivy u Pushkina (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), esp. 17– 20.
3. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Forma-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 317.
4. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Na-
tions, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 18.
5. Immanual Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (India-
napolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 46.
6. Pushkin elsewhere noted that Smith’s writings were “in fashion” among
Russian noblemen in the early nineteenth century (8:55). For more on the re-
ception of Adam Smith in Russia, see Andrei Anikin, “Adam Smit i russkaia
ekonomicheskaia mysl’,” Voprosy ekonomiki 3 (1976): 112– 22; Andrei An-
ikin, “Adam Smith in Russia,” in Adam Smith: International Perspectives, ed.
H. Mizuta and C. Sugiyama (Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan, 1993), 251– 60; and
Ioakhim Tsvainert, Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 1805– 1905, trans.

147
 Notes to Page 4

L.  I. Tsedilin (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Universitet Vysshaia Shkola Eko-

nomiki, 2008), 47– 53.
7. Seminal texts of the New Economic Criticism include Marc Shell, The
Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and
Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca, N.Y:
Cornell University Press, 1990). For useful surveys of this field of inquiry, see
Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic
Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in The New Economic Criticism., ed.
Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), 3– 50; and
Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-
and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008),
10– 14. Studies of the emotions that have been especially influential for me
include Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (Au-
tumn 1995): 83– 109; William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Frame-
work for the History of the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performa-
tivity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005); Deborah Gould, Moving
Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2009); Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest:
Central European University Press, 2011); and Ute Frevert et al., eds., Emo-
tional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700– 2000
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Overviews of the affective turn that
consider its impact in Slavic studies include Jan Plamper, “Introduction” to spe-
cial issue “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” The Slavic
Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 229– 37; and Il’ia Vinitskii, “Zagovor chuvstv, ili, Russ-
kaia istoriia na ‘emotsional’nom povorote,’ Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 117, no.
5 (2012): 441– 60.
8. In my exploration of the confluence of economics and the emotions,
I draw on such sociological studies as Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and
Social Organization,” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (1956): 264–
71; Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human
Feeling, 2nd revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and
Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994),
each of which analyzes the dependence of emotional experience and expres-
sion on class, gender, and commercial relations in U.S. consumer capitalism.
Emma Rothschild and Catherine Gallagher have also provided important prece-
dents for this book with their analyses of the crucial role of feeling in the dis-
course of classical political economy. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments:
Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2001); Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death,
and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2008).

148
 Notes to Pages 4–5

9. Thus another critical strain informing the book is conceptual history. In

particular, I take inspiration from such works in the history of ideas, concepts,
and words as Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1936); Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Inter-
ests: Historical Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1977); Reinhardt Koselleck, The Practice of Con-
ceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner
et  al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Viktor Vinogradov,
“Slovo i znachenie kak predmet istoriko-leksikologicheskogo analiza,” Voprosy
iazykoznaniia 1 (1995): 5– 33; and V. M. Zhivov, ed., Ocherki istoricheskoi se-
mantiki russkogo iazyka rannego novogo vremeni (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh
kul’tur, 2009).
10. On the ambivalence of Nicholas I and his ministers toward the ques-
tion of industrial development, see Walter McKenzie Pintner, Russian Economic
Policy under Nicholas I (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1967), esp. 29,
91– 93, 123.
11. In focusing on the economic discrepancies shaping this period of Rus-
sian literature, I follow a clue Mikhail Bakhtin leaves in Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics when he remarks that the “exceptionally acute contradictions of early
Russian capitalism” provided the ideal historical conditions for the emergence
of the polyphonic novel. M. M. Bakhtin, “Problemy poetika Dostoevskogo,” in
Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 1996– ),
6:45; M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), 35.
12. Pivotal studies such as T. S. Grits’s Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia: Knizh-
naia lavka A. F. Smirdina and William Mills Todd III’s Fiction and Society in
the Age of Pushkin detail the transformation of literary institutions in the 1830s.
Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Dostoevsky’s creative responses to these changes have
also been documented by André Meynieux, Anne Lounsbery, and Todd, respec-
tively. Together, these accounts demonstrate not only the transformation of lit-
erary institutions in the period but also the heated public debates such changes
provoked. Melissa Frazier has pointed out that the presence of these debates
is one of only a very few things that can be known for certain about profession-
alization during this period, as most of the information available about reader-
ship and book sales derives from literature itself. Considering the “literary mar-
ketplace” as a product of the Romantic imagination, Frazier highlights the con-
spicuous interconnection of aesthetic and economic theory and practice in this
period. T. S. Grits, V. Trenin, and M. Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia: Knizh-
naia lavka A.F. Smirdina (Moscow: Agraf, 2001); William Mills Todd III, Fiction
and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, Narrative (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); André Meynieux, Pouchkine, homme de
lettres, et la litterature professionelle en Russie (Paris: Librarie des Cinq Conti-
nents, 1966); Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and

149
 Notes to Pages 5–13

Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press, 2007); William Mills Todd III, “Dostoevskii as a Profes-
sional Writer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. J. Leatherbar-
row (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66– 92; Melissa Frazier,
Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the “Library for Reading” (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), esp. 41.
13. In making this assertion I follow the lead of Yuri Lotman and Russell
Scott Valentino, whose works have explored early nineteenth-century literature
in relation to such economic factors as the noble culture of prodigality, gambling,
and debt, and the spread of commerce, respectively. Iu. M. Lotman, Roman
A. S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin,” 491– 95; Lotman, “Tema kart i kartochnoi igry
v russkoi literature v russkoi literature nachala XIX veka,” Trudy po znakovym
sistemam 7, no. 365 (1975): 120– 44; Jurij M. Lotman, “Theme and Plot: The
Theme of Cards and the Card Game in Russian Literature of the Nineteenth
Century,” trans. C. R. Pike, PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory
of Literature 3 (1978): 464– 67; Russell Scott Valentino, The Woman in the Win-
dow: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the
Russian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014).
14. On the Nicholaevan monetary crisis and reforms, see Mikhail Kash-
karov, Denezhnoe obrashchenie v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipo-
grafiia, 1898), 1:1– 116.
15. I use the term “poetics” in the basic sense of “the creative principles in-
forming any literary, cultural, or social construction.” Oxford English Dictionary,
online edition, s.v. “poetics.”
16. The Alexander Column was designed by Auguste de Montferrand.
17. Arcadius Kahan, “The Costs of ‘Westernization’ in Russia: The Gentry
and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (March 1,
1966): 40– 66.
18. Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 44.
19. Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin,” 491– 95.
20. On Smith’s influence on the Decembrists, see Tsvainert, Istoriia eko-
nomiicheskoi mysli, 108– 21; Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina “Evgenii One-
gin,” 557.
21. The superfluous man is the subject of several book-length studies, in-
cluding Ellen Chances, Conformity’s Children: An Approach to the Superfluous
Man in Russian Literature (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1978); Jesse Clardy and
Betty Clardy, The Superfluous Man in Russian Letters (Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, 1980); and Frank F. Seeley, From the Heyday of the Superflu-
ous Man to Chekhov (Nottingham, Eng.: Astra, 1994).
22. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 39.
23. Boris Uspenskij, “Tsar and Pretender: Samozvanchestvo or Royal Im-

150
 Notes to Pages 13–17

posture in Russia as a Cultural Phenomenon,” in Tsar and God and Other Essays
in Russian Cultural Semiotics, ed. Victor Zhivov and Boris Uspenskij (Boston:
Academic Studies, 2012), esp. 127.
24. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession
in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 159.
25. Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133.
26. This riskiness is confirmed by the fate of such early economic thinkers
as Juraj Križanić (1617– 1683) and Ivan Pososhkov (1652– 1726). The former, a
Croatian scholar and adventurer who settled in Russia and wrote a treatise on
the economic problems facing the state during the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich
(1645– 76), was exiled to Siberia under suspicion of subversion even before writ-
ing his book, and after its completion, he had to rely on foreign diplomats to se-
cure his exit from Russia. The latter, a successful merchant of peasant stock who
intended his 1724 treatise, The Book of Poverty and Wealth (Kniga o skudosti i
bogatsve, first published in 1842), as advice for Peter I, was arrested soon after
his book’s completion and died in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Juraj Krizanic,
Russian Statecraft: The Politika of Iurii Krizhanich, ed. John Letiche and Basil
Dmytryshyn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), xiii; Leonid Shirokograd, “Russian
Economic Thought in the Age of the Enlightenment,” in Economics in Rus-
sia, ed. Vincent Barnett and Joachim Zweynert (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008),
26– 28.
27. Henri Von Storch, Cours d’économie politique ou exposition des princi-
pes qui déterminent la prospérité des nations, with notes and criticism by J.-B.
Say (Paris: L’Imprimerie de Rignoux, 1823), 1:xi.
28. Tsvainert, Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 62.
29. Aleksandr Butovskii, Opyt o narodnom bogatsve, ili, O nachalakh
politicheskoi ekonomii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tip. vtorogo otdeleniia Sobstven-
noi kantseliarii, 1847).
30. Tsvainert, Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 39.
31. Butovskii, Opyt o narodnom bogatsve, 428, 461– 64.
32. In elaborating these figures for comparison, I follow an example set by
Natalie Melas in All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of
Comparison (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). In each chapter
of her book, Melas presents a “literary-theoretical figure for that incommensu-
rability in which there is ground for comparison but no basis for equivalence,”
including “‘the foil,’ ‘dissimilation,’ ‘com-paraison,’ ‘Relation,’ ‘ruined metaphor,’
and ‘catastrophic miniaturization’” (xiii).
33. B. V. Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Frantsiia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1960), 171; Ioakhim Klein, Puti kul’turnogo importa: Trudy po russkoi literature
XVIII veka (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2005), esp. 319– 23; Todd, Fic-
tion and Society, 2; Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Frag-

151
 Notes to Pages 18–25

ment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4;
Priscilla Meyer, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tol-
stoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 10; Luba Golburt, The First
Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 194.
34. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” esp. 89; Gould, Moving Politics,
20– 22.
35. See, for instance, Gallagher, The Body Economic; Elizabeth A. Williams,
The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medi-
cine in France, 1750– 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jes-
sica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the
French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Valeria
Sobol, Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2009).
36. This surge in scholarship on the culture of sensibility has led Ilya Vin-
itsky to posit that we are now living in a neo-Sentimentalist age. Il’ia Vinitskii,
“Zagovor chuvstv,” 448. On Russian emotional culture during the age of sensi-
bility, see also Ilya Vinitsky, Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional
History of Russia (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

C H A P T ER O NE

1. For original French and Russian definitions of ambition, chestoliubie,

liubochestie, and ambitsiia, see the Appendix.
2. Goldstein, Console and Classify, 158.
3. Ibid., 161. See also Jean-Louis Alibert, Physiologie des passions, ou Nou-
velle doctrine des sentiments moraux, 2 vols. (Paris: Béchet Jeune, 1825), 1:346.
4. On Stendhal’s engagement with the French clinical treatment of ambi-
tion, see Kathleen Kete, “Stendhal and the Trials of Ambition in Postrevolution-
ary France,” French Historical Studies 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 467– 95.
5. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, esp. 39– 41.
6. B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-Nachalo
XX v.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i
pravovogo gosudarstva (St. Petersburg: D. Bulanin, 1999), 1:80, 138.
7. Ibid., 1:133– 39.
8. Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Frantsiia, 169.
9. For instance, the revised 1756 edition of the so-called Elizabeth Bible
translates ϕιλοτιμια as liubochestie in its Church Slavic rendering of Wisdom of
Solomon 14:18, which discusses the sinful creation of idols: “V prodolzhenie zhe
zlochestiia i ne razumeiushchikh prinudi khudozhnikovo liubochestie.” Mean-
while, the Russian Synodal text of 1876 replaces liubochestie with tshchane (dili-
gence): “K usileniiu zhe pochitaniia i ot neznaiushchikh pooshchrialo tshchanie

152
 Notes to Pages 25–30

khudozhnika.” Similarly, in the Authorized (King James) Bible, this passage

reads: “Also the singular diligence of the artificer did help to set forward the ig-
norant to more superstition.”
10. In an 1825 sermon on the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, the influ-
ential Moscow Metropolitan Philaret (1782– 1867) exhorts listeners to emulate
the apostles as nearly as possible by giving up the search for worldly honor: “Esli
ne mozhesh’ eshche vozliubit’ ponoshenie: otvergni po krainei mere liubochestie.”
Filaret, “Slovo v den’ pervoverkhovnykh Apostolov Petra i Pavla,” in Sochineniia
Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo: Slova i rechi (Moscow: A. I.
Mamontova, 1873– 85), 2:218.
11. Mikhail Lomonosov, for instance, defends both liubochestie and chesto-
liubie, which he uses interchangeably, in his Rhetoric (Short Guide to Ora-
tory) (1748, revised 1765). According to Lomonosov, “without this passion great
undertakings would not be carried out.” Cited in Marcus C. Levitt, The Visual
Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2011), 130.
12. Interestingly, the editors of the first Dictionary of the Russian Academy
give a more favorable account of the soon-to-be obsolete liubochestie, defining
it as “love of granting honor to another.” Here relegated to the older form, this
meaning would disappear from later editions. The second edition (1806– 22) re-
peats the first edition’s sharply negative definition of chestoliubie and explains
liubochestie as simply its synonym. Evidence of the understanding of liuboches-
tie as a desire to honor others remains, however, in the second edition’s defini-
tion of the related (now obsolete) form, liubochestivyi: “1. Desiring honors, re-
spect. 2. Generous.”
13. Aleksandr Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (St. Peters-
burg: Nauka, 1992), 54; A. N. Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to
Moscow, trans. Leo Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1958), 121.
14. A. S. Pushkin, PSS, 13:185.
15. For his part, Polevoi criticized these noble writers by calling them “liter-
ary aristocrats.” See Chester M. Rzadkiewicz, “N. A. Polevoi’s Moscow Telegraph
and the Journal Wars of 1825– 1834,” in Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, ed.
Deborah Martinsen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 73.
16. Faddei Bulgarin, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 131. I am
grateful to Luba Golburt for drawing my attention to this passage.
17. Irina Levontina, “Shum slovaria,” Znamia: Ezhemesiachnyi literaturno-
khudozhestvennyi i obshchestvenno-politicheskii zhurnal 8 (2006), http://
magazines.russ.ru /znamia /2006 /8 /le12.html.
18. Originating in classical Greece and disseminated throughout medieval
Europe in the Galenic theory of humors, in the eighteenth century the term
“melancholia” was commonly applied to psychological disorders ranging from

153
 Notes to Pages 30–32

depression to madness. For historical overviews of its conceptual evolution, see

Raymond Klibanksy et al., Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of
Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); Stanley Jackson,
Melancholia and Depression: From Hyppocratic Times to Modern Times (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
19. Ilya Vinitsky, “A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine
the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy,” in Madness
and the Mad in Russian Culture, ed. Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky (To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 36.
20. Cited in A. Startsev, Radishchev, gody ispytanii (Moscow: Sovetskii pisa-
tel’, 1990), 374; Catherine II, “Empress Catherine’s Notes,” in Aleksandr Niko-
laevich Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Weiner
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 244.
21. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des mé-
tiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, s.v. “hypochondrie.”
22. Vasilii Gippius, Gogol’ (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1963),
91; V. V. Gippius, Gogol, trans. Robert Maguire (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 79.
23. [Jean-Louis Alibert], “Sumasshedshii chestoliubets,” Moskovskii telegraf
12, no. 2 (1826): 89– 103.
24. Alibert, “L’Ambitieux fou, ou l’Histoire d’Anselme, dit Diogen,” in Phys-
iologie des passions, 1:341– 69.
25. Williams, The Physical and the Moral, 1– 2, 8.
26. Goldstein, Console and Classify, 49– 55, 71, 83– 84.
27. While the focus on instincts was Alibert’s own, his notion of the “animal
economy” and his equation of health to “harmony” are derived from the teach-
ings of the eighteenth-century Montpellier school of vitalism, which had pro-
foundly influenced the development of French medicine in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. Alibert’s teacher, Pinel, had himself studied at
Montpellier, and Pinel’s belief in the “moral” roots of insanity represent a con-
tinuation of that school’s insistence on the close connection between the physical
and moral elements of human life. The vitalists had drawn the idea of the har-
mony of the body from classical sources, which Alibert acknowledges at the be-
ginning of his Physiologie by citing Plato’s description of the body as a “har-
monious instrument designed to reflect, imitate, and reproduce the phenomena
of the spirit.” The topos of the “animal economy” was newer, having flourished
in seventeenth-century Dutch medicine. The Dutch physician Herman Boer-
haave (1668– 1738), whose work was influential in France, used the term “animal
oeconomy” synonymously with “physiology,” the “first branch of physic,” com-
prising “the several Parts of the human Body, with their Mechanism and Ac-
tions; together with the Doctrine of Life, Health, and their several Effects,
which result from the Action of the Parts.” Notably, the French physician-cum-

154
 Notes to Pages 32–37

Physiocrat, François Quesnay, wrote a treatise on the animal economy early in

his career, and it has been suggested that his theories of the “animal economy”
shaped his later thinking about political economy. Williams, The Physical and the
Moral, 37– 38, 40; Alibert, Physiologie des passions, 1:i-ii; Emily Booth, A Subtle
and Mysterious Machine: The Medical World of Walter Charleton (1619– 1707)
(Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2005), 82; Herman Boerhaave, Dr. Boerhaave’s Ac-
ademical Lectures on the Theory of Physic: Being a Genuine Translation of His
Institutes and Explanatory Comment, [etc.] (London, 1742– 46), 1:77; François
Quesnay, Essai phisique sur l’oeconomie animale (G. Cavelier, 1736); H. Spen-
cer Bazhgraf, “Productive Nature and the Net Product: Quesnay’s Economies
Animal and Political,” History of Political Economy 32, no. 3 (2000): 545– 49.
28. Alibert, Physiologie des passions, 1:269, 330.
29. Ibid., 1:275.
30. Alibert included several other anecdotes in his treatise, each designed
to illustrate his theories on a particular passion. Over the course of 1826, The
Moscow Telegraph printed translations of at least three of these anecdotes in
addition to “The Mad Man of Ambition.” In one case chief editor Nikolai Pole-
voi credited himself with the translation. [Alibert], “Ubogii Petr,” Moskovskii
telegraf 7, no. 1 (1826): 9– 45; [Alibert], “Kurame,” trans. Nikolai Polevoi, Mos-
kovskii telegraf 9, no. 10 (1826): 78– 102; [Alibert], “Sluzhanka Mariia,” Mos-
kovskii telegraf 10, no. 16 (1826): 150– 58.
31. Alibert, “Le Fou ambitieux,” 349– 50; [Alibert], “Sumasshedshii chesto-
liubets,” 90.
32. Alibert, “Le Fou ambitieux,” 365– 68; [Alibert], “Sumasshedshii chesto-
liubets,” 99– 102.
33. Alibert, “Le Fou ambitieux,” unnumbered page between 349 and 350;
[Alibert], “Sumasshedshii chestoliubets,” 89.
34. “Dom sumasshedshikh v sharentone (Otryvok iz zapisok odnogo putesh-
estvennika),” Babochka 34 (April 27, 1829): 134– 35.
35. Goldstein, Console and Classify, 139, 159.
36. “Dom sumasshedshikh,” 135.
37. F. D., “Une visite a la maison de santé de Charenton,” Le Voleur 6
(May 10, 1828): 1– 2.
38. L. G. Kokoreva, “O zhizni i tvorchestve V. S. Filimonova,” Uchenye za-
piski Moskovskogo oblastnogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. N. K. Krupskoi 66,
Trudy kafedry russkoi literatury 4 (1958): 54.
39. Faddei Bulgarin, “Tri listka iz doma sumasshedshikh, ili Psikhicheskoe
istselenie neizlechimoi bolezni (Pervoe izvlechenie iz Zapisok starogo vracha)”
Severnaia pchela, February 15– 16, 1834.
40. The original French text of the epigraph reads: “L’observation et
l’expérience nous ayant fait découvrir les moyens de combattre assez souvent
avec succès, l’état de maladie, l’art qui met en usage ces moyens, peut donc modi-

155
 Notes to Pages 37–42

fier et perfectionner les opérations de l’intelligence et les habitudes de la volonté.”

P. J. G. Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (Paris: Hacquart,
1815), 471. Cited in Bulgarin, “Tri listka,” Severnaia pchela, February 15, 1834.
The epigraph is missing from the most accessible reprint of Bulgarin’s story,
found in Iu. M. Medvedeva, ed., Biblioteka russkoi fantastiki, vol. 6 (Moscow:
Russkaia kniga, 1997): 360– 69. Other than the epigraph, citations from Bulga-
rin’s “Tri listka” refer to the reprint in Biblioteka russkoi fantastiki.
41. Williams, The Physical and the Moral, 80– 81.
42. Bulgarin, “Tri listka,” 360– 61.
43. I am grateful to Robert Bird for this suggestion.
44. Bulgarin, “Tri listka,” 360– 61.
45. Ibid., 362– 68.
46. On Bulgarin’s life and political views, see A. E. Reitblat, ed., Vidok Fi-
gliarin: Pis’ma i agenturnye zapiski Faddeia Bulgarina v III otdelenie (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998); A. G. Altunian, “Politicheskie mneniia”
Faddeia Bulgarina: Ideino-stilisticheskii analiz zapisok F.V. Bulgarina k Nikolaiu
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo URAO, 1998).
47. Before his death, Ferdinand had revoked a law preventing female heirs
from succeeding to the throne, thus making way for his daughter Isabella to be-
come queen. However, after his death ultraroyalists led by Carlos mounted an
insurrection, fighting for years in a futile attempt to establish Carlos as king.
Paul W. Shroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763– 1848 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 722– 25. It is worth noting that precisely
the reverse situation prevailed in Russia: Paul I legalized the principle of male
primogeniture in 1797, thereby preventing women from acceding to the throne.
On coverage of the Spanish insurrection in The Northern Bee, see also Igor Zo-
lotussky, “‘Diary of a Madman’ and the ‘Severnaya Pchela,’” Soviet Literature,
no. 10 (1975): 38– 52.
48. “Zapiski sumasshedshego” was first published under the title “Klochki iz
zapiskok sumasshedshego” in the collection Arabeski: Raznye sochineniia N. Go-
golia, ch. 2-ia (St. Petersburg: V tipografii vdovy Pliushar s synom, 1835).
49. See, for instance, Stephen Moeller-Sally, “OOOO; or, The Sign of the Sub-
ject in Gogol’s Petersburg,” in Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture
of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (Evanston,
Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 325– 46; Donald Fanger, The Creation
of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 115– 18.
50. On Poprishchin as a reader of The Northern Bee, see Zolotussky, “Diary
of a Madman and the Severnaya Pchela”; Fanger, Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 115.
51. The translation is from Nikolai Gogol, “The Diary of a Madman,” in The
Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(New York: Vintage Classics, 1999), 279– 300.
52. On the censorship of Gogol’s story, see Laurie Asch, “The Censorship

156
 Notes to Pages 43–49

of Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman,’” Russian Literature Triquarterly 14

(Winter 1976): 20– 35.
53. Gippius, Gogol’, 89– 91; Gippius, Gogol, 77– 80. Gogol reworked parts
of his abandoned comedy and published them as independent scenes in 1842:
“An Official’s Morning” (“Utro delovogo cheloveka”), “A Lawsuit” (“Tiazhba”),
“The Servant’s Quarters” (“Lakeiskaia”), and “Scenes from Society Life” (“Steny
iz svetskoi zhizni”).
54. Commentary to Nikolai Gogol’, Dramaticheskie otryvki, in Sobranie
khudozhestvennykh proizvedenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii
nauk SSSR, 1951– 52), 4:463.
55. Translation modified.
56. The association between dogs and matters of rank in the passage once
again provoked the censors’ discomfort: Gogol was made to strike the lines in
which Medji is unimpressed with the smell and taste of the “ribbon.” Asch, “The
Censorship of Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman,’” 22.
57. Commentary to “Zapiski sumasshedshego,” in Gogol’, SS, 3:297.
58. Zolotussky rightly points out that “the very spirit of the information
about these events in the press of the day, and also the spirit of the press itself,
predetermined the psychology of Gogol’s hero, his manner of thinking and act-
ing.” Yet whereas Zolotussky argues that ultimately Gogol means for the charac-
ter of Poprishchin to transcend the “mercantilism and the positivism of the Bul-
garin ideology,” in my reading the significance of Poprishchin’s character stems
from his incorporation of the contradictory ideological perspectives at play in
Bulgarin’s newspaper and the contemporary Russian cultural scene. Zolotussky,
“‘Diary of a Madman’ and the ‘Severnaya Pchela,’” 39, 52.
59. Cited in Commentary to “Zapiski sumasshedshego,” in Gogol’, SS, 3:298.
60. Iurii Mann, “Filosofiia i poetika ‘natural’noi shkoly,’” in Problemy tipolo-
gii russkogo realizma (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1969), 299– 304. Elena
Dryzhakova also examines Dostoevsky’s handling of ambitsiia in The Double
in her essay “Madness as an Act of Defense of Personality in Dostoevsky’s The
Double,” in Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, ed. Brintlinger and Vin-
itsky, 59– 74. Whereas Dryzhakova views ambitsiia as a universally human form
of self-consciousness, I am interested in its rootedness in historically specific
class structures and literary paradigms.
61. Mann, “Filosofia i poetika,” 299, 301.
62. Dostoevsky translated Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833) before he wrote
Poor Folk. On Dostoevsky’s engagements with Balzac, see Leonid Grossman,
“Bal’zak i Dostoevskii,” in Poetika Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia ak-
ademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1925); Leonid Grossman, “Gofman, Bal’zak i
Dostoevskii,” Sofiia 5 (1914): 87– 96; Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic
Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Donald Rayfield, “Dosto-

157
 Notes to Pages 49–55

evsky’s Eugénie Grandet,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 20, no. 2 (1984):
133– 42.
63. The translation is from Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double, in The Double
and the Gambler, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 2005), 1– 170.
64. Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues, in La Comédie humaine (Paris:
Gallimard, 1976– 1981), 5:699; Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Kathleen
Raine (New York: Random House, 2001), 646; Dostoevskii, Dvoinik, 168; The
Double, 86.
65. Translation modified.
66. Vinogradov discusses the speed, continual interruption, and uncertain
purpose of Goliadkin’s movements, but he does not mention ambition’s role in
propelling them. V. V. Vinogradov, “Evoliutsiia russkogo naturalizma,” in Poetika
russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1976), 109– 16.
67. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 43.
68. Balzac, Illusions perdues, 183; Balzac, Lost Illusions, 175, translation
modified.
69. Translation modified.
70. “O svetskikh obshchestvakh i khoroshem tone,” Moskovskii telegraf 1,
no. 2 (1825): 108– 9. Emphasis in the original. While it is certainly possible that
this text was translated directly from a French original, it is also possible that it
may draw on multiple sources. For instance, a short article entitled “Qu’est-ce
que le bon ton?” which appeared in a theatrical journal in 1825, differs from the
Russian text in most particulars but contains some strikingly similar formula-
tions. “Qu’est-ce que le bon ton?” La Pandore: Journal des spectacles, des lettres,
des arts, des moeurs, et des modes 878 (March 1825): 4.
71. On shame and embarrassment in Dostoevsky’s works, see also Debo-
rah A. Martinsen, Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Ex-
posure (Ohio State University Press, 2003); Alyson Tapp, “Embarrassment in
The Idiot,” Slavic and East European Journal 60, no. 3 (2016): 422– 46. On em-
barrassment as a central problematic of the nineteenth-century novel, see Kent
Puckett, Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
72. Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” 269.
73. Ibid., 265.

C H A P T ER T WO

1. Gogol’s album entry is cited and translated in Roman Jakobson and

Bayara Aroutunova, “An Unknown Album Page by Nikolaj Gogol’,” Harvard Li-
brary Bulletin 20, no. 3 (1972): 236. On On Gogol’s visits to Volkonskaya’s home
and his relationship with Vlasova, see ibid., 238; N. A. Belozerskaia, “Kniaginia

158
 Notes to Pages 56–57

Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia, I– VIII,” Istoricheskii vestnik 67 (1897):

939– 72; N. A. Belozerskaia, “Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia,” Is-
toricheskii vestnik 68 (1897): 154; and Maria Fairweather, The Pilgrim Princess:
A Life of Zinaida Volkonsky (London: Robinson, 2000), 244– 62.
2. André Trofimoff, La Prinesse Zénaïde Wolkonsky: De la Russie Impériale
à la Rome des papes (Rome: Staderini, 1966), 123.
3. Gogol’s thresholds serve a different purpose than those Bakhtin identifies
as central in the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In Bakhtin’s account, the thresh-
old in Dostoevsky “can be combined with the motif of the encounter, but its
most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in a life.” For
Gogol, by contrast, the crossing of a threshold announces encounter and, most
importantly, exchange at once everyday and fantastical. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms
of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Mi-
chael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2004), 248.
4. S. Shevyrev, “Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova, ili Mertvye dushi, Poema Niko-
laia Gogolia Mertvye dushi: Stat’ia pervaia,” Moskvitianin 4, no. 7 (1842): 210,
219; Stepan Shevyrev, “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, A Narrative
Poem by N. Gogol,” in Literature and National Identity: Nineteenth-Century
Critical Essays, trans. Paul Debreczeny and Jesse Zeldin (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1970), 19– 20, 28.
5. S. Shevyrev, “Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova, ili Mertvye dushi, Poema Niko-
laia Gogolia Mertvye dushi: Stat’ia vtoraia,” Moskvitianin 4, no. 8 (1842): 374–
75; Shevyrev, “The Adventures of Chichikov,” 62– 63, translation modified.
6. The translation is from Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1997).
7. On problems of value and evaluation in Dead Souls, see Gary Saul Mor-
son, “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics,” in Essays on
Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University
Press, 1992), esp. 206– 15; Valentino, The Woman in the Window, 64– 65; and
chap. 4 in the present volume.
8. Gogol’s representation of food has inspired several studies, including Ron-
ald D. LeBlanc, “Dinner with Chichikov: The Fictional Meal as Narrative De-
vice in Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls,’” Modern Language Studies 18, no. 4 (1988): 68– 80;
Natalia M. Kolb-Seletski, “Gastronomy, Gogol, and His Fiction,” Slavic Review
29, no. 1 (1970): 35– 57; Alexander Obolensky, Food-Notes on Gogol (Winnipeg,
Can.: Trident, 1972). Food features prominently in many other works of Gogol
scholarship as well. For Andrei Bely, the hero of Gogol’s works is the “belly”
(briukho), and together these works form one epic “Gobbl-iad” (Zhratv-iada).
Iurii Mann treats food in the context of Gogol’s engagements with materiality.
Simon Karlinsky ascribes to Gogol an “appetite for words that can only be de-
scribed as verbal gluttony.” Cathy Popkin discusses the dissatisfaction Gogol’s

159
 Notes to Pages 58–61

readers may experience when they approach his work with a “hunger for story”
and are served story-thwarting discourse, instead. A. Belyi, Masterstvo Gogo-
lia: Issledovanie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi lit-
eratury, 1934), 156; Iu. Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1978), esp. 151– 70; Simon Karlinsky, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word
Glutton, with Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures,”
California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 169– 86; Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of In-
significance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1993), 14.
9. In considering Chichikov’s accumulation of dead souls as a manipulation
of state gifts, I pursue an avenue opened by Andrea Zink in her article, Čičikovs
genialer Plan – (Anti-)Ökonomie in Nikolaj Gogol’s “Mertvye duši,” Wiener
Slawistischer Almanach 91 (2016), 87– 100.
10. For his part, Chichikov uses a related form of ambitsiia when offering an
unconvincing account of his interest in dead souls: he claims that he hopes to be
married and that he needs the appearance of owning at least 300 serfs in order to
impress his would-be in-laws, whom he terms “extremely haughty people” (“pre-
ambitsioznye liudi,” 5:76; 77), translation modified.
11. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic
Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, foreword by Mary Douglas (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1990), 3– 4, 7– 8, 37– 41.
12. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
(London: Vintage, 1999), 30.
13. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 24.
14. Jacques Derrida, “Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality,” in Jacques Der-
rida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites
Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000), esp. 25, 75.
15. Peter Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommoda-
tion (Waterloo, Ont., Can.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), 18.
16. Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 27– 8. See also Judith Still, Enlightenment
Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems, and Adoption (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
2011), 12; Alen Montandon, “Gostepriimstvo: Etnograficheskaia mechta?” trans.
E. Gal’tsova, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 65 (2004): 62– 63.
17. An especially vivid example of the nostalgic lamentation of the erosion
of hospitality by commerce comes in the definition of “hospitalité” in Diderot
and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie: “L’hospitalité s’est donc perdue naturellement
dans toute l’Europe, parce que toute l’Europe est devenue voyageante & com-
merçante.” Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou
dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., s.v. “l’hospitalité.”

160
 Notes to Pages 61–64

18. Samuel H. Baron, “Who Were the Gosti?” in Muscovite Russia (Lon-
don: Varorium Reprints, 1980), 4.
19. Émile Benveniste, “L’Hospitalité,” in Le vocabulaire des institutions
indo-européennes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 1:87– 101.
20. Mauss’s political preoccupations come to the fore at the end of The Gift.
Extending his analysis of gift-giving rituals in “primitive” societies to questions of
social organization in modern industrialized nations, he writes: “Over-generosity
and communism would be as harmful to [the individual] and to society as the
egoism of our contemporaries and the individualism of our laws.” Mauss, The
Gift, 69, translation modified. For further discussion of Mauss’s views on Soviet
Communism, see Mike Gane, “Institutional Socialism and the Sociological Cri-
tique of Communism,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, ed.
Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1992), 135– 64; and Marcel Fournier, Marcel
Mauss: A Biography, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 194– 205.
21. Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 1– 2.
22. Alexey Miller, “Natsiia, Narod, Narodnost’ in Russia in the 19th Cen-
tury: Some Introductory Remarks to the History of Concepts,” Jahrbucher fur
Geschichte Osteuropas 56, no. 3 (2008): 380.
23. P. Ia. Chaadaev, “Lettre première,” in Lettres philosophiques adressées à
une dame (1829– 1830), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow: Nauka,
1991), 1:90; Petr Chaadaev, “First Philosophical Letter,” trans. Valentine Snow,
in Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Har-
court, Brace, and World, 1966), 163. On rootlessness and wandering in the dis-
course of Russian national identity, see Ingrid Kleespies, A Nation Astray: No-
madism and National Identity in Russian Literature (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2012).
24. N. M. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo: Ezhemesiachnoe
prilozhenie k zhurnalu “Sever” (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 1:40– 41; 10:164.
25. Elena Hellberg-Hirn, “Khleb-sol’: Magicheskaia pishcha,” Studia slavica
finlandensia 7 (1980): 137– 60, esp. 145.
26. One testament to the religious roots of Russian hospitality is the
sixteenth-century manual of household rules known as the Domostroi, in which
the author instructs: “Invite churchmen, the poor, the helpless, the impover-
ished, the suffering, and the stranger to your house. According to your means,
feed them and give them drink, warm them, and give them alms accrued through
your own righteous labors. Whether they are at home, in the marketplace, or on
the road, people cleanse themselves in this way from their sins. For the unfor-
tunate bear witness to our actions before God.” Carolyn Pouncy, ed. and trans.,
The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 179.
27. N. M. Karamzin, Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad: Nauka,

161
 Notes to Pages 64–70

1984), 291; N. M. Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789– 1790: An

Account of a Young Russian Gentleman’s Tour through Germany, Switzerland,
France and England, trans. and abridged by Florence Jonas (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1957), 248.
28. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia,
8th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1:247, 260.
29. Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on a Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cul-
tural History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 142. On Cath-
erine II’s entertainments, see also George E. Munro, “Food in Catherinian St.
Petersburg,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and
Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 31– 48.
30. Roosevelt, Life on a Russian Country Estate, 130, 135, 142– 45, 174– 75.
31. For instance, Turgenev writes: “No crowd of servants came pouring onto
the porch to meet the masters; only one twelve-year-old girl appeared, and after
her a young fellow.” I. S. Turgenev, Otsy i deti, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i
pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR,
1960– 68), 8:207; Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children, trans. and ed. Michael R.
Katz, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 12.
32. M. Iu. Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow:
Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1979– 81), 1:460; Mikhail Lermontov, “My Native Land,”
trans. Irina Zheleznova, in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1978), 45– 46.
33. I. S. Turgenev, “Khor i Kalinych,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem,
4:8– 9, 18; Ivan Turgenev, “Khor and Kalinych,” in The Essential Turgenev, ed.
Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Elizabeth Cheresh
Allen (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 7– 8, 15.
34. L. N. Tolstoi, Voina i mir, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosu-
darstvennaia izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928– 1958), 10:268; Leo
Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude, rev. George
Gibian (New York: Norton, 1996), 454.
35. Troshchinskii had over 200,000 acres of land and 6,000 serfs. David
Magarshack, Gogol: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 42.
36. V. I. Shenrok, Materialy dlia biografii Gogolia (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I.
Mamontova, 1893), 1:48, 31, 45, 179.
37. Magarshack, Gogol: A Life, 62.
38. Shenrok, Materialy dlia biografii Gogolia, 1:297, 339.
39. Gogol’ to S. P. Shevyrev, June 4, 1842, St. Petersburg, in N. V. Gogol’,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1937–
52), 12:68, 604n; Nikolai Gogol, Letters of Nikolai Gogol, ed. Carl R. Proffer,
trans. Carl R. Proffer in collaboration with Vera Krivoshein (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1967), 114. According to Donald Fanger, Zhukovsky
helped Gogol obtain 800 rubles from Nicholas I in 1836 and 5,000 in 1837.
Between 1841 and 1845, Zhukovsky and Gogol’s other friends (including Pletnev
and Smirnova-Rosset) helped procure additional grants from the sovereign, his

162
 Notes to Pages 71–74

wife, and, in one case, from Sergei Uvarov: 500 rubles in 1841; 1,000 in 1843;
4,000 in 1844; and 3,000 silver rubles in 1845. As it is not clear whether the ma-
jority of these payments were made in paper or silver rubles, the precise worth
of the gifts at the time is not immediately clear. Fanger, Creation of Nikolai
Gogol, 148– 49, 282n4.
40. On the uncanny mood arising from the meeting of self and other in sit-
uations of hospitality, see Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, “At the
Threshold: Foreigners, Strangers, Others,” in Phenomenologies of the Stranger:
Between Hostility and Hospitality, ed. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semono-
vitch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 4.
41. Edyta M. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol between Ukrainian and Russian
Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 27– 34.
42. On feeling-tone, see Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 43; and the discussion of this
term in chap. 1 of the present volume.
43. Valeria Sobol, “The Uncanny Frontier of Russian Identity: Travel, Eth-
nography, and Empire in Lermontov’s ‘Taman,’” The Russian Review 70, no. 1
(2001): 65– 79.
44. M. Iu. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, in Sobranie sochinenii v che-
tyrekh tomakh, 4:226, 228; Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Paul
Foote (New York: Penguin, 2001), 57, 60.
45. The translation is from Nikolai Gogol, “The Night Before Christmas,” in
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol.
46. On Gogol’s adjustments to Ziablovskii’s text, see Vadim Besprozvannyi,
“‘Mirgorod’ N. V. Gogolia: Tsikl kak tekst,” in Permiakovskii sbornik, ed. Natalia
Mazur (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2010), 2:326n6.
47. Donald Fanger advances the convincing claim that “Old World Land-
owners” and the other stories in the Mirgorod collection show Gogol “bring-
ing to consciousness and seeking perspective on the kind of self-expression that
went more directly into the earlier tales.” Thus it is “with his readers” that Gogol
“looks down and in on the world portrayed, its very presence colored by the
framing acknowledgement of its absence.” Fanger brilliantly reads “Old World
Landowners” in particular as a “rumination on the idyllic, on its value and fate.”
Fanger, Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 95– 97, emphasis in the original.
48. The translation is from Nikolai Gogol, “Old World Landowners,” in The
Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol.
49. Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I– VIII, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev.
G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 451.
50. Kiprensky’s painting is included in the catalogue of Svin’in’s collec-
tion published in 1829. “Kratkaia opis’ predmetov, sostavliaiushchikh Russkii
Muzeum Pavla Svin’ina,” Otechestvennye zapiski 38, no. 110 (1829): 313– 76;
“Kratkaia opis’ predmetov, sostavliaiushchikh Russkii Muzeum Pavla Svin’ina,”
Otechestvennye zapiski 39, no. 111 (1829): 3– 77. On Gogol’s relationship with
Svin’in and his references to the sale of the Russian Museum in his works, see

163
 Notes to Pages 76–86

N. L. Vinogradskaia, “‘Muzei Drevnostei’ (ob odnoi realii v chernovom aftografe

‘Mertvykh dush’),” Novyi filologicheskii vestnik 3, no. 26 (2013): 73– 87.
51. Gogol’s family name was Gogol-Ianovsky; he dropped the latter part
of it, which was Polish, around the time of the Polish uprising of 1830– 31. Bo-
janowska, Nikolai Gogol between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism, 38.
52. Kevis Goodman, “Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia,” in The
Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 201, 208. See also Kevis Goodman,
“‘Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading,”
Studies in Romanticism 49, no. 2 (2010): 197– 227.
53. On time in “Old World Landowners,” see also Julian Graffy, “Passion
versus Habit in Old World Landowners,” in Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context, ed.
Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 40; Iu. M. Lot-
man, “Problema khudozhestvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia,” in Uchenye
zapiski tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 209 (1968): 25.
54. On the mildly disgusting aesthetics of the “sickly sweet” (douceatre),
see Hannah Freed-Thall, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in
French Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 133– 42.
55. Gogol’ to unknown addressee, around July 20, 1842, Gastein, in Gogol’,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12:81; Gogol, Letters, 116.
56. Gogol’ to M. P. Pogodin, February 1, 1833, St. Petersburg, in Gogol’,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:256– 57; Gogol, Letters, 43.
57. Gogol’ to V. A. Zhukovskii, November 12, 1836, Paris, in Gogol’, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, 11:74– 75; Gogol, Letters, 63.
58. Gogol’ to N. Ia. Prokopovich, September 19, 1837, Geneva, in Gogol’,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11:109– 10; Gogol, Letters, 71, translation modified.
59. Gogol’ to S. S. Uvarov, between February 24 and March 4, 1842, Mos-
cow, in Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12:39– 40; Gogol, Letters, 109.
60. For a useful summary of Freud’s writing on feces, the gift, and money,
see Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Emotion,
trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2003), 213– 20.
61. Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” in Character and Cul-
ture, trans. R. C. McWatters (New York: Macmillan, 1963), esp. 30– 33.
62. Cited in Menninghaus, Disgust, 217.
63. Vladimir Golstein, “Landowners in Dead Souls: Or the Tale of How
Gogol Blessed What He Wanted to Curse,” Slavic and East European Journal
41, no. 2 (1997): 248.
64. N. V. Gogol’ to V. A. Zhukovskii, November 12, 1836, Paris, in Gogol’,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11:74; Gogol, Letters, 63.
65. On the abject, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjec-
tion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

164
 Notes to Pages 86–91

66. On Gogol’s preoccupation with questions of authorship, see also Louns-

bery, Thin Culture, High Art, esp. 19– 31.
67. The translation is from Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Corre-
spondence with Friends, trans. Jesse Zeldin (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Uni-
versity Press, 1969).

C H A PTER T HR EE

1. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and

David Frisby (London: Routledge, 2004), 128– 29.
2. Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books,
1994), 18.
3. Jacques Catteau, Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans.
Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 135– 72;
Sophie Ollivier, “Argent et Révolution dans Les Démons,” Dostoevsky Studies 5
(1984): 101– 15; Susan McReynolds, Redemption and the Merchant God: Dos-
toevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2008); Todd, “Dostoevskii as a Professional Writer”; Boris
Christa, “Dostoevskii and Money,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii,
ed. Leatherbarrow, 93– 110; John Vernon, “On Borrowed Time: The Gambler
and La Cousine Bette,” in Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nine-
teenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1984), 108– 41.
4. Malcolm Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky’s
Fantastic Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15.
5. The main difference between Dostoevsky’s handling of money in the
two versions of The Double is that the 1866 text eliminates a few of the many
instances in which the hero makes payments or promises to do so. I identify
what I consider to be the most significant of these cuts in footnotes. For side-
by-side comparison of the two editions in English translation, see Fyodor Dos-
toevsky, The Double: Two Versions, trans. Evelyn Harden (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
Ardis, 1985).
6. V. G. Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1846-ogo goda,” in Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953– 59), 41.
7. Translation modified. Russian citations from The Double refer to the ca-
nonical text in Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:109– 229, which is based on the 1866 edition.
English quotations from The Double are from Pevear and Volokhonsky’s transla-
tion, which is similarly based on the 1866 text. Dostoevsky, The Double, in The
Double and the Gambler.
8. For detailed accounts of Dostoevsky’s incorporation of typical elements
of Natural School petty clerk tales, see V. Vinogradov, “Evoliutsiia russkogo nat-
uralizma: Gogol’ i Dostoevskii,” in Poetika russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy

165
 Notes to Pages 91–94

(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1976), 3– 187; Aleksandr Tseitlin, Povesti o

bednom chinovnike Dostoevskogo (k istorii odnogo siuzheta) (Moscow: n.p.,
1923).
9. B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii, 1:87.
10. Vinogradov, “Evoliutsiia russkogo naturalizma,” 104; Victor Terras, The
Young Dostoevsky: 1846– 1849 (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 13; Donald Fanger,
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 160.
11. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in The
Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton,
1978), 104– 5.
12. On the monetization of agrarian values in Dead Souls, see note 7 to
chapter 2 and chapter 4 in the present volume.
13. V. A. Zhukovskii, “Dvenadtsat’ spiashchikh dev, Starinnaia povest’ v
dvukh balladakh” (1817), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati to-
makh (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1999-), 3:81– 108; A. S. Pushkin,
“Pikovaia dama,” PSS, 8:225– 52; N. V. Gogol’, “Portret” (1835, rev. 1842), SS,
3:64– 115; Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “Gogol and the Devil,” in Gogol from the
Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 91; Vladimir Nabokov, “Our Mr. Chi-
chikov,” in Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1944), 73.
14. Jacob Emery identifies the cultural association between royal imposture
and counterfeit money in his essay “Species of Legitimacy: The Rhetoric of Suc-
cession around Russian Coins,” Slavic Review 75, no. 1 (2016): esp. 9– 10, 15–
21. On the demonic connotations of imposture, see Uspenskij, “Tsar and Pre-
tender,” esp. 118.
15. The social and historical conditions cited thus far in connection with
Dostoevsky’s fantastical representation of St. Petersburg in The Double include
the discrepancies between life in the Europeanized capital and the rest of the
empire, the contrast between Peter I’s legacy of “modernization from above”
and the apparent stagnation of Nicholas I’s Russia, and the imperative to project
various social personae depending on the rank and status of one’s interlocutors.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(London: Verso, 1982), 179, 181, 192; V. E. Vetlovskaia, “Sotsial’naia tema v per-
vykh proizvedeniiakh Dostoevskogo,” Russkaia literatura: Istoriko-literaturnyi
zhurnal 3 (1983): 91.
16. Russell Scott Valentino, “What’s a Person Worth: Character and Com-
merce in Dostoevsky’s The Double,” in American Contributions to the 13th In-
ternational Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, August 2003, ed. Robert Maguire
and Alan Timberlake, vol. 2 (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2003), 206– 8.
17. Entsyklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Brokhgauz and Efron,
1890– 1904), s.v. “assignatsiia.”
18. Tolstoy refers to this incident in War and Peace. Dostoevsky, too, hints

166
 Notes to Pages 94–99

at it in The Demons (Besy, 1871– 72): the character of Lebyadkin admits to hav-
ing been caught with “French counterfeit fifty-rouble bills.” Liudmila Petrovna
Marnei, “Iz istorii Napoleonovskikh poddelok russkikh assignatsii v nachale XIX
veka,” Slavianovedenie 6 (2012): 78; L. N. Tolstoi, Voina i mir, in Polnoe sobra-
nie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia lit-
eratura,” 1928– 58), 11:3; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2008), 609; Dostoevskii, Besy,
PSS, 10:213; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 269.
19. Mikhail Kashkarov, Denezhnoe obrashchenie v Rossii (St. Petersburg:
Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1898), 1:26.
20. For detailed analysis of the 1839– 43 financial reforms, see ibid., esp.
1:29– 71. For analysis in English, see Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under
Nicholas I, 83– 91, 127– 31, 184– 220. For a discussion of the state’s anticounter-
feiting techniques, see A. E. Mikhaelis and L. A. Kharlamov, Bumazhnye den’gi
Rossii (Perm’: Permskaia pechatnaia fabrika Goznaka, 1993), 13.
21. Kharlamov, Bumazhnye den’gi Rossii, 13.
22. Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 185– 86.
23. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve
University, 1973), 25.
24. Kashkarov, Denezhnoe obrashchenie v Rossii, 1:71
25. In the 1846 edition, Dostoevsky follows Goliadkin’s statement about
money’s power to “take a man far” with the character’s further musings on how
his money could help him become more like “the hero of a most ingenious
novel” (geroi samogo zateilivogo romana). Dostoevskii, Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia
gospodina Goliadkina, Otechestvennye zapiski 44, no. 2 (1846): 265; Dostoevsky,
The Double: Two Versions, 5.
26. Early critics of The Double faulted Dostoevsky for his own tendency to
squander language. For instance, Belinsky criticized the young author for his
“terrible ineptitude in controlling and economically distributing his surplus of
capabilities” (strashnoe neumenie vladet’ i rasporiazhat’sia ekonomicheski izbyt-
kom sobstvennykh sil). V. G. Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1846-ogo
goda,” 40.
27. On the assignatsii printed between 1786 and 1818, the word deist-
vuet is presented in the abbreviated form, deistv. For images of Russian paper
money before, during, and after the reforms, including images with visible wa-
termarks, see the photographs on unnumbered pages in Mikhaelis and Khar-
lamov, Bumazhnye den’gi Rossii.
28. For a brief history of such comparisons between language and money in
the Western philosophical tradition, see Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies
after Marx and Freud, 96– 111. For a survey of econo-critical treatments of this

167
 Notes to Pages 100–110

subject, see Osteen and Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic
Criticism,” 13– 21.
29. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 118.
30. Ibid., 111.
31. Entsyklopedicheskii slovar’, s.v. “assignatsiia.”
32. Translation modified.
33. Translation modified. In the 1846 edition of The Double, Vakhrameev
writes a second letter to Goliadkin, in which he continues using monetary lan-
guage to malign the hero. For instance, Vakhrameev declares that Goliadkin’s
failure to pay Karolina Ivanovna has become public knowledge, and that conse-
quently Goliadkin has lost “all credit and credibility” (vsiakogo kredita i dove-
rennosti). Dostoevskii, Dvoinik, Otechestvennye zapiski, 399; Dostoevsky, The
Double: Two Versions, 244.
34. Translation modified.
35. Valentino, “What’s a Person Worth,” 206– 7.
36. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the Slavic and East European
Journal, who made this observation in response to an earlier version of this chap-
ter that appeared in SEEJ.
37. Leonid Grossman, “Gorod i liudi Prestupleniia i nakazaniia,” in Prestu-
plenie i nakazanie, by F. M. Dostoevskii (Moscow: Goslitizdat., 1935), 10.
38. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 181.

C H A P T ER F O U R

1. For critical appraisals of type in Realism, see George Lukács, Studies in

European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal,
Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, trans. Edith Bone (London: Hillway, 1950), esp.
6– 8; René Wellek, “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship,” in Con-
cepts of Criticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), 222– 55;
Raymond Williams, “Typification and Homology,” in Marxism and Literature,
101– 7; Alex Wolloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of
the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003),
esp. 250– 60; John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014), esp. 115– 16. On Dostoevsky’s engagements with type, see Robert
Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art
(Bloomington, Ind.: Physsardt, 1978), 92– 123.
2. Early miser texts include fables by Aesop and Phaedrus; Theophrastus’s
description of “penny-pinching” in The Characters (319 b.c.); Menander’s The
Arbitrants (Epitrepontes, fourth century b.c.); and Plautus’s comedy The Pot of
Gold (Aulularia, c. 195 b.c.). According to Sander M. Goldberg, the miser was
already a stock character when Menander wrote The Arbitrants, as the humor-

168
 Notes to Pages 111–114

ous treatment of Smikrines depends for its effect on the audience’s recognition
of the character as the typical “miserly old man of comedy.” Goldberg, The Mak-
ing of Menander’s Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 33.
3. Logan Delano Browning explores the miser’s manipulation of signs in his
dissertation, “Reading Dickens’s Misers” (dissertation, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina, 1999), esp. 8.
4. Richard Newhauser, The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in
Early Medieval Thought and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
5. Ibid., esp. 11.
6. Molière explores this hypocrisy in The Miser, revealing the moneylending
of the wealthy bourgeois Christian Harpagon and associating him with an appar-
ently Jewish “broker,” Master Simon. James F. Gaines, “Molière’s Uncanonical
Miser,” in Classical Unities: Place, Time, Action: Actes du 32e congrès annuel de
la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, Tulane
University, 13– 15 avril, 2000 (Tübingen, Ger.: Narr, 2000), 201– 11.
7. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, esp. 41.
8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes
(New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 254.
9. By the late nineteenth century, capitalist enterprise played less of a role in
literary representations of miserliness, as the emphasis in such works as George
Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) shifted back to
the miser’s refusal to let money go. Likewise, Sigmund Freud’s account of ex-
treme parsimony in “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) is concerned only with
a pathological aversion to spending money, and not with the desire for wealth,
suggesting that by the early twentieth century, accumulating— whether through
saving or investing— was deemed normal if it served the goal of consumption.
Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” 27– 33.
10. See also Marc Shell’s discussion of the poetics of monetary inscription
in ancient Greece and Deidre Lynch’s account of the interrelated conceptual
history of coins and literary characters in eighteenth-century Britain. Shell, The
Economy of Literature, esp. 63– 88; Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels,
Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998), esp. 23– 79.
11. On the history of Theophrastan character writing in European litera-
ture, see Jeffrey Rusten, “Preface” to Characters, by Theophrastus, in Theo-
phrastus: Characters, Herodos: Mimes, Sophron and Other Mime Fragments,
ed. and trans. Jeffrey Rusten and I. C. Cunningham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 33– 39; J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan “Character”:
The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).
12. Nodier’s essay is informed by Schelling’s discussion of Falstaff, Don Qui-
xote, and Faust as “myths” that emerge from the particularities of the national

169
 Notes to Pages 114–115

present. Charles Nodier, “Des types en littérature,” Revue de Paris 18 (1830):

188– 90. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans.
Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 74.
13. Nodier, “Des types en littérature,” 193.
14. Nodier’s essay was not the only source of Belinsky’s thinking about types.
As Brown has noted in a phrase that is especially fitting to the present discussion
of types and money, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was “common coin” in the in-
tellectual circles in which Belinsky moved at the start of his career. Subsequently,
Balzac’s zoological treatment of social types gained greater influence over the
Russian critic, as is apparent in his definition of the term in the 1841 essay “Stat’i
o narodnoi poezii”: “Type (archetype) in art is the same as genus and species in
nature, as hero in history. In type there occurs the victory of the organic mixture
of two poles— the general and the particular. A typical face is a representative
of a whole genus of faces, a common noun designating many objects, expressed,
however, as a proper noun.” Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle: 1830–
1840 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966), 92. Vissarion Belinskii,
“Stat’i o narodnoi poezii,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5:318– 19.
15. V. G. Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia (Elegiia v proze),” in Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953– 59), 1:92.
16. V. G. Belinskii, “O russkoi povesti i povestiakh g. Gogolia (‘Arabeski’ i
‘Mirgorod’),” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1:296– 97.
17. On “self-giving,” see Iurii Lotman, “‘Dogovor’ i ‘vruchenie sebia’ kak
arkhetipicheskie modeli kul’tury,” in Izbrannye stati (Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992–
93): 3:345– 55.
18. The first manuscript translation of Aesop’s fables in Russian appeared in
1607, but the first printed translations appeared only in the eighteenth century.
Leslie O’Bell, “Krylov, La Fontaine, and Aesop,” in Russian Subjects, ed. Green-
leaf and Moeller-Sally, 92.
19. I rely on N. L. Stepanov’s discussion of the Russian fable tradition in
“Russkaia basnia,” in Russkaia basnia XVIII– XIX vekov (Leningrad: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1977): 5– 62.
20. The first translation of Molière’s The Miser was that of Kropotova, first
performed in 1757 and published in 1760. New translations by S. T. Aksakov and
V. I. Orlov appeared in 1830 and 1843, respectively. In terms of the number of
years in which the play was staged in St. Petersburg or Moscow, The Miser was
second only to The Bourgeois Gentleman in frequency between the years 1757
and 1845. Pashkevich and Kniazhnin’s opera was performed in Moscow or St.
Petersburg in twenty of the thirty years between 1782 and 1812. N. G. Zograf,
Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra v semi tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1977), vols. 1– 4 inclusive, 1:464– 65; 2:521; V. A. Pashkevich and Ia. B. Kniazh-
nin, Skupoi, Opera (Moscow: Muzyka, 1973).

170
 Notes to Pages 115–119

21. I adopt the term “cultural import” from Joachim Klein, Puti kul’turnogo
importa, esp. 319– 23.
22. Jean de La Fontaine, “The Miser Who Lost His Treasure” (“L’Avare qui
a perdu son trésor”), in Selected Fables, trans. Christopher Wood (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1995), 92– 93.
23. In his essay “About the Fable and the Fables of Krylov” (“O basne i bas-
niakh Krylova”), Vasilii Zhukovskii notes the origins of the fable in the rhetori-
cal example: “It was nothing other than a simple rhetorical means, an example,
a comparison” (ritoricheskii sposob, primer, sravnenie). V. A. Zhukovskii, Sobra-
nie sochinenii v 4-i tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhest-
vennoi literatury, 1960), 4:404. On the fable and the exemplum, see also Susan
Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary
Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 27, 45– 54.
24. Stepanov, “Russkaia basnia,” 9.
25. Aleksandr Sumarokov, “Storozh bogatsva svoego,” in Pritchi Aleksan-
dra Sumarokova, (St. Petersburg, 1762), 1:60– 61. Sumarokov also included two
other fables about miserliness in the same volume: “Skupoi” and “Skupaia so-
baka,” 1:15– 16; 1:27– 28.
26. The poems in the Anacreontea (1st century b.c.– 6th century a.d.) were
for centuries falsely attributed to Anacreon (570– 488 b.c.).
27. V. I. Maikov, “Skupoi,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1966), 148.
28. Krylov also wrote about misers in his fable “The Miser and the Hen,”
(“Skupoi i kuritsa,” 1819) and his satirical journal, Spirit Post (Pochta dukhov,
1789). I. A. Krylov, “Skupoi i kuritsa,” in Basni (Moscow: Akademii nauk SSSR,
1956), 158; I. A. Krylov, “Pis’mo XLVII,” in Pochta dukhov, Sochineniia v dvukh
tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969), 1:300– 309.
29. Krylov, “Skupoi,” in Basni, 204; Ivan Kriloff, “The Miser,” in Kriloff ’s
Original Fables, trans. I. Henry Harrison (London: Remington, 1883), 185.
30. Phaedrus, “The Dog, the Treasure, and the Vulture,” trans. Ben Edwin
Perry, in Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1965), 223– 24.
31. I borrow Tatiana Wolff’s translation of “veseloe lukavstvo uma” as “gay
craftiness.” Pushkin viewed this feature of Krylov’s work as an expression of the
Russian national spirit. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Pushkin on Literature,
ed. Tatiana Wolff (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 125.
A.  S. Pushkin, “O predislovii g-na Lemonte k perevodu basen I. A. Krylova,”
in Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh (Moscow, 1962), 6:15, cited in Stepanov,
“Russkaia basnia,” 5.
32. Krylov, “Skupoi,” 204; Kriloff, “The Miser,” 185.
33. I rely on James A. Falen’s English translation of The Covetous Knight in

171
 Notes to Pages 119–121

Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brevity, ed. Svetlana Evdo-
kimova (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 305– 20.
34. Commentary to “Skupoi rytsar’,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati
tomakh, by A. S. Pushkin, 5:613.
35. Vladimir Dal’ offers a similar definition of skupoi: “very miserly, inap-
propriately and immoderately thrifty; anton[ym] of liberal, magnanimous, gen-
erous” (skriazhlivyi, neumestno i neumerenno berezhlivyi; protivopol. torovatyi,
tchivyi, shchedryi).
36. Aleksandr Dolinin suggests that Pushkin’s use of “covetous” is a refer-
ence to Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which “covet” appears twice, first referring
to a desire for money, and second to a desire for honor. According to Dolinin,
Pushkin would have known that “miserly” would be the standard translation for
skupoi, but chose “covetous” to capture the tension between money and honor
that is central to his play. While Dolinin’s argument is convincing, I am espe-
cially interested in the rhetorical effect of Pushkin’s mistranslation. A. Dolinin,
“O podzagolovke ‘Skupogo rytsaria,’” in Pushkin i Anglii: Tsikl statei (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 98.
37. On Pushkin’s literary engagements with Derzhavin, see David M.
Bethea, “Pushkin, Derzhavin, and the Life of the Poet,” in Realizing Metaphors:
Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1998): 137– 234.
38. Horace, “Nullus argento color est avaris,” in Odes and Epodes, ed. and
trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 98– 101.
39. Gavriil Derzhavin, “K Skopikhinu,” in Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 291.
40. Gavriil Derzhavin, “Ob’’iasneniia Derzhavina k svoim sochineniiam,”
cited in the notes to “K Skopikhinu,” in Stikhotvoreniia, 436.
41. Commentary to “Skupoi rytsar’,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati
tomakh, by A. S. Pushkin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1962– 66), 5:614.
42. On Pushkin’s epigraphs, see V. Vinogradov, “O stile Pushkina,” in Lit-
eraturnoe nasledstvo, vols. 16– 18 (Moscow: Zhurnalno-gazetnoe ob”edineniia,
1934), 171– 91; David M. Bethea and Sergei Davydov, “Pushkin’s Saturnine
Cupid: The Poetics of Parody in the Tales of Belkin,” PMLA 96, no. 1 (1981): 14.
43. In his manuscripts, Pushkin himself labeled the project an “Experiment
in dramatic studies” (Opyt dramaticheskikh izuchenii). Cited in A. S. Pushkin,
PSS, 7:377.
44. Vladimir Markovich, “Scholarship in the Service and Disservice of the
Little Tragedies,” in Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brev-
ity, ed. Sevtlana Evdokimova (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003),
74– 75.
45. Nikolai Vladimirovich Fridman, Romantizm v tvorchestve A.S. Push-

172
 Notes to Pages 121–127

kina (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1980), 141– 54; Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Fran-

tsiia, 263.
46. When Shakespeare and Molière were writing their plays, there was a
conceptual separation of Christian avarice— or miserliness— and Jewish usury.
As Pushkin’s conflation of Harpagon’s miserliness and Shylock’s moneylending
shows, this distinction had largely collapsed by the nineteenth century. Push-
kin was forming ideas for The Covetous Knight at least as early as 1826, when he
wrote the title “Jew and Son. Count” (“Zhid i syn. Graf”) in a manuscript. This
suggests that he was originally planning to write about a Jewish miser or mon-
eylender, after the fashion of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Ultimately, he
made the miserly baron a Christian, but included the Jewish usurer Solomon in
the opening scene, where it is made clear that the baron’s stinginess has forced
his son Albert to borrow money from Solomon in order to maintain himself at
court. In this way, Pushkin shifted his work closer to the model of Molière’s The
Miser. At the top of a list of dramatic works he was planning in 1827 is the title
“The Miser” (“Skupoi”), perhaps indicating Pushkin’s reorientation to Molière’s
model at that time. Commentary to “Skupoi rytsarʹ,” in A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe so-
branie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, 5:613. On Pushkin’s appropriation of the ste-
reotypical figure of the Jewish moneylender, see Oleg Proskurin, “Chem pakhnut
chervontsy? Ob odnom temnom meste v ‘Skupom Rytsare,’ ili Intertekstual’nost’
i tekstologiia,” in Poeziia Pushkina, ili Podvizhnyi palimpsest (Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 349– 75.
47. Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Frantsiia, 267; Dolinin, “O podzagolovke,” 95.
48. Dolinin, 99; Svetlana Evdokimova, “The Anatomy of the Modern Self in
The Little Tragedies,” in Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, Svetlana Evdoki-
mova, ed., 114.
49. Marx, Capital, 159.
50. The baron’s unfortunate reading practices resemble those of Tatiana in
Evgenii Onegin, Samson Vyrin in “The Stationmaster” (“Stantsionnyi smotritelʹ,”
1830), and Lizaveta Ivanovna in “The Queen of Spades.” Of these three charac-
ters, Vyrin is most like the baron in that the text he misreads is a parable (that of
the Prodigal Son), which, like a fable, is meant to give moral instruction.
51. Grigorii Gukovskii, Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957), 323.
52. S. M. Bondi, “Dramaticheskie proizvedeniia Pushkina,” in Sobra-
nie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, by A. S. Pushkin (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959– 62), 4:574– 75; Svetlana Evdoki-
mova, “The Anatomy of the Modern Self,” in Alexander Pushkin’s Little Trage-
dies, ed. Evdokimova, 106– 43.
53. As Gary Saul Morson has compellingly argued, Chichikov invites the
landowners in and the readers of Dead Souls to participate in a “thought experi-

173
 Notes to Pages 127–129

ment,” in which they must reconsider the nature of economic value and its inter-
connection with linguistic, moral, and spiritual values. Morson, “Gogol’s Parables
of Explanation,” 210.
54. On Dead Souls and the rise of “symbolic, changeable, and convention-
ally determined value, with all its attendant mobility and ‘rootlessness,’” see Rus-
sell Scott Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead
Souls,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 546; and Valentino, The Woman
in the Window, 64– 65.
55. Gogol himself referred to his characters as “caricatures.” Gippius,
Gogol’, 154; Gippius, Gogol, 128.
56. The English translation is from Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Rich-
ard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
57. Dostoevsky uses the terms “new Plyushkin” (novyi Pliushkin) and “new
Harpagon” (novyi Garpagon) interchangeably to describe the same man, show-
ing that he considers Gogol’s and Molière’s misers to be examples of the same
essential type.
58. See, for instance, E. Cybulska, “Senile Squalor: Plyushkin’s Not-
Diogenes Syndrome,” Psychiatric Bulletin 22, no. 5 (1998): 319– 20; “Plyushkin
Syndrome 1.1 Is Out!” Clockwork Brains Blog, entry posted November 17, 2007,
http://clockwork-brains.blogspot.com /2007 /11 /plyushkin-syndrome-11-is-out
.html. Jacqueline Kasuya, “Delta Burke and Andy Warhol Were Plyushkins?”
Hoardhouse Blog, entry posted February 12, 2009, http:// blog.hoardhouse.com
/tag /plyushkin/.
59. In an article about Gogol, Belinsky discusses the ability of a character’s
name to cross over into everyday language as the hallmark of a true type. He lists
several of Gogol’s characters that he feels possess this power, but does not men-
tion Plyushkin, who by now has eclipsed all of Gogol’s other characters with the
durability his name has displayed as a noun. Belinskii, “O russkikh povestiakh,”
296. In a later essay, Belinsky celebrates another character with some miserly
traits— Korobochka— as an exemplary type in Dead Souls. Vissarion Belinskii,
“Literaturnyi razgovor, podslushannyi v knizhnoi lavke,” in Polnoe sobranie so-
chinenii, 6:359.
60. The second edition of the Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi (1822) explains
the word skriaga as follows: “In colloquial speech this designates an extremely
miserly person” (V prostorechii nazyvaetsia tak chelovek chrezvychaino skupyi).
61. On the paradoxically accumulative yet referent-less logic of Gogol’s
prose, and on this type of hoarding as a key “generative model” in his fictions, see
also Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, 143, 174, 186-9.
62. Russell Scott Valentino posits that the sequence of landowners in Dead
Souls instantiates the historical progression to a money-based economy in Rus-
sia, with Plyushkin appearing as the culmination of this process. This argument
is compelling, but in my view, what is so fascinating about Plyushkin is his dis-

174
 Notes to Pages 130–133

tortion (rather than exemplification) of commercial logic: he does not privilege

money above other forms of value, and he even forgoes the opportunity to profit
monetarily from his estate. Valentino, The Woman in the Window, 42.
63. In Morson’s words, “stinginess is its own reward.” Morson, “Gogol’s Par-
ables of Explanation,” 215.
64. See, for instance, Shevyrev, “Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova,” 174; and
Mann, Poetika Gogolia, 312.
65. The English translation is from Gogol, Selected Passages from Corre-
spondence with Friends, trans. Jesse Zeldin.
66. The Covetous Knight captivated Dostoevsky, and his literary engage-
ments with it continued throughout his career. See A. L. Bem, “Skupoi rytsar’
v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo,” in O Dostoevskom: Sbornik statei (Prague: Sklad
izdatel’stvo F. Svoboda, 1929): 82– 123; Susanne Fusso, “The Weight of Human
Tears: The Covetous Knight and A Raw Youth,” in Alexander Pushkin’s Little
Tragedies, ed. Evdokimova, 229– 42. I have found no sustained investigation of
“Mr. Prokharchin” in relation to the figure of Plyushkin in Dead Souls. On “Mr.
Prokharchin” as a critique of the Natural School, see also Priscilla Meyer, “Dos-
toevskij, Naturalist Poetics and ‘Mr Procharčin,’” Russian Literature 10, no. 2
(1981): 163– 90.
67. Vinogradov, Evoliutsiia russkogo naturalizma, 147.
68. This statement recalls Balzac’s description of his project in the pref-
ace to The Human Comedy: “By adhering to the strict lines of a reproduction
a writer might be a more or less faithful, and more or less successful, a painter
[un peintre] of types of humanity [des types humains], a narrator of the dramas
of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of professions, a
registrar of good and evil; but to deserve the praise of which every artist must
be ambitious, must I not also investigate the reasons or the cause of these social
effects, detect the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and in-
cidents?” N. Nekrasov, “Fiziologiia Peterburga,” in Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii
i pisem v piatnadtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981– 2000), 11.1:186; Hon-
oré de Balzac, “Avant-Propos,” in La Comédie humaine, 1:15; Honoré de Balzac,
“Balzac’s Introduction,” in At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, trans. Clara Bell
(London: J. M. Dent, 1895), 6.
69. V. G. Belinskii, “Vstuplenie,” in Fiziologiia Peterburga, ed. V. I. Kule-
shov (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 8– 9; Vissarion Belinsky, “Introduction,” in Peters-
burg: The Physiology of a City, ed. Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, trans. Thomas
Gaiton Marullo (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 7– 9, trans-
lation modified.
70. Belinskii, “Vstuplenie,” 6; Belinsky, “Introduction,” 3.
71. On the importance of the French physiological sketch to early Rus-
sian Realism, see Aleksandr Tseitlin, Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature:
Russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk (Moscow: Nauka, 1965).

175
 Notes to Pages 133–140

72. Faddei Bulgarin, “Zhurnal’naia vsiakaia vsiachina,” Severnaia pchela,

November 23, 1846.
73. The English translation is from Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Mr. Prohartchin,”
trans. Constance Garnett, in The Short Stories of Dostoevsky, ed. William Phil-
lips (New York: Dial, 1946), 3.
74. The word “corner” does not appear in Gogol’s story, but features in the
title of Nekrasov’s story “Petersburg Corners” (“Peterburgskie ugly”) included in
the Physiology of Petersburg collection.
75. Aleksandr Tseitlin, Povesti o bednom chinovnike Dostoevskogo, 24.
76. On Dostoevsky’s dialogism, see Bakhtin, “Problemy poetika Dosto-
evskogo”; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
77. Translation modified.
78. Compare Victor Terras, The Young Dostoevsky (1846– 1849): A Critical
Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 225.
79. Victoria Somoff discusses a similar tendency toward “monstrous” typ-
ification among writers of the Natural School in her book The Imperative of
Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820s– 1850s (Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University Press, 2015), 96– 98.
80. Translation modified.
81. Translation modified.
82. Grossman identifies the description of Eugénie’s coin collection as an
important source for Prokharchin’s hoard, but he does not suggest, as I do,
that this logic of collection is but one of many that govern Prokharchin’s sav-
ing. Grossman, “Bal’zak i Dostoevskii,” 85. For the full text of Dostoevsky’s (un-
credited) translation of Balzac’s novel, see Onoré de-Bal’zak, Evgeniia Grande,
Repertuar i Panteon 6, no. 1 (1844): 386– 57; 7 no. 1 (1844): 44– 125, http://www
.fedordostoevsky.ru /works /lifetime /grandet /1844/.
83. Misers figure prominently in such works as Ivan Kalashnikov, “Doch’
kuptsa Zholobova” (1831, reprinted 1832 and 1842); Mons’er Kukareku, “Adam
Adamovich Adamgeim” (1833, reprinted 1843 and 1847); Grigorii Kvitka-
Osnov’ianenko, Pokhozhdeniia Stolbikova (1841), a fragment of which, entitled
“Skupoi,” was first published in 1839; Nikolai Nekrasov, “Rostovshchik” (1841);
and A. N. Maikov, “Mashenka” (1846).

176
 Works Cited

Alibert, Jean-Louis. Physiologie des passions, ou Nouvelle doctrine des senti-

ments moraux. Paris: Béchet Jeune, 1825.
[Alibert, Jean-Louis, published anonymously in Russia]. “Kurame.” Translated
by Nikolai Polevoi. Moskovskii telegraf 9, no. 10 (1826): 78– 102.
[———]. “Sluzhanka Mariia.” Moskovskii telegraf 10, no. 16 (1826): 150– 58.
[———]. “Sumasshedshii chestoliubets.” Moskovskii telegraf 12, no. 2 (1826):
89– 103.
[———]. “Ubogii Petr.” Moskovskii telegraf 7, no. 1 (1826): 9– 45.
Altunian, A. G. “Politicheskie mneniia” Faddeia Bulgarina: Ideino-stilisticheskii
analiz zapisok F.V. Bulgarina k Nikolaiu. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo URAO, 1998.
Anikin, Andrei. “Adam Smit i russkaia ekonomicheskaia mysl’.” Voprosy eko-
nomiki 3 (1976): 12– 22.
———. “Adam Smith in Russia.” In Adam Smith: International Perspectives,
edited by H. Mizuta and C. Sugiyama, 251– 60. Basingstoke, Eng.: Mac-
millan, 1993.
———. Muza i mamona: Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie motivy u Pushkina. Mos-
cow: Mysl’, 1989.
Asch, Laurie. “The Censorship of Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman.’” Russian
Literature Triquarterly 14 (Winter 1976): 20– 35.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dia-
logic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emer-
son and Michael Holquist, 84– 258. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
———. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury,
1996-.
Balzac, Honoré de. “Balzac’s Introduction.” In At the Sign of the Cat and Racket,
translated by Clara Bell, 1– 15. London: J. M. Dent, 1895.
———. Eugénie Grandet. Translated by Sylvia Raphael. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003.
———. [Bal’zak, Onoré de-]. Evgeniia Grande. [Uncredited translation by Fedor

177
 Works Cited

Dostoevskii]. Repertuar i Panteon 6, no. 1 (1844): 386– 457; 7, no. 1 (1844):

44– 125. http://www.fedordostoevsky.ru /works /lifetime /grandet /1844/.
———. La Comédie humaine. 12 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1976– 81.
———. Lost Illusions. Translated by Kathleen Raine. New York: Random
House, 2001.
———. The Wild Ass’s Skin. Translated by Herbert J. Hunt. New York: Penguin
Books, 1977.
Baron, Samuel H. “The Fate of the Gosti in the Reign of Peter the Great.” In
Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays, 488– 512. London: Variorum Reprints,
1980.
———. “Who Were the Gosti?” In Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays, 1– 40.
London: Variorum Reprints, 1980.
Bazhgraf, H. Spencer. “Productive Nature and the Net Product: Quesnay’s
Economies Animal and Political.” History of Political Economy 32, no. 3
(2000): 517– 51.
Belinsky, Vissarion. “Introduction.” In Petersburg: The Physiology of a City, ed-
ited by Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo,
3– 15. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009.
———. [Belinskii, V. G.]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 13 vols. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953– 59.
———. [Belinskii, V. G.]. “Vstuplenie.” In Fiziologiia Peterburga, edited by V. I.
Kuleshov, 6– 13. Moscow: Nauka, 1991.
Belozerskaia, N. A. “Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia. I– VIII.” Is-
toricheskii vestnik 67 (1897): 939– 72.
———. “Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia. IX– XVI. (Okonchanie).”
Istoricheskii vestnik 68 (1897): 131– 64.
Belyi, A. Masterstvo Gogolia: Issledovanie. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1934.
Bem, A. L. “Skupoi rytsar’ v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo.” In O Dostoevskom:
Sbornik statei, 82– 123. Prague: Sklad izdatel’stvo F. Svoboda, 1929.
Benveniste, Émile. “L’Hospitalité.” In Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-
européennes, vol. 1: 87– 101. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969.
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.
New York: Verso, 1982.
Besprozvannyi, Vadim. “‘Mirgorod’ N. V. Gogolia: Tsikl kak tekst.” In Permia-
kovskii sbornik, edited by Natalia Mazur, vol. 2: 308– 26. Moscow: Novoe
izdatel’stvo, 2010.
Bethea, David. Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
Bethea, David, and Sergei Davydov. “Pushkin’s Saturnine Cupid: The Poetics of
Parody in the Tales of Belkin.” PMLA 96, no. 1 (January 1981): 8– 21.

178
 Works Cited

Boerhaave, Herman. Dr. Boerhaave’s Academical Lectures on the Theory of

Physic: Being a Genuine Translation of His Institutes and Explanatory
Comment, [etc.] 6 vols. London: 1742– 46.
Bogdanovich, Ippolit Fedorovich. Sochineniia. 2 vols. St. Petersburg, Izdatel’stvo
Smirdina, 1848.
Bojanowska, Edyta M. Nikolai Gogol between Ukrainian and Russian Nation-
alism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Bondi, S. M. “Dramaticheskie proizvedeniia Pushkina.” In Sobranie sochinenii v
desiati tomakh, by A. S. Pushkin, vol. 4: 553– 93. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959– 62.
Booth, Emily. A Subtle and Mysterious Machine: The Medical World of Walter
Charleton (1619– 1707). Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2005.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Brown, Edward James. Stankevich and His Moscow Circle: 1830– 1840. Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966.
Browning, Logan Delano. “Reading Dickens’ Misers.” Ph.D. diss., University of
North Carolina, 1999.
Bulgarin, Faddei. “Tri listka iz doma sumasshedshikh, ili Psikhicheskoe istselenie
neizlechimoi bolezni (Pervoe izvlechenie iz Zapisok starogo vracha).” Sever-
naia pchela, February 15– 16, 1834, nos. 37– 38.
———. “Tri listka iz doma sumasshedshikh, ili Psikhicheskoe istselenie neizle-
chimoi bolezni. (Pervoe izvlechenie iz Zapisok starogo vracha).” In Kos-
morama. Vol. 6 of Biblioteka russkoi fantastiki, edited by Iu. M. Medve-
deva, 360– 69. Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1997.
———. Vospominaniia. Moscow: Zakharov, 2001.
———. “Zhurnal’naia vsiakaia vsiachina.” Severnaia pchela, November 23,
1846, no. 265.
Butovskii, Aleksandr. Opyt o narodnom bogatsve, ili, O nachalakh politicheskoi
ekonomii. 4 vols. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia vtorogo otdeleniia Sobstvennoi
kantseliarii, 1847.
Cabanis, P. J. G. Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme. 3rd edition.
Paris: Hacquart, 1815.
Catteau, Jacques. Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation. Translated
by Audrey Littlewood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Chaadaev, Petr. “First Philosophical Letter.” Translated by Valentine Snow. In
Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, edited by Marc Raeff, 159– 73.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966.
———. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem. Moscow: Nauka, 1991.
Chances, Ellen. Conformity’s Children: An Approach to the Superfluous Man in
Russian Literature. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1978.

179
 Works Cited

Christa, Boris. “Dostoevskii and Money.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dos-

toevskii, edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow, 93– 110. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Clardy, Jesse, and Betty Clardy. The Superfluous Man in Russian Letters. Lan-
ham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980.
Cybulska, E. “Senile Squalor: Plyushkin’s Not-Diogenes Syndrome.” Psychiatric
Bulletin 22, no. 5 (1998): 319– 20.
Debreczeny, Paul. The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fic-
tion. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy
Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
———. “Hospitality and Hostility.” Lecture delivered at University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine, April 3, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourman-
telle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, by Jacques Derrida and Anne Du-
fourmantelle, translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
Derzhavin, Gavriil. Stikhotvoreniia. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957.
Dolinin, A. “O podzagolovke ‘Skupogo rytsaria.’” In Pushkin i Anglii: Tsikl statei,
95– 102. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007.
“Dom sumasshedshikh v sharentone (Otryvok iz zapisok odnogo puteshestven-
nika).” Babochka 34 (April 27, 1829): 134– 35.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Adolescent. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 2003.
———. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
———. Demons. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New
York: Vintage Books, 1995.
———. The Double. In The Double and the Gambler, translated by Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1– 170. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
———. The Double: Two Versions. Translated by Evelyn Harden. Ann Arbor,
Mich.: Ardis, 1985.
———. [Dostoevskii, F. M.]. Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina.
Otechestvennye zapiski 44, no. 2 (1846): 263– 428.
———. [Dostoevskii, F. M.]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh. Len-
ingrad: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1972– 90.
———. “Mr. Prohartchin.” In The Short Stories of Dostoevsky, edited by Wil-
liam Phillips, translated by Constance Garnett, 1– 38. New York: Dial, 1946.
Drozdov, V. M. Sochineniia Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo:
Slova i rechi. 5 vols. Moscow: A. I. Mamontova, 1873– 85.
Emery, Jacob. “Species of Legitimacy: The Rhetoric of Succession around Rus-
sian Coins.” Slavic Review 75, no. 1 (2016): 1– 21.

180
 Works Cited

Engels, Friedrich. “Foreign Policy of Russian Czardom.” In The Russian Menace

to Europe: A Collection of Articles, Speeches, Letters, and News Dispatches
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, edited by P. W. Blackstock and Bert F.
Hoselitz, 25– 55. Glencoe, Ill.: Free, 1952.
Evdokimova, Svetlana, ed. Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies: The Poetics of
Brevity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
F. D. “Une visite a la maison de santé de Charenton.” Le Voleur 6 (May 10,
1828): 1– 2.
Fairweather, Maria. The Pilgrim Princess: A Life of Zinaida Volkonsky. London:
Robinson, 2000.
Fanger, Donald. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1982.
———. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to
Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1998.
Frazier, Melissa. Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the “Library for
Reading.” Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Freed-Thall, Hannah. Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in
French Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Freud, Sigmund. “Character and Anal Erotism.” In Character and Culture, ed-
ited by Philip Rieff, translated by R. C. McWatters, 27– 33. New York: Col-
lier, 1963.
Frevert, Ute. Emotions in History: Lost and Found. Budapest: Central Euro-
pean University Press, 2011.
Frevert, Ute, et al., eds. Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the
Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700– 2000. New York: Oxford University Press,
2014.
Fridman, Nikolai Vladimirovich. Romantizm v tvorchestve A.S. Pushkina. Mos-
cow: Prosveshchenie, 1980.
Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Fournier, Marcel. Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Gaines, James F. “Molière’s Uncanonical Miser.” In Classical Unities: Place,
Time, Action: Actes du 32e congrès annuel de la North American Society
for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, Tulane University, 13– 15 avril
2000, edited by Erec R. Korch, 201– 11. Tübingen, Ger.: Narr, 2002.
Galich, A. Kartina cheloveka: Opyt nastavitel’nogo chteniia o predmetakh samo-
poznaniia dlia vsekh obrazovannykh soslovii. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Im-
peratorskoi Akademii nauk, 1834.
Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Poli-
tical Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2008.

181
 Works Cited

Gane, Mike, ed. The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. Translated by
Ben Brewster. London: Routledge, 1992.
Gippius, V. V. Gogol. Translated by Robert Maguire. Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1989.
———. Gogol’. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1963.
Goffman, Erving. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal
of Sociology 62, no. 3 (1956): 264– 71.
Gogol, Nikolai. [Gogol’, N. V.]. Arabeski: Raznye sochineniia N. Gogolia. 2 vols.
St. Petersburg, V tipografii vdovy Pliushar s synom, 1835.
———. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Translated by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 1999.
———. Dead Souls. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
New York: Vintage Classics, 1997.
———. Letters of Nikolai Gogol. Edited by Carl R. Proffer. Translated by
Carl R. Proffer in collaboration with Vera Krivoshein. Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1967.
———. [Gogol’, N. V.]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 14 vols. Leningrad:
Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1937– 52.
———. Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Translated by
Jesse Zeldin. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969.
———. [Gogol’, N. V.]. Sobranie khudozhestvennykh proizvedenii v piati to-
makh. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1951– 52.
———. [Gogol’, N. V.]. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Moscow: Khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura, 1976– 79.
Golburt, Luba. The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cul-
tural Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.
Goldberg, Sander M. The Making of Menander’s Comedy. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980.
Goldstein, Jan. Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the
Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Golstein, Vladimir. “Landowners in Dead Souls: Or the Tale of How Gogol
Blessed What He Wanted to Curse.” Slavic and East European Journal 41,
no. 2 (1997): 243– 57.
Goncharov, I. A. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati tomakh. St.
Petersburg: Nauka, 1997– .
Goodman, Kevis. “Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, edited by James Chandler,
195– 216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
———. “‘Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of
Reading.” Studies in Romanticism 49, no. 2 (2010): 197– 227.
Gould, Deborah. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

182
 Works Cited

Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud. Translated by

Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Graffy, Julian. “Passion versus Habit in Old World Landowners.” In Nikolay
Gogol: Text and Context, edited by Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell, 34– 49.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
Grant, Bruce. The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in
Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Greenleaf, Monika. Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient,
Irony. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Greenleaf, Monica, and Stephen Moeller-Sally. “Introduction.” In Russian Sub-
jects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Monika
Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller Sally, 1– 17. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1998.
Grits, T. S., V. Trenin, and M. Nikitin. Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia: Knizhnaia lavka
A. F. Smirdina. Moscow: Agraf, 2001.
Grossman, Leonid. “Bal’zak i Dostoevskii.” In Poetika Dostoevskogo, 64– 115.
Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1925.
———. “Gofman, Bal’zak i Dostoevskii.” Sofiia 5 (1914): 87– 96.
———. “Gorod i liudi Prestupleniia i nakazaniia.” In Prestuplenie i nakazanie,
by F. M. Dostoevskii, 5– 52. Moscow: Goslitizdat., 1935.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Gukovskii, Grigorii. Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia. Moscow: Gosu-
darstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957.
Hellberg-Hirn, Elena. “Khleb-sol’: Magicheskaia pishcha.” Studia slavica fin-
landensia 7 (1980): 137– 60.
Hirschman, Albert. The Passions and the Interests: Historical Arguments for
Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1977.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human
Feeling. 2nd revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012.
Holland, Kate. The Novel in the Age of Disintegration. Evanston, Ill.: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2013.
Horace. Odes and Epodes. Edited and translated by Niall Rudd. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. London:
Vintage, 1999.
Jackson, Robert Louis. Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy
of Art. Bloomington, Ind.: Physsardt, 1978.
Jackson, Stanley. Melancholia and Depression: From Hyppocratic Times to
Modern Times. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986.

183
 Works Cited

Jakobson, Roman, and Bayara Aroutunova. “An Unknown Album Page by Niko-
laj Gogol’.” Harvard Library Bulletin 20, no. 3 (1972): 236– 54.
Jones, Malcolm. Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky’s Fantastic
Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Kahan, Arcadius. “The Costs of ‘Westernization’ in Russia: The Gentry and the
Economy in the Eighteenth Century.” Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (1966): 40– 66.
Kant, Immanual. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. India-
napolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987.
Karamzin, N. M. Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo: Ezhemesiachnoe prilozhenie k
zhurnalu “Sever.” The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
———. Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789– 1790: An Account of a Young Rus-
sian Gentleman’s Tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and En-
gland. Translated and abridged by Florence Jonas. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1957.
Karlinsky, Simon. “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton, with Rabelais, Sterne,
and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures.” California Slavic Studies 5
(1970): 169– 86.
———. The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1976.
Kashkarov, Mikhail. Denezhnoe obrashchenie v Rossii. 2 vols. St. Petersburg:
Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1898.
Kearney, Richard, and Kascha Semonovitch, eds. Phenomenologies of the
Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2011.
Kete, Kathleen. “Stendhal and the Trials of Ambition in Postrevolutionary
France.” French Historical Studies 28, no. 3 (2005): 467– 95.
Khemnitser, I. I. Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1963.
Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian
Literature. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012.
Klein, Ioakhim. Puti kul’turnogo importa: Trudy po russkoi literature XVIII
veka. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2005.
Klibanksy, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy:
Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. London:
Nelson, 1964.
Klioutchkine, Konstantine. “The Rise of Crime and Punishment from the Air of
the Media.” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (April 1, 2002): 88– 108.
Kokoreva, L. G. “O zhizni i tvorchestve V. S. Filimonova.” Moskovskii oblast-
noi pedagogicheskii institut im. N. K. Krupskoi Uchenye zapiski 66, Trudy
kafedry russkoi literatury 4 (1958): 49– 78.
Kolb-Seletski, Natalia M. “Gastronomy, Gogol, and His Fiction,” Slavic Review
29, no. 1 (1970): 35– 57.

184
 Works Cited

Koselleck, Reinhardt. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spac-

ing Concepts. Translated by Todd Samuel Presner et al. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2002.
“Kratkaia opis’ predmetov, sostavliaiushchikh Russkii Muzeum Pavla Svin’ina.”
Otechestvennye zapiski 38, no. 110 (1829): 313-76. Otechestvennye zapiski
39, no. 111 (1829): 3-77.
Krizanić, Juraj. Russian Statecraft: The Politika of Iurii Krizhanich. Edited by
John Letiche and Basil Dmytryshyn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982.
Krylov, Ivan. Basni. Moscow: Akademii nauk SSSR, 1956.
———. [Kriloff, Ivan]. Kriloff ’s Original Fables. Translated by I. Henry Harri-
son. London: Remington, 1883.
———. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1969.
La Fontaine, Jean de. “The Miser Who Lost His Treasure.” In Selected Fables,
edited by Maya Slater, translated by Christopher Wood, 92– 93. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1995.
LeBlanc, Ronald D. “Dinner with Chichikov: The Fictional Meal as Narrative
Device in Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls.’” Modern Language Studies 18, no. 4 (1988):
68– 80.
Lermontov, Mikhail. A Hero of Our Time. Translated by Paul Foote. New York:
Penguin, 2001.
———. Selected Works. Moscow: Progress, 1978.
———. Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii
nauk SSSR, 1979– 81.
Levitt, Marcus C. The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2011.
Levontina, Irina. “Shum slovaria.” Znamia: Ezhemesiachnyi literaturno-
khudozhestvennyi i obshchestvenno-politicheskii zhurnal 8 (2006). http://
magazines.russ.ru /znamia /2006 /8 /le12.html.
Lotman, Iu. M. “‘Dogovor’ i ‘vruchenie sebia’ kak arkhetipicheskie modeli
kul’tury.” In Izbrannye stat’i v trekh tomakh, vol. 3: 345– 55. Tallin: Alek-
sandra, 1992– 93.
———. “Problema khudozhestvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia.” Uchenye
zapiski tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 209 (1968): 5– 50.
———. Pushkin: Biografiia pisatelia; Stat’i i zametki, 1960– 1990; “Evgenii One-
gin”: Kommentarii. St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-Sankt-Peterburg, 1995.
———. “Tema kart i kartochnoi igry v russkoi literature v russkoi literature
nachala XIX veka.” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 7, no. 365 (1975): 120– 44.
———. [Lotman, Jurij.]. “Theme and Plot: The Theme of the Cards and the
Card Game in Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century.” Translated

185
 Works Cited

by C. R. Pike. PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Litera-

ture 3 (1978): 455– 92.
Lotman, Iu. M., and E. A. Pogosian. Velikosvetskie obedy. St. Petersburg: Push-
kinskii fond, 1996.
Lounsbery, Anne. Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in
Nineteenth-Century Russia and America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2007.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1936.
Lukács, George. Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writ-
ings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others. Translated by
Edith Bone. London: Hillway, 1950.
Lynch, Deidre. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the
Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Magarshack, David. Gogol: A Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
Maikov, V. I. Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966.
Mann, Iu. V. “Filosofiia i poetika ‘natural’noi shkoly.’” In Problemy tipologii
russkogo realizma, edited by N. L. Stepanov and U. R. Fokht, 241– 305.
Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1969.
———. Poetika Gogolia. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988.
———. “U istokov russkogo romana.” In Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh,
by V. T. Narezhnyi, vol. 2: 5– 44. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1983.
Markovich, Vladimir. “Scholarship in the Service and Disservice of the Little
Tragedies.” In Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brevity,
ed. Evdokimova, 69– 88. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Marnei, Liudmila Petrovna. “Iz istorii Napoleonovskikh poddelok russkikh assig-
natsii v nachale XIX veka.” Slavianovedenie 6 (2012): 78– 87.
Martinsen, Deborah A. Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative
Exposure. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes.
New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
———. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by
Nahum Isaac Stone. Chicago: C.H. Kerr, 1911.
———. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In The Marx-Engels
Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edition, 66– 125. New York: Nor-
ton, 1978.
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn
1995): 83– 109.
Mauss, Marcel. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’éxchange dans les sociétes
arcaïches.” L’Année Sociologique, new series 1 (1925): 30– 186.
———. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990.

186
 Works Cited

McNulty, Tracy. The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of

Identity Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
McReynolds, Susan. Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy
of Salvation and Antisemitism. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 2008.
Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of
Comparison. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Melville, Peter. Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation.
Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007.
Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Emotion.
Translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2003.
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry. “Gogol and the Devil.” In Gogol from the Twentieth
Century: Eleven Essays, edited and translated by Robert A. Maguire, 55–
102. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Meyer, Priscilla. “Dostoevskij, Naturalist Poetics and ‘Mr Procharčin.’” Russian
Literature 10, no. 2 (1981): 163– 90.
———. How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
Meynieux, André. Pouchkine, homme de lettres, et la litterature professionelle en
Russie. Paris: Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1966.
Mikhaelis, A. E., and L. A. Kharlamov. Bumazhnye den’gi Rossii. Perm’: Perms-
kaia pechatnaia fabrika Goznaka, 1993.
Miller, Alexey. “Natsiia, Narod, Narodnost’ in Russia in the 19th Century: Some
Introductory Remarks to the History of Concepts.” Jahrbucher fur Ge-
schichte Osteuropas 56, no. 3 (2008): 379– 90.
Mironov, B. N. Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda Imperii (XVIII–Nachalo XX v.):
Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i
pravovogo gosudarstva. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: D. Bulanin, 1999.
Moeller-Sally, Stephen. “OOOO; or, The Sign of the Subject in Gogol’s Peters-
burg.” In Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden
Age, edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, 325– 46.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Molière. The Miser. In Don Juan and Other Plays. Translated by George Gravely
and Ian Maclean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
———. Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
Montandon, Alen. “Gostepriimstvo: Etnograficheskaia mechta?” Translated by
E. Gal’tsova. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie no. 65 (2004): 60– 70.
Morson, Gary Saul. “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosa-
ics.” In Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, edited by Susanne
Fusso and Priscilla Meyer, 200– 239. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1992.

187
 Works Cited

Nabokov, Vladimir. “Our Mr. Chichikov.” In Nikolai Gogol, 61– 113. New York:
New Directions, 1944.
Nekrasov, N. Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii i pisem v piatnadtsati tomakh. Lenin-
grad: Nauka, 1981– 2000.
Newhauser, Richard. The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early
Medieval Thought and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Nikodimov, Mari Gai. “Vozmozhno li gumanisticheskaia filosofiia gostepriim-
stva?” Translated by E. E. Gal’tsova. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 65 (2004).
http://magazines.russ.ru /nlo /2004 /65 /gai6.html.
Nodier, Charles. “Des types en literature.” Revue de Paris 18 (1830): 187– 96.
Novyi slovotolkovatel’. Compiled by Mikhail Maksimovich Ianovskii. St. Peters-
burg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1803– 6.
“O svetskikh obshchestvakh i khoroshem tone.” Moskovskii telegraf 1, no. 2
(1825): 108– 12.
O’Bell, Leslie. “Krylov, La Fontaine, and Aesop.” In Russian Subjects: Empire,
Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Monika Greenleaf
and Stephen Moeller-Sally, 81– 99. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1998.
Obolensky, Alexander. Food-Notes on Gogol. Winnipeg, Can.: Trident, 1972.
Ollivier, Sophie. “Argent et révolution dans Les Démons.” Dostoevsky Studies 5
(1984): 101– 15.
Ovid. Metamorphoses: Books I– VIII. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Revised
by G. P. Goold. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Pashkevich, V. A., and Ia. B. Kniazhnin. Skupoi, Opera. Moscow: Muzyka, 1973.
Phaedrus. Babrius and Phaedrus. Translated by Ben Edwin Perry. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Pintner, Walter McKenzie. Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967.
Plamper, Jan. “Introduction.” In “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History
and Culture,” edited by Jan Plamper, special issue. Slavic Review 68, no. 2
(Summer 2009): 229– 37.
Plautus, Titus Maccius. The Pot of Gold. In Plautus, vol. 1: 260– 353. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011– .
Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-
and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Popkin, Cathy. The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Pouncy, Carolyn, ed. and trans. The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in
the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Proskurin, Oleg. “Chem pakhnut chervontsy? Ob odnom temnom meste v ‘Sku-

188
 Works Cited

pom Rytsare,’ ili Intertekstual’nost’ i tekstologiia.” In Poeziia Pushkina, ili

Podvizhnyi palimpsest, 349– 75. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,
1999.
Puckett, Kent. Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Pushkin, Alexander. [Pushkin, Aleksandr.]. Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse.
Translated with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov. 4 vols. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991.
———. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Translated by James Falen. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
———. [Pushkin, A. S.]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1962– 66.
———. [Pushkin, A. S.]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v shestnadtsati tomakh.
Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1937– 59.
———. [Pushkin, A. S.]. Poemy i povesti Aleksandra Pushkina. Vol. 1 of So-
chineniia: Kommentirovannoe izdanie pod obshchei redaktsiei Devida M.
Betea. Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2006.
———. Pushkin on Literature. Edited by Tatiana Wolff. Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 1998.
———. [Pushkin, A. S.]. Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: Gosu-
darstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvenoi literatury, 1959– 62.
“Qu’est-ce que le bon ton?” La Pandore: Journal des spectacles, des lettres, des
arts, des moeurs, et des modes 878 (March 1825): 4.
Radishchev, Aleksandr. A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Translated by
Leo Wiener. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958.
———. Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1992.
Rayfield, Donald. “Dostoevsky’s Eugénie Grandet.” Forum for Modern Lan-
guage Studies 20, no. 2 (1984): 133– 42.
Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the
Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Reitblat, A. E., ed. Vidok Figliarin: Pis’ma i agenturnye zapiski Faddeia Bulga-
rina v III otdelenie. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998.
Riasanovskii, Nicholas. A History of Russia. 6th edition. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
———. Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825– 1855. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1959.
Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of
the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Roosevelt, Priscilla. Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural
History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.
Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.

189
 Works Cited

Rothschild, Emma. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the En-
lightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Rzadkiewicz, Chester M. “N. A. Polevoi’s Moscow Telegraph and the Journal
Wars of 1825– 1834.” In Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, edited by
Deborah Martinsen, 64– 87. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade
Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. The Philosophy of Art. Translated by
Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.
Seeley, Frank F. From the Heyday of the Superfluous Man to Chekhov. Notting-
ham, Eng.: Astra, 1994.
Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978.
Shenrok, V. I. Materialy dlia biografii Gogolia. 4 vols. Moscow: Tipografiia A. I.
Mamontova, 1893.
Shepard, Elizabeth. “The Society Tale and the Innovative Argument in Russian
Prose Fiction of the 1830s.” Russian Literature 10 (1981): 111– 61.
Shevyrev, Stepan. “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, A Narrative
Poem by N. Gogol.” In Literature and National Identity: Nineteenth-
Century Critical Essays, translated by Paul Debreczeny and Jesse Zeldin,
17– 64. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.
———. “‘Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova, ili mertvye dushi,’ poema N. V. Gogolia,
Stat’ia pervaia.” Moskvitianin 4, no. 7 (1842): 205– 28.
———. “‘Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova, ili mertvye dushi,’ poema N. V. Gogolia,
Stat’ia vtoraia.” Moskvitianin 4, no. 8 (1842): 346– 76.
Shirokograd, Leonid. “Russian Economic Thought in the Age of the Enlight-
enment.” In Economics in Russia, edited by Vincent Barnett and Joachim
Zweynert, 25– 40. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008.
Shroeder, Paul W. The Transformation of European Politics 1763– 1848. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Smeed, J. W. The Theophrastan “Character”: The History of a Literary Genre.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Edited by Edwin Cannan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Sobol, Valeria. Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009.
———. “The Uncanny Frontier of Russian Identity: Travel, Ethnography,
and Empire in Lermontov’s ‘Taman.’” Russian Review 70, no. 1 (2011):
65– 79.

190
 Works Cited

Somoff, Victoria. The Imperative of Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the
Novel, 1820s– 1850s. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015.
Startsev, A. Radishchev, gody ispytanii. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990.
Staum, Martin S. Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French
Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Stendhal. Le Rouge et le noir. In Oeuvres romanesques completes, vol. 1: 347–
838. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.
———. The Red and the Black. Translated by Robert M. Adams. New York:
Norton, 2008.
Stepanov, N. L. “Russkaia basnia.” In Russkaia basnia XVIII– XIX vekov, 5– 62.
Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1977.
Still, Judith. Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2010.
———. Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems, and Adoption. Oxford:
Voltaire Foundation, 2011.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Liter-
ary Genre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Sumarokov, Aleksandr. Pritchi Aleksandra Sumarokova. 3 vols. St. Petersburg,
1762– 69.
Tapp, Alyson. “Embarrassment in The Idiot.” Slavic and East European Journal
60, no. 3 (2016): 422– 46.
———. From Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion.
Ph.D. diss., University of California, 2011.
Terdiman, Richard. “Structures of Initiation: On Semiotic Education and Its
Contradictions in Balzac.” Yale French Studies 67, “The Pedagogical Im-
perative” (1983): 198– 226.
Terras, Victor. Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic
Aesthetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974.
———. The Young Dostoevsky: 1846– 1849. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
Theophrastus. Characters. In Theophrastus: Characters, Herodos: Mimes, Soph-
ron and Other Mime Fragments, edited and translated by Jeffrey Rusten
and I. C. Cunningham, 3– 175. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2002.
Todd, William Mills, III. “Dostoevskii as a Professional Writer.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Dostoevskii, edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow, 66– 92.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
———. Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, Narra-
tive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Re-
serve University, 1973.

191
 Works Cited

Tolstoy, Leo. [Tolstoi, L. N.]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 90 vols. Moscow: Gosu-
darstvennaia izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1928– 58.
———. War and Peace. Translated by Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude and
revised by George Gibian. New York: Norton, 1996.
Tomashevskii, B. V. Pushkin i Frantsiia. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1960.
Trofimoff, André. La Princesse Zénaïde Wolkonsky: De la Russie impériale à la
Rome des papes. Rome: Staderini, 1966.
Tseitlin, Aleksandr. Povesti o bednom chinovnike Dostoevskogo (k istorii odnogo
siuzheta). Moscow: n.p., 1923.
———. Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature: Russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk.
Moscow: Nauka, 1965.
Turgenev, Ivan. The Essential Turgenev. Edited by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen.
Translated by Constance Garnett and revised by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
———. Fathers and Children. Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. 2nd
edition. New York: Norton, 2009.
———. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1960– 68.
Uspenskij, Boris. “Tsar and Pretender: Samozvanchestvo or Royal Imposture in
Russia as a Cultural Phenomenon.” In Tsar and God and Other Essays in
Russian Cultural Semiotics, edited by Victor Zhivov and Boris Uspenskij,
113– 52. Boston: Academic Studies, 2012.
Valentino, Russell Scott. “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Nikolai Gogol’s
Dead Souls.” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 543– 62.
———. “What’s a Person Worth: Character and Commerce in Dostoevskii’s
Double.” American Contributions to the 13th International Congress of
Slavists, Ljubljana, August 2003. Edited by Robert Maguire and Alan Tim-
berlake, vol. 2, 203– 12. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2003.
———. The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the
Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2014.
Vernon, John. “On Borrowed Time: The Gambler and La Cousine Bette.” In
Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries, 108– 41. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Vetlovskaia, V. E. “Sotsial’naia tema v pervykh proizvedeniiakh Dostoevskogo.”
Russkaia literatura: Istoriko-literaturnyi zhurnal 3 (1983): 75– 94.
Vinitsky, Ilya. “A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the
Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy.” In Madness
and the Mad in Russian Culture, edited by Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vin-
itsky, 25– 51. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
———. Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015.

192
 Works Cited

———. “Zagovor chuvstv, ili, Russkaia istoriia na ‘emotsional’nom povorote,’”

Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 117, no. 5 (2012): 441– 60.
Vinogradov, V. V. “Evoliutsiia russkogo naturalizma. Gogol’ i Dostoevskii.” In
Poetika russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy, 3– 187. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
“Nauka,” 1976.
———. “O stile Pushkina.” In Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols. 16– 18: 135– 215.
Moscow: Zhurnalno-gazetnoe ob”edineniia, 1934.
———. “Slovo i znachenie kak predmet istoriko-leksikologicheskogo analiza.”
Voprosy iazykoznaniia 1 (1995): 5– 33.
Vinogradskaia, N. L. “‘Muzei Drevnostei’ (ob odnoi realii v chernovom aftografe
‘Mertvykh dush’).” Novyi filologicheskii vestnik 3, no. 26 (2013): 73-87.
Von Storch, Henri. Cours d’économie politique ou exposition des principes qui
déterminent la prospérité des nations, with notes and criticism by J. B. Say.
5 vols. Paris: L’Imprimerie de Rignoux, 1823.
Wellek, René. “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship.” In Concepts of
Criticism, 222– 55. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963.
Williams, Elizabeth A. The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology,
and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750– 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977.
Wolloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the
Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2003.
Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen. “Taking Account of the New Eco-
nomic Criticism: An Historical Introduction.” In The New Economic Criti-
cism, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, 3– 50. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Zelizer, Viviana. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Zenkin, Sergei. “Gostepriimstvo: k antropologicheskomu opredeleniiu.” Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie 65 (2004). http://magazines.russ.ru /nlo /2004 /65
/zen7.html.
Zhivov, V. M. Iazyk i kul’tura v Rossii XVIII veka. Moscow: Shkola “Iazyki russ-
koi kul’tury,” 1996.
———, ed. Ocherki istoricheskoi semantiki russkogo iazyka rannego novogo
vremeni. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2009.
Zhukovskii, Vasilii Andreevich. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati to-
makh. Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1999.
———. Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959– 1960.
Zink, Andrea. “Čičikovs genialer Plan – (Anti-)Ökonomie in Nikolaj Gogol’s
‘Mertvye duši,’” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 91 (2016), 87– 100.

193
 Works Cited

Zograf, N. G. Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra v semi tomakh. Moscow:

Iskusstvo, 1977.
Zolotussky, Igor. “‘Diary of a Madman’ and the ‘Severnaya Pchela.’” Soviet Lit-
erature 10 (1975): 38– 52.
Zweynert, Joachim. [Tsvainert, Ioakhim]. Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii,
1805– 1905. Translated by L. I. Tsedilin. Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Univer-
sitet Vysshaia Shkola Ekonomiki, 2008.

194
 Index
acquisition, 56, 57, 59
Aesop, 115, 170n18
affect, 4, 18– 19
Alexander Column, 6– 7, 150n16
Alibert, Jean-Louis, 21, 30– 34, 38– 39, 41,
154n27, 155n30
ambition, 4– 5, 12– 14, 21– 53, 110; concep-
tual history of, 15, 22– 29, 78; in French
culture, 13– 14, 18, 21– 25, 29– 36, 41,
48, 52– 53; madness and, 13, 29– 36, 52–
53; Russian terms for, 21, 24– 29, 38, 41,
48, 49, 52, 59, 143– 46, 152n9, 153nn11–
12. See also under featured authors
Anacreon and the Anacreontea, 116, 171n26
avarice, 4, 5, 14– 15, 22, 115; usury and, 111,
113, 173n46. See also miserliness
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 149n11, 159n3
Balzac, Honoré de, 23, 26, 48, 50– 51, 53,
113; Dostoevsky and, 49, 138, 157n62;
types in, 170n14, 175n68
Belinsky, Vissarion, 47, 91, 114, 133, 167n26,
170n14, 174n59
Benveniste, Émile, 61
Boerhaave, Herman, 154n27
Bondi, Sergei, 125
Bosch, Hieronymous, 111– 12
Brooks, Peter, 12, 23
Bruni, Fedor, 54– 56, 83
Bulgarin, Faddei: conservative orientation,
46, 47, 157n58; sense of pride, 28
works:
“All Kinds of Journal Things,” 133
“Three Pages from a Madhouse,” 13– 14,
22, 26, 36– 40, 41, 44– 46, 52
Butovskii, Aleksandr, 17
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 4
195
Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, 31– 32
Catherine II, 24, 30, 37, 64, 71, 93
Chaadaev, Petr, 62
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 126
contagion, cultural, 17, 21, 32, 52
counterfeiting, 14, 17, 89– 90, 100, 102– 4,
109; literary types and, 114; Napoleon
and, 58, 93, 94
currency, 6– 9, 88– 89, 93– 106, 109– 10, 114,
118, 122– 23, 130; in “Mr. Prokharchin,”
137– 39. See also money
Dal, Vladimir, 25, 26– 27, 172n35
Dante Alighieri, 111
Daumier, Honoré, 34– 35
Decembrist uprising, 11, 17, 24, 34, 36, 52
Derrida, Jacques, 60, 87
Derzhavin, Gavrila, 119– 20, 124
Dolinin, Aleksandr, 172n36
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5; ambition and, 48; dia-
logic narration in, 134– 36; money in,
89– 92
works:
The Adolescent, 104
The Brothers Karamazov, 89, 104
Crime and Punishment: ambition in, 13;
money in, 90, 104
The Demons, 91, 104, 167n18
The Double: ambition in, 12, 14, 21– 22,
26, 48– 52, 90; avarice in, 14; bon ton
in, 50– 51; embarrassment in, 48–
52; hospitality in, 97; madness in, 13,
21, 48, 52; money in, 90– 93, 97– 106,
165n5, 168n33
The Idiot, 91, 104
“Mr. Prokharchin”: miserliness in, 15, 90,
109, 110, 132– 41, 176n82
 Index
Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose,
128– 29
Poor Folk: ambition in, 48– 49; money
in, 89– 91
economics: aesthetics vs., 3– 4, 8; “animal
economy,” 32, 154n27; definition of,
8, 10; emotions and, 4, 7, 10, 17– 19;
literature and, 16– 17; Russian stud-
ies of, 16– 17. See also currency;
money
Engels, Friedrich, 3
Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique, 22,
34– 35
Evdokimova, Svetlana, 125
fables, 110, 115– 18, 120, 123– 26, 131, 136,
171n23
Fanger, Donald, 162n39, 163n47
fantastic mode, 39, 71, 92– 93, 94, 97; Dos-
toevsky and, 14, 48, 90– 93, 94, 97,
106, 134, 166n15
Filimonov, Vladimir, 36
Frazier, Melissa, 149n12
French cultural influences, 7, 12– 14, 23–
24, 29– 30, 41, 52, 64, 133
Freud, Sigmund, 83, 169n9
generosity, 4– 5, 7, 24, 59, 69. See also hos-
pitality; prodigality
Georgii Mikhailovich, 8
gift exchange, 4, 58, 60– 62; in Dostoevsky,
90; in Gogol, 71– 72, 77, 81– 83, 85– 86
Gippius, Vasilii, 30
Gnedich, Nikolai, 70
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 92, 114
Goffman, Erving, 51– 52
Gogol, Nikolai, 5, 13, 14, 54– 59, 69– 87,
133; constipation, 81– 84; Dostoevsky
and, 49, 133– 34, 174n57; early career,
69– 70, 75– 76, 82, 86; family name,
164n51; types in, 114; the uncanny in,
58, 71– 72, 77
works:
Dead Souls: ambition in, 12, 14, 59,
160n10; avarice and acquisitive-
ness in, 15, 56, 57, 59, 86; compo-
sition of, 55, 70, 82– 83; demonic
element in, 92– 93; digestive meta-
196
phors in, 80– 81, 84– 86; food in, 57,
77– 78, 159n8; generosity in, 79–
80, 84; hospitality in, 14, 56– 59, 65,
67, 70, 77– 81, 84– 87; miserliness
in, 85, 110, 127– 32, 135, 138, 141,
174n59; money in, 127, 173n53,
174n62; planned continuation of,
86, 87, 131; poetics of disgust in, 14,
56, 77– 80
“Diary of a Madman”: ambition in, 12,
14, 21– 22, 26, 40– 48, 52; madness
in, 13, 21, 41– 47; sources for, 30,
41, 44– 47, 157n58
Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, 70–
72, 77, 81– 82, 86
Mirgorod, 72, 86
“Nevsky Prospect,” 114
“Old World Landowners,” 72– 73, 75–
77, 163n47
The Order of St. Vladimir, 43– 44,
157n53
“The Overcoat,” 91, 133– 34
“Portrait,” 92
Selected Passages from Correspondence
with Friends, 86– 87
Goldstein, Jan, 22– 23
Golstein, Vladimir, 85
Goncharov, Ivan, 11
Goodman, Kevis, 76
Grandville, J. J., 108, 111
gratitude, 4, 7, 81, 84
greed. See avarice; miserliness
Grossman, Leonid, 104, 176n82
Gukovskii, Grigorii, 125
hoarding, 17, 113, 117, 119, 127– 30, 139.
See also miserliness
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 30, 45
Horace, 119
hospitality, 14, 16, 17, 56– 75; changing
connotations of, 15; as gift, 60– 62, 77;
nostalgia and, 58, 61, 73, 76, 160n17;
Philemon and Baucis myth and, 73–
76; religious roots of, 63, 161n26; Rus-
sian identity and, 57, 59, 62– 64, 69,
76; Russian terms for, 61, 63; serfdom
and, 58, 66– 67. See also Gogol, Niko-
lai: Dead Souls
hypochondria, 30, 37, 82
 Index
Iazykov, Nikolai, 131
Jones, Malcolm, 90
Karamzin, Nikolai, 63
Kiprensky, Orest, 73– 74, 76
Križanić, Juraj, 151n26
Krylov, Ivan, 70, 115, 117– 18; Pushkin on,
118, 171n31
La Fontaine, Jean de, 108, 111, 115– 16
Lermontov, Mikhail, 5; A Hero of Our
Time, 11, 71; “My Native Land,”
67– 68
Levontina, Irina, 29
Lomonosov, Mikhail, 153n11
Lotman, Yuri, 3
“Madhouse at Charenton” (anon.), 34– 36,
39, 41
madness and ambition. See ambition
Maikov, Apollon, 140
Maikov, Vasily, 116– 17, 120
Mann, Iurii, 48
Marx, Karl, 3, 92– 93, 113, 122
Mauss, Marcel, 60– 62, 161n20
melancholia, 30, 37, 153n18
Melas, Natalie, 151n32
Melville, Peter, 60– 61
mental illness, 29– 34
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 93
Mironov, Boris, 91
miserliness, 5, 14– 15, 108– 41; capi-
talism and, 113, 169n9; miser typol-
ogy in literature, 4– 5, 10, 15, 110– 20,
130, 140– 41, 168n2, 169n9, 174n57,
176n83; Russian terms for, 119,
172nn35– 36, 174n60. See also under
featured authors
Molière, 113, 115, 116, 119, 121, 169n6,
170n20, 173n46
money, 6– 9, 14, 88– 106, 140– 41; feces
and, 83; language and, 98– 100, 127;
Marx on, 92– 93; Saussure on, 99– 100;
sociological studies of, 89– 90; super-
natural associations with, 92– 93, 103–
4. See also counterfeiting; currency;
and under featured authors
Morson, Gary Saul, 173n53, 175n63
197
Nabokov, Vladimir, 3, 93
Napoleon Bonaparte, 6– 7, 12, 22, 32– 34;
in Dostoevsky, 136, 141 49; in Gogol,
58, 141
narodnost’ (nationality), 62
Natural School, 48, 90, 91, 132– 34
Nekrasov, Nikolai, 132– 33, 140, 176n74
Neoclassicism, 7, 110, 113, 115, 121, 126, 141
Ngai, Sianne, 50
Nicholas I, 7– 8, 17, 24, 162n39
Nodier, Charles, 113– 14, 121, 169n12,
170n14
Northern Bee (periodical), 39– 41, 45– 46
nostalgia. See under hospitality
Odoevskii, Vladimir, 45
Otrepev, Grigory, 99
Ovid, 73, 75
passion: defined, 18; medical view of, 32
Peter I, 24, 26, 62, 65, 118, 166n15
Phaedrus, 109, 115, 116, 117– 18, 120
Philaret, 153n10
Pinel, Philippe, 22, 31, 32, 154n27
Pintner, Walter McKenzie, 94
Pletnev, Petr, 70
Pogodin, Mikhail, 43, 81, 83
Polevoi, Nikolai, 28, 30, 153n15, 155n30
Pososhkov, Ivan, 151n26
prodigality and profligacy, 5, 10, 24, 57, 64,
97– 99, 150n13
Prokopovich, Nikolai, 82
Pushkin, Alexander, 5, 13, 118; Gogol and,
70; sense of pride, 28
works:
The Covetous Knight: Dostoevsky and,
132, 175n66; miserliness in, 15, 110,
118– 27, 131, 141, 172n36, 173n46;
money in, 122– 26, 129, 138; read-
ing in, 123– 24, 173n50
Eugene Onegin: economics in, 3, 7, 11–
12; hospitality in, 64– 67; prodigality
in, 10– 11, 64; reading in, 173n50;
superfluity in, 12, 51
“Little Tragedies,” 120– 21, 172n43
“The Queen of Spades”: ambition in, 12,
21, 26; madness in, 13, 21; money
in, 92; reading in, 173n50
Table Talk, 121
 Index
Quesnay, François, 155n27
Rabelais, François, 114
Radishchev, Alexander, 27, 28, 30, 37, 78
Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 30, 37
Realism, 14, 90, 92, 100, 106, 109, 132,
141. See also Natural School
Romanticism, 14, 30, 34, 62, 69, 92, 110,
113, 115, 121, 140– 41
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 37, 114
saving, 4, 10, 91, 111, 132, 137, 139
Say, Jean-Baptiste, 16
Schelling, Friedrich von, 121, 169n12, 170n14
“science of man” discipline, 31, 36– 37
sentiment, 78– 79, 152n36; defined, 18;
Sentimentalist fiction, 90
serfs: as basis of Russian economy, 5, 16,
127; hospitality and, 64, 66– 67; as
units of wealth, 4, 79, 127
Shakespeare, William, 113, 119, 121,
172n36, 173n46
Shenrok, Vladimir, 69
Shenstone, William, 118– 19, 125
Shevyrev, Stepan, 56– 57
Simmel, Georg, 89
Smith, Adam, 3– 4, 11, 16, 147n6
Sobol, Valeria, 71
social mobility, 21– 24, 26
Somoff, Victoria, 176n79
spending, 4, 5, 14, 59; in The Double, 97–
98, 103– 4. See also prodigality
Stendhal, 23, 26, 48, 53
Stepanov, Nikolai, 116
Storch, Heinrich von, 16– 17
Sumarokov, Alexander, 116– 17, 120
superfluous man figure, 11– 12, 51
Svin’in, Pavel, 73– 74
Table of Ranks, 24, 26, 38, 40, 43, 47,
52, 65
198
Theophrastus, 113, 132
threshold symbolism, 56, 63, 159n3
Tolstoy, Alexander, 86
Tolstoy, Leo, 5, 69, 166n18
Troshchinskii, Dmitry, 69– 70
Turgenev, Ivan, 5
works:
Diary of a Superfluous Man, 11– 12
Fathers and Sons: hospitality in, 65– 66,
162n31; serfs in, 67
“Khor and Kalinych,” 68– 69
types in literature, 15, 109– 10, 113– 15,
132– 33, 141, 170n14, 174n59; Balzac
and, 170n14, 175n68; Dostoevsky and,
132, 135, 137, 139; Gogol and, 127;
Pushkin and, 121
Ukraine, relation to Russia of, 71– 72,
75– 77
uncanny topos, 58, 71– 72, 77
Uvarov, Sergei, 62, 83
Valentino, Russell Scott, 93, 174n62
Viazemskii, Petr, 28, 62, 70
Vielgorskii, Mikhail, 70
Vinitsky, Ilya, 30
Vinogradov, Viktor, 132
vitalism, 31, 154n27
Vlasova, Mar’ia, 55– 56, 83
Volkonskaya, Zinaida, 54– 55
Williams, Elizabeth A., 31
Williams, Raymond, 15, 18
worm metaphor, 37– 38, 44, 52, 59, 84
Zelizer, Viviana, 89– 90
Zhukovsky, Vasily, 70, 82, 85, 92, 162n39,
171n23
Ziablovskii, Evdokim, 72
Zolotussky, Igor, 157n58