Poverty of The Imagination

Poverty of the Imagination
Northwestern University Press

Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
Founding Editor
Gary Saul Morson
General Editor
Caryl Emerson
Consulting Editors
Carol Avins
Robert Belknap
Robert Louis Jackson
Elliott Mossman
Alfred Rieber
William Mills Todd III
Alexander Zholkovsky
NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE

ABOUT THE POOR
David Herman
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210
Copyright © 2001 by Northwestern University Press.

Published 2001. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 0-8101-1692-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herman, David, 1962–

Poverty of the imagination : nineteenth-century Russian literature about the
poor / David Herman.
p. cm. — (Studies in Russian literature and theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8101-1692-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Poor in
literature. 3. Poverty in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PG3015.5.P58 H47 2001
891.709′35206942—dc21
2001001963
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri-
can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Poverty and Imagination ix
Chapter One Expelled from the Garden of Poverty:

Sympathy and Literacy in “Poor Liza” 1
Chapter Two The Call of Poverty: Learning to Love

the Low in “Egyptian Nights” 36
Chapter Three The Meaning of Poverty: Gogol’s

Petersburg Tales 78
Chapter Four Gogol against Sympathy 108
Chapter Five “The Poverty of Our Literature” 143
Chapter Six By His Poverty: Dostoevsky and

the Imitations of Christ 168
Conclusion: The Wealth of the Russian Imagination 202
Notes 213
Bibliography 263
Index 275
Acknowledgments
The writing of this book taught me what it means to be indebted, by which

I mean, in a manner not unlike that of Pushkin’s improvisor, to discover in
my own work themes and viewpoints others have imparted to me over the
years. Above all I owe thanks to Hugh McLean for having faith in me long
before I did myself, for letting me potter about in the sloppy and, at times
it seemed, purely fictitious workshop of my ideas, and finally for his friend-
ship. Caryl Emerson and Susan Betz were invaluable in helping the book
see the light of day, and I cannot thank them enough. Earlier versions were
vitally shaped by the readings of Ross Metzger, Hugh McLean, Irina Pa-
perno, and Nancy Ruttenburg. Later I got scholarly advice and collegial
encouragement from, among others, Irene Masing-Delic, Melissa Frazier,
Russell Valentino, Eliot Borenstein, Jenifer Presto, and Dariusz Tolczyk.
My University of Virginia graduate student Michelle Viise, perhaps without
realizing it, borrowed some of my ideas on Gogol and returned them in
much improved form.
Less directly my work has been inspired, in a variety of sometimes
roundabout but often crucial ways, by those I’ve worked under and with
and by their passion for the art of reading. I have been blessed at every step
by great teachers of literature, including, in my undergraduate years, Dan
Davidson. Hugh McLean taught me what it means to have the highest stan-
dards tempered with an impeccable sense of balance. Later Boris Gasparov
and Irina Paperno came to represent for me models of what creativity can
do when crossed with the finest intelligence and broad interests. At a key
moment of doubt, Anne Nesbet and Eric Naiman showed me that literary
scholarship could be wonderfully fun for both author and audience. And no
one has been a greater inspiration and a more meticulous reader than my
friend Ross Metzger, who is a constant living reminder of how much more
there is to learn.
Time and generous support for the writing of the book were made pos-
sible by a grant from the Title VIII Program of the Social Science Research
vii
Acknowledgments
Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds pro-
vided by the State Department under the Program for Research and Train-
ing on East European Training and the Independent States of the Former
Soviet Union (Title VIII). I also benefited greatly from three University of
Virginia Faculty Summer Research Awards. Different versions of chapter 1
and chapter 2 appeared, respectively, in Russian Literature XLIV (1998)
and Russian Review 55 (1996).
Finally, it’s a pleasure to acknowledge an inspiration not connected to
Russian literature: my father, whom it would take a lifetime to catch up to.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who taught me how
and why to think, and to Sabah Siddiqui-Herman, for an embarrassment of
riches too extensive even to imagine.
viii
Introduction: Poverty and Imagination
We had promised each other that all our

thoughts would be common to us both and that
henceforth our two souls would be as one—a
dream unoriginal, after all, except that having
been dreamt by all men, it has been realized by
none.
—Charles Baudelaire, “The Eyes of the Poor”
Russian literature boasts a long and varied tradition of works about or in-
cluding the poor, and its history is yet to be written. This is not that book.
The present work proposes instead something at once more modest and
more ambitious: to explore what might be called the poetics of the percep-
tion of poverty.1 To approach poverty as a cultural construction, the initial
question I ask of every text is a perceptual one: do the observers of the poor
(authors, narrators, characters, social commentators), viewers who may
themselves be rich or poor, see themselves in the needy? Does the specta-
cle of poverty inspire us to a sensation of identity, similarity, or difference,
or do we simply fail to compare? By extension, an essential question—es-
sential, it turns out, even more for historical reasons than for the evident
methodological ones—is the degree to which the poor do the same in re-
turn. The skill of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes thus stands at the
center of attention throughout. Whether such displacement is always a
commendable thing is another matter. The act can be perceived in a vari-
ety of ways: as the essence of what artists do in representational art, a
deeply Christian movement of compassion, a demonic distortion of the
imaginer’s true self, the only hope for the reconciliation and harmonization
of humankind, the key to manipulating others for good ends or ill, or plain
old nosiness. It also has a special relevance in relation to the poor. Projec-
tion is a fiction in the most real sense, since another’s experience can never
truly be my own; yet it retains its value amidst its unreality.
ix
Introduction
Fewer texts are included here than omitted, though that is an inevita-
bility in any case given the pride of place poverty held in nineteenth-century
Russian literature. Specifically, the main works under consideration are
Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”; Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”; “Overcoat,” the Peters-
burg tales generally, and the Selected Passages of Gogol; Tolstoy’s “Lu-
cerne”; and The Idiot and the 1880 Pushkin Speech of Dostoevsky. Even
this small selection will provide an almost bewilderingly wide range of views
on the identity of the poor. To summarize a general trend, it might loosely
be said that Russian writers of the modern period can with some frequency
imagine the poor as being like us in every way other than money—though
this is perhaps a slight overstatement—but they cannot imagine that the
poor imagine as we do.
POVERTY
It would not be a great exaggeration to say that the primal scene of all nine-
teenth-century Western thought involved an observer gazing at someone
poor, most commonly on the streets of a great metropolis, and wondering
what that spectacle meant in human, moral, political, and metaphysical
terms. Such encounters had been going on since time immemorial, but the
revolution in France which ushered in the new century by destroying the
foundations of the old one had raised the stakes as never before. Now, in
the epoch that would produce Marx, even those who had seen nothing es-
pecially interesting in the lower classes suddenly found it impossible to
maintain their indifference. Yet who were the poor? What governed their
actions? What did poverty mean? The questions that grew out of this en-
counter were numerous and troublesome, for they cut straight to the heart
of Western concepts of individual and social identity and received notions
of good and evil. Had those without earned their sad fate through their own
actions? Were they, on the contrary, the most innocent people? Had they
been victimized by an unjust social structure? Were the indigent less tram-
meled by the things of this earth and so closer to God? Perhaps with the
patina of decorum scraped away, they formed deeper bonds with other hu-
mans. Perhaps, in Russia at least, those confined to living modestly were
less exposed to European ways and more in touch with native roots. If
hunger drove a man to steal, was he still guilty? What if he killed? Coincid-
ing developments in social history and the history of ideas conspired to ren-
der such questions urgent and unavoidable.
Poverty was by no means just an abstract proposition to ponder—it
also demanded a practical response, particularly as cities grew and slums
swelled. In Russia, Westernizers and Slavophiles, novelists and government
ministers alike wondered what that response should be. Again the array of
choices was dizzying, each with some line of reasoning to recommend it. It
x
Introduction
was argued by various groups that the poor should be pitied, kept down, of-
fered charity, forced to work for their living, counted and classified into
categories, emulated for their self-abnegation, tossed into jail, left alone,
arranged into sewing cooperatives, or even led into battle. Contending voices
sounded all around: philanthropists said one thing, socialists and revolu-
tionaries another, the example of Christ still another, the civil penal code,
the growing discourse on national character, and the usages of polite social
conduct something else again. For all its weighty social and philosophical
ramifications, then, the first challenge poverty posed was always an excep-
tional ambiguity; it was an issue with more than the usual two sides. It was
not even clear that poverty was a problem; to some, the poor were a desir-
able and indeed necessary part of any healthy social continuum. Russian
writers struggle to resolve this uncertainty into clarity but in the meantime
continue to play on it.
Perhaps the most disturbing question—not the first to arise, not read-
ily apparent when it did, and nowhere quite explicit—was this: might a life
of material impoverishment spell a corresponding deprivation and short-
coming in other matters, matters for example of a spiritual, emotional, eth-
ical, mental, or aesthetic nature? Was the true tragedy that the poor just
had less, in other words, or that they themselves were somehow less? One
of the most widespread and unsettling suspicions was that the rich, with
their means and leisure, developed themselves, or rather, their selves—their
awareness of the world, their personalities, views, particular strengths, their
uniqueness—more fully than did the poor, who were left behind in a state
of inchoate potential, stunted versions of what they might have been. If this
was true, what were the consequences for all humanity? To what extent
were people the playthings of external conditions? In an era when the so-
cial sciences that might answer these questions were just being conceived,
the responsibility fell largely to literature to delve into the deterministic
possibility that in their lack and want, the impecunious might be deprived
of free wills and hence some portion of their moral responsibility, their hu-
manity, or both. Determinism represented a particularly noisome riddle
because what was probably the most reasonable stance on the issue was
strangely self-contradictory. Most thinkers, then as now, found it impossible
to avoid the sensation that factually the rich did have more freedom of op-
eration and yet morally, the poor were no less accountable for their deeds.
Given the attention accorded the vagaries of class, it should come as
no surprise that the Russian nineteenth century in general was a time of
shifting social boundaries. It witnessed, in varying degrees, a collapse of
aristocratic privilege, a deterioration of the agricultural way of life that had
long occupied the nation’s poorest, the emergence of a modern trade econ-
omy, and the freeing of the serfs. Meanwhile the growth of major cities
brought rich and poor to cross paths ever more frequently in the absence
xi
Introduction
of clear governing conventions (quintessentially, though by no means only,

represented by the famous sidewalk bumping scene in Nikolai Chernyshev-
skii’s What Is to Be Done? where the lower-class hero upends a wealthy
gentleman into the mud just to assert his equal right to the pavement). Lit-
eracy was spreading as well, and belles lettres and journalism were expand-
ing their readership into classes lower than the aristocracy. (Russia’s middle
class, as has often been observed, remained small by Western standards;
the descent down the social ladder thus led more precipitously from the up-
per classes to the lower.) In every way, the poor were entering increasingly
into public discourse, and yet they arrived with no clearly appointed place.
It was not even evident what discipline was best suited to ponder that
place. Poverty resided at a crossroads where what began as an economic
matter quickly spread into the realm of the political, the social, the philo-
sophical, the theological, and even the aesthetic (this last connection in par-
ticular will concern us here). To some, pauperism was the failure of the
modern world; to others, thinking more of spirituality, a life lived without
possessions afforded a kind of ideal. In either case, paradoxically, the poor
were humanity at its rawest and most authentic. With their magnified need
and exposure—the human condition, as it were, reduced to bare essentials—
the poor furnished the nineteenth century with a testing ground on which
whole philosophical systems might live and die. And almost everyone had
something to say. This, at least, is what one would have to conclude from
observing Russian literature, where entire careers were begun (Turgenev)
or staked (Belinskii, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevskii) on the depiction
of the lower classes, and where even authors more famous for writing about
the rich (Tolstoy) might nonetheless renounce earthly wealth and end
their lives in the garb of wandering beggars. Of the many vital questions
facing the era, poverty stirred passions and challenged thinking like almost
no other.
Poverty is certainly one of the most threatening guises alterity takes,
threatening not only because the poor have been known to stage violent in-
surrections, but because the concept follows patterns unlike those that gov-
ern otherness generally.2 Rarely does dissimilitude so automatically imply
not only difference but inequality; looking at the poor, arrogant aristocrats
and kind-hearted philanthropists alike sense that someone is more fortu-
nate than someone else, an assumption with no obvious justification when
the dividing line peered across is, for example, religion, race, or even age.3
The poor looking back often think the same thing. The idea is so deeply in-
grained it can be difficult to see clearly. For to be “poor,” in Russian as in
English, is to be “poor”: the life of want provides our vocabulary with its most
basic term for misfortune.4 (“Misfortune” itself is yet another example, as
the opposite of the ambiguously economic “fortune.”)
xii
Introduction
Though highly marked, poverty nevertheless possesses boundaries

that can be curiously hard to find. Not only is the term “poverty” itself
vague, denoting as it does the inability through lack of means to meet one’s
needs or wants (already an extremely broad range of realities, with no self-
evident internal cutoff to separate the truly essential from the merely
wished for, even before changing historical conditions and expectations are
factored in). The very otherness of the poor is oddly insecure. Few societies
are so constructed that the nonpoor can be certain they will always remain
so. The examples of vast wealth reduced to nothing are legion, whereas sud-
den and unwilled changes in other human determinants like age, race, reli-
gion, or nationality are rare or impossible. Poverty comes and goes at its
own discretion, claiming great numbers of victims according to patterns
that are not always evident and, thus far in human history, impossible to
eradicate. Hence the moment when two individuals look at one another
across class lines becomes one of the most precarious in Western culture,
because the distinction between them is simultaneously so palpable, so
powerful, and yet so unstable.
For all that, this book is not primarily about poverty in the narrow
sense. First, Russian literature of the period is rather indifferent to economic
complexities.5 When poverty does figure prominently in artistic texts—and
it does so with striking regularity from the time prose supplants poetry
around 1830—the focus is on the psyches and souls of the poor, not their
purses, even in writers like Dostoevsky who make regular reference to pre-
cise levels of material shortage and income. I thus necessarily treat poverty
along with class generally. By “class” I do not mean the Russian system of
legally assigned estates. That system had, to Western eyes, the striking pe-
culiarity of distributing certain important privileges with no correlation to
wealth. Raznochintsy, for example, belonged among the upper echelons
that were free from head taxation and recruitment for the army, yet re-
strictions on the ownership of serfs, land, and commercial property could
make it hard for them to assure their livelihood. Meanwhile, as a legally
lower estate, merchants faced taxation and recruitment, but they might, like
the Rogozhins in The Idiot, amass fortunes numbering in millions of rubles.
Rather, the ranking mechanisms that concern me are simply social status
and privilege, particularly but not exclusively as they are associated with the
possession of money and the things one can buy. There are thus such things
as rich peasants and poor noblemen.6
This is not to say that a poor peasant and poor nobleman would have
comparable experiences, of course. Pushkin half seriously observed in “A
Fragment” that the noblest Russian families, those of truly ancient lineage,
were by his day often completely destitute, and jokingly depicted the mod-
ern descendants of Russia’s semilegendary founder Riurik happily stopping
xiii
Introduction
to hail each other in archaic diction before they resume plowing their fields
by hand, too poor even to afford draft animals. This is not the poverty of the
homeless, to be sure, but would be (if it were true) poverty nonetheless.7 It
should be pointed out that the works we will read, like the culture they rep-
resent, often evince a distinctly elitist vantage point, sometimes conflating
all those at the lower end of the social spectrum into one huge, barely dif-
ferentiated mass and opposing them only to a few minuscule groups of the
exceptionally privileged.8 Perhaps the most famous poor figure in nineteenth-
century Russian literature, Akaky Akakievich of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” is in
fact a member of the single highest estate, the nobility, and his 400-ruble
annual salary, as pitiful as it is, clearly pays him much better than the vast
majority of the country’s population.9 He nonetheless remains poor, under-
privileged, and downtrodden in a number of ways obvious to any reader of
Gogol’s story.
IMAGINATION
More important, this book is not about poverty in the narrow sense because
it is about imagination, in particular the surprisingly complex ways in which
imagination intersects with poverty in nineteenth-century Russian culture.
(For this reason the reader will find little mention, except for some general
considerations, of the so-called “progressive” school, writers like Radish-
chev and Chernyshevskii whose depictions of the lower classes militate for
direct social change. These texts, though important in their own right, self-
consciously hold themselves apart politically and, more to the point, aesthet-
ically from those we will explore.) Much of the discussion centers around
the links contemporaries commonly drew, often only half consciously, be-
tween certain problems raised by the poor and certain problems associated
with art. This linkage is at first glance unexpected: what, after all, do pov-
erty and imagination have to do with each other? We might hazard a sim-
ple ahistorical explanation by saying that the reaction most commonly
coached from readers in portrayals of the poor is sympathy, and sympathy
is an act of projection or imagination, with, therefore, profound repercus-
sions for the literary process. Quite apart from class, literature in general,
and certainly in the nineteenth century, plays on our sympathies, inviting us
to identify with characters or, in the case of villains and satiric depictions,
ostentatiously asking us not to identify. Yet even in the latter case, we are
regularly enjoined—Gogol will do so explicitly—to consider the extent of
our own likeness to the characters we condemn.10 When narratives turn
their attention to the poor, this general convention is bolstered by long-
standing Judeo-Christian doctrines concerning charity and humanity and
translates into an imperative—by no means absolute, rarely whole and un-
compromised, but by the same token almost ubiquitous—to put ourselves
xiv
Introduction
in the shoes of those who suffer. Here we act on a deep and abiding as-
sumption of cultures that value human individuality highly—not all do so
equally, of course—that it is possible to understand and judge others, to ex-
plore what concerns us in the human personality and in human action, and
indeed to exist communally, only if we can gain some access to the interi-
ority of the other.
For writers, the gravity of this moment is double: every act of sympa-
thetic insight, of envisioning someone else’s experience as though it were
our own, is, if only implicitly, a theory of literature, of what happens and
what it means when we read and respond to texts about others. Sympathy
and imaginative identification everywhere undergird the literary process.
Not only are readers routinely invited to see things from the vantage point
of characters. Artists too need to have insight into the wellsprings of their
creations’ psyches. In some literary theories (Tolstoy’s in What Is Art? for
example) the audience is charged with trying to decode what a text tells us
about the feelings and convictions of its author as much as its characters.
And whenever we write or speak, as Bakhtin reminds us, we project our-
selves into interlocutors’ viewpoints in order to tailor our words and assay
the rhetorical efficacy of our statements. The literary process, then, is rife
with mental displacements as the various parties necessarily strive to make
out what the others are up to, every time by standing in the position of
someone else and seeing how things size up from there. This much is true
even when the characters in a work of literature are entirely indifferent to
one another.
Hence at least in the Russian tradition examined here, thinking about
poverty and how to depict it inevitably entails thinking about the methods
and value of artistic acts. To a surprising extent, the question of the poor is
the question of art. The issues become so intertwined in the texts that be-
fore long we find poor artists trying to imagine what rich artists must think
about them while the author in question (Pushkin), spurred on in part by
money woes, wonders if the spectacle of his narrative somehow demon-
strates the impoverishment of his own imaginative powers. The focus that
recurs with otherwise unexpected frequency in Russian poverty texts is not
who has more, but who imagines better, as though the true human wealth,
at once more valuable, more powerful, and even more dangerous, were imag-
inative insight. The outcome is a curious nineteenth-century tradition in
which stories about living with few possessions become stories about imag-
ination and its lack.11
My use of the terms “imagination” and especially “sympathy” is inten-
tionally not narrow, because a discussion of this type requires broad con-
cepts capable of standing for a range of closely related phenomena. In the
eighteenth century, where we begin, the English term “sympathy” had just
such a broad reach, as Brissenden and Marshall have shown.12 By “imagi-
xv
Introduction
nation” I mean simply the ability to picture for oneself things that are ab-
sent or nonexistent, not a part of one’s own life as naively experienced; sym-
pathy is a particular use of the imagination. (More precise definitions of
imagination will be given in the chapters, where there will be room to ex-
plore the writers’ highly varied and sometimes idiosyncratic understandings
of the concept.) “Sympathy” in turn is any kind of sharing of the inner
experience or private world of another—both another’s semipermanent
viewpoint on life and his or her moment-to-moment emotions. It takes sym-
pathy in this sense to gauge how someone else perceives and addresses the
world, and it takes sympathy to imagine what someone else feels, desires,
fears. Such shared sensation need not be expressed and may in some cases
have no intention or even possibility of assuaging the suffering of another;
for that matter, it need not be limited to suffering. There also occurs some-
thing closely related when, instead of seeing another subjectively, from the
inside, I attempt to perceive myself objectively, since I must again project
myself into an alien viewpoint (even if no specific other person is involved)
before I can look back at myself from the outside. Imaginative sympathy
can certainly be abused—the most despicable villains rely on it in manipu-
lating their prey—but it is nonetheless necessary for comprehension, com-
munication, and coexistence, and essential wherever there are the reading
and writing of the type of narratives we find in the Russian nineteenth cen-
tury. For imaginative sympathy, with all of its attendant imperfections, may
well be the best, almost the only, way to cross the boundary between self
and other.
THE IMAGINATION OF POVERTY

At first glance the texts I have assembled make motley company and may
seem less than ideal in their arbitrariness and sometimes short length to the
cataloging of a tradition. Even when brief, however, they are all pivotal
Russian literary texts. “Poor Liza,” though much maligned by later genera-
tions on aesthetic grounds, marks the inception of modern Russian prose.
“Egyptian Nights” is both the final piece of substantial length Pushkin
undertook and, although still underappreciated, a masterpiece that pro-
foundly influenced later writers. “Overcoat” may qualify as the “single most
famous short story in the whole of Russian literature” (Karlinsky, 135). In
Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, we have to
do not with a fictional text in the narrow sense, but rather an exemplary
antiliterary tract which provides a rationale for opposing writing’s usual
interest in imaginative acts of sympathy for the poor. Dostoevsky’s work,
finally, constitutes the best-known Russian writing about poverty, a theme
the writer pursued tirelessly from the opening page of Poor Folk to the
final page of The Brothers Karamazov.
xvi
Introduction
We begin with “Poor Liza,” the immensely popular inaugurator of the

tradition of Russian fictional works about the poor and the best known ex-
ample of Russian sentimentalism. Karamzin appeals to his countrymen to
recognize that “peasant women too can love” but goes on to demonstrate
exactly how rich and poor love differently. Karamzin’s greatest contribution
to Russian culture may have been his vision of the educated, urbane Euro-
peanized Russian, a persona implicit in all his work but at the heart of his
Letters of a Russian Traveler. “Poor Liza” asks in effect whether the imag-
inative skills of the newly refined nobleman might not produce an unin-
tended disaster when they collide with the loving hearts of the poor and
illiterate. Similarly, Karamzin’s concept of sentimental pathos is predicated
upon a body of cultural knowledge that the reader and the villain share, but
it is precisely this knowledge that excludes and imperils the innocent hero-
ine; to read the story as Karamzin intended, then, the reader must employ
the power denounced as evil. The peculiar mechanism of Poor Liza’s demise
suggests that by picturing the poor as like us, we change them, and so de-
stroy them. Karamzin thus ultimately speaks with two voices, lauding senti-
mental sympathy as balm for the poor and a civilizing influence on the
nation and yet sensing in that very power a dire threat precisely to the lower
classes and the Russianness of Russia.
The second chapter turns to the story “Egyptian Nights.” Here Push-
kin embodies his own position late in life, when he was sinking into debt and
falling out of popularity, in the tale of a rich poet who meets a poor poet
and finds that despite all of his aristocratic hauteur and distaste, he is sucked
into admiring, and indeed becoming, the poor other. With two literary prac-
titioners where Karamzin had had one, “Egyptian Nights” replicates the
stance of the rich writer peering into the soul of the poor man by having a
poor man staring back into his opponent’s heart. In effect, Pushkin sees rich
and poor as doubles, both engaged in the task of trying to envision each
other. The stakes are especially high since for Pushkin this is the artistic skill
par excellence. The most unapologetically aristocratic of the writers in ques-
tion demonstrates that the ability to identify with the poor has little to do
with one’s proximity to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and much
to do with one’s aesthetic skills. Yet the figure of the Italian improvisor fur-
ther suggests, against Karamzin, that excellence in creativity comes more
naturally to the poor, who can carry out the self-reinventions that constitute
art without the interference of a fixed and unwieldy social self. Poverty in
this sense is imaginative freedom. On the other hand, the story, which is un-
finished, breaks off just at the moment when an act of final rapprochement
between rich poet and poor poet is promised; and this, I believe, can be
read as Pushkin’s admission of his own inability to take the final step and
fully embrace the poor man’s similitude, in part because he has determined
that aristocrat and poor man can only be truly alike if both become poor.
xvii
Introduction
The next two chapters focus on the vital spiritual importance and yet
almost incapacitating ambiguity of poverty for Gogol. In his Petersburg tales,
Gogol simultaneously evokes sympathy for the poor and laughter at their
expense. These stories are meant to be read, as all Gogol’s mature fiction
was, as having Christian overtones; but the positioning of self and other in
the text challenges the religious enterprise. Is the reader to identify with
the poor because we all are spiritually poor? Or is the reader to realize his
own spiritual poverty precisely because he is so easily tempted to laugh at
the poor man’s misfortunes, that is, because he does not identify with his
brothers? Is poverty a sign of sin, so that the sufferings of the underclass are
proof of misdeeds visible or invisible? Or are the poor, in their forced self-
abnegation, practitioners of saintly kenosis? Ultimately, Gogol is unable to
resolve whether in the light of the realm he most cherishes—Orthodox spir-
ituality—we should see the poor as better than, worse than, or the same as,
ourselves.
Gogol does find some reliable certainties, however. The Petersburg
stories are all constructed around an underlying plot in which a tranquil
poor man is suddenly afforded a taste of wealth and begins to imagine him-
self as rich; the hero now begins to find his poverty unbearable but, unac-
customed to employing the skill of imagination that has dislodged him from
his rightful place, is (nearly or actually) destroyed. Selected Passages, exam-
ined in chapter 4, concurs in a still more extreme form, harboring profound
misgivings about all imagination and sympathy. Gogol strives to articulate a
vision of an ideal Russia in which the poor and the nonpoor must remain
separate and distinct to safeguard the stability of society, and must likewise,
for spiritual reasons, learn to live firmly within their varying psychic means.
This nonfictional work paints imagination as the most treacherous of forces,
since nothing so takes those who read out of themselves and teaches us to
project ourselves into the shoes of people and classes we are not meant to
penetrate. In the end, having proclaimed the reformatory value of satire but
then shown how such literature disorients us morally, Gogol renounces the
authorial power of imagination as the instrument of the devil, first symbol-
ically within his texts and then actually, via a self-imposed retirement from
the writing of fiction.
Chapter 5 provides an overview of Russian poverty narratives from a
different angle. It begins by examining a standing metaphor for the status
of nineteenth-century Russian culture, “the poverty of our literature,” in
which wealth is understood as the cultural abundance of the great Euro-
pean nations. The metaphor reaches its acme in the criticism of Belinskii,
who repeatedly laments the poverty of Russian letters. As a kind of master-
trope for the period, it provides an interpretive framework in which to read
narratives about real poverty as well, suggesting in fact that they are not en-
tirely about real poverty. Karamzin, Pushkin, and Gogol all agree in locat-
xviii
Introduction
ing superior imaginative facility where there is less Russianness; their quin-
tessential Russian hero is either outdone by someone else’s more European
imagination or undone when he tries to seize a skill not properly his. The
metaphor offers an alternate explanation for why poverty and imagination
should be linked in nineteenth-century Russia: for if the national literature
is impoverished, then the longed-for plenitude is quite literally imagination.
A key figure in such narratives becomes the copy clerk, an icon for
the anxieties of his culture, the poor man whose hand moves only to trace
the words of others. The clerk is a despairing self-image for a culture that
feared it was slavishly copying its European neighbors; the writer without
imagination, his attempts to achieve originality are doomed. Another key
repeating figure, however, is the improvisor, the poor artist whose mighty
imagination and sympathetic insight typically know no bounds—and may
be precarious for this very reason. Yet can he win over a rich audience? Since
the figure allows room for genuine creativity alongside conformity to the
words of others (those who stipulate his themes), the improvisor in partic-
ular absorbs Russian writers, appearing in a kind of multipart narrative in
Karamzin, Pushkin, Tolstoy (whose “Lucerne” occupies the end of the chap-
ter), and finally Dostoevsky. This section examines how a non-European
culture enters into the European arena, first borrowing freely but then
spending the better part of two centuries struggling to make the transition
from copying to originating European traditions of its own. The book is thus
a double study of self and other, in which Russian high culture begins by
attempting to open up lines of contact with its own poor and ends by per-
ceiving itself as distinctly like those poor in ways it had little expected. In
effect, the literature grapples with the rich/poor gap from both sides simul-
taneously—with asymmetrical results.
Chapter 6 charts Dostoevsky’s use of the tradition sketched out in the
preceding chapters in his own novel The Idiot and again in his Pushkin
Speech. The novel brings back all the main characters in the heritage in
new guises, as Dostoevsky inventories and reworks Russian fiction about
the poor and at the same time tries to undo the metaphor of poverty, in ef-
fect arguing that Russia has a great wealth—hidden precisely in its poverty.
Dostoevsky depicts the poor Prince Myshkin, the Christ-like hero, as an
artist of sorts, and formulates his sanctity as a gift of imaginative insight into
others. Myshkin is Dostoevsky’s attempt to reconcile the failing copyist and
the problematic improvisor—to harmonize and extend, in effect, “Over-
coat” and “Egyptian Nights”—and bring the Russian poor man to speak his
own triumphant word to Europe, to lay permanent claim to the imagina-
tion. Yet the well-intentioned hero of the novel fails to save his world. Dos-
toevsky returns to his cherished scenario, however, in the Pushkin Speech.
The oration portrays Pushkin as a Christ-like artist to replace the artistlike
“Prince Christ”; the great poet’s genius consists precisely in his mastery
xix
Introduction
of the ultimate form of kenotic poverty, where the self has so little that it
can take on other identities. Pushkin provides an enduring answer to the
poverty of Russian literature—it is wealthy precisely to the extent that its
ongoing exposure to lack has nurtured its sensitivity and enriched its aware-
ness—and unlike the novel, this time Dostoevsky augurs a successful salva-
tion of the world. With this stroke, Dostoevsky effectively finishes off a
metanarrative tradition stretching back to Karamzin: the master copyist has
become the highest form of originality. The power of literary fabrication
that once came from Europe to destroy Poor Liza has been reclaimed as
Poor Liza’s own power, and Russia’s gift to human history.
Those who are interested in a brief menu of possible cultural con-
structions of poverty (the poor as victims, as lazy, as beloved of God, as prone
to crime, and so on) will find them discussed at the start of chapter 4.
xx
Chapter One
Expelled from the Garden of Poverty
Sympathy and Literacy in “Poor Liza”
The thought of our amiable poet’s final years is

sad to anyone who can imagine himself in the
situation of others.
—Karamzin, “Of Bogdanovich
and His Compositions”
KARAMZIN’S “POOR LIZA” tells a story simple

enough on the surface. A poor peasant girl is taken advantage of by a rich
aristocrat. Seduced and abandoned, Liza drowns herself. What complicates
Karamzin’s text, however, is the question of literacy. On one hand, “Poor
Liza” can be read as casting the blame for the tragedy on the hero’s way
with words, his knowledge of the conventions of artifice and fiction, and his
ability to see into the heart of the other. Yet on the other hand, the story is
most important as Russian literature’s own first overwhelmingly successful
fiction, a work conceived to advance its author’s program of demonstrating,
lauding, and teaching the literary arts to a populace that was largely indif-
ferent to artistic writing in those cases when it could read at all. The para-
dox of “Poor Liza,” then, is that of a story which tells us that imaginative and
verbal skills can link us with others—other individuals, other classes—like
never before, and yet simultaneously shows us almost the exact opposite.
The most famous words in “Poor Liza” do not refer to the heroine,
but they point directly at the author’s underlying project: “For peasant
women too know how to love,” the narrator comments in passing of Liza’s
mother (1:607).1 What made “Poor Liza” in 1792 the most powerful and pop-
ular work of high literature Russia had ever seen, and what earned it,
despite the existence of older pieces, the right to be considered the progen-
itor of modern Russian prose, was not just Karamzin’s undisputed talent but
also the sentimentalist’s assertion that reader and character—any reader
and any character—whatever their degree of social or personal difference,
might overcome their otherness imaginatively.2 Where previously Russian
literary heroes had been objects of reverence, censure, amusement, admi-
1
ration, or just plain wonderment, Karamzin opened immense new poten-

tials by inviting the reader to identify with his characters emotionally to an
extent never before contemplated. And if full identification was an impos-
sibility, since we can never experience others’ fates quite as our own, read-
ers could at least strive toward a new ideal, of envisioning someone else’s
narrative with nearly the same acuity and vividness that mark our own ex-
perience. For Karamzin asserts not that peasant women know how to love,
but that they know how to love too, that is to say, just as we do—not as us,
but at least entirely like us.
If Liza’s mother’s amorous abilities, though mentioned in the middle
of the text, provide a logical starting point for the narrative, then the true
ending point is likewise located in medias res, where its noncadential place-
ment may be taken as a sign of the story’s inability to reach any more sub-
stantial conclusion.3 Seeking causes for the aristocratic hero’s misuse of the
peasant heroine, Karamzin cites his protagonist’s fascination with the mis-
leading myth of the Golden Age, “that era, which either existed or did not,
in which, if we are to believe the poets” (1:610). What concerns us is not the
description of bucolic innocence that follows, but the ontological status of
the age itself.4 Is Karamzin asserting that it exists (or at least existed) in re-
ality, or on the contrary that it is merely a literary fancy? The reader might
be tempted, as Hammarberg is, to see in the critique of Erast’s reading
habits a demand that fictions not be mistaken for facts.5 If the Golden Age
did not exist, then it is merely a figment and should not be taken seriously.
Instead it should be dismissed as a pleasant diversion, that is, at bottom, a
lie. The conscientious reader, at this point, has no choice but to put down
the story he holds in his hands, for “Poor Liza” has then told us that all po-
etic fictions are harmful to the extent that they are not literally true. This
surely is not Karamzin’s purpose; indeed, his modern reputation as pro-
saicist and historian notwithstanding, he was himself a poet.
Rather, Karamzin holds to an aesthetic philosophy which problema-
tizes precisely the possibility of simple distinctions between art and reality
(or idylls and mundane rural life). As Lotman notes, Karamzin was com-
mitted to—and resoundingly successful in—propagating the aestheticiza-
tion of the self and a related remaking of his reader through fictional
means.6 There is thus no simple answer. If fiction and fact are so distinct,
why does Karamzin hesitate to condemn the myth, wavering, “which either
existed or did not”? On the other hand, if fictions do have a certain reality,
what is the difference between deleterious idylls and presumably beneficial
works such as “Poor Liza” that draw on their tradition? We should also take
note that by making the question of imagination central to the interrogation
of poverty, “Poor Liza” binds together two seemingly disparate concerns
whose relationship will remain in contention throughout all the subsequent
depictions of poverty we will examine.
2
For a story so widely considered hackneyed, “Poor Liza” is curiously

self-conscious and rich in paradoxes. Karamzin dramatizes the newly em-
phasized connection of the poor to the rest of society, in particular those
wealthy enough to have an education in the production and consumption of
literary fictions. The key question of linkage behind the plot is thus simul-
taneously the main focus of the plot, for the reader drawn nigh to the peas-
ant is mirrored in Erast’s sudden interest in Liza. In her misfortune, Liza
may touch the reader and the narrator, yet that misfortune occurs only be-
cause she touches Erast. In effect, the story discusses its own enterprise.
“Poor Liza” begins by trying to show us a commonality with the poor by
means of the sentimental process of shared emotion—emotion shared both
because we grant that our emotions can be a guide in understanding Liza’s,
and because her sensations then become, to some extent, our own—but it
ends by disproving the commonality we are coached to recognize and, re-
markably, casting the blame on the very skills we use in the process of sym-
pathizing. “The surprising effects of sympathy,” as Marivaux called them,
are catastrophic not only for the characters, but for the sympathetic project
itself (cited in Marshall, 1).7
Though Karamzin seems to perceive his text’s dilemma only vaguely,
the dramatization of our closeness to Liza in fact reveals an irremediable
distance. Rich and poor, it turns out, do not love in quite the same ways, and
sympathetic emotion proves unable to overcome the distinctions that sepa-
rate us. Indeed, what keeps rich and poor apart in “Poor Liza” is the ability
of the former to sympathize with the latter—not the ability to sympathize
badly, thinking only of themselves, but precisely the ability to sympathize
well, with genuine sensitivity to Liza’s perspective.
CROSSING THE BORDERS OF ALTERITY:

SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION IN LETTERS
OF A RUSSIAN TRAVELER
Sympathy is predicated on the ability to see other as self or self as other,
that is, to span the gap and disarm the difference.8 We will examine the re-
lationship of self and other in Karamzin’s narrative, taking the poor heroine
as the other and placing in the role of the self variously the aristocratic pro-
tagonist, the reader the text envisions, and its narrator. But we begin by
considering the relationship to the heroine of the historical Karamzin him-
self, a writer who in earlier works had already addressed a number of the
key questions that would arise in “Poor Liza.” Central among those earlier
works was Letters of a Russian Traveler, in which the author prepared the
later crossing of class borders by exploring the possibility of crossing na-
tional boundaries, trying out the passport of shared emotion to see how it
would work. The Letters allow us to trace the role in Karamzin’s thinking of
3
literacy, imagination, and the sentimental project of learning to see our-

selves in others.
In Letters of a Russian Traveler, his first major work, Karamzin un-
dertook to introduce European culture, conceived for the most part as the
culture of sentimentalism, to Russian readers. Karamzin’s project was in ef-
fect a voyage of discovery, meant to familiarize his audience with names and
places, the customs and practices of more civilized nations, and—through
the literary style of the letters themselves and the persona of the narrator—
with the ways of the sentimentalist. Travel had been a favorite medium of
the school since Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
(1768). But where Sterne’s Yorick had bragged of his indifference to the
typical travel sights of “pictures, statues, and churches” and concentrated
on eccentrically soulful conversation with kind strangers, Karamzin accom-
modates in the Letters both Sternian encounters and a more standard trav-
elogue (84). With occasional caveats, Karamzin presents Europe as a model
for the wholesale reshaping of Russian civilization. In particular, by promi-
nently displaying the sentimental mind-set, he labors to disseminate a new
ideal of the personality of the cultivated Russian.9
Karamzin recommends sentimental values to his reader both by ex-
ample and by direction.10 At one moment we find him hailing “the modesty
and high morals of women” (365), or a man who is “kind-hearted, tender
and humane,” at others deploring drunkenness, depravity, and violent emo-
tions (with the signal exception of suicidal despair)11 wherever he finds
them (181). Meanwhile, Karamzin’s precise attention to his own psycholog-
ical states breaks all precedents in Russian letters (Lotman and Uspenskii,
528). In a scene typical of many dozens of others, Karamzin means to im-
press his reader with his own emotional breadth when he abandons plans to
visit the royal residence at Hampstead in order to observe beggars in the
street, and feels not regret, but a kind of exultant humanity (“My day did
not go for naught: my heart was touched!” [362]). In effect, the narrator
demonstrates upon himself a technology for the cultivation of the senti-
ments, methods designed to place one in emotion-inducing situations com-
bined with examples of how to savor emotion, in order that the reader learn
to do the same.
Most centrally, Karamzin’s voyager demonstrates three institutions
which will prove vital in “Poor Liza”: imagination, self-presentation, and
the salon and its style of discourse. For Karamzin, sentimental culture finds
its microcosm in a kind of conversational encounter with its roots in the
eighteenth-century French salon, but modified to accept a wider circle of po-
tential interlocutors (Karamzin likes to stop to talk with the lower classes).12
Time and again, he enters into heartfelt conversation with anyone who is
polite, sharing and stirring sympathetic feeling in one-to-one exchanges.
For Karamzin, something important transpires whenever people take the
4
time to chat and share their views. Karamzinian “salon” culture in turn pre-
sumes a mastery of imagination and self-presentation, seemingly disparate
concepts which in fact are profoundly connected, as the congruity of the
Russian predstavlenie sebe (“imagination,” literally “representation to one-
self”) and predstavlenie sebia (“self-presentation,” literally “representation
of oneself”) suggests. On this topic Karamzin is more verbose than his men-
tor Sterne, for the Westernizing slant of the Letters urges the reader to con-
sciously remold his own behavior.
Following a practice Peter the Great had initiated, Karamzin portrays
the process of imagining oneself as European and then practicing acting
European as the path to becoming European.13 To be civilized, especially
for a Russian, means not doing what comes naturally; civilization is learned.
This is true even in the realm of language, where Karamzin developed a
consciously innovative vocabulary for his new sentimental needs (Lotman
and Uspenskii, 528, 588–605). Karamzin’s famous 1802 dictum that writers
should imitate the speech of society ladies admits that since society ladies
do not speak Russian, it is necessary for would-be authors to imagine the
Russian locutions that they would use.14 And, as Lotman emphasizes, the
sophisticated audience whom Karamzin was addressing in the Letters did
not yet exist—Karamzin’s first creative act in the work was to envision a
reader who could then be conjured into being (Sotvorenie, 230). In the ide-
ologically charged questions of language and personal comportment, then,
Karamzin’s civilizing reforms are predicated upon a mastery of the tool of
imagination.
Even apart from historical exigencies, Karamzin recommends self-
presentational and imaginative strategies as part of the behavioral reper-
toire of any polite and cultivated individual, Russian or otherwise. The
primordially literary skill of invention, of representing to the mind’s eye,
though certainly a universal phenomenon, ultimately acquires in the Letters
an unprecedented importance. Karamzin makes his point time and again,
as when he travels to Vevey and Clarens in order to conjure forth pictures
of Rousseau’s St. Preux and Julie in their “real” setting (149), or when the
glory of France and the beauty of the Saône inspire him to imagine France
in prehistoric times and envision the day when France, like pharaonic Egypt,
might one day be forgotten (212), or when an inscription on the coffin of
the duc de Rohan brings to life for him scenes from Rohan’s life, replete
with detailed speeches the duke and his son might well have made (179–
81). This constant replaying of acts of imagination underscores what is for
Karamzin a fundamental truth: that genuine insight into any phenomenon—
and therefore also into poverty—is predicated not so much on mental acu-
ity, experience, training, or research. Karamzin values an insight that springs
from an affective cognition on the part of the viewer. For Karamzin, the true
meanings of things must be felt.
5
Karamzin travels with books, sometimes ignoring a sight to read about

it instead; he plans his itinerary around visits to authors’ homes and hunts
down locales occurring in literary works; he judges Herder by his literary
tastes rather than his personality or appearance and characterizes him by a
quotation from the man’s works; he spins elaborate fantasies over pictur-
esque monuments and historic settings. At every stop, Karamzin experiences
a Europe overwritten with preexisting narratives and overwritable with freshly
composed ones. Karamzin’s West is itself already a fictional construct, a
place which by its very existence reminds visitors that imaginary geogra-
phies can furnish their visitors with eminently real experiences. Thus both
the essence of the mature cultures and the means of knowing them reside
in the exercise of the fantasy. And it falls to the responsibility of the senti-
mental gentleman to master the methods of this skill.
In European sentimentalism even before Karamzin, these partly self-
induced emotions are no mere trifles but the key to social existence and the
welfare of communal structures.15 Sentimentalism typically celebrates the
pleasures of collective concourse or the sufferings of the unfortunate. In ei-
ther guise, it finds itself discovering the joys and sorrows of attending to the
other. This indeed is perhaps the central point of divergence from roman-
ticism; in postsentimental literature emotion becomes more personal than
interpersonal, as a result tends to produce social fragmentation instead of
cohesion, and can lead as often to vice as to virtue. Philosophers close to
sentimentalism, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, believed that the
ability to imagine oneself in someone else’s shoes was a precondition for un-
derstanding others, which in turn is needed if a society is to hold together.
That such a theory of shared emotion was advanced by a writer like Smith,
better known for his theories of political economy, is significant, for as the
title of his treatise, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), suggests, Smith was
interested in precisely the ethical dimensions of emotion.16
Smith traces the morality of emotion back to the sentiment of sympa-
thy, which he derives from our imagination rather than our senses. His mas-
sive tract opens with the postulation:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some princi-
ples in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others. . . . Of this kind
is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others,
when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. . . .
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form
no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we
ourselves should feel in the like situation. (9)
For the thinkers around sentimentalism, then, other-directed emotion was

a key to the creation of both a just society and the humane individuals who
would populate it.17 Imagination and its correlates not only civilize us; they
6
guarantee our collective well-being. This will be Karamzin’s point of depar-

ture in “Poor Liza.”
If Karamzin perceives the first step toward civilization in the essen-
tially literary skill of imagination, then the second step, the mastery of self-
presentation, is prototypically theatrical. Just as a proper writing and speaking
style for Karamzin means the regular use of polite periphrasis instead of
direct and potentially indelicate locutions, so a proper persona is one care-
fully groomed and conscious that it is being presented for public consump-
tion. A civilized man never simply speaks his mind or voices his desires with
indifference to the effect he creates. Karamzin was so successful in pro-
moting his new vision of sophistication that his innovations spread and soon
lost all association with their introducer.18 By 1808, in the essay “The Writer
in Society,” Zhukovskii was treating as a universal standard this same Euro-
peanized behavior, or as he called it, “the art [iskusstvo] of pleasant comport-
ment” (4:394). For Zhukovskii as for Karamzin, the sentimental personality
is not the mere expression of some inner self. Nor is it a trained entity striv-
ing to live up to ethical demands. Rather it is an aesthetic object, a con-
glomeration of personality traits deliberately chosen and performed for the
admiration of an audience, in hopes of drawing others near through one’s
virtuous refined sensitivity.
Zhukovskii makes this goal, “to please one another mutually” (4:393),
into society’s guiding impulse, and describes the expected efforts of a soci-
ety man “to please always, in every place and in all things: through his ap-
pearance, dress, the eloquence of his speech, his face and movements”
(4:394). Sterne highlights this aestheticization of the human personality in
a description of French shopkeepers: “Like so many rough pebbles shook
long together in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their
asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth, but will
receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant” (54). In Zhukovskii’s words,
society becomes “a broad theater, where every person is at one and the
same time both actor and spectator” (4:394). This awareness of an audi-
ence, and the concomitant ability to play for one, are implicit in Karamzin’s
flattering outpourings of emotion to writers he admires.
Yet sentimental theatricality stumbles over the poor, for it never re-
solves how to accommodate them in its refined role-playing. Yorick’s treat-
ment of the monk he meets exemplifies the confusion. The monk begs
for alms, and Yorick refuses with rather unkind words. Despite pangs of
guilt, he makes no redress. But as soon as a gentlewoman appears, Yorick’s
theatrically aware conscience gets the better of him and he bestows on the
monk an expensive snuffbox. There is, then, an implicit eligibility require-
ment lurking under the surface of Zhukovskii’s “every person”: a highborn
lady constitutes an audience, while a poor monk alone does not. Yorick’s
doubling-back typifies sentimentalism’s broader awkwardness over the rela-
7
tionship between poverty and role-playing. Karamzin encounters the diffi-

culty head-on, for, unlike Sterne, he does not skirt the inclusiveness implied
by Smith’s stance, clearly hoping by his chats with poor people throughout
Europe to unite all classes if not politically, then at least in a mutual dia-
logue of caring.
Yet theatricality constitutes a peculiarly slippery ethical agent. Lotman
astutely calls attention to Karamzin’s unexpected preference when watch-
ing actors on the stage for naturalness and simplicity in the performance
(Sotvorenie, 223). The aesthetic and hence behavioral ideal expressed here,
however, is not so much naturalness in the sense of verisimilitude or ingen-
uousness, but rather the seamless merging of artifice and reality, in which
the exertions of art cease to be visible and become one with being. This
ideal is crucial to all of Karamzin’s aesthetic and ethical thought. The poem
“To the Poor Poet” declares baldly:
We are all, my friend, liars [lzhetsy]:

Whether simple folk or sages;
An impenetrable fog
Hides the truth from us.
He who can invent pleasantly,
In verse or prose—is blessed!
So long as it be believable.
What is a poet? An artful liar.
(Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 195)
The same aesthetic stands behind Karamzin’s recommendation that writers

create neologisms and new uses for existing terms; he urges the process be
carried out “so artfully [iskusno] as to deceive [obmanut’] readers and con-
ceal from them the unusualness of the expression” (2:185). Karamzin thus
distinguishes artifice that is effective from artifice that is clumsy. The effec-
tive kind is valuable precisely because it recasts the viewer’s perception of
reality; clumsy artifice, artifice that shows, remains mere deception. Cer-
tainly, any culture which ascribes semiotic value to personal comportment,
and all do, encourages self-control and conventionalized behavior of one
form or another. But with its precise regulation of grooming, speech, and
emotion, perhaps no other cultural moment so prized (proper) artifice as
tantamount to civilization.
The European standards the Letters commend, then, presume the
ability to tell narratives about others to oneself, and about oneself to others,
to present oneself under controlled guises, to seek the truth imaginatively,
to understand by feeling, and to conceive of earthly existence as a canvas for
human creativity. A passage provocatively placed at the culmination (in one
version)19 of the Letters encapsulates the expansive role sentimentalism
allots to imagination:
8
“Beautiful is only that which does not exist,” said J.-J. Rousseau. Well then, if
this beauty always eludes us like a passing shade, we at least try to capture it
by our imagination: we shall direct ourselves high above the clouds to the
heights of sweet fancy; we shall draw ourselves a beautiful ideal; we shall de-
ceive ourselves and deceive those who deserve to be deceived. (“Letter to the
Spectateur,” 441)
For Karamzin, it is a great gap that imagination must span between a real-
ity perceived as vastly deficient and still-to-be-realized ideals of personal,
emotional, linguistic, and national refinement. Yet as a principle for the new
and humane Russian gentleman, this is an aesthetic which shares a precar-
ious border with callous manipulation and falsity. If nothing else, one won-
ders what disunifying force—similar to the one we saw in Zhukovskii—lies
ready to challenge Karamzin’s goal of national integration. For the words
“those who deserve to be deceived” hint at an awareness of questions that
will prove more troublesome in “Poor Liza.” Who deserves to be deceived?
What if the power to deceive should fall into the hands of the undeserving?
And what happens when innocents wander onto the stage of this theater of
the imagination?
In the Letters, Karamzin records a telling moment of doubt, brief but
articulated by a voice which would not have been admitted into Zhukov-
skii’s “broad theater.” While seeking out the proper village in which to un-
leash his imagination on the theme of Julie and St. Preux, Karamzin asks
directions from a peasant. “The laboring villager [poselianin], seeing there
a curious stranger, says to him with a smirk: The gentleman has of course
read The New Heloïse?” (152). This comment comes from the social class
that sentimentalists worked so hard to bring into the fold of national culture—
Poor Liza’s father is also described as a hard-working “poselianin” (1:607).
Yet in the Swiss peasant’s slightly mocking response we for once have an
emotion that is not meant to be shared, an ironic solo laughter reinforcing
social alienation rather than bridging it. It provides another suggestion that
Karamzin’s drive for inclusiveness had yet to come to terms with those it
would include, and that the sticking point was precisely imagination. The
possibility that a powerful literate fantasy might not necessarily be the uni-
versal good Karamzin had originally supposed eventually took on the pro-
portions of a full narrative as “Poor Liza.”
“POOR LIZA”: POVERTY AS APHRODISIAC

Poor Liza’s defining characteristic is poverty. As a result, any interpretation
of the story must begin with the vexed question of the title’s first word. The
story is largely predicated on a pun in this constant epithet. On first read-
ing, the meaning of “poor” seems to rest on money and Liza’s lack of it. If
there is any pathos of unfairness, it comes from the implication that Erast
9
can take advantage of Liza because he has an unfair advantage, like the
ruble he casually offers her for her flowers instead of the five kopecks she
asks. Even Simonov Monastery, the monument in reference to which Ka-
ramzin locates Liza’s home, sports a name which evokes the abuse of money
for the attainment of favors, simony.20 Between the monastery, the title, and
the large sums of money Erast gives Liza to meet her at the start and dis-
miss her in the end, Liza’s existence is framed by questions of economics.
However, what might seem an early conception of the poor enmeshed
in a wider net of social causality, the conception that so powerfully shaped
the later nineteenth century’s thinking about class, is belied by the text’s
peculiar anxiety over social categories. From the start, Karamzin supplies
alternate motivations for Liza’s naïveté and defenselessness, such as her
young age, seventeen. (Liza’s mother, herself a peasant, is explicitly on guard
against the dangers of youthful love.) Liza’s poverty too is strangely personal
rather than class-motivated. Certainly the plot mechanism turns on need—
Liza meets Erast because she goes to Moscow to sell her flowers on the
street—but this chain of events is only set in motion by the death of her
father. “Liza’s father was a rather prosperous villager, for he liked work,
ploughed the earth well, and always led a sober life. But soon after his
death, his wife and daughter found themselves growing poor” (1:607). If
Liza is at a disadvantage, then, it is through bad luck, not class. She might
well, Karamzin implies, have grown into the woman her mother must have
been before her husband’s death: reasonably well-off, mature, happily mar-
ried, and secure.
Karamzin’s obfuscation of the economic issues is clearly deliberate. As
Piksanov notes, Erast’s initial encounter with Liza replays scenes from Alek-
sandr Radishchev’s Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow which paint aris-
tocratic lust and financial seduction in horrifying colors (317–21).21
Karamzin restages the episode so as to remove the justification for reformist
outrage that Radishchev was eager to inspire. To the eternal question of
whether sorry fates are the fault of social institutions or the people who carry
them out, Karamzin gives the same answer Empress Catherine repeatedly
gave in her sallies against the satirical journals of Novikov: public ills in Rus-
sia stem from individuals, not the existing social order. “Poor Liza” excuses
political conditions in Russia by allotting them no direct role in the plot.
Erast too largely escapes censure, for, though responsible, he is clearly nei-
ther malicious nor even insensitive. Even money hardly matters; Erast tries
to spend his way into Liza’s heart, but she steadfastly refuses to accept
money except in fair exchange and does not admire him for generosity. The
tender tears of sentimentalism, Karamzin clearly believes, flow freely only
when blame is difficult to assign and recurrences hard to prevent. The drama
thus becomes primarily metaphysical, reflecting failings of human nature
that are beyond obvious remedy. But the question naturally arises, if
10
Karamzin wants to neutralize the class question, then why make Liza a
peasant at all?
By the end of the story it is clear the title’s first word refers most im-
portant to Liza’s abandonment and her suicide. “Poor” meant unfortunate,
pitiful. Yet Liza nonetheless remains a peasant, and the narrative would not
work without the class difference between the protagonists. Karamzin seems
to want us to feel Liza’s fate is not produced by financial forces, but is re-
lated to them by some obscured inner logic, a logic he discourages us from
following by the shell game he plays with social causality. As with the myth
of the Golden Age, so with socioeconomic factors: they both are and are not
responsible for Liza’s demise. Karamzin would rather that we pondered our
emotions and not the reasons that produce them. We will resist him, not
in order to rehash Soviet critiques of the feeble political awareness of
“upper-class sentimentalism,” but for precisely the opposite reason, because
shell games require of their practitioners close attention to what is really
going on.22
“Poor” thus both is and is not an economic designation. This remains—
for now—the unresolved pun of the title. But if puns are a form of dis-
sembling, then we must ask, who is deceiving whom? As Liza presciently
inquires of Erast: “Could you really deceive poor Liza?” (1:612). Here we
have the wordplay in all its complexity, for what is Liza thinking in calling
herself “poor”? Liza can only have in mind her economic status, since she
considers meeting Erast the best of fortunes. To be sure, she too seems to
consider her socioeconomic inferiority a form of peril—this is why she asks
her peculiar question—but she cannot quite grasp the connection. But the
pun is obvious to anyone literate; the reader knows that Liza’s choice of
terms corresponds to the story’s title and has a resonance that Liza cannot
possibly suspect and that we readers, informed at the outset that the story
would be “lamentable,” cannot possibly miss (1:606). This parallax vision,
where wordplay makes us see something different than Liza does, distances
us from her just when we are enjoined to come closer. And curiously, the
culprit is another side of that same power of literacy invoked to bridge the
gap in the first place. This paradox points mutely at a third sense of “poor”
in “Poor Liza,” the missing link between economics and sad fates, which
will eventually explain why financial questions are important in the story
even though Erast’s money is not.
If Karamzin obfuscates the status of the idyll, it is because he must,
for he still subscribes to its key conventions.23 As perhaps the only genres
with topographical stipulations, the pastoral genres (idyll, eclogue, georgic)
mark the bucolic milieu for its difference from the more familiar city. The
countryside is only tranquil and harmonious in juxtaposition to urban noise,
the overcrowded city’s contrasts and chaos. The retreat to a country estate,
the depiction of pipe-playing shepherds, the metaphysical appreciation of
11
nature, all acquire idyllic value only because they offer respite from the
city’s more pressing claims on consciousness. Rest is only rest, after all, to
the weary; to the refreshed it is simply inactivity. The pastoral setting, in
other words, is defined not by what it is but by what it is not, as an image of
otherness.24 The interloper in the countryside thus takes on the status of
Foucault’s self-eliding observer: the point of reference and principle of or-
ganization outside the frame of the picture.25
This dynamic grows especially problematic when crossed with a sec-
ond assumption Karamzin makes, that rural poverty is above all a form of
innocence, a lack of knowledge about the ways of the world. An anonymous
essay of 1795, “On the Character of the Idyll,” argues, “Innocent pastoral
love must be free from all the vices which are caused by the corruption of
the city.”26 Sumarokov had urged the aspiring idyll-writer a half century ear-
lier, “Give me to feel your shepherd’s simplicity / And to forget all earthly
travails.”27 Karamzin likewise portrays a poor countryside unspoiled and
pure by comparison with the city. Yet the price of purity is ignorance. The
truly innocent—by definition—must be not merely free of vice, but unable
to adequately conceive of it. With no knowledge of corruption, they lose the
power to comprehend the very purity they embody—for them, it has no vis-
ible contours; it is simply everything. This is the eternal conceptual diffi-
culty that arises with naïveté. Knowing, understanding, being able to situate
and articulate the delights of the country—at least as the idyll understands
them—is given only to those who know what it means to be separated from
them.28 The innocent of course speak of their own existence in any way they
like, but never as innocence. For to be able to define innocence is to know
something of what it is not, and to know anything more than innocence is
to possess experience and so to be tainted.
If into this scenario we inject sympathy, a drawing together of what
had been separate, we have a recipe for disaster. For when innocence and
experience meet on common ground, the name of that ground can only be
experience. If we are drawn to Liza for her purity and simplicity, we must
keep our distance, or we will compromise precisely what we value in her.
(This is the same dilemma that Tolstoy illustrates in his Cossacks, whose in-
ept hero dreams of meeting a wild, untamed—and poor—Circassian lass
and teaching her French.) That in this scenario we—narrator and readers—
are clearly presumed to be city-dwellers ourselves, not just as historical ac-
cident but as generic necessity, is evident from the story’s opening sentence:
“Perhaps none of Moscow’s inhabitants knows the city’s outskirts as well as
I, for none more often than I takes to the fields, nor wanders on foot, with-
out plan and without goal” (1:605). By clothing poverty in the garb of inno-
cence, however, Karamzin poses us all a difficult riddle: on what territory
and on what terms can we meet the poor without destroying them? Will not
our own very proximity poison what we came to admire? And all the dan-
12
ger, it should be noted, emanates from a sympathy that would genuinely

share with the other as in true love. The shallower sympathy that holds it-
self apart is, for once, no threat.
The territory Karamzin proposes for this encounter is the outskirts of
Moscow, a liminal ground between city and country and not incidentally be-
tween classes. Yet he opens with an introduction that seems to demonstrate
that in such a place, suffering and doom are by definition inevitable. In a
departure from their generic predecessors, the story’s shepherds sing
mournful songs. They are seconded by others: a monk incarcerated in his
monastery, another at the moment of death, hard-working fishermen, boats
plying the river to feed “ravenous” Moscow, the immense fields worked
by invisible laborers (1:605). Even historical Muscovy is present, also in the
capacity of victim, evoked in the narrator’s mind by pictures on the church
gates:
All this brings to life in my memory the history of our fatherland—the sad
story of those times when the ferocious Tatars and Lithuanians laid waste the
outskirts of the Russian capital with fire and with sword, and when unfortu-
nate Moscow, like a defenseless widow, could hope for succor from God
alone in the midst of her cruel sufferings [bedstviia]. (1:606)
Strangely enough, what holds all the victims in thralldom to misfor-

tune is in a sense the observer elided from the picture, the narrator himself.
For the narrator represents the city which condemns the serfs of the coun-
tryside to their picturesque labor; he supports a secular Westernizing proj-
ect that threatens to reduce all monasteries to figurative rubble; and he stands
for a modernizing impulse that endangers the national past. When the in-
troduction closes with the programmatic statement, “Ah, I love those things
which touch my heart and beg me shed tears of tender sorrow,” Karamzin
might as well speak his meaning openly: these are those we love—and destroy
(1:607). We must thus wonder if the narrator bears responsibility, in some
similar sense, for Liza’s demise.
In this liminal zone Liza represents the entire world beyond, a more
genuinely Russian Russia where the innovations of Karamzin’s Letters had
yet to penetrate. Looking back from the outskirts the narrator muses:
Standing on this hill, you can see on the right almost all of Moscow, that
frightful mass of buildings and churches which presents itself to the eye in
the form of a magnificent amphitheater: wondrous sight, especially when lit
by the sun, or when the evening rays are blazing on the innumerable golden
cupolas. . . . (1:605, italics in original)
The choice of a verb to denote how the city “presents itself to the eye [pred-
stavliaetsia glazam]” alerts us that Karamzin has decided to revisit the ques-
tion of predstavlenie which was central to the Letters; this time, the city is
13
depicting itself to the country. The European facility for theatrical self-
presentation, acting and deceiving, is further underscored when the narra-
tor casts Moscow as a magnificent amphitheater, since if the city is defined
as a place to sit and watch—as in the idyll, invisibly—then the surrounding
countryside by extension must be the stage. Here again we confront the
class exclusivity of Zhukovskii’s shared theater, for this is a stage on which
some of the participants, in their innocence, are not equipped to perceive
role-plays until it is too late. Meanwhile, Karamzin’s aristocratic hero, Erast,
wearied by society and seeking a change of scenery, is poised to make full
use of the prerogatives of the stage because, like a proper sentimentalist,
he possesses the actor’s talents of self-reinvention and self-presentation.
He has, in other words, tired of “society amusements,” but not the social
arts (1:610).29
In “The Improvisation of Power,” Stephen Greenblatt describes the
dark side of sympathetic imagination, arguing that an act normally con-
strued as generous and kind can just as well be turned to manipulative ends.
Greenblatt cites Shakespeare’s Iago and a historical account of Europeans
duping a tribe in the New World to suggest that the profounder forms of
deception require the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and see the
world through his eyes. Greenblatt’s skill of “improvisation,” as he calls it,
hardly characterizes the essentially decent Erast, but it does suggest some-
thing of the danger that faces Liza. At the same time, Karamzin gives us a
disaster caused by no sinister motives, and paradoxically therefore still more
troubling.
The plot turns on Erast’s ability to manipulate his own image in Liza’s
eyes—to represent and represent himself like Zhukovskii’s refined gentle-
man. When Liza first sees him he is “a well dressed man of pleasant ap-
pearance [priiatnogo vida]” (1:608). When he next appears, this time to Liza’s
mother though with Liza too looking on, “The young man bowed to her so
courteously, with such a pleasing appearance [s takim priiatnym vidom],
that she could think of him nothing but good” (1:609). At his third appear-
ance, he “glanced at her with a tender look [s vidom laskovym]” (1:612, ital-
ics in original). When early on Liza’s mother becomes worried by the tale
of the unknown man who offers much too much for Liza’s flowers and sug-
gests, “Perhaps that was some bad man,” Liza responds, “Oh no, Mother
dearest. . . . He has such a kind face, such a voice” (1:608). Liza is taken in
because she does not know that precisely face and voice are the actor’s
tools. With his mastery of vidy, Erast easily deceives Liza, telling her he will
always love her but leaving her.
Liza, on the other hand, is endangered because she remains untutored
in the new foreign behavior made possible when imagination and its corol-
laries are internalized. It is Liza’s own essence which betrays her. Always
naively truthful, she has not learned that character can be modified and
14
deliberately presented. Liza does not represent herself in any way; she sim-
ply is. All of her character appears on the surface and is as it seems. Her
cultural education is a native Russian one; it does not teach the conventions
of the stage. This national tradition produces great beauties like Liza,
whose chief attractive feature—her utter simplicity—is precisely her peril.
As we saw in Europe, border-crossing offers the possibility of unusual
experiences and renewed emotions, easy stimulation though not always of
great depth. Such are Erast’s feelings. Liza’s appeal is the rustic and finan-
cial difference that gives her a piquancy society beauties lack. Erast makes
this explicit when he formulates his choice of Liza as a choice of “nature”
over “high society” (1:611). At the same time, Erast has his narrator’s lim-
ited interest in actually exploring the otherness of the other. Poverty, bucolic
life, the complexities of Liza’s character Erast largely ignores, contenting
himself with calling her (incorrectly) a “shepherdess” (1:614). Liza falls only
too easily into Erast’s preconceived literary categories. Illiterate in the
proper sense and as a consequence unaware that personalities can be “au-
thored,” Liza’s own “human document,” to appropriate Ginzburg’s phrase,
is a blank page, and it is this blankness that allows others to write on it.30
It is important to note, however, that Liza faces danger only in the in-
between zone where European manners and uninitiated Russian innocents
meet. Deep in the countryside away from the city, where native Russian
mores would hold full sway, Liza would certainly be safer, if only because
Erast and Liza could find for their meetings no neutral ground away from
prying eyes and defined social roles.31 At the same time, it is not the city per
se that is dangerous. In Moscow the threat of misleading vidy is neutralized
by the presence of the rest of the audience—viewers of Erast’s play who are
no less sophisticated than he. As Erast asks Liza where she lives, “Passersby
began to stop and look at them, laughing slyly” (1:608). Exactly what the ut-
terers of this ambiguous laughter are thinking we never learn, but their
skepticism about Erast’s sympathetic undertaking must trouble us, espe-
cially if we allow that Erast is acting without malevolent motives. Like the
snicker emitted by the peasant Karamzin had met on the trail of Rousseau,
this laughter acknowledges that not everyone can be convinced the artifice
of predstavlenie is not just another lie.
Since the Karamzinian gentleman is expected to know his culture’s standard

narratives, it is worth recalling how prominently encounters with poor girls
figure in the sentimental ethos. When Karamzin meets the maidservant
Sophie during his sojourn in London, some of his favorite things—tasteful
polite conversation, charm, innocence, youth, poverty, and feminine beauty—
come together to produce a revealing exchange. With the best of intentions
but a profligate’s eye, he notes that his usual girl, Jenny, “who, to be honest,
is not especially good-looking,” takes Sunday off and is replaced by a “lovely
15
lass of seventeen” (370). Karamzin soon finds that communication across

national and class lines is facilitated by the company of a pretty and modest
young girl, despite her evident uneagerness to speak back. As delight loosens
his tongue, “To my amazement, English phrases presented themselves to
me of their own accord, and could I converse every day with the lovely
Sophie, in a month’s time I should begin to speak like—an Orator in Parlia-
ment!” (370). Symbolically, Karamzin concedes that sentimentalism finds
its voice in the presence of an attractive young woman waiting to be taken
advantage of.32 In the end, after much cajoling, Sophie agrees to drink tea
with the gentleman, but refuses to sit down and continues to blush.
Karamzin is fortunate to have happened upon so virtuous a compan-
ion, for a similar meeting nearly undoes Parson Yorick. In the chapter “The
Temptation,” Sterne’s hero gets to know a chambermaid who, though she
blushes, does agree to sit. Since there is nowhere else, they sit on his bed.
She obviously has no intention of leaving, their hands touch, and Yorick
struggles to resist, well aware that “the devil was in me” (92). Soon he is
helping her do the buckles of her shoes and accidentally upends her. At the
last second he finds the force to conquer his lust. But his triumph is tem-
pered by a lament for love: “If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that
some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece—must the
whole web be rent in drawing them out?—Whip me such stoics, great gov-
erner of nature!” (94).
Poverty and money are vital features in the background of each of
these three scenes. Yorick meets the chambermaid by giving her a coin as a
pretext to start a conversation. Erast and Liza meet when he buys her flow-
ers. And Sophie appears instead of the usual Jenny apparently because she
wants to “save up a few guineas to go back home to County Kent to see her
aging father who is in great need” (370). Lest we conclude that Yorick once
and for all reins in his libido, we must remember that the work suggests he
is not telling all, both at its beginning, where the title promises travels to a
second country never visited, and at its abrupt end, where, as he wanders
through a dark, shared bedroom (125):
So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s
END OF VOL. II
The narration proper cuts off when the limits of modesty are reached, but
the momentum of the events clearly continues forward.
Thus if the main theme of Sterne’s travels is “the connection between
sexual attraction and the finer feelings in man and woman,” Karamzin with
his fondness for modesty faces a precarious bind (Jack, xx). For sentimen-
talism is all about toying with the bounds of illicit sex, especially with a poor
girl, whether this leads to rape (as in Richardson’s Clarissa), incest (as in
16
Karamzin’s own “Bornholm Island”), or the parson’s coy refusal to tell all in
Sterne. Sentimentalism presumes to believe that between pleasant attrac-
tion and dangerous passion stands a clear border reliably patrolled by social
or personal restraint, but always finds itself ineluctably drawn to cross that
line for a glimpse of what lies on the other side. Hence Erast’s seduction of
Liza comes with the finest of sentimental pedigrees. Blagoi considers “Poor
Liza” to follow “one of the most characteristic plot schemes in sentimental-
ism” (532). But the widespread story of the seduced and abandoned poor
girl—what Blagoi has in mind—reflects urges and interests sentimental
writers share every bit as much as their villains.
IMAGINING THE POOR TO DEATH

The defining moment of “Poor Liza” is the heroine’s suicide. As Karamzin’s
own reaction to the French abbot’s suicide in the Letters suggests, there are
inevitable questions. Why? What caused the disaster? Certainly, as has been
pointed out, ethical questions remain secondary in Karamzinian sentimen-
talism since it is the writer’s more urgent goal to affect his reader than to
analyze the ways in which Erast errs.33 Nonetheless ethical issues always
loom over sentimental works due to their fascination with spectacles of
innocence wronged, what Brissenden’s book title calls “virtue in distress.”
The blame in “Poor Liza” falls on her aristocratic seducer, Erast. When Erast
finally orders Liza to be escorted from his courtyard, the narrator exclaims,
“My heart bleeds at this moment. I forget the man in Erast—am ready to
curse him—but my tongue will not move—I look heavenward and a tear
runs down my face” (1:619). However, since Erast errs originally by loving
Liza—as we are all adjured to do—the narrator walks a fine line in distin-
guishing virtuous behavior from vice. For what specifically, then, does Ka-
ramzin condemn his hero?
Tolstoy once observed, with evident frustration, that simplicity was
the most difficult effect to achieve in writing; sometimes the smooth sur-
faces of the plainest narratives conceal the most. Karamzin has in fact been
exceptionally precise in compiling Erast’s moral ledger. Let us consider the
most persuasive arguments that are usually advanced against Erast. One
might, first of all, perceive Karamzin to censure his hero for not controlling
his emotions:
“I shall live with Liza as brother with sister (thought he); shall not misuse her
love and will be forever happy!”—Unthinking young man! do you know your
own heart? Can you answer for your actions always? Is your reason master of
your feelings at all times? (1:614)
Karamzin’s apparent proponency of rationality, however, should not be

taken too seriously. It disappears from the text as quickly as it cropped up,
17
and more fundamentally, cuts against the grain of almost all brands of sen-
timentalism, which, in their commitment to loosening the inhibitors of
emotion, decline the long labor that would be needed to draw up limits
upon the freedoms they are busy introducing. Sterne has already alerted us
that sentimental “kindness” is interwoven with “threads of love and desire,”
and gone on to castigate, not the unrestrained, but those with cold hearts
which know no temptation. (At seventeen, it should be noted, Liza is exactly
the same age as the attractive Sophie whom Karamzin clearly hankers after.)
And in any case, sexual love is a less violent emotion than the suicidal despair
(a grave sin in Orthodoxy, after all) for which Karamzin clearly forgives Liza.
Nor can Erast be faulted for abusing a financial advantage that offers
no sway over Liza. Indeed, if wealth claims a victim in “Poor Liza” it is
rather Erast himself, who, having gambled away his fortune in the army is
finally obliged to marry a rich widow he does not love. (For the aristocrat,
poverty of the self is no aphrodisiac.) Nor does the hero directly lie (“And
so, did Erast deceive Liza, telling her he was going to join the army?—
No . . .” [619]). And one must wonder whether he is to be taken to task, ulti-
mately, for leaving Liza; it is hard to imagine Karamzin advocating aristocrat-
peasant marriages.
On another front, Erast’s ostensibly simplistic ideas of rural innocence
Karamzin traces back, scoldingly in some critics’ eyes, to “novels and idylls”
(1:610). But as we saw at the outset, Karamzin is in fact deeply ambivalent
about this point—and with good reason. Idylls, as fictions, may be false, but
they are not inherently more so than other cultural constructs, including re-
fashioned national identities. And if idylls are to blame, then one of the
writers responsible for misleading Erast is Karamzin himself. Consider his
1798 poem “Proteus”:
Then [the poet] together with Gessner summons

The people from the cities’ din into the fields
“Abandon your abode of tedious languor, says he,
Where all consists in pretence [pritvorstvo];
Where one finds only the false appearance [lozhnyi vid]
Of solace and amusement. Under modest Nature’s canopy
The sweet world of the soul resides alongside merriment;
There happiness blooms in the lea with violets
And peers into the stream with a beautiful shepherdess.”
This could be Erast’s credo, and since “Proteus” is a defense of the poetic
art, Erast can hardly be blamed: he too flees the pritvorstvo and lozhnyi vid
of the city, sits with his “shepherdess” at the edge of a river, and spins for
himself alternative literary fantasies. If Erast’s inventions have a troubling
kinship to the “pretence” and “false appearances” he wishes to leave behind
18
in the city, this is an unfortunate but inalienable quality of all fiction, from
which “Poor Liza” knows of no escape.
“Poor Liza” is a complex and ambiguous story, its equivocality deriv-
ing above all from the fact that Erast’s actions cleave so closely to the aes-
thetic and behavioral models Karamzin himself touts in the Letters. Erast is
characterized—commentators often say criticized—by the narrator as “a
fairly wealthy nobleman with considerable intelligence and a kind heart
which was naturally good, though weak and frivolous” (1:610). In the end,
Erast indeed proves to be changeable and self-indulgent. Yet if we are to
believe Karamzin, these are minor flaws, incommensurate with the disaster
they are yoked to, and rather charming in their own way. A crucial passage
in the Letters proclaims the French the most civilized people on earth,
Karamzin’s favorite nation other than his own; if he could not be a Russian,
he says, he would choose to be a Frenchman:
None but he can win over a person with a single glance [vid], a single cour-
teous smile. . . . The frivolity and inconstancy which constitute the flaw in his
nature are found in him conjoined with amiable qualities of the soul deriving
in some sense from these very same vices. The Frenchman is changeable. . . .
From frivolity he may abandon the good and prefer the bad: but in compen-
sation . . . he sheds tears if need be. A cheerful carelessness is the sweet com-
panion of his life. (320–21; italics in original)
This description perfectly captures Erast’s character as well, from his con-
trol over vidy and his “cheerful carelessness” to his willingness to weep over
Liza’s demise.34 That these are the qualities of an innately artistic nation is
clear from the context, where Karamzin is citing amusing quirks of French
behavior which almost all relate to art. The French conduct “debates over
the ancient and the new Literature” (319) and dispute whether Gluck’s
school of opera surpasses Puccini’s; indeed, the French nation has brought
to its acme the “art of communal life” (320). The French thus are commit-
ted through and through to a refined creativity, even ordinary Frenchmen
merely engaged in conversation.35
The seemingly harsher characterization of Erast echoes the admission
in mid-paragraph that the Frenchman’s greatest virtues are simultaneously
his worst flaws. For the French above all personify artifice in action, delight-
ing with smile and appearance, winning hearts with ease, and knowing no
restraint except in retrospect, and their example, for better and for worse,
stands at the heart of Karamzin’s sentimental project. The question he is
wholly unable to answer, however, is how to separate the shortcomings of
this artistic personality from its positive qualities. Karamzin’s concept of what
it means to be civilized harbors a lasting tension, for in it proper personal
comportment, the capacity to create and read literary fabrications as what
they are, and the ability to lie are precariously confederated.36
19
For those who have not read Karamzin’s Letters, “Poor Liza” curi-
ously enough recreates all of the same remarkable self-contradictions itself,
merely in less detail. Now Erast mirrors not the ideal Frenchman, but his
own narrator. The extended introduction of “Poor Liza” has been nearly
universally treated by critics as an “overture,” as Gukovskii and Hammar-
berg call it in echo of Sipovskii, designed to set the mood for what follows.37
But in fact the narrator’s demonstration of his own imagination at work pro-
vides a point of comparison by which to judge Erast. Karamzin apparently
means his narrator as a counterexample to his hero, though the distinction
proves hard to locate in the end. The narrator recommends traveling to the
countryside, observing arresting sights, and using them as fodder for touch-
ing stories one tells to oneself, impromptu narratives for self-consumption.
As we have seen, fantasy is focused upon the poor other—other in class, es-
tate, or historical era—whose poverty, like Liza’s, or misfortune, like the
monks’ or medieval Moscow’s, provides rich narrative potentials. Imagina-
tion here functions very much as in the Letters except that the otherness
comes now not from prosperous and advanced Europeans but native Rus-
sians, and, for reasons to be considered in more detail in chapter 5, their
stories always end sadly. The narrator dreams for himself, as one example,
monks who could have lived in the ruined monastery and various ways in
which they might have suffered: “Sometimes I enter the monks’ cells and
imagine those who lived in them—sad pictures [kartiny]!” (1:606). He does
the same with the Russian past: “Other times, on the temple gates I con-
template depictions of miracles which occurred in the monastery—there
fish fall from heaven to feed inhabitants besieged by multitudinous foes;
here the icon of the Virgin turns the enemy to flight” (1:606). Again imagi-
nation takes precedence over observation, discrimination, or knowledge.
One might be tempted to conclude that the narrator attributes his
moral superiority over Erast to never entering into contact that goes beyond
the imagination; he envisions monks, for instance, but does not meet them.
Yet this is belied by Karamzin’s explicit rejection of the attractions of soli-
tude that sentimentalists sometimes embraced (Brissenden, 67–70). As he
noted in “Thoughts on Solitude” (1802), “The heart . . . is formed to feel
along with others and to take pleasure from their pleasure. Retiring from
society, it dries up, like a plant deprived of the life-giving influence of the
sun. . . . The life of the heart is love, desire, hope, the object of which can
be found only in society” (Izbrannye, 2:181).38 Further, this interpretation
contradicts the entire methodology of the Letters, with its actual visit to Eu-
rope and its dozens of chance encounters and numerous intentional calls at
the houses of Kant, Wieland, Lavater, and so on.39
Hammarberg offers perhaps the only other plausible critique of Erast
in a related reading: “While Erast tries to transform art into life, the narra-
20
tor transforms life into art” (158). Karamzin’s ideal, then, would be to rigidly
distinguish the imaginational from the actual, enjoying each for what it is,
but not confusing the two ontologically. Yet such a reading vastly under-
estimates the sentimental project’s very serious goals and its use of aesthetic
processes to understand, refine, and shape reality in pursuing them. If art
cannot in the end be transformed into life, both the nation-refashioning in-
tentions of the Letters and the class-uniting goals of “Poor Liza” are doomed
to fail. Even the examples to hand do not accord. The narrator’s imagined
monks are not life transformed into art, but pure inventions, manifestly at
odds with what is known about medieval Russian religious life, and the tears
they elicit from him are real-life consequences of a fiction. To be sure,
Karamzin does not collapse fact and fancy into simple equivalence, for then
he would erase the boundary whose crossing is art’s task. Rather, the point
in Karamzin generally is to learn to make imagined ideals real—to over-
come the distinction in this sense. As the writer’s admiration for the seam-
less merger of artifice and reality suggests, the distinction between the two
is not inviolable; precisely its skillful violation is the measure of good art.
Liza, however, suffers greatly because she lacks the developed Euro-
pean imagination Erast wields. Karamzin is exact in recording the degree to
which each character understands the literary skills of imagination, dissem-
bling, and self-presentation. Liza, it should be noted, is not entirely devoid
of such abilities: for Karamzin, they are so fundamental to human nature
that even the naivest innocent has rudimentary knowledge of them. As she
muses one day over the social distance that makes her lasting union with
Erast impossible, Liza too follows the narrator’s prescription: she begins with
rural sights—a passing shepherd—and superimposes her own desires, and
in the process generates a story in which she is easily able to detain and
seduce Erast-as-shepherd. Liza’s problem is that she cannot imagine her
fiction into life, cannot divine how to make fiction and reality merge seam-
lessly—or even clumsily.
A young shepherd drove his flock along the river bank playing on his pipe.
Liza directed her gaze at him and thought: “If he who now occupies my
thoughts had been born a simple peasant or a shepherd . . . oh! I would bow
to him with a smile and say welcomingly: ‘Hello, kind shepherd! Where are
you driving your flock?’ ” (1:611)
But when she abandons her reverie with the sigh, “A dream!,” Liza reveals
that she believes the border between imagination and reality to be absolute
(1:611). Unlike her “sister” Dunia in “The Stationmaster,” one of Push-
kin’s rewritings of “Poor Liza,” Karamzin’s heroine literally cannot conceive
any possible narratives that would end with her joined with an aristocratic
beloved.
21
The facility for inventing literary narratives, which like all fictions par-
take of both truth and falsehood, stands squarely behind the paradox of
“Poor Liza.” Erast
had a quite lively imagination and often mentally transported himself to that
era, which either existed or did not, in which, if we are to believe the poets,
all people wandered through the meadows without a care, bathed in pure
springs, kissed like turtledoves, rested beneath roses and myrtles and passed
all their days in happy idleness. It seemed to him that he had found in Liza
what his heart had long sought. (1:610–11)
With the predilection for journeys implied by “transported himself,” with

his active imagination and his liking for literature, Erast simply embodies
the skills Karamzin has asked his nation to master.40 That this paragraph is
usually considered another impeachment of the story’s hero illustrates how
ambivalent “Poor Liza” is about literary fictions, and thus about itself.
Karamzin wavers over the status of idylls and literary inventions generally
because he recognizes their dangers, but knows of no solution to them.41 In-
deed, at this very moment, in Karamzin’s own dismissal of fictions, which is
of course only apparent, the indefatigable artifice of art is again at work,
meant to register in the reader’s mind but not be detected as artifice.
Orlov cannot bring himself to approve of Erast—“In his behavior
throughout one senses something duplicitous, evasive, never quite articu-
lated, and in the end—morally impure”—but the “something” is nothing if
not art, Orlov’s accusation being the eternal claim of art’s enemies (213).
Erast’s dubious reading list prominently features the name of his creator.
Erast may be guilty of inconstancy in his affections, but the narrator finds
such roving desire laudable, bragging of his strolls, “Each summer I find
new pleasant places” (1:605). Passersby may laugh when Erast asks where
Liza lives, but the narrator chooses to begin the tale with a description, as
exact as any address, of the location of Liza’s hut.42 Above all, Erast’s method
may be the willful imposition of literary techniques on the resistant mate-
rial of real life, using the poor for the creation of convenient fictions, but
this is precisely what the narrator has recommended, in painstaking and
elaborate detail. At what might be presumed to be the story’s turning point,
Erast does mislead Liza with a statement that is not dishonest but is am-
biguous. She laments that they cannot marry because she is a peasant, and
he responds, “You offend me. For your friend the most important thing is
the soul, a sensitive soul, an innocent soul—and Liza will always be the clos-
est to my heart” (1:615). Erast answers touchingly, but manages to avoid
saying anything specific about marriage. Yet such equivocation is the tech-
nique of the narrator himself, who passes over the most important question
he is called on to address, about the status of the fictional truths that are the
root of the catastrophe, with the same easy ambiguity.
22
For Karamzin, then, the real tragedy of this most famous of Russian
sentimental narratives is that Erast cannot be “faulted for his failure as a
Sentimentalist reader” (Hammarberg, 158).43 Erast’s acts precipitate the
disaster, yet the narrator is unable to point to a moment when Erast com-
mits a mistake that might be held up for repudiation or distinction from his
literary preceptors. Even the condemnation of Erast is in fact not a con-
demnation; the narrator, symbolically, does not pronounce the words which
he prepares: “I forget the man in Erast—am ready to curse him—but my
tongue will not move—I look heavenward and a tear runs down my face”
(1:619; compare Hammarberg, 154). If the narrator directs his glance at the
party from which he expects restitution, then, like Sterne before him, he
questions not Erast, but a higher authority. And when words cease to avail,
when an author’s tongue halts, his text confesses a breakdown in its own
thinking. Karamzin’s stilled tongue is emblematic of the dilemma of “Poor
Liza”; it represents the moment when the literary power finds itself lacking,
deplores itself, but knows no remedy other than to stop and call attention
to the absurdity of blaming the literary process in a work of literature. It
renounces itself temporarily and weeps. Then it resumes. The narrator’s
always teary eyes suggest a vision that does not want to see in sharp outline
because it is afraid it might see itself clearly.
True, Erast prevaricates by passing off fantasies for reality, but every
author must. Karamzin does as much in telling us of the man named Erast,
who of course never really existed. Indeed the near-condemnation of the
story’s hero is followed by a repeat of his crime—perpetrated this time by
the narrator. “Ah! Why is it that I am writing not a novel, but a sad and true
story [pechal’naia byl’]?” he cries, passing off fantasies for reality to readers
who know they are reading a fantasy (1:619). The implication is clear: such
are the laws of literature. And if this particular convention is beyond the
ken of certain lower-class readers, Karamzin is no more willing to stop and
expose it than is his hero.44
FALSE INNOCENCE AS DOUBLE DECEIT:

PUSHKIN’S READING OF “POOR LIZA”
Karamzin’s most perceptive contemporary, Aleksandr Pushkin, recognized
the aesthetic deceptions in “Poor Liza” and took issue with them in his own
story “The Gentlewoman Peasant” (“Baryshnia-krest’ianka”). The dissem-
bling that troubles Pushkin, however, is Karamzin’s own. Though “The Gen-
tlewoman Peasant” too is often counted among those tales “that amount to
scarcely more than playful anecdotes,” it actually raises quite serious ques-
tions about sympathy and falsity in Karamzin’s treatment of his poor hero-
ine (Debreczeny, 80). Pushkin objects particularly to Poor Liza’s widely noted
lack of resemblance to a real peasant, especially in her refined manner of
23
thought and speech. “The Gentlewoman Peasant” restages Karamzin’s story

to comic effect, though it produces its parody through unusual means. Rather
than ridicule the sentimental story outright, Pushkin proposes to take it
seriously and asks under what conditions might such events really come to
pass. Pushkin’s wholly unsentimental tale makes us laugh by taking us be-
hind the scenes, making us privy to the elaborate exertions in costuming
and impersonation that render possible the otherwise implausible interac-
tions on stage. In other words, one can produce a parody of Karamzin not
by taking liberties with the conventions of sentimentalism, but merely by
seeking to take them seriously.
Pushkin’s story reproduces Karamzin’s faithfully. The Erast figure,
again the representative of urbane sophistication (he has just arrived in the
countryside from “*** University” [8:110]), is Berestov, whose name carries
“Erast” embedded in it but now also evokes beriosta (“birch bark”), an icon
of Mother Russia; the easy Russification of the originally Greek name
(Erastos; “Lover”) suggests that literacy in the simple sense had by Push-
kin’s day lost any aura of alienness. Again the hero tries to seduce the hero-
ine by pretending to be someone he is not (Berestov seems to be familiar
with the suspicion of the upper classes that the mother in Karamzin feels
and so employs the opposite strategy, trying to pass himself off as a servant).
Meanwhile, hearing of her handsome new neighbor, the aristocratic Liza
dresses up every morning as a peasant in order to meet her beau in a fash-
ion that will circumvent the state of feud between their fathers. Complica-
tion piles upon complication as Pushkin demonstrates how a lie once told
snowballs out of hand (the families mend relations, Berestov comes for a
proper visit, and Liza must disguise herself under pounds of makeup in or-
der not be recognized by him, and so on). Pushkin shows great skepticism
at the idea that a peasant girl could have sentimental, that is to say, edu-
cated and literary, ideas about love. Here the mere change into peasant
garb is insufficient to justify all the trappings of naive love at first sight; one
must posit as well the influence of a Richardson-reading English nanny. In
the end, Karamzin’s Liza, with her inexplicably delicate sentiments and her
sanitized diction that knows no substandard forms turns out to be no peas-
ant at all, but a gentlewoman doing a rather inept imitation of one—and not
any gentlewoman, but specifically a headstrong frivolous young miss with
that peculiar type of Russo-European education to be found among the
provincial aristocracy.
Pushkin’s text is full of sly insights. The heroine is “Liza” to us, but
“Betsi” to her Anglophile father. Berestov teaches her to read by introduc-
ing her to Karamzin’s “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter” rather than the ex-
pected “Poor Liza,” in keeping with Karamzin’s own modus operandi as
Pushkin sees it, of replacing poor figures with disguised rich ones (Karam-
zin’s two heroines are, as critics have noted, almost indistinguishable except
24
for their putative class).45 Pushkin is sensitive enough to Karamzin’s text to

reproduce even features that have long escaped critical note (not all of which
we have yet discussed in relation to Karamzin). Through her reading les-
sons she “becomes” (for Berestov; the reader knows this in advance—itself
an inverted echo of Karamzin, as we shall see) fully literate, a master of
artifice, and wealthy. But, since she’s just playing peasant, Pushkin’s hero-
ine is genuinely marriageable, and Pushkin’s story comes to a happy ending.
Eventually, this peasant lass too commits suicide—by taking off her ser-
vant’s costume. Most important, Pushkin calls attention to the very real
deceptions of art that abound in “Poor Liza.” Where Karamzin had defined
the poor by their missing knowledge of literary chicanery, Pushkin instead
declares the original Liza herself duplicitous. Erast and Berestov may both
seek to hoodwink, but the two Lizas, Pushkin shows, easily out-dissemble
them, fooling the men into thinking someone so refined could actually be a
peasant.
In “Poor Liza” there is a revealing moment when Erast is parting for
war and the mother has expressed the hope that one day he will be present
at her daughter’s wedding. Liza, unbeknownst to the mother, still believes
Erast loves her. Karamzin writes, “Liza stood by her mother and dared not
look at her. The reader can easily imagine for himself what she felt at this
moment” (1:618). In fact, what a young peasant woman might think at such
a moment is far from obvious. Does she expect Erast to propose? To remain
forever with her, unmarried but best friends? To marry someone else? That
Karamzin intends his peasant heroine to be predictable here and indeed
throughout the tale to cultivated readers reveals a curious paradox.46 For we
have been led to believe that Erast is drawn to Liza because she offers an
antidote to the familiar ways of the beau monde because she is in some sense
alien and unpredictable. In fact, Karamzin is counting on a heroine who is
unpredictable in an entirely predictable way.
Thus the true deceit, Pushkin charges, is perpetrated by an image of
the other in which precisely the peasant’s difference from us is falsified.
Pushkin shows Karamzin’s Liza to be predicated on the author’s, the hero’s,
and the reading public’s inability to imagine a poor heroine (that is, an at-
tractive poor heroine, since in a culture where few are in the habit of buy-
ing books, heroines must still be attractive) with plausible traits of the
genuinely poor.47 Pushkin in effect makes Karamzin admit that a more life-
like peasant would present a spectacle too challengingly alien; too many read-
ers, Karamzin fears, and one presumes from his general sensitivity to his
readers’ mind-set, rightly so, would be unable to identify with a Liza whose
speech and manners might strike one as coarse or unexpected, perfectly
human but not instantly appealing.
Pushkin underscores this fact by making it explicit in his retelling. What
really intrigues Berestov about Liza is that she possesses “thoughts and feel-
25
ings unusual for a simple girl” (8:116). Throughout the story, Pushkin gives
Liza’s imitations of peasant speech directly. But when he reaches the
“thoughts and feelings unusual for a simple girl,” that is, the vital words that
define the essential nature of the Karamzinian peasant figure—words suffi-
ciently peasantlike to fool Berestov into believing he is dealing with a real
peasant, yet enough unlike a peasant that they easily charm him—the nar-
rator summarizes the gist of her words and, by way of baring the device,
adds, “All this, naturally, was phrased in peasant dialect” (8:116). The point
is that such utterances can be described and referred to but nothing more,
for they do not yet exist in a high culture just learning to comprehend its
poor. There are words evocative of peasant speech and there are words ca-
pable of winning over upper-class readers, but the two categories still do
not overlap.
Pushkin finally answers the question Karamzin evades time and again:
the idyll and its innocence are indeed literary fabrications. Real peasants,
with their backbreaking labor, have little time and little opportunity for the
cultivation of the refined gentility that makes Karamzin’s heroine appealing.
Insofar as “Poor Liza” is a pedagogical exercise, the reader learns to identify
with others who are not really other. For us as for Berestov, the traits that
please in Liza are our own features in her face.
POVERTY OF THE IMAGINATION

The general movement of my reading has been to see not a distinction of
good people from evil, but a gradual implication of the seemingly good in
the misdeeds the narrative deplores. The narrator, who Karamzin seems to
mean to contrast with Erast, turns out to resemble him closely, and, by his
similarity to the authorial persona of the Letters, to suggest how much Ka-
ramzin’s own sentimental project stands condemned in Erast.48 This move-
ment of implication, I would now like to show, takes in the reader as well.
For if we attempt to specify the relative position Karamzin allots to his audi-
ence vis-à-vis Liza, then, broadly speaking, “Poor Liza” asks us to shed tears
because in an important sense we are guilty of her downfall.
When Liza’s mother hears the story of the man who offered too much
for Liza’s flowers, she exclaims,
My friend, you still do not know the ways evil people can hurt a poor girl
[bednaia devushka]! My heart is always in my throat when you go off to the
city. I always light a candle before the icon and pray to God our Lord that he
might protect you from every calamity [ot vsiakoi bedy]. (1:608)
Like Muscovy faced with powerful enemies, like the narrator faced with
Erast’s abuse of literary skills, Liza’s mother can conceive no defense except
to turn imploringly to God. And with good reason, for though Liza’s mother
26
properly senses something sinister afoot, she cannot identify the exact na-
ture of the threat. In fact, she is wrong that Liza is unsafe in the city, where
snickering passersby police the streets; the danger is in the liminal zone
between the city and the country, where Erast can play any role, but Liza
can only be herself. Hence if the story’s framing metaphor of representa-
tion, amphitheater, and stage depends on lines of sight, we can speak of the
crucial invisibility of the danger to the poor endangered, an invisibility
familiar in the guise of Erast’s power to render his inner world opaque to
peasants.
Liza’s mother’s statement reveals a second form of invisibility as well.
Her words—again, her own words, not the narrator’s about her—contain a
profound irony, another version of the same pun on poverty we saw before:
Liza’s mother believes it possible to protect a bednaia devushka from beda.
Again Liza and her mother do not control even their own utterances, which
somehow contrive to take on meanings they are incapable of perceiving.
The equivocation of punning—not theirs, but the text’s—distances Karam-
zin’s poor from us just as we reach out to them via the literary process. This
particular pun remains meaningful even if readers overlook it, for it is merely
shadowing a more substantial literary convention that Liza and her mother
do not know and the reader certainly does, if only because Karamzin has
taken pains to demonstrate it: that the sentimentalist is interested in the
outskirts of Moscow because it is a place where the visitation of misfortune
upon the weak of the world is assured. Liza’s greatest vulnerability, then, re-
sides in the invisibility to her and to her mother of the causal connection
between bednost’ (“poverty”) and beda that is multiply implicit in Karam-
zin’s story. The poor cannot see what the rich can; it is not for nothing that
Liza’s mother needs rose water to treat her eyes.
The definition of penury that Karamzin’s story presumes is in the end
not primarily economic. Liza becomes poor (that is, unfortunate) Liza pre-
cisely because she lacks the key form of cultural “wealth” in Karamzin’s uni-
verse: the awareness of literary techniques. It is Liza’s imagination that is
impoverished. She simply cannot divine what Erast is up to, cannot guess
that she is witnessing the most mundane of imaginative games. For, as we
have seen, Erast is merely inventive rather than evil. His sentimental cre-
ativity overflows like his purse, seeking objects in the surrounding world to
expend itself on. In the quotation we considered earlier, “Could you really
deceive poor Liza?” Liza’s otherwise peculiar use of the term “poor” is in a
sense justified because it appears in its rightful context, side by side with
the power of deception at the heart of Karamzinian literacy.
This sentence brings us back to our initial question and gives us an
opportunity to take stock of poverty’s meanings for Karamzin. Poverty ulti-
mately is the lack of the capacity for invention and dissembling, an inno-
cence that exposes one to the dangers of being deceived. Karamzin posits a
27
link between lack of money and education on one hand and the resulting
inability to interpret the texts of life. Poverty is the shortage of literary cul-
tivation, those varied but related powers to invent narratives, present one-
self properly, imagine, equivocate, deceive, but also to find and impart the
truth through fantasies. Poverty is the absence of the power to read narra-
tives, see through prevarication, sympathize with others real and invented,
and divine their unexpressed motives. Poverty lacks the vital capacity to ward
off fabrications but also to accept and consume them without harm and
even with benefit. It is the inability to manipulate or even notice such things
as the puns that are swirling around Liza as she utters this very sentence
and bespeaks a poverty that defines her without her understanding it.49
Like a heroine tied to the tracks, Liza is pitiful in the sentimental way
because she is crushed by cultural forces bearing down on her from out of
her sight but within the field of vision of her audience. This foreknowledge
of Liza’s doom is essential to the generation of sentimental pathos and Ka-
ramzinian “suspense,” such as it is, as we gradually witness a destruction her-
alded in advance. The story’s rampant imitation by other writers attests that
the sad pleasures of anticipation proved an invaluable literary commodity.50
But the necessity that the reader know the shape of coming events, nor-
mally a function of generic expectations, in this case had to be encoded
within the text itself, since the usages of what was still Western sentimen-
talism remained unfamiliar to Karamzin’s audience and his own Letters had
only begun to be published. As Karamzin could not rely on qualified read-
ers, he did what artists do—he created them.51
Remarkable especially for such a brief text is the repeated foreshad-
owing, of which Liza’s out-loud wonderings whether Erast might mislead
her are a prime example. We are informed in advance that the story’s topic
will be “the lamentable fate of Liza, poor Liza,” and that it causes the nar-
rator to shed “tears of tender sorrow” (1:607); nature storms when Liza
loses her virginity—for the uninitiated, Karamzin adds, “It seemed that na-
ture was decrying the loss of Liza’s innocence” (1:616); and so on. Karam-
zin’s conception of a sentimental text presumes it is marked liked Dante’s
Inferno with an inscription warning us to abandon hope as we enter.52 With
this steady diet of forewarnings, the reader is raised to the same level of ex-
pectation as if he had just put down Clarissa. Thus if Erast’s relations with
Liza are corrupted because he possesses knowledge of literary practices,
Karamzin takes great pains to furnish this maleficent knowledge to his au-
dience, to make sure we experience the story from a corrupted viewpoint.
In this sense we as readers are implicated in the tragedy we bewail,
for this mechanism of pathos coincides exactly with the mechanism of the
disaster. The literary cultivation necessary to read the story properly is the
same power that destroys Liza. If Erast is guilty of Liza’s demise, so some-
how are we, for we bring to events—Karamzin makes certain of this—pre-
28
cisely the awareness of fictions. Like the narrator who guides us, we begin
in the role of those who lament the tragedy. In the end, we come to self-
knowledge: the crime we shed tears over is one we have repeated in read-
ing of it. We weep because we like Liza, wish her well, and destroy her by
doing so. What could be more touching?
In the canonical reading of the story, as Kochetkova says in a repre-
sentative quotation, Karamzin demonstrates “the theme of fate, which in-
evitably makes people bring suffering on others and themselves against
their wishes” (41). What Kochetkova calls fate should, I think, be called Eu-
ropean cultural literacy. At the end, the lamenting narrator sits by Liza’s
pond. “The pond streams in my eyes,” he writes ambiguously, as though ad-
mitting Liza’s death is a drowning in tears—not her own, but as the narra-
tor’s tears metamorphose into the pond that kills her—his and ours (1:621).
The lamentations of the narrator we saw over the fate of those—serfs,
monks, Orthodoxy, the Russian past—whose world he helps destroy, cease
to be paradoxical.53 Liza’s mother praying before the icon is wrong: the dan-
ger is not “evil people,” but precisely decent, sympathetically inclined peo-
ple, people kind enough to take an interest, to put themselves in Liza’s
shoes and imagine how things look from her perspective, people like Erast,
the narrator, and the reader.
SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION, A VENEREAL INFECTION

If it is clear that Liza is endangered by cultural literacy, it remains to be
demonstrated how it actually destroys her. The standard attribution of Liza’s
death is to love spurned.54 In fact, however, Liza dies not because she has
discovered a deception, though she has, but rather because she, like Erast,
like the narrator and the reader, finds herself implicated in one. The mech-
anism that moves the narrative at every level is thus one and the same dis-
covery multiply repeated: we all share the burden of what we deplore. Guilt,
it turns out, is the one thing literature is able to make us truly share with
Liza. In the story’s crucial scene, Erast teaches Liza the art of imaginative
representation. The result is that Liza becomes infected by the culture of
the rich and dies. After telling her that he will always love her, Erast demands
that she learn the key skill of dissembling, if only once. Liza exclaims:
— How I am happy! And how mother will rejoice when she learns that you
love me!
— Ah, no, Liza! You mustn’t tell her a thing. . . . She will imagine some-
thing bad.
— That cannot be.
— Nonetheless I beg you to say not a word to her about this.
— Very well; I must obey you, though I should not like to hide anything
from her. (1:612)
29
As a trained practitioner himself, Erast naturally fears the things that

Liza’s mother may “imagine.” More important, this is from all signs the first
time in her life that Liza has acted theatrically.55 This getting of wisdom, the
discovery which forever spoils innocence, costs her dearly. Since the distin-
guishing characteristic of the impoverished has till now been the inability to
speak anything but the evident truth or at most to keep silent, this small act
of polished dissembling causes Liza to forfeit her very essence. If formerly
her mark was always to be herself, now she has abdicated all that she once
held dear and betrayed her true self.
By learning to dissemble, Liza also immediately acquires the corre-
sponding powers to invent, represent herself, and engage in the fictional
arts. As soon as she returns home, she plays a literary trick on her mother,
the same trick that had formerly been played on her—she puns. Liza’s pun
is on her own happiness (that it is a commonplace is perhaps a demonstra-
tion of the literary beginner):
“He loves me!”—she thought and was delighted at this thought. “Ah, Mother
dear!” said Liza to her mother, who had just awakened. “Ah, dear Mother!
What a beautiful morning! How gay it all is in the field! Never before have
the larks sung so well, nor the sun shone so brightly, nor the flowers smelled
so sweet!” (1:613)
The point is not that Liza is lying, but rather that earlier, before meeting
Erast, Liza had seen the same beautiful morning and not been touched
(Karamzin makes a point of both the beauty of the river where Liza had sat
and her uncharacteristic failure to notice it). That she is now moved thus
stems not from the spectacle itself, but from another reason which she ren-
ders invisible to her mother. (The ability to depict landscapes verbally is, for
Karamzin, a key function of literacy; the heroine of “Natalia, the Boyar’s
Daughter,” because she is illiterate, “did not know how to praise nature elo-
quently” [1:627].) Liza has learned the Karamzinian artist’s secret, of effac-
ing the boundaries between fact and fiction by spinning an impenetrable
web of verbiage that screens reality, and then, as true art must, supplants it.
Before, Liza and her mother were imperiled by their blindness to the ways
of art; now Liza has acquired the power to make visible and invisible.
Liza’s new skill transcends the mere capacity to mislead. Revealing in
this scene is the status the narrator accords to her literary fantasy. “The old
woman, leaning on her cane, went out into the meadow in order to enjoy
the morning Liza had depicted in such delightful colors. It indeed struck
her as wonderfully pleasant” (1:613). Whether the scene is genuinely beau-
tiful we will never know, for Karamzin tells us only how it seemed to the
mother under the influence of Liza’s description. By refusing to resolve the
scene’s ontological ambiguity, Karamzin reminds us of the essential nature
of representation: it is both truth-making and yet distinct from truth in the
30
ordinary sense, not quite lying, but going confidently where no fact leads.
Without imagination, the introduction too concedes, there can be no full
appreciation of nature; but with it, dissembling is inescapable.
By the same stroke, Liza falls out of harmony with nature, as Karam-
zin repeatedly points out; on the contrary, she herself has become a manipu-
lator of nature’s image. Nature now takes on any form whose representation
Liza can carry off. When her mother concludes her walk with the observa-
tion that without suffering and sorrow, “Perhaps we should forget our souls,”
Liza thinks, “Ah, I would sooner forget my soul than my dear friend!”
(1:613). Liza’s words speak less by what they say than by the fact that Liza
can now hide such thoughts from her mother with polish and ease. The
accepted reading of “Poor Liza” traces Liza’s loss of innocence to her later
sexual deflowering, called “a straying” (zabluzhdenie) and attended by
thunderclaps and Liza’s plaint, “It seemed to me that I was dying, that my
soul. . . . [. . .] I’m terrified! I fear that the thunder may kill me like a crim-
inal” (1:615–16). But as we have seen, the form of innocence “Poor Liza” is
truly concerned about, the naïveté whose loss has already caused her to for-
get her soul, is not sexual. Liza’s true flower is her rhetorical purity, and she
has begun to forfeit it before she ever kisses Erast.56
Erast’s initiation of Liza is not complete, however, until the moment
she learns that he has married a rich widow. The student at last discerns the
depth of the master’s skill and the full potentials of invention. In his shame,
Erast gives her 100 rubles and has her sent on her way.57 What happens next
has, to my knowledge, escaped critical comment. Liza comes home and
notices the ancient oaks near her pond. They in turn remind her of her
own former self. “This recollection shook her soul” (1:620). For her insight
into imagination, sympathy, and deceit turns out to indict not only Erast.
This retrospective glance reveals to Liza the difference between who she is
and who she once was; she too has unwittingly become just another casual
dissembler.
Karamzin suggests as much in his wording at this point: Liza “saw her-
self on the bank of the deep pond, in the shade of the ancient oaks which
some weeks before had been silent witnesses to her raptures” (1:620). Liza
has “seen herself,” developed a self-image, or rather an awareness that she
has an image. She at last recognizes the amphitheater that has surrounded
her pond all along, with Karamzin, the reader, Zhukovskii, and polite soci-
ety all occupying seats and looking on. With the assertion that peasant
women too can love, Karamzin had meant to convince us that the human
objects around us are subjects in their own right. His prize pupil now real-
izes that the proposition can be inverted: if objects are selves, then my self
too can be treated as an object. Liza has, as self-presenters must, learned to
view herself from the outside, as others perceive us but not as the innocent
think of themselves. Liza can now see herself as an object in the landscape,
31
and what she notices around her is what actors always face—the trees form
a crowd of “witnesses” (1:620) Her immediate reaction is to do what the
practitioner of sentimental imagination is constantly doing, but which she
has never formerly done: “she sank into a certain thoughtfulness” (1:620).
For the first time, Liza’s inner thoughts are obscured from our view as Erast’s
have been all along.
What Liza is pondering, it turns out, is suicide. This end, self-
destruction rather than silent suffering, owes everything to Erast, for it is
utterly theatrical. Having understood that one is always playing to the pub-
lic but also that the stage can be crowded with other performers, Liza
makes the true actor’s deduction that one must compete for attention. That
Liza plunges into the pond in mid-sentence (“ ‘Tell her that I . . .’ Here Liza
threw herself in the water” [1:620; ellipsis in original]) suggests the degree
to which her death is for Karamzin precisely a rhetorical act. Liza com-
mands her viewer’s gaze with a suicide which, like true art, is wholly sincere
and wholly staged at the same time. Her ploy works. Erast has lost interest
in the drama of otherness that he had authored himself. But the finale, writ-
ten by the alien hand of a fledgling dramatist in her first moment of high
inspiration, remains engraved in his memory forever. Liza’s death makes
Erast, in Garrard’s phrase, into poor Erast—not merely a sufferer of mis-
fortune, but a victim of another’s narrative strategy, a sacrifice to someone
else’s imagination.
Once Liza has renounced her illiterate, honest soul, the total self-
repudiation of suicide is merely the final logical step.58 The literary arts are
unbearable to one so honest. Yet in drowning herself, Liza reenacts her
original sin by declining to speak her last words directly to her mother.
Then she takes her imitation of Erast a step further, passing the dangerous
knowledge on to other innocents. She sets upon a neighbor girl and intro-
duces her to the art of role-playing: “Kiss her hand as I now kiss yours. . . .”
(1:620). Since the story of the heroine’s misfortunes is, within the bounds of
“Poor Liza,” the story, and thus, intentionally or not, the measure of both
the narrator’s and Erast’s literacy, we might expect Liza to now tell this one
central narrative. And she does, recounting the real plot of her affair with
Erast to the neighbor girl (and, significantly, making her too learn to tell it)
and asking Aniuta to convey it to her mother, whom Liza has till now al-
lowed to infer an untrue version of the plot.
Liza says, “Tell her that Liza is guilty before her, that I concealed from
her my love for a certain cruel man—for E. . . . Why should she know his
name?—Say that he betrayed me” (1:620). Though she admits to decep-
tion, Liza immediately relapses by hiding Erast’s name. In doing so, she also
teaches Aniuta to lie. And she repeats Erast’s first act toward her down to
the minutest particulars, giving someone whose interests she has allowed to
be obscured by her own (her mother) a large sum of money and insisting
32
that it is warranted by the circumstances, proffering money where love is

wanted. As Erast did to her, so Liza does to Aniuta: detaining the younger
girl, giving her money, kissing her, and in the process causing her to com-
promise the simple unmediated mode of addressing the world that consti-
tutes her innocence. The cycle of corruption continues as the neighbor girl,
who at fifteen is the exact age Liza was when her carefree existence was
ended by death (her father’s), is forced to witness the spectacle of suicide.59
Like her daughter, Liza’s mother finds the story of a loved one’s deception
too painful and dies. The literary art is an infection; once it enters the
organism, it spreads everywhere.
At story’s end, Liza has mastered the skill that set the story in motion
in the first place, learning to sympathize with the poor figure toward whom
all sympathy is directed in this story, herself. Earlier, the death of her father
inspires the opposite reaction, a vow not to be sympathetic, not to feel too
sorry for her mother or herself, and thus to recover the quicker. Unlike her
narrator, Liza begins by believing that tears should not be shared, but rather
suppressed. At the end, with the narrator’s ability to make sad stories come
to life, she reverses her stance. Now all the mixed blessings of literacy are
hers to dispose of. Liza thinks, “If only the earth would swallow up this poor
girl! . . . No! [. . .] the earth will not tremble” (1:620). This inappropriate
statement with its reference to “poor” girl—she in fact is holding 100 rubles
in her hand—represents a moment of regression, a narrative hesitation like
her earlier lament “A dream!” But then she regains her gift, dreams up an
equivalent fate, and coaxes the water to swallow her up if the earth will not.
In the process, she claims rightful ownership (“Take this money to my dear
mother—it is not stolen” [1:620]) of the money which she had formerly so
vigorously refused. In the terms of the story, Liza ends up a rich woman.
With hands full of rubles, Liza also wields the figurative wealth of sympa-
thetic imagination that Karamzin derives from the monetary. Liza has at-
tained the skill Karamzin so eagerly desired in his readers at the outset. It
kills her.
As we have seen, the liminal zone on the margins allows for the dan-
gerous intermingling and blurring of identities. Even the dissembler falls
prey to these shifting boundaries. Erast’s mark had been his many masks
and a resulting inability to find a satisfying stability in his own identity—an
inability to be like Liza and simply be himself. But under the effect of the
tragedy, he at last adopts a fixed self and remains unchanging in this per-
sona until he dies (“he could not be consoled and considered himself a mur-
derer”; “was unhappy to the end of his days” [1:621]). Liza’s suicide ironically
confers on Erast the chance to escape the conventionality of high society
that, like the poet in “Proteus,” he has been unconsciously fleeing all along.
Erast has achieved the unmediated selfhood that he so admired in Liza at the
beginning and then destroyed.60 Meanwhile, Liza is Erast: indoctrinated
33
into the uses of imagination, instinctively deceiving even those she loves,
possessed of money, with nothing any longer to fear from the city but no
one to love, and no longer quite happy with who she is. Liza has become
Erast and Erast Liza, or something very close; yet they miss each other in
passing. Poor and rich can trade places, but even then they fail to unite.
And what keeps them forever apart is the literary power that moves in and
around every aspect of their story—the force originally summoned to bring
them together. Only after both Liza and Erast have died and the mecha-
nisms of literature have lost hold over them can Karamzin contemplate the
possibility he had hoped to produce originally: “Now perhaps they have rec-
onciled” (1:621).
We leave the “wealth” known as literary power in a different state than
we found it. Three entirely different reactions to it emerge from Karamzin’s
story; which is best we never learn. The narrator laments, leaving solutions
to a greater Author but in the meantime continuing to engage in sentimen-
tal self-stimulation. The experience changes him not at all: as the introduc-
tion shows, he continues to tell such tales, emphasizing that fiction and fact
should mingle without constraint. Erast, on the other hand, not only loses
his former flightiness and malleability; from what we can discern, he also
renounces the sentimentalist’s ever-renewing fanciful stories, no longer
finding anything delightful in them. It turns out that they are devastating
rather than touching, at least for the participants. Instead, Erast appears to
retreat into a new zone, barely glimpsed in the story but destined to be of
increasing relevance in the outside life of his creator: the telling of history,
narratives that eschew fiction. Erast now recites over and over a single fac-
tual set of events he never forgets: the second tale of Liza—not his love for
Liza, which was a fiction of his own creation and which, as such, had some
truth in it and some untruth—but the complete “real” tale, the one we have
just read. The escape from sentimentalism leads in the end to the desire to
speak soberly, with no admixture of invention. Liza has a third reaction. She
is so aghast to learn what fictions can do and that she herself has acquired
this evil power that she renounces not the imagination but life itself. A life
enmeshed with falsehood, a life which cannot be freed from deceit, is for
her not worth living.
CONCLUSION: TAKING PART

IN THE SUFFERING OF THE POOR
Karamzin’s injunction to his readers to learn to sympathize with the poor, to
project ourselves into their position and unlock their sensations, and thus to
be closer to them, demonstrates its own failure. Erast follows his tutor’s every
lesson and in the process destroys the Liza we all love. Our philanthropically
minded affective union with the poor leads us to impart to them, unwittingly,
34
the mechanisms of representation we use as we seek to bind our hearts to

theirs. “Poor Liza” provides an apt illustration of a modern lesson, that our
method of observing the poor irrevocably alters its object. While we watch
them, they are watching us and acquiring insight into our manner of watch-
ing, and thereby into us. Erast exemplifies both an imaginative facility for
admitting a peasant girl into his own heart—and the need for a story like
“Poor Liza” suggests this is by no means a common feat in a Russia which
had yet to experience its own French Revolution—and at the same time the
capacity for finding the right path of entry into a peasant girl’s heart. This
emotional intercourse infects both sides with something of the nature of the
other; both end up unable to carry on as formerly, cut off from happiness,
with nothing important to do but tell their story to others and await death.
What we see then in “Poor Liza” is merely the fulfillment of Karam-
zin’s desires. Karamzin wished his class to see itself in the poor. Erast, like
a bottle imp, carries out the master’s bidding, with the usual unforeseen
results. Instead of affective union, we get an exchange of identities. “Poor
Liza” pronounces the peculiarly conservative verdict that it is unphilan-
thropic to share our wealth—our imaginations—with the needy. They would
be better off left to their own (literary, or rather, nonliterary) devices. Ka-
ramzin demonstrates that by envisioning the poor as like us, we change and
so destroy them. And this, unfortunately, answers neatly to the description
of artistic invention—imagination that can provide true insights because it
finds a way to make its insights come true.
From the outset, Karamzin had asked us to take part in Liza’s suffer-
ings. There is a curious moment in the Letters when, as the suicidal abbot
is growing more depressed, those nearby express their concern: “Your
friends participate in your sorrow, though they do not know its cause” (186).
Those who watch from a distance, separated by an otherness palpable to all
present, nonetheless find themselves—or at least are moved to represent
themselves as—drawn into the spectacle before them. “Participate” here
renders the Russian brat’ uchastie, an ambiguous phrase like the French
prendre part, signifying either an affective bond or a causal connection. Ex-
actly why the abbot is despondent we, like they, will never know. But for
“Poor Liza,” whose mechanisms we can gauge, the moment has a distinct
resonance: the art of the statement—its punning, which both conceals and
reveals truth—suggests that to take part in the sympathetic sense is to take
part in the causative sense, that to share sentimentally in suffering is to be
part of its reason for being. This could be the motto of Karamzin’s story. It
turns out that he who weeps is, by definition, implicated. At this point, we
might as well turn to God, for there is nowhere else to turn.
35
Chapter Two
The Call of Poverty
Learning to Love the Low in “Egyptian Nights”
A lowly matter continually

Disturbs and allures you.
—Pushkin, “Egyptian Nights”
THE NARRATIVE OF “POOR LIZA” provided

Russian culture with what proved to be an exceptionally durable model for
conceiving and portraying interactions between the poor and the nonpoor—
a model far more lasting, it should be noted, than the story’s wild but then
fleeting popularity. An important countermodel, however, is given by Push-
kin’s “Egyptian Nights,” which like much of Pushkin’s prose is engaged in a
silent polemic with Karamzin and his views. In this late fragment, Pushkin
returns to the collision between poverty and literacy at the heart of “Poor
Liza” and proposes a radical reinterpretation. Pushkin suggests that Karam-
zin’s definition of poverty as verbal innocence or lack of cultural literacy is
not only wrong, but exactly wrong. Perhaps the poor and the rich do differ
in their powers of verbal artifice, but if so, the combat, he suggests, favors
the poor. Before “Egyptian Nights,” it is true, Pushkin had held the position
he will now attack, for it had appeared that the poor poet’s energies must
be exhausted in the struggle for financial survival. But now Pushkin sets
about exploring the possibility that the poor poet has a distinct advantage,
for he is spared the aristocrat’s hindering susceptibility to class obligations,
the fixed identity that comes with a historic family name, and social stigmas
against the passionate commitment that verse writing requires. Pushkin be-
gins to see in poverty freedom, and in his vocabulary, freedom is the origi-
nal poetic license: not so much leisure time, liberation from mundane cares,
or even independence of thought, but rather the space of imaginative open-
ness, of personal mutability and inchoate potential, which is needed if there
are to be the eternal self-reinventions that constitute poetry. The poor man,
having nothing, is free to give himself entirely to art.
To be sure, Pushkin is interested in a higher degree of literacy than
Karamzin, not a simple cultural awareness meant to be shared by every edu-
36
The Call of Poverty
cated individual, but the pure creative potency that defines poetic genius;
yet at bottom, the two focus equally on their heroes’ mastery of artistic
techniques and poverty’s influence over the imagination. “Egyptian Nights”
approaches its central theme, the poet’s economic and social status, by con-
trasting two models of the poet, Charskii and an Italian improvisor. In the
former, Pushkin presents a figure clearly meant to be perceived as a self-
representation, the artist as nobleman. The improvisor embodies the poet-
as-other. The Italian’s otherness has its source in his poverty (his foreignness,
curiously, plays a rather minor role). Indeed, the improvisor’s financial state
accounts for the characterization of both heroes, for his own particularities
stem from the effects of need on his personality, while Charskii’s profile
simply reverses those features. In other words, the two are exact opposites
except for their common craft. Their differences are the varied social, psy-
chological, and creative consequences of the improvisor’s penury.
The key question we will again be following throughout is the degree
to which Charskii and Pushkin see themselves in the improvisor, a topic
“Egyptian Nights” examines relentlessly. As before, the question of identi-
fication is tantamount to a question about verbal art, not accidentally, be-
cause by chance the protagonists both happen to be poets, but essentially,
because for Pushkin the ability to see oneself in another is the artistic skill
in its purest form. In the course of the story, Charskii begins to identify with
the Italian, not only the other’s poetic gift but actually his poverty, reaching
across layers of social difference and economic degradation to perceive a
bewildering similitude. Charskii is shocked as he comes to recognize that
the force that renders the other base, servile, and pitiable in his eyes is not
intrinsic worth—the improvisor is a magnificent poet—but merely the ex-
ternal impingements of economic need. Still worse, he is horrified by the
realization that the Italian has benefited from these disadvantages and fur-
ther that the same forces of the marketplace have begun to close in on him
too. The improvisor whom he initially reviles comes to be for Charskii an
agonizing but inescapable double, a second self he abhors but in his admi-
ration cannot escape. This is identification with the poor as nightmare.
Since the contrast between the two poets seems to promise a compe-
tition in which one will furnish a more viable model for poetry, we should
ponder Charskii’s insights. For competition is predicated on difference, but
the narrative’s inability to settle on either a victor or standards by which to
choose suggests that, as Charskii had feared, difference may be collapsing.
The Italian thus incarnates Pushkin’s anxieties over the prospect of (be-
coming) the poet impoverished. We will start, as before, by examining first
not the poor figure, but his observers: Charskii, and then his author. A rather
detailed examination of Pushkin’s own position at the time is in order be-
cause the reading I want to give of Russia’s greatest writer, though by no
means without precedent, is often resisted in critical literature.
37
Written in the fall of 1835, “Egyptian Nights” has fascinated readers

since it was first published in the year of Pushkin’s death. Much of the in-
terest has centered around the possible final form the unfinished story was
meant to take. The text as it has come down to us consists of three short
chapters in prose containing two verse performances by the improvisor.1 The
work seems to break off in the middle of the second improvisation, leaving
both it and the third chapter apparently unfinished. No plans suggest what
direction the story would have taken, or how many more chapters, if any,
remained to be written.2 One can only surmise that the second improvisa-
tion is meant as the story’s central event, since the topic on which the Ital-
ian extemporizes is the Egyptian Nights of the title.
Perhaps because of its fragmentariness, the story has exerted a kind
of uncanny fascination over its readers, especially those who were them-
selves writers.3 Belinskii and Briusov counted “Egyptian Nights” among
Pushkin’s profoundest works.4 Dostoevsky argued that despite appearances
this was “the fullest, most complete work of our poetry . . . ! To expand or
make any additions to this fragment in an artistic sense would be impossi-
ble” (19:133; “An Answer to The Russian Herald”). Despite Dostoevsky’s
proclamation, “Egyptian Nights” has spurred more than a few writers to pro-
duce responses of their own, perhaps an appropriate reaction to a story about
improvisation, or the art of appropriating another’s idea as one’s inspiration.
(Improvisation is usually presumed to imply above all quick, unplanned
creativity, but as we shall see, the story is less interested in this aspect of the
craft.) Briusov and later the scholar Modest Gofman violated Dostoevsky’s
principle directly, writing completions for, respectively, the verse and the
prose parts of the story.5 Tolstoy and Dostoevsky himself retold scenes from
“Egyptian Nights” (both more than once) in works of their own.6 A number
of lesser-known commentators have likewise suggested continuations, or
sought the fatal flaw that made the work inherently unfinalizable.7 The urge
to complete the story or argue for a hidden inner completeness suggests
readers (Russian readers in particular, for reasons to be discussed in chap-
ter 5) have seen some aspect of themselves in the story, in a manner strangely
reminiscent of Charskii’s seeing of himself in the Italian.
Yet if others have been inspired to finish off “Egyptian Nights,” it is
striking that Pushkin himself did not do so. The reason I would like to sug-
gest is that Pushkin depicted in the work the predicament he had come to
in his own literary life in a more intimate way than hitherto suspected, and
that he could not resolve the impasse he had reached, not even in the fiction-
alized form of “Egyptian Nights,” because he literally could not imagine a
way out.8 Since the inability to imagine must surely bear disastrous conse-
quences for any writer, we should not be surprised if we find in “Egyptian
Nights,” if only symbolically, signs that warn of the gravest danger. Indeed,
if read in this way, the story can be taken as an allegory that largely predicts
38
The Call of Poverty
Pushkin’s demise as a writer and a human being. At the center of this cata-
strophic scenario, the threat of an impoverished imagination troubles Push-
kin simultaneously with the threat of an impoverishment of the pocketbook.
Pushkin presciently realizes, if only implicitly, that in Russia’s coming age of
realism the question of the poor and the question of art are inextricably
bound up, uncanny doubles whose fundamental oneness at first seems
strange to our eyes.
The first puzzle of “Egyptian Nights” is whether to take as the central
narrative that of Charskii and the Italian, or the interpolated tale of Cleopa-
tra. None of the story’s many commentators—not Dostoevsky or Briusov,
Akhmatova or Ginzburg, nor Debreczeny in his book on Pushkin’s prose,
nor Leslie O’Bell in her book-length study of “Egyptian Nights”—has suc-
ceeded in showing how the improvisations and the frame narrative can be
read as a single thoroughly unified text.9 In fact, the strands of the story are
linked by a striking inner thematic cohesion. The improvisations are clearly
mises en abyme, retellings in miniature of the themes of the work as a
whole.10 The underlying structure of the work is thus repeated examinations,
but in different illuminations and to different conclusions, of a single para-
digmatic situation, the theme of which can be summarized as learning to
love the low. It should be noted that this theme is a restating and slight
broadening of the theme of all representations of poverty in our period.
On the surface, the plot is rather simple. Sitting one morning at his
writing desk, Charskii hears his door open and in walks a poor Italian. The
Italian turns out to be an improvisatore. Charskii can barely control his
temper when the Italian asserts that he is Charskii’s “confrère” and thus has
made bold to ask his aid (375). But after some hasty retorts, Charskii re-
considers and agrees to help him gather members of high society for an im-
provisation, by which the Italian hopes to earn money. In the second chapter,
Charskii has arranged the gathering and visits the Italian at his inn. In grat-
itude the Italian performs an improvisation for Charskii alone. Charskii
gives him the theme, but is unprepared for the Italian’s astounding talent.
In the last chapter the gathering takes place. After some hesitation on the
part of the audience, a subject is drawn. The theme is Cleopatra and her
lovers. The Italian extemporizes on these Egyptian Nights of love and death.
The text breaks off at a point where the frame narrative is clearly incom-
plete and the improvisation apparently so.
Pushkin starts by introducing Charskii. The hero is an aristocrat and
a poet, and therefore a paradox. He embraces both extremes of an old ro-
mantic dichotomy as an artist who flees the uncomprehending crowd and
yet is also a full-fledged member of that crowd. In public, Charskii plays the
role of social lion, attending every function and chatting idly about matters
of no consequence. He also refuses to acknowledge he knows anything about
poetry and studiously avoids other writers. In private, however, he is pas-
39
sionately devoted to his verse. Fastidious in public dress, Charskii neglects

his appearance when inspiration comes, locking the door to outsiders and
writing from morning to night in his bedclothes. The challenge of Charskii’s
existence is to juggle two entirely incompatible personae. Nothing more
horrifies him than their mixing. “Charskii was in despair if any of his soci-
ety friends found him with pen in hand” (373). By making of art a private,
solitary affair, Charskii in a strangely literal way embodies what Bakhtin con-
siders poetry’s inherent resistance to chuzhoe slovo (literally, “someone else’s
word”).11 And clearly his indifference to reception and his dislike of being
told what or when to compose derive from considerations more important
to him than mere preference. The refusal to allow the other into his art is
the condition that makes possible both the production of genuine poetry
and the “sweet oblivion” Charskii treasures in his craft (373). Poetry writ-
ing offers precisely the prospect of leaving behind the external world and
getting in touch with a deeper, meditative interiority. If forced to choose,
Charskii admits to preferring poetry, for only it provides him with “genuine
happiness” (373). But he has worked out for himself a delicate and deceit-
ful double role of poet and gentleman in the firm conviction that he will
never have to make that choice; unfortunately for Charskii, he is wrong.12
The presentation of the protagonist is without parallel in Pushkin’s
prose for the access we are given to his inner thoughts and unspoken reac-
tions. Where typically Pushkin presents his prose heroes with a certain aloof-
ness, claiming for them no special privileges in the reader’s affections, here
the very paradigms of Pushkinian art seem to have been suspended. The new
style is all the more remarkable for its divergence from the writer’s “ ‘ob-
jective’ tendency” in later years, as Mirsky calls it (203). One might surmise
that it was in part the restraint of the old-fashioned aristocrat that had for-
merly kept Pushkin at bay from his heroes’ hearts, revealing them, to be
sure, but without prying beyond what can be demonstrated in action and
speech. For the dislike of having his psyche probed is identified in Charskii
precisely with his aristocratic pride. “Egyptian Nights,” in other words, is
marked on a structural level by a willingness to cross formerly sacrosanct
boundaries and cast open to public view, if somewhat grudgingly, what had
been private. This stylistic change is effected by borrowing from the dis-
cursive practices of autobiography. Scholars are unanimous in tracing the
description of Charskii back to a short work which Pushkin wrote about him-
self in the third person and from which he borrows entire passages verba-
tim for “Egyptian Nights.” This piece, dating from 1830 but unpublished
during Pushkin’s life, and his only other work to openly probe its protago-
nist’s psyche, was called simply “A Fragment.”13
Even without the evidence of “A Fragment,” contemporaries had lit-
tle difficulty recognizing Pushkin by Charskii’s insistence on separating his
public and private selves. Shevyrev noted, “In Charskii, Pushkin practically
40
The Call of Poverty
presented his own personal relations to society: he did not like it when in a
drawing room setting he was addressed in a way that referred to his lofty
calling, and preferred to be treated according to the ordinary social prac-
tices” (quoted in Sidiakov, 175). Viazemskii noted similarly, “Pushkin dis-
liked to be known in public as a poet and writer. In Zhukovskii’s or Krylov’s
study he was happy to appear as such. But in society he wanted to be ac-
cepted as Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin” (2:349; “A Glance at Our Litera-
ture in the Decade Following Pushkin’s Death”).14 If there is ultimately to
be a demonstration of the merging of self and other, this is how one would
have to start, with a detailed portrait that exposes the self, even its sub-
terfuges, to view. Note also that the distinction of personae is defined by
how one is called: the aristocrat possesses a name known to all, whereas the
poet possesses, or is possessed by, in Shevyrev’s term, a zvanie, a “calling”
in the lofty sense.
However, the key to the story is the Italian improvisor and the ques-
tion of what to call him. This vital uncertainty is raised as early as the French
epigraph. “Quel est cet homme?” (“What sort of man is this?”) it asks, but
the answers it and the rest of the story provide are suspiciously numerous
and never resolve themselves into unanimity (371). The Italian appears to
have no personal name and no known background; he is never named even
in the story’s drafts (PSS, 8:842–55). Thus, if Pushkin and Charskii insist on
being known in public by (aristocratic) name instead of (professional) call-
ing, the improvisor is all calling and no name. But if the Italian has no name,
it is not for want of identities. Critics have generally asserted that he is in
Charskii’s mind, above all, a fellow member of the poetic brotherhood.15 Yet
if this were true, we would not expect Charskii to be so troubled by the
question of the improvisor’s identity. By turns he seems to be a musician or
a political conspirator or a zaezhii figliar, that is, an itinerant buffoon, with
the decidedly negative connotations the last term (“street performer,” “petty
actor,” “clown,” “buffoon”) always has in Pushkin’s vocabulary (382).16 The
Italian can be the voice of an Egyptian empress, of a lofty poet-genius, of a
destitute wanderer. Not only does he have a demonic profusion of per-
sonae. Some of the Italian’s identities go further and make the danger
explicit. Perhaps there really is in him something of the “robber” met in the
forest or the “charlatan trading in elixirs and arsenic” that he at first resem-
bles (374).
An equally important clue, leading in a very different direction, has
already been given away at the moment of the improvisor’s first appearance.
Charskii is in the grip of inspiration, experiencing “that blissful disposition
of the spirit, in which dreams portray themselves tangibly before you. . . .
Charskii was plunged in sweet oblivion . . . while society, and the opinions
of society, and his own eccentricities had for him ceased to exist” (373–74).
Suddenly and inexplicably, the Italian opens the door to the aristocrat’s study
41
without so much as a knock, having entered the house unheard and unseen
by either Charskii or the servants. The improvisor’s invasion of Charskii’s in-
ner sanctum, reserved for poetry and closed to outsiders, is symbolic, for it
represents the havoc he will wreak on everything Charskii believes poetry
to be. In effect, the improvisor is precisely a “dream,” an exact projection
of the nobleman’s anxieties over poetry’s predicament, come to life.17 Char-
skii may have no idea who he is, but in nightmare fashion the Italian seems
to know exactly who has summoned him and what end he is to serve. The
improvisor begins his attack by dragging Charskii back into precisely the
world he thought he had left behind, as he demonstrates for him a new way
of relating to “society, and the opinions of society, and his own eccentrici-
ties.” The Italian is thus bewilderingly other and at the same time intimately
near. It will be some time before Pushkin shows us how this gap can be
spanned.
Nonetheless, it is strange to see Charskii so threatened, for the Italian
closely approximates the poet of genius in the poem “The Prophet,” written,
after all, by Charskii’s alter ego. Improvisors must be able to create poetry
on any theme, and as Debreczeny observes, for this they require a kind of
infinite sympathy that allows them to intuit themselves into every aspect of
earthly existence and every identity—just like the prorok.18 In “The Prophet,”
the poet is commanded in weighty, archaic diction: “Arise, o prophet, and
behold, and hearken,” and is made sensitive to all earthly phenomena:
And perceived I the heaven’s shudd’ring,
And the lofty angels’ flight,
And the underwater course of the sea amphibian,
And the slow growing of the sublunar vine.
(3:31)
His gift is an awareness of the universe’s every detail, from highest to low-
est. The poet is given sharpened sensitivity because his ability to speak truth
depends on insight into his ever-changing objects. The true poet can pene-
trate any thing, living or nonliving, and find words for what he sees there.
The improvisor’s livelihood similarly turns on an ability to immediately as-
sume any personality, any point of view suggested by an audience. Thus,
and this is a vital point, the threat emanating from the Italian is merely the
natural consequence of his superior poetic gift; the ability to become any-
thing and anyone makes for great poetry, but this fluidity of identity stands
in direct contravention of Charskii’s other world, ruled by known aristo-
cratic names and a fixed order of zvaniia. In effect, “Egyptian Nights” be-
gins when Pushkin entertains a question that had never seemed relevant in
his earlier meditations on the nature of poetry: what would happen if the
six-winged seraph came down to earth and chose a prorok from among the
lower classes of society? The improvisor challenges class boundaries and
42
The Call of Poverty
violates the defenses of Charskii’s home with the same ease as his artistic
self-reinventions make a mockery of the borders of identity. Superior po-
etry turns out to be merely the flip side of dissolving hierarchies and social
disruption.
For the Italian is indeed meant to be seen as a poet of genius. It may
help to recall that Pushkin himself regarded improvisation as the supreme
form of the poetic art.19 In the words of one contemporary, describing a per-
formance by the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, “Pushkin . . . suddenly
leapt up from his place and, ruffling his hair, almost running about the
room, exclaimed ‘Quel génie! quel feu sacré! que suis-je auprès de lui?’
[‘What genius! What sacred fire! What am I beside him?’].”20 Charskii’s at-
titude to the Italian entails a similar stunned admiration. His temporary
speechlessness—his poetic gift, as it were, nullified—at the magnificence of
the first improvisation suggests who is the greater artist.21 When Charskii
can finally speak, he presses the other’s hand and exclaims,
Remarkable. [. . .] So! No sooner has someone else’s thought reached your
hearing than it has already become your own possession, as if you had been
fostering and developing it all along. So for you there is none of the labor, nor
the gradual cooling down, nor that disquiet that precedes inspiration? . . . Re-
markable, remarkable! . . . (380)
The unsavory and perhaps even dangerous stranger, it turns out, has privi-
leged access to the loftiest precincts of poetry, where Charskii spends his
own most intimate and authentic moments.
As soon as he appears, this seemingly powerless man proceeds to take
uncanny possession of Charskii’s life. He so confounds the distinctions that
order the aristocrat’s existence that soon he has Charskii too effacing his
cherished boundaries between private poetry and public aristocracy. First
he interrupts Charskii’s poetry writing and compounds the transgression by
addressing him as a fellow poor artist; then, by being mistaken for a musi-
cian, he confuses Charskii’s ostensibly flawless social sense and makes him
violate “the first mark of an intelligent man—to know at a glance who you’re
dealing with,” as Pushkin wrote in reference to Griboedov’s Chatskii; and
finally, his request for help in assembling a crowd of rich listeners for a per-
formance forces Charskii to approach acquaintances in the role he so ab-
hors of public poet (13:138). The undermining of Charskii’s separate and
secure personae reaches its peak at the second improvisation, where Char-
skii is continually required to step forward in full public view and mediate
between his protégé and the world of high society. The Italian’s repeated
request for themes is met with silence. Charskii
was seized with anxiety; a presentiment told him that the situation would not
come off without him and that he would be obliged to submit a theme of
his own. And indeed, several ladies turned their heads in his direction and
43
began to call him forth. . . . The improvisor’s eyes found him . . . and he gave
him a pencil and a bit of paper with a friendly smile. It was most unpleasant
for Charskii to be playing a role in this comedy. . . . (383–84)
As a society get-together, the improvisation is a failure. The Italian
commits repeated faux pas, the audience responds uneasily, now with an icy
silence, now with a raucous guffaw, and in their mutual embarrassment,
both sides keep looking at Charskii as if to inquire how his social sense
could have permitted such a fiasco. As an artistic interaction, the improvi-
sation is hardly more successful. The members of the audience, the very
people in the story’s introduction so eager to pry into the poet’s professional
secrets, stubbornly refuse to submit themes. And the subject ultimately
chosen is incomprehensible to the Italian—again until Charskii intervenes.
Charskii is living out his worst nightmare. Both poetry as he understands it
and aristocracy are being travestied, each in full view of the other, and in-
explicably, it is all through his own doing.
Charskii’s gradual loss of his sense of himself to a poor man comes be-
cause the boundary that seemed to separate poverty and wealth with such
certitude is collapsing. For lurking behind “Egyptian Nights” is a powerful
anxiety of impoverishment. Pushkin has good reason to see himself, if only
metaphorically, in his impoverished hero. Let us have a look at Pushkin’s
own inextricably linked financial and literary positions in 1835. The author
of “Egyptian Nights” faced very difficult choices in his last years, when po-
etry was little written and less read, when the periodical press could speak
of his prose as proof of his decline, and when suddenly the public’s taste be-
gan to turn toward the novel, a new social awareness, and plebeian writ-
ers.22 Pushkin had long before ceased to even offer many of his poetic
creations for publication. On the other hand, as a prose writer he might be
no less brilliant, but he had never met with the broad popularity or even the
critical reception he had hoped for.23 Meanwhile, Pushkin had amassed
nearly insuperable debts and needed to appeal to potential readers more
than ever.24 Lotman notes the drain on his finances from “the upkeep of a
family, the social life he was bound to against his will, the material assis-
tance to his parents, his sister, and his brother, who was utterly irresponsi-
ble in financial matters” (Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 222). The Pushkin
family estate was so deeply in debt that the author, who took great pride in
his ancestral lineage, was forced to take the humiliating step of rejecting his
patrimony, the only option in the case of unmanageable inherited debts.
Pushkin’s letters catalog his miseries. In July 1835, the poet was re-
duced to writing to the head of the secret police, Benckendorff, to ask the
emperor (his personal censor, no less) to save him from financial ruin. In
the period shortly before he wrote “Egyptian Nights,” Pushkin penned a
draft letter in which he asked for permission to open a political and literary
magazine, which he calculated would bring him about 40,000 rubles per
44
The Call of Poverty
year (16:29). Having dreamt up one possible avenue of escape, Pushkin grew
dissatisfied with it—as with the story that would follow in a few months—
and decided to channel his imaginative energies in a different direction. So
he wrote a request for an interest-free loan of 125,000 rubles (16:30). Then
in another change of heart he wrote for permission to live in the country for
several years to save money (16:31–32).25 When that was effectively re-
fused, he requested a loan of 10,000 rubles (16:41). When the tsar agreed,
Pushkin wrote back immediately to propose a more substantial deal in
which he would receive funds to pay off the more pressing half of the
60,000 rubles he still owed his creditors and would undertake to make re-
payment to the treasury by having his wages withheld, which request was
also granted (16:42–43). A mere six weeks later, now in the time period of
the creation of “Egyptian Nights,” Pushkin was forced to write again, ef-
fectively asking for yet another loan of 10,000 rubles (16:46–47). Even
worse, as Pushkin’s debts are being paid off—and then only in part—he is
merely contracting further debts. If this is not quite the same thing as the
Italian’s willingness, so distasteful to Charskii, “to fall from the heights of
poetry to the depths of some clerk’s shop,” then for a proud aristocrat who
only too well understood the opprobrium with which his class viewed any
visible worrying over finances, it is close indeed (381).26
The psychological dimension of the documents in question is still
more striking. Borrowing from the tsar was clearly a distressing proposition.
In July, Pushkin admits that with 60,000 in debts he has only two alterna-
tives: borrowing from moneylenders, “which will redouble my difficulties”
(“embarras,” the letter is in French)—and which he admits elsewhere is al-
most impossible in Russia in any case (16:41)—or borrowing from the tsar;
there are no other options (16:42). One of the letters already quoted ob-
serves with suspect sincerity, “Gratitude is for me no onerous feeling; and
it is certain that my devotion to the person of the emperor is not troubled
by any second thoughts of shame or regret” (16:41; original in French).
These loans put Pushkin in a position of obligation toward the tsar, a posi-
tion we see embodied in “Egyptian Nights” in transmuted form in the de-
pendency of Cleopatra’s lovers, their lives in the hands of a capricious
queen. In September, his urgent request for more money is accompanied
by another very carefully worded passage explaining the reasons for his ear-
lier petition: “Remaining in Petersburg”—as he had effectively been required
to do by the emperor—“I was bound to see my affairs further muddled by
the minute, or to resort to assistance [vspomozheniia] and favors, a means
to which I am not accustomed, for, thank God, I have hitherto been inde-
pendent and lived by my own labors” (16:46). It is not hard to guess Push-
kin’s state of mind at this point. No longer able to “live by his own labors,”
but desperately seeking some way of not having to accept “vspomozheniia,”
Pushkin sets about salvaging what little is left of his pride, insisting that he
45
had requested 30,000 rubles “as a loan rather than assistance [vspomozhe-
nie]” (16:46; emphasis in original), but also admitting that in 1834 he had
accepted 10,000 from the tsar “as assistance [vspomozhenie]” (16:46). Thus
when Charskii angrily asserts that a proper poet in his conception doesn’t
seek “vspomozheniia,” he is thinking of an ideal that is crumbling as he
speaks (376). The Italian has a very different attitude. He requests Char-
skii’s “friendly assistance [vspomozhenie]” straightforwardly, without any
shame (375).
Pushkin’s money problems obviously impressed themselves on contem-
poraries. Witness is provided by the censor Nikitenko, whose diary records
an incident none too flattering for the poet. Pushkin did not like censors
generally and once referred to “that little ass [oslenok] Nikitenko,” but none-
theless preferred the decent and moderate Nikitenko over other censors
(16:55). Nikitenko, who as the freed son of a serf would not be expected to
condescend lightly, wrote in 1834:
His “Andzhelo” reached [Pushkin] with several verses cut out by the Minis-
ter. He was irate: Smirdin pays him 10 rubles per line of verse, consequently
Pushkin stood to lose several dozen rubles. He demanded that in place of the
excluded lines be placed rows of dots with the purpose, no less, of making
Smirdin pay him money for the dots! (1:141–42)
Such observations were not limited to private diaries. A few days later,
Nikitenko found himself talking with Pushkin’s good friend Pletnev:
Pletnev began to berate Senkovskii, and rather coarsely, for articles he had
published in “The Library for Reading,” saying that they were written for
money and that Senkovskii was robbing Smirdin [the publisher of the
journal].
As far as robbery is concerned, I retorted, I can assure you one of our cel-
ebrated men of literature in no wise trails Senkovskii.
He understood and fell silent. (1:142)
Even the simple matter of selling his own art rubbed the poet the
wrong way. There may be no more telling expression of repressed anxieties
than his habit of alternating expressions of horror at the prospect with
proud proclamations of indifference. The issue evaded any satisfactory res-
olution. In a letter to Kaznacheev in June 1824 (that is, a decade earlier but
just three months before the “Bookseller’s Conversation with a Poet,” a key
thematic predecessor of “Egyptian Nights” we will look at more closely be-
low), Pushkin asserts with studied equanimity: “I have already conquered
my repugnance at the thought of writing and selling my verse to live—the
greatest step is taken. . . . I can’t fathom my friends’ consternation” (13:95;
emphasis in the French original). But even in 1835, the problem has yet to
be laid to rest. Pushkin confesses to his wife: “As God is my witness, I can-
not write books for money” (16:48).
46
The Call of Poverty
This key letter of 21 September 1835 to Natalia Nikolaevna fairly

brims with despair as the poet discusses the inevitability of their financial
ruin. Pushkin says he has been racking his imagination, trying to come up
with a possible solution; the important connection here to “Egyptian Nights”
is not just the financial bind, but also Pushkin’s artist’s instinct, which con-
ceives of the search for a solution as an assignment for the fantasy:
I am continually agitated and write nothing, while time passes. You can’t
imagine how vigorously the imagination works when one sits alone staring at
blank walls or walks through the woods, when there’s no one to keep you
from thinking and thinking till your head starts to spin. And what do I think
about? About this: what are we going to live on? Father will not leave me an
estate; he has already squandered half of it; your estate is a hair’s breadth
from ruin. The Tsar is not allowing me to be registered as either a landowner
or a journalist. We have not a half kopeck of reliable income but 30,000 in re-
liable expenses. (16:48)
As best we know, “Egyptian Nights” was written at the same time as this let-
ter, so that the story begs to be read as Pushkin’s reconsideration yet again,
in the person of the degraded Italian improvisor, of just how painful it
might be to submit fully to writing for cash. Pushkin’s fabled imagination
was being called on to dream up a way out; perhaps, by putting his concerns
into fictional form, the form he knew best, he could find a resolution. The
crux of the problem, as Charskii notes, is that when it comes to the mar-
ketplace, a writer’s talent, reputation, and quality cease to be meaningful.
Only one thing counts: “The only necessary thing is to be in fashion” (377).
That Charskii, with his repugnance for the public, states this twice is espe-
cially revealing: the workings of the market have impressed themselves
even on carefree noblemen who disdain the literary profession and have no
financial need to please.
Naturally, Pushkin’s class position would continue to insulate him
from the agonies of true destitution, but as the examples show, not from an
anxiety of poverty which, like any anxiety, cannot be defined exclusively by
reference to material realities. It is not difficult to imagine that the pride
and privilege of the aristocrat were less a defense against penury than salt
in the wound. On the contrary, Pushkin’s class adherence entailed a taboo
against any type of professionalism that exceeded the casual. The Italian is
a figure and exploration of what it might mean to be caught in just such a
double bind. He represents the increasingly obvious necessity Pushkin and
perhaps all writers would eventually face of learning to satisfy the demands
of the marketplace, even playing to a sometimes hostile audience, without
sacrificing their art, and in this sense he foretells a future that proved to be
inevitable in Russian writing.
Given his importance, then, we should pay close attention to how the
impoverished poet-prophet practices his craft. First of all he has no explicit
47
personal ties to the aristocracy, only those binding artist to audience. Un-
like Charskii, he has to seek out, rather than flee from, the crowd. To his
public he may be as incomprehensible as a foreigner, but finds that this fact
works to increase his salability. Meanwhile he finds compensation on the
financial plane, as Debreczeny observes, by providing a dramatic spectacle
replete with music and costumes that will offer mere entertainment for
those blind to art (293–94). If Charskii seeks to free his art from chuzhoe
slovo, the Italian’s livelihood, by contrast, depends on creation on demand
and is symbolically dialogized since it begins always with chuzhoe slovo. As
in the Bakhtinian model, the improvisor finds it necessary to penetrate
through the surface words of the other back to the viewpoint from which
they derive, and so asks the proposer of the theme of Cleopatra to “explain
for me his thought” (385). This moment is especially notable since it con-
stitutes nothing less than the renunciation of the broad prerogatives of po-
etic license, the first thing in the introduction that Charskii—or perhaps,
since the passage is ambiguous, the narrator himself—desires in the prac-
tice of poetry. The Italian could make something up, invent lovers for
Cleopatra if he cannot remember any, but he refuses to. For only so can he
make a serious attempt to enter the psyche of the proposer. Where previ-
ously for Pushkin, the issue had always been how to navigate around the
crowd, “Egyptian Nights” poses a much harder question: how to cooperate
with it. And as the Italian demonstrates, the crowd and the profit motive
can become not merely acceptable, but actually a constructive part of the
poetic process. That Charskii is so troubled by these observations measures
the degree to which he senses his own poetic activity is also implicated. For
if at the start it is Charskii who realizes that financial success in Russia is
purely a matter of fad, he nonetheless is woefully unprepared to accept the
art he himself has described.
The Italian not only resembles the prorok and offers a glimpse of what
may be an inevitable future for all writers. It can also be argued that he is
prophetic in a third way, as a harbinger of realism. He may still produce ro-
mantic verse, but his private existence drains romantic conventions of their
conventionality, converting them in the process into the stuff of realism.
Tomashevskii maintains that essentially the same strategy shapes the work
that prefigures so much of the treatment of the two poets in “Egyptian
Nights,” the “Bookseller’s Conversation,” pitting romantic figures or “subli-
mated reality” against “lowered, everyday reality” (Pushkin, 2:17).27 This
1824 poem had set the tone for Pushkin’s familiar cycle of works on the poet
and the crowd, providing guidelines for the practice of the poetic art that
remain remarkably unchanged over the whole sequence—until Charskii
meets the improvisor. But now, the improvisor’s realism reveals Charskii’s
romantic metaphoricity to be a thing of the past. If aristocratic poets in Rus-
sia had subscribed to the myth of the romantic genius—nameless, outcast,
48
The Call of Poverty
downtrodden, and impoverished, but through it all, brilliant—the Italian is

a realization of the metaphor. Where before the poet’s status as social outcast
had been understood figuratively in the “Bookseller’s Conversation” as “I
am alien to all,” and had taken on modest dimensions in Charskii’s attempt
to separate his two zvaniia, now it is realized in the Italian’s literal foreign-
ness (2:328; “Bookseller’s Conversation”). One of the marks of the fortunate
poet, that he is without reputation, “nameless,” is true of the improvisor lit-
erally (2:326; “Bookseller’s Conversation”). The Italian plays the standard
role of poet as prophet, as we have seen, in a way that Charskii cannot as-
pire to. The freedom to mix art and business, tentatively asserted in the
“Bookseller’s Conversation,” receives in his person merely its full elabora-
tion. (For all his “avarice,” the Italian never violates the implicit, clearly cru-
cial condition in the “Bookseller’s Conversation” that concern for profit leave
inspiration inviolable [381].)
The Derzhavin epigraph to the second chapter, “I am Tsar, I am slave,
I am worm, I am God,” long a cliché for the poet, is entirely conventional
when applied to Charskii, but takes on a more literal meaning when the
poor improvisor speaks as the Egyptian empress and goddess. Charskii calls
inspiration “rubbish” as if belittling what is actually highest in his mind, his
usual tactic with all things poetic (373). The Italian shows him a form of in-
spiration still higher in a context still lower. The Italian even embodies the
traditional epithet of “singer” for the poet when he begins his improvisations
with chords from his guitar and later the overture to the opera Tancrède. In
effect, the Italian—unwittingly, like everything important he does—charges
Charskii with taking excessive poetic liberties in acting the role of poet. Ex-
changing poetic figures for real coin, the stranger outdoes Charskii at his
own game. Pushkin is famous for cutting through old romantic clichés with
the razor edge of inescapable mundane truths. But here for once he is do-
ing something different: making the substitutions and then hesitating as he
ponders on which side his own loyalties lie.28 For the new realities seem to
belong to people whose downtrodden anonymity and lack of dignity are
hard to swallow.
Nothing is spared the Italian’s onslaught except the pure art of art. As
its most urgent attainment, the “Bookseller’s Conversation” had established
a method by which the poet could sell his manuscripts without having to
fear that he had sold his soul. The method was simple: the poet would write
without consideration for what would sell, and would sell without concern
for what he had written—a rigid separation which distantly but clearly pre-
figures Charskii’s divided personae. Yet if before the poet could define the
ultimate limitation of the marketplace as, “Inspiration is not for sale / But a
manuscript can be sold,” now the improvisor demonstrates that even inspi-
ration may be hired out (2:330).29 The entire artistic process has entered
the market.
49
ANSWERING THE CALL: POETRY AS POVERTY

—Кто сей?
—Пиит.
—Какое ж это званье?
—Как бы сказать? по русски — виршеписец
Иль скоморох.
—Pushkin, Boris Godunov drafts
If we can account for Pushkin’s identification with the Italian, we still have
no reason to explain Charskii’s. Indeed, in contrast to his creator’s ruined fi-
nances, Charskii’s “sizable estate” ought to shield him from the anxieties of
the marketplace (371). And yet Charskii obviously identifies: we see how
much he cares, for both better and worse, about the spectacle of the eco-
nomically humiliated writer. This involvement is all the more remarkable
for being entirely at odds with the jaded writer’s usual habits. The man who
must always feign enthusiasm because he never really cares about anything
happening in society suddenly takes “great interest [uchastie] in the suc-
cess” of the Italian’s improvisation (382). Why does the Italian have such
power to engage, awe, and infuriate the aristocrat?
As his source in the 1830 “A Fragment” suggests, Charskii begins the
story as though he were the carefree Pushkin of an earlier era, but this ends
when, as Greenleaf observes, the visit to the Italian in inn room 35 drags
him into the presence of the difficulties of 1835—yet what, if not money,
are they (334–35)? This is an essential question that will take some time to
explore. The answer, as we shall see, turns on Bakhtin’s notion of chuzhoe
slovo, or rather Pushkin’s. In “Egyptian Nights,” Pushkin works with a new
concept of human identity—very loosely, identity as it is reconceived within
the prosaic and deterministic universe of realism. And he concludes that
while not everyone in society is subject to determination from without, two
individuals certainly qualify: the poor man and, unfortunately for Charskii,
the poet. Once again, literacy and poverty have hidden, intimate connections.
Pushkin begins by emphasizing, rather than downplaying as Karamzin
had, the social distance that renders the Italian distasteful to Charskii.
Charskii makes the unlikeliest of candidates for identificatory rapproche-
ment, with no philanthropic instincts and no interest in social leveling. On
first meeting, he pegs the Italian as roughly of the same ilk as the subjects
of Grigorovich’s physiological sketch “Petersburg Organ-Grinders.”30 The
organ-grinders, also originally from Italy, perform in the street for small
coins. Like the blind violinist who delights Mozart and disgusts Salieri in
Pushkin’s little tragedy, these icons of human degradation represent the
lowest instantiation of the artist, a curious spectacle whose effect on more
prosperous artists is as ambiguous as it is powerful. Wandering about Europe
and struggling to survive, Grigorovich’s ragged performer at last hears rumors
50
The Call of Poverty
“that somewhere to the north, in Russia, his confrères are few, that there he
can turn a true profit: thither! a Pietroborgo!”31 It is this term “confrères”
(sobraty) and the Italian’s inclusive use of it that stand out in his dreadfully
miscalculated request, “I hope, Signor, that you will offer friendly assistance
[vspomozhenie] to your confrère” (375).
Charskii responds in a way so erratic that something more than mere
social mix-ups must be at stake. He immediately launches on a tirade about
the treatment poets receive in Russia, a topic with no relation to either the
Italian or his request (Charskii still thinks him a musician). Then Charskii
inexplicably claims not to be a poet anyway. This is his habitual lie, but fol-
lowing on the bitter rant, the mask of indifference seems faintly preposter-
ous. When the Italian mentions that he too is a poet, Charskii is apologetic
and solicitous—as we have been told he never is in the company of other
writers.
The contradictions are not Charskii’s alone, for one vital inconsistency
has to be attributed to Pushkin. Charskii’s contention, “The calling [zvanie]
of poet does not exist in our country” is bitingly sincere (375–76); but so is
the narrator’s exactly contradictory claim, “The bitterest and most intolera-
ble misfortune for a poet is the calling and nickname [zvanie i prozvishche]
with which he is branded and which never deserts him” (371–72). The con-
fusion over zvanie is remarkable; it simultaneously hounds the poet and
does not exist. One must assume a poet losing control of his words has come
literally to wit’s end. Clearly Pushkin is agonized by the lack of a viable con-
cept of zvanie. All he can find is a morass of belittling conditions and con-
flicting views of it, all enragingly unacceptable. The question “Egyptian
Nights” urgently wishes to answer, then, is: what can it possibly mean to be
a poet in Russia?
Some degree of uncertainty is inevitable because the Russian word
zvanie is itself diffuse. The term designates concepts as varied as job, class
or estate, or rank in the service.32 (We should recall that for an aristocrat of
ancient lineage like Pushkin, two of these meanings, service rank and true
nobility, are incompatible things. Service, even high-ranking service, is for
servants. Service motivated by a desire for ranks compromises the true no-
bleman’s independence.) As in “The Prophet,” zvanie also stretches in a dif-
ferent direction to accommodate the romantic concept of calling, with its
predestined awarding of talent and divine summons to prophecy. The com-
mon thread in all these usages is the question of human identity, in partic-
ular the troublesome ways in which our identity is determined from without.
Every calling is an imposed selfhood which comes over us whether we choose
it or not, a public persona we wield but do not wholly control, and that, to
anticipate, is what poverty for Pushkin also is.
Imposed selves can be deeply troubling. Here we should recall the 1830
debate over what was known as literary aristocracy. At the time, Viazemskii
51
and Pushkin had taken it upon themselves to defend the writer N. A. Pole-
voi (brother of the previously quoted Polevoi) from snide attacks on his
merchant background.33 Viazemskii believed literature should be governed
by an “aristocracy of talents” in which all classes would be welcome, and
therefore looked askance at attacks against a writer exclusively because of
his “merchant zvanie. . . . What matters is not the zvanie to which you are
born: On ne se choisit pas son père [One doesn’t choose one’s father], as
LaMothe said in his ode to Rousseau, but rather in how you carry your
zvanie” (quoted in Todd, 61).34 For Viazemskii, zvanie is not the final arbi-
ter of identity. Traits of character take precedence; human identity pro-
ceeds above all from within. Pushkin sided with his friend. In an instructive
moment, however, Polevoi ended up allied with his attackers against the
two poets, who themselves belonged to the highest reaches of the aristoc-
racy and whose protectorship he seems not to have appreciated. Pushkin
may have learned something about the gulf between classes in a markedly
stratified society from this unexpected outcome. After all, if noblemen can
appreciate literary talent with a blind eye to social niceties, why is Charskii
so appalled by the Italian’s behavior, time and again? Indeed perhaps some
of the lowly are proud not to be aristocrats.
“Egyptian Nights” differs from Pushkin’s earlier depictions of creative
artists because it for the first time entertains in its full gravity the question
perhaps most fundamental to realism, that of social forces that shape and
condition who individuals become. This newfound interest derives ulti-
mately from a desire to know whether we actually create and control our
own identities and so possess the freedom to be judged by the content of
our character. It would be difficult to overestimate the ramifications, in al-
most every area of human thought, of this crucial inquiry. Not surprisingly,
the poet’s social identity comes to the fore in Pushkin’s first prose work on
the poet and the crowd, after the long cycle of works in verse.35 And the
prosaic force par excellence, simultaneously the most powerful, the petti-
est, and therefore the most offensive to the nineteenth-century concept of
the sovereign individual—the conjunction of power and pettiness itself sug-
gests the paradoxes that now begin to arise—is money. The important ques-
tion of prose is not, as in Queen of Spades, how to make it, but, as in this
story of Egypt’s queen, how it makes us. With prose, we enter a new uni-
verse, where selves may not entirely belong to their owners, and where such
things as freedom, merit, and guilt as a result begin to be problematic.
As a prose work, “Egyptian Nights” foregoes the generalizing meta-
physical language with which the earlier poems describe the writer’s role
and for the first time assigns each protagonist a specific social standing.
Class is suddenly something characters discuss, defend, and fret about; and
with good reason, for it now conditions the practice of poetry. In a mecha-
nism not uncommon to depictions of otherness, the discovery of the exter-
52
The Call of Poverty
nal determinants of the other, of the forces that bespeak the other above
and beyond his will, leads to insight into how the self too is shaped by the
world beyond. The formulation of the other’s alterity ends up underscoring
the similitude of other to self. And as Charskii discovers, the self ’s unfree-
dom is a monstrous proposition—one capable of making a self-respecting
man lose self-possession over and over.
Poverty enters Charskii’s thinking just as powerfully—and just as un-
consciously—as it enters that of realism itself. The poor are the prime ex-
ample of pawns of circumstance. Certainly we all can, to some extent, resist
fate. But to what extent? Even if we grant the poor cannot buy all they
would like, can they at least be whomever they choose? The conceptual
difficulties only redouble when the poor are outrageous, for then we may
charitably wish to explain their actions by reference to circumstances they
do not control. Charskii, attempting to grasp the improvisor’s viewpoint,
ponders the “everyday necessity” that pursues him (381). He reminds him-
self that the other is subject to economic forces he is not responsible for.
If he seems greedy for profit, it is not by choice but because he has known
destitution. His distasteful kowtowing before unworthy audiences derives
from a need to eat, not disdain of the majesty of poetry. But if so, parts
of the Italian’s behavior, and hence of his self, are no longer truly his own.
The enduring paradox of victimization is that it allows us to forgive the
poor faults caused by their poverty, but only at the expense of demeaning
the poor themselves. Where penury in “Poor Liza” represented innocence,
a shortage of cultural knowledge, here it signifies non-self-determination, a
shortfall of being. The Italian becomes, in this view—it is Charskii’s view,
but also the only one we get—a diminished self, a creature stranded ex-
actly where we find him at the start, in a no man’s land of anonymity and
makeshift identities. What most haunts Charskii personally, however, is
the doubt that ensues: are the wealthy and powerful at least wholly free
to be themselves, whatever that might mean? Or are we all shaped by forces
that bespeak us from beyond—some of us by our privilege as others by their
need?
The poor man’s humiliations do not end with the economic. Instead,
he finds himself prey as well to all the world’s high and mighty. Before sug-
gesting economic reasons for the Italian’s nature, Pushkin gives us verbal
ones in the epigraph to chapter 1:
— Quel est cet homme?

— Ha, c’est un bien grand talent, il fait de sa voix tout ce qu’il veut.
— Il devrait bien, madame, s’en faire une culotte. (371)
[What sort of man is this? —Ah, he is quite a talent; he makes of his voice
anything that he will. —He should certainly, madame, use it to make himself
a culotte.]
53
The poor poet’s identity here is bespoken by the anonymous monsieur to

comic effect. Meanwhile, the identity of the aristocrat remains his to define;
the gentleman in this quotation bespeaks himself as a biting wit. The epi-
graph is a class-based put-down in which an aristocrat subtly challenges a
poet on the poet’s own ground, over the power of words. Perhaps the poet
can use his voice to make things, but he cannot escape the power of the rich
man who uses his voice too, to make the poet a laughingstock. The prosaic
causes of the poor man’s deprivation of self, then, are verbal as well as pe-
cuniary. This is what it means, in Pushkin’s story, to be “called.” The irony
of the opening scene is that Charskii, himself a poet, uses his aristocratic
privilege to dress the improvisor down, telling him when to speak and when
to remain silent, and making sport at his expense. This is the image of a
poor man one can pity but most certainly would not want to be. For Push-
kin, the true scourge of poverty or chuzhoe slovo, then, is not the suffering
it induces but its ability to wrench us out of our authentic selves and invest
us with an identity we may not prefer but inevitably proceed to incarnate.36
Being called deeply contradicts Pushkin’s idea of nobility, where in-
dependence is of the essence.37 Charskii is especially horrified because he
has always thought of himself, and is still presented at the story’s start, as an
aristocrat of untrammeled freedom. Not only is he wealthy. “He was not yet
thirty; he was not married; the service did not burden him” (371). Even
Charskii’s separate private and public personae guarantee his autonomy;
each offers a haven from the demands of the other. The story’s two poets,
in other words, represent two antithetical ways of being in a world of oth-
erness, engagement and detachment, and so utterly distinct starting points
for the poetic craft.
Charskii’s faith that both art and the autonomous human personality
as he conceives it are absolute values not subject to class, shaken by the
shameless avarice of the magnificent improvisor, is finished off as he con-
templates the nature of the calling that he too hears. Poetry in Pushkin’s
longstanding definition had always seemed to be predicated on indepen-
dence. At least before “Egyptian Nights,” inspiration must be allowed to
come freely, of its own accord—and as the “Bookseller’s Conversation”
shows, “freely” explicitly means without consideration for what sells and
what is likely to be rewarded. A poet, by this logic, cannot afford to be poor.
The “Bookseller’s Conversation” had summed up the situation thus: “In this
age of iron / Without money there is no freedom either” (2:329). Yet poetry
too, in Pushkin’s standard, but as “Egyptian Nights” now discovers, self-
contradictory presumption, entails a summons by the freedom-encroaching
imperatives of creation. The poet may be called differently, by Apollo in
“The Poet” (“Until Apollo summons the poet / To his sacred sacrifice . . .”
[3:65]), the Almighty in “The Prophet” (“And unto me called the voice of
God” [3:30]), or the annoying “passerby” who yanks the poet’s sleeve in the
54
The Call of Poverty
first improvisation and intones suitable topics for poems, but he is always
called (379). Presumably, Apollo and God will not make sport of the poet,
but this is not a matter poets have any say in.
The entirety of Pushkin’s programmatic masterpiece “The Prophet”
(1826) is devoted to the eclipse of the authorial self. The prorok acquires the
immense power of shaping the verbal image of the universe. But his height-
ened sensory perception is given at the cost of a forfeiture of self-mastery.
His own voice is silenced so he can hear and sound abroad what Mandel-
stam called “the noise of time.” (In the whole poem, the poet performs only
one action under his own volition: the first verb, “drifted [vlachilsia]” [3:30].)
The seraph sent from above rips out and replaces the poet’s heart and
tongue, the organs he will require most. When God commands, “Drink in
my will, / And traveling ’cross seas and lands, / Sear the hearts of the peo-
ple with your tongue,” the artist has once and for all been bespoken from
without (3:31). With transplanted sight, hearing, will, heart, and tongue,
you can speak only chuzhoe slovo. Outside of death, a more total loss of self
would scarcely be imaginable.
In using his sympathetic insight to assume other masks, the “camelion
Poet,” in Keats’s words, “has no character . . . no Identity—he is continually
in for—and filling some other Body—the Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men
and Women” (cited in Barish, 358).38 Pushkin reinforces the point by bor-
rowing for an epigraph Derzhavin’s Tsar-slave-worm-God citation. Cer-
tainly the poet regains his own identity in the end, but any art that aims to
reproduce the manifold voices of reality remains predicated on the renun-
ciation of the prerogatives of the performer’s self. Conversely, in their per-
sonal identity poets are not poets. (Charskii simply dissimulates, while the
Italian inevitably becomes tongue-tied.) And if in the work of a master, such
as “Egyptian Nights,” one of the masks may every now and then bear a
striking resemblance to the author’s real identity, this is simply because the
true impersonator must be able to impersonate himself as well.
Charskii has no visible pretensions to prophet status, but when he
composes, the description suggests the writing process makes a mockery of
any creator’s hopes of commanding his surroundings. Instead, words sug-
gest themselves, rhyme, rhythm, and thought circulate out of sight and find
themselves partners, while “you” merely stand by, little more than a de-
lighted observer.
Charskii felt that blissful disposition of the spirit in which . . . you come across
vibrant, unexpected words for the incarnation of your visions, in which the
verses lie down beneath your pen with ease and sonorous rhymes run to meet
shapely thoughts. (373)
If Charskii is indeed the Italian’s “confrère,” this is a brotherhood with a rite

of admission, one the Italian later evokes by his seemingly innocuous excla-
55
mation “Corpo di Bacco!” and, as in antiquity, the entry rite enacts the de-
struction of the self that bears the power (378).39 Hence even the moment
of inspiration that Charskii alone treasures, the most intimate core of his
poetry, is a calling, a speaking in which the poet is spoken more than he
speaks. Certainly, some poets may suffer the loss of self gladly. The prob-
lem in “Egyptian Nights” is that Charskii and his author still desperately
long to salvage aristocratic dignity.
The calling inflicts another form of dependence as well, for the poet
is enjoined to “sear the hearts” of listeners. His success, like the Italian’s, is
held at the mercy of a communicative act and depends in part on his many
receivers—some of whom may be minimally receptive toward poetry. The
prorok’s verses will now be judged less on internal qualities than on rhetor-
ical efficacy. That this model of the vacated self remains in effect in “Egypt-
ian Nights,” where so many of Pushkin’s former assumptions have been
suspended, is implicit in the divine imagery at the start of the second im-
provisation: “But already the improvisor was feeling the approach of the
god . . .” (386; ellipsis in original). To be sure, lending one’s tongue to the
divine message would seem to be not quite the same thing as offering one-
self up to the marketplace—unless the crucial criterion is independence.40
And in that case, as Cleopatra’s dying victims learn, the call of a goddess
may be the more devastating.
In applying to the situation he hates “every kind of effort to slough off
the unbearable nickname,” Charskii senses the problem has to do with his
vulnerability to otherness, but mistakenly attributes it to his visibility to so-
ciety (372). He continues to misformulate his misfortune as the invasion by
other people of a space he considers private, as though a poet sitting alone
would be master of the site of poetry. In fact, in the bedroom where he
writes he is not in charge, for though the house is his alone, this most im-
portant room is “decorated like a lady’s bedroom” (372). Metaphorically it
belongs to someone else, a woman not named but whose identity we can
guess: Charskii’s mistress, the muse. Here Charskii can only fill the role of
a flunky, for he is summoned to serve his mistress when she wills, not when
he chooses: “When that rubbish (as he called inspiration) came over him
[na nego nakhodila]” (373; italics in original). To poetry, then, Charskii
comes when called, a servant. His peculiar pride in the excellent cleaning
of the room suddenly makes sense (“there was none of that mess which ex-
poses the absence of broom and brush” [372–73]). And if even inspiration
is service, who is freer to give himself to art than the man who has nothing?
Charskii and “Egyptian Nights” are slowly groping their way toward the re-
alization that the poverty which makes the other poet so different from him,
in fact does just the opposite, making the two of them alike.
If there is a distinction still to be drawn, it is simply to show what a
poet can do when poverty is wholeheartedly embraced. The first improvi-
56
The Call of Poverty
sation scene directly pits Charskii against the improvisor in a test of poet’s
sympathetic insight, and it is the nobleman who ends up losing. Each poet
implicitly challenges the ability of the other to imagine himself in the place
of the first. Charskii gives the Italian a peculiar theme to improvise on: “The
poet selects the subjects for his songs himself; the crowd does not have the
right to govern his inspiration” (379). This theme is the supreme challenge
to the improvisor’s sympathetic skills, for it is the one and only topic on which
no improvisor can truly speak out of personal conviction. The theme chal-
lenges the very foundation of the improvisor’s art. The Italian must imagine
himself a man of leisure like Charskii with no need to appeal to his audience,
and this he does. Then the roles are reversed, but Charskii fails his test, for
though he tries, he cannot quite manage to put himself in the position of the
Italian when the latter wants to discuss money, a doubly striking failure since
he is not asked to author anything more complicated than a conversation.
It was unpleasant for Charskii to fall from the heights of poetry to the depths
of some clerk’s shop; but everyday necessity he understood full well and he
plunged into financial calculations with the Italian. In this the Italian mani-
fested such wild greed, such a simple-hearted love of profit, that he revolted
Charskii, who hurried to leave him lest he lose entirely the sensation of rap-
ture produced in him by the brilliant improvisor. (381)
When it comes to pure imaginative potency, most important of poetic pos-

sessions, the Italian proves richer than the aristocrat. And not surprisingly,
since if Pushkin’s vision of poetry values above all immersion in otherness,
then improvisors, whose very inspiration is alien, must be the purest poets.
The performance once and for all lays to rest Charskii’s credo of au-
tonomy above all things. For though the Italian is happy to voice that credo
himself, his doing so proves it untrue: while not internally generated, the
theme is no hindrance to verse of the highest order. Free as his creator had
been in his heyday, Charskii is a farewell to the license of poets.41 For if
even the man with no commitments cannot protect his liberty, then there is
no hope. And with good reason. Secure finances, far from freeing the poet
to write, allow him to retreat from engagement with a world that must con-
tinue to get under his skin if it is to arouse his full sensitivity. An aristocratic
identity, symbolized in “A Fragment” by the 600-year-old name whose
mention in the Russian chronicles delights the hero, prevents total absorp-
tion in poetry, since a fixed persona can only be an obstacle to chameleons.
Throughout the story, the constraints of shame, name, dignity, and reputa-
tion hold Charskii back and distract him from what is essential, offering no
benefits in return. It is “aristocrat poet,” not “poor poet,” that is the con-
tradiction in terms. Charskii’s revulsion to the Italian is not, as it first seems
to both him and us, a repugnance to money-grubbing but rather to the es-
sence of poetry itself as Pushkin’s story now portrays it.
57
The Italian possesses all the gifts of poverty. In his unprotected need-
iness, his being answers to forces that shape him from without. And in the
analogous art of improvisation, his inspiration does the same. Even if we
forget his provenance out of Charskii’s own mind, he is, as someone bespo-
ken in both art and life, all chuzhoe slovo. (Despite his boorish invasion of
Charskii’s sanctuary, the improvisor knows enough not to open his mouth
until Charskii addresses him first.) As Bakhtin in a sense always claimed,
chuzhoe slovo is indissoluble from prosaic forces because it is those forces,
such shapers of human destinies as need, social causality, and determinism.
It is the word which I utter, but which does not emanate from me alone, the
other voices that speak in, through, and against me even as I strive to be-
speak myself. What appalls Charskii as he contemplates the Italian is the
dawning recognition that the Italian is indeed his superior, not despite his
victimization by social forces, but precisely because of them, that need can
bend the will into the perfect staging ground for poetry. When he runs off
after the first improvisation to preserve the beautiful lines he has just heard,
Charskii vividly demonstrates the universal truth he thinks he so opposes,
that the poetic process is never owned by its performer. “A Fragment” had
jokingly referred to the “now proverbial poverty” of the prototypical verse
writer (8:409). “Egyptian Nights” has come to regard the idea in dead
earnest.
POVERTY AS NIGHTMARE
No doubt, he is a Pretender [samozvanets]

But I must avow, the danger is not slight.
—Pushkin, Boris Godunov
“Egyptian Nights,” however, is not content to discover a similitude ap-

proaching identity between poetry and poverty and leave us with that in-
sight. As Pushkin rightly senses, the crux of the matter lies ahead. It is easy
to embrace the poor in theory, from a distance; it requires no real sacrifice.
What is difficult is to take up wholeheartedly the poverty of poetry, to ac-
cept the Italian’s ugly, impertinent, oafish self as one’s own. This imperative
to love is held over Charskii as an absolute. He of course cannot be forced
to embrace it—aristocrats do not have to do things they do not like—but
there is no longer any doubt that the Italian is the truer poet, nor that
Charskii faces a difficult decision. He himself sees the fork in the road
ahead: poetry goes one way and aristocracy the other. His beloved illusion
of a viable middle ground is no more. One choice will take him down a path
that leads ultimately to loving the poverty of poetry completely, with none
of his typical self-withholding or resentment, while the other means com-
promising and so forever betraying the calling.
58
The Call of Poverty
Nothing less than love will suffice because for “Egyptian Nights” in-
spiration is an act of passion, not craft. The story marks its departure from
Pushkin’s earlier verse, where simple workmanship was equally essential,
unmistakably; Charskii is astonished to observe in the Italian “none of the
labor, nor the gradual cooling down, nor that disquiet that precedes inspi-
ration” (380).42 The metaphor behind the passion of poetry, of art or inspi-
ration as love—“metaphor” may be too weak a word—is well established in
the Western tradition since at least the concept of the poet’s muse, and it is
foundational in “Egyptian Nights” from the start.43 It is prepared in the first
chapter, where, to Charskii’s disgust, his lady-love brings out an album for
him to inscribe, suggesting an exchangeability of affections and verse. The
discussion of whether Charskii is more truly artist or gentleman is resolved
with the categorical statement, “However he was a poet, and his passion
was insuperable,” passion being the proof of the poetic calling (373). It re-
turns when Desdemona’s choice of Othello is used to figure the writer’s
freedom of inspiration in the first improvisation. Above all, it stands at the
heart of the second improvisation, where Cleopatra offers any man who is
interested a night of her love, in an extended metaphor for the poets’ aes-
thetic battle.44 Even the description of verse writing we have already seen
is highly sexualized: “The verses lie down beneath your pen with ease and
sonorous rhymes run to meet shapely thoughts”; here poetry and “your
pen” copulate while rhymes embrace winsome thoughts (373). No wonder
Charskii does his writing in his pajamas in a room decked out like a bedroom.
Because authenticity in art derives from the unstintingness of the cre-
ator’s fervor, the story must catalog in intimate detail Charskii’s struggle to
enter into the Italian’s new art form. For only when the last of his many
reservations has been conquered can he be said to love the low. Despite the
unusual writing apparel, Charskii is slow to give himself over to others.
Even love in its diluted form, sympathy, rankles him. What he detests about
the treatment of poets in Russia is not that they are not appreciated. Exactly
the opposite: he abhors the solicitude of readers, their well-intentioned pry-
ing and suppositions. “Should he stop to think about his troubled affairs . . .
immediately a trite smile accompanies the trite exclamation: sure enough,
you’re composing something!” (372). The world in Pushkin’s depiction adores
a poet, so much that it won’t leave him alone. Meanwhile Charskii relishes
society’s chitchat, purposely described in “Egyptian Nights” as shallow
(“His conversations were of the tritest” [372]), not despite but because it is
always satisfied with half-truths. The aristocratic prerogative he clings to is
not arrogance or power, but the rich man’s right to shield his true self: “He
masqueraded now as a passionate horse-lover, now as a desperate gambler,
now as the most refined gastronome” (373). In an exact reversal of Karam-
zin, society interactions furnish the perfect mode of moving in the world
without becoming entangled in webs of sympathy. The identity-swapping in
59
this last quotation would of course be the perfect poet’s ruse were it not
used for exactly the wrong purpose: to falsify the poet’s passions.
When Charskii does sympathize—Pushkin is careful to specify—he
does so from the wrong motive, nobility rather than poetry. After his initial
blowup, the Italian “uttered several incoherent excuses, bowed and desired
to leave. His pitiful appearance touched Charskii, who, despite the trifles of
his character, had a good and noble heart” (376). Precisely his “noble” heart
gets him into what, by his standards, is trouble. He does the same, again not
without repulsion, when the Italian asks for themes to no avail and Charskii
is forced to write the first and when, to rescue the “poor girl” reduced to
tears because the audience suspects her as the author of the salacious Cleo-
patra theme, he intervenes to explain it (386). Charskii always responds to
the spectacle of the poor in distress, begrudgingly but dutifully—as though
he sensed something greater were at stake. He feels inexplicably implicated
whenever he hears chuzhoe slovo calling in the form of others requesting
aid, others who are themselves caught in the chuzhoe slovo of fates they did
not make. Indeed, the aristocrats in the story who are not poets hear no such
call, instead sitting and complacently—Cleopatra would say delightedly—
watching the spectacle of first the Italian’s and then the young woman’s suf-
fering. Torn between his noble privilege of retiring and his noble impulse
to help, “touched” in the quotation as the man of independence vows never
to be, Charskii is at odds with himself and losing all sense of self. Yet self-
loss, as the Italian shows, may be the greatest boon for the artist.
At bottom, Charskii’s fear is a fear of passionate engagement. To the
extent that he learns as, in fascination and dread, he observes the Italian at
his craft, he is learning a new way of conceiving the roles of self and other
in art. “Egyptian Nights” speaks of these as sobstvennoe (“one’s own”) and
chuzhoe (“alien,” “someone else’s”), and in echo of the pairings wealth-self
and poverty-selflessness associates sobstvennoe with sobstvennost’ (“prop-
erty”). These terms appear again and again in “Egyptian Nights,” for the
fragment is insistent in linking the various ways in which the self intercedes
and participates in the other and vice versa: sympathy (sharing another’s ex-
perience), the sympathetic projection that defines art (insight into another’s
viewpoint), the calling (the intrusion of outside influences upon the self),
improvisation (the imposition of alien viewpoints on the artist), and, above
all, love.
The Italian’s most important lesson is a demonstration of how one can
bespeak oneself by means of bespeaking others. (Charskii is ripe for en-
lightenment because, as we learn in a small but significant aside, despite his
dislike of the motley crowd he nonetheless chooses to publish his work.)
For the cynical Charskii the concept of possession characterizes the rela-
tionship with society he has always fled, in which “the public regards [the
poet] as its own property [sobstvennost’]” (372). Charskii prefers in his art
60
The Call of Poverty
to seek refuge not only from the society that would own him, but even from
the self in him that society would seize. We see the flight from sobstvennoe
in his delight at escaping into verse writing from “his own [sobstvennye]
eccentricities” (373–74). The man who would flee chuzhoe is, in a peculiar
mechanism, forced to renounce sobstvennoe as well. The improvisor shows
Charskii a path back to the truest ideal of poetry, not the crowd’s subjuga-
tion of the poet, nor for that matter the poet’s ascendancy over the crowd,
but the mutual possession of poet and audience, modeled again on the re-
lations of lovers.
Charskii proposes for the first improvisation his favorite theme of po-
etic license. The Italian gives him back Othello’s Desdemona, who “selects /
An idol for her heart” (380). The image is not gratuitous: Desdemona in the
improvisor’s telling uses her freedom only to trade it for mutual possession.
She surrenders herself to another and actively seeks the subservience im-
plied by “idol” (kumir). This, the improvisor implies, is true independence—
the liberty not of retreat, but of giving oneself without reserve. But how
does one achieve mutual possession? The Italian has trouble explicating it
(“This intimate connection between one’s own inspiration and an external
alien will—vainly should I hope to explain it” [381]). But if he cannot quite
vocalize it, he nonetheless shows Charskii repeatedly that where the other
is, so is he.
True, the improvisor cannot give his audience an insight they do not
have. But he can obviate that necessity. By extemporizing on any subject his
listeners please, he undertakes to meet them on their ground, and then to
make it his. If a topic does not compel him, he will imagine what in it would
move or interest another. Charskii’s own conception of the event (“No
sooner has someone else’s thought reached your hearing than it has already
become your own possession [sobstvennost’]” [380]) portrays the impro-
visatory art precisely as an admission of chuzhoe slovo (Charskii calls it
“chuzhaia mysl’,” “someone else’s thought”) into the poetic process. The
Italian knows how to do something Charskii can barely imagine, to appro-
priate—that is, to make one’s own or make into one’s self, to incorporate
others’ inspiration and make it both his own possession and a part of his
very self—“as if you had been fostering and developing it all along,” Char-
skii himself volunteers (380). This is another form of the beautiful and ter-
rifying ability to step freely across the border between self and other, the
lover’s intuition of the beloved.
Indeed the Italian meets a requirement that even the prorok did not
face: he develops other people’s fantasies for them, spinning their words
into creations that show them, as he does with Charskii, things they may not
even know about themselves.45 He proffers his insights without coercion, in
the form of entertainment, on the off chance that the audience may prove
sufficiently attuned to notice the home truths he has delivered. As both an
61
emanation of Charskii’s unconscious and an adept of chuzhoe slovo, the

Italian embodies a way of getting back to the self through the other, a re-
turn to the poet Charskii considers his truest self. This is the revolutionary
significance of the spectacle the rich poet finds himself contemplating in
the poor poet.
The Italian at last answers the doubts that gnawed at Pushkin’s earlier
poets. The prospect that the assembled aristocrats will be unable to under-
stand his native language gives him no pause. He treats them nonetheless
to magnificent poetry. In acknowledging to Charskii that another poet is the
best possible audience, the Italian shows he knows the deficiencies of his
usual listeners but remains undeterred. Despite nearly botching their first
encounter, the Italian has no doubts that when it comes to poetry, his talent
will win over the demanding writer who is his audience and whom he barely
knows. “You are a poet, you will understand me better than they do, and
your quiet approbation is worth more to me than an entire storm of ap-
plause,” he says before his performance, even predicting accurately Char-
skii’s silence at the end (378–79). Instead he demonstrates a self-confidence
that must have loomed large in 1835, when Pushkin was having such unac-
customed trouble writing anything. This is a new poetic ideal for Pushkin in
his last years, mutual possession effected via the labors of one, an eternal
openness to the other which has outgrown its illusions, yet regained its abil-
ity to trust.
Like a pretender to the throne, the improvisor in Pushkin’s “Egyptian
Nights” has come to expose the current poetic nobility and stake his own
claim. Only this False Dmitrii turns out to be real.46 At least, when writers
may be regretting their usurped autonomy, a pretender, a samozvanets, has
some say in his zvanie and puts to good use the poetic prerogative of pre-
tending. Thus we must wonder who in the end would have taken the upper
hand if Pushkin had carried his story to its conclusion? The aristocracy of
names, or the claimant for the aristocracy of talents? The fragment seems
to be headed in a direction which implies that, in the end, Charskii may
wish to own up to his similitude with the Italian. Perhaps, as in Boris Godu-
nov, the Pushkin in this text would have been won over by the Pretender.47
Mutual possession—were Pushkin’s hero to embrace it unhesitatingly—
constitutes the most genuine form of the new fascination with the poor, when
we see ourselves in them with complete self-giving, and they in us, the ideal
Karamzin had pursued with such difficulty. Yet something peculiar is going
on in “Egyptian Nights.” If Karamzin called on the upper classes to enact a
sympathetic identification with the lower, Pushkin’s poor man, curiously
enough, is the walking embodiment of that very skill. Stranger still, his abil-
ity conjures up in Charskii’s mind images of neither cultural literacy nor
philanthropy but rather theft, poison, and betrayal. As Poor Liza, the came-
lion poet, and above all Cleopatra’s victims remind us, being touched by
62
The Call of Poverty
another can be deeply disturbing, for it takes you out of yourself, a precar-
ious position where you may end up in someone else, or worse yet, dead.48
Indeed, mutual possession can be an unnatural, sickening, even terrifying
sensation that the self has lost its integrity and been invaded or merged with
others. Cleopatra’s lovers undoubtedly feel something of the sort in the arms
of a woman who is satisfying their every desire “like a simple prostitute
[prostoi naemnitsei]” but will also execute them (387). Charskii knows this
existential horror too, when he looks at the greedy, tacky, ill-bred foreigner
who unexpectedly washes up in Petersburg and stumbles into his life, car-
rying, incomprehensibly enough, pieces of Charskii’s own psyche with him.
Charskii’s recalcitrance in loving the low thus may not be wholly mis-
guided. Pushkin hits upon an ingenious method of conveying to readers a
taste of his hero’s agonizing uncertainty. Like Charskii we too sense there is
no safe and comfortable distance to which we might retreat from the Ital-
ian’s embrace, for we find no reliable boundaries—even ontological—that
would allow for certain distance. Pushkin effaces boundaries in part by de-
clining to speak openly of just how much is at stake in the battle between
love and loathing for the poor, but relentlessly hinting and hinting at it,
metaphorically, symbolically, through the unvoiced gaps and leaps in
Charskii’s thinking, until we too are swept away by our suspicions, even as
we are left with no single piece of reliable evidence to confirm them. A man
who can pass anywhere is in essence always too close for comfort. The
story’s form exactly mirrors its content, for the reader, like Charskii, finds
himself drifting toward conclusions that strike with uncanny force while
nonetheless seemingly coming from nowhere, as though we were trapped
in a nightmare, as though the self were no longer its own.
A key aspect of this unsettling scenario, where the poet has been
alienated from himself and faces a double who may be his own most authen-
tic self or his doom (highwayman, political conspirator, arsenic-merchant),
is laid out for the reader before the story proper even begins, in the epigraph
to chapter 1, which is worth returning to one more time. The epigraph cap-
tures the fragment’s profound ambivalence about who is who:
— Quel est cet homme?
— Ha, c’est un bien grand talent, il fait de sa voix tout ce qu’il veut.
— Il devrait bien, madame, s’en faire une culotte. (371)
In a microcosm of the text as a whole, the question of the poor man’s iden-
tity yields multiple answers. The evident answer is that the poor man is
laughable from an aristocratic perspective. But behind the complacent su-
periority, another answer lurks. For the man who is too poor to possess “une
culotte” is of course the sans-culotte, the arms-bearing enemy of all aris-
tocracies and social distinctions. The laughable man may not be so funny
after all. When the later improvisation on Cleopatra depicts an unequal
63
combat in which the superior is threatening the inferior with death, we must
bear in mind that the epigraph has alerted us to another possibility: the in-
ferior are issuing a counterthreat. Meanwhile, the epigraph can be read a
third way, for in the context of Russian literature, the man who “fait de sa
voix tout ce qu’il veut,” the writer who could unquestionably claim to have
mastered every poetic form and nonetheless had trouble meeting his mate-
rial needs, could only be one man: Pushkin. The poet makes himself and
the haunting image of poetry’s harsh future into the two sides of a single
coin from the very beginning of “Egyptian Nights.”
Charskii as well is implicated, for the epigraph by its contrast under-
scores his later failure to make use of the witty aristocrat’s prerogative of as-
signing identities to the poor. Charskii cannot put the Italian in his place
because the other’s shifting personae make him uncertain what that place
is. The answer is right before him—the Italian is himself, a poet, a “con-
frère” indeed, perhaps even an aspect of the poet called Charskii, his in-
escapable destiny. Instead, in a symbolically charged moment, the nobleman
gives away the power of bespeaking identities: “Allow me to inquire, who
are you and whom do you take me for?” (375). The poor poet will now make
the pronouncements, though, in nightmare fashion, he seems blissfully un-
aware what this will cost Charskii. “I am ready to serve you,” says Charskii,
who once seemed only metaphorically a servant (376). By the end of the
chapter, Charskii has sworn he is not a poet and refused to help the Italian—
and confessed that he is a poet and offered every possible aid. If the epi-
graph is right that the beau monde laughs at the poor, Charskii, whose
response is anything but humor, is no longer a part of the society which
helped anchor his identity. The nobleman is being guided, both to true po-
etry and back to himself by the improvisor, and something is distinctly amiss
because he no longer quite recognizes either destination.
DEATH IN THE BEDCHAMBER OF VERSE
In vain! Imagination’s
Commotion cannot bend fate,
But not in vain does a clear vision
Acquaint me with the grave.
—Pushkin, “Whether I Wander Down Noisy Streets” drafts
All the trouble in “Egyptian Nights” starts when Charskii enters his bed-
chamber of verse. For though they inspire poetry, women’s bedrooms in
“Egyptian Nights” also breed great danger. In the second improvisation,
Cleopatra offers any man who would like to accompany her to her bedroom
a night of her love in exchange for his life, the passion of life at its fullest
but at the price of self-loss. If we assume the ecstasy she proposes is meant
64
The Call of Poverty
by Pushkin to seem truly tempting, as deeply satisfying as the pleasures of

inspiration that visit Charskii in that other bedroom, then the offer is dizzy-
ing, challenging the listener to decide once and for all what is worth living
for and what worth dying for. Perhaps an inspired death is preferable to
slow destruction in the marketplace?49 Do the two poets keep meeting in
bedrooms—Charskii’s, the improvisor’s, then Desdemona’s and Cleopatra’s—
because despite his resistance Charskii is, gradually and unhappily, being
seduced? On the other hand, Charskii is naturally unsure whether to allow
everything he believes the poetic craft to be to crumble so quickly. Perhaps
the fate that has come to call is not inexorable; perhaps there is an out—
especially for poets, who have the gift of imagination and thus might be able
to achieve the ecstasy and cheat death too. One thing is undeniable: in the
bedchamber of verse, sacrifices will have to be made—perhaps human
ones—to satisfy the gods, but in exchange, creativity, procreation, and ex-
tinction will finally be sorted out.
As previously mentioned, the lack of an obvious connection between
the second improvisation and the frame narrative has allowed critics to over-
look their thematic cohesion, often to the extent of completely ignoring one
of the two in building an interpretation. Dostoevsky and Briusov discuss
“Egyptian Nights” as a work of verse about ancient Egypt and Rome. Ginz-
burg and Akhmatova, on the other hand, are silent about the verse and treat
the work as a meditation on the fate of the poet.50 In fact, the centrality of
the theme of learning to love the low suggests Pushkin always intended a
more unified reading.
Only a unified reading is capable of capturing the vital variation in
tone between the Cleopatra improvisation and all that comes before. In the
Italian’s first performance loving the low is defended passionately—and,
significantly, by a theme of Charskii’s own proposal. In parallel metaphors,
it figures the poet’s right to choose his own topics as Desdemona’s love for
Othello, then as the eagle who favors the tree stump over the mountaintop
as his resting spot, and then as the wind, which lingers capriciously in a
ravine instead of blowing at sea where it is needed. In each case, something
literally or figuratively low is favored over that which is higher and to all ap-
pearances more appropriate. (Othello is inferior through his status as a
Moor.)51 Grouped together to illustrate the poet’s license, these symbols
suggest that even finicky upper-class writers like Charskii treasure their
right to partake of the unexalted and undignified. And in their unapologetic
unanimity, they cast love for the low in the most flattering of lights. The
two-poets narrative, however, suspends the first improvisation within an
ambivalent frame where loving the low shows a second, darker side. The
resolution of these tensions is left for the Italian’s second improvisation.
The improvisation treats the legend of Cleopatra, but follows the ob-
scure quotation originally attributed to the historian Aurelius Victor which
65
Charskii provides as a theme, in which Cleopatra combines lust with mur-

der. Where we might expect her better-known story with Antony and Cae-
sar, Pushkin here explores what he clearly considers some of the most
extreme psychological territory imaginable. The degree of the legend’s ob-
scurity should not be underestimated. According to a historian of the Cleo-
patra legend, Pushkin was the first writer in modern times, going back beyond
Chaucer, to base his treatment of the Egyptian queen on Aurelius Victor
(Hughes-Hallett, 225–26). As a result, Charskii’s version of the theme
“Cleopatra and her lovers” constitutes the conscious substitution of a myth
in which Cleopatra kills another in place of the more famous one in which
she kills herself, a very important change, as we shall see. This redirection
of the violence from self to other is, it should be noted, a blatant attack on
sympathy: if there is to be violence in Pushkin’s story, it will not be polite as
in Karamzin.
Like the first, the second improvisation has its source in Charskii’s
anxieties over verse writing’s future. The first had asked whether poetry
could still be practiced if the formerly essential condition of independence
could no longer be met. When the Italian demonstrates conclusively that
the answer is yes, the final improvisation addresses the ensuing fear that the
new poet who sells his art to live has become a prostitute. Charskii’s preoc-
cupation with the marketplace here is an extension, or rather reversal, of
the theme of love; he has in mind the antinomy between commerce and
verse which in Pushkin dates back at least to the “Bookseller’s Conversa-
tion.” In that poem, the poet, while still young and uncorrupted by “this age
of iron,” shelters his inspiration, just as
with silent pride,
From the eyes of the hypocritical crowd
The superstitious lover shields
The gifts of his young beloved.
(2:192–93)
Poetry is again tantamount to love because both are passion. Care for the
fruits of inspiration contrasts directly with their financial exploitation: “And
the muse’s dulcet gifts / I did not demean with shameful commerce”
(2:192). No wonder Charskii is aghast at the Italian’s “love of profit,” for the
Italian withholds some of his affections for what Charskii considers much
lower concerns (380). When the Italian turns to money matters after his
first improvisation, however, Charskii’s distaste at the fact that he must “fall
from the heights of poetry to the depths of some clerk’s shop” (381) mirrors
the complaint of the philistine in the poem he himself suggested and is still
admiring: “No sooner have you reached the heights / Than you cast your
gaze down (Едва достиг ты высоты / И вот уж долу взор низводишь)”
(379). By loving money, or seeming to, the Italian merely takes Charskii’s
66
The Call of Poverty
own plea for the right of uncoerced affinities to its logical extension, and
Charskii comes to see that the contradiction is his. At this point, seeing
commerce claiming what belongs to love, Charskii makes the theme of
the second improvisation prostitution. Charskii instinctively senses that the
yielding of inspiration to any audience with sufficient cash is a violation,
the commercial exploitation of the poet’s intimacy. He cannot believe that
an act performed for monetary gain can in any meaningful sense be an act
of love.
As the Italian must sell his passion, so Cleopatra sells hers—the pay-
ment she collects being her lovers’ lives. The idea of prostitution in the
Cleopatra narrative is all the more prominent for being purely metaphori-
cal. The queen does not actually sell anything; rather her challenge is always
treated as if money were involved.52 Charskii explains, “Cleopatra desig-
nated death as the price of her love” (386; emphasis added). And the Ital-
ian has Cleopatra say:
Bliss can you purchase . . .

Hear me well: I can restore
Equality between us.
Who will accede to passion’s auction?
My love I offer for sale;
Speak, who among you will buy
My night at the price of his life?
Блаженство можно вам куПИТь . . .
Внемлите ж мне: могу равенство
Меж нами я восстановить.
Кто к ТорГу сТрасТному приступит?
Свою любовь я ПроДаю;
Скажите: кто меж вами куПИТ
Ценою жизни ночь мою?
(387; emphases added)
However, this is a most peculiar figure of commerce. It is Charskii’s anxiety

over the Italian’s degradation that spurs him to suggest Cleopatra as a sym-
bol of prostitution; yet in Cleopatra, he has chosen a figure that eliminates
financial need and dependence, the original motives of the whole process.
Charskii’s prostitute is a woman whose wealth and social status cease to re-
semble the Italian’s—and begin to resemble those of Charskii himself.
Charskii is worried about the prostitution of nobility.
With her double-edged offer of “equality,” Cleopatra finally gives
voice brazenly—Cleopatra’s fashion, after all—to the overturning of class
privileges implied by loving the low all along. But she also introduces man-
ifold ambiguities the first improvisation, operating under the aegis of the
poet’s license, had not bothered with: for the wages of equality are death.
67
At the same time, her offer also lays the groundwork for a very different
possibility: that the empress might not fulfill the second half of her inten-
tion and might come instead to genuinely love the low. The improvisation
begins with a thoroughly jaded and joyless Cleopatra. Every pleasure is fa-
miliar and has lost its luster. She contrives her murderous plot to renew her
pleasures, by doing something even she has never experienced. Her three
victims volunteer and come forth. The first two, a warrior who hates women
and an Epicurean devotee of the pleasures, are acting on long-standing im-
pulses; for the warrior, this is just another battle, for the sybaritic philoso-
pher, merely another pleasure. Like Cleopatra, these two have tired blood.
But the third, a youth, unexpectedly catches the eye of the empress. His
motive is something he is experiencing for the first time, a passion as pure
as youthful inspiration.
The passions with inexperienced power
Boiled in his young heart . . .
And the empress rested her gaze
Upon him with tenderness [umilenie].53
Страстей неопытная сила
Кипела в сердце молодом . . .
И с умилением на нем
Царица взор остановила.
(389)
The words above conclude the improvisation and the story, and though we
will never know with absolute certainty, seem to chart a new path for the
narrative; the empress is poised to renounce her plan and come to love the
youth. Dostoevsky for one felt the passage a transparent allusion to Christ-
ian compassion, as we shall see in chapter 6. Perhaps a new Cleopatra will
come out of the encounter with the youth as a new Charskii is already hes-
itantly emerging from the meeting with the Italian.
Othello and the Italian, as socially inferior others, have their direct
analogue in the youth. All three wield a powerful passion, or its variant, in-
spiration, that impresses the social insider and affords him or her unexpected
insight into, almost identification with, otherness, a rapprochement always
figured as love and in every case approaching actual love. The correspon-
dence between the improvisor and Cleopatra’s youth is particularly close;
unlike the other two victims, the youth shares the Italian’s key mark of name-
lessness (“The last did not bequeath / His name to the ages [Последний
имени векам / Не передал],” 389).54 The description of his eyes recalls those
of the improvisor when in the throes of creation.55 Even the “first down” on
the young man’s cheeks suggests an early version of the Italian’s dense beard
(389). Moreover, the distinguishing feature of the youth is the simplicity that
allows him a direct passionate response that is closed to the jaded empress.
68
The Call of Poverty
The youth and the Italian submit to prostitution and/or commerce and are
about to emerge triumphant, disproving Charskii’s and Cleopatra’s belief
that prostitution and commerce kill off love and poetry. The inferiors show
their cynical superiors that not only can the beautiful survive within these
business exchanges, it can flourish. Like the improvisor, the youth’s passion
comes into direct opposition to the authority of the higher powers that
sanction the social order, for Cleopatra’s threat of execution is sealed by a
triple vow in the names of the gods of love and death. Yet Cleopatra, like
Charskii, stands to gain by violating the authority of the name in favor of the
energy of the nameless, for the youth’s powerful ardor can cure Cleopatra’s
inability to feel anything. The youth promises to save her from herself,
though at the cost of forcing her to transgress against the social order.
This same mechanism of reinvigoration acts on Charskii. The Italian’s
childlike delight at the thought of turning a profit repels Charskii. But per-
haps, underneath, his revulsion masks envy. The easily annoyed Charskii,
whose social contortions betray a deep frustration with his world, may be
secretly envious of a man his age who can still feel childlike delight at all—
haughty but envious as Salieri is before Mozart’s tasteless jokes. Just as the
youth mirrors the Italian, so Pushkin has prepared us to see a parallel be-
tween Charskii and Cleopatra. The empress’s jaded psyche with its slow
turn toward violence is simply the aristocrat’s writ large: “the greetings, the
inquiries, the albums and the little boys [reciting verse badly] so annoyed
[Charskii], that he was constantly obliged to restrain himself from a coarse
remark of one sort or another” (372). The unwelcome public outpouring of
sympathy for Charskii’s verse makes a reappearance in Egypt when Cleopa-
tra’s crowd shows an empathetic bond with its distinctly unempathetic
celebrity. She lowers her head in thought, seemingly despondently, and
“Hearts flew to her throne [Сердца неслись к ее престолу]” (387). When
Cleopatra falls silent at her feast and all await her pronouncement she pon-
ders whether to imitate Charskii and his manner of coping with the crowd,
for like the aristocrat she is seeking a remedy for a social existence which
has grown tedious despite, or perhaps because of, her role in the limelight.
Cleopatra too must draw on her poetic imagination: she will have to
author a new narrative of being, dream up a way out of her difficulties. She
too resolves on a retreat from the public gaze to a private location: the inti-
mate but perilous woman’s bedroom that serves other functions. The ex-
plicit writing, “realistic” talk of money, and implied threats of violence in
Charskii’s bedroom all reverse themselves in Cleopatra’s into an implicit au-
thoring, a metaphorical talk of money, and open promises of harm. Like
Cleopatra in her narrative, Charskii in his begins to understand that he can-
not deny the superiority of the Italian’s gift, even though the association
with what is low will endanger his ties to high society and confound his se-
cure identity.56 Moreover he, and his author/double, will have to learn to love
69
this lowly model of the poet and accept a model of art as business, for this
is the poet of the future and his brave new world.
In effect, Pushkin envisions a reversal of the roles of the superior and
inferior in each pair (Charskii-improvisor, Cleopatra-youth) as social emi-
nence gradually is eclipsed by superiority in the art of passion.57 This is Char-
skii’s forking road: aristocracy on one side and, on the other, an inverted
hierarchy that values poetry and passion but also promises a form of poverty
and a form of prostitution. Charskii’s opening outburst at the Italian con-
tains an uncanny moment that should no longer surprise us. The wealthy
Charskii reveals he too has inexplicably tasted the humiliations of the poor
artist, erupting: “Our poets do not enjoy the patronage of gentlemen; our
poets are themselves gentlemen, and if our Maecenases (may they be
damned!) do not know this, then so much the worse for them” (375–76).58
The protagonist’s aristocratic self-control goes the way of his sense of self as
he curses other noblemen in the presence of a nonaristocrat and a total
stranger. Charskii is fighting a losing battle. From the very first, he knows
in the back of his mind that poverty is his calling. Even Cleopatra herself
was at one time, in the drafts, “la povera regina [the poor queen]” (8:853).
And Cleopatra is poor precisely in the context of love (the Italian is stating
that the poor queen—in the final version, “the great queen”—did not have
many lovers); for who is great and who is poor depends upon whether the
wealth worth measuring is passion or money.
We find a measure of how dire a situation art has come to in “Egyp-
tian Nights” lurking in the world of subtexts. Among possible forebears for
Pushkin’s text, one might explore Othello and Tancrède, both mentioned in
the text and both containing the key plot elements of love, death, the south,
a cruel leader, and fictions.59 But the master subtext for “Egyptian Nights”
is a work clearly suggested by the title of the story itself. Like the improvi-
sor’s themes, like the other subtexts, it belongs to the thematics of the Orient:
Arabian Nights.60 This is a work whose title, like “Egyptian Nights,” refers
to potentially fatal evenings during which the lover of a cruel Middle East-
ern ruler can avoid death only by inspiring the ruler’s love.61 There are hints
of the presence of the subtext, though just a few. In the first chapter, while
playing the tyrant toward the Italian, the role Cleopatra will later adopt, Char-
skii is dressed like an orientalist, in a Chinese dressing gown with a Turkish
sash. The first improvisation presents Othello in the guise of Desdemona’s
“Moor [arap]” (380).62 And one of the signs that Charskii belongs to high
society is that he “masqueraded . . . as a passionate horse lover . . . though he
could not begin to differentiate a mountain breed from an Arabian,” a sug-
gestion of the importance of things Arab and, via the contrast to the moun-
tains, a reminder that the distinction of high and low is now collapsing (373).63
Like “Egyptian Nights,” Arabian Nights consists of a frame narrative
and improvisations. Like the prose sections of “Egyptian Nights,” and the
70
The Call of Poverty
improvisation on Cleopatra, it presents its potentially fatal exchange in

something like economic terms, for by managing nightly to please the sul-
tan, who takes a new wife every day and kills her after consummating their
union, Sheherezade buys another day of life. Moreover the motive for the
sultan’s cruelty is the infidelity of his wife, an act not far from Cleopatra’s
sexual license. Sheherezade willingly offers herself as his bride in an act that
resembles prostitution, for her motivation is not love but a desire to save
the women of Persia from his blood thirst by her own sacrifice. Not inci-
dentally Sheherezade is herself a poet (we learn that she “faisait des vers
mieux que les poëtes le plus célèbres de son temps” [“wrote verse better
than the most famous poets of her time”], Les Mille et une nuits, 10).64
Most important, the subtext confirms the more troubling theme of
“Egyptian Nights,” the theme of the writer’s demise, by suggesting that po-
ets face only two choices, passion/inspiration or violent and untimely death.
Arabian Nights is the archetypal narrative of the writer’s need to continu-
ally produce new narratives, in a hostile setting, by means of improvisation,
or face imminent destruction. If in Othello and Tancrède fictions cause the
death of those facing cruel “southern” rulers, here, as in “Egyptian Nights,”
they bring life. Sheherezade spins tales night after night, winning a new day
of life with each unfinished narrative, and in the end turns the threat of
death into love. She, like the Italian, must play to the crowd, satisfy the de-
sires of her audience, in order to live to compose another day. If not, she
will become just another in a line of victims stretching over several narra-
tives to lose their head. And at this moment, it is clear the Pushkin of 1835,
with his repeated and urgent letters requesting undeserved but not alto-
gether unreasonable condescension from a capricious tsar, sees himself in
the lowly member of each pair as well as the superior. As Arabian Nights
suggests and Cleopatra’s kindly gaze at the youth confirms, the poor and the
passionate, that is, the poets of the world, who fearlessly and shamelessly
give themselves over to creative acts of mutual possession can conquer even
the cruelest of hearts.
Or so it seems. For this reading crosses the boundary that marks the
end of the text as it stands. Whatever significance we may derive from the
story’s narrative potentials, the fact remains that “Egyptian Nights” is un-
finished. And what needs to be read now is not the significance of the text’s
conclusion, but the symbolic meaning of its incompleteness. Pushkin aban-
dons work at the point where Cleopatra first sees the youth. If he planned
to develop the story as suggested here, then the next important task lying
ahead was that of imagining, more or less from scratch, the third encounter,
the change in Cleopatra, and how Cleopatra might justify sparing the youth.
Meanwhile, the continuation of the frame narrative posed exactly the same
riddle: it would have to begin to offer indications of how the abyss between
the indigent poet and his aristocratic audience might be closed or resolved.
71
Even if the public likes the Italian’s verse, how might those assembled, and
Charskii as well, begin to interact with him without the mutual embarrass-
ment and near-complete alienation that all three parties have thus far felt?
In both of the parallel story lines, the story comes to a halt at the same point.
The final image is a double one: the youth and the Italian, passion shining in
their eyes, possessed by an inspiration that knows no shame, while their su-
periors look on with a mixture of derision, love, and murderous aggression.
The impasse can be formulated in a different way. In clarifying the
theme of Cleopatra, Charskii does something we have already pondered.
He takes a narrative in which Cleopatra dies and, reflecting on his relations
with the Italian, substitutes another in which she possesses the aristocratic
privilege of determining the fate of her inferiors, even to the point of killing
them. Simultaneously, Charskii’s Cleopatra is converting an act of love into
murder, symbolically paralleling the one and only privilege Charskii had
ascribed to poets in Russia: the right to use the accusative case instead of
the genitive (after a negated verb).65 The Italian, however, seems to want to
recast the narrative a second time, as his Cleopatra is poised to renounce
her right to kill. And yet the definitive words remain unspoken. In this fig-
urative drama of poverty and poetry, no solution is at hand, and the call is
never entirely answered. Pushkin had set up the theme of loving the low,
but hesitated just at the moment when love for the low would begin to take
the upper hand. As in the despairing letter to his wife, it seems Pushkin
could not imagine his way beyond this impasse. Faced with the otherness
of poverty, “Egyptian Nights” looks long and hard, and then pauses, as it
turns out, forever.
Thus suspended, the narrative leaves us wondering which of the many
overt and hidden threats of death and promises of life scattered throughout
the text might have taken the upper hand. Would the Italian’s poisons have
come into play? Or perhaps his life-prolonging elixirs, if not in liquid, then
in narrative form? 66 Will “the fatal axe” fall, and on whose neck (388)? 67 Af-
ter all, it is the Italian and not the youth who first appears around Charskii’s
door with his head strangely separated from his body, and whose description,
just before he stands up before the aristocrats who will judge him, for some
reason focuses unusually closely on his neck: “The lace collar of his shirt
was thrown open, the bare neck clearly distinguished from the dense black
beard by its peculiar whiteness” (382). Will the youth find a pardon awaits
him, as his lowliness wins over the hearts of his elevated audience? Such an
outcome would not be without parallel in the frame narrative, for we have
seen Pushkin three times bring the narrative to the brink of extinction,
where with a simple show of cold-heartedness Charskii could cut it off for-
ever and escape from the nightmarish goings-on. At each juncture, Charskii
hesitates, clearly resolves to himself to withhold his sympathy from a peti-
tioner, and then relents. The story by its very continuation thus already pre-
72
The Call of Poverty
supposes aristocratic mercy. But Charskii remains wary. When he visits the
Italian at his inn, the improvisor invites him to have a seat. Charskii glances
at the chairs in the room, observes that one is covered with papers and the
second broken. So the aristocrat sits on a suitcase. Such detail from the fa-
mously concise Pushkin is meant to make us note where Charskii avoids
sitting: he doesn’t want to get on the bed. Subliminally if not consciously,
Charskii knows what lies ahead, or for that matter behind, as in an early draft
where the Italian had resembled “an unhappy husband who had poisoned
his wife,” a man whose bed spells danger (8:842). The threat, then, goes
both ways. Perhaps the essence of art really is mutual possession, and the em-
brace of the inferior tantamount to love of the calling. But the mutual pos-
session of lovers, as both Othello and Cleopatra remind us, has a price.
For a writer, of course, who must continually confront the challenge
of creating new others and exploring them through poetic sympathetic in-
sight, setting aside one work of literature can be just the regular operation
of the freedom to follow one’s inspiration. Yet it can also signal a more
deeply seated crisis of the imagination.68 For Pushkin, “Egyptian Nights”
could almost be called the end of a career.69 The following year, 1836, saw
the production of only a few poems, some incomplete, most not intended
for publication; and while among them are acknowledged masterpieces, the
significant verse of the poet’s last year turns to themes traditionally associ-
ated with life’s conclusion: the summation of one’s accomplishments, death,
biblical scenes.70 No work of major length in any genre was undertaken
after “Egyptian Nights” was set aside.71 The Italian’s veiled menace seems
to have proven fatal. When Pushkin died, his own journal Sovremennik
published all his important unknown manuscripts, and “Egyptian Nights”
appeared last, in its rightful place as the writer’s concluding major state-
ment in art.
Cleopatra’s three volunteers find themselves facing the central agony
“Egyptian Nights” dispenses. “The death bed summons them”: they are
called (388). In these few words Pushkin captures a sprawling dilemma.
The crux of the situation is not the promise of decapitation but rather the
vertiginous union of love/bed and death within the calling.72 Cleopatra beck-
ons, and those who respond then face the primordial scenario of earthly
existence: everything—to the point of full, if temporary, union with the di-
vine—followed by nothing. Such a proposition stirs terror in both ancient
Egypt and modern Russia because no one is safe from it. And no one is safe
because the scenario unfolding is the most ambiguous drama conceivable.
“Calling” is the name for the danger that haunts poets as it does lovers, a
beautiful peril that may be tempting, ecstatic, disastrous, worth the price,
avertable, negotiable, or simply inevitable. At bottom, the mysterious call is
nothing but the voice of the other. What Pushkin wants to resolve in his
story is the question, what fate awaits the man willing to grant sympathy, to
73
hazard being touched, the man who goes truly beyond himself and risks
merging with others? Does he lose his self or gain the other? Faced with a
threat that cannot be certainly defined, we no longer know with certainty
what it means to be safe.
In “Egyptian Nights,” Pushkin undertakes a vital thought experiment.
Can he imagine a way to rescue poetry, or at least his own career, from a
slow death by unpopularity? Can he invent a solution to his own money
woes? Having set himself such a task, the author gives us cause to expect ei-
ther the triumph of imagination or its potentially fatal breakdown. And so
the final dilemma that “Egyptian Nights” poses is this: can Pushkin swallow
the shame of prostitution, learn to improvise in the face of the gravest
threat like Sheherezade, and narrate his way through the story of his own
existence to a hopeful ending? Will he take on the role of that Cleopatra
who is poised to make use of the poetic prerogative of loving even the lowly,
however the highborn crowd might respond, in order to see her passion
reinvigorated? If so, how will the crowd react, and how will Cleopatra ex-
plain herself to the gods of love and death whose vows she breaks? Or will
Cleopatra instead proceed with her original bloody plan? Or will it be the
other Cleopatra, whose more famous story Charskii suppresses, who sells
her passion to save her empire in another act of prostitution of sorts, but
comes into mortal combat with an Italian and ultimately prefers to end her
own life narrative with an asp?73 The arms of the other are open and both
love and death are in the air on this final Egyptian night. Pushkin leads us
up to the point where the narrative must fork and painful choices must be
made. Faced with a series of truly difficult alternatives, the poet lays down
his pen.
CONCLUSION
“Egyptian Nights” is an exceptionally intricate narrative, but one whose
complications work entirely to deepen and diversify its examination of a
single knot of questions: poverty, literacy, and identification. This same
seemingly arbitrary conjunction of concerns arises with startling regularity
whenever nineteenth-century Russian writers turn their attention to the
poor. “Egyptian Nights” suggests a reason for the conjunction by revealing
an artistic question at the heart of the social and ethical questions surround-
ing poverty. For seeing ourselves as others is an aesthetic skill, indeed for
Pushkin, the vital core of the artist’s task. “Egyptian Nights” does not con-
summate the act of identification it contemplates, but it shows us more in
its failure than we will see in any contemporary success. If Pushkin is less
optimistic than Karamzin, it is because he is more realistic—more aware of
the almost insurmountable social forces that make us who we are and resist
our efforts even to see around them. Yet Pushkin’s pessimistic assessment
74
The Call of Poverty
details both the skills and the emotional concessions successful projection
requires. True identification, Pushkin suggests, requires art, passion, and
love. True identification must always be aware of the other looking back at
us, who, though he may lack our socially granted prerogatives, nonetheless
possesses as many choices in artistic matters as we do, for art, passion, and
love are mental or spiritual powers not awarded along class lines. True iden-
tification must be an act of mutual possession, not in the sense of mutual
insight—one person alone can never guarantee that—but precisely the crea-
tion of a new entity, an offspring that shares two identities, a new and broader
self, as it were.
The bewildering complexity of “Egyptian Nights” is in the end mar-
shaled into a powerful simplicity. I would like to finish by returning to the
beginning of Pushkin’s text, to a seemingly small detail which captures the
structure of the whole with breathtaking accuracy. The story’s first, casual
mention of poetry happens also to be its first mention of poverty, and it
neatly sums up the entire story’s dilemma. We first learn that Charskii is a
poet from the words, “In journals he was called a poet [ego zvali poètom],
in the servants’ quarters, a scribbler [sochinitel’]” (371). This formulation,
which again addresses the question of calling, divides the world into two
parts, the realm of the prosperous and the realm of the poor, and since the
story proves to revolve around the disparities between these worlds, it is par-
ticularly instructive to trace the fate of the distinction here. The statement
appears in the opening paragraph, before the sarcastic portrait of a poet’s
existence, and in such a context Pushkin clearly means us to perceive the
poet’s two names as antithetical, one proud and the other belittling. Cer-
tainly, to be called a scribbler by servants is no great honor. The surprise
awaiting us is the discovery that the poet’s treatment at the hands of high
society is identically humiliating. For the root of the problem is not what
or by whom the writer is named; it lies in the fact that he is named, called
equally in both halves of the sentence. Charskii may be labeled different
things by different classes—one imagines a poet might welcome the variety
of possible personae—but in the end, the differences prove meaningless.
Either way, he is bespoken from without. His fate, then, is precisely the one
he shares with the lackeys who poke fun at him—the fate of the servant, to
come when called. What is important here is the brief symbolic micronarra-
tive: the division into two realms and two identities proves illusory, and the
common ground all poets are destined to inhabit belongs to the lower classes.
Charskii’s dualistic calling here neatly mirrors the structural device
governing the text, for the division into two realms accurately predicts Char-
skii’s two opposed callings, as well as the story’s two opposed poets, and even
the fragment’s organization into prose and verse. The fate of these distinc-
tions is, in every case, to prove merely apparent, to collapse back into an en-
compassing sameness on the lower of the two levels. The splitting into two
75
that then falls back into one prefigures all of “Egyptian Nights,” and sug-
gests a principle to guide us in imagining the parts of the story never finished.
Indeed, this micronarrative repeats again and again in “Egyptian Nights” at
every level: the tale of a Russian poet is leavened with the seemingly unre-
lated narrative of an Egyptian pharaoh that turns out to be the same story;
love in Cleopatra’s offer is expanded to accommodate its opposite, death,
but then begins to contract back to its original dimension; Charskii’s mind
spawns the Italian, who appears in the role of antipode and opposite, but
ultimately turns out to be Charskii yet again; Charskii’s aristocracy and po-
etry at first cannot coexist, but then cannot be kept comfortably separate
and the socially higher must be sacrificed to preserve the socially lower; the
poet and the crowd emerge from a tradition that wants them linked but
leaves them hopelessly at odds until the Italian proposes reuniting with the
ignorant audience on their ground, however lowly; sobstvennoe (“one’s
own”) and chuzhoe (“someone else’s”) stand apart until the Italian shows
how to effect their union in a mutual possession; and the life of poverty and
humiliation, being called and being bespoken from without, divides the poor
poet from the rich one at the start but then skips ahead to await them both
together at the end. This is the theme of learning to love the low. We must
love the low, the structure of “Egyptian Nights” implies, even if we’re in-
clined to despise them, because in the end we cannot escape the knowledge
that, at bottom, we are they.
“Egyptian Nights” leaves the reader in a most peculiar position. This
may be the closest Russian narrative ever comes to bringing the nonpoor
to seeing themselves in the poor, especially when we consider Pushkin’s
refusal to underestimate the vast social and psychological distance that di-
vides the classes. Yet it may be significant that to come so close to the poor,
we must be enmeshed within a fragment, a work that itself sports the open,
unfinished identity from which every act of projection into another—poor
or not—must begin. In a sense, the integrity of Pushkin’s vision derives
from its incompleteness. For both the pat proclamation that we are the
poor and the straightforward objection that we are not, though either would
allow the narrative to reach the state of completion it struggles toward,
would be unconvincing, too quick and simple to account for the immense
difficulties Pushkin realizes stand in our, and his, way. Such easy answers
would be, in a broader sense, less than the whole truth. Pushkin has armed
his four central combatants, upper class and lower, equally. They all possess
the gifts of the artist. All know the value of passion. And each holds the
power of life and death over his opponent.
We leave the heroes frozen in action. The skeptical crowd looks upon
the Italian and sees, as far as can be gauged, immense distance and social
separation which may be mollified by the Italian’s art, but which are fated
not to be overcome soon. Meanwhile, Charskii listens to the Italian’s voice
76
The Call of Poverty
speaking the theme he himself suggested, the theme, moreover, of himself

and his own fate, spoken by what is nothing more than a fantasy of his own
poetic mind. Charskii’s innermost self seems to be trying to convince him
he must learn to go beyond himself and welcome the dizzyingly beautiful
and yet dangerous merger with others. The reconciliation of poor and non-
poor, which Karamzin finally abandoned as too difficult for mortals and
within the power only of God, is reframed as a distinctly human, psychic
drama for every individual, dependent on the primordially artistic tool of
imaginative sympathy into the other and the willingness to use it. We leave
Charskii listening to the voice that is all mutual possession, at once entirely
his and not his in the slightest, and wondering with a mixture of loathing
and love, existential horror and Dionysian liberation, how someone so dif-
ferent can be he himself.
77
Chapter Three
The Meaning of Poverty
Gogol’s Petersburg Tales
Right so as by richesses ther comen manye

goodes, right so by poverte come ther manye
harmes and yveles.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Tale of Melibee”
Linked with this treatment of laughter is

[Gogol’s] effort to overcome the comicality,
theatricality, and seriousness of the liturgical
attitude toward art.
—Mistranslation of Iu. M. Lotman
IN THIS CHAPTER we turn to Gogol’s Petersburg tales,

five stories about the downtrodden and impoverished in Russia’s daunting
and cruel metropolis.1 In the last 100 years, the tales’ fame has rested on
their absurd violations of narrative and logical propriety, but at the same
time they address a number of serious topics, most prominently poverty
and vice. Moreover, Gogol can be seen thinking long and hard in them
about sympathetic emotion, imagination, and art. Gogol’s attitude toward
the poor has been a point of dispute, sometimes bitter, since his works first
appeared. The squabbling continues to this day, most famously in regard to
the so-called pathetic or humane passage in “Overcoat,” where a narration
designed to make us laugh at the hero is interrupted by a brief rhetorical
flourish suggesting that the lowly Akaky Akakievich is our brother. This is,
of course, the claim of similitude that concerns us generally. As the multi-
tude of opposed critical contentions suggests, the passage is ambiguous
enough to give heart to several different interpretations, for, as Eikhen-
baum first noted, “Overcoat” is built on grotesque juxtapositions, incom-
patible elements of mockery and sympathy placed side by side, their
meaning left for readers to unravel (284–91). That fact alone, however,
need not drive us into the camp of those modern commentators (Bitov,
78
Bernheimer, Fanger, Zholkovsky) who argue the writer’s true intention is

precisely to escape fixity and celebrate ambiguity, whether from artistic in-
genuity or personal anxiety.
The image of a humanitarian Gogol was originally popularized by Vis-
sarion Belinskii, that era’s most famous critic. Belinskii and influential allies
such as the writers of physiological sketches perceived in Gogol’s texts a
deep compassion for his downtrodden heroes and spoke of the use of hu-
mor as a kind of sugar, to make the bitter pill of social commentary go down
easily with a reading public unused to stark depictions of reality. I take this
to be entirely wrong, and the writer’s humor to be a kind of apotropaic and
alienating gesture, a claim Gogol makes explicitly and repeatedly in theo-
retical works. His Petersburg heroes are in fact more violators of the social
system than its victims. Belinskii’s complete misunderstanding of Gogol be-
came public knowledge during the controversy surrounding Selected Pas-
sages from Correspondence with Friends, whose appearance late in Gogol’s
career revealed the socially concerned, liberally intentioned champion of
the little man as in fact an anxiety-ridden apologist for a reactionary and dra-
conian social order, concerned with keeping the poor in line rather than with
publicizing their perspective or improving their lot. With Belinskii’s assess-
ment tarnished, a counter-reading eventually sprang up in the twentieth
century, as scholars such as Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, Eikhenbaum, Bem,
Chizhevsky, and Setchkarev called attention to the lack of actual signs of
sympathy for heroes like Akaky Akakievich and adduced from among Gogol’s
avowed moral and artistic goals a number of possible reasons for this. Inexpli-
cably enough, Belinskii’s view survives to the present day, especially in crit-
icism from Russia, where Eikhenbaum’s observation is regularly dismissed
as an overstatement even by such thoughtful latter-day critics as Iurii Mann.2
Like Karamzin and Pushkin, Gogol continues to see poverty, sympa-
thetic insight, imagination, and art as inextricably linked. The problem of
poverty once again raises the problem of art. The linkage is crucial and per-
ilous because Gogol harbors a truly herculean ambivalence when questions
of poverty arise—exactly as he does, as the next chapter will try to show,
with questions of art. On one hand, he makes a standing claim throughout
his life that we are all impoverished, at least spiritually, and must learn to
see ourselves as such—an imaginative act, it should be noted—in order to
achieve salvation. On the other hand, Gogol’s normal response to material
poverty is to blame the poor (an act, however, which he construes as very
charitable on his part); moreover, he produces an ongoing stream of elabo-
rate conceptual schemes for avoiding sympathy and for covertly disproving
any similitude between classes. Gogol will ultimately conclude that nothing
is more harmful to the social weal than sentiments and sensations shared
across class boundaries. As he hesitantly thinks and rethinks his position,
79
poverty for Gogol takes on a kaleidoscopic variety of special significances.

At one moment we are all poor; at another we are not the poor but their
brothers; still later rich and poor are declared permanently separated by
God in the strictest way. Now the poor are ethically superior, now inferior.
If a matter of minor importance were presented so inconsistently, we might
assume its representation was accidental and so not meaningful. Yet Gogol
is fascinated by poverty as by little else.
The contradictions come to a head in “Overcoat.” The story sums up
both the specific preoccupations of the Petersburg tales and Gogol’s career
as a satirist. Yet the work, I will argue, has always been misread—by both
traditions.3 Indeed, it seems in a sense to have been misunderstood even by
its own author. His writings in later years suggest the tale had made inad-
vertent mockery of everything he himself held dearest, a failure which
might reasonably cause a didactically minded author to wonder about the
value of his other works, his aesthetic theories, and what, using a Gogolian
metaphor, could be called the poverty of his own art. At the heart of all the
trouble is the ambiguous spectacle of a life lived with few possessions, a
spectacle whose meaning Gogol struggles unremittingly and unsuccessfully
to define once and for all with certainty.
THE RANKS OF THE POOR
It is not the man who has little,

but he who desires more, that is poor.
—Seneca, Ad Lucilium
Gogol’s attitude toward poverty is bound up with his attitude toward eco-
nomic matters in general. And that is by no means a simple question. Ac-
quisitiveness, bribery, get-rich-quick schemes, and, on the other hand, the
ability to perceive those truths which are higher than money, to live within
one’s means, to make sacrifices and endure hardships, are always vitally im-
portant, indeed spiritual, matters for Gogol. But spiritual in what sense?
The plots of Gogol’s two major works, Dead Souls and The Inspector Gen-
eral, are predicated on economic metaphors. Both emphasize the ethical
gravity of money and wealth, yet simultaneously suggest it is impossible to
determine conclusively, indeed impossible even to label generally as good
or bad. The Inspector General concludes with the famous mute scene in
which all the actors freeze on stage at the sudden and unexpected an-
nouncement—we have just discovered that the man they have been brib-
ing all along is not the Inspector—that the real Inspector has arrived. Gogol
reminds us that all faults will out, and the Inspector General becomes a fig-
ure for the Final Judgment.4 As Gogol notes in the “The Denouement of
The Inspector General”: “Say what you will, but that inspector general who
80
awaits us at the entrance to the grave is terrifying” (4:130). Thus a govern-

ment official whose job is to ascertain the financial and material well-being
of state institutions carries out a task with a heavenly model and mandate.
Money and its flow are presented as if divinely supervised, and not meant
to be tampered with by man; ultimately, God himself keeps the account
books. Meanwhile, there is corruption wherever individuals give or take
money, wherever greed, selling, and the profit motive (as opposed to the
imperatives of a feudal agrarian economy) move human actions.
Dead Souls is also concerned with the abuse of money. Now the hero’s
design to buy up the rights to serfs whose death is not yet officially recorded
in government documents is exposed as indicative of the moral and spiri-
tual hollowness of Russia. The wordplay (“soul” is a common way of refer-
ring to serfs in their capacity as chattels, but Gogol clearly has the religious
meaning in mind as well) is meant to remind us that much can be bought,
but not immortal souls. The novel thus implicitly laments the encroach-
ment of economic drives on higher human impulses. Where the drama had
presented financial accountability as a necessary divine watchfulness, in the
novel everything associated with money smacks of deceit, falsity, greed,
Russian backwardness, social instability, and even blasphemy. In the play,
proper regulation of financial matters is godly. In the novel, attention to
economics at all seems ungodly. Yet how one can regulate without paying
attention Gogol does not explain.5 We are left to wonder whether it is the
abuse of money the writer deplores or simply its use.6
Thus while the ruble is clearly the problem, the solution is nonetheless
vague as always in the case of satire: knowing what is wrong does not mean
we know what is right. This same hesitation on Gogol’s part—whether to
condemn economic matters as distractions from more godly pursuits or re-
gard them as a means of divine intervention in human affairs—marks his
depictions of poverty. Like, but much more than, prosperity in Gogol, poverty
is spiritually charged to the highest degree and yet agonizingly ambiguous.
Who answers for the distribution of wealth on earth: is it done according to
God’s plan, or is it controlled by markets, merchants, and speculators? Who
makes the poor poor—man or God?
It is not that Gogol cannot make up his mind; on the contrary, he does
so only too often, making one blanket pronouncement at one moment and
the opposite the next, never ultimately choosing among the possibilities he
entertains. Does poverty or wealth better incline human nature to virtue?
Should social or ecclesiastical categories be used in thinking about class? Is
poverty a punishment from God, or a virtuous renunciation of earthly lux-
uries? Above all, when we look at the poor with a seemingly instinctive re-
vulsion, do we display a salutary condemnation of all that is lowly in human
nature? Or, on the other hand, do we commit the sins of pride and nonlove?
Or, even worse, do we fail to recognize the higher wisdom of these perhaps
81
unwitting exemplars of Christian asceticism? In all the confusion, Gogol

finds only two certainties to cling to: that economic matters determine hu-
man virtue and hold the key to entering heaven, and that Russia’s fate hangs
in the balance.
The St. Petersburg tales all revolve around impoverished protagonists. In

the cases of Piskarev, Chartkov, Leon’s father, Poprishchin, and Akaky
Akakievich, the hero’s penury is evident.7 The other examples, however, are
even more indicative of how essential poverty is to Gogol’s vision of St. Pe-
tersburg. Pirogov at first seems to represent another level of prosperity if
only by contrast with Piskarev, yet he in fact spends most of the story han-
kering after a German woman in Meshchanskaia Street, the street of “base
craftsmen” which Poprishchin, in his story, deems wretched-smelling and
unfit for a proper gentleman even for a visit (3:200). Pirogov’s story does
not so obviously concern poverty because he does not seem to understand
his station in life and therefore goes about his affairs blindly and so more
confidently. The running joke is that everyone knows that he rates as a zero
but Pirogov himself, including even the German workmen, who realize that
thrashing an officer is dangerous—unless he is low enough on the totem
pole. Pirogov at one point pauses to reflect on his “brilliant rank,” but in actu-
ality he is the lowest-ranked character in the tales: as a lieutenant, he comes
in two levels below even Akaky Akakievich, even if military positions gener-
ally entailed somewhat greater prestige than equivalent civilian ranks (3:40).
Another special version of the narrative of poverty is Kovalev’s. “Nose”
presents a well-off civil servant suddenly plunged into poverty by an un-
imaginable catastrophe, the loss of his nose. That the peculiar state of nasal
deprivation is meant to be read as a kind of financial loss is confirmed by a
series of details, such as the repeated references to Kovalev’s being robbed
where we should expect mentions of dismemberment.8 Indeed, one sus-
pects money in the proper sense is not the main plot spring only because
Gogol doubted that its loss alone could awaken the prosperous Peters-
burger from his smugness and drive home unambiguously that his existence
is marked with crying lack. To produce the requisite change of perspective
in Kovalev, Gogol had to deprive him of a possession even more valuable.
Perhaps the most revealing moment comes when “poor Kovalev,” as the
narrator calls him at this point, chases his nose to Kazan Cathedral to ask
him or it to return to its proper place and, approaching the entrance,
“squeezed through the row of poor old beggar women with bound faces and
two holes for their eyes, at whom he had formerly laughed so” (3:55).9 Sud-
denly the pauper women with rags on their faces do not evoke such mirth,
since with a cloth covering the spot where his nose used to be, he realizes
a discomfiting similarity: he too is now just another needy beggar, come to
church to plead for mercy and sympathy from a stranger.
82
The poverty of the VIP in “Overcoat” too is likewise hidden on first

examination, but in fact proves vital to his characterization: he is, in effect,
poor on the inside and rich on the outside, having lately been promoted to
the status of “someone” after being no one in particular all his life. His
inability to master his new role and a variety of other parallels suggest he
is just another Akaky Akakievich psychologically, but has risen out of his
proper range and has lost his sense of how to function. He thus exactly re-
verses the experiment with Kovalev: not a man suddenly deprived of his
comfortable high rank, but a man suddenly deprived of his comfortable low
rank. Clearly for Gogol even a Petersburg subnarrative without poverty in
some form—psychological or spiritual, if not material—is an impossibility.
The cycle gives us a sequence of variations based on a common assumption:
that the fundamental experience of the capital is that of the poor man over-
whelmed by a heartless metropolis which counts him as nothing.
Indigence takes on different significance in an art tale like “Portrait,”
which suggests that living modestly nurtures the artist’s awareness of higher
things and facilitates his moral perfection. Through Chartkov, Gogol dem-
onstrates the downfall of any artist who acquires much money. A struggling
painter who can barely make ends meet, Chartkov idly daydreams of wealth.
As if by magic, his wish is fulfilled: money falls from the frame of a painting
he has just bought. With the money he commissions a favorable review of
himself in the papers, as a result of which his business booms and his rep-
utation blossoms. His popularity, however, deprives him of the time to paint
carefully and his talent atrophies. Realizing this too late, he goes mad and
dies. The peculiarity in Gogol’s telling is the sweeping, one might almost say
unthinking, prohibition against wealth. In the typical parable of artistic sac-
rifice, the hero faces a dilemma between devoting himself to the painstak-
ing pursuit of excellence or the pursuit of profit. In “Portrait” on the other
hand, the hero is corrupted not by the compromises necessary to acquire
wealth and fame; Chartkov becomes magically rich and then betrays his art.
Money is dangerous in itself because it saps the painter’s dedication. Leon’s
father, the artist in the second part of “Portrait,” provides the necessary
counterexample. In contrition over painting the sinister moneylender, he
gives away all his earthly possessions and even his son (to the Academy of
Arts) and enters a monastery, where he embraces a rigorous penury and prays
incessantly. For him, indigence cleanses morally; for Chartkov, it guaran-
teed a single-minded devotion to his craft. In making explicit Gogol’s belief
that the poor must remain as poor as possible lest they ruin themselves,
“Portrait” merely says aloud what the other tales are thinking: poverty is the
arete of the poor, their peculiar excellence, that for which they are destined
and therefore the only possible path, for them at least, to virtue.
There are five Petersburg stories, though more realistically one
should probably speak of six. In order (by date, except for those works
83
which appeared together in Arabesques, where Gogol ordered them explic-

itly) they are the 1835 version of “Portrait,” “Nevsky Prospekt,” “Notes of a
Madman,” “Nose,” “Overcoat,” and the 1842 version of “Portrait.” In schol-
arly literature, the provenance of “Overcoat,” the last-begun, is well estab-
lished. It is traditionally traced back to a story Gogol heard many years
earlier, in a scenario recorded in the memoirs of Pavel Annenkov:
Once when Gogol was present an office anecdote was told about some poor
civil servant, a passionate game hunter, who through exceptional economies
and tireless work on the side accumulated enough to buy a good LePage ri-
fle worth about 200 paper rubles. The first time he went out in his little boat
to shoot on the Gulf of Finland, resting his precious rifle before him on the
bow, he was, by his own admission, in a bit of a muddle and came to his
senses only when he glanced at the bow and failed to see his new acquisition.
The gun had been swept off by dense reeds he had passed through, and all
his efforts to find it proved vain. The civil servant returned home, took to his
bed, and did not rise again, for he was taken with a fever. Only through a gen-
eral subscription on the part of his friends, who found out about the event
and bought him a new rifle, was he returned to life, but he later could not re-
call the horrible event without a deathly pallor on his face. . . . Everyone
laughed at the story, which was based on a real event, with the exception of
Gogol, who heard it out thoughtfully and dropped his head. The anecdote
was the original idea behind his wonderful story “Overcoat.” (76–77)
Annenkov’s last claim is not entirely right, however, for the anecdote is
clearly applicable to the other Petersburg tales as well. Even “Nevsky Pros-
pekt,” published with the first of the works, in Arabesques, contains a de-
scription of Piskarev obviously based on the anecdote: “Hanging his head,
he sat in his room with lowered arms like a poor fellow who had found a
priceless gem and immediately dropped it in the sea” (3:22).10
The stories consist of this same basic plot retold six times (twice in
“Nevsky Prospekt”), with a series of fairly minor modifications. Annenkov’s
anecdote captures the core situation. A poor man invests all his psycholog-
ical energy in one possession which utterly captivates his imagination. With
his new acquisition, he begins to act as though he really were a rich man, if
only a rich man in miniature. The change transforms his life, even his iden-
tity, refashioning his psyche into something prouder, more capacious, more
exacting. But then the object is cruelly wrenched away from him by fate and
he is left bereft, without either his former tranquillity or the ability to sat-
isfy his now more demanding psyche. With a psyche out of harmony with
its surroundings, a rich man’s heart and a poor man’s possessions, so to
speak, he perishes. This, it would seem, is Gogol’s reading of the original
anecdote. It is tragic because the hero ends up in precisely the same situa-
tion in which he began, but he has meanwhile changed, and can no longer
tolerate what he once could.
84
Piskarev in “Nevsky Prospekt” is an unassuming painter whose life

flows peacefully until one day he is suddenly enraptured by a passing beauty.
The woman, however, turns out to be a prostitute. Piskarev attempts to re-
deem her by offering his hand in marriage and the promise of a life of sim-
ple labor. She scoffs at him and he commits suicide. Before the meeting
Piskarev’s life is secure; after, it is undermined by his monstrous awareness
of what he cannot have. His double, Pirogov, is an exploration of how the
same story might be retold so as to let the little man survive in the end: at
each stage he follows more or less in Piskarev’s footsteps, but, being no sen-
sitive artist, takes his setbacks with a kind of shallow resilience. Pirogov es-
capes unscathed because his attachment to the object of his desire is weak
enough to be severed with no permanent damage. Poprishchin, of “Notes
of a Madman,” mirrors Piskarev, though his affections are aimed at his boss’s
daughter, a woman so far above him socially that she is completely inacces-
sible, though his disturbed psyche imagines marrying her. In “Overcoat,” as
Karlinsky notes, the rifle which became a woman now becomes a coat, but
the basic shape of the plot remains unchanged, and is reflected in the sub-
plot of the VIP as well (138–39). In every case, the tale leaves its hero in the
same material state in which he began, the state of poverty, nonpossession,
but the hero does not learn the vital lesson fate has brought him: that he must
humble himself and make his peace with his condition once and for all.
The strikingly different external contours of “Portrait” divulge an-
other typical Petersburg story. Chartkov succeeds in acquiring the riches of
his dreams, which in turn cut him off from the poverty and genuine art he
was lucky enough to start out with. The slight variation here is that the hero
is agonized not by the loss of his new wealth but just the contrary, by the
loss of his old poverty, which he realizes too late was more valuable—as
though Akaky Akakievich, in acquiring a new coat, were to discover he had
lost the more important ability to copy correctly (which, in fact, I take to be
Gogol’s understanding of the import of that story).11 Leon’s father travels
the same path, but manages to turn back where his predecessor had gone
over the edge. The possession that undoes him is the image of evil he seeks
to capture on his canvas; it too is a form of wealth, the soul of a money-
lender, permeated for Gogol with the essence of cash. Indeed, the first re-
daction classes the moneylender’s face as “a treasure for an artist” (3:435).
“Nose” unfolds the underlying plot backward: Kovalev reverses the voyage
from poverty to wealth and back to poverty, starting out wealthy and smug,
then losing his nose and temporarily becoming a better, more modest per-
son, but in the end getting his nose and his bad attitude back.
The point here is not that the five stories are identical. Certainly they
do not read that way. What is important is the underlying poverty narra-
tive and Gogol’s attitude toward it. In each case (inverted, as mentioned, in
“Nose”), the protagonist is morally better—the only lasting consideration
85
for Gogol—before undertaking to acquire the object symbolized in one way

or another by the story’s title. For the love of earthly possessions, as Chi-
zhevsky reminds us, panders to the hero’s pride, entangles him in the realm
of status and esteem, and compromises his self-restraint, though he always
sees his error only in retrospect (314–21).12 The metaphor of poverty and
possession is explicit even when the object is a human being. To cite just one
example: Piskarev is like a “poor man,” while the woman is his lost “pearl”;
she ought to have been the “priceless pearl,” “the entire wealth” of a hus-
band; and so on (3:22). The poor man is destroyed because his brief career
as a “rich” man—a state which is restricted almost entirely to his hypothe-
sizings—ruins his modesty and his ability to bear the state of nonpossession.
Piskarev, Chartkov, Poprishchin, and Akaky Akakievich all go mad in the
end, their insanity signaling the mismatch of the little man’s psyche and his
circumstances.
Poprishchin captures this tantalization of the man stranded between
the two poles of wealth and poverty in his peculiarly worded cri de coeur:
“Everything in the world that’s best, everything goes either to the kammer-
junkers [a high rank] or the generals. You find your poor little treasure
[naidesh’ sebe bednoe bogatstvo], you think to seize it in your hand—and a
kammerjunker or a general grabs it away from you” (3:205). What dooms
the poor man is the concept, precarious even linguistically, of “poor trea-
sure” (in Russian literally “poor wealth”). The little man suffers not for what
he cannot have, not of need per se, but for what he cannot have that some-
one else can. It is not the loss of a necessary object that torments, but his
own act of self-comparison with others, and his sensation of the unjustness
of it all. Poverty for Gogol is not so much having little as wanting more.
In this sense Gogol’s fiction is prepared to rebut Marxian readings
that would see a thirst for justice in the ferment of the oppressed. Yes, Gogol
wants us to see, his protagonists suffer, but not unduly, and only after they
invest psychologically in some lavish luxury they do not really need.13 Class
envy flourishes purely as an afterthought, and only among those who were
foolish enough to spend far beyond their means. By contrast, Gogol’s poor
always begin their tales with limited desires and humble expectations; they
are used to their lot and so inured to misfortune. This is the innate strength
of every downtrodden individual, and its loss, treacherously easy, is the only
real subject of the Petersburg tales.14
An ambiguity of poverty thus not only looms over Gogol’s texts; it is
built into their split before-and-after structure. Poverty plays entirely op-
posed roles even in narratives that may be as short as Annenkov’s anecdote:
both the innocence before the fall and the retribution after. The unsullied
poverty of virtue directly opposes the corrupted poverty of desire, the temp-
tation that always leads to sin and thence to suffering. Materially the two
states are identical; but ethically and psychologically they are almost exact
86
antipodes. The poverty of virtue and the poverty of desire are ambiguous
even within themselves. Laudable penury is both ethically better and the
poor man’s best bid for happiness, the virtue that is its own reward. Simi-
larly the poverty of desire; it is a sin, a murmuring against God, and yet it
bears its own punishment implicit in it: wanting and not getting. Certainly
the stories toss in a little extra punishment once the poor hero conceives
unsettling desires and longs to rise above his position. Yet fundamentally,
penury in the Petersburg tales is everything at the same time: innocence;
the repayment for innocence, which is tranquillity; (ungodly) desire; and
longing, the penalty for desire. In the poor Gogol would like to see the
serenity that comes of the knowledge that the size of one’s purse deter-
mines one’s fate in this world; meanwhile he fears nothing so much as the
boiling resentment that comes of the knowledge that the size of one’s purse
determines one’s fate in this world. Precisely here we approach something
of a semiotic and so ethical disaster. Good and evil begin to look treacher-
ously alike; and in the end no one will be so horrified by the failure to guide
us to a higher understanding as Gogol himself.
Unmet desire serves Gogol as an image of the human condition at its
most acute and most authentic. This is the moral to the two stories in
“Nevsky Prospekt,” where both protagonists fail in their quests for a desired
woman.
“Our world is oddly constructed!” I thought, walking down Nevsky Prospekt
a couple days ago and recalling these two incidents: “How strangely, how in-
comprehensibly fate toys with us! Do we ever get what we desire? Do we
achieve what our powers would seem to be especially designed for? Every-
thing turns out quite the reverse.” (3:45)
There follows a picture of the horse enthusiast too poor to have his own,
sadly admiring the beautiful trotter of a rich man who in turn is wholly in-
different to equine perfection. Like Piskarev, like Pirogov, like the horse
lover, we are all poor in the sense that no one gets what he wants, the nar-
rator asserts. The focus on material poverty in the stories is—one would
have to assume at this point—purely a heuristic device, a universal spiritual
truth easier to illustrate via the economically poor. Hence if we feel
Piskarev and Pirogov to be beneath us, Gogol is reminding us to see our-
selves, indeed to recognize the most basic human condition, in them.
“Overcoat” makes the same move, calling its unfortunate hero a man on
whom “misfortune rained down just as . . . painfully as it has on the tsars
and sovereigns of the world” (3:169). Like Karamzin, Gogol would like us
to believe his heroes’ poverty has nothing particular to do with class.
Yet even apart from the facile identification, the passage raises trou-
blesome questions. For surely the argument that we are all equally beset by
unfulfilled desires can more persuasively be made with a rich hero, a prince
87
like Buddha or a count like Pierre Bezukhov. But Gogol continues to dem-
onstrate human limitations on the poor in tales set in a city crawling with
princes and counts. In fact if we look back, the claim of a universal longing
is phrased as a rhetorical question rather than a statement, as though Gogol
feared a statement would be too bald. For as Gogol well knows, some peo-
ple indeed get what they want. Rather, the tales put the poor on display be-
cause the scenario as Gogol sees it does not really apply to the rich. Since
the blame falls on the mechanism of human desire, Gogol effectively ob-
jects not to the possession of wealth, but its acquisition, the moment of
wanting and the actions it spawns.15 Wealth itself is therefore no crime. In-
deed, the possession of wealth may be the best defense against the sin of
desire. If all classes looked equal, they in fact are not; some are tempted less
and so sin less. And since for Gogol being psychologically poor in the good
sense is tantamount to not wanting what you do not have, no one is as safe
from temptation as the truly affluent. If nothing else, the rich with their
wealth can always purchase indifference to material possessions, and that
for Gogol smacks of Christian virtue. These views will be confirmed and
fleshed out in Selected Passages.
The Petersburg tales thus hold out neither guidance nor hope for the
poor. They suggest that living without inevitably exposes the needy to the
temptations of desire, which in turn spoil the innocence that defines good
poverty. What they do not show—the demonstration is impossible—is how
one can return to the purity of nondesire after it is lost.16 Like Poor Liza’s
naïveté, the innocence of Gogol’s downtrodden protagonists is at once their
best feature and their inability to defend themselves or even understand
why defense is necessary. Meanwhile, only by remaining above the fray in
an economic sense can one escape it, and yet it is precisely in seeking to be-
come richer that the poor seal their own doom, plunging once again into
the scalding currents of desire in which all perish. In Gogol’s world, then,
nothing frees us from mankind’s universal spiritual impoverishment like
having—already having—lots of things. The genuinely, stably, and virtu-
ously poor are those who are rich. Poverty’s truest—one might say, lofti-
est—form exists only in the prosperous. With this conclusion, however, it is
hard to say we have achieved the clarity a moralizing writer could embrace.
THE UNDERSIDE OF “OVERCOAT”
The poor man’s wisdom is despised,

and his words are not heard.
—Ecclesiastes 9:16
In all Gogol’s thinking we see the imprint of a never-voiced suspicion that

the rich, those monied enough to be beyond the desire to climb socially or
88
acquire new possessions, must be the most virtuous. This is seconded by his
hunch that if wealth is awarded by God, it must be awarded for a good rea-
son, and so the richest must be genuinely the best. This bias is encoded in
the vocabulary with which he propounds his theories of art, which are es-
sentially theories of laughter. Gogol seems not to notice that his thinking
about art always echoes with the sneers of the rich laughing at the poor sim-
ply because they are poor. He regularly calls the appropriate target of satir-
ical laughter “lowness.” It is striking to what extent words like “vice,” “evil,”
“shortcoming,” “fault,” “flaw,” words unambiguously directed at the defect
itself, are supplanted in his aesthetic discourse by terms that resound am-
biguously in both the social and ethical registers.
In the crucial passage at the end of “Leaving the Theater after the
Performance of a New Comedy” where the author of the play steps forward
to defend, against his many detractors, laughter’s power to ennoble and for-
tify the spirit, Gogol declares war against variously “pettiness,” “emptiness,”
“the despised,” “the insignificant,” and that which is “lowly” (meloch’, pu-
stota, prezrennoe, nichtozhnoe, nizko). Meanwhile, his positive epithets are
just as tendentious: “honorable/honest,” “noble,” “bright,” “kind,” “high”
(chestnyi, blagorodnyi, svetlyi, dobryi, vysokii; 5:169–70). Of the ten terms,
only “emptiness” and “kindness” are blind to class differentiations. “Petti-
ness,” “lowness,” and “despisedness” derive originally from the rich man’s
disdain of his social inferiors; to be despised and to be bad are of course en-
tirely different things. Nichtozhnyi is vaguer, denoting insignificance gen-
erally, but while it works for the designation of social valuations (compare,
in a similar vein, the znachitel’noe litso, the VIP or literally “significant per-
sonage”), it lacks almost any moral or religious dimension; indeed, nich-
tozhnost’ doubles as a term of (social) abuse, meaning not a reprehensible
individual, but a nonentity, a nobody. On the other side, “honor,” “high-
ness,” and “nobility” (in Russian literally “well-bornness”) have dual conno-
tations as measures of both mere social prestige and actual ethical worth,
two sets of determinations which can be sharply, sometimes diametrically,
at odds. Even svetlyi (“bright”), seemingly just a vague term of approbation,
evokes svet “(high) society.”17
Gogol uses these class put-downs in discussions of ethical and theo-
logical matters constantly, favoring in fact the most ambiguous terms, “lowly,”
“noble,” and “honorable.”18 His aesthetic thinking calls its most important
concepts by designations which fail to distinguish value accorded by society,
precisely the kind of false esteem a Gogolian scoundrel such as Kovalev
pursues, from true ethical value. Used in reference to stories where the he-
roes are economically disadvantaged, such terminology raises still more prob-
lems. Gogol simply cannot resist the idea that wealth is given from above,
and so those who receive it must somehow be worthier than those who do
not. The rich, for Gogol, really are morally superior. When Gogol speaks of
89
his admiration for noble souls, it is often clear that he means noble, as in part
2 of Dead Souls, where Russian society is saved, in Karlinsky’s term, by
“saintly millionaires” (240). Gogol seems to have had trouble deciding whether
his disdain of the lowly arose high-mindedly or simply high-handedly.
As long as the discussion of virtue and vice remains secular, there is a
certain logic to seeking exemplars of honor and nobility among the rich and
powerful. But when the focus shifts to religious territory—as Gogol always
thinks he wants it to—suddenly a long church tradition demands to be reck-
oned with in which “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a nee-
dle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24). This
difficulty Gogol finally explicitly addresses in “Overcoat.” While no one will
dispute that Pirogov’s lowliness is the type that deserves derision, we are
never quite sure in “Overcoat”—the story sees to it—whether we laugh at
the poor hero fairly, because he bears faults that merit censure, or unfairly,
simply because he is so far below us in social status. The problem, in other
words, might be described as one of sympathy. Do we laugh because we put
ourselves in Akaky Akakievich’s shoes, or do we laugh precisely because we
do not?
Gogol’s most cherished ambition as a writer was the reformation of
Russian mores. In “Overcoat” he returns to his favorite mechanism: satire.
The tradition of using laughter to combat vice is long and august, yet at the
same time not without certain tensions. These tensions are perhaps most fa-
miliar in the Russian context from the eighteenth-century journalistic de-
bate between Nikolai Novikov and Empress Catherine the Great.19 Novikov
championed a vigorous satire which would hold up foibles to public mock-
ery. Catherine, by contrast, felt Novikov’s attacks disparaged not only short-
comings but the individuals who possessed them and so opened him to the
reproach of lack of Christian love. Such venom could be said to breed one
set of vices even as it resisted another. Catherine’s objections may overstate
this particular case, but are entirely sensible internally. The satirist always
risks both self-aggrandizement and the violation of Christian tolerance.
Satires on morals thus confront the rhetorical challenge of assuring their
own modesty, a challenge whose solution is not always at hand. This com-
plication is still with the satiric project when Gogol takes it up.
Gogol devotes his theoretical works on satire (“Leaving the Theater”
and the two versions of “The Denouement of The Inspector General”) to
answering this critique, which he seems to feel is directed against him by
the Russian public. The virtue of the form, as Gogol sees it, is that we laugh
at imaginary characters for their shortcomings, but afterward, in retrospec-
tion, realize that we cannot claim to be free of the traits we have deplored.
As a result, we too are chastened—by our own laughter, in effect. Gogol
elaborates this principle repeatedly. The hero of “The Denouement of The
Inspector General” pleads, “Just as we have laughed at the vileness in another,
90
so let us laugh magnanimously at our own vileness, whatever form it might

take. Let us take not only this comedy [The Inspector General], but every-
thing that comes from the pen of any writer whatsoever mocking the vice-
ridden and the low, directly on our own account, as though it were written
about us personally” (4:132). Seeing Gogol’s play, the ideal viewer is meant
to be repelled by the spiritual impoverishment on stage, the bribe-takers,
the hypocrites, the vulgarians. “And laughing, the spectator irresistibly
looks back, as if sensing that what he has found ridiculous is near to him,
and that he must be eternally on guard, lest it permeate his own soul”
(5:160). This is one of Gogol’s most treasured touchstones, not only in aes-
thetics but also in ethics.20 Gogol thus seems to have redressed the flaws
Catherine saw in the satiric process by requiring us to see ourselves in the
other, no matter who the other is. Along with the mayor in The Inspector
General, Gogol is always telling us, “What are you laughing for? You’re
laughing at yourselves!” (4:94).
Gogol’s defense of satire as an abstract proposition is eloquent enough.
But it does not accurately describe what happens in his own art, where
laughter is rarely satirical in this sense. The oversight in Gogol’s theorizing
is his inability to show that his laughter derives from the repudiation of eth-
ical shortcomings. In fact, as Gogol well knows, there are many ways to make
an audience laugh. We smile when we meet Schiller in “Nevsky Prospekt,”
for example, because the narrator insists he is not the writer Schiller, but
the famous one, the tinsmith on Meshchanskaia Street; we smile at him be-
cause he speaks Russian with an amusing accent and a peculiar grammar;
we laugh at him because he has decided that his nose is his enemy and
should be cut off. But what vices have we condemned? Moreover, even
when laughter does repudiate and abase, who is to say that it proceeds on
moral grounds? The ethical outrage moving the colleagues who tease Akaky
Akakievich is hard to descry. Yet if the audience laughs at something other
than moral lapses, then Gogol’s theory of self-mockery runs aground. The
writer’s humor suffers from the same shortcoming as the vocabulary it is
couched in: it is good at demolishing its targets but careless about choosing
them. Like the essentially blind policeman who apprehends the poor bar-
ber in “Nose,” chiding laughter, if it does locate a culprit, does so mostly by
accident. Meanwhile, like all the poor in Gogol’s Petersburg, the barber
Ivan Iakovlevich is guilty of crimes, even though, as the story’s fractured
logic makes clear, how he could have committed them remains literally
inconceivable.21
Gogol feels it necessary to defuse a second criticism as well: that laugh-
ter is easy to ignore. “Leaving the Theater” proudly proclaims: “It is unjust
to say that laughter has no effect on those against whom it is directed. . . .
Mockery is feared even by the man who fears nothing else in the world”
(5:169–70). Yet the mere presence of a work designed to explain to an audi-
91
ence how it should have laughed at a play after the fact suggests certain
doubts about the success of the project. Indeed, as the author spies on depart-
ing patrons he concludes that not one has fully understood his intentions.
Why is my heart become heavy? It is strange: I am filled with disappointment
that no one noticed the honorable personage in my play. Yes, there was an
honorable, noble personage at work through the whole of it. That honorable,
noble soul was—laughter. (5:169; emphasis in original)
Laughter, then, is a powerful but clumsy weapon. Coupled with Gogol’s own
turn away from satire after “Overcoat” toward increasingly didactic works,
the passionate attempts to find an adequate defense for satire suggest that
the most important doubter was now Gogol himself. We can guess some of
Gogol’s reasons for losing faith in laughter, since they are already spelled
out in the Petersburg tales.
Whenever it occurs within the Petersburg tales, laughter not only fails
to help, it clearly harms morals, for it feeds the laugher’s smug sense of
pride. There are many examples; the most revealing may be one of the least
obvious. Acquiring a new coat, Akaky Akakievich holds it up for comparison
with the old one. This act of comparison may seem innocuous enough, but
we should be on guard. Rousseau, for example, regards the moment indi-
viduals first compare one being with another as the moment society is con-
stituted and the moment of man’s fall from grace and purity, for from this
moment spring egoism, self-image, and vanity.22 Gogol is not far behind.
Akaky Akakievich “took a look at [his old coat], and even began to laugh him-
self: there was such a world of difference! And long after, at lunch, he con-
tinued to laugh whenever the condition of the ‘dressing gown’ came to mind”
(3:158). This example has all of the paradigmatic moments of Gogolian
laughter. Akaky Akakievich’s mirth is predicated on the disparity separating
the two coats. One is vastly superior and he delights in that superiority.
The clerk experiences the difference viscerally, for without realizing it,
he identifies with his new coat. Indeed, the comparison of coats is tantamount
to a comparison of his own identities: the new Akaky Akakievich surpasses
the old as one coat does the other. He laughs, then, for self-aggrandizement,
albeit in the smallest of ways. If Chizhevsky is right that Akaky Akakievich’s
acquisition of a new coat represents a sin, the clerk is delighted by his mis-
deed. Laughter, instead of correcting, revels in sin. As a Russian proverb
recorded by Dal’ puts it, “Where there is sin, there is laughter” (“V chem
grekh, v tom i smekh”) (1:402).23 The lexicographer notes revealingly that
the proverb is reversible, as though hilarity and evil were two sides of the
same coin. The example from “Overcoat” adds a third element, binding up
sin, laughter, and distance, the distance of nonidentification. This is the only
type of laughter that occurs within the Petersburg tales.24 If the pathetic
passage portrays Akaky Akakievich as the innocent victim of shameful laugh-
92
ter, in smirking at his old overcoat, the clerk has become like everyone else
in Petersburg, laughing at the lowly because he now identifies with the su-
perior. The question, of course, is what kind of laughing we as readers do
as we move through the text.
Elsewhere the sin implicit in such laughter is less subtle. When he fi-
nally gets his nose back, Kovalev cannot help indulging in a little nastiness
to celebrate: “He merrily turned around and with a satiric look stared,
squinting somewhat, at two military men, one of whom had a nose no larger
than a waistcoat button” (3:74). Earlier, without his own nose, Kovalev can
only lament, “What a lampoonish appearance!” (3:65). The terminology be-
hind the “lampoonish appearance” inflicted on him and the “satirical” pose
he aims at another is drawn from the forms of literary mockery, the very ones
Gogol so ardently champions. Kovalev, in other words, understands exactly
what is going on—if one person is suffering, then another is enjoying that
suffering, and this ridicule is known as “satire.” He is of course right. For in
“Nose” Gogol indeed encourages us to ridicule the grasping and shallow
collegiate assessor.
Gogol’s Petersburg is governed by an economy of ridicule, in which
no one can pass up any reasonable pretext for putting down another human
being, and everyone knows he is fair game as well. The stories play the same
game they pretend to expose. The point is simply to make fun of the other
guy before he does it to you. Kovalev trusts that his travails with his nose
will finally be at an end if the “real jokester” who is his friend “doesn’t burst
from laughter when he sees me” (3:74). This is a world, however, in which
laughter never effects moral changes; if anything, the fear of being laughed
at feeds the root of all Gogolian vices, “the unaccountable thirst to be some-
thing other than what one is” that the Kovalevs of Gogol’s world suffer.25
Indeed, Kovalev is clearly worse after his exposure to the world’s laughter
than before. In Poprishchin’s case, the discovery that “Sophie simply can-
not refrain from laughing when she sees him,” as he reads in the canine cor-
respondence, helps drive him out of his mind (3:205).
What is most striking in Gogol’s examples is that no one ever laughs at
himself. Kovalev, a collegiate assessor, the eighth rank in the Table of Ranks,
feels that in plays, “you can allow anything referring to ober-ofitsery [officers
of the lower ranks 9 to 12], but there should be no attacks on shtab-ofitsery
[officers of ranks 6 to 8]” (3:64); Kovalev, of course, has just barely and
through dishonest means cleared the hurdle at which one becomes a “shtab-
ofitser.”26 Poprishchin, a titular councilor (rank 9), similarly goes to the the-
ater to have a good laugh at those lower on the social ladder than he:
Went to the theater. They were doing the Russian buffoon Filatka. Laughed
a lot. There was also some vaudeville with amusing little verses at the expense
of solicitors, especially a certain collegiate registrar [rank 14], written most
freely, so that I was surprised that the censor passed it. And about merchants
93
[a lower estate than Poprishchin’s] they said openly that they deceive the
people, and that their sons try to worm their way into the aristocracy. (3:198)
This scenario of satire is repeated again and again in the Petersburg stories:
the laugher contrasts himself to another and revels in his own supremacy.
Petersburg thus may be the funniest place on earth, since everyone knows
the comparisons and everyone lords it over his inferiors. The Petersburger
does not notice he is implicated even when the fault he mocks is one he
very conspicuously shares, as the upwardly-mobile Poprishchin with his
snicker at the social climbing of the merchant class and the nasally deficient
Kovalev with his pleasure at another man’s substandard nose indicate. Pop-
rishchin’s diary entry above is meant to highlight the limitations of his moral
vision, yet there is a certain irony, for a nearly identical description could be
applied to Gogol’s own tales or play with only a little stretch. Satires, lam-
poons, pasquilles, and the other forms of literary mockery, in other words,
work by a logic with little connection to Gogol’s theories. In satirizing char-
acters who like to have a good laugh, Gogol is locked in a downward spiral,
mocking mockery for its moral defects.27
I want to consider the two major readings of sympathy and severity in
“Overcoat”: the widespread nineteenth-century reading (still alive in Russian-
language criticism to this day) that assumes Gogol finds Akaky Akakievich
innocent and so sympathizes with his suffering and deplores his mistreatment;
and the counter-reading that has gained ground in the twentieth century—
especially after Merezhkovsky and Chizhevsky—according to which Akaky
Akakievich is guilty at least in Gogol’s eyes of a terrifying lowliness, acquis-
itiveness, or both. (There is room to accommodate other interpretations be-
tween these extremes, but these at least mark out the far bounds within
which almost all others have moved.) The key distinction is that while the
modern interpretation acknowledges the harshness toward Akaky
Akakievich, it also discerns a justification for it in the salutary scourging of
vice. The views differ, in a sense, over the meaning of lowliness, precisely
the quality that Gogol’s ruminations on satire treat carelessly. Where one
sees a hero misused by life and deserving of compassion, the other sees a
hero who is himself lowly, the hollow shell of a human being who does not
deserve deep sympathy. Both readings, I would argue, are imperfect. In
fact, Akaky Akakievich is lowly in a third sense, and readers have been mis-
led by the ambiguity of poverty in part because Gogol himself was.
This most famous of Russian short stories is probably also the most
controversial. At the center of contention has always lain our overarching
question, that of sympathy for the poor. It is not impossible to read sympa-
thy into “Overcoat,” to imagine that Gogol loved Akaky Akakievich while re-
counting his mishaps, but there is no evidence in the text. On the other hand,
there is ample evidence to the contrary. Indeed, even the vaunted pathetic
94
passage is demonstrably unsympathetic. The passage, probably the most

debated few sentences in Russian literature, has such importance for Gogol
criticism because it is, peculiarly, perhaps the only moment in the satiric
stories, Gogol’s specialty, when Gogol explicitly states an attitude toward his
hero’s plight—an attitude, though not necessarily his own. Writing in 1911,
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii introduces the passage with the words, “In Gogol there
is no sign of cruelty or sentimentality, but rather a profound humane feel-
ing of pity and compassion which permeates the entire story.” He further
credits it as “the magnificent noble foundation of that humane sermon in
defense of the ‘insulted and injured’ which was to become one of the glori-
ous pages in the history of Russian literature” (70). The critic, like the en-
tire tradition he typifies in Gogol studies stretching from Belinskii to the
present day, clearly misjudges the writer.
The passage describes the endless teasing Akaky Akakievich experi-
ences at the hands of his colleagues and the soul-rending effect the scene
has on an anonymous young witness. What it conspicuously does not show
is that Akaky Akakievich suffers. The hero never responds to the jokes—
Gogol tells us that nothing can distract him from the joy he experiences
while copying—and only speaks up when his arm is jostled and he cannot
do his job properly. At this point, a sentimental set piece intervenes and the
young man, imagining Akaky Akakievich is trying to tell us, “I am your
brother,” is overcome with a sorrow he cannot shake off (3:144). All the evi-
dence, however, suggests the man has misunderstood Akaky Akakievich. In-
deed, the following paragraph goes on to show that, for the time being at
least, Akaky Akakievich is one of the happiest people alive. The impulse to
tease, torment, and ridicule is indeed cruel, but it has no effect in this partic-
ular case. Though sympathetically inclined, the young man cannot be called
sympathetic, for he fails to divine Akaky Akakievich’s actual sentiments.
If the passage makes an important point, it is not about Akaky Aka-
kievich but about us. The key words are: “A certain young man, recently ap-
pointed, who, on the model of others, was about to permit himself to laugh
at [Akaky Akakievich], suddenly stopped as if pierced through, and from
that day forward it was as though everything had changed before his eyes”
(3:143–44). The young man discovers not the private suffering of the other,
but the inhumanity of his own nature, for he recognizes in himself the im-
pulse to mock. Gogol’s words here are a warning to the many readers who
feel we both laugh at Akaky Akakievich and yet somehow still genuinely pity
him. The passage tells us laughter of the kind found in Gogol’s Petersburg
is the opposite of compassion.28 At most, our mock-concern only serves to
prick our sense of guilt enough to make us laugh more. That this amuse-
ment does not hurt the copyist is a commentary on Akaky Akakievich’s
exceptionality, not the nastiness of this sort of derision. If the passage is
right, Gogol’s signature technique of laughter through tears, supposedly
95
grounded in an overwhelming tenderness for Mother Russia in her travails,

must be something of an obfuscation. The question that arises then is not
why is life so harsh to Akaky Akakievich, but why is cruelty so funny and,
more to the point, why is a moralist like Gogol using all his skill to purvey
such a base pleasure? The young man may be overcome with guilt, but the
narrative is certainly not. His complete dismissal from the scene, never to
return, is symbolic. Guilt has been entertained, found to be fully justified—
and banished anyway. Now we return to the more pressing business at
hand, of laughing at Akaky Akakievich’s ludicrous misadventures, with a
troubled conscience no doubt, but laughing nonetheless. This is not what
satire was supposed to be.
If “Overcoat” gives us any guidance where to place our sympathies,
then they go not with Akaky Akakievich. The narrative will sympathize with
anyone before him. In the pathetic scene we have more grounds to pity the
“poor young man”; he after all genuinely suffers (3:144). Later, when Akaky
Akakievich loses his coat, he turns for help in getting it back to the VIP. The
narrative again explicitly bestows sympathy, but not on the clerk. The en-
counter has a crucial resonance for the depiction of the poor, since in beg-
ging the VIP’s aid, Akaky Akakievich takes on the time-honored role of the
impoverished supplicant. Moreover, his plea for sympathy recreates his re-
lationship to the reader, for as a literary character he is entreating us for
compassion as well. What transpires is the classic Petersburg face-down, in
which the intimidating superior lords it over the inferior and justice is trav-
estied. It is safe to say readers who take sides in the encounter with some
regularity feel for Akaky Akakievich. The narrative, however, places its loy-
alties elsewhere, in a deliberate and ostentatious manner.
The text begins from the usual assumption that such a meeting is psy-
chologically painful, but then diverts all our charitable response into the
hands of the true victim:
Having obtained the rank of general, [the VIP] somehow grew confused, lost
his bearings, and utterly did not know how to act. If he happened to be with
equals, he was still a proper human being . . . but as soon as he chanced to
be in company where there were people as little as one rank below him, he
was simply at a complete loss: he kept quiet, and his condition aroused pity,
the more so that even he himself felt that he might be spending his time ever
so much better. In his eyes could sometimes be made out a fervent desire to
join in some interesting conversation or group of people. (3:165)
Gogol takes the poor man’s fear of those who outrank him, the anxiety of
not belonging and of insufficient social graces which gives rise to Piskarev’s
nightmare of a lavish ball where he is ill-dressed and unable to converse,
and inverts it. Again we pity the man overcome with awkwardness in the
presence of others—but now, that man is the VIP. The inversion is rather
amusing, and Gogol again has us delighting in what we ostensibly deplore.
96
That the unfairness is intentional is corroborated by another example

a few lines earlier. Just when the VIP is about to be taken to task for excess
fascination with his position, the narrator suddenly digresses and the attack
lands instead on an anonymous titular councilor—Akaky Akakievich’s rank—
who is specially inserted into the text to take the blow. The official is made
the head of some tiny suboffice and is so taken with his rank that he installs
a “Presence Chamber” with double doormen in gold braid, although the
space they guard is so small it barely accommodates an ordinary desk. The
intended censure of the VIP falls on another lowly unfortunate. The narra-
tive too kowtows before rank.
It is hard to take seriously the possibility that in the pathetic passage
Gogol means to denounce the jokes made by Akaky Akakievich’s colleagues.
We of course smile as we read the wisecracks. More important, they are all
duplicated by the narrator. Akaky Akakievich had earned, “as those subtle
wits, his comrades, put it, a pin for his buttonhole and hemorrhoids in the
small of his back” (3:144); this is the same joke, with its hemorrhoids in the
wrong place, as the narrator’s description of Akaky Akakievich as “with
wrinkles on both sides of his cheek and a complexion which was, as they say,
hemorrhoidal” (3:141). The narrator laughs at how the frost afflicts poor
Akaky Akakievich; his office mates shred paper and toss it at him calling it
snow. Colleagues make up stories about Akaky Akakievich marrying his 70-
year-old landlady; the narrator, with his references to “a pleasant life’s com-
panion,” raises chuckles by getting us to imagine Akaky Akakievich marrying
his coat (3:154). The story is brazenly explicit about its strategy. The hero
belongs to the type of the “perpetual titular councilor, who, as everyone
knows, has been the butt of jokes and cracks galore by various writers with
the laudable habit of picking on those who can’t bite back” (3:141–42). As
Gogol well knows, few things are funnier, when dispensing insults, than
pretending to be solicitous of the victim’s well-being. This is just another
aspect of the ineptitude, first highlighted by Eikhenbaum, of the narrator,
who acts as though he were not in control of a text which in fact is master-
fully calibrated for comic effect, and who pretends to lament the miseries
of little Akaky Akakievich when of course the narrative wants nothing more
than to see them multiplied. Gippius reads the quotation about gibing and
jeering as a reference to writers such as Bulgarin, who had also made fun of
their lowly civil servant-heroes, but we do not need to go so far afield (108).
Yet the story’s cruel humor is only unjustified, according to the theory
of satire, if it fails to combat vice. Akaky Akakievich’s suffering, though
eventually severe, may thus be edifyingly deserved. Perhaps through his
deeds he has earned his fate? The hero of “Overcoat” is a lowly copy clerk
who lives the most degraded existence imaginable. He is miserably poor,
bald, ill-complexioned, badly dressed, and likely to be crowned with the slops
that people toss out their windows. If his food is covered with flies, he eats
97
them too, because he pays no attention to anything except the transcription

of documents. Copying is his entire existence. Akaky Akakievich is not even
interested in the import of the words. Instead, he adores the process of
handwriting; he loves to come across his favorite letters, which delight him
so much that he giggles, winks, and “helped them along with his lips” (3:144).
He even takes extra work home to occupy his leisure hours, and falls asleep
every night as contented as ever a man was with his lot in life, wondering
what he will get to copy tomorrow and filled with a profound and truly ridic-
ulous bliss.
All this changes when he takes his winter coat to be mended. Gogol
suggests that the tailor bullies the clerk into purchasing a new coat fancier
than he needs.29 The new coat leads Akaky Akakievich into adventures
which destroy him. As in the common model of the Petersburg tales, how-
ever, Gogol implies that the real tragedy is that Akaky Akakievich, who can
quite literally stand any form of abuse, consents to the purchase of an ob-
ject that is for him unaccustomedly fine, for by doing so, he sets in progress
a chain of events which irrevocably alter his own mental makeup and ren-
der him vulnerable. At the end, robbed of his beloved new overcoat, Akaky
Akakievich is back in his old coat, but having developed a sensitivity to bod-
ily comfort and simultaneously some little pride, can no longer survive the
cruelty of nature and man.
Akaky Akakievich fits Gogol’s aesthetic theories precisely. If the ene-
my of satire is that which is low, Akaky Akakievich is the ne plus ultra—any
lower and we leave behind the category of Homo sapiens. Gogol presents
“this deformed, sick creature,” in Mann’s phrase, as a specimen of mankind
at its most horrifyingly petty, for he is satisfied with an existence so shallow
it can be ennobled by a simple overcoat (399). The underlying question of
spiritual hollowness deeply disturbed Gogol at the time.30 Gogol later claimed
as the essence of his own special artistic gift the ability to portray “the pet-
tiness [poshlost’] of the petty man,” an ability, he liked to point out, dis-
cerned by no less a connoisseur than Pushkin himself (8:292). Similarly,
“Leaving the Theater” describes the highest form of the satiric art as that
which “brings out vividly that which would have slipped past, without
whose piercing power the triviality and emptiness of life would not horrify
man so” (5:169).
The description could have been crafted expressly for Akaky Akakie-
vich. He goes through life wholly unnoticed (dying “a creature . . . dear to
none, interesting to none . . . who went to his grave without having done
anything remarkable” [3:169]) and is salvaged from oblivion only by the
intervention of Gogol’s comic genius, which can make mountains out of
molehills. Gogol promotes a nebbish to the status of a protagonist in order
to underscore precisely the “triviality and emptiness” that threaten all life
in Petersburg. If the theory is right, we are laughing at Akaky Akakievich
98
because we are appalled at the spiritual degradation of the man, a being so

descended that his life is literally without meaning: Akaky Akakievich writes
all day and yet has no inkling what it all stands for.
Yet the situation is not quite so simple. “Overcoat” is constructed on
a certain ambiguity, what Fanger calls the story’s “transcendence of single-
ness of message” and Bernheimer reads as Gogol’s ambivalence over the lit-
erary project per se (Fanger, 161). Ambiguity, of course, does not sit well
with Gogol’s goal of making overlooked shortcomings too evident to miss;
something apparently remains obscured despite Gogol’s self-avowed tal-
ents. The eponymous overcoat exemplifies the confusion. Its acquisition
seems to awaken the clerk from his spiritual stupor. In Driessen’s words,
Akaky Akakievich “finds himself” (203); Gogol himself tells us that Akaky
Akakievich “was spiritually nourished” (3:154). Yet as Chizhevsky notes, love
for any worldly possession, however trivial, is one of the devil’s snares (319);
Dead Souls, the core narrative, and a variety of Gogol’s private statements
concur: acquisitiveness is a sin, one of the worst. Hippisley captures the wider
uncertainty in the space of a single reading. He concludes the coat has to
do with spiritual enlightenment, but admits we cannot say for sure whether
it represents Akaky Akakievich’s genuine opening to a higher spirituality or
a false awakening deliberately perpetrated by the demonic Petrovich. There
is something ominous in the fact that the linchpin in Gogol’s moral reason-
ing so resists clear understanding.
This ambiguity emerges still more by comparison with “Nevsky Pros-
pekt.” Akaky Akakievich’s tale in a sense is merely Piskarev’s with a slight re-
duction in stature: instead of an artist, a copyist; instead of a woman to love,
a coat; and instead of lofty strivings trampled by fate, pitifully modest ones.
Yet in lowering his hero in this fashion, Gogol entirely alters the meaning of
his story, for where Piskarev’s tale is meant as tragedy, Akaky Akakievich’s
clearly shades toward farce. In “Nevsky Prospekt,” we laughed at the puffed-
up vulgarian Pirogov, but trembled and wept at the destruction of Piskarev,
who was after all a good man. In “Overcoat,” Gogol retells the same story
in such a way as to bring us precariously close to laughing not at Pirogov,
but at Piskarev. It is as though “Overcoat” meant to illustrate precisely the
ease with which satire can be abused, to make us laugh even when we should
not, to inculcate sin as easily as it inspires virtue. We might frame the prob-
lem another way. If “Nevsky Prospekt” insists, in some seriousness, that only
by wrapping oneself up in one’s coat can one escape from the evil effect of
the devil’s lamps on the grand avenue, why does Akaky Akakievich meet
such a sorry fate precisely when he tries to follow his creator’s advice?
To my knowledge, no critic has yet pointed out—perhaps because it
is so obvious—the most egregious of the story’s paradoxes.31 Gogol encour-
ages us to laugh at Akaky Akakievich by deploying some of his most devas-
tating humor, yet the pathetic passage declares such laughter inhuman. In
99
each of Gogol’s previous satiric stories, at least the hero we laughed at was
a man of many vices and insufficient conscience, a Kovalev or a Pirogov; the
cruelty, if such there was, was therefore necessary. Yet it is clear that Akaky
Akakievich is not amusing to the extent that he is flawed morally. His moral
defects, if any, are slight, while his ability to make us laugh is almost un-
limited. Gogol’s “Overcoat” does not quite fit its hero. The story in effect
probes the limits of satire and asks at what point justified satire loses its
mandate and shades into simple nastiness of the sort that Kovalev practices.
“Overcoat” testifies that satire abused is, perhaps not incidentally, every bit
as funny as satire used properly. Akaky Akakievich falls short in almost
everything—he is not only comical in his speech, hilarious to look at, and
preposterous in his actions and motivations, but at times almost unrecog-
nizable as a human being. Akaky Akakievich falls short in everything, that
is, except ethics, the one thing that is supposed to occupy satire.
Indeed, we shall see that “Overcoat” lampoons not spiritual hollow-
ness, but precisely spiritual fullness as Gogol understood it. It seems un-
likely that Gogol was entirely conscious of what he was doing. All the same,
“Overcoat” forces us to confront, if we would resist, the tension within the
satiric project: do we laugh because we love virtue, or do we laugh because—
a reading more radical than might seem to emerge from Dal’’s folk saying—
certain types of laughter are indistinguishable from sin? Under the cover of
some of his funniest writing, Gogol can be seen asking what is for him a
truly radical and painful question: what if laughter works not for the bet-
terment of society, but actually to its detriment?
“Overcoat” is the most important of the Petersburg tales because it
alone details the first phase in the narrative of poverty, the innocence be-
fore the fall. What we find is rather surprising. It has long been noted that
Akaky Akakievich’s story is a travesty, or in Driessen’s term, a “reductio ad
absurdum” of the hagiographic tradition (194).32 “Overcoat,” in this inter-
pretation, resembles a saint’s life, but always with a twist; where we expect
a holy topos, we find it undermined and parodied. Hence the preposterous
naming scene where the church calendar disgorges unpronounceable name
after unpronounceable name, the prophecy not of future greatness but pet-
tiness, the hero’s inurement to privation but only in the name of an over-
coat, the humility that seems noble but actually stems from cowardice, and
so on. There is even, in the form of the posthumous theft of coats, a kind of
inverted miracle, wonder-working transmuted into petty larceny. Contem-
poraries undoubtedly recognized the hagiographic model, not necessarily
consciously, and must have been slightly embarrassed at the recognition.
One can presume that the resemblance makes the reader laugh all the more,
since we feel vaguely—though only vaguely—uncomfortable at the fact that
we are laughing if not quite at what is holy, then, to borrow the words of a
contemporary comic, awfully near it. This is the story’s ambiguity yet again.
100
“Overcoat” is in fact not a travesty. Travesty derives from an incon-

gruity in topic and treatment; one thinks for example of Sumarokov’s defi-
nition of the mock-epic, in which “Verses which are occupied with elevated
affairs, / Are written with very low words” or, alternately, the Muse bestows
“elevated words on low affairs” (83). The key to the burlesque is the mo-
ment of the grotesque, the incompatibility of content and style. “Overcoat”
does not travesty hagiography for a simple reason: hagiography is quite
nearly impossible to travesty. The vitae of saints, especially ascetic saints,
are built on a presumption that is itself already grotesque in this sense: that
the lowly is lofty—or more precisely, that earthly lowliness implies, expresses,
and feeds spiritual loftiness. There is always incompatibility implicit in ha-
giography—incompatibility and often diametrical opposition between the
values of society and those of God.33 We must proceed with great caution
whenever we perceive a travesty of hagiography, since every genuine ha-
giography already reads as its own parody. To travesty saintliness, in other
words, is simply to read it with the wrong set of values—and this is precisely
what “Overcoat” does.
It is here that the story’s ambiguity becomes most important. For it
could be said that the Akaky Akakievich we meet at the start of the story is
laughable not to the extent that he diverges from the hagiographic prece-
dent, but precisely to the extent that he follows it. Akaky Akakievich is uni-
versally described as hyperbolic, yet there is hardly a single detail of his
story which could not be read, within the tradition, as literally true and wor-
thy of reverence. His lack of attention to his surroundings, his patient suf-
fering of humiliations at the hands of men and deprivations at the hands of
fate, the bugs and filth that he consumes with his food, can all be taken as
signs of a towering ascetic rigor. Likewise his refusal to murmur against his
lot and his tireless labor at a task which he does not so much as ask to un-
derstand yet submits to joyfully, as though its value were in mortifying the
flesh. His name, as funny as it is, is historically attested among saints more
than once (Schillinger, 36). Even the often noted scatological reference im-
plicit in the name, intentionally underscored in one variant by the reference
to the unfortunate “close frequency of the letter k,” has a holy antecedent
in the life of St. Symeon, one of the first Greek holy fools, who intention-
ally defecated in public (3:522).34 Besides, copying, as has been pointed out
more than once, was often a major part of a monk’s lifework. It may be that
Akaky Akakievich performs no proper miracles (though as Alissandratos
maintains, even this is debatable [33]), but at the very least he is pure, sim-
ple, humble, honest, and disciplined.
The matter is especially serious since of all nineteenth-century Rus-
sian writers, perhaps none so genuinely believed in the necessity of a monk-
like existence, a turn away from the things of this earth, as Gogol. When the
artist who paints the maleficent title work in “Portrait” realizes what he has
101
done, he resolves to purify his soul and retires to a monastery, shunning all
relations (Gogol has most of them conveniently killed off in a series of “edi-
fying” accidents). There he mortifies his flesh and disciplines his soul. Though
the brethren are amazed at the “strictness of his life,” which exceeds the
normal “strictness of monastery life,” the artist nonetheless finds it “insuffi-
ciently strict” (3:133). This passage was added to “Portrait” in its 1842 re-
daction. We should note that the triple rigor comes directly from “Overcoat,”
where it had seemingly been a laughing matter, in the form of the VIP’s
comical guiding principle in all affairs: “strictness, strictness, and—strict-
ness,” pronounced, Gogol tells us, with a special emphasis on the final word
(3:164). In fact, triple strictness turns out for Gogol to be literally salvific.
Gogol continues of the repentant painter in “Portrait” that he went into
the wilderness to live, subsisted on raw roots, hauled stones from place to
place on his back, and stood motionless for whole days at a time engrossed
in prayer. “In short he seemed to strive for every possible degree of patience
and that incomprehensible self-abnegation, examples of which can be found
only in the lives of the holy men” (3:133). Gogol defines saintliness as restraint
of the ego and the body, inurement to suffering, and the rejection of the world.
These, at least until he receives his new garment, are Akaky Akakievich’s
virtues. “Overcoat” in effect challenges the claim for the painter’s uniqueness
in “Portrait,” since it presents another hero who achieves the same saintly
infinite patience and a degree of self-abnegation even more incomprehen-
sible. The ending of “Portrait” and the beginning of “Overcoat”—written in
the same period—are not so much different sets of events as the same events
told from different viewpoints, with a hushed reverence in one case, and with
intentionally distracting laughter and narratorial ineptitude in the other.
It is true that Akaky Akakievich never prays (that we see), never goes to
church, and never explicitly claims to seek to obey the will of God. Yet we
do know he is filled with the sense of being in God’s hands, eating his din-
ner “with flies and whatever God might have sent at the time” (3:145) and
going to bed at night “smiling in advance at the thought of the next day:
what was it God would send to be copied tomorrow” (3:146). Akaky Aka-
kievich’s entire existence is a continual paean of thanks to heaven, at once
joyous and meek. Moreover, the Orthodox tradition of the holy fool makes
the absence of prayer inconclusive: some holy fools prayed incessantly, oth-
ers not at all. Akaky Akakievich cannot be a true saint, for he is not canon-
ized; he is not a proper monk either, since he has no monastery. But it is
clear he is a wholly good man, a cross between a monk and a holy fool in a
secular setting.35 The grounds on which Akaky Akakievich is normally
deemed preposterous are intentional, that is, dependent on our attribution
of his motives. Unlike the monk in “Portrait,” he does not, that we know, seek
out his existence, and shows none of the signs of dread and self-loathing
that propel Leon’s father to take the orders and so delight Gogol. Akaky
102
Akakievich simply stumbles into his beatific existence innocently, and may
not even be aware of his achievement.
Because of this, some readers are tempted to demean his virtue. Schil-
linger observes that he is “an insignificant man performing a small task with
no thought as to why he does so”; Alissandratos’s critique proceeds in the
same manner, attacking Akaky Akakievich’s motivations, which after all are
unspecified, rather than his actions (39). Gogol forestalls such readings,
however, when he gives us perhaps our only moment of insight into his
hero’s reasons in the first half of the story. “He served zealously, no, he served
with love” (3:144). The description that follows of Akaky Akakievich’s ab-
sorption in writing is indeed comical, but in no way undermines the sugges-
tion that he is moved not by an absent mind, but by a powerful and present
fervor. Indeed, the clerk is free of all the Gogolian vices: he has no pride,
lives within his means, serves the state devotedly, gives thanks to Providence
every day. The spiritual hollowness so often attributed to Akaky Akakievich
is a mirage.
Readers seem to have overlooked Akaky Akakievich’s goodness to
such a large extent because he does not correspond exactly to the image of
the virtuous individual Gogol normally discusses. For Akaky Akakievich is
beyond even the moralist’s power to imagine seriously. Where Leon’s father
represents his author’s vision of tormented and stern virtue, weeping, tor-
turing himself, struggling against the failings of all flesh, Akaky Akakievich
represents innocence, a goodness so perfect that it literally does not know
what evil is or how the world is constructed. Akaky Akakievich has no spe-
cial techniques for conquering body and spirit; his flesh is already van-
quished, his spirit as meek as can be imagined. Such miraculous innocence
may be less painful than hard-won virtue, but only because it is more ideal.
Thus, in opposition to the weight of critical commentary, I think we have to
take the meaning of his name literally, not with a smile: Akaky, or in Greek
Acacius, “free of evil.” Akaky Akakievich is the moral equivalent of the id-
iot savant, not quite sure how he does it, but doing it to perfection.
If we look closely at those of Akaky Akakievich’s actions commonly
deemed preposterous, we find that each represents some virtue either for
Orthodox asceticism generally or for Gogol’s own peculiar ethical system,
which he perceived to be an updating of tradition. We can test the propo-
sition on the most unambiguously ridiculous moment in Akaky Akakievich’s
biography. When he is promoted from mere copying to something higher,
the change is minuscule, but he cannot handle it:
All that was required was that he should change the main title [zaglavnyi
titul] and switch a few verbs from the first person to the third. This caused
him such labor that he broke out in an utter sweat, wiped his brow and finally
said, “No, better I should copy something.” Since then they had left him to
his copying once and for all. (3:145)
103
Certainly it is impossible to mistake Gogol’s comic intentions (though Alis-

sandratos points out that St. Sergius too always refused higher appoint-
ments [31]). Modesty and incompetence, after all, are not the same thing.
Yet even here, at his most laughable, Akaky Akakievich’s shortcoming is
open to multiple interpretations as we shift back and forth between stan-
dard and ascetic modes of viewing. The clerk proves unable not merely to
write on his own, but more specifically to convert first-person verbs into
third-person ones. He is stymied by a profound conceptual limitation, the
inability to grasp an equivalence. Akaky Akakievich cannot comprehend the
fact that every “I” can be translated into a “he” or “she.” What he implicitly
lacks is the notion of self-image, an awareness of the external aspect of the
ego as seen by others. And indeed, Akaky Akakievich is singularly oblivious
to how he appears to the world, both in dress and in demeanor. (Later, of
course, this innocence will be forfeited when the new coat teaches him that
the inner self is always shadowed by a phantom double known as one’s ap-
pearance.)36 For the clerk, “I” remains “I” and “he” remains “he.” The mu-
tual convertibility of terms is too difficult to master.
This is no small achievement. Again the ridiculous is just the lofty
seen from another angle. Gogol regularly measures the moral corruption of
Petersburg by the degree to which the inhabitants live for their self-image.
As one example of many, “Nevsky Prospekt” paints the city’s most public
space as a site of public promenades and self-display. The famous descrip-
tion of body parts and pieces of clothing without apparent owners stands for
the victory of image over self, of seeming over being. The Petersburger
regresses morally not when he seeks esteem—everyone does—but when he
believes esteem can be seized via manipulation of his public aspect, a new
coat or elaborate mustaches, rather than through authentic self-scrutiny
and change.
Akaky Akakievich’s manner of writing is thus the surest defense against
Petersburg’s corruptive force. In the Petersburg tales, changing persons
and altering titles—the clerk’s other inability as a writer—are the very defi-
nition of vice, impiety, and even insanity.37 Akaky Akakievich cannot change
titles. Poprishchin can, and it is his special disaster; he changes his title to
King of Spain, making first person into third in the most literal sense (he
has read of the missing claimant to the Spanish throne in the paper and at
first posits no connection to himself ). Yet the feat, Gogol means us to see,
is madness. Kovalev similarly manufactures a semblance to replace his true
identity by drawing on the same small toolbox. He alters his title, from Col-
legiate Assessor to the more prestigious but not quite justified military ana-
logue Major. Kovalev is so enamored of his self-image that he likes to refer
to himself in the third person, luring poor women for seduction with the
words, “Sweetie, just go and ask for the apartment of Major Kovalev” (3:53).
His punishment of being separated from his nose, seemingly so outlandish,
104
is in fact perfect poetic justice. Gogol provides the man who likes to think
of himself as “he” rather than “I” what he always wanted: a self in the third
person. The version of himself he beholds on the street gives him the jolt
he so richly deserves. The VIP likewise presumes to inflate his importance
by speaking of himself as if of another: “Do you know who you are speaking
to? Do you understand who stands before you?” (3:165). “I am not I, but
he,” he seems to want to say. This is the eternal claim of the pretender.38
Akaky Akakievich’s idiocy, then, in the proper etymological sense of a
lack of a public self, is exactly the virtue Gogol desires for Russia’s de-
bauched capital.39 The moral importance of the first-person/third-person
alternation was one Gogol liked to underscore. One of the characters in
“Leaving the Theater,” swayed by the speech of Gogol’s mouthpiece, the
Very Modestly Dressed Man, responds, “I must confess, your words give
one pause.” As if thinking particularly of Petersburg and the false self-
images that arise there he adds, “And when I recall, when I picture, how
proud our European upbringing has made us, how it has hidden us from
ourselves, . . .” and then, as if reflecting now on “Overcoat,” continues,
with what condescension and contempt we look upon those who have not got
the same external polish we have, and the way each of us holds himself to be
almost a saint, and speaks of evil forever in the third person—then, I confess,
a man’s heart can’t help being sad. . . . (5:142–43)
Again vice is the translation of what should be the first person to the third.
Gogol would like to teach Russia to stop saying, “Someone has that fault”
and to start saying, “I have that fault.” Thus if the refusal of responsibility
implicit in converting “I” to “he” defines vice, the reverse defines virtue. Con-
verting the first person into anything else is escaping from who we really
are, while making third into first means taking the whole nation and its
shortcomings as our personal responsibility. Or rather, this is virtue for
those who are flawed in the first place. Gogol’s highest ideal, perhaps un-
conscious, is the pure innocence of Akaky Akakievich, who stays out of the
cycle of conversions altogether. Unfortunately, we must again wonder, if
Gogol is opposed to judging social inferiors on the basis of their “outer pol-
ish,” then what has he wrought in “Overcoat”?
It is assumed in the hagiographic tradition that the greatest saints are
difficult to recognize in person. In the fourteenth-century Life of Sergius,
perhaps the most illustrious of all Russian holy men, we read:
Blessed Sergius never wore new clothing, nor any made of fine material, nor
colored, nor white, nor smooth and soft; he wore plain cloth or caftan; his
clothing was old and worn, dirty, patched. Once they had in the monastery an
ugly, stained, bad bit of cloth, which all the brethren threw aside; one brother
had it, kept it for a while and discarded it, so did another, and a third and so
on to the seventh. But the saint did not despise it, he gratefully took it, cut it
105
out and made himself a habit, which he wore, not with disdain but with grat-
itude. (Epiphanius, 276)
The parallel with Akaky Akakievich is obvious; what follows is still more re-
vealing. One day, a peasant comes to see the great saint. He is told Sergius
will return presently from the garden. Looking impatiently in that direc-
tion, he sees a badly dressed man toiling away. Clearly this is no holy man,
he thinks. When Sergius is returning, the monks point to him. The peasant
is by now convinced they are having a joke at his expense. “The visitor
turned from the saint and mocked at him: ‘I came to see a prophet and you
point out to me a needy-looking beggar’ ” (277). The monks indignantly in-
form Sergius, but he suffers the humiliation gladly, refusing to enlighten
the peasant, bowing down to him, praising his right judgment, and inviting
him to share a meal. The peasant, however, is still disappointed not to have
seen the great saint. Just then a neighboring prince arrives at the monastery
and encountering Sergius bows low before him. “Who is the man with the
prince?” the peasant asks. Being told yet again that the very man is Sergius,
he at last understands, is stricken with remorse, begs Sergius’s forgiveness,
and in repentance comes to spend the final years of his life as a monk at the
monastery.40
“Overcoat” reads remarkably like a retelling of this episode with one
minor modification: the story places us in the role of the peasant. We see an
image of holiness and mistake it, deriding what we should revere. Akaky
Akakievich’s appearance, his willing submission to mockery, his ceaseless
toil, his lack of pride make him exalted in the spiritual realm and prepos-
terous on earth. That is not to say that Akaky Akakievich is somehow, as a
result of his humility and asceticism, any less funny. He is preposterously
lowly and the story has been written so as to make it impossible not to laugh
at him. And this precisely is the point. What “Overcoat” shows is the pro-
found and genuine ridiculousness of the holy, for those inclined to see it
that way. Yet Gogol omits the dawning of enlightenment that is the key mo-
ment in the vita episode, not so much as hinting at it. We are never alerted
that the laughter of the trained reader of satires has come too quickly, that
we are being not regenerated as we laugh, but rather led away from virtue.
Whether this modeling is at all intentional is hard to divine. For while one
might want to reconsider the possibility of reading “Overcoat” as though we
were meant to be shamed into repentance in retrospect, Gogol’s text, at a
time when his moralistic statements are growing rigidly doctrinaire, seems
oblivious to the possibility.
In Selected Passages, discussing the salvation of Russia by ethical ref-
ormation, Gogol writes, “Freedom lies not in saying yes to the indulgence
of your desires, but in being able to say to them no. . . . In Russia no one as
yet can say this firm no to himself” (8:341). It is true, Akaky Akakievich
106
eventually develops some desires, and even turns to crime in the end; but we
laugh hardest at the start, where under the guise of just another humiliation
we are shown his ability to say this firm no to himself. “Overcoat” suggests
that while there may not be one righteous man in all of Russia, if one were
to appear, Gogol’s genius for small details would make short shrift of him.
In effect, Gogol shows that satire lashes innocence just as well as vice;
if this is Gogol’s greatest story, then innocence is actually funnier to deride
than corruption. Laughter is indeed sadly noble, in the dual senses of ex-
pressing a viewpoint that looks down on what is socially devalued simply for
being devalued, and of possessing a superiority that is limited to the secu-
lar realm. At the heart of the story’s error of judgment lies the ambiguity of
the spectacle of poverty, that condition in which loftiness and lowliness look
treacherously alike. Akaky Akakievich is the perfect example to undo satire,
since he turns out to be one lowly individual we should not mock. And he
exposes Gogol’s scorn for sympathy, for he is one poor man whose experi-
ence we should try to make our own.
According to Mann, Gogol’s fictional universe is ruled over by a “logic
of reversal” in which “the more worthy languish and suffer; insignificance
and vice are rewarded,” and everything is the opposite of what we would
like (390). Mann’s principle is really just the satirical stance made into a
mode of argumentation: the author depicts only pettiness, ignorance, fail-
ure, and sin to make all the more palpable the value of fullness, insight, jus-
tice, and righteousness. Yet inverted logic is logical only so far as it can be
unraveled. As “Overcoat” demonstrates, Gogol’s vision is sometimes clouded
by an illogic of reversal, in which there are multiple and irresponsible twists
simply to magnify the fun, in which both vice and virtue can appear in dis-
guise and what the author really values can be impossible to divine. In 1846,
looking back at his own work and seeking retrospectively to explain the
meaning of “comedy and satire generally” (4:135), Gogol has his mouth-
piece in “The Denouement of The Inspector General,” an actor discussing
his craft, argue that the goal of verbal art is to make clear moral distinctions:
What is bad is not that we should be shown the badness of the bad and should
see that it is bad in every way; what’s bad is if it is shown to us so that you
don’t know whether it’s evil or not; what’s bad is when evil is made attractive
to the viewer; what’s bad is when it is so mixed with good that you don’t know
which side to take. (4:125–26)
Or, as the other characters intone time and again, as though repeating some
sort of mantra, “What’s bad is when you don’t see the goodness of the
good.” Gogol had reason to fear morally disoriented and disorienting satire.
Satire may be good at combating some vices, but it stumbles over poverty
and its ambiguity.
107
Chapter Four
Gogol against Sympathy
Akaky Akakievich wandered sad back to his

room, and the manner in which he spent the
night there is left to the judgment of anyone who
can in the least imagine the situation of another.
—Gogol, “Overcoat”
GOGOL CONTINUED TO WRESTLE with the

ambiguity of poverty even after his career as an artist came to an end. In
“Poor Liza” and “Egyptian Nights” we have seen two projects of uniting
with the poor on grounds of sympathy, projects with their own motives,
their unique successes and, perhaps more strikingly, failures. Yet for all the
differences, Pushkin and Karamzin both present sympathy and identifica-
tion as potentially precious to art and life. Gogol, on the other hand, gives
us an opportunity to consider some of the reasons writers and thinkers
might be inclined to object to the sympathetic project knowingly and pur-
posively—not, as the reader of Karamzin might conclude, because the
process sometimes misfires, but rather because Gogol finds it undesirable
in the first place. In a sense, Gogol builds on Karamzin’s discovery that sym-
pathy can be socially destabilizing, as well as Pushkin’s demonstration that
it necessarily infringes aristocratic privilege and longstanding traditions. It
is true, Gogol’s reasons are sometimes outlandish, but on the other hand,
his underlying anxiety over and defense of the sanctity of a hierarchical so-
cial structure—hierarchies and sympathy are fairly fundamentally at odds—
enjoys a long and esteemed history in Russian thinking. Gogol is especially
valuable as a source of objections to sympathy because perhaps nowhere
else are such ideas so thoroughly espoused by an artist. The rejection of
sympathy necessarily entails a rejection of identification, and challenges the
use of the imagination and the value of art as well. Needless to say, the artist
who repudiates art finds himself in a peculiar position.
In this chapter, then, we turn away from Gogol’s art in two senses. We
will trace Gogol’s own rejection of art. But first we explore Gogol’s approach
to the poor as a social thinker, as spelled out in his Selected Passages from
Correspondence with Friends. (The chapter also includes some more gen-
eral considerations about the social construction of poverty, even apart from
108
Gogol, that enter our field of vision once political realities are addressed.)
Gogol’s views of the social phenomenon of poverty are not without rele-
vance for his literary works, and indeed suggest some of the reasons for his
problems in carrying on as an artist. Gogol repudiates aesthetic endeavor
more forcefully and damningly than many commentators would have us be-
lieve. His final flight from literature—a lifework he had long defended as
devoted to battling lowliness—culminates years of pondering human
poverty and the question of how to deal with it in both fictional and eco-
nomic terms. True, Gogol considers fixing poverty in the philanthropic
sense unnecessary: it needs not remedying, but rather reinforcing. Yet the
corresponding problem of clarifying once and for all the meaning of a life
of want absorbs Gogol’s energies until the very end. We start, however, with
some background considerations.
FIXING POVERTY
All crimes are safe but hated poverty.

This, only this, the rigid law pursues.
—Samuel Johnson, London
As “Overcoat” raises the question of holy poverty, we should stop to ponder

the nature of the ambivalence that marks Gogol’s story. At its heart is the
crucial indeterminacy of the status of the poor. Who are they, and who, if
we are defined by some relation of similitude or difference toward them,
are we? The deep equivocality which we have already seen in both Gogol’s
aesthetic vocabulary and his fiction is made possible by a conceptual hesi-
tation that long precedes him in the Orthodox world, an endemic and age-
old uncertainty about what living with few possessions really means.1
In Orthodoxy as in the West, the poor are first of all simply those who
are unable to meet their needs for economic reasons. Such poverty is gen-
erally construed as a misfortune, something undesirable but not entirely
controllable.2 Russian society’s longstanding response, based on religious
teachings, was charitable acts by the more fortunate and by the church
itself. Voicing a sentiment repeated in Orthodox documents for centuries,
Vladimir Monomakh’s twelfth-century “Instruction” reminds its reader,
“Above all things: Forget not the poor, but support them to the extent of
your means” (97). This responsibility only shifted to the state in relatively
modern times, under Peter the Great, although until the twentieth century
the state tended more to govern poor relief than actually finance it (Lin-
denmeyr, 3–47).
At the same time, poverty bears an entirely different interpretation,
one especially important to thinkers of a spiritual bent. In the various monas-
tic traditions, poverty is an actively sought state of askesis, a means of shed-
109
ding the world and living more fully in the spirit. This indigence is no mis-
fortune but a virtue, and is sought rather than fled. It looms especially large
in the thinking of nineteenth-century Russian writers not only as they re-
flect on the greatest achievements of the nation’s past, but also as a native
counterweight to Western secular values. Ascetic models, primarily me-
dieval, furnish an indigenous though no longer entirely familiar touchstone
in a Russia where imported European mores were widespread but some-
times still rang hollow. Though practiced by but a small percentage of the
population, virtuous poverty exerted a major influence on the thinking of
Russian intellectuals (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Slavophiles, and many oth-
ers) about the methods and meaning of human existence.
The distinction between these two types of impoverishment, misfor-
tune and virtue, is not as clear as may seem at first glance. Like the modern
critiques of Akaky Akakievich we have seen, the opposition would seem to
turn on intentionality: the monk embraces poverty willingly, while the sim-
ply poor person does not. For some thinkers, purifying value comes from
the active decision to accept poverty more than the day-to-day experience
of being poor, that is, from either the renunciation of worldly goods or the
openness to suffering rather than the lack or the suffering per se. Yet for
others, any shortfall of necessary means cleanses the soul, whether willed
or not. In the latter interpretation, a nun and an impecunious woman in the
world garner similar moral and spiritual benefits from their similar experi-
ence. Those poor by misfortune thus can be variously seen as having nearly
the same experience as monks, or, on the other hand, one so different as to
have no relation.
The distinction is ambiguous even in western Christianity, but still
more so in Orthodoxy because of the tradition of holy foolishness.3 Fedotov
emphasizes the contrast between the poverty of the monk and the poverty
of the holy fool. “For a monk askesis is a means of battling against sensual-
ity. For a salos [holy fool] it is a radical form of destitution, of contempt for
the world and all the conditions of ordinary human existence” (2:321).
Some holy fools pursued their calling willingly, leaving behind productive
monastic lives and taking up a wandering existence. Others certainly suf-
fered mental handicaps or mental illness and came to begging for alms for
lack of any other livelihood (Thompson, 25–49). However, because both
groups were, albeit ambivalently, perceived as beloved of God, intentional-
ity ceases to be a clear requirement for piety. Within holy foolishness, all
forms of poverty can be sanctified, as the holy individual’s intentions are—
sometimes intentionally—hard to judge.
At the extreme, of course, and motivating the monastic tradition,
Christianity finds its most important poor figure in Jesus himself. Christ’s
poverty diverges fundamentally from the monk’s, for there is no longer any
question of mortifying the flesh and subduing a sinful spirit. In Christ penury
110
represents neither suffering nor restraint nor even striving of any kind, but
pure and unblemished innocence. Before his new overcoat Akaky Akakie-
vich comes close to this category as well—as close as we can imagine a hu-
man being coming, though as the example shows, such virtue strains our
credulity and begins to lose its resemblance to human nature. Yet it is not
for nothing that Dostoevsky perceived a likeness between Gogol’s hero and
Christ, as he showed by combining them into one person, the protagonist
of his novel The Idiot, who is another master of calligraphy and at the same
time, in Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, a “wholly good man” (28.2:251).
These then are the two main groups of the poor: those without suffi-
cient earthly possessions, and those who give up their belongings deliber-
ately. (A slightly different possibility, poverty virtuous on secular grounds,
will be discussed somewhat later.) The attitude toward the nonecclesiasti-
cal poor can be far more complex, however, than mere pity or charity, and
the category breaks up into numerous subgroups. In particular, with the
creation of the modern economic order and the gradual fading of poverty’s
association with piety, indigence begins to be less a state of moral innocence
and more a state of guilt. From the viewpoint of the nonpoor, poverty can
now be a kind of inversion of misfortune: poverty as vileness, something un-
pleasant not for the experiencer, but for outsiders. In this vision, the poor
are badly behaved, disease-ridden, smelly, and bothersome—unsavory and
to be shunned. This is the repudiation of the poor on social grounds. Here
poverty entails a shortage of good graces, grooming, an upstanding exis-
tence, the qualities that society likes in people. The poor are people to avoid
because they are publicly unacceptable.
Related to this view is its sociopolitical cognate: the idea of the poor
as lazy and a threat to the stability of society. This stance tends to emerge
in modern times (in Russia, it is first seen under Peter), as societies grow
more prosperous and increasingly convinced that employment is available
for all who desire it. Now the poor are not victims, but the cause of their
own misfortune. Beggars too unindustrious to work, they find it possible to
survive on charity and do so. Normally, this attitude distinguishes two sub-
classes, the able-bodied poor and the deserving poor, generally excusing
widows who must care for their children, the ill, the handicapped, the aged,
and the insane, but by the same token demanding that “sturdy beggars,” as
the English called them, provide for themselves. Now poverty endangers
the functioning of society because the poor spread their bad habits to oth-
ers, making a mockery of the social order with their provocative idleness. At
its extreme, this view may associate poverty with crime, as for example does
Luzhin in Crime and Punishment.
While simultaneously admiring monastic poverty, Gogol seems in-
clined, especially in the Petersburg tales, to follow one of the least common
and least charitable interpretations and to repudiate the poor not on social
111
grounds, but on religious ones. This thinking usurps the normal Orthodox
tendency to pity the downtrodden and organize charitable relief. To my
knowledge, Gogol never quite articulates the view explicitly, but it is im-
plicit every time he reminds us that misfortune is sent by God to man “in
order that he change his former existence, in order that he should become
not as formerly, but in effect a different man both materially and morally”
(8:236). Peace’s sensible reaction to “Overcoat” can stand in for what Gogol
hesitates to say aloud. Voicing a widespread and I think correct assumption,
Peace argues that the “outward poverty of Akakiy Akakiyevich is a metaphor
for his spiritual indigence” (143). In Akaky Akakievich, Gogol seems to want
to represent precisely that ugly, vague lowliness he so abhorred, that for
him smacked inexplicably of the work of the devil. Akaky Akakievich is, in
other words, a kind of petty demon, or rather a demon of pettiness. The lan-
guage of the diabolical in Gogol studies derives from Merezhkovsky’s 1906
essay “Gogol and the Devil,” in which the poet and critic observes, “Every-
one can perceive evil in great violations of the moral law, in rare and un-
usual misdeeds, in the staggering climaxes of tragedies. Gogol was the first
to detect invisible evil, most terrible and enduring, not in tragedy, but in the
absence of everything tragic, not in power, but in impotence . . . not in the
greatest things, but in the smallest” (58).
Akaky Akakievich is certainly the smallest thing Gogol ever depicted,
and if Merezhkovsky is right, the most demonic. He might indeed be taken
to illustrate the death of all that is uplifting in the human spirit, the com-
placent downtroddenness of the downtrodden. Like Pirogov, or the tem-
porarily poor Kovalev, or Poprishchin, Akaky Akakievich has been sent all
that is bad by God as a warning and punishment, and is blind to the truth
that stares him in the face. Akaky Akakievich’s misfortunes are justified and
deserved; outward poverty merely denotes inner lack. If this is true—I have
tried to show it is not—Akaky Akakievich would be poor in the sense that
he does not possess that deep aspect of our human nature that seeks good-
ness, fullness, and the godhead.
Poverty as chastisement from above is a leitmotif of “Overcoat” from
the very beginning. When the menology provides only bizarre names for
the child’s christening, Akaky Akakievich’s mother reads this as a sign from
God: “ ‘Now that’s divine punishment. . . . Well, I can see,’ said the old
woman, ‘that such is clearly meant to be his fate’ ” (3:142). (Scholars have
incidentally verified that all the names come from real Orthodox saints; Gogol
can again be seen showing how funny real saintliness can really be.) At the
actual christening, Akaky Akakievich “made a kind of grimace as if he fore-
saw that he was going to be a titular councilor”; even the infant apparently
recognizes that his demeaning is part of a higher plan (3:142). Again events
seem parodic, as though Akaky Akakievich’s mother were simply mistak-
ing the workings of chance for divine punishment. And yet the mother’s
112
ascription of her son’s misfortunes to God’s wrath follows exactly Gogol’s

counsel.
The most frightening thing about Gogol’s oeuvre as a whole is the ex-
tent to which his own serious pronouncements—and few Russian writers
could be as carried away by their own seriousness—read exactly like the
things he lampoons in his fiction. Most casual readers know Gogol’s literary
works only, and so miss the striking discord. In 1847, after his fiction writ-
ing had ended, Gogol published the exhortatory Selected Passages from
Correspondence with Friends, in which he laid out his credo on pressing so-
cial and spiritual issues in the form of excerpted personal letters.4 The views
on poverty espoused there, however, merely multiply our perplexity over
the intended meaning of “Overcoat.” The mistreatment of Akaky Aka-
kievich by the authorities, for example, which the story seems so obviously
to deplore, proves to answer with remarkable accuracy to Gogol’s stipula-
tions for disciplining the poor. Meanwhile Akaky Akakievich’s overlooked
humility, it turns out, embodies not only Gogol’s religious ideal, but also the
specific civic virtues he demands of the poor.
In important ways, then, Selected Passages compounds the already
paralyzing ambiguity of poverty in Gogol’s fiction, suggesting the extent to
which his imaginative works read counter to his own beliefs, ridiculing al-
most everything that he holds dear and representing accurately, in the sense
of according to his tenets, only the overarching idea that poverty is punish-
ment because poverty is sin, that the poor deserve to suffer. “Overcoat” is
nowadays most often read as a series of travesties, a travesty of humanity
compounded with a travesty of a saint’s vita, topped off with a travesty of
justice—all in all, a parody of every serious story and every type of decency.5
Yet the satire, in a sense, ought not to make anyone laugh, since, flying in
the face of Gogol’s theory of deserved mockery, almost everything in it—
with the exception of Akaky Akakievich’s return as a criminal—answers to
its author’s sense of how things should be. On the other hand, we can sur-
mise that Gogol was troubled by his own responsibility for the confusion;
Selected Passages is occupied with a new attempt to define poverty conclu-
sively by approaching it through a different form of discourse.
Akaky Akakievich’s first virtue is the lowly rank that gets him in so
much trouble at Gogol’s hands. One would think—Belinskii clearly did—
that Gogol pokes fun at the fascination with rank and wealth because they
do not measure true human worth.6 How else are we to understand the nar-
rator’s sarcastic comment, “As far as rank is concerned (for in our culture
one must always specify rank before anything else) . . .” (3:141)? In fact
Gogol lauds both rank and wealth as vital organizing forces in society.
Selected Passages, speaking of the desire to change one’s “position” or “du-
ties,” states categorically, “Know that it is with good reason that God has
ordered every person to be in the position where he now stands” (8:225).
113
Another letter refers to “the sacred nature of one’s calling [zvanie] and sta-
tion (all stations are sacred)” (8:291–92). Viise likens Gogol’s ideal society to
the human body, in which each organ has a responsibility uniquely its own.
The whole depends on the proper functioning of the members in their ap-
pointed tasks. Parts cannot move or trade duties since each is designed only
for what it does.7 By extension, certain people are meant to occupy the low-
est classes; every society has lowly tasks that someone must fulfill. A healthy
society thus needs its poor. Gogol longs for a world where the poor feel no
impulse to abandon their status—whether by revolt, by simply prospering,
or even by the mental act of projection implicit in wanting to be rich. The
Gogolian scoundrel appalls not because he values superficial determina-
tions of worth, but simply because he is always trying to change his lot in
life. Harmful then are those who identify with their rank not too much, but
too little.8
Gogol’s only reservation about title and wealth is that they not be used
as levers for social mobility. In his impassioned response to Belinskii’s fa-
mous excoriation of Selected Passages, Gogol writes of his ideal Russia that
if only the tsar, who serves as example for all, will begin to live and rule
righteously, then the moral reformation of Russia will follow of its own ac-
cord. “The civil servants will see that one need not lead a rich life and will
stop stealing. And the man of ambition, seeing that important posts are
compensated neither with money nor handsome rewards will quit the ser-
vice” (13:444). Viise observes, “Whereas Peter’s civil service, organized by
the Table of Ranks, allowed and even encouraged upward mobility, Gogol’s
ideal civil service is no place for the ambitious man, precisely because his
aspirations would disturb the stasis that Gogol considers the naturalness of
the hierarchy” (4–5). The ambitious man troubles Gogol not because of
what he might accomplish with his drive, but because his uniquely ap-
pointed task goes unfulfilled the moment he leaves it to move to another
posting. Gogol’s civil servant is meant to be poor. Government service must
be unremunerative or it will attract the wrong people and become infected
with their vices of egotism and unreliability. A proper civil service should be
run like a monastery as Gogol conceives it: unpleasant enough that only
virtue could motivate one to enter it.
To the extent that Gogol does sympathize—I use the word loosely—
with the poor, it is because he is filled with emotion at the gulf between
classes, not, like Karamzin, when it is crossed, but precisely when it sepa-
rates; in this sense, Gogol’s sympathy for the poor is predicated on their
immutable otherness. In “Leaving the Theater,” Gogol defends the repre-
sentation of provincial corruption in The Inspector General against the
widespread criticism of gross exaggeration. To this end, he introduces the
Very Modestly Dressed Man as an ostensibly objective corroborating eye-
witness (though he is of course Gogol’s creation).9 The man reveals he is a
114
chinovnik (government functionary) from the provinces himself, arrived in

the capital only the day before yesterday, and can vouch for the accuracy of
the play. “In our town not all the civil servants are of the honorable/honest
type; one often has to move mountains simply in order to carry out some
good deed” (5:143). So ingrained is bureaucratic malfeasance, the man ad-
mits, that he has been tempted in the past to resign, but remains out of a
sense of duty. Gentleman B (the term “gentleman” is used here in the proper
sense, meaning “of the upper class”) is so impressed with his interlocutor’s
integrity that he announces,
Allow me to make you a proposal. I occupy a rather substantial government
post. I require genuinely noble and honorable/honest [blagorodnye i chest-
nye] assistants. I can offer you a post where you will have wide possibilities
for action, where you will receive incomparably more benefits, and will be on
display for all to see. (5:143)
The provincial civil servant offers his heartfelt gratitude and refuses the
spot. “If I feel that I am already of use in my position, then is it noble [bla-
gorodno] of me to abandon it?” (5:149). The sticking point, he makes clear,
is the misguided concept of service rewarded: “In my estimation, a man in-
capable of being noble [blagorodnyi] without compensation—well, I can’t
believe in his nobility [blagorodstvo], his nobility [blagorodstvo] isn’t worth
half a kopeck” (5:149).10
This is the ideal poor man in Gogol’s vision, the type the writer would
entrust government functions to after all the social climbers and men of
ambition had been sent home, and the example is vital. Selected Passages
laments, “In our day everyone is of the opinion that he could do much good
in someone else’s position and duties, and merely cannot do so in his own.
This is the cause of all evils” (8:225). The man of modest attire’s greatest
achievement—and it should be added that he is the member of the audience
Gogol admires most in “Leaving the Theater”—is his ability to understand
that the lower rungs must be occupied by someone. As he points out, if he
were to leave his job in the provincial government, he might be replaced by
someone corrupt. Gogol offers no explanation, however, why the higher spot
the clerk turns down will not suffer the same fate. Gogol’s chinovnik realizes
that God has made him impecunious for a reason, and seeks only to be the
best poor man he can be. Lowliness is diabolical not when it revels in its infe-
rior station as Merezhkovsky felt, but when it begins to hanker after loftiness.
This image of the virtuous little man was one Gogol believed not just
critical for the survival of Russia, but also realistic, for it is based on an ac-
tual person his mother had chanced to encounter (PSS, 5:497–98). The let-
ter in which she describes the meeting is not extant, but we know Gogol’s
response. Gogol was, of course, slow to admire anything about human beings.
He writes,
115
Of all the details in your letter . . . the one which most caught my eye was
your story about the civil servant you met in Khar’kov. I could not make out
his last name. No matter, say or write to him that his nobility and honorable
poverty [blagorodstvo i chestnaia bednost’] in the midst of others growing
rich dishonestly [bogateiushchie nepravdoi] will find an echo in the depths of
every noble [blagorodnyi] heart, and that there are things higher than abun-
dant rewards. (12:101)
Gogol objects to those who “grow rich dishonestly.” It is hard to avoid the
suspicion that he means not that there are officials who grow rich by crooked
means, but rather, more radically, that anyone who begins in a low or mid-
dling station in life and grows rich is fundamentally out of place. Not the
means of enrichment, in other words, but again the fact of it troubles
Gogol. Low-ranking civil servants do not need to abuse their power to go
astray; even justly acquired wealth, apparently, is ruled out.
Gogol’s anxiety over the fluidity of the class system engenders the
many upwardly mobile pretenders in his fiction. He seems to fear that if a man
can simply become rich, then one can become anything, and no one will any
longer be who he authentically is. For socially mobile individuals challenge
the very possibility of a safely ordered society by seeking to transport them-
selves to a new status of their own making. It is as though Gogol is thinking
in advance of Marx and looking for reasons why the poor should want to be.
There is a certain irony—or perhaps an indirect causal connection—in the
fact that Gogol himself came from a noble family whose nobility was an out-
and-out lie, perpetrated by his grandfather when a government edict threat-
ened to confiscate property from nonnobles (Karlinsky, 7).
To reward the man from Khar’kov, Gogol wishes to reassure him that
noble hearts everywhere thank him. Once again Gogol resorts to ambigu-
ous vocabulary. One might presume the “noble hearts” who rejoice to be
noble in a moral or spiritual sense. But when translating the idea into living
characters for “Leaving the Theater,” he places the noble heart in a charac-
ter who is elevated in class as much as thought (Gogol has a bystander whis-
per later, “I say, isn’t he a minister?” to drive the point home [5:150]). Gogol
would like the Akaky Akakieviches of the world to believe that deep down,
the VIPs of the world really do appreciate them. Yet the vagaries of hand-
writing alone may not be entirely to blame for the writer’s failure to make
out the Khar’kov man’s name in his mother’s letter, for the definition of
virtue Gogol works with makes anonymity the poor man’s due.
We have seen that virtuous poverty, that is, the freedom from a desire
for more, is strangely more accessible to the really rich than the really poor
in Gogol’s world; now, as if to compensate, Gogol is willing to make a lin-
guistic concession. Nobility or at least honor of a sort will be conferred on
those of the lower classes who consciously embrace their impecuniousness;
this is what Gogol calls “honest/honorable poverty,” a nineteenth-century
116
catchword that means poverty willingly, and so virtuously, embraced, but

without any religious component. Such poverty is laudable because its prac-
titioner sacrifices himself for the common weal. The term is commonly met
with during the era. It can be found, for example, in Belinskii’s laudatory
discussion of those French “scholars and writers” who lead the battle for so-
cial justice, a group Belinskii clearly though silently means to be perceived
as a parallel for Russian liberals like himself (8:173). But since the term des-
ignates socially beneficial poverty, a concept which unlike religious poverty
has no central institution to define it, different thinkers apply it to some-
times very different groups.
For Gogol, “honorable poverty” signifies those born to a poor status;
their nobility inheres in the willingness to remain there. For Belinskii, on
the contrary, the term refers to social activists who forego what they might
earn in well-paid lines of work, and instead devote themselves to battling
poverty and defending the downtrodden, people, that is, “meant” to be
rich and famous, but who throw their lot in with the lower class. For Gogol,
honorable poverty is limited to the other and practiced by those conserva-
tive in their social acts. The radical Belinskii, simultaneously Russia’s most
famous critic and desperately poor most of his adult life, subsumes it under
a liberal cause. Once again, the last thing anyone who hopes that such hon-
orably poor people will be publicly honored should read are the Petersburg
tales of Nikolai Gogol, which offer a credible demonstration that appre-
ciation of the little man is less likely even than noses that walk. Instead
such poverty is saluted by the “noble” in their hearts—silently and invisibly.
Like the nobility discussed by the Very Modestly Dressed Man, noble
poverty is lofty precisely to the extent that it requires neither reward nor
recognition.
Akaky Akakievich is thus the perfect Gogolian man and the perfect
Gogolian government official. What readers typically understand as an ab-
surd lack of self-esteem and ambition on his part answers exactly to Gogol’s
conception of public service. “Thus flowed the peaceful existence of a man
who with a salary of 400 a year was able to be content with his lot in life”
(3:146). Indeed, the clerk keeps to his place and fulfills his function with ar-
dor and nary a thought of recompense or gratitude.
One could hardly find a man who so lived within his duties. More than that:
he served zealously, no, he served with love. . . . If rewards were to be given
him commensurate with his zeal, then to his great surprise he might even
qualify as a state councilor.11 (3:144)
While most readers smile at the thought of the little clerk’s modesty, Gogol
does not. Or rather, Gogol does smile as well, and this is the problem of
“Overcoat,” for the writer’s ability to ridicule his own ideals makes a travesty
of his hope that successful writing will spread goodness.
117
Gogol’s conviction that financial restraint is the foundation of virtue

almost directly contradicts his idea that wealth is awarded by God to those
he finds worthy. Selected Passages finally advances a method of reconciling
his two views. The method produces poverty without poverty and helps the
rich master the virtue of fiscal modesty without giving up any money. In
“What a Wife Can Be for Her Husband in Ordinary Home Life, Given the
Current State of Affairs in Russia,” Gogol answers a letter from a corre-
spondent who had described her newfound bliss as a married woman. He
insists she is mistaken; true happiness follows only when restraint has been
cultivated. Gogol recommends she practice the technique of the seven
piles. The woman is to calculate her budget for the entire year, then divide
the family’s money into seven lots. Each pile represents a different need;
there is one for food, one for transportation, and so on; pile seven “is for God,
that is, money for the church and the poor” (8:339). In the usual peremp-
tory tone of Selected Passages, Gogol insists that the money from one pile
may not be transferred to another pile under any circumstances whatsoever.
The goal of the exercise is merely to learn to live within one’s budgeted al-
lowances. This simple step will teach the essence of virtue for Gogol, the
sometime virtue of poverty, which is the ability to limit one’s desires. “It is
essential that some aspect of a human being grow firm and become un-
bending; from this, orderliness will involuntarily be established in every-
thing else as well” (8:340).
Strangely, nowhere does Gogol recommend reducing one’s expendi-
tures and nowhere does he demand the curbing of desires, though he pre-
dicts these effects may come on their own. Gogol answers the question of
how poverty ennobles: not through deprivation, need, or suffering, but only
as a form of restraint, through the aware acceptance of restrictions. Gogol’s
sole requirement is to calculate seven roughly equal amounts “in accor-
dance with your income” (8:340). Since he is in fact giving the advice to all
Russian families, this condition enables each economic level to learn its ap-
propriate degree of restraint. The rich get to keep all their money other
than what is left over in pile seven after donations to the church. But each
group will live firmly within its means; and all will learn that one’s economic
level fixes one’s status in the world. The poor will learn to do without; the
rich will learn to do with.
This play poverty, Gogol’s analogue of Marie Antoinette’s peasant vil-
lage, is not just the fruit of a muddled moralistic mind. It suits Gogol’s goals
admirably. In the end, all classes acquire the spiritual benefits of poverty
without the destruction of the social fabric that would ensue if the rich were
actually to relinquish their wealth and earthly position. (This is the same
“theft” of the meager possessions of the poor that we saw enacted in the
shifting of the narrative’s sympathies to the VIP.) The intersection of money
and the divine is negotiated not as a detachment from earthly things, but as
118
the calibration of just the right attachment. Money is again the battlefield
on which the campaign against weakness and sin is waged, and not, for
Gogol, the evil. “As you strengthen in matters of a material order, you will
imperceptibly strengthen in matters of a spiritual order” (8:340). Virtue is
indeed something to buy: “And now do not for a moment forget that you
are doing all this for the purchase [dlia pokupki] of a firm character, and
that this purchase [èta pokupka] is for the time being more necessary to you
than any other” (8:339).
Gogol’s main focus in his exposition, however, is on the sanctity of the
piles. He makes his point in a peculiar way.
Even if there should arise the necessity of helping someone poor, you may
not use more than the amount in the particular pile for this. Even if you
should be witness to some picture of heartrending misfortune, and should
see yourself that monetary assistance might be of help, do not dare touch the
other piles, but go about the whole town to all your acquaintances and en-
deavor to incline them to pity: beg, entreat, be prepared even to lower your-
self, that this might remain a lesson to you, and that you might forever recall
how you were brought to the cruel necessity of refusing an unfortunate and
how because of this you had to endure humiliation and even public mockery.
(8:339)
Here again, Gogol has the rich playing poor, begging publicly for money
even though they have plenty at home. What is more sinister is Gogol’s
enmity to sympathy: the sight of the poor suffering and the softening of a
hard heart are portrayed as the most likely enemies of personal virtue. If the
Petersburg tales mean us to see ourselves in the poor but only in a strictly
delimited manner, the seven piles provide a way of getting us into the shoes
of the poor precisely to the extent Gogol considers beneficial while simul-
taneously keeping us emotionally distanced from them.
Just as Akaky Akakievich embodies Gogol’s regulations for the lower
classes, staying in his position, loving it from the bottom of his heart, learn-
ing to survive and even thrive on almost nothing, so the harsh treatment he
gets at the hands of society also fulfills Gogol’s teachings. The various offi-
cials’ refusal to help and Akaky Akakievich’s office mates’ inability to raise
enough money to help him buy a new coat are almost impossible to read as
anything but unfortunate; but judging by the standards of Selected Pas-
sages, they merit praise. Gogol has little sympathy for beggars to start
with.12 In “Nevsky Prospekt,” old women in torn clothes make “raids” on
churches and passersby (3:10). Chertkov in the original version of “Portrait”
is unable to pay his rent and the landlord brings a policeman to intimidate
the tenant. The narrator speaks of the appearance of a policeman as being
“for the small of this world just as unpleasant as for the rich the ingratiating
face of the petitioner” (3:411). The letter “On Helping the Poor” in Selected
Passages responds to a criticism of Petersburg youth for giving lavish gifts
119
to foreign opera stars while entire districts in the Russian hinterlands

starve. For once, Gogol finds it in his heart to sympathize—with the self-
absorbed rich.
Why do the capital’s wealthy not give to the poor? Not from stupidity
or hard-heartedness. The cause, he insists, is “the human carelessness com-
mon to us all” (8:235). We must see ourselves in those who are not generous
because we are all the same. Gogol continues that when suffering occurs far
from sight, it naturally escapes notice. If the youth of Petersburg were to
witness with their own eyes even a part of the misery of the provinces, they
would sell “their last belongings” (8:235). Gogol makes no proposal that
such scenes be brought before people’s eyes, however—this headstrong
generosity would after all undermine the theory of the seven piles—and in-
stead raises objections to almsgiving. Charity will never be a problem in Rus-
sia: everyone in Russia makes donations. It is merely charity for the poor
that people resist, and with good reason, for “in the main it so happens” that
poor relief to the provinces does not arrive; like water carried a long dis-
tance in a cupped hand, nothing survives the journey (8:235). Gogol is again
discrediting sympathy for the poor.
Gogol’s letter to his mother about the Khar’kov official suggests how
charity ought to be distributed. As it turns out, Gogolian charity requires no
money, and draws all its value from its ostentatious eschewal of sympathy.
Gogol instructs his mother that she can always extend aid if she should hear
“that somewhere there suffers a man noble of soul”—she is to examine the
poor for signs of nobility, apparently to determine who deserves help and
who does not; “deserving,” we can surmise, means those noble in the sense
of embracing rather than fleeing their lot in life (12:101). “Don’t think that
you are too poor to help others. A person cannot be too poor for that. Not
with wealth, not with money can we help others, but rather much more
with heartfelt feelings, with a sincere word, uplifting and cheering a fallen
spirit” (12:101). If it sounds like Gogol is at least advocating empathy, he
is not.
Tell him above all: he should praise his poverty and misfortunes. They bring
a man closer to God, they provide him with the chance to perform those feats
of virtue which man is rarely able to perform, for it is much loftier to stand
firm rather than sinking and perform a noble deed amidst poverty, in op-
pressive conditions, than to perform a similar feat surrounded by wealth and
ease, even if a man has resolved to expend all his wealth for this purpose.
(12:101)
Being poor and not surrendering to despair is a greater spiritual feat than
any charitable act. It would be selfish for the rich to give alms generously;
to save their own souls they would spoil the chance the poor have of saving
theirs. The rich keep their money and give advice instead. For the wealthy,
120
the noblest deed is not to alleviate suffering, but to demonstrate to the poor
man how your financial indifference will benefit him.
Gogol’s instructions are remarkable. As “Overcoat” by its calculated
counterthrusts obliquely acknowledges, the viewer of poverty naturally has
some inclination to sympathize, to put himself in the underdog’s shoes,
however weakly. It is precisely this impulse Gogol would have us resist if we
are to proffer effective assistance. You see the moral benefits awaiting the
poor man from the embrace of penury; he cannot, because he is suffering.
You must make him adopt your viewpoint, not vice versa. This is the exact
reversal of the sympathetic competition in “Egyptian Nights,” where each
poet attempted to see into his opponent. In Gogol, no one should put him-
self in the shoes of the poor, not even the poor themselves. Rather, they
should become more like us: able to perceive those spiritual truths, which,
in our social superiority, we naturally see better. As in “Overcoat,” all sym-
pathy should be on the side of the rich. Lindenmeyr shows a long Russian
tradition of humanitarian caring for the poor; Gogol tries to show us the
vice this instinct conceals. The rich in effect teach the poor not to beg.
Selected Passages illustrates the proper way to deal with social inferi-
ors who seek your aid.13 The example concerns a landowner and two peas-
ants, one lodging a complaint against the other. Gogol’s notorious advice,
which for some reason he felt to be innately Russian: punish both peasants.
First administer earthly justice, Gogol says, and punish only the criminal.
But then turn your attention to the more important matter of divine justice.
Now, punish the miscreant for his crime, but punish the complainer as well.
First tell him that the other would not have harmed him had he not done
something to deserve it; then condemn him because he “did not forgive his
brother as Jesus ordered” (8:342). Judged by these standards, the treatment
Akaky Akakievich receives at the hands of the VIP is indeed appropriate.
To be sure, the VIP thunders at Akaky Akakievich primarily for not
following the appointed order in lodging a petition; however, his angry
statement meshes with his author’s principles: “What sort of unruliness has
spread among our young people against their leaders and superiors!” (3:167).
This is merely a funnier formulation of the same respect for the divinely in-
stalled authorities that Gogol seeks to inculcate with his advice that all
earthly ranks are bestowed by God. The narrator proceeds to poke fun at
the VIP’s statement as though finding fault with it, but in doing so gets de-
flected from the central question of justice and latches on to the VIP’s in-
appropriate use of the word “young” for Akaky Akakievich, who is in his
fifties. Once again, the narrative repeats the act ostensibly being deplored,
replaying the VIP’s failure to attend to the heart of the matter, and doing so
knowingly, in one of Gogol’s favorite devices.
What is really inappropriate, one would think, is the VIP’s wrath at
Akaky Akakievich for trying to get his coat back. Yet Gogol’s objection to the
121
misattribution of Akaky Akakievich’s age may indeed be his only cavil. Se-
lected Passages insists that the reparation of wrongs is not the goal of the
highest justice. Instead the victim must be brought to comprehend that his
own desire for redress compounds the sin. Even the VIP’s friend, sitting in
a chair and watching the encounter, whose presence seems to underscore
that the VIP is showing off for an audience, answers to Gogol’s specifica-
tions. Of the dressing down of inferiors, Selected Passages advises, “Try to
do it in the presence of witnesses” (8:342).
Most astonishing about the letter is not the harsh justice dispensed,
but Gogol’s inability to see any similitude between rich and poor even be-
fore God. The poor man is punished because he fails to forgive the wrong
done to him. When the landowner refuses to forgive, the same act is deemed
virtuous. The poor follow Christ’s law; the powerful enforce it. It is as though
in thinking through ethical matters, Gogol placed rich and poor, fortunate
and downtrodden, in wholly unrelated categories.14 Meanwhile, the sympa-
thetic act of seeing ourselves in those deserving of punishment—as in the
admonition that the blameless should cast the first stone—has been refor-
mulated as the worst of ethical errors. Coupled with the teaching to take
every bit of advice to others as advice to ourselves, this absence of identifi-
catory awareness reveals Gogol’s blind spot for poverty. The poor whom we
all resemble in the conclusion to “Nevsky Prospekt” we in fact do not re-
semble at all.
Empathy and charity alarm Gogol, of course, because society nor-
mally esteems them. As opposed to the threat to the political well-being of
the nation from, say, armed insurrection (Gogol was aghast at the revolu-
tions that swept Europe in 1848), the pernicious destabilizing effect of car-
ing may be treacherously hidden from view. In Selected Passages Gogol
makes it his own special cause to alert his countrymen to the disastrous con-
sequences of such seemingly laudable acts. The harm of charity, of course,
is that it makes possible the acquisition of money. The threat of sympathy
is less obvious and hence doubly dangerous. Gogol objects to sympathy
across class lines because nothing is more likely to seep into the souls of
men and weaken those gradations and essential differences that guarantee
all of a society’s functions will be filled. Sympathy, as we have seen in “Poor
Liza” and “Egyptian Nights,” has the potential to transport us out of our-
selves, if only mentally. In a world where each person possesses a true and
proper place, sympathy is capable of placing us temporarily in the shoes—
and so the rank—of another, and, worse yet, of inciting our curiosity about
what it might be like to actually become another.
Gogol’s madman Poprishchin suffers from a particular type of insan-
ity, sympathetic projection run amok. Poprishchin, who works one day a
week at his superior’s house rather than the office and so has glimpsed the
lifestyle of the rich up close, becomes so fascinated with the wealthy, so des-
122
perate to experience for himself what is meant only for others, that he drives
himself mad with wondering. The process that ends so badly begins so sim-
ply, as he sits silently watching the boss work: “I should like to know what it
is he thinks most about; what sorts of things are cooked up in that head of
his. I wouldn’t mind having a closer look at the life of these gentlefolk. . . . It’d
be nice to peek into the drawing room where, just sometimes, you see an
open door beyond the drawing room into a certain other room . . .” (3:199).
Poprishchin represents a menace to his superior and the latter’s daughter,
and indeed all of Russia, because he is drawn to them so much, because he
wants to live where they live and think what they think. From his musings
he learns to see things through other people’s eyes (the example is not com-
pletely persuasive because Gogol does not want it to be) and soon is taking
in the world from the perspective of educated dogs and the holder of the
Spanish throne.
Poprishchin is an object lesson in the perils of empathy, of seeking to
penetrate too deeply the existence of another, for the impulse lands the Go-
golian poor man painfully outside of himself. In Gogol’s universe, the other
is meant to be and remain other. McLean and Karlinsky have chronicled
what the former calls Gogol’s “retreat from love.”15 That reticence might be
considered part of a pattern that ranges even more broadly, for though he
cannot steel himself for a wholesale repudiation of human fellow-feeling,
Gogol comes quite close.16 For many decades Gogol had an unassailable
reputation as a friend of the little man; nothing could be further from the
truth. Gogol wishes the poor well, but on the condition that they do not
pester other classes with requests for money or compassion and further
keep their own sympathies to themselves.
In “Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich meets the fate of every poor man in
Gogol’s St. Petersburg, being deprived of an object he should not really
have been attached to in the first place and then doubly robbed as he gets
no empathetic response either. The key episode in Gogol’s original concep-
tion of the story, judging from the working title, “The Tale of the Clerk Who
Stole Overcoats,” comes at the end. This title frames Akaky Akakievich’s
final act as one of theft, but it could be argued his real crime is sympathy.
Unable to win anyone’s sympathy at least within his narrative, he proceeds
to force others to share his situation. As he went in the cold without a coat,
so will everyone he meets. Akaky Akakievich wants not vengeance—he
takes many coats though he lost only one—but congruity of experiences.
The clerk has no special animosity for the upper classes: when the ghost is
finally apprehended, it is in the act of fleecing a poor musician. He is not
interested in social justice like Robin Hood; he simply wants everyone to
know firsthand what he has been through. Akaky Akakievich is a thief: what
he steals is the separateness of others, the salutary emotional distance that
Gogol would have us maintain from all that is low and all that is alien. Strik-
123
ing a blow not only for himself but also for the Poprishchins of the world,
Akaky Akakievich commands Petersburg to experience sympathy.
Indeed, it is sympathy—not affection, but the sharing of experiences—
that makes the ghost impossible to apprehend. When he is finally arrested,
the policeman in charge has his two accomplices hold the malefactor so he
can take snuff. The snuff, Gogol says, is so bad that even a dead man can-
not stand it; Akaky Akakievich sneezes, temporarily blinding his captors,
and makes his getaway. Gogol has already suggested how such a peculiar
event should be read in “Notes of a Madman,” toward the end of which
Poprishchin, in his ravings, pronounces England and France allied against
him (since he is Spain). “The whole world knows by now that when Eng-
land takes snuff, France sneezes” (3:213). Here the displaced sneeze sym-
bolizes the two nations’ collusion, the identity of their motives and actions.
Such also is Akaky Akakievich’s sneeze; the policeman raises snuff to his
own nostril, but it is Akaky Akakievich who has the reaction. Akaky Aka-
kievich is now in sympathy. Yet sympathy, enacted by a ghostly larcenist, is
for Gogol a state at once fantastical and criminal. The implicit threat to the
social order from the sharing of sensations in “Notes of a Madman” has be-
come explicit.
In the light of Selected Passages, “Overcoat” begins to read like the fa-
ble of the three wishes. Up until the poor man’s return as a ghost, Gogol
gets almost exactly what he wants. Akaky Akakievich embodies his creator’s
spiritual and social values, while the VIP follows Gogol’s regulations for the
disciplining of the poor and the denying of sympathy—and yet in the end,
we seem to deplore it all. The attempt in Selected Passages to pin down the
meaning of poverty makes Gogol’s earlier and more famous artistic texts all
the more inexplicable and suggests the satiric process delivers us to some
final location far from the embrace of virtue and the revelation of the truth.
On the other hand, Selected Passages does elaborate some of the grounds
upon which one might raise if not entirely reasonable, then at least rea-
soned, objections to the sympathetic undertaking.
DEATH BY IMAGINATION
For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.

—Genesis 8:21
Akaky Akakievich is undone when he buys a new coat. The purchase is not
one he wants to make. Initially he applies to the tailor Petrovich in the hope
of having his current coat, which the narrator belittles with the label of
kapot (“dressing gown,” or more precisely a casual loose coat of the type
women wore at home), mended. We have seen on a number of occasions
that passages that read as parodic in fact are funny but not, in the satiric
124
way, because we are to deride what is depicted; rather Gogol makes scenes
bitingly funny even when the action portrays his own cherished ideals. The
following passage proves to be just such a false-comical scene. I cite it to
bring out the role of originality, creativity, and imagination in the clerk’s
demise. Hearing that the coat cannot be mended, Akaky Akakievich reels.
“No,” said Petrovich decisively: “nothing can be done about it. It’s a sad state
of affairs. . . . Clear enough, you’ll be needing to have a new overcoat made.”
At the word “new” Akaky Akakievich’s eyes went dark and absolutely every-
thing in the room started to get jumbled. . . . “A new one? But how?” he said,
still in a sort of dream: “I haven’t the money for it.”
“Yes, a new one,” said Petrovich with barbaric calm. (3:151)
Several pages later, when at last the coat is ready, Petrovich delivers it in
person.
On [Petrovich’s] face appeared a significant expression the likes of which
Akaky Akakievich had never before seen. He seemed filled with the feeling
that he had performed no small feat and that he had suddenly made clear the
abyss which separates tailors who just put on a new lining and tidy things up
from those who sew things from scratch. (3:156)
Gogol’s terminology remains consistent through the first discussion between
Akaky Akakievich and Petrovich, their second verbal duel (not quoted), and
the presentation of the coat when it finally arrives: the clerk and the tailor
are enacting a battle between repetition and originality, between the reten-
tion of the same coat and the creation ex nihilo of a new one. The word that
makes Akaky Akakievich’s head spin is “new.” What Akaky Akakievich would
like is the maintenance of stasis, his old coat again, merely restored to usa-
bility. Meanwhile, as Petrovich haggles with Akaky Akakievich, creativity
and originality vie with repetition and sameness.
The scene comes across as distinctly trivial because of the individuals
and the stakes involved, but as usual in Gogol, the petty masks—in the
sense of hiding but also revealing, the Gogolian method par excellence—
something very important. After all, the acquisition of a new coat alone
spoils Akaky Akakievich’s perfect self-denying abstinent virtue and sets him
on the path to total destruction. On the other hand, Petrovich plays the role
of artist; given Gogol’s romantic vision of the aesthetic calling, a drunken,
one-eyed, pockmarked, ex-serf tailor who occasionally sews a new coat hardly
deserves such an exalted title. Nonetheless, even such minor craftsmanship
involves crucial aspects of every creative act: envisioning what does not yet
exist and calling it into being through one’s own labors. No doubt minimal
originality goes into a garment that will ultimately resemble thousands of
others in the same city. But in an era before the machine production of
clothing, every overcoat is unique. In however little degree, then, Petrovich
is a possessor of imagination.
125
Akaky Akakievich is the ideal opponent in such a contest, represent-

ing precisely the other mode of being, an existence wholly alien to the inno-
vations of creativity. Thus far the fabric of his life has been pure repetition.
His daily routine replicates itself every 24 hours; his task at work is to repro-
duce the contents of one piece of paper on another; even his name, as Pop-
kin reminds us, is a reiteration (170). This for Gogol is the image of the
natural life of the poor: a circle, going around and around without change,
retracing itself endlessly—a figure for boredom but also safety and a kind
of goodness. All this ends when Akaky Akakievich agrees to buy the new
coat. Not the actual material possession, but the psychological adjustment
to it changes him. After losing the argument with Petrovich, the dazed Akaky
Akakievich walks out and unwittingly heads “completely in the opposite di-
rection,” setting his own narrative likewise on a new course (3:152). Since
the purchase is unavoidable and yet still impossible, Akaky Akakievich un-
derstands he is facing a question unlike any he has ever pondered. He sim-
ply must develop imaginative faculties in order to answer it. He thinks to
himself with a self-duplicating diction meant to denote a copyist,
Now how indeed, with what, with what money can it be made? [. . .] Though,
of course, he knew that Petrovich would be willing to do it even for 80, still
all the same, where could he get those 80 rubles? As much as a half he could
come up with: a half could be found; perhaps even a little more; but where
to get the other half? . . . Where to get the other 40 rubles? (3:153–54)
The question will not go away; a solution must be dreamt up.

Akaky Akakievich eventually finds a method—redoubled sacrifices—
and restructures his life for the first time ever, eating even less, cutting out
his evening tea, and so on. “But on the other hand he was spiritually nour-
ished, carrying in his mind at all times the image of his future overcoat”
(3:154). However inchoately, Akaky Akakievich has entered the realm of
imagination, and innovation has touched his existence. Where before he had
the emptiest head his creator could imagine, filled with nothing but letters,
signifiers so impoverished they lacked even meaning, the only possession
signifiers can have, Akaky Akakievich now pictures a coat he has never actu-
ally seen, senses its presence, and is warmed by its absent warmth. As in
Karamzin, contact with someone else’s imagination spreads the infection
imperceptibly.
It is precisely at this point that Akaky Akakievich’s psychology changes,
albeit in small ways. He lies, telling colleagues in his embarrassment over
the fuss that he has simply had his old coat repaired (the sheer naïveté of
the attempt suggests he has probably never lied before). He stops being
so happy; even before thieves ambush him, the coat gets him invited to a
tedious and trying get-together. He also becomes more decisive, and can
suddenly entertain—the language is exaggerated but appropriate—“the
126
boldest, most audacious thoughts” (3:155). He further ceases to be the per-

fect copyist, first almost making a mistake and then, once he owns the coat,
taking no extra work home with him. And now, by no coincidence, we can-
not be certain what is going on inside of Akaky Akakievich: “After all, you
can’t just peer into a man’s soul and find out whatever he’s thinking” (3:159).
Before his originality, Akaky Akakievich’s inner world was exposed at every
moment, since he thought only of the alphabet and every letter was legible
on his face (3:144). With a dash of originality, Akaky Akakievich has ceased
to be transparent, since he can now invent on his own and could conceiv-
ably think or do anything—well, almost anything. The scale may be minus-
cule, but Akaky Akakievich has opened the genie’s bottle. Yet imagination
mixed with poverty can be a deadly combination.
In Gogol, precisely the lack of any inventiveness assures the tranquil-
lity of the poor. If a copyist is someone who trades in the words of others
and who implicitly lacks his own—Akaky Akakievich exemplifying ordinary
verbal lack and Poprishchin lack at a more advanced level, since his “own”
words more properly belong to the people he poses as—then all of the poor
in Petersburg are in some sense copyists, people to whom creativity is fun-
damentally alien. The throwaway description of the life of lowly clerks at
their amusements in “Overcoat” portrays a verbal economy in which every-
thing is recycled endlessly, and whatever fresh impulses are introduced
trickle down from the upper classes. The petty officials go to visit “their ilk”
(svoi brat, literally, “one’s brother”)—the entire class is, if not identical,
then of familial resemblance (Gogol uses the phrase a half-dozen times in
“Overcoat” and “Notes of a Madman”)—where they play cards
telling, while they hand back their cards, some piece of gossip which had
drifted down from the highest society, which a Russian simply can never re-
sist, or even, when there was nothing to talk about, simply retelling the an-
cient anecdote about the commandant who they come to tell that the tail of
Falconet’s monument [of Peter the Great] is chipped. (3:146)
The topics of conversation descend from gossip about the rich by the rich
(there is such a thing as gossip about the rich by the poor, of course, but
Gogol will have none of it); when that fails, the copyists fall back on reviv-
ing what has been told before. Judging by the rank of the main character,
even the “ancient anecdote” kept in reserve derives originally from the
classes who at least have enough creativity to make up their own jokes. This
is Gogol’s version of the chuzhoe slovo that dogs the needy wherever they
go in the Russian tradition: that which should, by rights, emerge when the
poor need to open their mouths to speak.
Sometimes not having imagination can be a good thing. We see the
horse-lover who doesn’t have one, Gogol’s illustration of the “universal”
poverty everyone suffers in Petersburg, clicking his tongue as a trotter passes
127
by; the noise represents not so much appreciation as his unvoiced thought,
“If only I had such a horse.” For the type of not having to which both
Piskarev and Pirogov descend in “Nevsky Prospekt” brings only the torment
of dissatisfaction. And what links us with these thoughts that only serve to
make us unhappy, what goads on both Piskarev and Pirogov even after they
have understood that failure is inevitable, is imagination the destroyer. Un-
like “Poor Liza” and “Egyptian Nights,” however, the Petersburg tales have
little interest in whether imagination favors rich or poor (for Gogol, the an-
swer is obvious; everything worthwhile naturally belongs to the rich). Rather,
Gogol’s poor heroes are themselves the combat ground upon which the lack
of imagination (what Gogol calls virtue) and the possession of it (what he
calls vice) compete. In the core narrative of the Petersburg tales, goodness
and tranquillity become sin and discontentedness when the hero masters
the skill of envisioning what is not present and transporting himself men-
tally into another position than his own.
Imagination promises us a wealth that we cannot possess; we can
dream of things, Gogol shows, and so tantalize ourselves, but we cannot have
them. (Sometimes, as Kovalev suggests, some people do get what they want—
Kovalev being the highest-ranking hero in the tales—but in those cases they
are violating the natural order of things and deserve to be punished with the
cruelest and most unusual measures writers can devise.) The brush with
fantasy both renders miserable and corrupts. Nothing is more dangerous
than the visitation of imagination, for it sets the poor man adrift in a world
of fantasies and desires, mentally wandering wherever the first passing
thought might take him, headed ever further from his psychic home. The
danger is symbolized by Akaky Akakievich’s long walk to his coworker’s
party, where women and advertisements he chances upon suddenly begin
to intrigue him, making him wonder whom he is seeing and what they
want—and where he is drawn out of his shell and his overcoat even before
the thieves finish off the job. It is a literary topos that the great nineteenth-
century metropolis encompasses crying opposites, causing crime and vir-
tue, sophistication and benightedness, glimmering wealth and pauperism to
rub elbows like never before. Gogol’s Petersburg takes the commonplace
one step further: his metropolis, because of its shared public spaces (of Nev-
sky Prospekt, the drafts say, “Here alone can all the classes of our society
encounter one another” [3:340]), naturally taunts the poor by inciting them
to observation, comparison, and imagination. The Gogolian poor man is
lured from his secure and appointed self hood with hallucinatory visions of
coats, or rifles, or women, or fame that he might—but never will—possess.
The narrative of destruction via imagination, however, is exceptional,
for it requires unusual victims who begin their tales with little or no power
of invention whatsoever. In Poor Liza we have such a victim, and she is in-
deed extreme in her naïveté. Few writers could find a way to reproduce such
128
Karamzinian naïfs in a postsentimental age. Yet such is Akaky Akakievich,

who like Poor Liza is imperiled by the very innocence that his author con-
siders his best feature. The VIP resembles Akaky Akakievich in numerous
ways except the most important: he does understand role-playing and self-
images. Indeed, he has learned to chew out inferiors by practicing in front
of a mirror. The concept is laughable, and yet as usual, Gogol is speaking
seriously, for the VIP has precisely the power of manipulating images—
imagination—on his side. Though Gogol puts less emphasis on the role of
sympathy in art than do Karamzin and Pushkin, it is nonetheless at work
when the VIP takes in the “humble exterior of Akaky Akakievich and his
aged little uniform” and immediately understands who he is dealing with: a
man one can terrorize (3:166). In the ensuing verbal battle, Akaky Akakievich
has no powers of fancy to draw on—he cannot imagine that the VIP is sim-
ply exercising his ego and showing off to his friend, cannot invent anything
to say in response. He simply stammers and prepares to die. Yet just as the
encounter with Petrovich had spurred on the development of the slightest
rudiments of imagination, this battle of a higher order at last inspires in the
clerk an aptitude for verbal invention that approaches a human level.
The onset of full imagination and full verbalization is simultaneous.
Unfortunately, it only occurs when Akaky Akakievich is on his deathbed.
Visions, each stranger than the last, visited him without end: at one moment
he saw Petrovich and was ordering an overcoat from him with some kind of
traps in it for thieves which he kept seeing under his bed; every other minute
he was calling the landlady to drag a thief out from under his blanket, no less;
at another moment he asked why his old “dressing gown” was hanging in the
room before him, since he had a new overcoat; then he dreamt he was stand-
ing before a general, listening to a proper chewing out and mumbling: “All
my fault, your excellency.”17 (3:168)
In all of his final fantasies, Akaky Akakievich is, in Austinian fashion, doing
things with words, demanding, ordering, apologizing. The man who could
not even substitute pronouns finally begins to invent entire speeches in his
head; they are simple, but might have been enough to save his life. In kow-
towing before the general, a modest act but infinitely bolder than what he
had actually done, he has learned to sense out other people and their view-
point; he has figured out the VIP’s psychology enough to realize that a pub-
lic demonstration of his own humiliation would have been enough to satisfy
the other man’s vainglory, after which it might still have been possible to ask
for assistance. But now, when the gift is no longer any use, the incendiary
powers of imagination finish off the copyist. Like the wealth, the desired
object, that seems to every poor man his salvation but torments him instead
because he is too weak to rise to the responsibility of owning it, the power
of imagination holds out the possibility that it might have spared the little
129
clerk, but in fact it demolishes him. Akaky Akakievich passes his final mo-
ments “all the while in delirium and fever” (3:168). His imaginings grow
more and more fecund until he surpasses all bounds, blaspheming with
phrases so inventive his landlady must cross herself, and finally passing over
into “complete gibberish” (3:168).
This same scenario, where originality overcomes a small man cut out
only for copying, underlies “Notes of a Madman.” Poprishchin’s famous sig-
nature phrase is “never mind, never mind, silence”; what is often over-
looked is that this is not a metaphysical statement, a verbal tic, or a motto,
but, in context, what he says to silence the fancy that he realizes is about to
run away from him, as when he sees a pretty actress and thinks involuntar-
ily of possessing the boss’s daughter.18 For Poprishchin too, imagination un-
leashed is imagination run amok. A power so overwhelming cannot reside
in a frame so flimsy and explodes the entire edifice. Poprishchin goes mad
and Akaky Akakievich dies. To wield the powers of fantasy in Petersburg, to
be able to go outside oneself and still return home in the end, one must
have a different psyche in the first place, the psyche of the wealthy, the se-
cure, the strong and satisfied.19 As with money, so with imagination: every-
one must know his level.
We left “Overcoat” at the moment of the hero’s death. In fact, noth-
ing much changes at that point. It turns out that Akaky Akakievich is still
plotting to get his coat back; meanwhile, the course the story had charted
in the direction of ever-greater imagination has not abated. In the continu-
ation Akaky Akakievich returns from the dead and Gogol makes the funda-
mental antithesis of poverty and imagination explicit. The coda is
introduced in the following terms:
But who could have imagined that this was not yet the end of Akaky Aka-
kievich, that he was fated to live on to cause a fuss a few more days after his
death, as if in compensation for a life unnoticed by anyone? But so it hap-
pened, and our poor story unexpectedly acquires a fantastical ending. (3:169;
emphases added)
What follows is beyond ordinary imagining. With ghosts as the main char-
acters, the ending is inventive and preposterous like nothing else in the tale,
a final flight of fancy to be viewed, in Gogol’s terminology, as “compensa-
tion” for the poverty that has gone before. This trajectory is double, shared
by both the narrative and its hero. As Akaky Akakievich snatches coats and
amasses the kind of wealth he might most appreciate, the story too leaves
behind poverty and grows fat on Gogol’s inspired imaginings. The epilogue
unites all of Gogol’s intuitions about poverty: increasing wealth mirrors bur-
geoning imagination and, as we saw earlier, a spreading sympathy, and all
three remain hopelessly beyond the grasp of the poor—except as part of an
episode against both the law and all plausibility.
130
The exceptional role of imagination in Gogol takes a still more remark-

able form in the stories of poor painters. The paradox is simple: how can
imagination destroy artists? And yet, in Gogol, it does. The three artists in
the Petersburg tales, Piskarev, Chartkov, and Leon’s father, follow the general
pattern almost too closely. Here we see Gogol struggling—unsuccessfully—
to explain to himself how one might properly acquire imagination. The pre-
sentation of Piskarev makes it clear that an artist in Petersburg is a kind of
contradiction in terms—“A peculiar phenomenon, don’t you think?” the
narrator asks (3:16). Idealism has no place in a city lit by the demon’s lamps;
worse yet, the city’s vagueness (“an artist in the land of snows, . . . where
everything . . . is smooth, flat, pale, gray, misty,” that is, where nothing is dis-
tinct and nothing stands out [3:16]) gives would-be writers and painters
nothing to inspire their ability to invent. This featurelessness, the “dull, gray
coloring—the ineradicable imprint of the north,” found in Petersburg art,
is yet another expression of the poverty of the Russian capital (3:17). The
poor Gogolian artist, who must remain poor to guard his virtue, is, just as in
the core narrative, endangered by nothing so much as this very lack in and
around him.
Piskarev, we learn, uses as a sitter “some poor old beggarwoman or
other” with a “pitiful, unfeeling mien” (3:17). Gogol presumes that those with
no money have no emotional depth to them; the lack of striking qualities
mars the interiors of the destitute as much as their exteriors. At other times,
Piskarev might turn his attention to “the pallid Neva and some poor fisher-
men” (3:17). A shortfall of form and meaning afflicts both the needy and, in
a reflex we will return to in chapter 5, Russia itself.20 While Gogol insists
that only in poverty can an artist develop a true and inspired fantasy,
Piskarev’s work is nonetheless apparently so impoverished that it does not
bear describing; we never actually witness him at his easel, nor do we see any
of his completed canvases. Gogol merely names the subjects that occupy
Piskarev and leaves it at that. Chartkov similarly starts out painting the im-
poverished realia of a fundamentally lacking city. His landlord notes dis-
dainfully that Chartkov won’t paint “pictures with noble [blagorodnyi]
content” like a general or Kutuzov and instead concentrates on a “muzhik
in a rough-sewn shirt” or his own filthy room (3:94). This, apparently, Gogol
means to stand for art utterly devoid of creativity and originality, though the
reader may want to ask why this should necessarily be so.
Instead, Gogol places invention in the role the core narrative would
lead us to expect, as the nemesis of the poor man even when he is an artist.
Piskarev finally obtains the “gift” of fantasy, the ability to intuit what does
not exist and what is not present, when he glimpses the passing prostitute;
discovering his mistake in idolizing her beauty, he does not renounce the
vision of purity he had misperceived, but rather nurtures it. Soon he is buy-
ing opium to stimulate his dreams and living almost entirely in the land of
131
fancy, where the prostitute appears in the guise of a modest and exalted
woman. “Finally, dreams became his life and from that time on his whole
existence took a singular turn: he slept, one might say, while awake, and was
awake only in his dreams” (3:28). Unable to part from the image of the pros-
titute reformed, he finally proposes marriage to her in an attempt to make
reality correspond to imagination; reality naturally refuses the weak artist,
and he kills himself. Piskarev would be a rarity anywhere except in Gogol:
an artist undone by the acquisition of imagination.
He has colleagues. Chartkov/Chertkov meets the same end. Chertkov
laments in the 1835 version, “Here are my sorry paintings. They’re accurate
and look like their subjects; but just let me wish to produce something
of my own—and it turns out all wrong: the leg won’t rest . . . in a realistic,
unforced way; the arm won’t rise up . . . lightly and smoothly” (3:406). Like
Akaky Akakievich, Chertkov can copy, but cannot produce anything origi-
nal. A related but slightly different fate befalls Chartkov in the 1842 ver-
sion. In seeking imagination too soon, he “neglected the exhausting and
lengthy ladder on which one gradually acquired knowledge and the prime
and fundamental principles of future greatness” (3:113).21 Chartkov’s at-
tempted seizure of imagination before his time is thus merely another ex-
ample of the overweening poor who want to rise above their proper station.
Chartkov soon magically obtains fame and fortune, but not imagina-
tion. In fact, once he is lionized by society, all his portraits look alike, telling
us nothing of importance about either the sitters or the artist. When he fi-
nally uncovers the error of his ways, Chartkov does begin to fantasize, but,
like Akaky Akakievich it is too late, and like the clerk who lost the original
rifle, he is not lofty enough to handle the powerful skill, though neither is
he any longer lowly enough to swallow its loss humbly. Seeing the magnifi-
cent achievements of a rival, he suddenly develops a mad thirst to possess
creativity and undertakes to paint, instead of modish society portraits, the
image of his discovered predicament, a fallen angel, a metaphor for himself.
But his imagination is hampered by a clumsy technique. “The hands would
fold only in the same worn-out fashion; the head didn’t dare take an unusual
angle”; he can paint, but the images still want for originality (3:114). In the
first redaction, he encounters “a threshold for the imagination”; “his imagi-
nation espied something dimly illuminated” but cannot grasp what it intuits;
it all ends with a spent “upsurge of impotent imagination” and unbearable
frustration (3:423). In the second version,
All his emotions, his entire being, were shaken to the core, and he learned
the horrific torments, which, like some astonishing exception, appear now
and again in nature when a weak talent struggles to make itself known be-
yond its extent and cannot do so, the agony which in a youth gives rise to
something great, but in one who has surpassed the bounds of dreaming turns
132
into a fruitless longing, the terrible sufferings that make a man capable of
fiendish misdeeds. (3:113–14)
The capacity to fantasize, which draws youth to that which is magnificent,
can, in excess, annihilate. Attempting to operate a fantasy whose workings
he has not mastered, he must express in acts what he cannot express in
paint and so produces in himself torments, commits crimes against man and
art, and drives himself insane. His wealth mysteriously disappears, and Chart-
kov, poor again as the core narrative stipulates, is cut down by fate and his
own backfiring imagination to his proper dimensions. In his final hours,
Chartkov is surrounded by visions of the evil portrait multiplied on every
surface of his room, which in turn grows infinitely large to accommodate
the endless profusion of eyes staring back at the madman. Chartkov sup-
plies an “astonishing exception” because he is an artist undercut by the get-
ting of imagination. As throughout the Petersburg tales, Gogol derives
insanity from neither organic nor developmental causes; it all comes from
an overheated artistic gift residing in an unauthorized breast—a man not
quite poor enough, an Akaky Akakievich who has begun to think of himself
as the owner of valuable possessions, a Chartkov whose material wealth
measures both his worldly success and his aesthetic failure, or Leon’s father,
who is unfailingly modest in his fees, but nevertheless needs to taste the
true poverty of the monastery if his art is to become impregnable to error
and corruption.
We cannot possibly impute a lack of imagination to the hero of the
second part of “Portrait”—he has painted successfully for years—yet he too
is done in by a strangely similar sudden magnification of imagination. This
time the condemnation is filtered through Chertkov’s perspective. As he
views the sinister portrait, Chertkov senses that its corruptness has some-
thing to do with an artist’s over-grasping fantasy. In terms that forestall
Raskol’nikov’s predicament (like Leon’s father, another poor Petersburger
ensnared in evil dealings with a moneylender), Chertkov muses:
Why is it that crossing the limit, the appointed boundary of the imagination,
is so horrible? Or does there finally follow, beyond the imagination, beyond
that striving, reality, the horrible reality imagination stumbles on when some
external jolt knocks it off its axis, the horrible reality that appears to the
seeker when, in his urge to understand an admirable man [postignut’ pre-
krasnogo cheloveka], he takes a scalpel in hand, exposes his innards, and sees
a repulsive man [vidit otvratitel’nogo cheloveka]. (3:406)
Thus, even though Gogol repeatedly attributes the painter’s error to an over-
done fidelity to reality, symbolized by the hyperrealistic eyes, he classes this
as an effect of the imagination, seemingly the opposite of realism.22 It is de-
batable how comprehensible Gogol’s theorizing ultimately is, but he clearly
133
wants to ascribe every transgression of the poor, even excessive verisimili-

tude, to the fantasy. For imagination is the most powerful form of wealth in
Gogol’s world—after all, a writer’s world—and as such, its acquisition, though
not necessarily its possession, violates the cosmic order.23 Certainly, some
minimal kind of representation by poor painters must be allowable. But the
higher reaches of imagination, where the artist has enough that he can give
of his own to enrich his depictions, where the artist is a creator, are reserved
for nobles (Gogol himself, Pushkin). Yet sometimes even they must tread
lightly—especially if they are Russians, called on by historical circumstance
to depict a reality itself impoverished and therefore inimical to art’s mission
of promoting the lofty.
THE WAX OF POVERTY
Poor Gogol.
—Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “Gogol and the Devil”
The pitfalls awaiting portrayers of a Russia that is, as Piskarev discovers, it-
self indigent, wanting form in its people and institutions, are substantial and
not limited to aesthetic matters. What Gogol feels such a milieu can do to
its artists is illustrated by the Pushkin he draws in “What Ultimately Con-
stitutes the Nature of Russian Poetry and What Its Uniqueness.” Though
Gogol never specifies how the mechanism works, his Pushkin is dragged
down by the lowliness around him, which the poet’s art means to combat,
but whose threat is insidiously inconspicuous:
Much was the good being readied for Russia in his person. . . . But while be-
coming a man, while gathering force from every quarter to grapple with great
matters, he neglected to think of how to contend with petty [nichtozhnyi]
and small ones. (8:385)
It is this oversight that destroys Pushkin, and if the poet could not escape
the dangers spawned when art comes into contact with poverty, what fate
could Gogol himself expect? Indeed, it seems that the poverty that truly
troubled Gogol to the end of his life, that led him to renounce art and burn
his manuscripts, was metaphoric and more dire: the impoverishment of his
own art. (The metaphor, as we have seen, is Gogol’s own, since he allies pov-
erty and artistic failure in multiple ways—low poverty being naturally at
odds with high art—and therefore is to be expected in his self-assessments.)
There might be cause to detect lowliness in a body of fiction where the
characters are barely human—and sometimes even less than that; where the
author can make even goodness seem comical; where the text means to laud
humility but employs techniques that feed the reader’s arrogance; and where
a demand for moral clarity coexists with didactic lessons almost impossible
134
to disentangle. “Portrait” divulges an anxiety that in the simple act of depict-

ing lowliness an artist may somehow become infected with it. This possibil-
ity must have haunted Gogol himself. At least the artist-monk in “Portrait”
eventually returns to painting once he has thoroughly expiated his sins; not
all artists find it possible to muster the confidence that their sins have been
paid off.
The letter “On Helping the Poor” from Selected Passages displays just
how precarious the intersection of creativity and poverty can be. The sce-
nario is by now familiar; Gogol is trying to prevent financial aid from reach-
ing the poor too easily and explaining why the poor deserve their suffering,
when suddenly art makes an unannounced appearance. We have seen Gogol’s
reaction when the poor are the subjects of the imaginative act, the imagin-
ers themselves; now, in the following full text of a passage excerpted before,
we see an even deeper ambivalence over what happens when they are its
objects.
Instruct [the poor victim of some natural calamity] how he is to get by with
the very help which you are bringing him; explain to him the true meaning
of misfortune, that he might see that it is sent to him in order that he change
his former existence, in order that he should become not as formerly, but in
effect a different man both materially and morally. (8:236)
Gogol’s benefactor gives financial assistance to pay for the right to deliver a
sermon. Gogol never explains why we should presume every disaster victim
to have lived especially badly. Rather poverty and adversity are so evidently
meant to drive home to the sufferer the error of his ways that they furnish
sufficient proof of his inner spiritual shortcomings. On the other hand, the
letter offers no hint what moral improvements the benefactor might rec-
ommend, or even what constitutes moral improvement generally.
Gogol continues, “He will understand you: misfortune makes a man
softer; his nature then becomes more sensitive and accessible [sic] to the
comprehension of subjects that exceed the awareness of a man in an ordi-
nary, everyday condition” (8:236). At first glance, the passage seems to be
suggesting that poverty and loss confer spiritual insight (an idea hardly
borne out by the Petersburg tales). Yet it simultaneously assumes the bene-
factor has access to higher wisdom inherently, whereas the victim is ready
to understand only temporarily, under the immediate effect of his loss. Per-
haps most revealing is that Gogol can neglect to explain the referent of such
phrases as “the awareness of a man in an ordinary, everyday condition.” Only
in retrospect do we realize he means that the normal insightfulness of the
poor man is limited; the rich man is free of such constraints. Being born to
privilege on the contrary automatically qualifies one as a moral preceptor.
The key to helping the poor properly, however, is to apply what can
loosely be called artistic methods: “You will have put it shrewdly, if only you
135
truly enter into his nature and his circumstances. . . . In effect all of him will
become heated wax, from which one can mold whatever one wishes” (8:236).
Essential here is a sympathetic act in which the philanthropist must, to bor-
row a term from Greenblatt (and Pushkin), “improvise” the poor man, see
into him, penetrate his psyche. This is the artist’s sensitivity to souls and sit-
uations. Then comes the Gogolian twist: make the poor man your character.
Having placed yourself in his shoes, use your insight not to appreciate or re-
spond to his suffering, but to betray it—albeit with Christian ends. Make
him see your viewpoint, and refuse to acknowledge his even though you
perceive it. The image of heated wax is telling. Gogol has asked the rich
man to become a creator, using as his material another human heart, shap-
ing and forming it, remaking the poor in a superior image.
This refashioning of the poor is heady stuff, and Gogol knows it. In
the following lines, in a moment with distinct autobiographical resonance,
he suddenly is afraid of the powers of art and retracts what he has said:
Best of all, however, is if all aid should be conducted through the hands of ex-
perienced and wise priests. They alone are capable of interpreting to a man
the sacred and profound meaning of misfortune, which, in whatever manner
and form and to whomsoever on this earth it should appear, be he inhabitant
of a hovel or a palace, is the same heavenly cry, calling out to man to change
his whole previous life. (8:236)
Now, with the equating of hovels and palaces, misfortune is recast not as the
lot of the materially poor but of the spiritually poor, which is to say, all of
us. Now “we” have no business teaching “them” since we are all the same.
Gogol is again hesitating over poverty. We have a right, indeed a respon-
sibility, to teach the poor. But since we are all poor, we do not really have
the right.
The ability to make anything one wants out of the poor is central to
the Petersburg tales themselves, and lies behind their troubled ambiguity.
We have seen “Overcoat” make anything it wants out of virtuous poverty.
“Nevsky Prospekt” has already, and more explicitly, made a similar demon-
stration, since its two tales, antithetical in tone, are presented as a deliber-
ate parallel. The doubling of the two stories is unmistakable, and has been
noticed by many readers.24 Pirogov and Piskarev do essentially the same
things, yet curiously the stories come out in opposite tonalities, one a trag-
edy and the other a comedy. As Peace remarks, the juxtaposition of narra-
tives is “incongruous,” so much so that “although one must obviously be
taken as a comment on the other, their essential relationship is . . . oblique
and grotesque” (105). Though it seems from the example of Piskarev and
Pirogov that a few details must at least be adjusted to convert the sad story
into a comical one, such as whether the hero lives or dies in the end, Gogol’s
ingenuity in “Overcoat” disproves even that, since the hero expires and in a
136
most amusing manner. The Gogolian narrative of poverty can thus be told
with equal felicity as laughter or as tears.
It is true, for many years Gogol regards his ability to smudge the boun-
daries between laughing and crying as a key element of his special artistic
gift. But upon reflection it might also be seen as the perfect cover-up for a
writer who cannot make up his mind, or a reminder of the moralist’s failure
to enunciate clearly what he is trying to teach. Weeping at another’s mis-
fortunes and laughing at them cannot be reconciled as easily as some read-
ers would maintain. It is true, the two constantly co-occur in Gogol, but
only, as I have tried to show of Akaky Akakievich, to the extent that our at-
titude toward the heroes and their morality remains suspended in ambigu-
ity, that is, to the extent that we go along with the questionable pun on
“lowly” throughout Gogol’s art. With its two opposite heroes illustrating a
single truth, “Nevsky Prospekt” teaches us the lesson that Napoleon once
derived: from the sublime to the ridiculous is but one step. In fact, Gogol
adds, the step is named literature. Like his benefactors, Gogol himself is
molding wax, and he is gradually growing convinced that the misdeed must
be stopped.
This reversibility of the poor is Gogol’s version of the calling of out-
side voices that so horrifies Pushkin in “Egyptian Nights,” the same expo-
sure of the poor to the narrative whims of another. Gogol does not share
Pushkin’s interest in the summons to creation that overtakes the poet; nor
does he care much about the social forces that bespeak the poor, since for
him poverty clamors to be explored under the lens of spirituality, not social
causality.25 But the ability of the rich to mold the poor with their words con-
cerns him deeply. Certainly, malleability and narratorial reversibility need
not disturb every artist, but they must trouble an ethically committed writer
of Gogol’s cast. For as every moralist knows, nothing cancels precepts and
complicates obedience like ambiguity. Indeed, if we cannot establish some
facts with passable certainty, then we may not be able to distinguish good
from evil. On the other hand, wherever art can mold at will, nothing re-
mains to assure that things will be called by their proper names. And at a
certain degree of ambiguity, even the best-intentioned writer loses his bear-
ings. The crime of Khlestakov, the protagonist of The Inspector General,
passing himself off as someone higher than he in fact is, is just such a remold-
ing of the wax of poverty, this time merely self-directed. And, as Merezh-
kovsky notes, it is the sort of thing Gogol regarded as the work of the devil:
“The greatest power the Devil possesses is his capacity to look like some-
thing he is not” (Merezhkovsky, 59).
In the last decade of his life, Gogol was seeking a new spirituality for
himself and thence for Russia, as well as an innovative form of art in which
to express and promulgate his renewed piety. He had high hopes that part
2 of Dead Souls would be able to reconceptualize poverty, and so also
137
implicitly wealth, for all of Russia to see. It is on this ambitious note that he
chose to commence his new novel. The drafts that have survived open:
Why must we depict poverty and more poverty and the imperfections of our
life, digging up people from the wilds, from the far-flung corners of the em-
pire? What can be done, if the author is of such a temper and, afflicted with
his own imperfections, can no longer depict anything other than poverty and
more poverty and the imperfections of our life, digging up people from the
wilds, from the far-flung corners of the empire. And so here we have ended up
in the wilds again and once more find our way to the corners of the empire.
And yet what wilds and what far-flung corners they are! (7:7)
As even the sentence structure reveals with its long repeating clauses, this
would be a return to an old theme but in a new manner, a reiteration but
with a vital difference. In allying Russia’s poverty with its imperfections and
those in turn with an author’s flaws, the passage shows Gogol to be acutely
attuned to the metaphor of a writer’s impoverishment. Gogol wanted one
more crack at poverty.
Gogol found it difficult to carry out what his introduction proposed
in part because he felt his personal spiritual predicament was holding up
his development as an artist. But he clearly wondered as well whether the
incompatibility of art and poverty as he conceived them—the crucial di-
lemma facing every Russian artist—was amenable to any resolution. Justi-
fying himself to Father Matvei Konstantinovsky, his spiritual advisor, Gogol
near the end of his life feels it necessary to provide an apologia for all prac-
tice of art:
I confess I am still confident that one can take Christ’s law with oneself any-
where, even within prison walls, and that one can fulfill his demands in any
calling or class [vo vsiakom zvanii i soslovii]. It [sic] can just as well be ful-
filled by those whose calling is that of writer. [. . .] Surely in an entertaining
tale a writer can depict lively examples of people who are better than those
depicted by other writers—and can present them as vividly as a painter does.
Examples are more powerful than reasoning; a writer need merely manage
to make himself good beforehand and make his life in whatever degree pleas-
ing to God. [. . .] And that (I will be frank) is the reason for my being a writer,
not money or glory. But . . . now I am setting aside everything for the time
being, and I tell you that for quite some time I shall publish nothing and shall
do everything I can to try to learn God’s will and how I am to go about this
matter. (13:390–91)
By the end of the passage, the optimistic proposal for a pious art has ceded
to hesitation and misgivings and the confession that he cannot yet figure out
how to practice Christ’s law in the calling of writer. Meanwhile, the gratu-
itous reference to social class underscores a crucial and still unresolved
blind spot.
138
The Gogolian figure in “Overcoat,” in the sense of a figure whom the

author would have to identify with, is the VIP. It is he who represents the
aristocratic viewpoint on the poor, making sport of the lowly simply because
he can. And it is he who takes on Gogol’s role of intentionally tormenting
Akaky Akakievich in an act of impressing an audience (his friend), practic-
ing the Gogolian “virtue” of strictness while simultaneously perpetrating a
misdeed by his failure to distinguish Akaky Akakievich’s virtues from the
vice of the thieves. Yet as the ending of the story seems designed to remind
us, the repressed will return: all those responsible for the sufferings of the
meek can expect, one day, to pay the price. Certainly, the story shows no
genuine compunction even at this point. The spectral raids that Akaky Aka-
kievich launches remain comical; even as a merciless and efficient instru-
ment of retribution, Akaky Akakievich still bumbles in his speech, inserting
the filler word togo (literally, “that”) when he loses the thread of his thoughts.
Indeed, Gogol has Akaky Akakievich forget what he was saying right in the
midst of his most triumphal speech, when he has just nabbed the VIP: “Aha!
So here you are at last! Finally I have, what’s it called [togo], caught you by
the collar” (3:172).
Gogol’s comment in “Overcoat” that authors like to pick on defense-
less titular councilors reads as a joke, yet by the end of his life, Gogol clearly
had lost his taste for this sort of humor.26 Laughter, it turns out, does not
reform the one laughed at. It reforms the one who laughs. It works espe-
cially well if the one laughed at is destroyed, for then the sinfulness of the
satiric stance becomes evident. Maguire argues that Gogol ultimately turned
away from language and toward spirituality, silence, and death because “Per-
haps Gogol . . . came to see that there were realms of experience that re-
sisted verbalization, at least by him” (340).27 Yet Gogol’s was less a case of
the broad human dilemma of the ineffability of the truth, and more a pecu-
liar instance of the fear that falsehood and evil are so treacherously effable.
Art, with its capacity to mold human souls, was simply too dangerously pow-
erful; and lowliness, with its capacity to take on any conceivable shape, was
too confusingly alluring. If, as “Nevsky Prospekt” demonstrates, narratives
about a poverty-scarred world can shift from one extreme to another with
the adjustment of just a few words, effortlessly recasting a suicide into a
comic simpleton, then at bottom such tales satirize less public mores than
some writers’ own misguided striving to make certain types of entertain-
ments a forum for clear moral lessons. This would seem to be what Gogol
has in mind when in “On the Nature of the Word” from Selected Passages
he warns, “The word must be treated honorably/honestly [chestno]. . . . With
the purest desire to do good one can do evil” (8:231). The same anxiety is
present in “Overcoat,” whose hero copies without reading, and so exempli-
fies the peculiar possibility that an author might write tirelessly, exercising
a natural and inalienable gift, and yet fail to understand the true import of
139
his words. And if art and poverty cannot safely coexist, then the Gogol we
see at his own denouement in 1852 is, unexpectedly, more willing to give up
art than poverty.
The scenario of Gogol’s demise is well known but deserves rehearsal
one more time. In his last few weeks of life, Gogol fell completely under the
spell of the virulently antiaesthetic Father Konstantinovsky, who went
so far as to demand that Gogol renounce the “sinner and pagan” Pushkin
(Veresaev, 493). Gogol was under no compulsion to befriend and heed the
priest other than that of his own conscience. Karlinsky justly describes
Gogol’s demise as an uncanny replication of Poprishchin’s. But Gogol “be-
came” Poprishchin only when matters passed out of his own hands and his
doctors attempted to force him to renounce his fast with brutal measures.
The self-scripted ending Gogol was perhaps unwittingly working on in his
last days was a restaging of the early existence of the simple clerk from
“Overcoat.” This was an act of final sympathy, as it were, a material sharing
of the experience of a character he could not bring himself to identify with
imaginatively. Gogol seems to have returned to the motto of “The Denoue-
ment of The Inspector General,” “What’s bad is when you don’t see the
goodness of the good,” with the hope of demonstrating, at least to himself
and God, that he had finally seen clearly the good of poverty and lowliness.
Father Matvei was himself an ascetic of implacable strictness and rigor.
According to one witness, Konstantinovsky “directly and abruptly, without
weighing personalities and situations, delivered his teachings, preaching with
merciless strictness and sharpness the truths of the Gospel and the severe
admonitions of the church” (Veresaev, 493). What specifically Konstanti-
novsky advised Gogol is unknown, but if his message was always the same,
then Gogol would have been instructed like the parishioner to whom Father
Matvei wrote, “You must surely know what mortifies the passions: eat as lit-
tle and as rarely as you can, stop regaling yourself, cut out tea, drink only
cold water, and only when you really want it, with bread; sleep less, talk less,
and work more” (Karlinsky, 274). A more perfect ready-made paraphrase of
Akaky Akakievich’s existence at its most modest would be hard to find.
Under Konstantinovsky’s sway, Gogol turns back to the model of
virtuous poverty that had so fascinated him and begins to live a life as ma-
terially impoverished as possible. One contemporary reports: “Gogol sur-
rounded himself with books of a spiritual nature even more than before,
saying that ‘such books should be reread often. . . .’ From this point on he
abandoned his literary labors and all other activities, and began to eat very
little” (Veresaev, 494). Having sworn off creativity, Gogol turns his attention
toward a topic bearing endless repetition and rereading, in a peculiar way
mirroring the copyist who gave up any pretensions to original composition
and embraced, once and for all, the repetitive and so virtuous practice of
rewriting.
140
It is, however, the most literary moment in the scenario that points
unambiguously to Gogol’s model. “Overcoat” defines its title concept when
the ghost of Akaky Akakievich begins to filch “overcoats of all sorts: with cat
fur, with beaver fur, fox fur, cotton wadding, made of coonskin, of bearskin,
in short, of every type of fur, leather, and skin that humans have yet devised
as a covering for their own” (3:169). Whether cloth or fur, a coat is a second
skin, a refashioning of the substance underneath. When Akaky Akakievich
gains a new coat, he gains pride; when the VIP loses his coat, he becomes
a humbler man. Whether stolen, ordered, or self-sewn (as when Poprish-
chin makes himself a new “mantle” to commemorate his promotion to King
of Spain [3:210]), a change of coats marks an epoch in personal develop-
ment and promises a new self. As Hippisley points out, Meditations on the
Divine Liturgy (omitted from Soviet editions of Gogol’s collected works)
makes much of the priest’s request, while donning the sacred vestments and
preparing himself to celebrate the Eucharist, to be “clothed with righteous-
ness,” of which Gogol comments, “The priest is now another man” (Medita-
tions, 8). And, as the narrator of “Nevsky Prospekt” adds of St. Petersburg’s
dread-inducing lamps of deception (“I always wrap myself tighter in my
raincoat when I’m walking down [Nevsky Prospekt]” [3:45])—a coat is one
of the few defenses against ambiguity, deceit, and the other devilish tricks
art can perpetrate.
Deprived of his beloved garment, Akaky Akakievich engineers a kind
of trade with the VIP: instead of going cold, he takes the VIP’s coat. In his
final letter to Father Matvei—he was to pen only one other letter to his
mother after this—Gogol the writer performed his last symbolic gesture:
I was about to write you a letter yesterday to apologize for having offended
you. But suddenly through someone’s prayers divine grace visited even hard-
hearted me, and my heart longed to thank you firmly, so firmly, but why speak
of that? I was only sad that I had not traded coats with you [ne pomenialsia s
vami shuboi]. Yours would have warmed me better.
Indebted to you with eternal gratitude here and beyond the grave.
Yours, Nikolai (14:271)
This is the entirety of the letter. From the ecstatic devotional tone, we can
infer that Gogol’s coat was more luxurious than Father Matvei’s, and that he
wished to exchange them because his confessor’s promised a greater ascetic
rigor and so more spiritual warmth. The new coat would have witnessed
Gogol’s new commitment to an impoverished and hence elevated existence.
This is not the sort of garment that placates the ghostly robber in “Overcoat,”
yet the gesture is the same: seeking another’s coat, while thinking of the re-
tribution of sins we should all expect. The beleaguered clerk had found, if
not quite empathetic emotions, then a sympathetic sharing of experiences
in his own creator. Perhaps, Gogol seems to have felt, if poverty was too soft
141
a wax for a writer of a powerful satiric bent not to abuse, at least an artist
could acknowledge his mistakes of comic judgment, renounce his offending
pun on “lowly,” burn his manuscripts and swear off art altogether, and, with
a newfound ascetic devotion, put an end to a career’s worth of hesitation by
showing all the world that poverty indeed had one overriding meaning—as
a virtue, a step closer to God.
142
Chapter Five
“The Poverty of Our Literature”
It is painful, but one must concede that hereunto

our literature has been, if only one may so ex-
press it, barshchina [corvée, “a serf’s work for
the master”] for Europe; it has been worked by
Russian hands not in the Russian manner; it has
expended the fresh sap of the Russian spirit to
raise foreign graftings instead of our own. What
have we now of our own?
—Nadezhdin (1832), “Chronicles of the Nation’s
Literature, Report on the Year 1831”
All this is Russian, ours, original, unlike anything

European, national [narodnoe].
—Dostoevsky (1861)
THE TEXTS WE HAVE SEEN thus far, though not

numerous, exemplify a much broader pattern found across an array of works
by a variety of authors. In Russian writing from Karamzin on, poverty serves
as a broad (and undoubtedly not always conscious) metaphor for Russia’s
perceived cultural position vis-à-vis Europe, regularly spawning, in stories
seemingly only about poor people, ruminations on Russia’s vexed attempts
to assimilate Western achievements. The inverse is common as well: refer-
ences to poverty, both figurative and literal, in discussions of Russia’s iden-
tity within Europe. As heirs of Peter the Great’s legacy of Westernization,
nineteenth-century thinkers speculate and fret not only about what Russia’s
“poverty” means, but also about what—if indeed anything—should be done
to alter it. In this sense, writers of all classes identify powerfully with the
poor, seeing “our” plight and “theirs” as strangely congruous despite obvi-
ous differences.
Matthew Arnold gives us an ideal starting point in an 1887 essay on
Tolstoy—oddly enough, since Arnold was English and his knowledge of Rus-
sian culture was doubly removed from the original (he read his Russian books
in French translations):
143
The Slav nature, or at any rate the Russian nature, the Russian nature as it
shows itself in the Russian novels, seems marked by an extreme sensitiveness,
a consciousness most quick and acute both for what the man’s self is experi-
encing, and also for what others in contact with him are thinking and feeling.
In a nation full of life, but young, and newly in contact with an old and pow-
erful civilisation, this sensitiveness and self-consciousness are prompt to ap-
pear. . . . They are somewhat agitating and disquieting agents to their
possessor, but they have, if they get fair play, great powers for evoking and
enriching a literature. (179)
The passage admittedly shows a certain tarnish, what with its sweeping gen-
eralizations and its fail-safe patterns of historical development. And yet
Arnold profoundly sensed a vital undercurrent which has since largely re-
ceded from critical view. It is not so much that the critic is factually correct
but rather that his approach reproduces the way in which Russians under-
stood the same issues themselves. In particular, the reference to enriching
a literature and the implicit shadow double of an impoverished national cul-
ture indicate obliquely—obliquely seems to have been how Russians too
sensed it—a fundamental metaphor that shaped nineteenth-century Rus-
sian culture’s self-perception. Arnold’s assumption that the want of an estab-
lished identity breeds a refined sensitivity to other identities is in effect a
contention that the state of cultural absence, of insufficiency and lack, which
Russians will regularly conceive as a form of poverty spawns imagination,
and that imagination in turn redeems that poverty. This will prove to be a
distinctly Russian viewpoint.
THE CULTURAL COMPETITION

In 1868 there appeared in Petersburg a short book by the title The Poverty
of Our Literature. This “critical and historical sketch,” as it was subtitled,
came from the pen of Nikolai Strakhov. Perhaps no one in the second half
of the century had an insider’s up-close view of the practices of the nation’s
finest writers to rival Strakhov’s. Strakhov was an editor for both Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, the man who later was allowed to reorganize the chapters of
War and Peace and who pointed out to Dostoevsky the limitations of the
writer’s talent with something approaching impunity. Strakhov’s perception
of Russia’s quandary was not overly optimistic:
Poor is our literature, but of what sort is this poverty? Is it the poverty of an
old man, all of whose labors have been fruitless, or the poverty of a youth who
has yet had but little chance to test his powers? Is it an internal poverty, that
is, a dearth of spiritual content which might be combined with quite a bril-
liant external abundance, or rather an external poverty under the surface of
which lie hidden deep and rich potentials? (11)
144
Strakhov saw an evident shortfall in Russia’s literature, notwithstanding the

contributions of Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev, and the early Dos-
toevsky and Tolstoy, and he responded with a question. Yes, the nation was
unmistakably poor in its cultural achievements. But was this penury irrevo-
cable, or might it one day be rechanneled into some form of wealth? Per-
haps great artistic riches were simply slow in coming; on the other hand,
perhaps even those few things Russians were proud of would prove, on re-
examination, inwardly lacking.
For Strakhov, the Russian poverty came into focus by contrast with an
opposing ideal, the wealth of European literatures. “Literature” here stands
for both belles lettres and the society reflected in them (some of the “liter-
ary” problems Strakhov will discuss include nihilism and Russia’s moral and
spiritual ills); a stunted literature for Strakhov’s era was both symbolic of
and partly responsible for an underdeveloped culture as a whole.1 We may
be flattered, he points out, at the note of inclusiveness sounded when an
English journal salutes Russian conquests in Central Asia, “because, in their
words, the Russians are at bottom a civilized people and will bring order
and peace to these wild populations” (1). But we quickly realize the praise
is undeserved; Russia is powerful, but in fact not fully civilized. Strakhov’s
rhetorical strategy is itself revealing. One begins a survey of the nation’s sta-
tus from the viewpoint of a Europe looking back at Russia.2 The instinctive
turn to an outside assessor concedes that, in Russian eyes at least, authority
resides without. It contextualizes Russia within Europe’s cultural sway, but
also, perhaps unintentionally, cedes to foreigners the final word in defining
civilization and awarding bragging rights.
Strakhov continues: “Our literature is poor and our intellectual de-
velopment meager: ‘Es ist eine alte Geschichte, / Doch bleibt sie immer
neu’ ” (1). The critic quotes Heine in the original and without attribution,
knowing that no scholar anywhere in Europe would dream of citing a Rus-
sian in the same fashion.3 The quotation betrays the double anxieties facing
the nation: on one hand, Russia lags behind; yet on the other, the path of
growth merely promises miscarriages of a more advanced sort, for if the
story of a people developing its own identity always repeats, then the very
pursuit of a unique literature leads toward another sort of unoriginality.
This is more than the anxiety of backwardness; this is the Bloomian anxiety
that coming later of necessity means borrowing, that influence is inevitable
and disastrous, that even one’s most original moments might simply be im-
itation of a higher order, with true originary creativity remaining forever in
the hands of an alien source that has always done everything first and so
alone is genuine. When even the terms of success are defined by another,
then both attainments and aspirations are just another failure of unique-
ness. Strakhov nonetheless holds out the possibility that Russia may escape
145
from the vicious circle: “This old song—maybe, just maybe, it will resound
in our case especially loudly, as though it were something new” (1).
Poverty furnished the prism through which nineteenth-century Rus-
sian writers most commonly regarded their country’s predicament.4 Russia
was the poor neighbor among the major European peoples. Western cultures
were rich—undoubtedly imperfect, perhaps even one day to be exceeded—
but with a literary and cultural wealth that was universally acknowledged.
Each great European power possessed arts and sciences, accomplishments
and public institutions, a national self-image expressed in indigenous tra-
ditions both highbrow and low-, a native literary canon, strengths and even
weaknesses not quite like anyone else’s—in short, an identity. Russia, on the
other hand, was mired in the absolute nothingness Chaadaev asserted by
signing himself, in his famous “Philosophical Letter,” a resident of “Necrop-
olis,” the city of those not even entered upon the career of life (51). There
were other conceptual frames in which to pose and ponder the national
dilemma, especially maturation (Russia was immature and unformed while
Europe was older, fuller, had come into its own), as in Strakhov’s old and
young men.5 Less commonly writers might employ images of sowing and
reaping (as in Bestuzhev-Marlinskii’s hope for a “rich harvest” [539] of na-
tional talents or Belinskii’s definition of Russian literature as “not an indig-
enous, but a transplanted growth” [7:107]). Other possibilities included
education, enlightenment, or a dispelling of chaos; recently, Boris Groys has
suggested a psychoanalytical conscious-unconscious distinction, with Russia
as the West’s unconscious.6
Maturation imagery, for all its Freudian resonance and though wide-
spread—Belinskii, the most important voice in such matters, used it of-
ten—held a weaker grip on the national imagination, perhaps because it
lacked the urgency implied by destitution. Growth and aging, after all, re-
quire no special exertion; time works the passage of power to younger gen-
erations more or less inevitably. Such patience struck contemporaries as
insufficient: “We do not need a literature that will appear in its own time
without any efforts on our part, but enlightenment!” Belinskii vociferated
(1:102). More dire was the trope of impoverishment, which entailed real,
not necessarily masterable, difficulty in the overcoming. Wealth, after all,
need not be passed on; the poor may simply remain poor forever.7 Poverty
also had, to most ears, a tone of insult or self-recrimination, insinuating
defeat in a public competition. As we shall see, when Russians think about
their own cultural poverty, references to Europe, whether as model, teacher,
benchmark, or opponent, are almost always at hand.
Strakhov’s imagery was by no means a novelty. It derived from a ven-
erable native tradition that dated back at least to Karamzin. The sentimen-
talist, writing when financial setbacks and censorship problems had beset
him, lamented in a 1798 letter to Dmitriev: “I had a good laugh at your idea
146
of living off translations. Russian literature is wandering the world with a

beggar’s sack and staff. No profit to be had here!” (Izbrannye stat’i i pis’ma,
175). Karamzin, in imagery he will return to almost obsessively, figures Rus-
sian literature as a mendicant in a world where there are, implicitly, others
with enough wealth to look down pityingly upon her. As usual, the trope in-
vokes a comparison with Europe, for Karamzin informs Dmitriev he has
been attempting to make a living by publishing translations of Western writ-
ers. The figure of poverty refers for once to actual economic difficulties, but
the context of translating an entire foreign tradition is an unmistakable re-
minder of Russia’s relative cultural position as well.
Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler pay a more explicit homage
to the richness of European cultures, in particular (as seen in the first chap-
ter) Europe’s literacy, understood as an ability to imagine subtly and ma-
nipulate civilized fictions. Concomitantly, metaphoric language at the
beginning and the end of the voyage, when the traveler is in Russia, clus-
ters around the idea of poverty. Though in every case it has other, more im-
mediate textual motivations, the imagery is too consistent to be accidental.
The departing traveler is “your poor friend” (7); having left Russia behind,
“your friend became an orphan in the world, an orphan in his own heart”
(6). (This conjunction of poverty and orphanhood is a doubling that will be-
come second nature to succeeding generations of writers concerned with
Russia’s fate.) Much later, returning to Russia at the end of the book, Ka-
ramzin spends the first night in Kronstadt: “The coastline! fatherland! I
bless you! . . . The local inn might be called a beggars’ hotel [gostinitsa ni-
shchikh], but I am happy here!” (388). His eventual arrival in Moscow prom-
ises another abode on the same economic level: “And you, kind friends,
quickly, quickly prepare me a tidy hut [khizhina] where . . .” (388).
The contrast with Europe’s wealth is all the more striking because,
just before leaving Europe, Karamzin discourses on how prosperous—and,
as though it followed naturally, how well-read—England is. Part of this last
European letter tells the sad tale of a Russian Everyman, “Zh*, our coun-
tryman” (381), who runs out of money in France, makes a display of “our
poor, unreasoning heart” (382; italics in original), and in so doing irks a
“w e a l t h y Englishman” (381; emphasis in original). The English are per-
fectly aware of Karamzin’s metaphor themselves: “Generally the English
people consider us foreigners a sort of pitiful beings. Don’t touch him, they
say here on the street, he’s a foreigner—which means: ‘He’s a poor person
or a little child’ ” (383).
The metaphor has a slightly different sense when in 1795 Karamzin
speaks of “the wealth of a language” in a column in the newspaper Moskov-
skie vedomosti. The two-paragraph piece, by no means privileged in the
writer’s oeuvre, neatly represents certain of his unthinking mental reflexes.
A proper literary language, he says, distinguishes a wide variety of nuanced
147
abstract concepts. Arabic, with its five hundred names for such physical ob-
jects as “lion” and “sword” nonetheless lacks an adequate moral vocabulary.
Karamzin’s aim is “genuine wealth of the language”; full development means
“a rich language,” “a language enriched by intelligent authors”; if a tongue
is like Arabic, then “it is poor; poor with all of its millions of words” (2:142).
Though only Arabic is under discussion, a silent ranking of nations is appar-
ent: Russian outranks Arabic, but—Karamzin’s own practice as a committed
neologizer stands as a reminder—is outranked by Western languages still
richer. Until it can catch them, Russian remains in the lower category, a lan-
guage whose “material or verbal richness,” Karamzin notes elsewhere, will
remain nothing but promising raw material until it is shaped by men of lit-
erature into a valuable possession (2:185). With so few talented authors, the
Russians trail the French and still “have not had the time to enrich their
words with refined ideas” (2:185).
The metaphor recurs throughout the nineteenth century. The purely
literary lack that Karamzin discusses mildly contrasts with the complete
destitution in every branch of culture that Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical
Letter” (written 1829) bitterly decries as a national humiliation. The docu-
ment, “a shot that rang out into the dark night” in Herzen’s phrase, was
scandalous enough to close the journal that had published it and to get its
author declared insane and confined to house arrest (Chaadaev, 14). In a
period when German romantic ideas on the importance of finding evidence
of a national character were gaining ground in Russia, Chaadaev bemoans
Russia’s backwardness in matters of spirituality and creativity: “From the
very first moment of our social existence, nothing has emanated from us for
the common good of men; not one useful thought has sprouted in the ster-
ile soil of our country; not a single great truth has sprung from our midst;
we did not bother to invent anything” (41).8
The imagery of the “Letter” runs primarily to maturation as Chaadaev
describes the predicament of “a culture which is wholly imported and imi-
tative” (164); but poverty too appears. In a variation on the theme, Chaadaev
locates the nation’s penury within his countrymen themselves: “Even in our
gaze, I find, there is something oddly vague, cold, and uncertain, resem-
bling somewhat the look of people on the lowest rungs of the social ladder”
(166). What little Russia does possess (a certain carefree boldness) “is to be
found mainly among our lower classes” (166). And the traits of this lower
class are nearly universal: “Painful as this is to admit—in our country even
the upper classes are prone to vices which elsewhere afflict only the lowest”
(166). The entire Russian population may not be impoverished, but com-
pared with other nationalities it all looks and acts poor.
References to cultural poverty come into general use at just this time.
Kireevskii in 1829 asserts that Russia will never have its own philosophy un-
til it can master the “intellectual riches of that country [Germany], which in
148
speculative thought has outstripped all other nations” (68). Three years
later, Nadezhdin admits to “our bibliographic destitution” (159), and cites a
need to “transform the wealth of Europe’s education into our own prop-
erty” (152). The metaphor reaches its height in the work of Vissarion Be-
linskii. In 1834, Belinskii opened the greatest critical career of the century
with an article, “Literary Reveries,” in which he recentered the absence and
want Chaadaev found in all walks of life back in literature. Belinskii’s fa-
mous cry “We have no literature” in all italics (1:22, 23) is prefaced with a
recollection of the good old days when it still seemed that Russia was on the
brink of producing an authentic and unique literature—a hope that proved
stillborn: “We slept and dreamt ourselves Croesus but woke up as Irus!” (Irus
is a beggar in The Odyssey; 1:21). Belinskii sums up the conclusions of his
85-page disquisition: “The age of childishness is passing as we watch. And
may God grant that it pass quickly! But all the more may God grant that
everyone cease believing so fast as possible in our literary wealth! Noble
poverty is better than imaginary wealth!” (1:102).
Belinskii—himself pitifully remunerated most of his adult life, de-
spite his immense popularity and influence—returns to the metaphor many
dozens of times. The first of the 11 articles on Pushkin cites “the poverty of
our literature” (7:106), as does the introduction to The Physiology of Pe-
tersburg (8:375). In “Russian Literature in 1843” the problem worsens to
become “the extreme penury of contemporary Russian literature” (8:100).
On the other hand, “an original literature” Belinskii defines by “a numeri-
cal wealth . . . of remarkable works” (10:7). French letters are so refined and
bursting with uniqueness—“French literature is rich to such a degree”—
that a mediocre writer there can make a career just by knowing how to copy
others skillfully (8:183).
At times the metaphor becomes a crutch for Belinskii’s famously in-
elegant style. In the space of just two pages in the 1843 survey, Russian lit-
erature is ironically called rich if it all fits into three sections of two journals;
our scholarly literature is so poor it doesn’t deserve to be called literature,
though medical literature is relatively richer; educational literature recently
has been enriched by a number of works, and so the poverty of scholarly
and educational literature is less than formerly; belles lettres seemed as rich
from the ’20s to the ’40s as it does poor today, but it doesn’t follow from the
fact that it seemed rich that it actually was rich; in fact, most of the literary
treasures of the era were worthless; and so on (8:48–49). Elsewhere the
critic asserts that even if Russian literature has attained a certain “quantita-
tive richness,” it is still undercut by “a qualitative poverty” (8:376). Belinskii
ties literary insufficiencies to a broader cultural shortfall: “Our existence is
not overly rich in poetic elements and can give little in the way of content
to inspire the poet” (8:50). Nor does folk literature escape the common de-
ficiency; there as well one encounters “the monotonous forms of our poor
149
folk poetry” (10:21). In Belinskii’s terminology, then, poverty represents—

in addition to a lack of money—the shortcomings that constitute the current
state of his homeland’s literature, and lurking just beyond, the inadequacies
of the collective cultural life.
It should be noted that one major writer had no tolerance for the
metaphor: Pushkin. His article on the unimpressive state of Russian letters,
“On the Insignificance [nichtozhestvo] of Russian Literature,” steadfastly
refuses to refer to any national cultural poverty even in its title (11:268–74).
When speaking of pre-Petrine literature, Pushkin is not averse to consid-
ering “the causes . . . of its poverty” (12:208). But in reference to modern
Russian literature, he refrains from the metaphor, perhaps because as an
aristocrat (“high society . . . throughout Europe constitutes a single family”
[7:312]) who read and learned from European literatures, he perceived
his own activity less as competition with the cultural life of the continent
than as participation in it.9 As a result, Pushkin’s narratives, especially “Egyp-
tian Nights,” tend to diverge from the patterns we will see below, some-
times in ways so striking as to cause later writers to self-consciously “correct”
Pushkin—even, or rather especially, writers who admired him; in particular
Dostoevsky proclaims the artistic inviolability of “Egyptian Nights” in a pas-
sage already cited, but nonetheless later found it necessary to modify
essential details when reusing Pushkin’s scenario in his own work, as chap-
ter 6 will try to show.
IMAGINATION AND PATRIMONY

Poverty is the Muse’s patrimony.
—Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy
If there was a solution to Russia’s dilemma, contemporaries sought it in

the imagination. Belinskii’s “Literary Reveries,” significantly, was not only a
lament for a missing aesthetic institution; its title divulged a critic day-
dreaming, if only implicitly in the midst of his rant, of a genuine and origi-
nal Russian literature to come—dreaming not so much about a literature,
as of one. Karamzin and Chaadaev similarly trace the natural remedy for
the country’s poverty in the application of the imagination. The latter ad-
vises the addressee of his “Letter,” who seems to have complained of some
sort of spiritual ennui, that the “quiet and serene lives” she longs for are not
beyond reach and that she can “bring one of the charming fictions into be-
ing” by learning to use “the most pleasant dreams of your imagination”
(33–34).10 Karamzin, the one practicing fiction writer among the three, is
still more explicit. Having in the Letters returned to Russia, he sorts through
“my treasures,” souvenirs from Europe (pebbles, grasses, jottings) that in-
spire the fantasy with memories of “the disappearance of the Rhône, la
150
perte du Rhône, or the grave of Father Lorenzo, or the dense willow under
which the Englishman Pope composed his finest verse! You must agree that
all the Croesuses in the world are poor beside me!” (388).11 As Karamzin’s
synthetic imagery identifies imagination, Europe, and true (nonmonetary)
wealth, his baubles compensate the poverty of the flophouse where he is
staying. The simple abode that represents home in the conclusion to the
Letters will be enlivened using the same method: “And you, kind friends,
quickly, oh quickly ready for me a tidy hut in which I might at my leisure
enjoy . . . my imagination” (388).
Despite different emphases, these thinkers share a faith that the na-
tion’s plight can be resolved only by imaginative individuals, above all writ-
ers capable of embodying the national character and expressing the national
essence, summing up the country’s tendencies and hinting at the direction
it should move next. And yet the peculiarities that defined Russia’s unique
essence remained hard to see and impossible to agree on, since by general
consensus they had not yet come into their own. In Kireevskii’s words: “To
find them we must search; they do not catch the eye as does Europe’s intel-
lectual development” (255). Hence the task of portrayal artists were being
called on to perform required a prior divination, itself another act of imagina-
tive insight, into what the adult would become based on who the child was.
Like Karamzin’s advice that aspiring writers should write tastefully,
and since no accepted conventions regulating taste existed, everything
important depended on the powers of fantasy and creation. Kireevskii re-
marked: “To this point we still do not know what fantasy and invention
[fantaziia i vymysel] are; a kind of verisimilitude in our daydreaming [prav-
divost’ mechty] constitutes the originality of the Russian imagination” (58).
Over the next decade Gogol would show just how expansive a gift for fabri-
cation was necessary in some eyes to tease out the Russianness of Russians
and make them worthy of aesthetic depiction. In an era when a literature
was nearly tantamount to an entire culture, all could be righted if only the
imagination were given free rein, not because imagination is required to
solve any problem, but because for once the prime need was an original na-
tional imagination itself.
The metaphor of poverty must be considered the prime figure for the
Russian condition not by any inherent expressivity or applicability, but for a
much simpler reason: because it appears in so much of the era’s literature.
Indeed, the metaphor seems to strive from the outset to expand itself into
full-length narratives, where more complex matters can be explored, such
as the national poverty’s causes and possible outcomes. Strakhov’s imagery
demonstrates this striving. His double figure of poverty hiding an inner
strength or an external multiplicity masking an inner destitution contrasts
two key micronarratives: the poor figure will either acquire wealth to rival his
neighbors’, or he will fail in the endeavor. This duality energizes the tradition
151
from its start, as authors enter the fray for a chance to take sides with one
version of the story or the other.
Indeed, it would be hard to overstate the centrality of penury in
nineteenth-century Russian literature. Gogol and Dostoevsky, with their
galleries of needy protagonists, are only the most obvious examples. The
poor are at the center of all the many works devoted to the Petersburg myth
and the type known as the “little man,” as well as numerous scattered texts
by authors great and small.12 By comparison, the secondary rank of matu-
ration is reflected in the striking paucity of Russian Bildungsromane, an ab-
sence perhaps explainable because of the difficulty of envisioning such a
novel’s end point, a fully articulated, unique and yet Russian individual,
whose development need not be completed, but would necessarily have to
be sufficient, in one sense or another.13
Stories about poverty focused on the earlier and more pressing stage
in the process. Not all reflect the nation’s insecurities, of course. Pogodin’s
“The Beggar [Nishchii]” (1826), for example, treats indigence for more
purely humanitarian reasons. Yet every writer during this period, roughly
1790 to 1880, who accepted Karamzin’s assumption that the poor as a rule
tended to be more genuinely Russian—and almost all did—was a potential
contributor to the trend. Those uninclined to credit the Slavophiles’ equa-
tion of authentic nationality with the peasant class might look for the para-
digmatic Russian in the urban poor favored by the physiological sketches
and the highly productive Petersburg myth. As a result, almost all major
narratives about poverty after Karamzin bear dual readings: both for them-
selves and, less obviously though no less significantly, as parables of the
national fate.
The poverty whose emplotment fascinated contemporaries was ex-
actly the sort invoked by the metaphor: one that erected substantial hur-
dles, yet whose solution was not primarily economic. At the same time, the
penury was typically so severe that escape was at best a distant dream. This
was not necessarily a complete disaster, however, since in a vital sense, dream-
ing was the escape that was sought. It was always the one with the fertile
imagination but not much practical inclination, like Oblomov, who quite lit-
erally dreams the most important section of his narrative but nonetheless
ends up in poverty, who was the true hero, not the moneymaker like Shtolts,
who went places, did things, and got the girl, but, as his name hints, had
something about him alien to the nation’s deeper preoccupations.14
Accompanying the substitution of imagination for money in the pro-
totypical Russian plot of poverty is a second quirk. Poverty is regularly asso-
ciated, as Karamzin does in his Letters, with orphanhood. The poor orphan
may have a mother, but always lacks a father.15 Poor Liza, for example, is not
poor until her father dies. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is an orphan in
this sense, as are Raskol’nikov, Myshkin, and countless others. Akaky Aka-
152
kievich’s father is conspicuously absent at his son’s christening. A test case

might be Gogol’s “Portrait”: Leon actually has a father—but is raised out of
his care, meeting him, as far as we can judge, only once in his adult life.
When the father finally makes a conspicuous reappearance at the end of the
century, in The Brothers Karamazov, he does so only to allow Dostoevsky
to make explicit the tension that has always existed, as Fyodor Ivanovich Ka-
ramazov is slain by his sons precisely for bequeathing them no patrimony ex-
cept the family name and his own gifts of absence, indifference, and neglect.
The lack of a father in the lives of those already poor symbolizes the
lack of a patrimony, not just missing money but the related loss of a stable
and enduring identity; the broken familial connectedness is a broken bond
with history and the past.16 Holquist adduces as endemic Poprishchin’s self-
bestowed Spanish genealogy (26); the problem looms over all the era’s ma-
jor poor figures. Ivan Karamazov, like his siblings, will grow up poor, the
ward of another family, embittered and humiliated by paternal abandon-
ment and by his own lack of means, his lack of anything his own. It is be-
cause he has nothing proper (in the dual sense of “correct” and “one’s own,”
as the Latin root implies) to hold on to that Ivan is set adrift to rethink eth-
ical categories from scratch and demand an accounting from God. Akaky
Akakievich, in a typically Gogolian reversal, does get a very striking inheri-
tance—his father’s ridiculous hyper-Russian (that is, monastic) name and a
legacy of misery, but nothing else.
When a valuable patrimony does appear to be available to a poor
hero, it is of necessity false and so disastrous. Chartkov gathers up the 1,000
gold coins that fall from the frame of the evil portrait thinking that they
must represent a “gift” intended by some grandfather for his grandson and
hidden away in the frame of a “family portrait”; he decides he does not care
whose grandfather it was and will venerate the figure in the portrait as his
own ancestor—and so seals his doom (“Portrait,” 96). As the foolhardy painter
illustrates, none of the usual responses to poverty—begging, borrowing, or
stealing—is of much use in restoring lost patrimonies. For the very ease
with which an object of value can be acquired from an external source pro-
hibits it from being truly one’s own. The dilemma might be phrased as The
Idiot will pose it, where both of the main characters, Myshkin and Nastasia
Filippovna, are raised through financial resources not their own. The hero-
ine, sexually abused and scarred by her benefactor Totskii, demonstrates
poignantly that the escape from poverty only too easily becomes simply a
greater enslavement to someone else’s wealth.
As the metaphor expands into a narrative, the plot thickens, so to
speak, for the competing patterns differ substantially in import. The options
all derive from Karamzin. The dramatization of the country’s attempt to ac-
quire imagination and literacy, thus creating a cultural tradition ex nihilo,
occurs first in his poetry. (The more somber vision of “Poor Liza” is already
153
a later stage in his thinking.) All of the necessary elements—penury, the lost
patrimony, and the acquisition of imagination—are explicitly present in a
crucial (though not necessarily distinguished) early poem, which sets the
stage for much of the literature of the following century:
I was born to the world in poverty

And in poverty was brought up;
Deprived of a father in childhood
And lived in the world an orphan.
But the god who is expert in song
Conceived love for me, an orphan;
Came to me in a dream
And with a caress gave me a harp;
He divulged the secret of strings
That can speak with hearts
And, played dolorously and sadly,
Awaken pity in all who are kind.
I took up the harp—and struck the strings;
One look—sorrow is gone from my heart! . . .
He has no need for Fortune
Who lives in friendship with Phoebus!
The poem represents the simplicity and optimism of the initial ver-
sion of the poverty narrative: the want of a patrimony is recouped through
the intervention of a surrogate father figure (whose methods and motives
remain somewhat obscure) and a divine gift of imagination. Why the poem
deserves to be projected onto national anxieties is not immediately obvious
but is hinted at by the image of the heavenly harp player, which refers back
to the first poem Karamzin had published, “Poetry” (1789). In this major
work, the writer had attempted the common eighteenth-century Russian
genre of a survey of the luminaries of world literature with an accompany-
ing exhortation to his countrymen to find a place amongst them. Ruling as
an epigraph over the work was a Klopstock citation in which writers of
genius were figured as “göttliche Harfenspieler,” divinely inspired harp
players (58). The harpist in “I was born to the world in poverty” thus reads
as the Russian voice answering the call issued in “Poetry.” The hopefulness of
this early poem deserves note, since by universal agreement Russian litera-
ture in Karamzin’s day still had far to go to prove itself on the world stage.
It should be pointed out that the literalistic scenario we might expect
never materializes: in no major work do we find a Russian artist performing
in front of Europeans and trying to win their approval. (Though of course
at another level, this happens implicitly every time a Russian takes up his or
154
her pen during the era.) What we do find, however, is a symbolic double, a
scene fraught with consequences, in which a poor Italian performs in front
of Europeans who are foreign to him in hopes of earning favor and recom-
pense.17 Karamzin’s verses about the harp player are at least as important
for where they appear as for what they say. Their setting is a scene in the
Letters. In Berne, during dinner at Karamzin’s inn, before a crowd of mostly
French and English guests, a poor itinerant Italian musician performs for
donations. The poem is his song.
From surrounding episodes we learn that the French residing in
Berne are committed aristocrats while the city’s English visitors are demo-
cratically inclined. When the Italian sings, the English, as if to pique the
French for their aristocratism, react expansively, crying “Bravo! bravo!” and
tossing him “a whole plateful of silver coins,” while their ideological oppo-
nents—who as expatriates of the recent Revolution have no fondness for
the upwardly mobile urges of the lower classes—are conspicuously un-
moved (130). The mixed reaction somewhat dims the optimism of the song,
suggesting that the fate of the poor fatherless outsider amidst his wealthier
neighbors is not so assured as the Italian would wish. The importance of
this brief scene, buried amidst the hundreds of pages of the Letters, should
not be underestimated. Certainly some of Karamzin’s most important read-
ers did not. Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky found the episode sufficiently
compelling that they imported it into their own fiction. Pushkin borrowed
the scene for “Egyptian Nights,” but brought the Italian to Petersburg. Tol-
stoy polemicized with both of his predecessors in his early story “Lu-
cerne.”18 And Dostoevsky’s The Idiot responds to all three previous variants.
We will return to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky below.
Karamzin himself took up the topic again in 1796 in his poem “To the
Poor Poet.” A typical praise of art over earthly riches and pleasures, it ad-
vises the poor poet, unhappy when he compares himself to the wealthy
of the world, to appreciate the superiority of the fantasy. All the usual im-
agery appears: the poet lives in the same “modest hut” (Polnoe sobranie
stikhotvorenii, 195) Karamzin returned to in the Letters; the loss of a her-
itage now takes on feminine form as “stepmother Fortune” (192) drives the
poet out, but the surrogate “true birth mother, Nature” (192) takes him in
(again the belated kinship is the true one).19 The poet is handed the same
beggar’s sack and staff Russian literature carries in the letter to Dmitriev, as
Fortune sends him wandering: “She awarded me an empty sack / And sent
me out into the world with a staff” (192). The heart of Karamzin’s claim is the
comparison of two types of wealth:
My friend! reality is poor:
Let your heart disport with dreams,
Else dull will be your life.
Not Croesus with his bags and trunks
155
Lives more happily here,

But he who can in poverty
Amuse himself with his wealth;
Who has the power to imagine
A thousand rubles in his pocket
Possessing not a kopeck to his name.
It is “Poor Liza” above all, however, which imprints the metaphor in
the culture’s collective memory, for here the Letters’ imperative to imitate
Europe becomes an ambivalent relationship in which love and animosity
intertwine. Like the poem above, the story holds imagination higher than
money. But where in the verse, “An excess of blessings and pleasures / Is
imagination’s cold grave,” now the figure of Erast suggests that on the con-
trary poverty stunts the imagination, for wealth affords education in Eu-
ropean ways, which in turn produce a flexible though also dangerous
imaginative faculty (194). The national dimension of “Poor Liza” is impos-
sible to miss, though embodied as an internal battle between Russians. Like
all peasants, Liza is raised in native traditions; noblemen, as even the name
“Erast” reminds us, are Europeanized. Liza’s innate Russianness is under-
scored in the story’s introduction, where the narrator asserts a similitude
between her tale, the country’s past, and the lacking national patrimony
(figured in the image of the crumbling monastery). In a quotation we con-
sidered in chapter 1, paintings of miracles in the now dilapidated monastery
revive in the viewer’s mind the “sad history” of an “unfortunate Moscow”
which, “like a defenseless widow, could hope for succor from God alone
in the midst of her cruel sufferings” (1:606). Liza then lives in a place
where the past is still partly alive and where the governing narrative is
that of a widow without a protector, both Liza’s mother and historical Mus-
covy, who are weak and imperiled because the father of the family is
missing.
That Karamzin assumes Liza’s clumsy imagination to be a direct out-
growth of the Russian cultural inheritance, rather than, say, a personal trait,
is clear from his following story, “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter.” Cross
notes, “Despite the fact that Liza is a peasant’s daughter living at the end of
the eighteenth century and Natalia is the daughter of a mighty seventeenth-
century boyar, they are essentially one and the same. . . . Both are young,
innocent, naive; both are unable to read or write” (N. M. Karamzin, 109).
The illiteracy that afflicts only the poor by Karamzin’s day was, originally, a
national trait. In the story’s introduction Karamzin toys with the differences
between the well-traveled Europeanist he is and the past of his homeland,
as an ancestor threatens to cane him for retelling this story with too much
fanciful embellishment. The poetics old Russia observed, on the other
hand, was one of literalness: “Who does not cherish those times when Rus-
156
sians were Russians, when they dressed in their own garments, walked with
their own gait, lived according to their customs, and spoke their own tongue
according to their hearts, that is, spoke as they thought?” (1:622).
This is a past that knew no individual inventiveness, where the only nar-
ratives were fairy tales, composed by no one and meant to be retold exactly
as they were heard, where Locke’s Concerning Education and Rousseau’s
Émile were unknown not only because they had not been written yet but
more important “because people little knew how to read and write” (1:626).20
The beating Karamzin fears from his ancestor, then, is the revenge of a past
that used language either to speak the plain truth, or told stories that were
obvious inventions and admitted it, but kept out of the ambiguous zone in
between which Karamzin calls art, where the fruits of the imagination can
be taken for reality. “Poor Liza” shows that to be fully Russian and possess
the wealth of imagination is impossible in Karamzin—one wants to jump
into a pond, while to dispose of imagination is to be, precisely to that extent,
alienated from the collective heritage.
POVERTY, IMITATION, AND EUROPE
You see . . . how good my French pronunciation is? But

what use is it to have a broad and ample intellect, to un-
derstand everything, know much, and keep up with the
times when you haven’t got anything that’s yours, anything
of your own!
—I. S. Turgenev, “Hamlet of the Shchigri District”
Given the metaphoric framework Karamzin bequeathed to his heirs, it

should come as no surprise how ubiquitous otherwise gratuitous images of
Europe are in Russian poverty narratives. In a paradigmatic example, Push-
kin’s The Bronze Horseman, the poor hero’s imagination ruptures because
it cannot keep pace with the powerful Westernizing fantasy that conjured
his hellish and beautiful hometown into existence. As so often, none of the
action occurs abroad and all the characters are native born, yet the conflict
pits Russians who are wealthy, imaginative, and versed in Western ways
against the nation’s poor with less foreign exposure and a limited capacity
to dream. This European dimension is present in all of the works we have
examined closely. The obvious tension between the unimaginative Liza and
the foreign-influenced Erast, or Pushkin’s Russian poet and the Italian who
out-fantasizes him, suggests a literary culture that admires but also to some
extent fears its powerfully gifted neighbors.21
Gogol’s Petersburg tales are built on a similar though more sub-
merged rivalry. Again substituting a thing for a person as is their wont, the
tales cast the capital, that most alien and inimical city in the empire, in the
157
role of the European enemy of the poor man. “Nevsky Prospekt” opens
with the declaration: “There’s nothing finer than Nevsky Prospekt, at least
in Petersburg”; the nod implicit in “at least” is to the other avenues, clearly
European, among which Nevsky finds its peers (3:9). In “Overcoat,” the city
with its cruel weather serves as Akaky Akakievich’s opponent, spurring him
on to imagination and death. In “Notes of a Madman,” it is living in Peters-
burg that oppresses Poprishchin to the point of “becoming” Spanish; and so
on. While the city itself does not quite have an imagination (though Nevsky
Prospekt, with its demonic lamps, comes very close), it symbolizes the im-
possibility that poor Russians might ever acquire an independent faculty of
invention of their own—as we have seen, Gogol is not certain he thinks this
a bad thing. Instead, the hard-hearted capital offers the lowly only two op-
tions: either total submission to unoriginality or disaster by imagination.
Hence “Nevsky Prospekt” describes the Petersburg artist as a contra-
diction in terms: the human fantasy and the city simply cannot be made to
coexist on any natural basis. True, the two can be combined, as in Gogol’s
own art or Kovalev’s wild vision, but then they inevitably produce logic-
defying distortions. The implicit (and in the discussion of Italian artists in
“Nevsky Prospekt,” explicit) frame of reference comes from the mature Eu-
ropean cultures and the sort of defined and colorful characters found there,
amenable to depiction without exaggeration and thus legitimate fodder to
nurture artistic talents. Indeed, the Russian painter with ambitions of un-
derstanding anything other than his own misshapen reality must, like Leon,
travel to Italy, or at least, like Leon’s father, make a detailed study of the
Italian masters while at home. This overriding awareness of a European
context is so automatic that authors often do not bother to mention it explic-
itly. Dostoevsky, like Gogol, tends to refer to it indirectly in his fiction be-
cause he refers to it continually. (Diary of a Writer, on the other hand, does
away with all obliqueness and latches onto the topic as an idée fixe.) An un-
ceasing referentiality might itself impress a nation as a sign of the poverty
of its inventiveness. Such, at any rate, is the logic behind Belinskii’s excla-
mation: “Poor is the nationality that trembles for its independence at the
slightest contact with another nationality!” (7:436).
Chaadaev followed up the “First Philosophical Letter” with a change
of heart in the 1836 “Apology of a Madman,” retreating from his pessimism
and claiming that the blank slate that represented Russia’s past failures had,
after all, a second side, as a sign of future potential; if nothing else, only
a very unfinished history like Russia’s still had a chance to surpass what
Europe had already achieved. Predicated on the assumption that poverty is
for better or worse a form of nonbeing, of minimal self-definition, this dual-
ity or reversibility, where undevelopment alternates with potential—the
same sort of ambiguity we see in Strakhov’s two micronarratives and Gogol’s
confusion—continues to move in channels opened by Karamzin’s compet-
158
ing emplotments of the interaction of poverty and imagination. To the tragic

narrative of Liza, destroyed by the European power of aesthetic deception,
Karamzin’s poems had counterpoised a hopeful scenario of the outsider
saved by his imagination, proffering an optimistic vision of Russia future
instead of the tragedy of Russia present. In the poems, poverty had not hin-
dered imagination, it spurred it on—or rather, it promised to do so; the re-
sults were, for the time being, still lacking. This alternate situation had not
finished in tragedy, in part because it had not finished. Rather, it was open-
ended and ongoing, invoking poverty to symbolize works and identities still
in progress. Over time, successive revisions by later generations alter the
form of these two plots substantially while nonetheless retaining Karamzin’s
core issues.
By no accident, the capital where Russia and Europe most palpably
meet and do battle has a classic inhabitant, downtrodden and penurious.
Mikhail Epshtein has observed, “In every national literature there are char-
acters typical not only for a certain author or era, but for the literature as a
whole—characters who are symptoms, characters who are tendencies” (134).
The figure Epshtein has in mind is that of the government copyist. I would
add only that the copy clerk is a favorite figure in nineteenth-century Rus-
sian literature because he is so obviously a figure for that literature. As often
happens, the type is by no means unique to Russia (witness Dickens’s hum-
ble copyists, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and so on).22 But clerks
possess a special resonance in the Russian context, where the anxiety that
“There’s absolutely nothing original about me” (to cite Turgenev’s Hamlet
of the Shchigri District) extends from the capital to the deepest hinterlands
(4:280).23 The copy clerk picks up where Poor Liza left off, since his narra-
tive continues to assume that the poor Russian underling’s true calling is the
battle to survive the acquisition of imagination and literacy. Karamzin’s
heirs object, however, that the purity and innocence that handicap Liza
were never the real problem; the true scourge is mimicry, the deficiency of
those who know writing but only as a form of imitation. Liza had actually
had a tendency toward repetition of her own, though it had been left at the
level of the implicit (she duplicates Natalia the Boyar’s Daughter and, the
same idea in a different form, has her home in a place where the narrative
tells us the past lives on, repeating itself endlessly). And while repetitious-
ness remains a sign of the peasantry throughout the nineteenth century
(thanks to real or perceived factors including agriculture’s cyclical rhythms,
the reiterativeness of oral folklore, and the peasants’ largely unchanging
lifestyle), the unimaginative but nonetheless educated clerk more aptly fig-
ures his culture’s dilemma than does the illiterate manual laborer.
However, as Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich shows—for once with com-
plete eloquence—the Orthodox monastic tradition clouds the matter, for
while demonstrating on one hand that copying enjoyed a privileged position
159
in the nation’s heritage, it also suggests that such disciplined self-abnegation

might better be counted a virtue. The ambiguity that haunts Gogol, fasci-
nates Dostoevsky. Alyosha Karamazov, one of the few actual monks in the
period’s fiction, does not duplicate in the literal sense, at least as far as we
see. But he does do so in the more important literary sense. When a reac-
tion is demanded of him to his brother’s puzzling meditation on the Grand
Inquisitor, he steals a cue from what happens in the poem and kisses Ivan,
a borrowing the well-read Ivan delightedly calls “literary theft” (14:240).
Why, in Dostoevsky, the brothers both take such pleasure in this quintes-
sentially Russian embarrassment is vitally important but must be left for the
next chapter.24
Whatever their shape, poverty narratives almost all share the same
basic assumptions, with the exception already noted in Pushkin’s case. Rus-
sia is in some sense (the sense varies from work to work) fundamentally im-
poverished. About half the time the poverty extends to all Russians; in the
remaining cases, one class (overwhelmingly but not always the rich) is ex-
empt. This material poverty doubles and tropes an imaginative lack, either
the wholesale inability to work with fictions or a deficiency by comparison
with Europe’s (or the highly Europeanized Russian character’s) excellence.
The initial urge to equal Europe economically, if there is one, falls by the
wayside as less significant (later in the century it will become positively harm-
ful) and the contest shifts to the realm of literacy and fantasy. The Russian
begins to acquire imagination (for widely varied reasons—intentionally, un-
intentionally, willingly, unwillingly, knowingly, unwittingly). But the process
is treacherous, and the hero is normally destroyed. The structure is built
upon paired opposites:
Russia Europe
material poverty material wealth
lack of imagination imagination, literacy
weakness, fragility, madness strength
becoming being
national inchoateness, mere potential national grandeur, majesty
weak or artificial identities (e.g., rank) full identities
ordinary Russians Peter the Great25
Of these, “imagination” is the vaguest term, meaning something slightly dif-

ferent to each Russian author, perhaps because for writers imagination is
both a crucial and highly idiosyncratic matter.
These uniform plot elements, however, give rise to texts whose indi-
vidual meanings are anything but uniform. The earlier narratives, perhaps in
reaction to historical conditions, are steadfast in their admiration of Europe
and focus on the “practical” question of which class has the greater aptitude
160
for imagination. “Poor Liza” places it in the hands of the rich, while “Egyp-
tian Nights” objects and gives it back to the poor. Later narratives shift the
emphasis to new issues, reexamining poverty under the lens of ethics.
Gogol argues that imagination in the grasp of the poor is neither likely nor
unlikely, but rather morally wrong; for the benefit of all, it should be kept
from them. Meanwhile, the existence of the poor who want for imagination
is unenviable but necessary. Over time, these retellings of the same story by
different authors coalesce into a single metanarrative. Missing—for now,
though we will turn to it next—is the end of this metatale, the counterar-
gument to Gogol, in which the imagination of the poor would be ethically
good and poverty the preferable state. With this fourth and final option, the
contours of the tradition are rounded out: poverty grows more inevitable
but also more desirable; it ceases to be Russia’s cross and becomes Russia’s
distinction. Pushkin’s enigma of learning to love the low, writing our way to
an identification with the downtrodden and needy, is left to a younger gen-
eration to resolve: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who will take up poverty in the
manner their national tradition dictates, as both an acute social problem
and a figure for the nation itself. Their innovation is to grant that materially
Russia indeed shelters great need but then to embrace that shortfall as a
boon for creativity—the step that Pushkin foresaw as inevitable, but balked
at. And as poverty loses its bad name, these writers give voice to a doubt
which Karamzin and Gogol had not thought to ponder deeply: whether
Russia should indeed want to model itself after Europe’s wealth.
HISSING THE AUDIENCE: TOLSTOY’S “LUCERNE”
The most profound feature of our social life is improvisation.

—P. Ia. Chaadaev, “Apology of a Madman”
It was Karamzin’s Berne episode which caught Tolstoy’s creative eye. His
version of the outsider-artist performing in front of hostile Europeans, the
1857 story “Lucerne,” borrows from Pushkin as well. Again a traveling Rus-
sian in Switzerland views a performance by an itinerant artist, this time a
Tyrolean. Again the artist is an orphan and Switzerland represents a meet-
ing ground for all western Europe rather than the homeland of one nation.
Tolstoy takes great pains to emphasize that the Swiss artist is on foreign ter-
ritory, for the embankment of Lake Lucerne where the story’s action takes
place is decidedly un-Swiss. It is described as built to the tastes of, and per-
haps by, English visitors—in effect, an outpost of England within Switzer-
land. Where Karamzin had been mum about the incident, offering not a
word of his own reaction, now the gap is filled in: the meaning of Tolstoy’s
episode flows out of the Russian viewer’s peculiar identification with the
poor artist surrounded by foreigners. But whereas Karamzin found a split
161
audience, one half reacting with a stony silence and the other raucously wel-
coming the outsider’s art, Tolstoy sees an almost entirely negative reaction.
There is something decidedly uncanny—Freud’s unheimlich—in the
narrator Nekhliudov’s experiences. The story is constructed on the contrast
between “home” and “foreign” (as in a paradoxical English embankment on
a Swiss lake), and between self and other. As in “Egyptian Nights,” the ob-
server finds an uncanny double in the performer, and undergoes a disorient-
ing succession of extremes, swinging suddenly from complete identification
to complete alienation, a scenario overwritten with the Russian’s concern
for integration in a community of Europeans.26 The story opens with a nature
description which emphasizes harmony and belonging, as the earth, sky,
and mountains merge fluidly into a composite whole: “not a single unbroken
line, not a single undiluted color . . . and in everything calm, softness, unity”
(5:4). The English embankment represents a rude contrast: “Constantly, un-
willingly my eye came up against the horribly straight line of the embank-
ment” (5:4). Nekhliudov labels the intentionally placed green benches lining
the bank “poor, tawdry human creations”—within the natural order, poor-
ness marks that which is signed “civilization,” for nature and integration are
fundamentally at odds with the stunted tenets of European culture (5:4).
These two warring tendencies are carried along to dinner. Dining
among English tourists, Nekhliudov knows the rules have changed to those
of civilization, and poverty has taken on the opposite valuation. The English
themselves are dressed “extremely beautifully, even richly” (5:5). As Orwin
observes, “Rational individualism makes each Englishman an island unto
himself, with nothing connecting him to the inner life of any other individ-
ual” (69). This is more than national characterization, for the mark of the
English, with their “complete lack of attention to anything in their sur-
roundings that doesn’t directly touch upon their own person,” is precisely
the reverse of what Pushkin saw as the essence of the artist—the ability to
share the viewpoint of another, to put oneself in the other’s shoes (5:5). By
the terms of the story’s competing poverties, what the English lack is more
important than what they possess.
In what follows, a series of minor events completely reshapes the nar-
rator’s sense of self. Nekhliudov’s very identity comes to be implicated in
the most profound way. Just as he felt fully alive and integrated when he
contemplated nature, so at dinner he demonstrates the Russian quality of
sensitivity and takes on the English lifelessness of his table companions.
Moreover, “At such dinners . . . it seems to me that I am guilty of something
and am being punished like a child” (5:5). Nekhliudov’s guilt may derive
from the paradox of letting his sensitivity to others lead him into adopting
the English insensitivity to others. What Nekhliudov too seems to regard as
the Russian national quality has, in the wrong context, led him mistakenly
to alienate himself from himself.
162
If in Karamzin’s Letters it is the English who welcome the outsider, in

“Lucerne” the opposite takes place. The English deadness is contrasted to
a very different scene recalled from Nekhliudov’s earlier travels in France,
where a harmony close to that of nature had prevailed. Here “twenty of us,
of the most varied nations, professions and characters” sit at a “common table”
(5:6). The group includes Spanish, Italians, Americans, French, yet “every-
thing was shared” (5:6). An English table, on the other hand, is the very im-
age of the unheimlich, evoking in Nekhliudov a feeling “as sometimes
happens for no visible reason when one has moved to a new place,” and it,
Nekhliudov will later conclude, represents Europe as a whole (5:7).27
Nekhliudov’s question of how to translate the integration nature prom-
ises into a social belongingness suddenly becomes the Tyrolean’s question
when he struggles to win over the audience on the street. In this shadow play
of self and other, Nekhliudov, who at first is simply out for a stroll, begins
to lose his orientation and sense of identity.28 Hearing the musician’s song,
he makes out several voices instead of one. Then he cannot quite hear the
melody, yet is aware that he senses it clearly. The voices are, uncannily, near,
then far, bass, then tenor. The song, indeed, is not a song. “Everything was
strange, yet inexpressibly beautiful, or so it seemed to me” (5:8). In the end,
the music effects a remerging of the self in the harmonious totality, return-
ing Nekhliudov to the mysterious sensation of being at one with the world
as an unknown inner voice whispers, “Everything is yours” (5:8).
Nekhliudov’s sensitivity now expands, and he begins to experience the
scene also from the viewpoint of the singer, noticing the reaction as well as
the performance and hearing what he thinks is the crowd’s “hum of ap-
proval” (5:9). The whole audience seems to share his sentiment of rapture
and mutual union. Tolstoy is longing here for the perfect artistic moment
he will describe three decades later in chapter 15 of What Is Art? when all
present are conjoined with the artist and each other. What happens, how-
ever, is a travesty of that ideal. The large gathering clearly enjoys the song,
yet not one person except Nekhliudov himself makes a donation. Instead,
the Tyrolean’s request for money is met with universal laughter. The artist,
humiliated, walks off alone.
At the center of this episode and the story stands a moment of iden-
tification. Nekhliudov is outraged and anguished to a remarkable degree. “I
felt pained, bitter, and above all, ashamed for the little man, for the crowd,
for myself, as if I had requested money, no one had given me anything and
it was me people were laughing at” (5:11–12). Tolstoy makes explicit what
Karamzin in his telling never openly says, that the Russian observer is inex-
orably drawn to see himself in the improvisor. When the singer has to repeat
his request for donations to the cold audience, Nekhliudov notes in him a
childlike hurt that doubles the feeling of a punished child he too had expe-
rienced. Again he comments on the wealthy dress of the English tourists
163
and marvels at their “indifference to every other human being’s life” (5:12).
Nekhliudov then describes himself walking off in terms self-consciously
mimicking the description of the singer. His oneness with the poor artist
becomes complete precisely at the moment art and poverty are mocked.
Nekhliudov is especially indignant because he is certain the singing did break
down the wall of isolation; it is a successful performance which the audi-
ence simply refuses to recognize. By understanding art as emotional sharing,
Nekhliudov makes it into a mirror of the “Russian” ability—defined by the
only Russian present as his own distinguishing trait—the capacity to share
the other’s viewpoint, to see other as self. In “Lucerne,” the Russian and the
artist double each other, and having a powerful gift for scaling the walls of
human atomization in this fashion is, apparently, a guarantee of failure in
the European amphitheater.
The plot now turns to Nekhliudov’s attempts to avenge his hero.
Forestalling the Underground Man (who lives, of course, in the most Eu-
ropean of Russian cities), Nekhliudov walks up and down the lobby of his
hotel several times in order to jostle a smug English gentleman. Finally, he
settles upon a course of action, chases down the artist, and invites him to
his own elegant hotel for a drink. The attempt to use aristocratic powers
to elevate the poor fails. The waiters first mock the poor man and then de-
cide they can dispense with any respect toward Nekhliudov as well. Both of
them are now treated as though they lacked any status: “They stopped to
look at us the way one stops to look at cute children when they’re playing
cutely” (5:14).
The parallels with “Egyptian Nights” are fairly rigorous.29 In both sto-
ries, the artist dresses in black; improvises (the Tyrolean doesn’t make up
the words for his songs, but improvises the melodies, even changing them
from verse to verse “freely and instantly” [5:9]); again the artist remains
nameless while the aristocrat Nekhliudov possesses, and then, by throwing
his lot in with the poor, loses, the substantial powers of his name and posi-
tion; again the artist is almost undefinable (his appearance suggests an in-
determinate age between 25 and 40 and does not hint at his gifts), but he
also turns out to have connections with crime (in “Egyptian Nights,” they
are metaphoric; in the city of Lucerne, public performances are forbidden
by law); and a hidden animosity between the nobleman and the artist boils
to the surface and subsides when the singer suddenly accuses Nekhliudov
of trying to get him drunk to take advantage of him. This too is a standard
element of the improvisor figure: his loss of sympathetic insight when speak-
ing in his private rather than performing persona.
Like Charskii, Nekhliudov can barely restrain his fury (he longs to
punch the waiters or brain the English miss with a stick) and erupts in anger
at being drawn into a position of social inferiority, but again, to no avail. In
“Lucerne,” however, the animosity is directed at Europe. The element of
164
wounded national pride comes explicitly to the fore when Nekhliudov con-
ceives a desire to be back in the Crimean War, so he can leap into an English
trench and slaughter his nation’s enemies. The scene ends and Nekhliudov,
like the Swiss, retires, alone and alienated, seeing in his sensation of inferi-
ority “stupid, childish resentment” (5:21). “Egyptian Nights” had been pro-
pelled by the fear that a proper Russian audience could not be found,
whether by Charskii or his Neapolitan visitor; this Russian inadequacy was
implicitly contrasted to the enlightenment and sophistication of audiences
elsewhere. “Lucerne” explores a different anxiety, that European audiences
may be no better, at least when the performer is an outsider. Indeed they
may well be worse, sensitive to the beauty of powerful art and nonetheless
adamant in their refusal to show appreciation or generosity.
The story ends ambivalently, with two almost antithetical conclusions.
On one hand, the Russian finds himself excluded and longing for inclusion,
and is outraged at how the poor are treated by “the most civilized people
from the most civilized nations” (5:23). Nekhliudov mentally inquires of the
European audience how as Christians or simply as people they could re-
spond so hard-heartedly. He imagines their reply: “There are no beggars,
and by rights there should not be any, nor should there be the feeling of
compassion on which begging is based” (5:22).30 At issue here is sympathy,
and its rejection renounces both the poor and art in one gesture. Nekhliu-
dov reacts by proclaiming the small nonevent at the story’s core a revelation
of near-apocalyptic significance: “This is an event which the historians of
our time should record in fiery letters. This event is more significant, more
serious, and of deeper import than the facts recorded in newspapers and
history books” (5:23). The episode has revealed nothing less than the hol-
lowness of European values, an orientation toward the self and a blindness
toward the other that overturns Europe’s traditional title as an audience
worth impressing and an adequate moral and aesthetic authority. Tolstoy
thus advances his own solution to the difficulty of winning European recog-
nition for Russian letters which Dostoevsky so laments: in the words of the
proverb, the game is not worth the candle.
Nekhliudov sees two competing orders: a world ruled by hierarchies
of money (a world of exclusions) and a world ruled over by art (a world of
inclusions and linkages). The European, he claims, instinctively feels his life
to be governed by economic hierarchies, but the performance has shown
that, even if unwittingly, people are more attracted to and swayed by art.
Imagination again conquers money, but now the plot takes a new turn: the
victory is not widely acknowledged. The power of art stands as a counter-
poise to the sad significance of the scene, where in the audience’s aesthetic
and financial nongiving, Nekhliudov has perceived nothing less than the de-
nial of Christian brotherhood, of the integration that nature promises, and,
in the process, of the dignity of every outsider.
165
At this point, however, Nekhliudov hears faint sounds of the singer

wafting in from the edge of town; the Tyrolean, he decides, is playing on his
own, alone but unbowed. There follows a second conclusion which some-
what ambivalently supersedes the first. Nekhliudov chastises himself and
admits that the interaction with his enemies has made him too like them.
They trumpet exclusivity, while he lauds harmony and acceptance. But in
setting himself up as their opponent, he has betrayed his own best impulses
toward harmony and descended to strife—he has, in effect, been too sym-
pathetic to the Europeans and again taken on their traits without noticing.
If in fact, in a higher sense, all men are brothers, then the true task of the
artist, the Russian, and simply the moral individual is to trust in this union,
for only so can he fulfill his calling of strengthening the bond. Like love—
or perhaps as love, just as the mutual possession in “Egyptian Nights” is an
act of love—art will conquer in the end.
“Lucerne,” then, presents a vision of art, Russia, and poverty tightly
bound up within a concept of shared sympathy with the other; artistic in-
sight is assimilated to the Russian national character, and both double the
necessary and Christian act of sharing in the plight of the poor, the “feeling
of compassion” for the needy to which Tolstoy’s imagined Europeans object
(5:24). As the story concludes, we have more reason to believe the poor out-
sider will meet with rejection, but less reason to be dismayed. If the Swiss
musician can feel at harmony in a world filled with cold Europeans, Nekhli-
udov counsels himself, so can I.31 Russian culture’s longstanding anxiety
that Europe might not be moved has been canceled not by evidence that
Europe is moved, but rather by the assertion that such an audience’s reac-
tion is no gauge of an artist’s worth. In light of the mounting evidence that
Russian culture had yet to make a major impression in Europe, Tolstoy up-
dates Karamzin’s scenario. Imagination does not recoup material poverty.
The rich keep their money and their offensive embankments; but the poor
take away their artistic imaginations and the knowledge that they have
come out truly more fortunate.
The conclusion finds the narrator, “poor” by virtue of being a Russian
outsider, and the little man, poor in the ordinary sense, united in spirit (the
gift of the poor) but nonetheless physically separated and still little ac-
quainted. Nekhliudov is pondering the failure of the rich to identify with
the poor, but, if he is honest, must also be troubled by the memory of his
own ill-fated experiment in social leveling, his inability to find anything
more effective than a drinking invitation to bridge the gap between classes.
The story leaves unresolved the dilemma Tolstoy’s later stories and novels,
with their aristocrats trying to learn virtue from peasants, will struggle long to
master. The crux of the matter, Tolstoy will come to believe, is not whether
to identify with the poor—the answer is self-evident—but rather how to do
so, and in particular how to do so in an authentic and meaningful way.32 The
166
writer’s postcrisis gravitation toward simplicity in both fiction and life (his
shorter, ethically pointed narratives; his renunciation of copyrights, his peas-
ant garb, plowing, modest diet, and so on) measures how far he ultimately
advanced from Karamzin. In later years, Tolstoy lost some of his predeces-
sor’s faith in imagination, which did not guarantee the virtue he came to
prize above all. Europe he was increasingly able to dismiss as a total irrele-
vancy. And no longer was Russia too poor to survive. On the contrary, pov-
erty was the first of blessings, and Russia, if anything, was not poor enough.
167
Chapter Six
By His Poverty
Dostoevsky and the Imitations of Christ
For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus

Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake
he became poor, so that by his poverty you might
become rich.
—2 Corinthians 8:9
Poverty strips the material life entirely bare, and

makes it hideous; then arise inexpressible yearn-
ings toward the ideal life.
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
AS PUSHKIN READ his Karamzin attentively, so Dos-

toevsky digested his Gogol with great seriousness. It has long been a cor-
nerstone of Dostoevsky studies that the writer began his career by reacting
against, or parodying, his forebear.1 That the national preoccupation with
poverty and imagination stands at the heart of their dispute, however, is not
yet part of the commonplace. In fact, Dostoevsky works long and hard to
reformulate a legacy which to his mind addresses all the right issues—
material and figurative shortfall, sympathy, literacy—but too often in exactly
the wrong way. Like Pushkin in “The Gentlewoman Peasant,” Dostoevsky’s
strategy generally leaves intact Gogol’s plots and instead savages the frame-
work of values behind them. His narratives make no secret of their opposi-
tion to Gogol, commending imagination in the hands of the poor in the
strongest terms. True, imagination remains painfully difficult to master. But
for Dostoevsky, sympathetic projection becomes poverty’s redemption, not
its poison; affective linkages promise to save society rather than ruin it; and
the risks of a vivid fantasy are always worth running. As Dostoevsky gradu-
ally knits together a metanarrative of his own, his poor heroes begin to
speak for themselves and finally, toward the end of his career, discover how
imagination can save them, make them Russian, and relieve the sufferings
of their penury. Meanwhile, Russian literature’s two ongoing tales of pov-
168
By His Poverty
erty, copying (verbal poverty as weakness) and improvising (verbal lack as

potential), at last merge in Dostoevsky’s scripting of a triumphant denoue-
ment for the nation’s self-told narrative.
Dostoevsky chips away at Gogol by cobbling together insights on
poverty from the other writers we have already examined and Orthodox
Christianity. As a result, his fiction in its multiple indebtedness is doubly
illustrative of the relevant anxiety, since the country’s dilemma—how to
convert a daunting regard for alien voices into the source of one’s own
uniqueness—is his personally as well. The insinuations of national unorigi-
nality symbolized by copy clerks like Akaky Akakievich agonized Dosto-
evsky much more than other writers. In a bitterly sarcastic 1861 article, for
example, he notes that visitors from France are sure to admire Pushkin as
a poet “who was entirely national and who successfully imitated André Che-
nier and Mme Deshoulières,” along with Derzhavin, that Russian La
Fontaine, and Krylov, who wrote novels in the style of Dumas until he was
stolen away by an untimely demise (18:44).2 Dostoevsky’s sense of humor
was not always in evidence, however, in part because a national tradition of
importation and borrowing was indisputable. (He objects here not to the
charge of copying per se, it should be noted, but only its misapplication to
those Russians who were unquestionably original.) His Diary of a Writer
rails against European condescension but admits there is a certain logic in
not respecting people who are proudest when they manage to sound like
you. It goes on to describe such people, from the European viewpoint every
educated Russian had internalized, as apes, slaves, and lackeys (25:23).
For a nation of reputed imitators, the figure of the office clerk thus
has a special resonance. Such an anxiety may seem excessive in retrospect
given the era’s ultimate stature in literary history, but the topic clearly
moved many. According to Tseitlin, at least 150 stories about poor clerks
had appeared in Russia by 1850 (7).3 From a writer’s perspective, matura-
tion narratives had had one clear advantage over poverty narratives: the
chance to explore the anxiety of influence that was bound to afflict what
Vogüé later would call “that young nation” in “its long servitude to foreign
masters and its final emancipation” (1–2). The copy clerk restores this di-
mension, combining in one individual both impecuniousness and a desper-
ate striving to be released from mimicry—the same linkage we have seen
before of poverty of the purse and poverty of the imagination.
The profession of transcribing other people’s documents embodies
the key impediments facing a culture eager, in Kireevskii’s words, to “trans-
form the character of our submissive imitativeness into a method of devel-
oping the unique internal principles of our own life” (203). For if the
government clerk does achieve originality, it will be by repudiating a train-
ing that has taught him to privilege outside voices and demonize the self-
authored. The copyist is in this sense perfectly tailored to the patrimonial
169
anxieties, for the focus shifts away from how much he has—Akaky Akakie-
vich, for example, is swimming in words—and onto how little he has of
his own. The association is more graphic, so to speak, in Russian, where
Akaky Akakievich’s and Poprishchin’s livelihood clearly travesties what a
real writer does. Clerks perepisyvaiut, literally “rewrite,” while an inde-
pendent author simply writes; the two acts are antithetical, one the surest
proof of originality, the other the most certain disproof.4 Poprishchin, in a
natural progression, refuses to reproduce documents once he becomes Span-
ish and hence, to his thinking, unique and creative. The originality Gogol
deems madness, however, Dostoevsky sees as the only path to liberation
and authenticity.
The sequence of Dostoevsky’s works from the 1840s to the 1880s
charts the progress of a culture coming to maturity. It starts simply, with a
clerk, Makar Devushkin, who in Poor Folk struggles toward an individual-
ity capable of expressing itself and whose most outrageous dream is a book
of poetry with his name on it. Though he begins badly educated and with
execrable literary taste, Makar approaches his goal in the end. His mantra,
“I’ve got no style, Varenka, no style at all” (1:24), is in the epistolary novel’s
final letter replaced: “And here my style is taking shape” (1:108). The clerk
is a challenge to every reader too quick to accept the assertion in “Poor
Liza” that the gulf of literacy between classes is unbreachable. As Vino-
gradov has shown, in the end Devushkin proves himself a committed and
competent reader, a literary critic with his own tendencies, and finally an
author beginning to be original, albeit in modest form (“Shkola sentimen-
tal’nogo realizma,” 339–90). Makar is Dostoevsky’s first and last protagonist
whose tale ends just at the moment originality has hesitantly emerged; his
heirs will take the battle substantially further.
The extent of the little clerk’s success is less significant than the tra-
jectory of his narrative. For Devushkin is, in embryonic form, Dostoevsky’s
Everyman, struggling to find his voice and dream up something he can
leave to be recorded in the annals of history. Dostoevsky diversifies succes-
sive works, in other words, not with always-new story lines but by returning
to uncover yet another possible meaning for the plot that captivated him
like no other. His poor heroes set out in life with next to nothing but, upon
consideration, conclude that money is not the answer (the pursuit of wealth
is found only in minor characters); they work instead to develop a powerful
imagination, for motives that can be highly varied: personal, literary, crimi-
nal, Christian. By contrast, if the Dostoevskian hero does come into money,
he ends by either giving it away (like Makar with his meager resources, or
Myshkin with his sudden fortune) or intentionally squandering it (Nastasia
Filippovna with Rogozhin’s 100,000 rubles, Dmitri Karamazov). Raskol’ni-
kov is perhaps the most telling example: he thinks he is murdering for money,
but then hides what he has stolen and forgets about it. Gradually his true
170
By His Poverty
motive dawns on him: to distinguish himself from the crowd, to prove he

could venture where others fear to tread—either to become or prove he al-
ready is (the distinction is regularly ambiguous in Dostoevsky) original.
Imagination, on the other hand, one can never have too much of.
Even those not literally copyists are painfully aware of repetition’s stigma.
Ganya Ivolgin, a personal secretary rather than a government clerk, explains
to Myshkin in The Idiot:
You say I am not an original [original’nyi] man. Please note, dear prince, that
there’s nothing more offensive to a man of our time and place than to tell him
he is unoriginal, weak in character, without special talents, and an ordinary
fellow. . . . You know, I wanted to eat you alive when you said that! (8:105)
The student Raskol’nikov who murders in Crime and Punishment is bat-

tered by destitution, whipped by carriage drivers because of his tattered
rags and too needy even to eat regularly, but this type of poverty barely
figures in his thoughts. As an emblematic Russian, he divides people into
two categories: “into the lowly (the ordinary), that is, so to speak, into mere
material serving exclusively to breed others like them, and into people in
the proper sense, that is, those having the gift or talent to say in their sur-
roundings a new word” (6:200; emphasis in original). The only existence for
Raskol’nikov worthy of the name is one leavened by an inventiveness of
one’s own. Those with no fantasy, on the other hand, wield a misfiring cre-
ativity; all they can do is repeat themselves genetically. Goliadkin, in “The
Double,” a government clerk, shows just how nightmarish the lack of orig-
inality can be. In an act of false invention that is really repetition at its most
horrific, he gives birth to a complete second self so fully articulated that
it ceases to be him, though it sports his name and identity. Unlike his Gogo-
lian prototype Kovalev, whose nasal disaster qualifies as disintegration, Gol-
iadkin’s unique agony is to be self-copied.
In madness and crime, Dostoevsky’s poor heroes often suffer the same
fates as Gogol’s, but within a very different universe where meanings are re-
versed. Indeed, it is a running metaphor in Dostoevsky that the greatest
good—aside from loving Christ—is to have enough imagination to produce
svoe slovo, one’s own word.5 “Saying one’s own word” is a vague designation
for something so important because Dostoevsky means to unite disparate
concepts: first, having a unique viewpoint of one’s own, a self-aware indi-
viduality unlike any other; and second, employing that viewpoint to make a
creative contribution to the world, if only the creative act implicit in ex-
pressing how life looks to me and no one else. The poorest of the poor in
Dostoevsky are not those with nothing to wear, but those with nothing to
say. Meanwhile, the broad metaphor of “one’s own word” allows the author
to finally bring into the open the lasting parallelism between the quest of
isolated individuals and the quest of a nation.
171
Raskol’nikov muses in his initial soliloquy: “It’s curious, what is it peo-

ple are most afraid of ? A new step, a new word of one’s own—that’s what
they fear the most” (6:6). Raskol’nikov’s own new idea, morally justified
murder, misses the point, yet the pathos of the novel is not, as it is often
read, that his motives are so patently wrong, but that they are so very nearly
right. For Raskol’nikov’s quest is at bottom merely a more extreme version
of Makar’s, who also admits that the frustrations of indigence incline one to
“free thinking” (1:86).6 Both seek to forge a more authentic self that is not
simply a drone, to answer, as it were, the poverty of their own literatures
with a stroke of originality (when Raskol’nikov first appears for question-
ing, the police investigator symbolically presumes him to be a writer [6:79]).
Certainly murder is extreme; but it is an extreme that grows naturally, Dos-
toevsky means us to see, out of the Russian psychology. The crimes around
which he spins his tales are never petty larceny or casual killing, but
grandiose attempts by the disenfranchised to rethink the order of things, to
dream a different world—crimes which value their own originality. Ras-
kol’nikov’s stance is thus self-serving and yet not entirely wrong: people
capable of “saying some new little thing, must, by their nature, unavoidably
be criminals—more or less, of course” (6:200). If nothing else, as Dosto-
evsky’s repeated frustrated tirades against Europe remind us, those who
have a powerful voice of their own are bound to intimidate their neighbors.
The figure of one’s own word was not, however, Dostoevsky’s own.
Belinskii is already using it in his 1846 survey of Russian literature: “Yes, we
have a national life, we are bound to speak to the world our own word, our
own thought; but which word, which thought—that’s not a matter to worry
about yet” (10:21). Six years later, while Dostoevsky was in Siberian exile,
Kireevskii had employed the same metaphor in his major essay “On the
Character of Europe’s Enlightenment and Its Relation to Russia’s,” but in
reverse: “Europe has had its say completely [vyskazalas’ vpolne]” (255).
Nor was Dostoevsky alone in heeding Belinskii’s call. The editors of such
periodicals as The Russian Wealth, The Russian Thought, and The Russian
Word [Russkoe bogatstvo, Russkaia mysl’, and Russkoe slovo], all opened
during Dostoevsky’s career, were trying to show by the titles they had cho-
sen that they had untangled part of the same riddle.
The quest for svoe slovo pervades Dostoevsky’s fiction to the very end.
In the climax of his final book, The Brothers Karamazov, the search bears
perhaps its richest fruit as Alyosha Karamazov, the novel’s great listener, for
the first time stands up at a funeral to make a speech of his own.7 This is not
to say that Dostoevsky elevates imagination over virtue itself; but as Zosima
suggests when he chides Alyosha for clinging to the security of the mon-
astery and sends him out to live in the world, even the virtuous man must
have something to do in life, and that means cultivating one’s imagination
and articulating svoe slovo. For human nature strives, as Dostoevsky says in
172
By His Poverty
another context, “to have its say [vyskazat’sia] and show off what is best
about it (not from vanity but in consequence of the most natural human
need to acknowledge, actualize, and shape one’s self in real life)” (18:31).
Certainly liberal social activists preferred to see the national poverty
dealt with in more substantial political and economic ways, but Dostoevsky
considered these so many variations on the theme of money, selfishness,
and depersonalization—for him intrinsically European concepts objection-
able both morally and because nothing could be worse than to “copy slav-
ishly” precisely where the new word was to be spoken (26:132).8 Those
striving for a unique selfhood, however, always face a paradox: unrecognized
originality is useless, and yet recognition which depends entirely on others
effectively saps any claim of autonomy. The Russian new word thus had to
surmount not only the copyist’s challenge of producing something of one’s
own and the Christian challenge of voicing the self without aggrandizing it
but also the improvisor’s dilemma: how to win over an audience that had
never promised to be perceptive, just, or interested. As Tolstoy argues in
“Lucerne,” not even an exceptional talent can guarantee recognition. Dos-
toevsky illustrates the vicious circle that spins every copyist’s head when he
laments, “Why does Europe deny us our independence, our own individual
word [nashe svoe sobstvennoe slovo], there’s a question that arises on its
own” (25:202). The difficulty is almost intractable: if outside entities have
the power to deny or legitimize, then in what sense can any word be truly
svoe? Yet the opposite extreme is no more help. Tolstoy, always more self-
reliant than Dostoevsky, has Nekhliudov simply forget about Europe in the
end. But for Dostoevsky, solipsistic self-affirmation smacks of an unaccept-
able egotism. Dostoevsky’s heroes understand both horns of the dilemma
and struggle to improvise a solution.
In whatever form, the answer clearly requires imagination. The rudi-
ments of Dostoevsky’s understanding of this naturally diffuse concept are
worth examining in some detail. We find in inchoate form perhaps the near-
est thing to the young author’s artistic credo—in particular definitions of
art, imagination, and originality, and a telling meditation on why Russia des-
perately needs them—in the Petersburg feuilletons he wrote in 1847, his
second year as a professional writer. The feuilletons, much less known than
Dostoevsky’s fictional works, have inspired remarkably divergent readings,
perhaps in part because they are rambling and seemingly inconsequential
as befits their genre.9 In fact, the first (dated April 27) reiterates some of
Gogol’s assumptions about the national poverty so that Dostoevsky can jus-
tify the reconceptualization his fiction will undertake.
The work opens by observing that Russians hate the question “What’s
new?” because there is no possible reply. How can there be anything new
in a land handicapped by amorphousness and repetitiveness? Dostoevsky
then turns to the institution of the claustrophobically small circle of friends,
173
the prime form of public life in Russia, he says, and significantly “a product
of our national character” (18:12). The typical philistine who populates these
circles, a figure who sounds suspiciously close to Dostoevsky’s typical Rus-
sian, is the man with the so-called “kind heart” (18:13). His label is ironic;
he is in fact utterly blind to those around him, treating even his closest friends
as “something along the lines of a spittoon,” talking endlessly of himself
while having no inkling what is going on in others’ hearts (18:13).
As in Gogol, Russia is still poor in form and particularly in its collec-
tive institutions. But now art is the cure, not the illness. Dostoevsky’s sce-
nario is carefully crafted to draw in readers with images familiar from his
predecessor but then feed them novel conclusions. For each of the flaws
described can be righted if only Russia develops an original art of its own.
By “art” Dostoevsky has in mind the skill of creative living exemplified by
Karamzin’s Frenchmen, aesthetic invention applied to all aspects of being
rather than merely literature, painting, or music. As the narrator longs to
make the philistine see, “Life is an entire art . . . living means making of
oneself a work of art” (18:13). Dostoevsky’s program rests on exactly what
Gogol feared in the hands of the poor, the twin capacities to create and to
project oneself into other identities. Projection here harks back to the sen-
timental project more than it does to Pushkin or Gogol, however, for it is
closely allied with what Dostoevsky calls “public interests,” the will toward
a truly collective life (18:12). This is the same vision that so touched the
young man who meets and cannot forget Akaky Akakievich: the brotherhood
of man, an ideal whose traditional hurdle has always been the overlooking
of the poor and downtrodden. This union represents not primarily an ethi-
cal challenge for Dostoevsky but an aesthetic one, since sympathy is the
artist’s skill. Yet again poverty and imagination make natural bedfellows.
The liking for private circles is thus nothing but the antiaesthete’s
fear of communalism: “For public life one needs art, one needs to prepare
so many conditions—in short, better just to stay home [where the circles
meet]. There things are more natural, art’s not essential, it’s more peaceful”
(18:12). The philistine himself cries out for an artist’s creative touch. On
one hand, he is “an example of our raw material, as the Americans say, on
which not a drop of art has been spent” (18:13). On the other, “His kind
heart has never so much as dreamt that it is not enough to love passionately,
that one needs to possess as well the art of making others love you, without
which everything is lost” (18:13). This final condition is especially prescient,
looking far ahead to a problem in the improvisor tale which will begin to
haunt Dostoevsky only in later years. For if there is such a thing as an “art
of making others love you,” if admiration and respect are things which the
right talents should be able to inspire, then can a Russia which fails to win
over its distracted European audience ever rest in its battle for recognition?
174
By His Poverty
At this early stage, however, that future difficulty is of no moment.

Dostoevsky envisions complete success if only the philistine can meet the
necessary conditions:
Only given common interests, in sympathy with the whole of society and its
direct, unmediated needs, not in dozing, not in the indifference which makes
the whole collapse, not in isolation can his treasure, his capital, his kind heart
be polished into a precious, authentic diamond! (18:13–14)
Dostoevsky’s language here revives not only the underlying metaphor of

poverty and prosperity, but specifically the image Karamzin borrowed from
Sterne, the imaginative human being as a polished gem.10 Strakhov and
Gogol’s thinking as well can be discerned behind the metaphors: a form of
wealth (“treasure,” “capital”), but hidden away as an undeveloped inner po-
tential, abides for now within a state of poverty so rudimentary that the lack
of riches is overshadowed by a much more basic want of form. Again shape
and character are tantamount to wealth, formlessness goes hand in hand
with material shortfall because both are equally species of absence, and the
transition from not having to having can be effected only by art and inven-
tion. Imagination, for Gogol the worst trait of the social climber, one of
the proscribed riches he roughly equated (money, women, creativity), has
become for Dostoevsky precisely the right outlet for the energies of the
frustrated poor, the dreaming nature entitles us all to, and, as money’s alter-
native, a force for social cohesion rather than disintegration. In a land where
all repeats endlessly, aesthetic imagination can introduce a thousand novel-
ties, and where the philistine thinks only of himself, projective sympathy
can stitch together a mutual awareness. The answer to “What’s new?” if there
is to be one, must logically enough be the new word (18:11).
At this point, Dostoevsky suddenly interrupts his monologue and
mock-flagellates himself for forgetting to talk about appropriate feuilleton
topics, such as the fact that Jenny Lind has gone to London. But this turns
back into a reminder of the national poverty by comparison with Europe:
“But what is Jenny Lind to the St. Petersburg reader! He has plenty of his
own to be interested in. . . . But our own is just what we don’t have, gen-
tlemen, not even a bit” (18:15; ellipsis in original). It is not Jenny Lind, not
European art that Russia should be absorbed by, but the development of its
own aesthetic capacities; only they can make something appear where, for
now, there is nothing. The “quest for form” which Robert L. Jackson has
outlined as a primarily personal striving in Dostoevsky’s art thus has vital
national relevance from the very start of the writer’s career.11
Having endorsed art as a panacea for Russia’s ills, however, Dosto-
evsky refines his definitions in the last feuilleton (June 15) and circles back
to reclaim a small piece of the Gogolian legacy which he had so ostenta-
175
tiously jettisoned. This addendum shows how in a land just embarking on

its destiny, the imperatives of creativity may too easily be misunderstood.
Here Dostoevsky first describes the “dreamer” type prominent in his fic-
tion, sharply differentiating him from the true artist in the first feuilleton
(18:32).12 This falsely artistic individual seems to be a devotee of the power
of invention but, “at times wearied and exhausted as if from heavy labors,
yet in reality producing nothing whatsoever” (18:32), he in fact lacks “his
own individual creativity” (18:31).13 No surprise then that he loves to read
but gives up on the third page (18:33). Fantasies take him out of real life;
he would rather daydream than do. Such pseudo-artists are as self-absorbed
as Dostoevsky’s scoundrel with the kind heart; they shy away from the
“common interests” Dostoevsky again demands of committed art (18:34).
These uncreative minds prefer repetition to originality: if they have inter-
esting real-life experiences, they “try to repeat the same thing . . . copying”
what they felt the first time (18:34). This is another response to poverty—
the desire to avoid the arduous task of imagining something into being and
simply escape into a world of ready-made fantasies. The dreamer is the
Russian with the necessary capabilities for a full-fledged life of form-giving
who wastes them idly and who will never speak his own new word.
The intersection of poverty and originality proves equally problematic
at the other extreme—that of action. The dilemma is first embodied in
Raskol’nikov, who conceives of crime as a form of life-affirming creativity.
Propelled by a powerful awareness of all that is missing in his existence
(above all a meaningful and original identity but also money, food, a father,
self-respect, accomplishments), he undertakes one of poverty’s oldest reme-
dies: stealing. The obvious failure of robbery as a viable solution for the
Russian poor man’s dilemma is less significant than the thinking that moves
him. Raskol’nikov’s search for self is expressed, by a certain logic, as a flight
from others. He believes he has found the great virtue of poverty: it offers
independence, a way of being in the world but not too much of it. “Ras-
kol’nikov was unused to crowds and . . . for a month had been avoiding
every type of contact” (6:11). He treasures his freedom in every form: from
love, from relationship, from Razumikhin and the jobs he keeps offering,
from the claims of social decorum, from classes and comrades at the uni-
versity, from his mother and sister. As though acting out the urges of an im-
mature literature, Raskol’nikov pursues svoe slovo by fleeing from the
dialogues of the world and chuzhoe slovo, for chuzhoe slovo he narrow-
mindedly understands as a trap that leads only to unoriginality. As a robbery
committed with no true financial purpose, his crime is an attempt to ex-
punge the other, not an other, but the other per se, all others, from his life.
If an individual’s or nation’s independent selfhood can never be certain of
recognition, this is the ultimate declaration of self-sufficiency. Raskol’nikov
has had enough of other people’s sympathies, for he senses that the receipt
176
By His Poverty
of sympathy always leaves the poor man indebted to his benefactors—and

debt is just another turn of the vicious circle of not having. The criminal is
not, as Dostoevsky emphasizes, opposed to charity for others; several times
he gives what little he has to the needy. But he intently rejects all concern,
compassion, or love for himself, in the hope that even if he should end with
nothing, that nothing will at least, for the first time, be truly his.
Yet we are left to wonder how a nation of copiers ultimately can find
itself without resorting to theft or at least descending into hatred for those
who intimidate it to the point of oppression. This, in fact, is the topic of
Dostoevsky’s next novel, The Idiot, which undertakes to find an answer for
the poor man’s dilemma: how to speak a new word and thus assert oneself,
without violating the commandment to love others. The Idiot focuses on
the attempts of yet another poor hero—in fact, of yet another artist, though
this is not evident on first glance—to win over his audience using the “art
of making others love you.” Myshkin will have to find himself amidst other-
ness, be original while surrounded by copying, and extract an enduring sta-
bility from an identity which grows up without roots, knowing itself to be
radically self-conferred and yet resistant to the lures of self-centeredness.
This is a tall order.
THE COPY CLERK CHRIST
What is it that torments you? Poverty, destitution? But

poverty and destitution form the artist. They are insepara-
ble from a beginning.
—Dostoevsky, “Netochka Nezvanova”
Tolstoy’s scenario in “Lucerne,” where allusions to apocalyptic selfishness

compete for the story’s final word with an ideal of a redeeming Christian
brotherhood, returns a decade later, in a very different but strangely related
work where again real poverty is allied to art, “the poverty of our literature,”
and Russia’s status in Europe: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The novel, set partly
in Switzerland in a nod to its predecessor, puts on an implicit demonstra-
tion of a growing literary patrimony as it brings together a wealth of poor
figures from the past of Russian culture, as though Dostoevsky wanted to
create a forum in which the most famous poor in the Russian tradition
could mingle and sort out their differences. Karamzin’s poor singer, Pushkin’s
improvisor, Tolstoy’s Tyrolean, Poor Liza, Akaky Akakievich, the medieval
monk-copyist, Jesus Christ, and even Cleopatra (but poor and Russian this
time) are all present in one form or another, along with much of their various
supporting casts, establishing if nothing else a certain solidity of numbers.
The resemblance to Tolstoy’s story stems from the two works’ common
inspiration in “Egyptian Nights,” which, however, Dostoevsky, like Tolstoy,
177
interprets in the light of the Berne episode from Karamzin’s Letters.14 (Like
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky perceives in addition a lesson about Christian ethics in
“Egyptian Nights” which there is no evidence Pushkin intended.) In a jour-
nalistic sally into an 1861 debate over a public reading of Pushkin’s ostensi-
bly scandalous work, Dostoevsky made clear his deep admiration for the
fragment, which he called “one of the greatest works of art in Russian liter-
ature”; indeed Cleopatra’s feast was his favorite recitation piece along with
“The Prophet” (19:102). A follow-up article, “A Response to The Russian
Herald,” analyzes the literary merits of the work. Dostoevsky regards “Egyp-
tian Nights” as Pushkin’s commentary, albeit indirect, on Christ, a topic Push-
kin otherwise never broached in any serious way. Focusing on the Cleopatra
improvisation, Dostoevsky argues that Pushkin presents a glimpse of Ro-
man life, which, though brief, captures the core of the archaic mind-set and
lets us divine the entire world behind it.15 This is for Dostoevsky a most hor-
rible stage in history, and Cleopatra is its symbol, a monster, a perversion of
human nature, who shares Ivan Karamazov’s motto that all is permitted.16
All faith is lost; hope seems a mere pointless illusion; the capacity for thought
grows dull and disappears: the divine fire has forsaken it. . . . Everything re-
treats into the body, everything rushes into carnal dissipation and, to com-
pensate for the absent higher spiritual impressions, turns to anything capable
of exciting sensuality to stimulate the nerves and the body. (19:135)
Pushkin’s commentary on Christianity, in other words, works by inversion;

the poet shows us no Christ, but rather the palpable effect of his absence.
Dostoevsky interprets Cleopatra’s fascination with the youth as a sign of
nascent compassion, but since he read the older version, where the passage
occurs not at the end, he reasonably enough concludes that this moment of
grace is only temporary. The youth “looks the empress in the eyes and his
gaze shows such intoxication, such limitless rapture, so much radiant love
that the human being awakens briefly in the hyena, and the empress looks
at the youth with tenderness. She is still capable of tenderness! But only for
a moment. The human feeling fades away”—at this point, though he had
flatly prohibited any additions to the text, Dostoevsky cannot resist the in-
spiration of the moment and finishes with a flourish of his own—“but wild
animal elation flares up in her even more powerfully, perhaps precisely
because of the glance of the youth . . . and you understand the people to
whom our divine redeemer was to come. And the word as well you under-
stand: ‘redeemer’ . . .” (19:137; ellipses in original). Dostoevsky inserts a
new character into the story and “Egyptian Nights” suddenly becomes
a dramatization of the woeful consequences of the absence of caritas.17
The writer’s imagination, champing at the bit, would love to take us about
30 years forward to picture Cleopatra actually encountering Christ. Dosto-
evsky was so captivated by this idea that he built it into the plot of The
178
By His Poverty
Idiot. There it takes the form of the relationship between the hero and the
heroine.
The hero of Dostoevsky’s novel is Prince Lev Myshkin. Myshkin will
spend most of the novel as the possessor of a bequest from a distant rela-
tive (who manages, in the manner of a certain school of novel writing, to
both turn up and die in a single stroke), but his exceptional personality and
his peculiar behavior stem from his impoverished youth when, in his own
words, “I never had so much as a kopeck” (8:60). As we first meet him,
Myshkin admits with his affable smile that all his earthly possessions fit into
the small bundle he carries in his hand. This poor man is called upon by his
author to serve as a vision of a modern-day, human Christ, though charged
with no larger mission than living in the world.18 What a modern Jesus might
look like, however, is anything but self-evident; Dostoevsky pieces together
his “Prince Christ,” as Myshkin is called more than once in the notebooks,
in a peculiar way: from the images of several secular figures, all of them
poor men, in whose outlines he dimly espies the virtues he seeks.19
Myshkin begins as a clear reincarnation of Akaky Akakievich.20 The
first sign by which we know him is his inappropriate clothing; as he arrives
in Russia on the train, Myshkin is wearing a light cloak and shivering in the
winter cold. Even six months later, when he returns to Petersburg at the
start of part 2, dressed now in overly fashionable garb, he is still “a man
without the least interest in it, so that a careful examination of the prince
might give those rather too inclined toward mirth something to poke fun at.
But then there’s no shortage of things a man might laugh at” (8:159). In
“Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich’s own idiocy, his lack of words with which to
express himself (recurrent rumors assert that Myshkin too barely speaks
Russian), is symbolized by his use of togo (“that”) to fill verbal pauses. Dos-
toevsky borrows Gogol’s emblem when Nastasia Filippovna responds to
Myshkin’s completely unexpected offer of marriage: “Actually, you know,
maybe what they say about him is true that he . . . togo” (8:138). The Gogo-
lian connection is directly invoked, since the term signals idiocy literally.21
On the other hand, Dostoevsky works to uncover to public view the virtues
Gogol had hidden in Akaky Akakievich, allowing that Myshkin can still ex-
pect to meet with ridicule, but shifting the Gogolian balance so our sympa-
thies cleave to Myshkin rather than to his mockers.
At the same time, Myshkin is also Pushkin’s improvisor. The novel
opens with the hero on a train just about to arrive, like the Italian in “Egyp-
tian Nights,” in St. Petersburg. The scenario that follows can be described
in terms equally apt to both works. The hero’s strikingly un-Russian dress
reveals he is a newcomer to Russia. In his penury, his first task is to ingrati-
ate himself with unknown aristocrats, who hold the key to his survival. He
claims a kinship (“confrère” or distant family relation) to the aristocrats—
the claim of unrecognized brotherhood being the eternal claim of the
179
poor—arousing first scorn, then curiosity, and then a volatile and continu-
ally shifting mix of affection and anger. Soon Myshkin is informing his new-
found kin that his days in Switzerland were devoid of events and so
correspondingly filled with imagination: “I kept seeing visions of a big city
like Naples, full of palaces, noise, excitement, and life” (8:51). Naples is the
home of Pushkin’s improvisor, and if Myshkin has never been there in fact,
he has been there in the poet’s fashion, in his visions. The connections only
begin here.
At the Epanchins’, in exchange for a meal, Myshkin is sent to perform
in front of the three sisters and their mother (at Nastasia Filippovna’s party,
Ferdyshchenko will later announce as a joke that Myshkin “will pay his way”
[8:116] by singing a “fashionable romance” [8:117]). Lizaveta Prokofievna
has been informed by her husband that the stranger is some sort of “pitiful
idiot and practically a beggar [nishchii] accepting alms for his poverty”
(8:44). From the first scene of “Egyptian Nights” we now switch to the
third, where the improvisor gives his public performance. After lunch, Liza-
veta Prokofievna instructs him to tell some stories: “I would like to see how
you recount tales”; the stories should be interesting and well told, she adds
(8:47). The women begin to give him themes on which to improvise: his
impressions of Switzerland, love, executions.
Though Myshkin’s verbal creations are polished, he is actually speak-
ing sincerely from real experiences, not, in improvisatorial fashion, from an
alien viewpoint. The sisters, however, assume they are witnessing a perfor-
mance (one whispers: “It’s shameful of him to play-act” [8:48]). Myshkin
improvises in the proper sense when Adelaida, who tries to paint but hasn’t
an imaginative bone in her body (she by contrast is just taking up her brush
to “copy from a print a landscape she had begun long ago” [8:47]), admits
she can never come up with subjects on her own and asks Myshkin to sug-
gest one. He proposes the face of a condemned man—at which point she
asks him to develop the idea. Myshkin’s suggestion itself is directly from
“Egyptian Nights,” where Cleopatra’s lovers are all contemplating immi-
nent death and their fate turns on how she reads their faces, and where, for
that matter, all the topics proposed for the improvisor’s public performance
concern execution or imminent death. Looming behind these unfortunates,
of course, is Christ himself on the cross—though this is consistent, since
Christ is the key figure in Dostoevsky’s understanding of “Egyptian Nights.”22
Myshkin as both Christ and Cleopatra’s young man will then encounter
Cleopatra herself—Nastasia Filippovna—at her name-day party. A number
of parallels between Nastasia Filippovna and Cleopatra have been traced
by Diana Burgin, most obviously the gathering itself, where Nastasia Filip-
povna delights in perverse cruelty and then bargains for her favors, choos-
ing among three potential lovers.23 The scene depends, like Cleopatra’s feast,
on whether the “queen,” as Rogozhin calls her, will embrace cruelty or
180
By His Poverty
goodness (8:146); or, as Myshkin says when he first sees Nastasia Filip-
povna’s portrait: “It’s a proud face, terribly proud, and what I would like to
know is whether she is kind. Oh, if only she were kind! Everything would
be saved!” (8:32). The word “everything” here is spoken out of Dostoevsky’s
“Egyptian Nights” reading, and means everything in the sense of the apoc-
alyptic absolute, for this is mankind’s ultimate choice between kindness and
cruelty, and for Dostoevsky salvation quite literally hangs in the balance.
The writer has realized his dream ending for Pushkin’s story: Jesus has
come, uninvited, to introduce himself to Cleopatra. But the outcome—the
conversion to goodness, for Dostoevsky, can only be chosen freely and
never imposed, and must be performed by each individual individually—
remains open.
Among his several identities, Myshkin is most famous as Dostoevsky’s
“positively beautiful human being,” a wholly good and, since the Russian
epithet prekrasnyi applies equally to aesthetics, wholly beautiful man.24
That Myshkin is meant to be admirable, however, is in itself less significant
than how Dostoevsky envisions goodness. Qualities not normally associated
with morality become vital components of Myshkin’s psychology. Key among
them is the hero’s peculiar way of negotiating the shoals of poverty and
imagination, that is, the deeper forms of his resemblance to the copy clerk
and the improvisor. It has often been observed that Myshkin is a bit of an
artist, especially in his telling of stories.25 The trait is usually perceived as
incidental (Jesus after all was not an artist) or as an unnecessary and indeed
tragic accretion on the character of an otherwise noble man (Kovacs, Finke).
In fact, it is precisely Myshkin’s imaginative insight that constitutes
his goodness. For Dostoevsky, the artistic gift—which the novel will define
much as the Petersburg feuilletons had two decades earlier, and as “Egyp-
tian Nights” had a decade before that, as above all insight into otherness—
is the very soul of Christian virtue. Christianity, as Dostoevsky understands
it, is compassion, and compassion is art by another name.26 Dostoevsky sees
in Pushkin’s improvisor, in other words, an image of Christ—or the closest
thing to Christ that modern man can achieve. (This is not at all how Pushkin
seems to see the improvisor, of course.)27 The new Christ need not compose
or paint in the ordinary sense, but his characteristic feature is the artist’s
power of projecting himself into others. For this his poverty provides indis-
pensable training, since it teaches a crucial lesson in the rudiments of the
human psyche—lack, longing, suffering, and aloneness, those states that
most pressingly cry out for fellow understanding.
Myshkin’s prowess is multiply reinforced. He has an eye for paintings,
recalling ones he has seen abroad. We have no idea whether his taste is
good, but his viewing is committed and passionate and, significantly, he can
tell a copy from an original. He notes of a painting on Epanchin’s wall, “That
landscape I know; it’s a view in Switzerland. I’m certain the painter did it
181
firsthand and I’m certain that I’ve seen the spot: it’s in Uri canton” (8:25).
On his first day in Russia, Myshkin’s observant eye allows him to read Na-
stasia Filippovna from her photo-portrait (instantly sensing the deep suf-
fering that others overlook as they attempt to appease her pride), to give an
interpretation of Rogozhin from that morning’s meeting on the train, and to
brag that he has deduced the Epanchin women’s characters from their
faces.28 This is what Adelaida calls Myshkin’s ability of “looking” (8:50)—
looking and seeing deeply—a skill which, as Myshkin himself will later
claim with great heat, is vitally lacking in Russian society (8:458).
Myshkin’s entire career is a demonstration of the salvific potential of
the human imagination as over-read on both the confrontation scene be-
tween Cleopatra and her victims and the art of the Italian improvisor. What
will conquer, in the end, will be the art of compassion.29 Myshkin’s impro-
visation on the face of the dying for Adelaida’s benefit is explicitly a lesson
in art and empathy in extremis. Myshkin intuits the feelings of the con-
demned man looking out at the crowd: “There are ten thousand of them
there and none of them being executed, but I am” (8:55). Perhaps no greater
metaphor for nonpossession can be dreamt, since those without even time
have literally nothing left. The condemned are maximally cut off from hu-
manity, most painfully alienated; they furnish the ultimate exercise in fel-
low feeling and thus necessarily the ultimate literary exercise. Since the
dying never return to tell tales (Dostoevsky, who once underwent a mock-
execution, famously being one of the rare exceptions), their experience is
only to be known at second hand, “with a little imagination” (8:20), as
Myshkin puts it while telling the same story to the butler, or when unfold-
ing the methodology to Adelaida: “You must imagine here everything that
had happened leading up to it, everything, absolutely everything” (8:55).
What was explicit in Cleopatra is still implicit here: in this moral sense, the
viewer of the condemned colludes in the cruelty to the extent that his imag-
ination is not fired by the face of the other.
To Adelaida Myshkin specifically recommends painting a man (he has
in mind a particular criminal he once really saw) at “that very moment when
he has ascended the ladder and just set foot on the scaffold. Here he
glanced my way. I looked at his face and understood everything” (8:55).30
What Myshkin understood is truly remarkable: in the man’s face he intuits,
for example, what time the convict awoke that morning (5 a.m.), and what
he ate for breakfast (wine, coffee, and beef ). Myshkin practically admits he
is playing loose with the facts, embellishing his story to bring out its full ex-
periential poignancy by later calling the man “as white as paper, exactly like
white writing paper”—shortly before, Myshkin’s own facility with a pen was
linked to Epanchin’s elegant writing paper (8:56). The man’s face is another
blank sheet, and our job is to write on it; Myshkin understands sympathy as
a creative act.
182
By His Poverty
The excess of detail is meant to point up Myshkin’s insight. He may

not be right, of course, but for Dostoevsky only by picturing such possible
circumstances and trying to enter into them ourselves can we appreciate
the meaning of any human event. Myshkin’s technique suggests that to un-
derstand an experience truly is necessarily to understand it as my own.
Truth in the mundane sense is superseded at this point by imagination; the
obvious verity—that I am of course not the other—is indisputable, but no
longer sufficient. As Dostoevsky noted in his drafts to the novel, “Compas-
sion is the whole of Christianity,” and it is practically the whole of Myshkin’s
simple message (9:270).
The irony of the novel’s title is that rather than retiring from public
concourse, as the etymology of the term “idiot” suggests, Myshkin is as im-
mersed in public interests as humanly possible: he takes such interest in
others and their affairs that he hardly has any of his own.31 Myshkin’s sole
“private” aspiration, divulged so unsuccessfully at the party where he breaks
the vase, lies in working toward the formation of a superior Russian society
(even his most personal thoughts concern the collective). Again, the true
artist is not to be confused with the dreamer. The dreamer is someone like
General Ivolgin, whose “colossal mythomania” takes him away from reality
and into a fantasy world where inventiveness serves no purpose (Frank,
Miraculous Years, 330). With his contrived tales of being Napoleon’s page
boy or knowing Myshkin’s father, he ends up alienating others rather than
drawing them nigh. Nor is he above stealing stories, as when Nastasia Fi-
lippovna catches him repeating an anecdote word for word from L’Indépen-
dance Belge (his source is a European paper, of course). His tales are false,
self-absorbed (he is always the hero), and ultimately tedious, full of imagi-
nation but in all the wrong senses. A sham improvisor, Ivolgin represents
the less important aspect of that art, the faculty of instantaneous fabrica-
tion, without its truly important component, insight into other identities.
Not surprisingly, poverty has visited General Ivolgin late in life, when
his personality was already formed. And it is not for nothing that he is the
father of Varya and Ganya, whose response to poverty is singularly literalis-
tic; they are indifferent to creativity and hence devoid of insight into those
operating around them, and their only aim in life is to marry into money.32
As Fanger has shown, Dostoevsky’s romantic realism depends on the pas-
sionate conviction that the artist cannot be limited to the depiction of the
already attested and the fully visible, but must push on to intuit and repre-
sent what lies beyond the ordinary and the obvious, what lies—at first
glance—in the realms of the future, the inchoate, or even the fantastically
improbable.33 As he wrote to Maikov while finishing up The Idiot:
I have completely different concepts of reality and realism than do our real-
ists and critics. My idealism is more real than their realism. . . . With their
realism you couldn’t explain one percent of the real facts that have actually
183
occurred. Whereas we, with our idealism, have even prophesied facts. It has
happened. (28.2:329)
Dostoevsky’s bragging refers to the Danilov case, in which his artist’s sup-
positions about Raskol’nikov were “confirmed” by a real crime reported in
the press (PSS, 7:349–50). He had, in other words, guessed correctly what
Russia’s future held. Genuine imagination, then, is guided by a deep instinct
for truths whose time has not quite come, or which are difficult for all but
artists to recognize. It enters sympathetically into the contours of other psy-
ches and perhaps also the invisible structures of history and causality. It is
the only path, for Dostoevsky, to those truths not yet fully formed—like the
national essence itself—which crowded the world of nineteenth-century
Russia, and the fact that The Idiot ends in disaster rather than Dostoevsky’s
longed-for salvation should not be taken to discredit it.
Part 3 of the novel opens with a long, rather peculiar passage about
railway personnel and personal weirdness, written in the type of unreliable
narratorial voice Robin Feuer Miller explores; the skaz (stylized viewpoint),
however, should not undermine our faith in Dostoevsky’s meaning.34 Rus-
sia, the narrator announces, is said to lack practical people. The trains, for
example, cannot find the necessary staffing. The passage is an assault on the
concept of practical people; to them the narrator counterpoises people with
quirks and imagination. (Dostoevsky, of course, is not arguing that trains
should be run by incompetents, merely that common sense is not the high-
est human faculty.) Yes, it is commonly assumed that “a shortage of origi-
nality” is the key to being able to get things done; one must be able to focus
on the essential, not get lost in dreams (8:269). Dostoevsky here intention-
ally uses a word for inventiveness with negative connotations; an original in
Russian can be a crank or a crackpot. But so, by definition, would be any-
one speaking svoe slovo.
The reference to trains is premeditated. As Lebedev explains, the rail-
way in The Idiot signifies the coming of the apocalypse, a Trojan horse in
which selfishness and inhumanity lurk in the belly of advanced European
institutions.35 The train images onrushing destruction spawned by the iron
logic of rational thinking, while its rails figure undeviating impulses and
blind obedience, and thus unoriginality. In such a world, the key figures are
those eccentrics who “leave the rails”—objects of horror in society, every
mother’s greatest fear, but, for Dostoevsky, the only ones throwing their
weight against the juggernaut (8:269).36 The writer would like a society of
artists, not trainmen. “Proper” Russian society, naturally, sees only deviation
and failure in that which “is distinguished by any personal initiative or
which has hopped off the rails due to . . . an inclination toward originality”
(8:270). Thus if the train symbolizes all that is wrong with Russia, artistic
sensitivity and freedom from the bonds of convention mark the beginning
of all that is right.
184
By His Poverty
The type of imagination that provides insight into others is not an

incorruptibly kind or compassionate thing, however, as the new Cleopatra
shows. Like Myshkin’s, her sympathetic power is inseparable from a pro-
pensity for flouting precedents and decorum. The outrages and scandals with
which Nastasia Filippovna peppers the novel testify to a real inventive tal-
ent; in his personal shorthand, Totskii calls her a “fantastic woman” (8:39).
Nastasia Filippovna was born the daughter of an “extremely poor landowner”
(8:35). She grows up much like Myshkin, orphaned, painfully aware that
she has “not a thing of my own,” and taken in by a neighbor (8:138). At
the age of 16, she is seduced by her benefactor. Dostoevsky here is per-
forming a literary experiment. Pushkin had asked, not in “Egyptian Nights,”
but in another fragment, “We Were Spending the Evening at a Sum-
mer House,” where one might uncover a modern Cleopatra in nineteenth-
century Russia, implying the age was so colorless—in anticipation of
Gogol’s plaint, but with a different meaning—that the hunt would be diffi-
cult. Dostoevsky proposes his own answer: the best way to produce a blood-
thirsty monster who destroys men just for the pleasure of it is to “grow”
one—from Poor Liza.
Nastasia Filippovna is a former Liza—Karamzin’s story had been one
of Dostoevsky’s favorites while growing up—but with one crucial modifica-
tion: the power of imagination has been hers from youth. Like Myshkin, she
was physically immobilized in her formative years and turned her energies
to literature and a life of fantasy. Both read prolifically, the only characters
in the book of whom this is said (Myshkin, though raised abroad, announces
he has read many Russian books).37 This is not Karamzin’s universe, how-
ever; reading and innocence are now not opposites but corollaries. When
the new Liza learns of her lover’s deception, she turns to her fantasy. She
dreams many things. First she dreams Myshkin, a decent man who would
absolve her of blame for being a fallen woman.
And didn’t I dream of you myself ? You’re right, I have long dreamt of you,
even when I was on his estate and lived for five years in total isolation; you’d
spend so much time thinking and dreaming—and all the while it was some-
one like you I imagined, kind, honorable, decent and just as foolish as you
are, who would suddenly come and say: “You are not guilty, Nastasia Filip-
povna, and I adore you!” Yes, and sometimes you would get so carried away
dreaming that you might go mad. (8:144)
This is genuine Dostoevskian imagination: Nastasia Filippovna’s vision comes

true, not through her own doing but through her own divination (it is not
for nothing she and Myshkin alone realize from the start what fate awaits
her in Rogozhin’s embrace). That this skill is the prince’s own, rather than
a perversion of it, is clear from his admission that he has dreamt of Nastasia
Filippovna as well, as though the author meant to underscore the prophetic
185
potential of imagining by making it still more improbable. Nastasia Filip-

povna, seeing Myshkin for the first time, stammers, “What’s this, really it
seems as if I’ve seen him somewhere before?” to which Myshkin replies—
perhaps Dostoevsky is also drawing attention to the connection with
“Egyptian Nights”—“This is precisely how I imagined you. . . . It’s as though
I’d seen you somewhere as well. [. . .] I’m sure I’ve seen your eyes some-
where. . . . but that cannot be! I don’t know what I was thinking. . . . I’ve
never even been here before. Or perhaps it was in a dream. . . .” (8:89–90).
While still in Totskii’s clutches, Nastasia Filippovna feels the Karam-
zinian model to be her only option; she continues, “And then this one [Tot-
skii] would come: he’d spend two months out of the year, shame me,
outrage, incense, and despoil me, and leave—I wanted to throw myself into
the pond a thousand times, but I was too lowly and lacked the courage”
(8:144). But when some years later news unexpectedly reaches her that Tot-
skii plans to marry and she realizes her shame is sealed, she begins to dream
other things. Totskii’s Erastian visits to the countryside suddenly halt. Like
Liza, Nastasia Filippovna appears in the city on her own, unexpectedly; be-
fore him, Totskii beholds “a completely different woman” (8:36). He tries
the Karamzinian escape—throwing money at the problem and running the
other way—but his scheme to corrupt her with luxury fails. For this is now
the jaded and barbaric empress, dulled to pleasure and bodily pain alike.
She lives, it seems when she first appears, only to enjoy the cruelty she can
inflict on others. And at that she is extremely proficient.
The problem, for Totskii, Epanchin, Ganya, and even Rogozhin, is that
she understands them so well and they understand her so little. All of them
know only that she is infinitely unpredictable, or as they continually call her,
“original [original’naia],” spoken with derision but even more fear (for ex-
ample, 8:114, 115). Almost anyone in her situation could be expected to
pursue revenge “without deviating too eccentrically from the norm,” but
not Nastasia Filippovna (8:37). She realizes exactly how to manipulate Tot-
skii because she can put herself in his shoes. “He realized that she had stud-
ied and understood him through and through” (8:38). What she knows, of
course, is rather comical: he would not so much fear death at her hands, a
very real possibility as he understands it, but her ability to make it infinitely
shameful, by dealing it “in such an unnatural and unwonted form” that even
if he survived the attempt his reputation would be ruined forever (8:38).
Such punishment “off the rails” far outstrips anything young women, in Tot-
skii’s experience, are supposed to be capable of meting out.
To her name-day party Nastasia Filippovna has invited one of her
“original old fellows,” eccentrics who serve no purpose except to be out of
place with the rich guests (8:119); Ferdyshchenko likewise considers his
own presence at the table with the others inexplicable, the point being pre-
cisely that “it was impossible even to imagine” (8:117). The scandal, in other
186
By His Poverty
words, is at bottom imagination itself, as seen from the socially “proper”

viewpoint that has no use for it. When Ferdyshchenko suggests a twisted
parlor game consisting of recounting one’s worst deed—Nastasia Filip-
povna finds the idea “terribly original”—she immediately sees how to har-
ness it to her purposes: everyone will watch while Totskii lies; it is not that
his story of hijacked flowers is untrue but rather that everyone knows the
much worse misdeed which Totskii is too faint-hearted to mention (8:120).
If she cannot make Totskii confess the harm he has done her, she can make
him publicly display the cowardice of refusing to do so. Here we see the di-
alectical Dostoevsky at work: not only the sensitivity to other psyches that
Myshkin wields but even the confession that others are inclined to perform
in his presence has become an efficient weapon of hatred in Nastasia Filip-
povna’s hands.
What is strange about The Idiot is that these two central figures for
originality begin so obviously as copies from other literary works. More
striking still, Myshkin, whose “strangeness and originality” Nastasia Filip-
povna discerns even before he proposes marriage to her, is cloned from a
man, Akaky Akakievich, who is himself a copyist (8:118). Dostoevsky seems
to be suggesting that the path to one’s own word leads through imitation.
When asked by General Epanchin if he has any marketable skill, Myshkin
shows off his “magnificent” penmanship (8:25). Epanchin, though fatuous,
is probably correct: Myshkin has no right to hope for more than the Gogo-
lian destiny: “an easy position somewhere in the civil service” where he can
live off his handwriting skills (8:25).38
Dostoevsky takes pains to emphasize the duplicative essence of every-
thing Myshkin writes in his demonstration for Epanchin: Myshkin’s hand is
anything but his own. The prince first writes in medieval Russian script,
“The humble Abbot Pafnutii hereby affixeth his name” (8:29). This is repli-
cation at its acme: the words and their style are copies; the phrase he chooses
is a signature, sign of someone else’s unique identity (Finke, 79–80); and
they do not even come from an original document, but from a reproduction
of a copy. (Myshkin found it in a book of medieval texts compiled by Pogo-
din; Dostoevsky has his hero copy the only signature in the book, which
contained lithographs of 44 documents, all but one unsigned [PSS, 9:431].)
As Epshtein has emphasized, however, Dostoevsky means us to per-
ceive the link between this proficiency at mimicking and Myshkin’s insight
into others. Measuring the distance between his own manner of scripting
and an alien example, Myshkin has learned to chart the coordinates of an-
other psyche. Given his closeted youth, his interpretation of the human face
and the capacity of rendering it into vivid verbal portraits can only have
been honed in the school of silent and aloof penmanship. Myshkin makes
the connection almost explicit in his manner of describing another sample,
the work of a military scribe:
187
This is how one writes an official document to an important addressee, also a

round script, a wonderful one, an unpolished script, written as a draft but
with exquisite taste. A calligrapher would not have allowed these flourishes
or perhaps I should say these attempts at flourishes, these unfinished little
half-tails here—you see—and yet on the whole, if you have a look, you must
admit it produces the character and indeed, here you can see the whole soul
of the military scribe shining through: he would love to let his hair down, his
talent is begging to come out, but the military collar is tight around his neck
and so there’s a discipline even to the handwriting—how lovely! (8:29)
Gogol had jokingly doubted in “Overcoat” whether it was possible to see

into another’s soul; Dostoevsky answers that it is, especially for those trained
to conform their own hand and spirit to another’s bidding. The lack of a pat-
rimony, the absence of svoe, in other words, offers a natural compensation:
those with nothing of their own come to feel at home in alterity and can
learn to make it divulge its secrets.
The illness during which Myshkin must have mastered the art of cal-
ligraphy is significant, for it is both an intensification of the copyist’s
dilemma of a loss of self and the mirror of a national predicament. Myshkin
has been abroad all his formative years in a sanitarium recovering from
some sort of vague complication involving but not limited to epilepsy. Root-
less and confused, with nothing of his own to fall back on, neither identity,
past, nor possessions, Myshkin suffers from the Russian ailment par excel-
lence; meanwhile, the overwhelming intimations of a universal synthesis
and complete belonging which visit him during his attacks are paid for by a
redoubled disintegration of the psyche the rest of the time. That this loss of
self qualifies also as the burden of every improvisor Dostoevsky signals by
putting Pushkin’s key term in Myshkin’s mouth: “From the very start some-
thing was calling [pozyvalo]” (8:50); “It kept calling me somewhere [zovet
vsë kuda-to]” (8:51). Myshkin explains his malaise to the sisters as first of all
a lack of self-sensation: in Switzerland, he never knew quite what he was ex-
periencing. Concomitantly, he was completely unable to express himself;
Dostoevsky is adamant about this condition, having Myshkin explain several
times that only now, in retrospect, is he even able to put words to his for-
mer state. Then he was simply mute, himself barely cognizant of his feel-
ings. Speaking svoe slovo doesn’t enter the novel till much later and in a
different context, but Myshkin has felt the need to do so in the most vis-
ceral and basic way. Myshkin’s most tormenting recollection, however, is of
the unutterable foreignness of everything around him; this total discon-
nectedness is the ultimate expression of the lack of patrimony. “I remem-
ber: the sorrow I felt was unbearable; I even wanted to weep. . . . I found
it horrifying that it was all alien [chuzhoe], that much I comprehended. The
alienness was killing” (8:48; emphasis in original).
188
By His Poverty
To be sure, a Russian abroad might well feel out of place. But Mysh-
kin is tormented by a metaphysical or spiritual foreignness, for as in the
tales of executed men or Marie the Swiss pariah, separation and aloneness
are for him the universal human predicament, even for those surrounded
by large crowds. His depression, however, is dispelled when Myshkin hears
a donkey bray in the Basel marketplace. At a moment of profound loneli-
ness, when we might expect him to want to share his feelings with someone,
Myshkin takes to a creature that one cannot speak to and that can never
speak back. Dostoevsky reinforces this by having Myshkin call the donkey
“a kind and helpful person [chelovek]” (8:49), which soon has the sisters gig-
gling and later would appall Tolstoy (Gor’kii, 63). Myshkin’s image of the
donkey is of a “a most helpful animal”: he is drawn to it because it is “hard-
working, strong, patient, inexpensive, and imperturbable” (8:48). Not a
word is said about the women who raised Myshkin, whom we discover
much later he loved and must have missed at this moment. For Myshkin is
seeking not a friend or caretaker, but something again to copy—a model of
how to be in a world scarred by distance and discontinuity.
This is an important ethical and poetic moment. Myshkin admires the
donkey’s other-orientedness; its traits are of value not primarily to itself. Yet
in choosing to imitate, Myshkin performs a strikingly original act. With one
eye on the plight of the nation’s literature, Dostoevsky suggests that total
originality is a chimera. Such freedom from all influence is the pure chaos,
the idiocy Myshkin is struggling to escape, the solipsism of self-absorption.
The emergence to lucidity is rather an act of identification or attraction in
which the self is constituted out of the other, for every self finds the other
as a category preexistent and at first more perfectly formed. Complete orig-
inality, Dostoevsky asserts, espousing the idea Pushkin contemplates but
never quite accepts in “Egyptian Nights,” is not the freedom from the other,
but a way of finding oneself amidst others. The relationship between “re-
writing” and writing grows unprecedentedly complex as Dostoevsky pieces
together a hero broad enough to accommodate both the copy clerk’s strug-
gle to reach himself and the improvisor’s very different struggle to reach
the other.
Myshkin finishes up his handwriting test with several calligraphic
gems. He pens the abbot’s signature again, but now in a script that though
Russian is designed to reproduce the “broad curving” stroke he found in the
work of a French street scribe of the eighteenth century (8:29). “I’ve trans-
lated the French character into the Russian letters, which is quite difficult,
but it turned out well,” Myshkin brags of his feat of perelozhenie na nashi
nravy (8:29).39 There then follows another gesture toward “Overcoat” in the
letters that delight him (“Have a look at these round d’s and a’s” [8:29]).
Dostoevsky accentuates the parallels with Gogol’s clerk on purpose, to show
189
how copying can expand by degrees into a powerfully creative act. The au-
thor is attacking the distinction between svoe slovo and chuzhoe slovo—not
because each is already penetrated by the other and no longer exists in its
pure form, but because his highest ideal is a moment of self-articulation in
which multiple consciousnesses speak in one self.
Myshkin finally writes, “Zeal conquers all” in Russian letters done in
a simple elegant English style; then, in another variation, that already dual
style is crossed with the slightly heavier hand of a traveling French sales-
man. Dostoevsky is challenging Gogol, as if to show that he can redeem
whatever his predecessor rendered ridiculous. We half expect Myshkin to
go on to describe what the French salesman was wearing, in Gogolian fash-
ion but in the service of an argument whose admiration for fluid human
identities is distinctly anti-Gogolian. All of Myshkin’s copies—like Myshkin,
who is one himself—transcend their originals, but not in a spirit of viola-
tion. His calligraphy recombines and harmonizes, while he himself teases
out hidden potentials in his non-Dostoevskian sources. Myshkin’s use of an
abbot’s signature is emblematic, as it in effect restores to Akaky Akakievich
the association with monastery life (and, as Myshkin’s own later deeds will
make clear, the connected virtue) that was left merely implicit in the for-
mer’s smallness.
Myshkin’s hybrid Russian/English/French script, which further rec-
onciles the three different social classes of its original writers, suggests a
resolution to the dilemma of Russian literature. In it we see the clear im-
print of his own inventiveness, yet his personality emerges primarily by its
effacement; Myshkin’s orchestration is everywhere present, but at first
glance, one sees only ancient Russia or commercial France. This feat ad-
umbrates the image of the iconically Russian artist Dostoevsky will settle
upon at the end of his career.
Unfortunately, as Myshkin discovers in Nastasia Filippovna, reconcil-
ing human souls proves more difficult than combining handwriting styles,
even if his principles are impeccable. The new Cleopatra resembles the old
in her behavior, but she arrives by very different, indeed exactly reversed,
psychological mechanisms. She puzzles Myshkin because, as a preemi-
nently Russian Cleopatra, her towering hatred turns out to be directed at
herself. This is a problem even Christ cannot solve easily. She acts not from
a surfeit of pleasures but from the raw and trampled pride of the poor and
humiliated, the classically Dostoevskian urge for self-laceration. The “pas-
sionate Russian nature of ours” Myshkin cites pushes her equally Russian
selflessness and deep thirst for justice to an extreme where they become
unmasterable (8:452).40 The original image of her as a vicious monster who
delights in General Ivolgin’s story of a lapdog tossed out of a train window
or a self-confident tormentor who destroys men for entertainment thus
proves to be entirely misleading.
190
By His Poverty
Nastasia Filippovna is only embittered to a state of resembling Cleo-

patra because of her powerful sense of morality—as Skaftymov first noted,
her sexual mores are above reproach—and as a moral being, she does not
allow herself to deal others anything more than insults (Skaftymov, 142–
45).41 Before her wedding, she is again at Myshkin’s feet, racked with sobs
at the thought of despoiling his innocence with her corruption. Unlike even
Poor Liza, she refuses to propagate the cycle of vice; better it should stop
with her. Thus the faces of her victims at the name-day party do not arrest
Myshkin’s eye half as much as does her own, for the unjust wrath in her
heart is self-directed. Thus also the Russian Cleopatra loses interest in wit-
nessing the execution of others; the only execution she will allow is the one
she arranges at novel’s end. If nothing else, such a death will at last make a
persuasive display of her guiltlessness. This is the final challenge to com-
passion Dostoevsky sees: those who in a spirit of compassion are willing to
acknowledge that hatred of others is a sin (Nastasia Filippovna forgets Tot-
skii after the first quarter of the novel), but who nonetheless refuse to give
up their right to hate themselves.42
Dostoevsky seems to regard this scenario as quintessentially Russian
and typical of those of his characters who have known deprivation: a pas-
sionate urge to see wrongs righted, turned against itself by the despair of
the downtrodden, leads a character to excess. Dostoevsky takes a certain
perverse satisfaction in the demonstration that the country’s practical disas-
ters are compensated by powerfully good intentions that, though unreal-
ized, augur well for the future. When someone mistakenly derives Russia’s
propensity for extremity “partly from our oversatiety, and partly from . . .
ennui,” Myshkin offers a slight correction: “It’s precisely ‘from ennui, our
ennui,’ not from oversatiety but rather just the opposite, from thirst [. . .]
even from fever, from an inflamed thirst!” (8:452). The malady that Nasta-
sia Filippovna shares with her homeland, in other words, is the hunger of
the poor, not the satiety of the rich, the unhappy conviction that the world
is awry, rather than the tired certainty that all is well.
What Nastasia Filippovna suffers is a version of the copyist’s anxiety,
one she shares with the hero of Notes from the Underground (another poor
copy clerk): the inability to reclaim one’s own word amidst so many hostile
alien words. For all her originality, she lacks the temerity that led Raskol’ni-
kov to reject all others; she cannot quite define herself and say her own
word, if only whispering to herself that she is truly not at fault. Hence she
is doomed to repeat in her own self-estimation society’s evaluation of her.43
In Nastasia Filippovna’s heart, chuzhoe slovo will always speak louder than
svoe. This collusion in an unfair self-abnegation Dostoevsky means us to see
as something unhealthy but distinctly laudable. Poverty and humility pro-
duce in both the novel’s heroes the same sensitivity to alterity, the same
submission to and appropriation of alien voices. But the loss of self that
191
rejoices Myshkin casts Nastasia Filippovna into despair. There is no middle

ground; as in “Egyptian Nights,” finding another person inside oneself begets
either love or hatred.
In criticism over the last few decades, the halo of Myshkin has ac-
quired something of a tilt, Dostoevsky’s references to “Prince Christ” in the
drafts notwithstanding. These rereadings draw on his spectacular failure in
teaching and converting; at the end of the novel, not only does Nastasia Fi-
lippovna refuse his help and die under Rogozhin’s blade, Aglaia has married
into dreaded Catholicism, Rogozhin languishes in Siberia, a murderer, and
Myshkin is again in Switzerland, plunged back into idiocy apparently for-
ever. Why Myshkin should be responsible for the mess is less obvious,
though a variety of arguments have been advanced: either he monologizes
others, a move their pride is bound to make them resist (Kovacs, Emerson);
or he imposes a shallow and foreign Rousseauian model of human redemp-
tion on a recalcitrant Russian reality, trying inappropriately to save Nastasia
Filippovna as he saved the Swiss girl Marie (Kovacs, Finke); or he enter-
tains “double thoughts” that drive Rogozhin to a crime that might otherwise
have been avoided, a bit like Ivan will later do with Smerdyakov (Wasiolek,
Kovacs, Bethea); or he simply fails to effect the divine synthesis he glimpses
in his preepileptic transports.
This last criticism, the one most obviously supported by the text, is
voiced by Holquist, who traces Myshkin’s failings back to the irremediable
disjuncture between earthly and holy chronotopes (that is, the discrepancy
between the type of time and therefore events depictable in novels and the
type of ultimate chronology and events reserved for divine agents). Holquist
chides Myshkin for trying to span an unspannable gap, to make history link
up with kairos (divine time). Yet Holquist himself suggests the difficulty
with such an objection when he observes that the ultimate reconciliation of
man with man was not effected even by Christ himself (123).44 Christ has
come, provided the model of loving compassion that Dostoevsky cherished
above all else, and yet hatred, violence, and enmity persist into Dostoevsky’s
day, unabated.
Certainly, Myshkin is meant to be plausible as a human being, very
good but not perfect. He has flaws like doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, and
especially inexperience; he can be annoyed when Ganya insistently calls
him “idiot” or when he has to hurry to Nastasia Filippovna’s party and Gen-
eral Ivolgin wastes his time. He even has double thoughts, suspecting ill of
people—though rather accurately, it should be pointed out. But any impor-
tant shortcomings that might be attributed to him derive from his likeness,
not his dissimilarity, to his model; and thus whether they are flaws is debat-
able. Christ did not stay Judas, though he knew what he would do. His
earthly story ends in suffering and crucifixion, not triumph.
192
By His Poverty
Myshkin’s admonition to Nastasia Filippovna that in insulting Ganya’s

mother she is merely playing Cleopatra, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself !
As if you are really the way you just acted,” may well monologize, but, as
similarly with Rogozhin, his injunction is simply not to hate oneself, that no
one is wholly evil even in the midst of an evil act (8:99). Undoubtedly, this
truth is difficult for some to accept, and such recalcitrance should be taken
into account. But Nastasia Filippovna certainly does not submit to Ro-
gozhin’s knife to prove Myshkin’s faith in her goodness wrong; she does so
because she hates herself, and did before Myshkin ever appeared. Rogozhin
likewise murders not at Myshkin’s underhanded behest but from his own vi-
olently passionate nature. On the few occasions when Myshkin does mono-
logize, he does so in the same manner as Dostoevsky’s Christ: for absolute
truths, such as the need for compassion, are nonnegotiable, even in Dosto-
evsky. Dostoevsky’s Christian existential ethic presumes that individuals re-
tain the prerogative to make their own choices, but the truly right answers
remain right regardless.
Perhaps the issue should be posed in light of “Egyptian Nights.” If
Dostoevsky’s scenario were to be played out—if the real Christ came to the
real Cleopatra—would he convert her to goodness? We cannot know, but
we can be certain a failure would not sully the purity of his image or his
message, any more than does the failure of Jesus in Ivan Karamazov’s poem
to convert the Grand Inquisitor. Goodness cannot forcibly transform the
world, though the Inquisitor wishes it would, for that very force would com-
promise it. Put another way, the tragic ending of The Idiot is the only one
consistent with the model, for to believe in Christ and at the same time to
take a burning interest in this-worldly events, as Dostoevsky does, is of ne-
cessity to believe that his work here remains undone. For it is a cornerstone
of Dostoevsky’s understanding of Christianity that Christ’s work is intention-
ally undoable by him alone.45 Despite its novelty, Myshkin’s tale at bottom re-
mains an improvisor’s. And it runs into exactly the obstacle we should expect:
audience resistance. Myshkin touches those he meets with his aesthetico-
spiritual prowess, but if they are not lured in identifying with him as he
throughout has identified with them, the responsibility is theirs.
THE PUSHKIN SPEECH
The original writer is not the one who imitates no one,

but he whom no one can imitate.
—Châteaubriand
Myshkin’s skill never comes to fruition in the novel. That result is left for
another hero more than a decade later. As Myshkin is “copied” from pre-
193
decessors, so he begets a double of his own.46 Like so much in the novel, it

comes from “Egyptian Nights.” This time, however, Dostoevsky mobilizes
that work’s author himself. This Pushkin, passionately eulogized and mythol-
ogized in Dostoevsky’s dedicatory speech at the opening of the poet’s Mos-
cow monument in 1880, harks back to “Egyptian Nights” in that his artistic
method is defined as improvisation in the copyist’s sense of borrowing the
materials of art from others (rather than in the secondary sense of instanta-
neous composition). Though impecunious heroes can be found in many
other Dostoevsky works, it is only here—where poverty, while still crucial,
is presumed more than openly addressed—that Dostoevsky finds a satisfac-
tory end for the metanarrative of need, reconceiving the poor improvisor in
Pushkin’s story as, at bottom, a mask for his own author.
The speech, the crowning achievement of his own career as Dostoev-
sky saw it, praises Pushkin as the exemplary Russian (in the dual romantic
sense, as both typical and prophetic), the Russian spirit brought to com-
plete realization for the first and only time. Dostoevsky makes the impro-
visatory skill of sympathetic projection the nation’s great contribution to the
march of history. (There is of course a serious problem to be addressed, since
in “Egyptian Nights,” the skill belongs not to the Russian, but the Italian;
Dostoevsky, however, has an answer.) The oration credits the poet with the
sole full manifestation of this gift in all world culture. In his works Pushkin
perceives and represents other identities from within, not as other—which
many can do—but as self, as each different individual or nation perceives
its own being. In the end the heart of the Russian poet, flooded with multi-
ple foreign identities, becomes the only possible ground on which all nations
can meet on equal terms, each—including Russia—assured of receiving its
due. Thus mankind’s penchant for conflict, for privileging self over other,
stands to be resolved. Dostoevsky’s hyperbolic messianism here is less im-
portant than the nature of the ideal he advances, for this is the ultimate
apotheosis of the poor man’s—or now, as the metaphor translates it, the
poor nation’s—imagination as the force that can literally save the world.
Russia has been elected to pronounce Christ’s “final word”—an opportunity
that is still open since Dostoevsky’s Christ refuses to speak it himself on
principle (26:148). The Idiot had intimated one possible ending for the world,
the dark ending of money carried out by the scion of a fabulously wealthy
merchant family.47 Now Dostoevsky proposes an alternative consummation,
the ending via artistic creativity, apocalyptic in the positive sense, as human
spiritual development promises to reach its climactic stage.
Dostoevsky’s Pushkin retraces the writing career of Myshkin. The poet
begins by mimicking European literary schools, learning everything they
can teach. Pushkin studies not only genres but also the European view-
points they embody, mastering Byron’s or Chenier’s style, finding the cor-
responding Russian realia into which they might be translated, and most
194
By His Poverty
important learning sensitivity, learning to see through Byron’s or Chenier’s

eyes. The lack of a native literary patrimony leads the poet to open himself
fully to the wealth of forms contained in the outside world. Well aware of
the stigma of imitation, Dostoevsky insists that no Pushkin work is deriva-
tive: “Even Pushkin’s very first narrative poems were no mere imitations, so
that even in them we find expressed the exceptional independence of his
genius” (26:137). Nevertheless, the key to this period is Pushkin’s deep
probing of alterity.
In his second stage, Pushkin turned his attention entirely to Russia;
here the task was still harder: to descry the Russian essence, what it was that
both defined the nation and might show how it was fated to develop. As
Gogol and Kireevskii had argued, the challenge was great because Russia
had not yet come into its own and so lacked a perceptible identity. The
result we have already seen: the poet was required to mentally complete his
people’s growth before he could begin to depict it artistically. The heart of
Russianness was accessible only through an artist’s intuition. The Russian
individuals that Dostoevsky’s Pushkin created were, in accordance with the
land they represented, all works in progress, either early versions of the su-
perfluous man, Aleko and Onegin, aimless and unproductive but at least
unhappy enough to sense their own stunted development, or else Tatiana,
the positive counterpoise to Onegin, better but no happier, her high prin-
ciples expressible only in the form of a repudiation of Onegin.
Dostoevsky’s values condition his reading of Evgenii Onegin. The
eponymous hero, like Aleko of The Gypsies, Dostoevsky calls a “dreamer”
in the negative sense, drawn this way and that by idle musings (26:140). At
the end of the novel, meeting the now-married Tatiana, he experiences
not true love but simply another “fantasy” (26:143). His is not the imagi-
nation that deduces truths, but just the opposite, a distraction in favor of
ephemera: “For she knows with certainty that he in fact loves only his new
fantasy, not her” (26:143). Devoid of genuine imaginative insight, Onegin
correspondingly lacks all originality, or as Tatiana suddenly wonders in what
for Dostoevsky is the key moment in the masterpiece: “Is he not then a par-
ody?” (26:141). Pushkin’s dandy here becomes an advanced version of the
copy clerk. Dostoevsky sees no ambiguity in the heroine’s thought; Onegin
in fact would certainly have appreciated her in the first place if he could
have done so imitatively: “Oh, if only at that time, in the countryside, at his
first meeting with her, Childe Harold had come from England, or even
somehow Lord Byron himself, and taking notice of her shy, modest charm,
had drawn his attention to it—oh, Onegin would have been stunned and
amazed on the spot” (26:140). Repetition and invention remain housed
within the old frame of reference: Dostoevsky calls Tatiana poor while One-
gin is rich and, as he emphasizes repeatedly, could only be from “European”
Petersburg.48
195
Dostoevsky’s reading of the novel in verse is laced with verbs mean-

ing to divine another person’s inner character.49 He faults Onegin above all
for lacking this capacity: “He was unable to discern in the poor girl her
wholeness and perfection” (26:140). Pushkin’s hero fails to do what Pushkin
succeeds at when he looks at Russia: sensing the final stages of development
implicit in the earlier stages. One must have the imagination to see in the
poor more than their lack. Tatiana, on the other hand, has the improvisor’s
instinct for the psyche of the other:
Here she is in his study. She looks over his books, his things, various objects,
and on the basis of them tries to plumb [ugadat’] his soul, unravel his riddle,
and stops at last deep in thought, with a peculiar smile, with an inkling of the
answer to the riddle, and her lips softly whisper: “Is he not then a parody?”
Yes, she had to whisper that, for she had guessed the answer. Afterward, in
Petersburg much later, when they meet anew, she now knows him through
and through. (26:41)
The onus of unoriginality here has shifted; it rests now not on the
poor man, but the rich dandy. It is true, these are not images of the un-
finalizability of the human personality Bakhtin would have us believe Dos-
toevsky values above all, but the treatment of Onegin and Tatiana is
consistent throughout; both have true natures whose discovery is the cen-
tral task of the other. The European nations are to all appearances similarly
defined. Only Pushkin, as the prototypical Russian, rises above the fixity by
his capacity to redefine himself endlessly.
The definitive national achievement consists not in the image of Rus-
sian womanhood Tatiana represents nor in the beacon that guides her, that
connection with the Russian soil she clings to in continually recalling “the
cross and the shade of the branches over her poor nurse’s grave” (26:143).
She speaks it simply by her manner of recognizing Onegin. Imaginative
projection, finally, furnishes the new Russian word the Dostoevskian narra-
tive has sought all along. As Levitt observes, “Russia’s ‘imitativeness’ and lack
of identity, which Russians had bemoaned since the start of the century, it-
self emerges as the essence of her greatness” (131). By this trait Dostoevsky
identifies as well what Diary of a Writer calls “the Russian Christ,” that ideal
of humanity willing to suffer others in the fullest sense, taking on not just
their pain, but everything that is theirs, yet another conception where the
Russian national character answers to the highest Christian commandment.
Pushkin’s third period displays the potentials of this Russian faculty:
the poet explores the psyches of the nations of the world, no longer, as in
his first period, building on ready-made literary models from abroad. Now
he needs no guidance and knows no bounds; he not only guesses how Ger-
mans, Englishmen, or Muslims think—he essentially becomes them, taking
in the entirety of alien viewpoints:
196
By His Poverty
No, I will say positively, there has never been a poet with such all-encompassing
sensitivity [vsemirnaia otzyvchivost’] as Pushkin, and not only is his sensitiv-
ity here at issue but its astonishing depth and the reincarnation of his spirit
as the spirit of alien nations, a reincarnation almost flawless and hence mirac-
ulous, for nowhere in any of the world’s poets has such a phenomenon been
repeated. (26:146)
The romantic doctrine of the national poet had been built on a pun on the
concept of representing: the poet represented (stood for) his people in the
great dialogue of the nations because he could represent (portray) it artis-
tically; Dostoevsky borrows the pun here, for Pushkin’s ability to depict is
simultaneously an ability to defend the interests of all nations and reconcile
their contentious claims. The national poet-genius has been replaced by the
first international poet-genius. Myshkin’s goal of breaching the walls of
alienation has been realized, if only in this one case. The key to becoming
fully Russian is no longer to be Russian in the narrow sense—something
only Pushkin achieved in any case—but to vault forward to the final stage
of the “universal human” (26:147; italics in original).50 Even in Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky notes, we do not see this; all his Italians, for example, sound
palpably English under their disguises.
Dostoevsky chooses to conclude, however, on a tragic note, with a la-
ment for his countrymen’s failure to heed Pushkin’s example. This makes
the Pushkin Speech a fragment like “Egyptian Nights” and The Idiot, their
open ends a structural necessity for Dostoevsky, designed to draw in the
reader to a collective artistic task that requires completers. In both the novel
and the speech, the hero’s labors furnish a model that remains unemulated
by his contemporaries. All three fragments lack only one piece for their
consummation: the transformative appearance of Christ. Yet where “Egyp-
tian Nights” awaits the appearance of a single divine being from beyond,
Dostoevsky’s works struggle toward a much more difficult eschatology: the
slow and gradual second coming of Christliness in each individual.51
The Russian gift is predicated on the Russian poverty. If Dostoevsky’s
Pushkin is not poor himself in the mundane sense, he nonetheless speaks
for—or rather, given the nature of his skill—as a nation that is distinctly im-
poverished in multiple senses: lacking a cultural patrimony, economically
backward by European standards, and—for Dostoevsky at least—quintes-
sentially represented only by its lowest class. The speech imagines skeptical
Russian voices objecting: “So you think such a fate awaits us, our poor
[nishchii], our crude land? Out of all of humanity we are the ones fated to
speak a new word?” (26:148). Dostoevsky answers in his own voice: “Why
not? It is not as if I were speaking of economic glories. . . . Granted, our
land is poor [nishchaia], but this poor land Christ himself ‘traversed, blessing
it, in slave’s form.’ Why should his final word not dwell with us?” (26:148).52
Europe completes the scenario by being rich, and though Dostoevsky does
197
not state that wealth precludes such wisdom, he hints as much by using the
most highly charged negative reference he can muster.53 A later preface to
the speech warns:
In Europe, that same Europe in which so many riches are stored up, the
entire foundation of all the European nations’ civic life is wholly under-
mined and perhaps tomorrow will come crashing down without a trace
till the end of time. . . . And all the riches accumulated by Europe will not
save her from her collapse, for “in one hour all this wealth will be laid waste.”
(26:132)
The citation is, predictably, from Revelation. In refuting critiques of his

speech, this time real ones, that an underdeveloped country has no business
showing the path to its richer neighbors, Dostoevsky repeats the lesson that
marks his fiction: imagination—in the broad definition he gives it, where art
and spirituality find their common ground—will conquer the false wealth
of money.54
Since it is Pushkin’s transcendence of his own nationality that guaran-
tees his place in history, Dostoevsky’s speech places special emphasis on the
poet’s works that take place abroad. Stone Guest, set in medieval Spain, for
example, is treated as a greater spiritual achievement (if not necessarily a
greater work of art) than anything Pushkin wrote about his homeland, thanks
to its distance from Russia in time, space, and mind-set. Judged by this
standard, “Egyptian Nights” indeed becomes the poet’s ultimate feat, for
this single most displaced work takes us—uniquely in Pushkin’s oeuvre—
back before the advent of Christ and the modern world. And yet, for all his
admiration for “Egyptian Nights,” Dostoevsky violates its spirit. For in tak-
ing the Italian improvisor as the symbol of the Russian national gift, Dosto-
evsky ostentatiously ignores the nationality Pushkin gave him. “Egyptian
Nights” of course has a Russian poet, Charskii, with the fixed aristocratic
identity that hinders art which Dostoevsky reassigns to European culture as
a whole. (Pushkin would not have welcomed Dostoevsky’s views on Russia’s
cultural poverty if only because of his resistance to the metaphor in the first
place. His own version of Poor Liza in “The Gentlewoman Peasant” is quite
explicitly a reversal of Karamzin’s image, a rich girl merely posing as poor,
with a patrimony so heavy she cannot slip free even to meet the neighbors,
a “native” type possible only in a comically Anglophile family.) So Dosto-
evsky must take matters into his own hands.
In retrospect, the attack on Shakespeare’s sham Italians turns out to
have been a preemptive strike, since Dostoevsky now maintains that Push-
kin’s improvisor not only looks but is Russian. Dostoevsky’s 1861 “Series of
Articles on Russian Literature” had suggested China or the surface of the
Moon was more comprehensible to Europeans than Russia, even those who
had lived in Russia for 20 years (18:41). Dostoevsky must therefore have
198
By His Poverty
been nonplussed by the spectacle of an Italian suddenly arriving in Peters-

burg and seeing so deeply into a Russian’s soul. We can be certain he was
troubled because of the elaborate plot manipulations his novel introduces
to correct Pushkin’s “mistake” and explain how an improvisor might seem
European but nonetheless be Russian. The improvisor in The Idiot also
arrives from abroad, but despite the impression he makes at first with his
Swiss cloak and gaiters (people even wonder what language to address him
in), his foreign veneer eventually discloses a prince of ancient and impec-
cably Russian lineage. Dostoevsky expends considerable ingenuity motivat-
ing the twisting story line that orphans Myshkin, gets him to Europe, lets
him grow up there, draws him into at least fantasied contact with Naples,
exposes him to European “writing”—and then, in a foretaste of the trajec-
tory later traced for Pushkin—brings him home, more Russian than those
who stayed behind, to discover Russia having already learned to copy orig-
inally in foreign lands.
There are dozens of poor characters in The Idiot, but it is Myshkin
and Nastasia Filippovna, those with the power of sympathetic insight, around
whom Dostoevsky constructs his plot. At the heart of Dostoevsky’s reason-
ing in both the novel and the speech is the assumption he found in “Egyp-
tian Nights”: that the self-sacrifice necessary for art at its highest reaches is
the natural gift of the poor. For Dostoevsky the etiology of imagination lies
in having nothing of one’s own and so being ineluctably drawn to regions
beyond, via wondering, musing, and literature.55 Poverty feeds the imagi-
nation unfulfilled desires that must find an outlet somewhere. It inculcates
curiosity into the existence of the wealthy and, on the other hand, insight
into the psychology of the sufferer. It inures the spirit to an emptiness and
modesty that may one day become kenotically generous. Those who have
nothing will, naturally, long to create something.
Not all Dostoevsky’s poor master the imagination. Notably, those born
low who refuse the gifts poverty confers are some of the pettiest scoundrels
in his gallery of characters, the Ganya Ivolgins and the Luzhins. In their
greed, they take the wrong fork in the road where money diverges from
imagination; as Ganya wrongheadedly tells Myshkin, “When I’ve got a lot of
money, just you watch—I’ll be as original as a man can be” (8:105). The
yearning for riches dooms their every undertaking because it diverts them
from the development of the imaginative tools that even schemers need.
This is what Nastasia Filippovna has in mind when she mocks Ganya as “the
impatient beggar [nishchii]”—Ganya is in such a hurry to escape his indi-
gence that he never acquires the capacity to read the world that for Dosto-
evsky constitutes the innate inheritance of those with no patrimony (8:90).
His project to marry into wealth backfires because he cannot decode other
people’s inner thoughts, insulting first Nastasia Filippovna and then Aglaia
without so much as understanding the nature of his offenses.
199
Luzhin in Crime and Punishment makes the same error, writing a

clumsily intimidating letter to Raskol’nikov’s sister and later trying to impli-
cate Sonya in a trumped-up crime. He fails because he can neither envision
how the letter will be received nor imagine the type of crime that Sonya—
who after all as a prostitute breaks the law every day—is actually capable of.
(Raskol’nikov’s transgression, on the other hand, succeeds in large part be-
cause he can imagine—we know because the opening of the novel shows
him doing so—what the pawnbroker will think if he knocks at an unusual
time, if and when she will turn her back, where she must hide her money,
and so on.) Not surprisingly, Luzhin “more than anything in the world loved
and cherished . . . his money: it made him equal to all that had been above
him” (6:234). These inept manipulators are also, as we should expect, unin-
ventive repeaters who aspire to be just like everyone “proper” rather than
makers in their own right, copyists in the wrong sense. Dostoevsky’s fictions
suggest that for the most important human tasks, poverty is not a hindrance,
but an invaluable apprenticeship in the workings of other people’s hearts.
The outlines of poverty and imagination traced here can be extended,
in varying degrees, across Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, for the concerns were en-
during in the author’s mind. In The Brothers Karamazov, to take the latest
possible example, the four siblings are again distinguished by their attitude
toward their common impecunity (their father has money, but they do not).
Like every outraged poor child, Ivan wants to see justice done on earth.
Hence as well he insists, through his Inquisitor, that the hungry should be
fed and need permanently eliminated. Like Gogol’s poor, he seizes the
power of imagination too early (he is the writer among the brothers) and
goes mad, chatting with a devil (with his literary education, Ivan actually
knows that he is merely speaking to a figment of his own imagination, but
to no avail).
Dmitry wants beauty, love, and honor, things he believes for most of
the novel can be had by the man with money, though he has no interest in
wealth for its own sake. As the subplot with Katerina Ivanovna demon-
strates, Dmitry also understands that to receive wealth as a gift is to be hu-
miliated. The subplot’s theme is patrimony (Katerina has a father, but his
shenanigans with regimental finances pass on to her only debts and a fam-
ily name associated with shame), and as Dmitry and Katerina separately dis-
cover, offspring who think money can redeem a missing inheritance must
be ready to commit dastardly acts. Smerdyakov alone is acquisitive. He
wants his own restaurant, so if he has to serve, he can at least profit. By the
same token, only he rejects the life of the imagination, refusing to read once
he understands that the stories he was given (Gogol, of course) are invented
and did not really happen. Smerdyakov is doomed by his own rhetorical
backwardness, for his belief that money cures poverty is excessively literal.
Alyosha, who as a monk embraces poverty reverentially, finding it a source
200
By His Poverty
of strength rather than an impediment, is the only one to survive the fam-
ily disaster intact and have a chance of speaking his own new word.
We see Dostoevsky’s ultimate ideal in the complex metaimaginative
chain at the heart of his Pushkin Speech. Each character with a voice be-
speaks viewpoints that are not his own. Everyone is ventriloquized, open-
ing his mouth to emit someone else’s words. When Tatiana contemplates
Onegin, what is articulated is the perspective of the Russian people on their
upper class; through Tatiana (a provincial aristocrat in origin, from a com-
fortable though neither rich nor powerful family) speaks Pushkin (a noble-
man of distinguished stock, used to the highest society though with troubled
finances and a vivid imagination), and through Pushkin, the narod. And the
verdict announced is what Russian poverty has to say about Russian wealth:
poverty—which through a deep species of imitation is able to make itself
rich in form and personality—chides Russian wealth, which through an im-
itation that may seem very similar, ends up impoverishing itself in form
and persona. Like Myshkin, Russian poverty becomes itself by becoming
the other; like Onegin, Russian wealth loses itself by taking in otherness
indiscriminately.56
In his 1861 essay “Bookishness and Literacy,” Dostoevsky had con-
tended that the narod lacked the verbal finesse to speak for itself, and that
this was the one skill the educated (that is, the imaginative) class could
truly teach: how to give voice to the projective agility the common people
were already spiritually prepared for. Since the source of the new Russian
word, the narod, is not capable of articulating it on its own, the final fate of
Russia—a fate still unachieved—requires complete mutual improvisation
or copying: each body will find those others which will tell it how and what
it is to speak. No one will speak for or as himself; all will find themselves be-
spoken from without. The originary source of speech—and so the problem
of originality—will be forever effaced.57 Meanwhile the highest models—
Christ, Myshkin, and Pushkin—embody the ultimate poverty, that self-
abnegation that is both repetitious and original, as old as Christ and as new
as Russian art.
201
Conclusion
The Wealth of the Russian Imagination
THE TRADITION CATALOGUED HERE finds

Russian authors writing about penury within a cultural and figural frame-
work inherited from Karamzin. The writers in question begin from shared
assumptions, but quickly diverge as they begin to weave their own narratives.
This continuous return to and resistance against a common center meanwhile
generates a larger tale, one in which Russian literature mulls over its own fate
in the person of the poor. In this sense, Russian writers do see themselves—
metaphorically at least—in the needy.1 Yet if authors can imagine the poor
as like them, it is striking that they never imagine that the poor imagine as
they do; the texts presuppose that the classes come to the fantasy with un-
equal endowments, though who is favored is a matter of dispute.
The tradition begins when, in Karamzin’s hands, poverty is associated
with literacy and both are connected to Russia’s fate. The linkage is both
metaphorical (poverty is a way of figuring other shortcomings) and literal
(poverty is often causally linked with those shortcomings).2 The intimate
connection perceived here between art and impoverishment endures in
multiple guises throughout the tradition as a defining feature. In the plot
that emerges, simple Russians lack what educated Europeans possess, and
that is an understanding—in one sense or another—of imagining and in-
venting. But each later writer will construe this literacy differently. For
Karamzin, it is a facility for sophisticated fictions of the sort anyone might
use; for Pushkin, a degree of pure creativity of concern almost exclusively
to artists; for Gogol, the unsettling capacity to abandon one’s economically
assigned psychic level; for Dostoevsky, the skill of insight necessary to ful-
fill the Christian commandment to love another as oneself. In every case,
the power of projection, the ability to put oneself hypothetically in the
shoes of others and intuit what they must think and experience, is vital.
On the other hand, the classically Russian lack that complements Eu-
rope’s fullness is not complete muteness, but a stunted way with words,
again varying according to the definition of literacy employed: imitating
rather than creating, or a weak imagination whose fantasies prove unbeliev-
able, or an imagination that remains fixated on the self or wealth rather than
202
probing alterity. Most important, the lack of creativity figures as copying;

copying so directly mirrors post-Petrine Russia’s own cultural borrowings
that, for watchful writers at least, its representation resonates with painful
double meanings powerful enough to commandeer a narrative’s final shape.
The similarities that hold the tradition together are multiplied because
Russian writers do not hesitate to borrow from one another. This is fitting,
since borrowing and appropriation are key themes within all our poverty
narratives. Indeed, a self-conscious referentiality has come to constitute
one of Russian literature’s most distinctive traits. What eighteenth-century
writers found abroad, their nineteenth-century heirs increasingly found at
home: models to pilfer, rework, and make their own. Pushkin marks the
shift; his magisterial appropriations from other Russian writers, unconstru-
able as a weakness, absolved such tradition-internal adaptations of all taint.
(As “Egyptian Nights” heatedly argues, borrowing is harder for a serious
artist than inventing from scratch.) Consistently enough, it is Pushkin who
first objects to imputations of a native paucity; for a thief with sufficient tal-
ent, he seems to have felt, even Russia’s fledgling literature offered plenty
of temptations.
No summons to the common theme, no manifesto calling for poverty nar-

ratives, is ever explicitly sounded. Rather the tradition arises spontaneously,
as Karamzin’s descendants find themselves captivated by the questions he
had managed to pose so provocatively. Though it can be told two very dif-
ferent ways—as a copyist tale and as an improvisor tale—the underlying
plot is essentially one. In all cases we find a poor hero contending with the
bounds of his ability to imagine and to impart those visions to others. The
two narrative versions diverge only in how the plot’s key building blocks are
defined—authors may dispute what constitutes insufficient verbal sophisti-
cation, for example, but all agree on its centrality—and in the tenor of the
conclusion. While stories of copyists are resigned to failure, improvisor
narratives undertake the difficult struggle toward success; it is a measure
of the nation’s self-estimation that the tale is not told with an unqualified
happy ending, even in Dostoevsky’s Pushkin Speech. As the underlying
metaphor of cultural poverty is built on motifs such as chuzhoe slovo, speak-
ing one’s own word, improvisation, and a missing patrimony, it stands to rea-
son that they should recur. But there are other common motifs, peripheral
to our main concerns yet intertwined with them, which we have seen so of-
ten that it would be neglectful not to mention them and indicate at least
cursorily how they intersect with those discussed at length.
First among them, the poor tend toward namelessness and anonym-
ity. Some are literally anonymous (Karamzin’s, Pushkin’s, and Tolstoy’s im-
provisors; Gogol’s civil servant from Khar’kov and his Modestly Dressed
Man; the hero-types of the physiological sketches, such as “The Petersburg
203
Watchman [dvornik],” “Petersburg Organ-Grinders,” and so on). Others are

saddled with ridiculous nonnames (Akaky Akakievich, Pirogov) or obnoxious
nicknames (the Idiot); the characters in the most important Russian physi-
ology, Nekrasov’s “Petersburg Corners,” are known as “the Teacher,” “Scruffy
Head,” and so on. In these cases, observers are not quite certain who the poor
are, but the insinuation lingers that whoever they are, they are in a less reli-
able, less meaningful manner. The preoccupation with names, in other words,
at bottom signals a preoccupation with human identity; the identities of the
poor wobble, due either to inscrutability to outsiders or actual unfixity.
What such flexible selves stand for again is open to an astonishing range of
interpretations, from the highest Christian caritas to the lowest social trans-
gression, from creative genius to minor self-serving dishonesty. Or, as Gogol
tries to object with the name of his madman who might be King of Spain
(but isn’t)—“Poprishchin” is based on poprishche (“calling,” “profession”)—
the point should be immutability of identity. If nothing else, the difference
in writers’ opinions measures the durability of the underlying plot; without
it, such centrifugal thinking would certainly completely disperse. The at-
tention to selfhood too reflects a national self-doubt in which, to use the pe-
culiar formulation which gained wide currency after Chaadaev, Russians, as
a people belonging neither to the repudiated medieval past nor the still un-
attained European future, were not, or were no longer, themselves.
Another returning motif is love. Whether brotherly or carnal, the close
connection between two selves seems to follow as a logical consequence of
the fascination with identity and projection. The test case is Gogol, whose
abhorrence of the amorous is well known; even his most asexual Akaky Aka-
kievich hankers after a garment that is suspiciously anthropomorphized (“a
person . . . some pleasant life’s companion” [3:154]). As Piskarev discovers,
anxieties over human bonds amidst poverty quickly conjure up the question
of prostitution. Women are for sale—or ostentatiously not for sale—in every
writer examined. Whether Russian peasants or Egyptian empresses, the main
heroines are trading, some in bouquets or human lives as well, but all in
their selves, for which they are always offered something in exchange. Occa-
sionally, like Nastasia Filippovna, a fitting cross between Poor Liza, with her
bouquets, and Cleopatra, with her traffic in lives, they take money for their
favors only for the privilege of throwing it back in someone’s face. As love is
on the market, so is literacy, and not only in Pushkin, where art and love make
genetic twins. Clerks are selling their handwriting, improvisors their inven-
tions. Their creators too are of course busy peddling wares of a related sort.
A further scourge of poverty is repetition. Repetition haunts the Rus-
sian poor in multiple forms; they are subject not only to transcription and
verbal imitation, but to more radical indignities, such as the doubling of the
self that befalls Gogol’s Kovalev, Dostoevsky’s Goliadkin, or in diluted form,
characters such as Pushkin’s gentlewoman/peasant. This fate has something
204
unsavory about it (Goliadkin’s servant mutters, “Proper people . . . never

have doubles” [1:180]), and it may be just the broader relevance of the stigma
Dostoevsky had in mind when he wrote, “I have never put forth anything in
literature more serious than this idea” (26:65). A kindred horror visits the
hero of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, who ends his days mouthing over and
over the sequence of cards he was sure would make him rich. The same writ-
er’s “The Undertaker” suggests another variation. At a gathering of his Euro-
pean colleagues, German tradesmen living in Moscow, a toast is proposed
to “unsere Kundleute [our customers]” (8.1:91). This is a jibe at the under-
taker, Adriian, who unlike the Germans must serve the destitute (who re-
quire coffins even when penniless). (Here again we see Pushkin’s resistance
to the standard metaphor: the poor are merely a part of Adriian’s clientele;
in another writer’s hands, they would be his unique or stereotypical con-
stituency.) That night the undertaker dreams his customers have come back
from the dead, a reanimation nightmare that fuses repetition at its most
horrific with a visit to Necropolis, Chaadaev’s inflammatory appellation for
Russia. If, as Chaadaev asserted, Russia was fundamentally ahistorical, then
it circled endlessly over never-changing terrain. Repetition, in other words,
was simply copying by another name—the ineluctable fate, in ways from the
trivial to the terrifying, of a land where, as the young Dostoevsky main-
tained, nothing new ever came to life.
These themes travel through many narratives in nineteenth-century
Russian literature. One example may suffice to illustrate the ease with which
they could circulate in contexts different from those emphasized here. Nek-
rasov’s poem “The Poor Woman and the Elegant Woman” (“Ubogaia i nar-
iadnaia”; 1857), a contrast of two prostitutes, is built entirely out of the
same complex of ideas. One of the two heroines deserves compassion and
so the poet asks us to enter into her position. She is indigent, forced into
the profession by hunger, and her attempts at “European” deceit—wearing
rouge and trying to look interested in passersby—pitiable (deceit here
stands in for the category of imagination as a whole). The other, though also
Russian, was raised in Paris, where she learned to speak French, flirt, and
dissemble; she is therefore rich and in demand with young dandies, a cour-
tesan rather than a streetwalker. The narrator declares her inauthentic and
counsels us by example to withhold our sympathies—both our fellow-feeling,
and, in the case of the young rakes, affections. Despite the one’s popularity,
the other proves more admirable, her body sacrificed to financial need, her
capacity to love violated, her name unknown to society, but her self, curi-
ously, intact in its suffering, truly Russian in the poverty of its marketing
acumen and its financial means.
The nation’s future, however, remains in doubt, seemingly more in the
hands of the courtesan, who alone has a child. Her illegitimate son in true
nineteenth-century Russian fashion confusedly calls every man he meets
205
Daddy (a scene set, not surprisingly, on Nevsky Prospekt) and is fated to

grow up with no understanding of his roots or real identity. Though literacy
is a secondary theme, speaking French still means having an instinctive
knowledge of how to promote and advertise oneself and so prosper, as the
poet emphasizes by calling the courtesan herself “imported goods [zamor-
skii tovar]” (2:39). (Meanwhile, the narrator, thanks to his own cultural liter-
acy, is confident he knows more about proper rouging techniques for women
than the streetwalker herself.) Most strikingly, Nekrasov demonstrates how
easily what was originally a metaphor of prostitution can be converted into
realized form, with actual prostitutes, without sacrificing the rest of the fig-
ural framework.
The metanarrative of poverty which emerges from the tradition is con-

sciously pursued but amorphous until Dostoevsky, aware of its permuta-
tions like no other writer, ties together the strands—a career-long labor he
undertakes in part for the privilege of ending it his own way. The tradition
had come down to Dostoevsky still in bipartite form. Karamzin’s poor poet
narrative had sired improvisor tales like it, while his Poor Liza had begot-
ten a very different descendant, the struggling copyist. For all their seeming
dissimilitude, scriveners continued to incarnate Poor Liza’s dilemma, in
which insufficient literacy doomed the impoverished heroine regardless of
how she proceeded. Liza could do no more than pick her poison, either
falling victim to her lover’s rhetorical sophistication, or mastering the skill
herself but then being ruined by it. The government clerk was harried by
the same nonchoice: either the slow demise of silence, or if he threw off the
shackles of creative limitation, the more spectacular end of an uncontrol-
lable fancy and thence insanity. As a result, writers more optimistic about
the nation’s fate preferred the improvisor tale. Now the man who had little,
sensing like Chaadaev the immense potential that inhered in an unshaped
ego, enlisted his mobility to further his art. Here obstacles of a different or-
der arose. Literacy had become fully masterable but as if in compensation
was asked to rise to a higher, perhaps the highest possible, challenge: could
Dostoevsky’s “art of making others love you” win over strangers’ hearts? In-
deed, once Tolstoy and later Dostoevsky have charged the improvisor with
bringing about an essentially religious reconciliation of individuals and na-
tions, the poor man is consigned to a fate almost as daunting as Poor Liza’s.
But the rewards, should the hero succeed, have become immense. How then
to tell the tale to an optimistic conclusion?
Dostoevsky begins by dismantling Karamzin’s assumption: poverty
does not symbolize lack of imagination; precisely the contrary, nothing so
spawns an ability to invent. As Nastasia Filippovna says, locked away in the
countryside in her youth there was nothing to do except read and dream,
read and dream. Dostoevsky explains away Pushkin’s objections to the meta-
206
phor and, pointing to the author who really wrote the Italian’s improvisations,
nationalizes the projective skills conceded to Europe in “Egyptian Nights.”
He reverses Gogol’s moral stance against poverty to align it with Orthodox
teachings as he sees them. In the process he binds together disparate poor
heroes and heroines into syncretic characters, openly flaunting the taboo
against repetition. Such a combinatory methodology is challenging because
a writer must find a way to satisfy his own requirements—if only the desire
to bring others together fruitfully and meaningfully—while continuing to
respect the resistant otherness of other voices; he must, in other words, be-
speak himself by bespeaking others. Ultimately Dostoevsky makes a persua-
sive argument for the truth “Egyptian Nights” had simply taken for granted:
that accomplished borrowing is an art rather than a defect.
In his commitment to appropriation and amalgamation, Dostoevsky
senses that the copier narrative, the improvisor narrative, and the Gospels
can be read as three versions of the same story and so deliberately conflates
them, first in Myshkin and then in the Pushkin of his oration.3 Dostoevsky’s
revision maintains that copying is simply improvisation’s training ground, an
earlier part of the same story, and that both are preparation for Christ-like
love. In the end, the novelist both calls on his countrymen to embrace Russia’s
poverty and simultaneously redefines that poverty. The national shortfall to
identify with is an aesthetic-spiritual openness to alterity which Dostoevsky
assembles out of the communalism of the Russian poor, nurtured by age-
old material insufficiencies, and the literate class’s projectional sensitivity,
begotten of the missing cultural patrimony. This rereading of Poor Liza re-
claims the imaginative sophistication that does the heroine in as her own
skill; Dostoevsky’s interpretation even accounts for the fact that Liza’s skill
appears precisely in Erast’s hands. The meeting with the poor on a common
ground that was essentially theirs which “Egyptian Nights” had glimpsed
but hesitated to accept Dostoevsky now embraces warmly in Pushkin’s
name. What his forebear had called mutual possession, Dostoevsky—who
completes the fragment—recasts ever so slightly as mutual lack, selves
voiced only through others. Poverty and imagination can feed one another
until, in the apotheosis of the not-having-anything-of-one’s-own of poverty
and the acme of the imaginative leap, all of Russia and then all of the world,
learn to take in the other entirely, becoming, in the final transfiguration,
fully poor and fully imaginative. In Dostoevsky’s hands, lack is finally a form
of possession.
Within a few years of the novelist’s death, Russian literature was moving in
a radically new direction. Even in 1880, at the time of the speech, Dostoev-
sky represented a literary old guard whose anxieties over the nation’s unique-
ness no longer concerned the younger generation. Among the symbolists and
modernists, poverty receded from its pride of position and its mission of
207
troping national needs. By the early twentieth century, the weight of an in-
herited patrimony was, if anything, only too heavy. Some young artists even
felt that nineteenth-century writers should be unceremoniously tossed off
the ship of modernity to make room for those with creative impulses of
their own. As the first Russian futurist manifesto indicated by its pluralized
opponents (“all those Maksim Gor’kiis, Kuprins, Bloks” [Terëkhina, 41]),
the unoriginality writers now reviled was that of the hordes of emulators of
Russia’s only too-entrenched literary pantheon—this just some 30 years af-
ter the unveiling of Pushkin’s monument.
When metaphors were needed for the cultural competition with Eu-
rope, which had not ended but had changed shape, poverty was now rarely
the choice; even when the West remained monied as in, for example, Bunin’s
“The Gentleman from San Francisco,” wealth appeared as Dostoevsky had
ultimately recast it—a disgusting surfeit, material rather than imaginational,
a temptation to spiritual torpor, not something a sensible nation would de-
sire anyway. When comparing themselves to Europe, post-Dostoevskian
writers inclined to see such things as Asians more than the poor, as in Solo-
viev’s “panmongolism,” Blok’s “Scythians,” and the seething Asiatic masses
who worry Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov in Belyi’s Petersburg with their
hats from “Manchuria” (96) and their troubling “Mongol” faces (139).
“Asians” implied separate but equal, or if not entirely on the same level of
sophistication and culture, then at least possessing daunting, rough-hewn
traditions Europe little knew but would be foolish to continue overlooking.
With the Communist Revolution, the wheel turned again and poverty
again took center stage, but in a new guise. Impoverishment of course under-
pins the Marxist ur-narrative, in which the needy, the good, overthrow the
rich and permanently destroy the mechanisms that allowed class inequali-
ties to arise in the first place. As if in response to sentimentalist leveling fan-
tasies, Marx sought once and for all to breach the distinction between rich
and poor materially, by giving to each if not the same, then only according
to his needs. The innovation is the devaluation of imagination; only tangi-
ble prosperity now counts. (In another sense, of course, by standards like
Karamzin’s at least, Marx was one of the nineteenth century’s great fanta-
sists, a powerful visionary exceptionally adept at selling his vision to others
and hence an excellent fictionalist.) Unlike European communists, how-
ever, the Bolsheviks were willing to abandon Marx’s universalism and soon
enough assimilated the new capitalist-communist distinction to their cul-
ture’s old rich-poor one: the West was capitalist, Russia communist; the
West was rich, Russia was poor (but only temporarily, while new social con-
ditions were being constructed); and “their” wealth was again of the wrong
sort, the sort that was doomed to be overtaken in the end. Indeed, it may
well be that nineteenth-century Russian literature’s habit of thinking the
world from the perspective of the poor helped—if only in a small way—
208
ease the acceptance of communist ideals. Certainly, this is the gambit of

Blok’s The Twelve, which reworks Dostoevsky’s identification of the poor
with the Christian savior into a very different pairing of violent lower-class
revolutionaries devoid of political savvy with a solitary Jesus guiding but also
invisible to them. Blok was roundly criticized for imagining the redeemer
in such an unchristian environment, yet if nothing else, such an out-of-place
Jesus acknowledged, behind the obvious rupture, a distinct continuity in
the nation’s habits of dreaming.
Not surprisingly, it was not the authors chronicled here to whom Soviet crit-
icism looked for like-minded ancestors and early exemplars of socialist
thinking. The conventions uniting narratives of poverty and imagination
were of course not heeded by all nineteenth-century Russian writers. Some,
like Goncharov and Odoevskii (considered earlier in passing), borrowed
selectively, preferring to treat poverty in partially idiosyncratic ways. But
beyond this atomized group operated a well organized countertradition to
the first, so familiar in Soviet literary criticism that it has been mentioned
sparingly—the politically “progressive” school, quintessentially represented
by Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Belinskii’s criti-
cism, the physiological sketches by the writers of the natural school, and
Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? These works largely dissociate pov-
erty and imagination (or more precisely, try to, imagination being hard to
escape in any kind of literature) and burn instead with a desire to see pre-
emancipation social ills remedied in concrete political and economic ways.
With this goal of practical change came a consonant demotion of mere
inventiveness; social justice was important, daydreaming was not. Compo-
sitionally, the opposition to imagination gave rise to a striving toward real-
istic images of the poor, verbal portraits drawn from life itself, as promoters
of the physiological sketches liked to say. (The antithesis, still fresh in the
reading public’s mind, was romanticism’s propensity for self-conscious and
far-fetched invention.) The stricture against fantasy is perhaps nowhere so
strong as in depictions of poverty and similar social ills, where it is precisely
the authenticity of the degradation that shocks readers, the reminder that
real people really experience such horrors. It should be recalled that the
nineteenth century witnessed steady social disintegration throughout Eu-
rope. As agricultural modes of class organization fast collapsed, the great
metropolises so swelled that no one intelligence could continue to track
their fragmented populations. As a result, slum-dwellers, the physiologists
liked to point out, had become as foreign to the educated classes as the
most exotic American Indians. In the context of such ignorance, verisimili-
tude in representations of the downcast was essential; it alone conferred au-
thority, making mere images into social commentaries. Someone’s wholly
fantasized travails, after all, demand no remedy. Only documentary accu-
209
racy could hope to rouse readers to the daunting labor of gradually remak-
ing the structures that regulated all of society.
This is another link between poverty and art, though very different
from those we saw before. The poetics of the Russian physiological sketch
(the socially committed sketch such as Nekrasov’s “Petersburg Corners,” as
opposed to the also common comical sketch), with its effacement of the au-
thorial persona, its “precise” engravings of the various social types, and its
nearly zoological treatment of human subjects in a tone of scientific rigor,
attempts to assure readers that they are beholding pure, unmediated facts,
not told by an author, but merely recorded by an observer. Art—understood
as sentimentalism’s and romanticism’s deliberate fabrications—was, just as
Karamzin had initially asserted, antithetical to poverty and its tasks. Or as
the preface to What Is to Be Done? bragged in a shocking inversion, read-
ers could expect only the truth from Chernyshevskii, not despite but be-
cause of his scant writer’s gifts (Chto delat’? 14). Not surprisingly, these
authors little fretted over Russia’s uniqueness; for them, Westernizers as a
rule, Russia’s main distinction was a backwardness to reverse, not preserve.
Exceptionality in this sense was simply the measure of the nation’s lag be-
hind civilization’s universal standards.
The opposition to fiction is mirrored by another resistance, seemingly
less essential but no less widespread, to literacy, especially literary taste in
the Karamzinian sense. Radishchev is famous for stilted, archaic turns of
phrase because he felt a lofty topic required lofty diction; Belinskii wrote
sloppily, partly from the poor man’s haste but partly from his belief that
ideas outweigh style; and among the many peculiarities of the physiological
sketch as a genre is its urge to outrage readers with graphic depictions of
squalor and at least occasional incomprehensible (and therefore “authen-
tic”) lexical items. Though the texts varied, they shared the assumption be-
hind Chernyshevskii’s proud clumsiness: that the new politically pressing
topics required radically new expository methods. Many shied away from
narrative altogether, due, it would seem, to the kindred conviction that
stories exist for entertainment, and preferred to package their ideas as re-
portage or essay. Exceptions like Chernyshevskii took pains to drive home
their narratives’ lofty objectives. Together, the school’s formal innovations
read as an attempt to identify with the mute, but therefore truthful, Poor
Lizas of the world and to retreat from the glib and therefore untrustworthy
Erasts who had liked to concoct fictions and write books in Russia.
All the writers we have examined except Pushkin make at least nominal ges-
tures of encouraging identification with the downtrodden, yet it is strangely
enough the great poet who paints the most convincing portrait of projection
across class boundaries. Karamzin argues we are all essentially the same
210
underneath, sharing a single human nature that longs for love (among other
things) regardless of our class. Though Gogol asserts, mostly obliquely
through his harsh comedy, that we are all poor in a spiritual sense, his sweep-
ing failure to perceive any similitude—especially in spiritual matters—
between rich and poor probably goes back to his intuition that uplifting
monastic impecunity cannot have anything in common with the secular lack
of possessions which was so common in a Russia that still desperately
needed reform. Tolstoy’s narrator reproves nations who fail to acknowledge
the primordial human oneness—and therefore the oneness with the poor—
which the Tyrolean’s art highlights, and defiantly declares that at least he, as
a prototypical Russian, does identify. In his later works, of course, Tolstoy
will increasingly recommend poverty as an old-fashioned catchall remedy
for the distortions and superfluity of life in the upper classes and the mod-
ern world. Dostoevsky entertains the most grandiose vision for poverty, in
part because as one of his literature’s most sensitive readers, he makes full
use of the punning ambiguity the term had accumulated among his prede-
cessors. For Dostoevsky, true Russians are, like Christ himself, unacquisi-
tive and unencumbered. The nature of this native scarcity, however, is fluid,
stretching from the purely economic, to the patrimonial, to the monastic, to
the divine, to the projectional—and thereby giving an imaginative thinker
rich material to work with.4
It is Pushkin, with no evident interest in impecunity’s holiness or its
symmetry to Russia’s attainments and, unique in this group of writers, no
pronounced moralizing tendencies, who most deeply plumbs the process of
identification. Unlike the others, Pushkin owns up to a degree of aversion
for the poor, and his hero clearly hesitates to step forward into the Italian’s
waiting arms. But in so doing, “Egyptian Nights” takes full measure of what
real identification must be; the story’s point, ultimately, is not that the poor
are repulsive, but that the other is always so—if his embrace threatens to
dissolve the self’s integrity. The trade-off of themes in the improvisations
enacts a stinging psychic battle. When the Italian is asked to extemporize
on the rich poet’s motto of poetic license, wealth taunts need: “You would
rather be me.” Without batting an eye, the Italian clothes his assent in po-
etic form: he would, apparently, rather be prosperous and untroubled. But
his way with words is so ravishingly effortless that the taunter unexpectedly
concludes, “No, I would rather be you.” Then the unsettling matter of
money intervenes and the epiphany slips away: who does either man truly
want to be? To complicate desire, Pushkin charts its possible outcomes in
action, registering promises of adoration and allegiance and threats of de-
struction in both directions. Troping the invasion of one self by another
with extreme imagery—the prostitute’s humiliation, murder for fun—the
depiction owes its depth to its creator’s unparalleled imagination and its
211
own romantic excess, above all the idea that two bodies might really be-
come one.
With Dostoevsky’s Pushkin Speech, the metaphor of nineteenth-century

Russia’s cultural poverty and the narratives it inspired take their last twist.
We have seen the poor man, like the impoverished national literature,
dream of the greatness that awaits when the powers of literary imagination
one day bear fruit. We have seen the seeker be unceremoniously destroyed
by the nearly metaphysical impossibility of his quest; or, in the case of Dos-
toevsky’s own Myshkin, take others so deeply into himself that in the end
their disaster becomes quite literally his own; we have even seen the hero
struggle in some cases as far as the border of success, where his fate rests
in the hands of an audience whose favorable reaction is denied or post-
poned forever. But we have never, till now, seen imagination succeed, or
heard the new word of the poor articulated clearly. With imagery of an im-
poverished homeland finding its voice in a poet who has learned to make
lack speak, Dostoevsky at last supplies a hopeful ending for the longstand-
ing narrative—to cite this time Dostoevsky himself, from the notebooks to
The Possessed—of “the poverty of Russian literature.”5
212
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. In Russian-language studies of nineteenth-century Russian litera-
ture, the depiction of the lower classes is probably the single most examined
topic. Yet for all the attention the matter has received, its very ideological
importance in the Soviet era left a number of questions unposable, or in any
case unposed. It is perhaps symptomatic of the uniformity of method and
focus the topic has inspired that despite its prominence in both original and
critical literature, not a single book to my knowledge is wholly devoted to
the topic.
2. On philosophical approaches to otherness as such, see Theunissen.
3. There may of course be discrimination based on categories like
religion, race, or age, but the states themselves are not presumed to be
undesirable.
4. The Russian term here, of course, is bednyi. It denotes all degrees
of lack, both moderate and severe. There is a second word in Russian with
no sentimental coloring, nishchii, which refers specifically to absolute des-
titution. The nishchii must beg or perish, while the former may be fortu-
nate enough to be able to work for a modest living. This pairing is somewhat
different than that known in the West as the “deserving poor” and the “lazy
poor” (on which see Himmelfarb, especially 288–370).
5. This literary indifference is doubled by a sociological one, un-
doubtedly worsened by censorship restrictions. For a variety of reasons,
there are few nonliterary sources that might be used to illuminate literary
texts about the poor written before the end of the nineteenth century. Tools
which historians or literary critics working with the French or English tra-
ditions take for granted seem to be utterly lacking for the Russian. And
what little data can be found usually are of doubtful reliability, such as the
1840 police census of Petersburg. One can only envy the commentators of
Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil, who have traced his knowledge of poverty back
to its origins in Parliamentary reports such as “the Children’s Employment
Commission, the Select Committee on the Payment of Wages, the Midland
Mining Commission, the Sanitary Commission” as well as “speeches in Par-
213
Notes to Page xiii
liament on the Ten Hours Bill, press accounts of the agitation against the
New Poor Law, publications of the Chartists and the Anti-Corn League,
and the private correspondence of the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor”
(Himmelfarb, 499). Even so simple and necessary a thing as a social history
of preemancipation Russia is still to appear, as William Mills Todd noted in
Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (15–16). And it should be noted
that by no means do scholars in these more fortunate fields find their task
simple. Mollat’s The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History
even has a separate “Note on Sources” to guide other scholars toward some
30 types of historical documents from which information on the poor can
sometimes be gleaned.
Revealing in this connection are two articles in the 1890 Entsiklope-
dicheskii slovar’ of Brockhaus and Efron. The author of the article “Pau-
perizm” (the use of a foreign name for the phenomenon is itself suggestive)
presents precise statistical data on the extent of the problem in France,
Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Netherlands, Sweden, Nor-
way, England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and even an-
cient Rome, but has only some impressionistic comments on poverty in
Russia. He concludes, “For Russia no general statistical data are available
on the number of those receiving charity and assistance” (45:55). The arti-
cle’s list of relevant literature likewise mentions only works in English or
French, of which even a Russian translation can be cited for only one
(Malthus). Meanwhile, the description of a turn-of-the-century project to
expand official welfare institutions in the lengthy entry, “Public Charity”
(“Prizrenie obshchestvennoe”), a project for which the author of the entry,
V. Ger’e, takes personal credit, affords precise data on the number of em-
ployees (1,506), or the amounts collected for the purpose at charity balls in
1895 (14,920 rubles), but not on numbers of the needy served. The recent
work by Lindenmeyr does fill some of the former gaps, but, understandably
enough, focuses on a later period than that which interests me.
The lack of reliable historical data on the poor has doubly influenced
my decision to examine poverty in the light of imagination: by making
certain other approaches prohibitively difficult but also by suggesting that
such approaches at times overlook what is peculiar about how nineteenth-
century Russians thought through the issue.
6. One note on my choice of material: the category of “poor” in Rus-
sia during the period in question (roughly 1790–1880) consisted of two very
distinct groups, the peasant class and other poor. I have completely ex-
cluded from consideration peasants in their traditional setting because they
challenge social distinctions and thus identification in entirely different
ways than the other poor. Peasants in nineteenth-century Russia are a fixed
entity, if not well known then at least known of by all, whose agricultural
livelihood and folkloric culture had changed, or were presumed to have
214
Notes to Page xiv
changed, little over centuries and whose interactions with other classes
were regulated by time-honored conventions governing everything from
legal rights to casual conversation. Since the other poor lacked these fea-
tures, the process of identification an outsider faced was substantially dif-
ferent in the two cases. Moreover, the normal distinction between the poor
and the rich—how much they own—is abrogated in the case of serfs. Serf-
dom requires that the issue be posed in a fundamentally different way, since
whatever they possessed, those who toiled as serfs were themselves owned.
Only free peasants with lives that unfold at least partly in the city, like Poor
Liza, who sells flowers on the streets of Moscow, shift far enough across the
boundary to be considered with the other poor.
7. Our culture has a certain resistance to calling such things as the
poverty of noblemen real poverty. To be sure, nobility undoubtedly softens
poverty’s roughest edges, but it does not follow that such poverty is there-
fore entirely inauthentic. We are, in this respect, trained to think of social
ills and the words that designate them like realists in the literary sense of
the term, and to insist on realistic readings whenever the matter is socially
serious. In a literary study, however, such an approach can only bias our
evaluations in favor of a particular mode of writing about social phenomena
and a particular set of texts. If we filter out all references to poverty in its
less dire senses, then we will necessarily come to the conclusion that our as-
sumption has made inevitable, namely that poverty is an inherently morally
weighty and troublesome evil to all writers in all periods. Clearly this is not
entirely true.
8. This trend, however, diminishes through the 1800s, as the central
class viewpoint from which Russian culture as a whole surveys the world
around it—clearly aristocratic at the start of the century and clearly not by
the end—slides lower.
9. Akaky Akakievich is a titular councilor, rank 9 in the Petrine Table
of Ranks, which makes him, like anyone occupying the lower 6 levels, a per-
sonal nobleman (a man whose estate applied only to him and not his heirs);
however, with any promotion, he would cross the key boundary and join the
higher ranks (1 to 8) where nobility became hereditary for the holder’s de-
scendants. In neither case, of course, would he belong to what old-time
aristocrats like Karamzin and Pushkin considered the true nobility, those
whose ancestors had achieved their position before Peter began giving out
nobility on the basis of services rendered to the state (on which, see the re-
vealing anecdote in Todd, 29).
10. Among the varieties of nineteenth-century writing, certain types
of narrowly moralistic literature in which the only goal is to instill virtue and
where understanding others therefore is deemed irrelevant, may be wholly
indifferent to sympathy, since they believe that human experience validates
and elucidates nothing except the manifold paths of sin. (Gogol at times
215
Notes to Pages xv–1
comes close to this extreme.) But any literature which posits the existence
of a human experience that is capable of taking many forms and is signifi-
cant, if only to those who live it, in each of those forms, is bound to conclude
that we cannot understand others fully unless we can at least vicariously live
as them, close to them, observing them proximately and pondering what
transpires within.
11. Other links may connect poverty and imagination as well, though
not unambiguously and subject to historical conditions. If poverty is con-
strued as the absence of opportunity or of human fullness, then it is harder
to write about because the poor and their lives are duller; poverty becomes
a challenge to the artist’s imagination. Similarly, when poverty is still some-
thing of a literary novelty and writers tend to be aristocrats, its unfamiliar-
ity poses a natural challenge to the fantasy; both the contours of the
condition and the appropriate means of inscribing it may not be immedi-
ately at hand. Some of the competing schools of early-nineteenth-century
aesthetics objected to the depiction of lowly reality (since art was meant to
be lofty); in such circumstances, destitution posed a different type of chal-
lenge to the imagination, since it put a premium on authorial taste and dis-
crimination and demanded that its presence be fully justified. (For succinct
surveys of the ostensible aesthetic inappropriateness of poverty, see Vino-
gradov, “Shkola sentimental’nogo realizma,” 291–338; Nekrasov, 8:585–88
[critical responses to The Physiology of Petersburg]; and LeBlanc.) On the
other hand, the depiction of poverty specifically as a social problem requir-
ing remedy depends in large part on the author’s ability to convince read-
ers that his images are real or realistic, that is, not simply figments of his
imagination. Here the connection is reversed, but just as pronounced: the
imputation of authorial invention now taints a representation. Poverty may
also inject ethical urgency into the literary process, since the spiritual im-
port of the act of projection may suddenly seem to grow more acute.
12. Marshall, 3–5; Brissenden, 13–22.
CHAPTER ONE
1. A word about the usual response to Karamzin’s story: ever since
Pushkin, there has been a tendency to dismiss “Poor Liza” as unsuitable for
real interpretation because its intentions are fully and even unbearably
manifest. This, I think, is simply untrue. Pushkin himself provides an edify-
ing example. Though he professed to abhor “Poor Liza,” he deemed the
story worthy of the highest form of commentary he knew, rewriting it sev-
eral times in his own fiction. Moreover, the presence of clichés is no proof
of univocal meaning, for the commonplace of the naïve poor figure, gullible
before even the clumsiest deception, is wholly at odds with other equally
familiar images of the poor, such as the benighted and brutally cruel poor
216
Notes to Pages 1–3
to be found in Nekrasov’s verse, the common folk in War and Peace who
regularly deceive their masters rather than vice versa, and so on.
2. On the phenomenal popularity of Karamzin’s story, both with the
reading public and as a model for aspiring writers, see the notes by Lotman
and Makogonenko to Karamzin, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, 663–64, as
well as the engraving by N. Sokolov reproduced in Gukovskii, 79.
3. The final sentence of the story, about Erast and Liza’s possible rec-
onciliation in the next world, is similarly inconclusively suspended between
reality and dream, what is and what might be, what is known and what is
merely desired.
4. Hammarberg, the critic who is perhaps the most perceptive of the
text’s paradoxes and riddles, calls this passage a self-ironization on Karam-
zin’s part (156–59; compare also Kanunova, 55–56). But its purpose clearly
goes beyond irony. It is nothing less than an admission—regardless of
whether we read it as a slip, an intentional obfuscation, or a knowing self-
contradiction—that the literary undertaking itself is in question in “Poor
Liza,” an especially significant admission coming from a man who would
later abruptly cease to write fiction forever and become his nation’s first
great historian instead.
5. Hammarberg, 158. Hammarberg’s exact contention will be dis-
cussed in more detail below.
6. The artifice of the self is discussed by Lotman, Sotvorenie Karam-
zina, passim; the reinvention of the reader is Lotman’s theme on 230–31.
7. I follow Marshall in employing the term “sympathy” not merely to
designate pity or compassion, but in its older and broader sense as the abil-
ity to feel the sentiments of others of all sorts. See Marshall, Surprising Ef-
fects of Sympathy, 3–5; and Brissenden, 13–22.
8. Bakhtin, of all thinkers, disagrees, at least in his early work “Artist
and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” It may seem strange that a philosopher
most famous for his belief in dialogue and the mutual insight it affords,
should argue that sympathy and understanding proceed from my ability to
see the other as other. However, this essay from the early 1920s predates
Bakhtin’s work on dialogue. Further, while Bakhtin insists that the fullest
perception I can achieve of another requires that I make full use of the pre-
rogatives of distanced viewing (seeing you as you, not as myself), he still
allows that a profound sympathy is a necessary step in the process, to be en-
riched later by the additional insights I can muster from my own perspec-
tive. “Poor Liza,” however, was historically the first Russian text (with
Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow) to call for sympathy
for the poor with great urgency, and thus works on the reasonable assump-
tion that sufficient distance between observers and the indigent already ex-
ists. As we shall see, even the more rudimentary aspects of sympathy prove
highly problematic in Karamzin.
217
Notes to Page 4
9. Despite Lotman’s considerable illumination of this topic, certain

key issues remain to be explored. In Sotvorenie Karamzina, Lotman pro-
vides numerous examples of Karamzin’s real or perceived foppish (that is,
markedly European) behavior. Moreover, he works with a concept very close
to Stephen Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning”—self as (artistic) construct, cre-
ated by the same processes as artwork, a concept which furnishes both Lot-
man’s title (The Creation of Karamzin) and his overriding theme. However,
after taking great pains to distinguish the real Karamzin from the narrative
persona adopted in the Letters of a Russian Traveler (the real Karamzin’s
letters to real friends were few, uneffusive, and businesslike, for example),
Lotman provides examples of self-construction exclusively from Karamzin’s
own deportment in private life. What remains to be explored is the views
on self-fashioning urged on readers by his Letters and “Poor Liza,” since
Karamzin is ultimately more important as a writer than as a dresser or con-
versationalist. One can come away from Lotman’s work with the impression
that Karamzin’s goal in his dandified behavior was to shock, or in effect to
distinguish himself from the society around him (Lotman, Sotvorenie, 193–
201; also Uspenskii, 46–48); such a view, however, underestimates the de-
gree to which Karamzin in his published work, both prose and essays, is always
intent on legislating new behavioral and aesthetic norms for others to copy.
10. Certainly not all the values Karamzin esteems are entirely senti-
mental. Among his likes and dislikes are some undoubtedly influenced more
by masonic and Enlightenment convictions (though these are not always at
odds with sentimentalism). And occasionally Karamzin is even anti-European,
showing preferences for Russian mores and habits.
11. Here too the Letters prepare a narrative vocabulary for “Poor
Liza.” Sipovskii argues that the story owes its popularity with contemporary
readers to the fact that it was the first to make use of the theme of suicide
in Russian fiction (518). Despite suicide’s violence, which exceeds the gen-
tle pitch of emotion normally sanctioned in sentimentalism, Karamzin was
clearly fascinated by the topic, as in the story of the Abbot N** (185–87).
With its uncharacteristically gruesome imagery, the story of the abbot’s self-
demise lacks even a didactic message, since the reasons for the act are
never uncovered. Karamzin claims to have known the victim personally, and
in one very suggestive scene, the two of them sit side by side in a park, eerily
mirroring one another (“Both of us thought and remained silent” [186]). Yet
it turns out that one of them is plotting his own demise. In effect, the
episode sets up a pattern that is inherited by “Poor Liza”: suicide as the
other choice, the alternative to sentimental practices, or what happens to
those who fail in the sentimentalist feat of finding pleasure in sorrow.
12. On Karamzin’s visits to real salons and salons in general, see Lot-
man, Sotvorenie, 135–40, 275, and also 130–35, 199–201, 230, 268–70; and
Uspenskii, 46–55.
218
13. It is also worth noting that acting, in the form of wearing a dis-
guise, plays a prominent role in the mythology of Peter the Great’s original
Great Embassy to Europe. On theatricality as a mark of the age, see Lot-
man, “Poetics of Everyday Behavior,” “The Stage and Painting,” and “The
Theater and Theatricality.”
14. “What does that leave an author to do? He must fabricate and
compose expressions; guess the best choice of words; give old ones a some-
what new meaning and propose their use in new contexts. . . .” (Karamzin,
Izbrannye, 2:185; “Why Does Russia Have So Few Talented Authors?”).
15. On the philosophical underpinnings of sentimentalism, see Bris-
senden, 22–64; Mullan, 18–56; and Hammarberg, 1–14.
16. Bate observes that the design of Smith’s Theory of Moral Senti-
ments “is the complete substitution of ‘sympathy’ for the ‘moral sense’ as
man’s internal monitor, and the elaboration of it as an all-embracing princi-
ple of moral feeling and action” (147).
17. Even Belinskii, a decided cynic when it came to sentimentalism,
would later agree: “These tears were a great step forward for society: for he
who can weep not only over the sufferings of others but more broadly about
imaginary sufferings as well is of course more human than one who cries
only when he is subjected to painful beatings” (7:166; “The Works of Alek-
sandr Pushkin. Second Article”; italics in original).
18. On the predominance of the culture of artifice in general, mostly
in reference to a slightly later period, see Todd.
19. The exact status of this passage is problematic. In the “Letter to
the Spectateur du Nord about Russian Literature” (written in French),
Karamzin quotes from his own Letters, presenting a version of the ending
which includes the above. But the passage is missing from the canonical
text of the Letters, and is not mentioned in the variants given by the editors.
It could be simply a falsification for the purposes of the “Letter to the Spec-
tateur,” but in Sotvorenie Karamzina Lotman considers the text here part
of an early version that did not survive (258).
20. “Simony” most commonly refers to the selling of church offices.
But Karamzin might have in mind the original passage from the Bible in
which Simon Magus attempts to purchase the power to impart the Holy
Spirit. Peter admonishes him: “Your silver perish with you, because you
thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!” (Acts 8:20). Erast
partly relives Simon’s fate, losing his money at one point and like Simon,
humbly repenting when he realizes the misdeed of trying to buy what is
genuine only when given freely. The name symbolism, it should be noted,
was not lost on Dostoevsky, the most sensitive reader of Russian poverty nar-
ratives. When his Underground Man wants to purchase sexual services from,
and try, Erast-like, to break the heart of, a woman named Liza (now a pros-
titute), he has to borrow the money from an acquaintance named Simonov.
219
21. Radishchev’s work is another sentimental journey which addresses

the varied subjects that catch its narrator’s attention, but with an ardent moral-
izing tone very unlike Karamzin’s. It includes, among much else, clear de-
pictions of the abuses some serfs suffered and is widely credited as the first
public attack on the institution, the more so as it appeared in 1790, just at
the start of the French Revolution.
22. Toporov discusses the exceptional and underappreciated preci-
sion of the story’s structure at more length, though not in the sense that I
will (111–23).
23. On idyllic features of “Poor Liza” see, for example, Cross, N. M.
Karamzin, 102; Garrard, 43; Kanunova, 47, 55–56, and 59; and Hammar-
berg, 138–41, and especially 295 n12.
24. See Rosenmeyer, especially 207–14.
25. The self-eliding observer is a widespread phenomenon, but Fou-
cault’s demonstration of the effect in Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas is
particularly enlightening (The Order of Things, 3–16).
26. “Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni,” 7 (1795): 100;
cited in Cross, N. M. Karamzin, 103. Hammarberg identifies the probable
author as Richard Steele (283 n17).
27. Sumarokov, Izbrannye, 136 (“Instruction for Those Wanting to
Be Writers”).
28. Thus even the author who brags to his readers about his own bu-
colic existence betrays his knowledge of the life of the city, and hence his
own compromised innocence.
29. Marshall points out the eighteenth-century novel’s attempts to
draw on two older art forms that may have suggested to a nascent genre
modes for the representation of emotion: theater and painting (Surprising
Effects, 38–39). While I concentrate on the theatricality of Moscow, note
that Karamzin’s characterization of the city hesitates between a great am-
phitheater and a “magnificent picture” (Surprising Effects, 1:605).
30. Ginzburg, O psikhologicheskoi proze, 12. In this passage,
Ginzburg is referring to documents such as letters and memoirs that record
and shape perceptions of human character. But as Ginzburg herself goes on
to demonstrate, the term has a more radical meaning of human behavior as
a deliberately created artifact, a text like other texts, produced by the same
process of “writing” that produces texts in the traditional sense. Liza’s com-
bination of illiteracy with innate honesty underscores the link between lit-
erary texts and behavioral ones. It should also be noted that Liza’s illiteracy
is a part of the plot mechanism of Erast’s escape from Liza; because she
cannot write to him when he is away at war, Erast, who Karamzin makes
clear is not villainous enough to lie outright, is able to arrange a new life
without having to account for anything.
220
31. This becomes abundantly clear in “The Gentlewoman Peasant,”

Pushkin’s retelling of “Poor Liza,” when the heroine (who is posing as a
peasant) and her aristocratic beau must make comically elaborate plans in
order to meet without being observed.
32. We might observe as well that by aspiring, even in jest, to speak
like a Parliamentarian, Karamzin valorizes a distinctly performative, highly
theatrical discourse notably at odds with his pedagogical preference for in-
nocent, tight-lipped tutors. As with the innocent Liza and her experienced
observers, the force of attraction is again to differentiate.
33. On the primacy of affect, or what Piksanov calls “the lyric and the
pathetic” (315), see, for example, Gukovskii, “Karamzin,” 77–78; Blagoi, 530.
34. There is a good deal of Yorick as well in Karamzin’s typical French-
man. Piper cites “the great depth of Yorick’s feelings and their very short
duration” (98). For a related interpretation of Erast as close to both Karam-
zin’s own younger biographical self and the first of the two types in his essay
“The Sensitive Man and the Cold Man,” see Toporov, 158–63.
35. Karamzin also borrows Sterne’s earlier image of polished person-
alities (Sterne too was talking of the French) for a revealing pun, describing
the French as (in French) “polis,” polished but also polite—that is, posses-
sing selves at once polished like a work of art, and, by virtue of being thus
“artistic,” socially presentable and polite (Letters, 319). This is the self as a
work of art and salon-style conversation as the proper activity of the artist.
36. For a discussion of related issues, see Prendergast.
37. Sipovskii, 513; Gukovskii, “Karamzin,” 78; Hammarberg, 145,
148–50. Orlov sees its purpose in preparing the reader “to perceive the
work in the right frame of mind” (215). For Nebel it is a “lyrical evocation
of the Moscow environs” (123; compare also 128).
38. Karamzin’s praise of solitude is decidedly lukewarm: “Solitude is
similar to those people whom it is well and pleasant to see occasionally, but
with whom to live tries both the mind and the heart!” (Izbrannye, 2:183).
39. It should not be overlooked that the entire narrative is itself pred-
icated on a real meeting. The narrator only knows what he knows because
he befriends Erast and hears his story.
40. To Kochetkova, this characterization of Erast also “calls to mind
the personal biography of young Karamzin” (41).
41. As Cross observes of Karamzin in general, “Recognizing the
Golden Age is an illusion, he was, nevertheless, enchanted by it” (“Karam-
zin’s Versions,” 85). Like Cross, Orlov notes that Karamzin reserves his
highest praise in the Letters for the inhabitants of the Swiss Alps, whom he
depicts as “a sort of vision of the legendary ‘golden age’ ” (206).
42. The precision with which Karamzin situates Liza’s home is odd
for a story that is otherwise so vague, and as Toporov notes, the description
221
stands out doubly as the only landscape in the story not motivated by any
sentimental potential (119).
43. Karamzin’s well-known pronouncements about the edifying ef-
fects of high literature, such as “Bad people do not even read novels,” do
not allow for a distinction of proper and improper reading, and emphasize
instead the ethical value of literature per se (Izbrannye, 2:176; “On the Book
Trade and the Love of Reading in Russia”).
44. In a fascinating insight into the lower classes’ perception of sen-
timental fictions like “Poor Liza,” Lotman cites a conversation recorded in
1799 at the edge of Liza’s pond by the poet A. F. Merzlyakov, who over-
heard a young craftsman retelling the story of Liza (not without distortions)
to a middle-aged muzhik. Again it is precisely the question of imagination
which proves to be the stumbling block, for the craftsman, who claims to be
able to read, is under the impression that Liza’s tale must be true because
it appeared in a book, and even warns the muzhik against bringing his wife
to bathe in the pond since “The ladies, they all drown here” (“Ob odnom
chitatel’skom vospriiatii,” 280).
45. There are echoes of “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter” in the plot as
well, such as the lovers’ feuding fathers.
46. Another example of Liza’s (intended) predictability is the use of
unfinished sentences (meant to be transparent enough to be filled in by the
reader), such as “He is a master, whereas among peasants . . .” (1:610).
47. It would be foolhardy, at such a historical remove and with so
little evidence available in any form, to presume to know in more than ap-
proximate terms how Karamzin’s heroine diverges from actual eighteenth-
century peasants. We can say with certainty, however, that Karamzin himself
did not wholly believe the fiction he had produced, as its obvious contrast
to some of his own thoroughly unsentimental comments about real peasants
show. In “Letter of a Rural Inhabitant” (1803), Karamzin describes the folly
of hoping one’s peasants can work idyllically and harmoniously when left to
their own devices. Such peasants almost invariably end up idle, poor, and
miserable, spending all their money on vodka (instead of busily sacrificing
their youth to hard work, like Liza). Only the discipline of a strict master
can keep them working and happy, ready to thank the master for their pros-
perity, and hopeful of becoming “the rich of the countryside [sel’skie bo-
gachi]” (2:292).
48. Hammarberg explores the coincidence of Erast’s and the narra-
tor’s voices, seeing a striking similarity but arguing for some distinction of
the two (141–43, 155–59).
49. The one critic who in some sense has acknowledged the central
mechanism of the illiteracy of poverty in “Poor Liza” does so with such
obliqueness that one must assume his insight is unintentional—though not
therefore any less revealing. Porfir’ev begins his brief essay on the story,
222
“The content of this celebrated story is exceedingly simple, not to say poor”
(94). The point is that the best-loved work of Russian sentimentalism could
not have been written around an unfortunate but sophisticated heroine.
And by identifying literary simplicity with poverty and contrasting them to
a literary culture (his own and ours) that demands high standards of imagi-
native sophistication and can manipulate puns (as he is doing), Porfir’ev
indirectly indicates the root of the matter.
50. It may be this effect of foreknowledge that sometimes renders
sentimentalism so annoying to later generations.
51. “Poor Liza” was published in 1792; the Letters, though written
largely or entirely before that, were published in irregular increments from
1791 to 1801.
52. Karamzin’s story “Frol Silin” shows this indirectly: it is, loosely,
“Liza” without the misfortune. It is also wholly uncompelling, and by as-
suring the reader that the industrious peasant Frol manages to get by just
fine on his own, neither draws us to him nor suggests there is any necessity
in our being drawn to him.
53. This same mechanism works in Karamzin’s “Bornholm Island” as
well, where we lament the cruel fate visited on the incestuous lovers, but
with the implicit understanding that we are part of that force that will not
tolerate incest.
54. For example, Cross, N. M. Karamzin, 102–03; Nebel, 127.
55. When Liza fulfills Erast’s request, the moment contrasts sharply
with her reaction to her father’s death at the beginning of the story. There,
Karamzin shows us that Liza can clumsily manipulate emotion, but only to
hide it. To help her mother recover from the father’s death, Liza begs her
not to grieve too much and “to calm her mother tried to hide the sadness in
her own heart” (1:607). Yet this is no more than the child’s attempt to fool
its parent, doomed to failure because it is as primitive as her invented nar-
rative of Erast-as-shepherd; Liza’s mother can have no doubt of Liza’s true
feelings, since “often gentle Liza could not hold back her own tears” (1:607).
56. Liza’s reaction to Erast’s first deception is telling. After meeting
Erast, she comes to town the next time intent on selling her flowers only to
him, as he has promised to buy them. But he does not come. In despair, she
throws them into the river. Literary play abounds here. The flowers figure
Liza’s own innocence, doomed to be lost as soon as she has been exposed to
the ways of deceit. Meanwhile, Liza is again effectively punning on herself
without knowing it, enacting her own watery demise in advance.
57. Assuming the five kopecks she asked for her flowers when selling
the whole bunch at the beginning of the story was a whole day’s wage, Erast
has just given Liza over five years’ earnings.
58. This destructiveness of the acquisition of imagination is amply dem-
onstrated in an anonymous story entitled “Kolin and Liza” which appeared
223
Notes to Page 33
in the journal Evenings in 1772, 20 years before “Poor Liza.” The story has
to my knowledge been commented on only by Pukhov and Toporov but is
clearly Karamzin’s most important source (Pukhov; Toporov, 275–81). This
earlier Liza lives in idyllic innocence with her peasant beau, Kolin, both of
them happy and possessed of “hearts . . . not knowing pretence” (“Kolin i
Liza,” 27). But an unexpected visit to town awakens Liza’s imagination.
Suddenly she pictures herself and Kolin living in the city, and begins to en-
vision the possibility of becoming rich. Returning to town a second time,
she “imagines that she will again see much that will cause her to marvel”
(29). An aristocrat in town woos her with his skills of self-presentation, his
“courtesy . . . beauty and . . . attire” (30). Liza is clearly taken by the gen-
tleman’s art that endangers her, telling Kolin, “You do not know how to
speak courteously,” and then in another imaginary act adds, “Oh, if only you
could converse as amiably and pleasingly as that gentleman” (31). When the
aristocrat asks her to live in his house, Liza “being innocent, believes every-
thing” (31). Now she no longer seeks Kolin, and, like some sort of addict,
“abandons herself to the sweetest imaginings of her new beloved” (31).
When her father becomes alarmed and forbids her to visit the aristocrat’s
house ever again, Liza finally “dies of sadness” (32). The story concludes
with a moral: Liza perished because “not knowing man’s deceitfulness, she
was captivated by the exterior alone, never thinking that pleasant appear-
ances [priiatnye vidy] might conceal poison within (32).” (It is interesting
that we never actually learn anything about the aristocrat or his motives.)
The anonymous author warns “innocent hearts” (32)—one wonders what
readers he could possibly have in mind, since like “Poor Liza” the story
equates innocence with illiteracy—to beware of deceit and deception, and
then, in a fabrication of his own drawn from idyllic mythology, claims that
true love exists only away from the city. In the end, the poor woman ex-
posed to wealth is destroyed not by actual money, but by the “wealth” that
is imagination—the imagination she herself acquires. In a rare moment that
Karamzin does not borrow, this older Liza’s undoing proves to be the fancy
that is not powerful enough to make its visions into realities, but which is
strong enough to draw before her tormenting images of what she cannot
have. Again we must suspect that the aristocrat of undefined intentions who
lives in the big house and practices the social arts has a subscription to jour-
nals like Evenings that publish sentimental stories.
59. Aniuta’s name is symbolic. Aniuta is the serf girl in Radishchev
whose story is retold in that of Karamzin’s heroine. Liza thus repeats
Radishchev’s Aniuta, but then asks the second, younger Aniuta to repeat
her—signaling a circular passing on of fates. We may suspect, then, that the
younger Aniuta may pass the fate on to another Liza at some later point,
and so on. For more on the name, see Toporov, 262–65.
224
60. This integrity of the Russian personality later became a touch-

stone for the Slavophiles. Kireevskii, for example, argues, “At every mo-
ment of his life [Western man] is like a different person” (200). “In Russia,
on the other hand, [there is] an overwhelming reaching out for wholeness
of being, both external and internal, social and individual. . . .” (205). Kire-
evskii even sees some of the same causes: in the West “theatricality becomes
life’s inseparable companion, serving as an external cover for falsehood even
as idle fancy provides its internal mask” (203). The eighteenth-century no-
bleman and historian Mikhail Shcherbatov, whom Walicki considers the
first forerunner of the Slavophiles, likewise perceived fictions as a deleteri-
ous European import, as in this description of the moral strength of Russia
before Peter’s reforms: “There were no books for jollity concocted and con-
sequently dullness and solitary living drove people to read the divine writ”
(12). Karamzin, of course, did not agree and regularly underscored the
moral benefits of fiction. But “Poor Liza” records his greatest hesitation
over the value of fictions and provides the first hint of the turn away from
fiction that lay ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
1. In the manuscript, Pushkin left empty spaces where the improvi-
sations belong. However, the themes of the improvisations are stated, and
Pushkin was simultaneously reworking two earlier poems of his own on the
given themes. Thus, while some wariness is in order, there is little critical
doubt that these are the improvisations Pushkin intended. Whether they have
come down to us in their desired final form, however, is another question.
2. The story exists in two variants which differ in the arrangement of
two vital plot elements in the second improvisation: first, Cleopatra seeing
the youth and being moved by the look of love in his eyes, and second,
Cleopatra vowing to have all three of her lovers executed. The earlier ver-
sion of the text (in the Jubilee Edition, for example) ends with the promise
of execution; a later version, which is argued for by Tomashevskii and
adopted in the more recent Academy collections of Pushkin in 10 volumes,
ends with the effect produced by the youth on Cleopatra. The key differ-
ence of Tomashevskii’s version resides in the possibility that the vow will not
be fulfilled in the case of the youth; Cleopatra promises to have him killed
with the others, but then has what may be second thoughts. I have used
Tomashevskii’s widely accepted text but also consider the implications of
the other ordering of events. On the question of variants, see Tomashevskii,
“Tekst stikhotvoreniia.”
3. A fragment has reason to interest other writers, for it draws us in as
a finished work does not, asking us to complete or unravel it, if only hypo-
225
Notes to Pages 38– 40
thetically. A fragment is in this sense open to otherness intrinsically. Such a

form is especially appropriate in this case, since openness to alterity is the
central matter in Pushkin’s story.
4. In “The Works of Aleksandr Pushkin. Fifth Article,” Belinskii lists
“Egyptian Nights” among Pushkin’s half-dozen masterworks (7:347). Else-
where, Belinskii calls it “an artistic miracle” (7:553; “Eleventh Article”). For
Briusov it occupied a special place in Pushkin’s oeuvre as “one of his most
profound creations” (Sobranie sochinenii, 3:621).
5. Briusov, “Egipetskie nochi,” 107–18; Hofmann, Egipetskie nochi.
6. Some of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s uses of “Egyptian Nights” will
be discussed in subsequent chapters. Other echoes of Pushkin’s story in
Tolstoy are discussed in my “Stricken by Infection.”
7. Lednicki has even speculated that Pushkin gave up because he dis-
covered in the middle of his project that the French writer Janin had com-
pleted it for him, by answering in a story of his own the very question
Pushkin was posing (244–55). More recently, the novelist D. M. Thomas has
written a series of novels, including Ararat (New York: Viking, 1983) and
Sphinx (New York: Viking, 1986), that return to “Egyptian Nights” and pro-
vide several different endings for both the verse and the frame narrative.
8. For a reading of the fragment as fundamental to Pushkinian poet-
ics, see Greenleaf, especially 1–18. Greenleaf agrees, however, that “Egyp-
tian Nights” belongs to a period of Pushkin’s anxieties over writer’s block, and
even proposes thinking of the various Cleopatra tales as “an epitaph” (287).
9. Akhmatova, 192–206; Ginzburg, “Pushkin i liricheskii geroi”; and
Debreczeny, 282–99. Of the works named, O’Bell makes the most con-
certed effort to link the narratives. Other scholars as well have attempted
to provide possible unifying readings, including Petrunina, Val’be, and
Chirpak-Rozdina.
10. On mise en abyme, the standard work is Dällenbach.
11. Bakhtin’s stance on the monologism of poetry (in “Discourse in
the Novel”) is widely considered unconvincing, a mere straw man designed
to furnish a contrast to prose’s dialogism, but Pushkin’s self-referential hero,
who clearly makes the same assumption, invites us to reconsider the issue,
even if in the end his views appear to be overshadowed by the Italian’s.
12. In “Pushkin i liricheskii geroi,” Ginzburg demonstrates by a com-
parison of Pushkin’s verse with Khomiakov’s that Pushkin’s conception of
the poet’s proper role was always more tolerant of his participation in social
intercourse than Khomiakov’s more standard romantic reading, in which so-
cial life is not irrelevant, but positively harmful. More important, this shows
that for Pushkin the position of the gentleman poet within high society was
long an issue of conscious concern.
13. A number of similarities between Pushkin, Charskii, and the poet
in “A Fragment” are demonstrated by Sidiakov.
226
14. Belinskii as well noted the resemblance, though from a greater

personal remove: “In the person . . . of Charskii perceptive readers will find
for themselves a number of clues to aid in understanding the poet” (2:352;
“Literary Chronicle,” 1838).
15. See, for example, Sidiakov, 179; O’Bell, 105; and Debreczeny,
296.
16. On the disparaging implications of the term, see “figliar” and also
the invented name “Figliarin” in Vinogradov, Slovar’ iazyka Pushkina (Dic-
tionary of Pushkin’s Language).
17. O’Bell points out that the improvisor may be a projection of
Charskii’s psyche, though without exploring in what way (106).
18. Debreczeny, 296–97.
19. The poem “The Prosaicist and the Poet” suggests the extent to
which Pushkin understands improvisation as poetry at its most authentic
when it locates the poet’s distinction from the prose writer precisely in his
ability to develop instantly others’ ideas (specifically, the idea the prosaicist
is struggling with). For future reference, note also that this poem figures
the fruits of the poet’s imagination as weapons he uses in battle with his en-
emies, that is, not as pure aesthetic creations, art for art’s sake, but as effica-
cious tools for use in the realm of real life (“Give me any thought you like: /
I’ll sharpen it at one end, / . . . / And bending my trusty bow in an arc, / Will
send it on its merry way, / And woe to our enemy!” [2:444]).
20. Letter of A. E. Odynets to Iu. Korsakov, 9/21 May 1829, in Adam
Mitskevich (Mickiewicz), Sobranie sochinenii, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1954),
5:631; quoted in Akhmatova, 266, emphasis added. Judging from K. A.
Polevoi’s description, Pushkin’s general stance toward Mickiewicz was sim-
ilarly awed: “The penetrating Russian poet, usually the leader in literary cir-
cles, was exceptionally humble in Mickiewicz’s presence, made him speak
more than he spoke himself, and addressed his opinions to Mickiewicz as if
desiring the latter’s approval” (Polevoi, 207).
21. It is worth noting that the verse improvisations, actually begun by
Pushkin years before “Egyptian Nights” as independent texts for publica-
tion under his own name, are deemed in the drafts to have been translated
into Russian either “pallidly” or “weakly,” as though the Italian were an even
greater poet than the story conveys (8:848).
22. On the general condition of changing literary and social institu-
tions and their influence on Pushkin, see Todd, 10–105.
23. One French acquaintance recalled Pushkin saying often in 1836,
“I’m no longer popular” (quoted in Shchegolev, 347). Eidel’man provides a
useful summary of Pushkin’s changing readership and how it shaped his di-
minishing popularity (287–355). Belinskii, as one illustration, later recalled
that between 1831 and 1835 the direction of Russian literature significantly
altered, and concomitantly “people began to say that [Pushkin] had fallen
227
behind the times and had disappointed the universal expectations—in a

word, they began to speak of his decline” (8:437; “Russian Literature in
1844”). Belinskii, of course, neglects to mention that one of the offend-
ing voices had been his own (compare, for example, PSS, 1:87, or 1:139–
40, where Pushkin’s stories are “not artistic creations” and merit “bitter
displeasure”).
24. The most thorough treatment of Pushkin’s publishing difficulties
and the developments in the literary marketplace in this period is Meynieux.
25. The information on the official response to Pushkin’s requests is
more complete in the commentaries to the letters given in PSS, 2nd ed., 10
vols. (1957–58), than in the Jubilee Edition.
26. On the aristocratic notion of income, especially debt, see Lot-
man, “Ocherk dvorianskogo byta.” As for Pushkin’s social orientation, the
classic work is D. D. Blagoi, “Klassovoe samosoznanie Pushkina.” The sense
in which “poverty” is an appropriate designation of Pushkin’s intersecting fi-
nancial and publishing difficulties is explored in Anikin, 162–200, especially
166. One might recall that later in the century, Tolstoy’s Vronskii, an im-
peccable aristocrat, can be seen calculating that he owes 18,000 rubles to a
variety of individuals and businesses, but determining that of that sum only
6,000 must actually be paid with any urgency. Meanwhile, his friend Stiva
Oblonskii feels it beneath the dignity of a nobleman to let bills impinge on
his independence of thought, and, as if to make a point, intentionally goes
to the restaurant he is most indebted to (18:319–21, 18:36)
27. Ginzburg, loosely following the broad Soviet tendency to portray
Pushkin’s artistic development as a constant and prescient striving toward
realism, at least implies the same replacement of romantic values with re-
alistic ones: “In the improvisor the romantic image of the poet is realized
[realizovan]” (152). However, for Ginzburg, the improvisor is a grotesque,
rather than realistic, version of the metaphor.
28. As Greenleaf observes, also speaking largely of “Egyptian Nights,”
“Far from ‘overcoming Romanticism,’ in the stock phrase of Soviet criticism,
Pushkin may have played out the last scenes of his life within its discursive
field” (18).
29. The drafts speak of viewers curious to see “the very operation, the
mechanics of inspiration” (8:846).
30. The physiological sketches, a brief craze that either occupied or
influenced almost every writer working in the 1830s and 40s, were nonnar-
rative descriptions of social types (the grocer, the water-carrier) or social
scenes (a neighborhood, a notable urban locale) which in Russia focused al-
most exclusively on the lower classes. They are normally considered a key
step in the emergence of realism.
31. Grigorovich, 149.
228
32. Dal’, 1:671; Dal’ makes no mention of “calling” in the sense of vo-
cation (for example, the calling of the poet), but this meaning and its wide-
spread use are evident even from the few examples I have quoted.
33. For a brief summary of the events, see Todd, 85.
34. Viazemskii, 2:162–63. The idea was apparently such an attack on
public institutions that the article did not pass the censor, and Gillel’son
considers this the offending passage (197).
35. Prose, it should be noted, is itself for Pushkin tinged with the
theme of “Egyptian Nights.” The switch from verse already requires an act
of learning to love the low, rephrasing one’s thoughts in the lowlier medium,
“speaking in contemptible prose [prezrennoi prozoi govoria],” as “Count
Nulin” calls it (5:3). In a sense, of course, “A Fragment” qualifies as Push-
kin’s first prose work on the destiny of the poet, but we still have the same
innovative awareness of prose to social conditions.
36. “Egyptian Nights” intentionally bypasses an issue raised in “A
Fragment” and worth mentioning. Pushkin describes the self-referential
hero there as “poor, like almost all our ancient aristocracy” (8:410). Since
“ancient aristocracy” is meant to be understood as tantamount to true aris-
tocracy, Pushkin associates genuine nobility with a financial need that para-
doxically can only work to undermine the class’s essential and definitive
independence. The search for someone who might represent or possess
true freedom is even more problematic than “Egyptian Nights” glumly ad-
mits. (See also Driver, 14–15.)
37. In his notes for an article in defense of the institution, “Of No-
bility,” Pushkin defends true aristocracy (the pre-Petrine hereditary aris-
tocracy) as defined by, and valuable to society because of, its independence
(12:205-6). He provocatively exemplifies the kind of freethinking he has in
mind in Boris Godunov when the tsar angrily denounces “the mutinous
Pushkin clan” (7:45). Likewise, in the early versions of “Ezerskii,” the ge-
nealogy of the hero (whose name in one draft, Volin [from volia “will,” “lib-
erty,” “license”], gives the game away) is all the more impressive for his
ancestors’ refusal to always obey the tsar (5:387–419).
38. On Keats, see also Bate.
39. “Corpo di Bacco” (“Bacchus’s body”) is a reminder of the Bac-
chanalian revelries in which the god of wine and poetry was ritually torn
asunder.
40. The equivalence of the two forces that deprive the poet of his au-
tonomy is suggested by the drafts. The reference to the marketplace in the
words “the connection between one’s own inspiration and an alien external
will” was originally a reference to the poet’s required sensitivity toward the
cosmos: “the connection between one’s own inspiration and external na-
ture” (8:849).
229
41. A good deal of ink has been devoted to the question of which
Pushkin, a current or older one, Charskii represents. The most interesting
examination is by Akhmatova, who concludes Charskii is clearly an earlier
version of his creator, and tries to pin down the time period Pushkin is
thinking back to.
42. The inability of the poet to force his inspiration was clearly on
Pushkin’s mind at this time. In October 1835, he writes to Pletnev, “I write,
but it’s like pulling teeth. For inspiration one needs to be calm at heart, and
I am not at all calm” (16:56). The Italian, of course, is an exploration of how
one might manage to continue writing under such seemingly impossible
conditions.
43. In modern times alone, numerous attempts to formulate the cu-
rious congruence of love and literary art could be cited, from Tolstoy’s pro-
nouncement, “All novels and poems invariably convey the feeling of sexual
love in its various forms” (30:88; What Is Art?) to Peter Brooks’s concept of
“narrative desire” (37–61).
44. The metaphor works both ways, of course. Cleopatra figures the
two poets, but the poets also elucidate and enrich the tale of Cleopatra.
45. “The Prosaicist and the Poet,” incidentally, illustrates this same
ability of the poet to reveal the other to himself when the poet takes the
prosaicist’s thoughts and makes them speak.
46. There may be more similarity between “Egyptian Nights” and
Boris Godunov than meets the eye. In the play the Pretender has multiple
identities and, as Emerson observes, improvises a persona for every new sit-
uation depending on his intuition of what those around him want him to be.
“He can speak back whatever language is projected upon him. . . . And the
very lack of a self, the very absence of identity is, paradoxically, his identi-
fying characteristic” (Boris Godunov: Transposition of a Russian Theme, 100).
There is in addition a Polish subtext in “Egyptian Nights,” as in the histor-
ical events surrounding False Dmitri, which could be made much of. The
prime, though not exclusive, prototype of the Italian is Mickiewicz (Akhma-
tova, 194). A secondary parallel to the Italian in his role as Charskii’s neme-
sis is furnished by Bulgarin, who similarly came from abroad to bedevil the
literary life of Pushkin himself, achieving great financial success and popu-
larity just at the time when Pushkin’s were waning, and whom Pushkin dis-
dained as shamelessly low and mocked with a name, “Figliarin,” which
evokes the Italian’s image as a “zaezhii figliar” (“itinerant buffoon”). (On Bul-
garin’s image in Pushkin’s eyes, see Eidel’man, 330–39; Todd, 71–99 passim.)
47. In the play, Pushkin’s relative Afanasy Pushkin, who appears
briefly, remains on the Muscovite side, but clearly admires the Pretender.
Meanwhile his nephew Gavrila Pushkin figures as one of Dmitri’s most
trusted men, though like his uncle he displays an independence of mind
even from those he serves.
230
48. A number of enduring riddles for literary theory and philosophy,

too complex to do justice to here, lurk behind the seemingly simple con-
cept of being taken out of oneself by identifying or feeling deeply for
others. The issues most often surface in discussions of sympathy and pity,
theater and acting, Rousseau (who objected to the preceding as deceitful
and hence corrupting), and sincerity; and they often center on the eigh-
teenth century. See Barish; Trilling; and Marshall. As recognizably modern
concepts of literary identification emerge along with the novel in the 1700s,
images of the ostensible pre-Christian love of cruelty, such as Cleopatra
and gladiatorial combats, pose an important difficulty, for they seem to
imply human nature is not innately sympathetic; see Marshall, Surprising
Effects, 23–27.
49. The philosophy of the inspired and self-scripted death was clearly
on Pushkin’s mind at the time; it serves as the centerpiece of another frag-
ment from 1835, “We Were Spending the Evening at a Summer House.”
50. Rzhevskii has taken this tendency to heart and argued that the
work was doomed from the start because the two themes are unrelated and
needed to expand in different directions.
51. The Italian’s inclusion in this series, self-evident as his lowliness
is, is reinforced by the “eagle’s” nose and the “swarthy . . . face” he shares
with Othello—and with a famous poet, of course (374).
52. The idea of prostitution and sale is explicit (if still figurative) in
Aurelius Victor’s original Latin, which O’Bell translates, “This woman was
so lustful she often offered herself as a prostitute, so beautiful that many
bought one of her nights with death” (14). Debreczeny, by the way, notes
that the attribution of the legend to Aurelius Victor is probably spurious,
though the true author is unknown (334 n19).
53. The Russian word umilenie can be more powerful than its near-
est English equivalent, “tenderness.” The most important cultural associa-
tion derives from the class of icons (very popular in medieval Russia) known
as icons of umilenie, in which the Mother of God looks with uncorrupted
maternal pity at her child and thinks of the sufferings he will have to en-
dure. Ouspensky and Lossky’s The Meaning of Icons observes of possible
English renderings of the term, “Various words such as mercy, compassion,
pity, tenderness suggest themselves, but are either too limited or sentimen-
tal or both. The nearest translation is probably ‘lovingkindness’ taken in its
fullest sense as including all the gifts of Grace” (93 n1). The use of such a
word in reference to Cleopatra is thus highly suggestive.
54. Othello too is nameless, in that he is called only “Moor” (380).
55. The description of the youth, “Vostorg v ochakh ego siial” (“The
ecstasy shone in his eyes”; 389), uses Lomonosov’s term for poetic inspira-
tion (vostorg) and duplicates the improvisor’s demeanor: “The Italian’s eyes
began to glitter” (379); “His eyes glittered with a magical fire” (386).
231
56. We should recall that the tendentious Soviet image of Pushkin as

friend of the narod and admirer of his niania and Pugachev whitewashes
Pushkin’s obvious aristocratic pride. Driver provides a more realistic as-
sessment of Pushkin as an aristocrat and dandy. In the autobiographically
based “A Fragment,” for example, the hero “descended from one of our
most ancient noble lines, of which he bragged with the greatest of good na-
ture” (8:410). While the hero has a constant need of money, he nonetheless
dubs reading reviews of his own works, in a period when the periodical
press had effectively become the fiefdom of writers who were either not
aristocrats, or not aristocrats in Pushkin’s sense, “listening in down at the
alehouse [kabak] to what the lackeys [kholop’ia] have to say about us”
(8:410). Pushkin might entertain the possibility of an aristocracy of talents,
but he never surrendered his right to administer class-based insults.
57. An incisive subtextual parallel to the primitive, unrefined power
of the lowly poet is furnished by a ribald poem Pushkin wrote simultane-
ously with his work on “Egyptian Nights” (September 1835):
A violinist once came to visit a castrato
Who was rich, while he was poor.
“Observe,” said the [––––]less singer,
“My diamonds and emeralds—
I was toying with them from boredom.
Say, by the way, brother,” he continued,
“What do you do when
You’re bored, pray tell?”
The poor chap answered coolly:
“Me? I scratch my [–––––].”
К кастрату раз пришел скрыпач,
Он был бедняк, а тот богач.
“Смотри, —сказал певец без[––––],—
Мои алмазы, изумруды—
Я их от скуки разбирал.
А! кстати, брат,—он продолжал,—
Когда тебе бывает скучно,
Ты что творишь, сказать прошу.”
В ответ бедняга равнодушно:
—Я? я [––––] себе чешу.
(3:394)
Typically for Pushkin, the very serious themes of “Egyptian Nights” are re-
flected in frivolous, and seemingly unrelated, imagery. In fact the poem
presents a microcosm of the two poets’ narrative. It opens with the same
event as the story, as a poor artist (here a musician, there mistaken for a
musician), called “brother [brat]” in one work and “confrère [sobrat]” in the
other, visits a wealthy and successful artist (the title pevets applies to Char-
232
Notes to Page 70
skii as well). The story turns on prostitution (especially of the artist), or the
exchange of the passion/inspiration of art for money. The castrato has, in ef-
fect, exchanged his sex for his art and money. Ultimately the poor artist
turns out to possess precisely the creative powers that the privileged artist
lacks. The economic ranking that organizes the artists at the start is inverted
in the end by a more urgent creative hierarchy.
58. Compare Pushkin’s statement in 1824: “I know of nothing more
degrading than patronage” (13:95; original in French).
59. Ross Chambers gives a concise reading of Othello’s ability to se-
duce, via narratives, both Desdemona and the council chamber, winning
love and escaping danger, in his Story and Situation (5–6). Iago, of course,
underscores exactly the obverse, the fatal power of the storyteller’s art.
60. The English title Arabian Nights or 1001 Arabian Nights seems
so obviously to correspond to Pushkin’s title. However, neither Russian nor
French editions call the work Arabian Nights. According to Modzalevskii’s
inventory, Pushkin had in his library four volumes from the best-known ver-
sion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, translated by Galland un-
der the name Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes (Modzalevskii, 289).
61. The underlying association of love and death (especially murder-
ing one’s lovers) is a standard trait in both Pushkin and western European
orientalism; Pushkin got it most directly from Byron. Moreover, Toma-
shevskii notes that Pushkin’s first ideas for a poem on Cleopatra date to the
same time that he was working on his Byronic tale “The Gypsies,” the “Imi-
tations of the Koran,” and, one might add, the “Bookseller’s Conversation”
(Pushkin, 2:57). Petrunina points out additionally the close resemblance of
Khan Girey in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” to Cleopatra (23).
62. Arap, of course, though according to Vasmer (Fasmer) derived
from the Turkic word for “Arab,” is not the proper Russian designation of
Arabs, meaning instead anyone with dark skin (Dal’, 1:21). But like the
English word “Moor,” it generally implies Muslims.
63. In Pushkin’s poetic mythology, Arabia had always been associated
with poetic imaginative prowess, an association that seems to have been
based largely on Sheherezade’s inventiveness in Arabian Nights. Arabian
Nights fed an orientalist vision of the East as a place fabulous in both senses
of the word: outlandish things happened there, and, concomitantly, poets
there possessed prodigious gifts of fantasy. This is the facility for “little Arab
fairy tales” (13:309) whose natural antipode Pushkin once located in Rus-
sian reality, a juxtaposition which was repeated in the adjacency of “Blos-
soms of the Eastern fantasy” to northern snows on another occasion, and
which would later be duplicated in “Egyptian Nights” (3:160). Over the
years, Pushkin’s attempts to write a poem about Cleopatra had always been
accompanied by simultaneous work on the theme of prodigious Arab imag-
ination. In 1824, when he first began “Kleopatra” (the earliest version of
233
what is now the second improvisation in “Egyptian Nights”), Pushkin was

producing his “Imitations of the Koran” (the opening section of which fore-
shadows the scene of the conferring of boundless imagination in “The
Prophet”). In 1828 Pushkin’s return to the Cleopatra manuscript coincides
with the poem, “In the exquisite chill of the fountains,” which compares
Mickiewicz’s endless inventiveness favorably to that of Eastern poets and
thereby makes the connection between the prodigious Oriental fantasy and
the art of improvisation. (Bakhchisarai is mentioned by name; on the poem’s
reference to Mickiewicz, who is not mentioned by name, see Izmailov.)
Mickiewicz seems to have qualified as an equal of the Eastern poets, one
can surmise, not only because of his poetic talents, but because he had im-
bibed the spirit of the East in his “Crimean Sonnets.” The linkage between
Cleopatra and Sheherezade is also implicit in the figure of Agrippina
Zakrevskaia. Zakrevskaia, for Pushkin, represented both women simultane-
ously. (On Zakrevskaia as Cleopatra, see Hofmann, “Les ‘Nuits égyptiennes’
de Pouchkine.”) It was she who served as the prototype of the “Cleopatra
on the Neva” in “Evgeny Onegin”; yet on another occasion, she inspired a
poem in which the narrator, the secretly enamored confidant of Zakrev-
skaia, addresses her as though she were Sheherezade, once again (this time
unintentionally) inspiring his passion with her stories: “But check your
tales, / Hide, oh hide your dreams: / I fear their inflaming contagion”
(3:113). Monika Greenleaf argues additionally that Pushkin turned to the
topic of Cleopatra precisely when he felt trapped by writer’s block, creating
an association of a different sort between the Orient and imagination. When
the south/imagination connection at last becomes explicit, it is merely the
articulation of an idea Pushkin has worked with for years.
64. It should also be noted that by inspiring the love of the loveless
sultan through her tales, Sheherezade demonstrates again that art is an act
of love.
65. I am indebted to Eric Naiman for this insight. In the two exam-
ples which occur in the Italian’s improvisation we may perhaps descry his
sympathies; the genitive is used both times.
66. The implied function of “elixirs” was spelled out in the drafts,
where Pushkin had experimented with the wording “elixirs of life [zhiznen-
nye èliksiry]” (8:844).
67. A poem Pushkin was working on around the same time, “When
the Assyrian sovereign . . . ,” based on the tale of Judith and Holofernes from
the apocryphal Book of Judith, touches on the same theme. This time, it is
the all-powerful leader of the Assyrian army, the nobleman, as it were, who
enters a dangerous bedroom and is decapitated by the wily widow Judith.
The threat of decapitation, in other words, can be reversed and used by the
low-placed against their social superiors.
234
Notes to Page 73
68. Compare Pushkin’s plaintive reference to the flagging of his

famed autumnal productivity in a letter to Pletnev, “Never before has such
an unproductive autumn fallen to my lot” (16:56).
69. Mirsky notes that it was precisely in the fall of 1835 that Pushkin
bought a grave plot for himself, as if suddenly taking more seriously the
prediction in his 1831 Lyceum anniversary poem that with Del’vig dead, he
would be the next classmate to die (215–16).
70. Discussing 1834–36, Eidel’man refers to Pushkin’s preoccupation
with “the theme of withdrawal and death” (373). Todd astutely suggests
“Egyptian Nights” be read together with Pushkin’s contention, in his 1836
review of Voltaire’s correspondence, “that the true place for a writer is his
study and that ultimately only independence and self-esteem can elevate
one above life’s petty cares and the storms of fate” (12:81). Pushkin’s seem-
ingly secure triad of writer’s study, independence, and self-esteem, however,
has found no answer to the dangers illustrated the year before in “Egyptian
Nights” (which was still being kept hidden from publication and the pub-
lic). At the start of the story, Charskii is in his study; he is fully independent
in every possible way a poet can be; and the inward orientation, the deaf-
ness to chuzhoe slovo implicit in self-esteem, as opposed to esteem that
comes from its usual source in others calling to us from without, is precisely
his poetic credo. But even the poet has no control over the forces and indi-
viduals beyond his door who may unexpectedly come calling at any mo-
ment. And that, “Egyptian Nights” suggests, is when all the trouble begins.
71. Meynieux detects the same dynamics in Pushkin’s journalistic ca-
reer. He highlights similar background forces of social condemnation by cit-
ing Gogol’s relieved reaction to what appeared to be the end of Pushkin’s
disgraceful career in journalism in 1832: “So [Pushkin] is not going to pub-
lish a newspaper. So much the better! In our day and age taking up the
shameful craft of journalism is none too flattering even for an unknown;
while for a genius to do so means sullying the purity and chastity of his soul
and making himself into an ordinary man” (10:247). Meynieux notes, “It is
not from enthusiasm (quite the opposite, Pushkin despises journalists and
journalism with all his heart) but from need, from financial need, that
Pushkin embraces the career, which he makes fun of every chance and as
much as he can” (556). “Over the course of this year 1836, which sees him
realize his dream of having his own journal, one can sense passing over the
famous poet, at the height of his glory, the bitterness of total disillusion-
ment” (557). Pushkin, by the way, did finish one major work in 1836, The
Captain’s Daughter.
72. The choice here is meant to seem real enough to be perplexing.
In 1835, Pushkin had already tried incorporating his verse on Cleopatra
into another (unfinished) narrative, “We Were Spending the Evening at a
235
Summer House,” where he asks his reader to consider the possibility that
Cleopatra’s offer may be worth accepting.
73. The destruction of self implicit in the cry “Corpo di Bacco!” is,
notably, a destruction specifically of divinities. It should also be noted that
Bacchus/Dionysus reigned over the East; in one important procession,
Cleopatra rode alongside a Mark Antony in the ceremonial garb of Diony-
sus (Hughes-Hallett, 26). Moreover, the Bacchanalian revelries combined
the ritual tearing asunder of Bacchus, who was god, among other things, of
poetry and theater, with the suspension of normal social strictures. This dis-
membered body, then, marks a site where the inversion of social hierarchies
shows its inherent affinity with the theatrical power of the improvisor to
don new identities like costumes, a site where, loosely, aristocracy and po-
etry contend and the victory of poetic mutability over the fixity of selves and
social order is symbolically enacted.
CHAPTER THREE
1. The Petersburg tales were written at different times and were
never explicitly called a cycle by Gogol himself. Whether a conscious effect
or not, their internal unity—which I will explore in what follows—is thus all
the more striking.
2. Compare 399–400, especially Mann’s reference to “the irresistible
humane power of Gogol’s masterpiece.”
3. Only a few reactionary critics at the time the story appeared seem
to have understood Gogol’s hero in ways related to that which I will suggest.
According to Gukovskii, conservatives greeted Akaky Akakievich’s humility
and modesty with delight, though whether this was on spiritual or political
grounds is unclear (Realizm Gogolia, 353, 356). In either case, the view has
dropped from sight in Gogol criticism, leaving no trace, not only in the Soviet-
era anthology N. V. Gogol’ v russkoi kritike i vospominaniakh sovremen-
nikov, but even in the turn-of-the-century Russkaia kriticheskaia literatura
o proizvedeniakh N. V. Gogolia. Actually, Gukovskii provides neither cita-
tions nor names, and it is not impossible that he simply extrapolated from
Chernyshevskii’s vague references to (actual or anticipated) opposing views.
4. This moment of Final Judgment or, as the Russian has it, Terrible
Judgment, is in a curious sense foundational for Gogol’s vision of art. It not
only structures his major literary work, explicitly in The Inspector General
and implicitly elsewhere, but by Gogol’s own admission, gave birth to his lit-
erary talents and first awakened his imagination when he was a boy. In a fa-
mous letter to his mother, he writes:
I still often recall my childhood. . . . I remember I didn’t feel anything

strongly. . . . I looked at everything dispassionately; I went to church because
236
Notes to Page 81
I was made to or taken; but once there, I saw nothing but the vestments, the
priests, and the horrible howling of the deacons. I crossed myself because I
saw that everyone does. But once—I remember it like it was yesterday.
I asked you to tell me about the Final Judgment, and you told the child that
I was of the bliss awaiting those who live virtuous lives in such a good, clear,
moving way, and described the eternal torments of the sinners so vividly, so
appallingly, that it shook me and awakened in me all my sensitivities. This im-
planted and later brought forth in me the loftiest thoughts. (10:282)
As Mochul’skii notes in Dukhovnyi put’ Gogolia, “The emphasis in this ac-

count is certainly not on the description of the rewards for virtue, but on
the depiction of the sinners’ torments. The terrifying picture drawn by the
morbid imagination of his mystically endowed mother shook Gogol. It was
a shock he would never forget. His religious consciousness was to grow out
of the stern image of Retribution. . . . The picture of the Final Judgment al-
lowed the formation of the indistinct terrors that tormented him from
childhood on” (9). What is curious about the scene is that a clear vision of
the horrible penalty for sin is accompanied by a much murkier sense of
what constitutes and separates sin and virtue. This imbalance, where the
awareness of punishment outweighs the awareness of how or why humans
are judged (compare also the reference in “An Author’s Confession” to pre-
paring oneself to face “him before whom no man is justified” [8:435]), un-
derlies Gogol’s vision of poverty. As we shall see, someone is always being
castigated when poverty is present—the mere presence of poverty is proof—
but it is not clear to Gogol whether the punishment falls to the poor, for be-
ing poor, or the nonpoor, for not being poor enough.
5. For some interesting ideas on Gogol’s attempts to do just this (reg-
ulate, as The Inspector General seems to want to do, without paying atten-
tion, as Dead Souls seems to prefer), see the wonderfully insightful M. A.
thesis of Viise (38–45).
6. There are good reasons why a reactionary proponent of patriarchal
values like Gogol might object to a market economy per se. The free flow
of money infringes aristocratic privilege, encourages social mobility, destroys
traditional modes of social organization and old ways of life, turns human
attention to worldly rather than spiritual realities, and usurps the admiration
of men (see also Viise, 21–37). On the other hand, the aristocratic lifestyle
presumes a reliable source of income. Money is thus, for the upper-class
viewpoint Gogol identifies with, something one absolutely must have, but
may not think or worry about consciously (see Lotman, “Ocherk dvorian-
skogo byta oneginskoi pory,” 36–42). Since the Russian aristocracy’s eco-
nomic position was rapidly eroding in the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties
on the topic were inevitable. Gogol’s fictions evince this ambivalence. As
aristocrats are those who, by their own ethos, have money but do not com-
promise themselves with the lowly activities necessary to acquire it, so the
237
poor may seem to be the exact opposite: those who have the least money,
and who are therefore the most guilty of unsavory economic thoughts. Since
for Gogol it is the interest in money, not its possession, that is the evil to
avoid, the poor man is spiritually handicapped, more likely to be derailed
by practical concerns of no lasting significance.
7. I call the painter of the evil painting in “Portrait” “Leon’s father”
simply for the sake of convenience, even though the son is called Leon only
in the 1835 version of the story (in 1842 he becomes “the painter B.”;
3:119). The new name makes the son less European-sounding and more
anonymous, changes which bring him still more in line with the typical Rus-
sian poverty narrative.
8. There are several signs that Kovalev’s nose problems are effec-
tively money woes. When the newspaperman hears Kovalev’s story, he re-
sponds, “And did this Mr. Nosov rob you of much money?” (3:60). Similarly,
Kovalev cannot hire a cab and has to run after the nose’s carriage on foot;
at the newspaper office, he must wait for a lackey to finish speaking (about
the price of expensive dogs) before he can address the newspaper employee
(who himself is counting a pile of coins); and his announcement is turned
down because it resembles a lost-dog ad in which the dog turned out to be
the “treasurer” of some institution (3:61). Like the poor man, wherever he
turns, Kovalev is reminded of and oppressed by money.
9. The image of the bound faces may strike some readers as peculiar.
Lindenmeyr provides a useful gloss, citing a 1691 decree that mentions beg-
gars who “by covering and screwing up their eyes, as if they are blind, . . .
beg for alms in Christ’s name” (30).
10. According to the PSS, Gogol heard the anecdote between 1833
and 1836 (that is, either before or after writing the three tales in Arabesques),
but the event must have occurred before “Nevsky Prospekt” was completed
in 1834 (3:688).
11. Driessen speaks of Akaky Akakievich being “unfaithful to his first
love” (copying) in his excitement over the new coat (192).
12. This moral deterioration characterizes even the most innocent-
seeming of the Petersburg heroes, Piskarev. Though motivated by a laudable
love for ideal beauty, Piskarev ends up an opium addict and his suicide con-
stitutes an unpardonable sin in Orthodoxy. Worse yet, the man so repelled
by prostitution ends up prostituting his own art, agreeing to paint a shameless
image of a woman with a man lying next to her to pay off the opium seller.
13. Some may object that surely Akaky Akakievich suffers unduly
even if the other heroes do not. And indeed, “Overcoat” clearly toys with
the earlier tales’ balance, if only to see how much injustice can be meted
out before the reader is alienated. But, as we shall see shortly, by Gogol’s
standards the clerk’s new coat remains an unnecessary extravagance and so
a punishable offense.
238
14. This state of idyllic innocence is obviously present in most of the

tales, but is only hinted at in those heroes who provide the second half of
the two-part stories (Pirogov, the VIP); “Nose,” as usual, inverts the basic
pattern: Kovalev begins to approach the state only for the duration of his
noselessness.
15. Gogol’s dislike of specifically the exchange of money is implied by
the Antichrist in the 1835 “Portrait,” who is a usurer, a man who makes a
profit when money changes hands, but not when it is simply owned.
16. Leon’s father, in taking monastic vows, suggests a possible means
of regaining purity; but for reasons too complicated to do justice to here,
his example is problematic. Suffice to say, having ostensibly cleansed him-
self he returns to painting, but in a curiously incomplete manner. The good
artwork he now produces is a Nativity, which on one hand suggests a pure
way to render poverty (prominently displayed in every Nativity, since
the manger setting reminds us the central figures were too poor to stay
at the inn). But the painter’s choice of topic leaves unanswered the ques-
tion that caused his downfall in the first place: how to portray this world,
nineteenth-century Russia, whose very different poverty, as we shall see,
both the painter and his author find impervious to representation ex-
cept through risky artistic maneuvers for which there are no centuries-old
precedents.
17. In the second “Portrait,” rewritten around the same time, Leon’s
father lectures his son about “a lowly topic,” “the insignificant,” and “the de-
spised” (3:135). Note also the terms of Gogol’s description of Pushkin’s art:
“Poetry for him was a holy domain—almost a sort of temple. He would not
enter it tousled and disheveled . . . and naked, tattered [nagishom ra-
strepannaia] reality never entered it” (8:382). The thought is less important
than its vocabulary. Art is now a temple and what should not be admitted is
what is “naked, tattered”—the beggar in the temple. This is, incidentally,
the same identification we have seen before and will see again of reality
with poverty, as though wealth afforded access to ideality and invention
while the poor were stuck in the here and now, stranded outside the
precincts of art and imagination.
18. Interestingly, when discussing his own shortcomings, Gogol more
often uses a neutral terminology. For example, in the same “Leaving the
Theater” passage, Gogol claims (with at least a desire to be sincere, if not
actual sincerity), “I see my vices and see that I deserve reproach” (5:170).
This is an important shift because, as we shall see, Gogol later attacks those
who detach the first person from the third in ethical debates.
19. For a sampling of the Novikov-Catherine debate, see the excerpts
in Segel, 1:255–300.
20. In Selected Passages the principle of self-scrutiny spreads beyond
art to all admonitions of every sort:
239
Any advice or teaching whatsoever that you should have occasion to give,
though it be to someone on the lowest rung of education with whom you can-
not have anything in common, apply at the same time to yourself, and as you
have counseled the other, so counsel yourself; the same reproach you make
to another, make immediately to yourself. Believe this, that all will come back
to you yourself, and I do not truly know whether there is a criticism that one
cannot turn on oneself, if only you examine yourself carefully.” (2:282)
21. The absurdity of Ivan Iakovlevich’s crime is unmistakable: he is
accused of taking Kovalev’s nose for some secret reason, yet as we clearly
see, he has no recollection of, and indeed no motive for, the crime, and
wants only to be rid of the nose as quickly as possible. Still more inconsis-
tent, the nose he does try to discard is small and inanimate, while the nose
that everyone else encounters resembles a human being and is alive. We
never figure out quite what did happen, but we know with certainty the
poor man cannot be culpable in the way society concludes.
22. For a succinct summary of Rousseau’s position, see Grimsley,
43–53.
23. The idea takes many forms: “Gde grekh, tam i smekh. Grekh ne
smekh. . . . I smekh, i grekh. . . . V chem zhivet smekh, v tom i grekh. . . . I
smekh navodit na grekh” (4:241).
24. There is, to my knowledge, one exception, one case of laughter
without sin. It is when Akaky Akakievich copies and laughs a bit when he
comes to his favorite letters. This is the laughter of the innocent.
25. Cited in Gippius, 142. The quotation, apparently, is from the ver-
sion of “On The Odyssey, as Translated by Zhukovsky” which appeared not
in Selected Passages, but earlier, in two journals. I do not find the words
among the variants listed in PSS, however.
26. Accounts of the Table of Ranks and the terms ober-ofitser and
shtab-ofitser can be confusing due to the 1884 adjustment to the Table. In
1884, the rank of Maior (that is, “Major,” what Kovalev likes to call himself )
was canceled and the lower military ranks each moved one spot higher on
the Table. Kapitan, which thus moved from rank 9 to rank 8, nonetheless
remained the highest ober-ofitser. The differences in the relevant terms can
be compared in the Dal’ dictionary of 1882 and the Entsiklopedicheskii slo-
var’ (Brockhaus and Efron) of 1890.
27. Bakhtin argues that critical inquiries into Gogolian laughter have
all erred by taking too seriously Gogol’s statements about the meaning of
satire, and that Gogol described for contemporaries a satirical project sim-
ply because that is all the age was capable of understanding, while in real-
ity Gogolian laughter echoes with the energy of Rabelais, a profoundly
liberating, fundamentally carnivalistic energy. In a brief response, “Gogol’ i
sootnesenie ‘smekhovoi kul’tury,’ ” Lotman objects that in the Orthodox
world, unlike the western European tradition in which Rabelais operated,
240
laughter carries a much larger component of sin and shame attached to it.
Indeed, having read Gogol’s nonfictional statements on social matters, one
can hardly credit Bakhtin’s thesis; it is almost impossible to imagine a
thinker more instinctively horrified by the Rabelaisian carnival’s rituals of
displacement, which stand social hierarchies on their head and which in
their coarse and unrepentant laughter assert the fundamental animalistic
equality of all humans and the arbitrariness of class restrictions. Lotman is
certainly right that a sense of sin and shame oversee Gogol’s art, but per-
haps it is not so much the traditional Orthodox stricture on all laughter that
troubles Gogol, as his retrospective discovery of the meaning of his own
satiric acts. Bakhtin examines carnivalistic laughter in his Rabelais and His
World and Gogol in “The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor
(Rabelais and Gogol).”
28. Dostoevsky also finds the laughter in “Overcoat” unforgivably
cruel, as he signifies by the bitter reaction of his Makar Devushkin, the low-
ranking clerk who reads Gogol’s story and is outraged precisely by its in-
sensitivity to its hero.
29. The more widespread interpretation of the story has it that Akaky
Akakievich is done in not by the purchase of the coat, but by the wind and
frost that force him to obtain a new coat whether he wants to or not (for ex-
ample, Driessen, 184; Alissandratos, 35). However, Petrovich’s satisfaction
at the fact that he “neither demeaned himself, nor betrayed the sartorial
art” in the argument over whether Akaky Akakievich needs a new coat sug-
gests that the tailor refuses to mend the old one from obstinacy more than
necessity (3:156).
30. “One of the most important themes in the correspondence be-
tween 1840 and 1842 is the question of whether a person can attach his life
to things of the external world” (Chizhevsky, 317).
31. Driessen comes close to making this point, but then exculpates
Gogol, though his use of quotation marks seems to indicate lingering
doubts: “The nameless and shapeless figure of the narrator . . . appeals in
this way to the ‘healthy’ desire to laugh of the ‘normal’ person. Yet on a few
occasions . . . not only is another light thrown on the situation and the hero,
but also on everything that went before and follows. There arises in this
changing light that uncertainty, that ambivalence of feelings which always
accompanies humour” (197).
32. Driessen, 194; Seemann, Schillinger, Alissandratos.
33. In Sviatye drevnei Rusi, Fedotov speaks of the holy fool’s “dem-
onstration of the contradiction between profound Christian truth and super-
ficial common sense and moral laws, with the purpose of ridiculing the
world” (193). A typical example of the contradiction is St. Theodosius’s
mother’s demand, when he is still young, that he stop dressing in such tat-
tered rags—her complaint is itself revealing for Gogol’s story—because it
241
brings the family shame. What looks bad to society looks good to God, and
vice versa (18).
34. On Symeon’s practice of squatting down in the marketplace
whenever “his belly sought to do its private function,” as his hagiographer
puts it, see Krueger, 92–96.
35. Krueger discusses the role of the city in inspiring holy foolishness
(115–20), arguing that the institution arose as an attempt to solve “the prob-
lem of living a holy life in an urban environment, an environment which was
by its nature profane” (115). This is less true in the Russian context, histor-
ically speaking, but the hyperbolic figure of Akaky Akakievich suggests the
extremes to which virtue would have to go to be safe from the city. The
artist-monk of “Portrait” takes the easy way out, leaving St. Petersburg
when he decides to pursue piety.
36. Self-image and self-awareness are insightfully explored in Viise,
passim.
37. The Russian term for what Akaky Akakievich cannot change
(titul, “title,” not the regular word for a document’s name) stands out all the
more in a story where the term “titular councilor” (tituliarnyi sovetnik) ap-
pears dozens of times, and where the VIP, in acquiring a new “rank” also ac-
quires a new “titul” (3:165).
38. Certain questions of pretendership in Gogol are discussed by
Meyer.
39. The Latin word idiota meant a person ignorant and ill-informed
about public goings-on; in the original Greek, it designated a private indi-
vidual, one who held no public office.
40. A similar moment of nonrecognition followed by the saint’s will-
ing humiliation occurs in the Life of Theodosius as well (Nestor, 33–34). It
occurs also in the vita, very popular in Russia, Alexei, the Man of God.
Krueger discusses the topos of the saint’s, and especially the holy fool’s, con-
cealed sanctity (66–71) and observes, “Economic humiliation is a key com-
ponent of sainthood” in the genre of the vita of the concealed saint (70).
CHAPTER FOUR
1. In a sense, ambiguity is an inescapable feature of poverty as long
as it is construed not as the presence of certain qualities but as the lack of
others. For what has only negative features can never be certainly defined.
2. There is another possibility as well: poverty not as suffering, but as
a pleasing freedom. Perhaps in some ways it is enjoyable to have nothing,
to be free of the bonds of possessions. This view is less common but by no
means unthinkable.
3. For a general introduction to the institution of the holy fool, see
Fedotov, 2:316–43; Thompson; Murav; and, in the Greek context, Krueger.
242
4. For an overview of Selected Passages, see Sobel.

5. Popkin argues that the story, like all of Gogol’s fiction, reads above
all as a travesty of meaning: the story, like Akaky Akakievich’s coat, is pri-
marily a series of absences where the reader would prefer presences, a se-
ries of irrelevancies and digressions that refuse to come to the point and so
emblemize desire eternally unsatisfied.
6. Belinskii is not alone. Most scholars would agree with him. Fanger,
for example, categorizes “the themes of money and social rank” in the Pe-
tersburg tales as “[the devil’s] agents” (Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism,
112).
7. There is, however, a lingering tension between Gogol’s beloved
stasis and his project of reform, since change and immutability are opposites.
8. The joke about rank in the opening paragraph of “Overcoat” (the
lowly kapitan-ispravnik who objects to the depiction of his rank as drunk-
ards) falls into the same category: the narrative’s mockery derives not from
the man’s identification with his rank, but from the mental step that follows,
his wholesale rejection of the criticism of dereliction of duty; the man
would prefer to speak of vice in the third person. The scenario Gogol would
not find funny but rather ideal is if the man were to take every criticism per-
sonally, identifying with his rank and soberly reflecting that all kapitany-
ispravniki could indeed be more zealous in their work.
9. In Gogol’s mouthpiece, modesty in dress, which occasioned such
laughter in “Overcoat,” now seems distinctly laudable.
10. It is a bit of a surprise to find the poor lecturing the rich, espe-
cially in Gogol. “Overcoat” shows that the rich and the poor in Petersburg
fail to communicate because the rich do not listen to the poor. In “Leaving
the Theater,” Gogol skirts the issue, by having Gentleman B announce he
is already acquainted with the Very Modestly Dressed Man from a conver-
sation they held in their seats earlier. One wonders how the modestly
dressed man could afford a seat next to the illustrious Gentleman B. Gogol’s
slight problem motivating the scene reminds us how intractable are the so-
cial pressures which he would prefer to presume away. Similarly, as Akaky
Akakievich illustrates, honest hard labor can go wholly unnoticed in Russia.
Yet Gogol wants to bring to light the simply dressed chinovnik’s honesty and
dedication. So, after drawing for us a man of impeccable modesty, he is
forced to have him brag of his deeds. The point here is not Gogol’s failure
to pull off the scene more skillfully, but rather the shadow demonstration
that accompanies the main show: for as Gogol claims that the poor are ap-
preciated, he simultaneously reminds us that the hindrances standing in the
way of a poor man’s deserved recognition are so substantial that they are
hard to overcome even in fiction.
11. The rank Akaky Akakievich’s energy and devotion “might even
qualify” him for, state councilor, is the fifth rank, quite an achievement and
243
the highest status a man could earn purely on his own merits. Appointment
above the fifth rank could only be made by the tsar (Peace, 301).
12. Gogol does not seem to have been averse to participating in char-
itable events if they were arranged by someone else. “The Denouement of
The Inspector General,” for example, was originally to be performed as a
follow-up to a performance of the play in a benefit for the poor (PSS,
4:549).
13. This letter is entitled “Rural Judgment and Punishment,” imply-
ing that it applies only to serfs and peasants. Yet judged by Gogol’s concept
of lowliness spiritually conceived, serfs could hardly rate lower than the
barely human Akaky Akakievich. One rather suspects Gogol limits his com-
ments to country estates simply because it is only in the context of master-
serf relations that the rich can with impunity follow Gogol’s instructions for
keeping the poor in line.
14. Gogol’s sense that the rich are closer to God is a view of ancient
pedigree. The etymologies of the various Russian terms for poverty and
wealth imply the proximity of the rich to God or the gods and the corre-
sponding alienness of the poor from the divine and sometimes from society.
According to Vasmer (Fasmer), bogatyi (“rich”) derives from Bog (“God”),
presumably on the assumption that the rich enjoy God’s favor. Ubogii
(“poor”), on the other hand, means “separated from the rich,” “not rich,”
and, by extension, “away from God,” “unfavored by God.” Bog itself de-
scends from Sanskrit and Persian words meaning “god,” “lord,” “he who
grants,” “he who imparts,” and is related to words in those languages for
property and fortune. If giving goods is God’s function, then the prove-
nance of wealth is self-evident. Other languages make similar assumptions.
Vasmer cites a work by Schulze to the effect that the Latin word fortunatus
(compare English “fortune,” which means, of course, both luck and wealth)
suggests the same, meaning “protected by the gods”; similarly, Schulze
posits a clear connection between the Latin dives (“wealthy”) and the Eng-
lish “divine.” Bednyi, on the other hand, is from beda, related to bedit’ (“to
do harm”) and Old Slavic bediti (“to compel”), which come from a common
semantic cluster meaning “force,” “convince,” “vow,” as in the modern Rus-
sian pobedit’ (“defeat”) and ubedit’ (“convince”) (Indo-European bheudh-,
meaning “to be aware,” “to make aware”). Misfortune and poverty, implic-
itly, are like being forced, having one’s will bent or, to use an English word
with the same root as the Slavic, bidden—deprived of free will. The poor
are those who are coerced, or, as Pushkin finally recovers the root, “called.”
Nishchii (“poor,” “beggar”) is from a proto-Slavic word derived from a San-
skrit term meaning “alien” and a related word meaning “outside” (the con-
cept is unrelated to the Slavic words for “nothing”). Both bespeak an
assumption that the poor—in this case, perhaps itinerant beggars—are not
like us, not from here, not our people, other.
244
15. McLean uses the phrase in his title.

16. Gippius traces an attempt to rehabilitate sympathy somewhat in
Selected Passages (140–43). The attempt is limited, however; it concerns
seeing the springs that motivate bribe-takers (mostly from the upper class, it
should be noted). And the ultimate goal remains the same: to alienate the sin-
ner from himself, only in a kinder, gentler way. Meanwhile, in insisting that
almost all bribery stems from officials’ wives with extravagant tastes for the
latest fashions, Gogol displays a peculiar lack of imaginative insight of his
own. On the other hand, Gogol could make genuine and quite extensive ap-
peals for forgiveness based on sympathetic understanding if the one to be
sympathized with was he—as his letters and particularly “An Author’s Con-
fession” (see, for example, 8:453–55), with their regular self-justifications,
show.
17. In imagining thieves under his bed, Akaky Akakievich comes to
the same pass as Poor Liza: acknowledging that he too has been sleeping
with the enemy. Like Liza, he too will shortly become one of the tormen-
tors himself, returning in his epilogue as another thief.
18. 3:199. Compare also 196, 201, 202, and 203.
19. Because of the promethean temptations imagination poses in
Gogol, it turns out that the Russian capital’s cruelty to the poor actually does
society a service by punishing those who dream too much. The Inspector
General illustrates the disasters that are inevitable when lowly clerks escape
Petersburg’s surveillance. Khlestakov is mistaken for a lofty dignitary by the
officials of a small town (meant to represent all of provincial Russia) and,
without quite realizing what he is doing, begins to fabricate, lie, and im-
personate. The snowball of imagination is soon careening out of control (he
even claims to be friends with Pushkin); the downfall of all the town’s offi-
cials, their morals suspect to start with, is the result. (Khlestakov’s own fate,
for once, is not specified, but if Gogolian justice is done, it will not be pleas-
ant.) Khlestakov is not by nature sly or inclined to lie—Gogol is adamant
about this in the instructions to the play’s actors. And this precisely is his
point. Would we not all agree it must be more fun to be rich and powerful
than poor and victimized? (Khlestakov cannot even afford food, though
the play somehow manages to insinuate that this is his own fault.) In a city
like Petersburg that teaches everyone, even the lowest, what role-playing
is and how it works, all the poor would soon be out of hand if only they
had a chance. So they must never get that chance. In yet another rever-
sal, the “deplorable” soulless regimentation and relentless bullying of the
lower classes in Petersburg in fact keep them in line and spare Russia un-
told hardships.
20. The vagueness and featurelessness of the poor—Kovalev’s quality
as well, though in a slightly different sense—is emphasized in “Nevsky Pros-
pekt” and the description of Kolomna in “Portrait,” as though it were endemic
245
to all of urbanized (and so Europeanized) Russia. The drafts of the former

story call the great avenue the only place in Petersburg where:
howsoever little is to be seen our mysterious society, famed in its populous
mass for an utter colorlessness that even makes one suspicious enough to
doubt its existence. . . . The painter of characters, the incisive observer of dis-
tinctions, will burst from frustration if he should desire to depict it in vivid,
fiery colors. No striking peculiarity! no sign of individuality! (3:339)
21. Chartkov’s ladder of gradual advancement is, incidentally, the

same ladder that the VIP berates Akaky Akakievich for not observing; the
VIP, Gogol tells us, has two quirks: as to petitions, he insists “that everything
proceed according to the strictest order: the collegiate registrar [rank 14,
the lowest] should report to the provincial secretary [rank 12], the provin-
cial secretary—to the titular councilor [rank 9] . . . and the matter should
thus make its way to him”; and he likes to meet his inferiors on the stairs,
the funny again masking Gogol’s serious concepts (3:164).
22. When he redid the story, Gogol removed all mention of imagina-
tion at this point and allowed the references to cold hard reality to stand
alone. This small alteration occasioned another, however: Gogol also ex-
cised the references to the painter’s extreme poverty. In 1835, Leon’s father
is often utterly penniless and sits hungry for days, yet declines to borrow
from the moneylender and refuses—as Piskarev does not—to produce
paintings simply to barter for earthly goods (3:422). In 1842, Leon’s father
works “for modest pay, that is, such pay as he needed only to maintain his
family and make it possible for him to do his work”; as the story becomes
less about imagination it also becomes less about poverty (3:127). Yet while
imagination is no longer directly blamed for the artist’s error, the underly-
ing problem of how to reconcile imagination in the poor with virtue remains
unresolved.
23. The equivalence of riches and imagination is underscored in
“Nevsky Prospekt,” where dreams become Piskarev’s “only . . . form of
wealth” (3:28).
24. Gogol highlights the parallelism of the two stories by numerous
plot elements. Most significantly, both narratives enact the failure of the
poor hero to find love. Both heroes, with similar and rhyming names, start
out on Nevsky Prospekt, looking at passing beauties, then follow one to her
home. The pursuit of love is strangely converted into a business dealing, the
hero is repelled (physically or emotionally), but later returns, visits his
beauty several times, a dance takes place, there is danger in the form of for-
eigners with intoxicants (the Persian with opium, Schiller with beer and to-
bacco), the hero wins her in his imagination but not in reality, and comes to
bodily harm. The only major difference is the hero’s attitude toward paying
for the woman. Piskarev, who pursues the woman who is for sale, finds the
246
idea abhorrent, while Pirogov, who has no objections (he pays 15 rubles for
spurs he does not need, just to carry on the pursuit), happens to have cho-
sen a woman who is not on the market. Significantly, the stories share a
common conclusion, as if to underscore that the lesson learned, despite the
division into a comical story and tragic one, is really unified.
25. Gogol is aware of the issues surrounding determinism, even if he
offers them no accommodation in his story. The deterministic argument runs
something like this: if external forces guide our actions above and beyond
the control of our own will, then we cannot be held entirely responsible for
our deeds and misdeeds. The classic example is the person so destitute he
steals in order to eat. Such a person, Belinskii and others insist, cannot be
accused of any crime; rather society as a whole is to be blamed. Part of the
cruel humor in “Overcoat” derives from its play with this assumption. Akaky
Akakievich is as good as humanly possible, and has seemed to most readers
a pure victim, battered by forces he cannot possibly resist, like the wind, the
frost, and robbers; what Akaky Akakievich could have done other than what
he did do—the classic deterministic bind—is hard to imagine, and yet he is
destroyed anyway. (Gogol might have had him shiver in his old coat or de-
mand Petrovich patch it, but even so it must be admitted that Akaky
Akakievich’s moral transgression is unmistakably tiny.) For liberal-minded
readers who would be inclined to forgive Akaky Akakievich the crime of
stealing a decent coat in his dire need, Gogol arranges the fantastic ending,
where the theft is perpetrated by a spirit who naturally does not need to
keep warm any longer. The crime which the narrative labors so hard to ren-
der forgivable is made unforgivable again; the deterministic pardon, like
the coat itself, is yanked away just when it seems within grasp.
26. The almost confident defense of laughter in the 1842 “Leaving
the Theater” becomes, in the 1846 version of “Denouement of The Inspec-
tor General,” a more worried distinction of types of humor, as the author
states he has staked his career on the good variety, “not that dissolute
[laughter] one person uses to ridicule another in society and which arises
from the idle emptiness of time unoccupied, but the laughter born of love
for man” (4:132). At last we have an admission that there is such a thing as
laughter, socially based, that humiliates simply because it can. The piece
nonetheless concludes with a final salvo on behalf of satire which is said to
serve “supreme eternal beauty,” at which point the stage directions instruct
the actor to look up toward heaven (4:133). By 1847 and the second version
of the work, Gogol is closing on the exact opposite note. The new ending
tells us that laughter is given to man “so that he should be able to laugh at
himself, not at others. And he who lacks the spirit to laugh at his own short-
comings—better he should never laugh again! . . . Otherwise his laughter
will be transformed into slander, and as for a crime he will answer for it! . . .”
(4:136, ellipses in original).
247
27. Maguire discusses possible reasons for Gogol’s retreat into silence,
some slightly different than those quoted, on 242–54 and 318–41 (espe-
cially 338–41).
CHAPTER FIVE
1. For more on Strakhov’s attitude toward the relationship of Russian
culture to Europe, or as his magnum opus called it, The Struggle with the
West in Our Literature, see Gerstein, 102–46.
2. Kireevskii and Dostoevsky will regularly repeat the rhetorical move
of making Russia’s identity and worth dependent on its similarities to or
differences from Europe. Kireevskii’s “On the Character of Europe’s En-
lightenment and Its Relation to Russia’s,” ironically a classic of Slavophile
thought, promotes the dependency to the title.
3. The citation comes from Heine’s poem “Ein Jüngling liebt ein
Mädchen” in his Buch der Lieder (Heine, 98). My thanks to David Lee of
the University of Tennessee for this information.
4. For general background on the plight of Russian literature in the
formative period up to the middle of the nineteenth century, see Koyré,
217–85; Bowman, 1–30; and Holquist, 3–34.
5. Michael Holquist, basing himself on the skewed dates of the diary
entries in Gogol’s “Notes of a Madman,” has suggested a related motif of
anachronism (3–34). Belatedness is clearly central to Chaadaev’s reading
of Russian history. On the other hand, Holquist, sensitive to the trends of
the age, himself refers to “the poverty and peculiarity” of Russian culture
(4), “a very poorly and recently developed tradition of the ode” (6), “the
poverty of Russian literature” and “the poverty of the Russian language”
(12), and “the Russian sense of historical poverty” (15).
6. Compare, as an example of the conscious-unconscious distinction
Groys has in mind, Kireevskii speaking of Europe and Russia together:
“Every era has its reigning, its vital question, predominating over all minds,”
which for his own time he identifies as “the great question of the relation-
ship of the West to that hereunto unnoticed principle of life, thought, and
civilization which lies at the basis of the Orthodox Slavic world,” a relation-
ship between something aware and something obscured but more impor-
tant (175; “Survey of the Current Condition of Literature”).
7. Nadezhdin gives an example of the daunting superiority meta-
phors of wealth could impute to the West when he speaks of the hope of
one day sharing in the “intellectual capital of mankind, accumulated by the
efforts of nations over the course of millennia” (151).
8. On the history of the Russian interest in national character, see
Koyré, 217–55; Zeldin, and Walicki.
248
9. It may also be significant for Pushkin’s rejection of the metaphor

that the typical nineteenth-century Russian writer’s visit to Europe tended
to produce a certain disillusionment (obviously so in many cases—Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Kireevskii—and less obviously in others), and that Pushkin
alone among our writers never traveled there.
10. The full text of Chaadaev’s endorsement of imagination: “In your
reading, you tell me, nothing so touches your imagination as the descrip-
tions of those quiet and serene lives whose view, like that of some beautiful
landscape at dusk, gives rest to the soul and removes us, for a moment, from
a painful or insipid reality. Well, these pictures are not fantasies: it is up to
you to bring one of the charming fictions into being; you lack nothing to ac-
complish it. You see that I am not enjoining a very austere morality: I am
seeking that which can give peace to your soul in your own inclinations and
in the most pleasant dreams of your imagination” (33–34).
11. La perte du Rhône is a spot where the river goes underground
briefly; see Karamzin, Pis’ma, 191.
12. Antsiferov provides an overview of the Petersburg myth. For one
recent interpretation of the canon of the “little man,” see Filippova.
13. There is a major theme of generational conflict in the period’s lit-
erature, but it has a very different tinge than the story of the nation’s own
maturation, juxtaposing the “men of the 40s” and the “men of the 60s,” ro-
mantics and realists. For some key Dostoevsky works, however, Holquist
is able to show, as the title of his chapter on The Brothers Karamazov has
it, “How Sons Become Fathers.”
14. Pushkin’s Germann in The Queen of Spades is also a man of ac-
tion, eager to escape his modest means through money rather than the power
of dreaming, and so is the appropriate recipient of both a non-Russian
moniker and a hyperimaginative demise like Gogol’s heroes.
15. The use of the word “orphan” (sirota) for those who have lost
only their fathers is normal in Russian (and acceptable in English as well).
16. Holquist again precedes me in discussing some of these central
ideas. His treatment of the Russian cultural predicament is entitled “Or-
phans of Time” (3); he also has a number of important remarks on the lack
of inheritances in The Idiot (119–22).
17. Italy provided a not entirely inappropriate double for Russian
culture. To some extent, contemporary Italian literature stood in the same
relationship to the European powers as did Russia: though it had a great
history behind it, it was currently weak and insignificant, another runt, at
least in Russian eyes. Karamzin only half jokingly notes that climate cannot
account for Russia’s literary belatedness, since if so, modern Italy with its
warm climate would be producing new “Virgils and Tassos” but in fact turns
out only “castratos” (2:184). Kireevskii’s discussion of national literatures
similarly classes Italy as “out of date” (177).
249
18. The connection of Tolstoy’s story to Karamzin’s Letters is pointed

out by Lotman in the notes to Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii,
382 n2, and briefly discussed by Lotman and Uspenskii in Karamzin, Pis’ma
russkogo puteshestvennika, 570–71. Tolstoy, incidentally, is vague about the
nationality of his hero. The singer hails from Argovia, a German-speaking
Swiss canton. His native language, however, is unspecified (when he speaks
German, the narrator calls it a patois, but the term “patois” is also ambigu-
ous for our purposes, since it means either a regional dialect or an ungram-
matical mixture of several languages). What is clear is that he comes from
another place, like Russia and Italy, on the periphery of the great European
nineteenth century.
19. This need for self-supplied genealogies retains a powerful grip on
Russian fiction as late as The Brothers Karamazov, where the one brother
to survive the ordeal is the one (Alyosha) raised by a surrogate father with
surrogate brothers in a monastery.
20. This is also a past where, though the protagonists of the story are
high-ranking and rich, they live a common life with the innumerable Rus-
sian poor; most of the description of Natalia’s father is devoted to his habit
of inviting passing beggars into his house to dine with him at the same table
(1:624–25).
21. As already mentioned, Pushkin reverses key parameters in the
pattern in accordance with his belief, atypical until we get to Dostoevsky,
that imagination intrinsically comes easier to the poor. (Italy as well has a
different significance for him than for others.) But he aligns the Russian
and European axes of imagination exactly as do others.
22. Other examples, both European and Russian, of “scrivener fic-
tion,” as she calls it, are catalogued by Shore (377–88).
23. Turgenev, as another committed aristocrat like Pushkin, senses
his nation’s anxieties before Europe but simultaneously downplays them.
(He was, notably, the most famous Russian writer of the day in western Eu-
rope.) His Hamlet who shares the nation’s self-doubts is a distinctly Russian
type buried in the provinces, aware of the full extent of his unoriginality be-
cause, like the copy clerk confronted with Petersburg, he has had exposure
to Europe (having done his studies in Berlin). What is specific to Turgenev
is, as the Shakespearean moniker shows, that such native types still illus-
trate pan-European tendencies.
24. Another text on poverty and imagination we will not discuss at
greater length nonetheless deserves mention, Odoevskii’s “The Improvisor”
(1832). The work has the shape, though none of the tone, of Gogol’s face-
tious Petersburg tales: the poor hero acquires imagination, is irrevocably
altered by the power, and ultimately destroyed. The story differs from those
we are examining more closely, however, because though there are hints,
there are no explicit references to the relationship between Europe and
250
Russia. Odoevskii situates his action in an anonymous land not unlike the
Germano-Italic zone occupied by Hoffmann’s tales. (The named characters
are Kipriano, Dr. Selegiel’, Charlotte, and Pepe.) On the other hand, as in
the case of Russia, the imaginative powers around which the action turns
come from abroad.
The poor young hero is an incompetent poet, held back in part be-
cause “the cold skeleton of need greeted his developing fantasy with its im-
mobile smile” (87). Desperate to be able to versify, he barters his soul in a
deal with the demonic Dr. Selegiel’ and acquires the ability to sense more
than the ordinary human, or as the doctor calls it, “to see all, to know all, to
understand all” (92; emphasis in original). The doctor’s own powers stem
from a mysterious voyage abroad made because his practice was too small
and he was poor. When he returns, he is fantastically wealthy and possessed
of supernatural capacities. National anxieties surface briefly when the doc-
tor’s enemies accuse him of crimes and ask that he be judged according to
“the former laws on necromancy” (91); this elicits only laughter from a com-
mittee of judges, however, and “thanks to European enlightenment” Se-
legiel’ is able to carry on (91).
The gift Kipriano acquires from the doctor comes with a condition:
“The power which I am giving to you will become a part of your very self”
(92). The poor man is thus transformed but soon comes to be tormented by
his heightened impressionability: he sees beyond the surface of objects, dis-
cerns two warring gases rather than water, and so on, until he can no longer
bear the avalanche of detail. For the poor man, imagination can only be ac-
quired through supernatural means and at the expense of madness. Before
long, half crazed by sensory overload, he resolves to buy back his gift “at the
price of poverty and need,” but it is too late (96); he ends his days as the
ward of a “landowner living in the steppes,” another slight hint at Russia
(96). Odoevskii’s innovation, in a sense, is to tell the improvisor tale but give
it for once the ending of the copyist tale. As in Gogol, the escape from
poverty is a forfeiture of true self, though how fully the drama deserves to
be projected onto any particular nation remains debatable.
25. Things associated with Peter the Great are somewhat ambiguous.
(The matter is actually more widespread than this, but one example suffices
to illustrate the point.) St. Petersburg is highly European, especially Nevsky
Prospekt, but less so than Peter himself; a Petersburg artist is still less, then
comes a Petersburg copyist. On the other hand, a Moscow artist would fol-
low a Petersburg artist, and both would precede the Russian countryside
and peasants. Whether the spectrum divides into opposites or finer grada-
tions, however, it remains bipolar.
26. Of all Tolstoy’s works, “Lucerne” may be the most apt as an illus-
tration of Gustafson’s contrasting concepts “resident” and “stranger,” as
Gustafson himself observes (26).
251
27. The heimlich element also intrudes in the original entry in Tol-
stoy’s diary out of which the story grew. Where Nekhliudov is returning
from a trek around the city gloomily and in detachment, Tolstoy had been
out to visit a “privathaus,” German for “private house” (47:140).
28. Tolstoy himself tried unsuccessfully to repress this feature, scold-
ing himself in his diary for letting the story become, in French, “diffus”
(47:144). This diffuseness, however, is essential, for it figures the uncertain
boundaries of the self, the alternation of belonging and alienation that is the
story’s theme.
29. While writing “Lucerne,” Tolstoy was reading Hans Christian An-
dersen’s novel The Improvisatore (PSS, 47:141).
30. A very similar criticism of Europe’s principled indifference to the
poor is voiced in Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.
31. Khrapchenko, in a typical Soviet interpretation, undermines the
second conclusion by attributing the singer’s reaction to his “submissiveness
and moral limitations” (47).
32. Tolstoy’s attempts to mold himself after the poor were not limited
to ethical matters. He was also capable of embracing the proposition that
the rich should learn how to imagine from the poor, as in “Who Should
Learn to Write from Whom—Should Peasant Children Learn from Us, or
We from Them?” (1862), one of the articles he published on his experi-
ences running a school at Iasnaia Poliana. The work lavishly praises his stu-
dents’ ability to outdo the professional writer who was their teacher (Tolstoy
himself ) in the judicious composition of fictions. (By focusing on the young,
Tolstoy further repeats the association we have seen before, of poverty and
immaturity as dual forms of uncivilizedness.) What Is Art? (1898) takes a
related stance, making the judgment of uncorrupted peasants the final ar-
biter in questions of aesthetic quality.
CHAPTER SIX
1. The classic study of Dostoevsky’s borrowings from Gogol is Tynianov.
2. The French assessment is of course a comedy of errors. Krylov
wrote no novels and lived well into his 70s, while Derzhavin did not write
fables and hardly imitated La Fontaine; Antoinette Deshoulières was a par-
ticularly saccharine French poet of the eighteenth century. The quotation
comes from the introduction to “A Series of Articles on Russian Literature.”
3. On the popularity of the poor clerk story, see also Vinogradov, 313–
15. Vinogradov quotes Shevyrev as complaining in 1846 that clerks “provide
literature with almost the only material for vaudevilles, comedies, tales, satiri-
cal scenes, etc. All of literature relies on them almost exclusively” (314).
4. In 1850, the Ministry of Internal Affairs alone produced 31 million
documents (Lincoln, 472).
252
5. I take the term “(one’s own) word,” by the way, from Dostoevsky
himself, as in the Raskol’nikov quotation already cited, not from Bakhtin,
who popularized a slightly different usage. In general, Problems of Dosto-
evsky’s Poetics overvalues chuzhoe slovo (the alien word) at the expense of
svoe (one’s own), often making the former sound like an end unto itself. It
should be clear by now that Dostoevsky regards svoe slovo as man’s legiti-
mate goal, even if Bakhtin is certainly right that svoe slovo ends up being
penetrated through and through by chuzhoe. The profusion of alien voices
in the universe is simply an inescapable condition that each self encounters,
which does nothing to prevent it from often being, as we have seen, a hor-
rible, oppressive force even as—or rather precisely because—it serves as an
obligatory tool for anyone striving toward selfhood.
6. As Mochulsky observes, “Devushkin is Dostoevsky’s first ‘rebel.’
With trepidation he mumbles that which later Raskolnikov will proclaim
loudly and boldly” (Dostoevsky, 35).
7. Of Alyosha’s listening skills, Pevear notes “His opinions and judg-
ments consist . . . of things others have just said to him” (xviii).
8. A major alternative to the underlying narrative of poverty, highly
favored by political liberals, is of course Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be
Done? Clearly, much of the novel’s appeal derives from the fact that
Chernyshevskii was not content with the wealth of dreaming and, as in the
cooperative sewing workshop, portrays the pursuit of actual money as nec-
essary to guarantee the dignity and independence of the poor (on the book’s
popularity and influence, see Paperno, 26–38). On the other hand, a vital
role in the novel is played by Vera Pavlovna’s dreams, in which, alongside
narrative expedient (utopian visions like that in her famous fourth dream
more or less have to be presented as imaginings), can be discerned a certain
residual respect for the imagination and its powers of human fulfillment.
9. Fanger reads the first (which I concentrate on), for example, as an
attempt to define the metaphysical mood of the capital city (Dostoevsky,
142), while Frank sees an attack on the “lack of a free press in Russia”
(Seeds of Revolt, 221), and Morson perceives verbal images of chaos meant
to mirror “a city with neither identity nor history” and therefore no news to
report either (18). Morson’s reading is perhaps the most insightful, yet
there is clearly method to the feuilletons’ chaotic madness. For Dostoev-
sky’s aim, the aim of Russian art in general as he saw it, is less to depict the
nonbeing of the nation accurately than to remedy it.
10. Dostoevsky does not refer to poverty in this part of the feuilleton
(though as in his fiction, he returns to it obsessively in the feuilletons as a
whole); but his fiction, both before and after 1847, extends the aesthetic
concerns here and associates them directly with poverty.
11. Jackson uses “quest for form” in the title of his book, and outlines
the major issues he discusses on 1–4.
253
12. The dreamer does of course resemble the true artist to some ex-
tent. Morson identifies the persona of the feuilletons’ narrator as that of the
dreamer, though it makes more sense to see in them a sober viewpoint de-
liberately discriminating the idleness of one from the difficult imaginative
labors of the other (17–18).
13. Mochulsky finds a key feature of the dreamer in “an emotional ex-
periencing of literary and historic images” but there is no reason to think
the trait limited to dreamers (Dostoevsky, 94). It is not the energy invested
in the reception of art that defines the dreamer, but the lazy preference to
be immersed in someone else’s creativity—to borrow instead of making
oneself.
14. Aspects of Dostoevsky’s interest in Pushkin’s story have been ex-
plored by Komarovich, Kirpotin, 97–108, and Burgin.
15. As we saw in chapter 2, for Pushkin “Egyptian Nights” is set not
so much in pagan Rome, as in the orientalist South.
16. Kirpotin suggests that Cleopatra nonetheless represents for Dos-
toevsky the highest point of this pre-Christian world, for she stands out
against the subservient crowd by virtue of her independent mind and, in her
ennui, at least senses the gnawing hollowness of the life around her (101).
17. It is fairly clear from Pushkin’s related story fragments about
other Cleopatra figures (“The Guests Were Arriving at the Summer House”
and “We Were Spending the Evening at a Summer House”) that Dosto-
evsky’s reading of the empress is not at all Pushkin’s (on which, see O’Bell,
37–69, 90–96). Pushkin is interested more in Cleopatra’s passion for life
than in her immorality, and finds much to admire in her energy and vitality.
18. How fully Myshkin actually corresponds to his model has in re-
cent decades become the subject of substantial critical dissent, especially in
the West. We will return to the matter below.
19. Myshkin is called “Prince Christ” several times, for example, 9:246.
20. Even the novel’s title gestures toward Gogol’s clerk. Chernyshev-
skii had in a review lambasted Akaky Akakievich (who, he felt, deserved
compassion for his poverty and his class but not for his own ineptness) as “a
ridiculous idiot [idiot]” and “a total ignoramus and complete idiot [sover-
shennyi idiot], incapable of anything” (750; Ne nachalo li peremeny?). For
an extended modern discussion of Myshkin’s resemblance to Akaky Akakie-
vich, see also Epshtein.
21. General Epanchin uses the term togo in the same meaning (8:153);
Chernyshevskii had as well in his critical article (750).
22. Johnson examines the motif of the face, its meaning, and its in-
terpretation in detail.
23. Burgin, 260–62. Numerous parallels could be added to Burgin’s
list. The first description in the drafts of the character Mignon, who later
became Nastasia Filippovna, is “Cleopatra” (9:141). One example of how
254
completely governed some sections of the novel are by the Pushkinian model
is: “Rogozhin asked his question like a man already lost addressing some
sort of divinity, but with the boldness of one who is condemned to execu-
tion and has nothing left to lose” (8:97).
24. The citation is from the letter to S. A. Ivanova (Dostoevsky’s niece),
1/13 January 1868 (28.2:251). Compare also, on the same topic, the letter
to A. N. Maikov of 31 December 1867/12 January 1868.
25. For an example of the type of artistic abilities ascribed to Mysh-
kin, see Miller, 192.
26. Frank offers an insightful discussion of Myshkin’s sympathetic
skills and how they can be related to his demise (Miraculous Years, 316–41,
especially 318–19, 339).
27. Holquist and Bethea trace a crucial logical flaw in Dostoevsky’s
(apparent) aspirations for his book back to the fact that the novel genre,
since it unfolds in earthly time and excludes otherworldly events by defini-
tion, could not possibly accommodate a true Christ figure, who would have
to operate in a different realm and bring to pass events of a radically dif-
ferent, un-novelistic kind. Yet Dostoevsky signals that he understands (and
perhaps is not distressed by) the bind by assimilating Myshkin not only to
Jesus but also to Pushkin’s Italian, since, for Dostoevsky at least, the im-
provisor is a teller of Christ’s story. In other words, Myshkin is—because he
must be, to be truly Christ-like—both an earthly figure (a new Jesus) and a
resident of a higher ontological level (a new teller of the Jesus story), for
only the teller can end the tale. Myshkin’s duality, being in a sense both
within and without his own story, thus tropes Jesus’ own. Dostoevsky can
therefore attempt to almost double what Christ will one day do: give a sum-
mary that foresees the end that it cannot depict.
28. Myshkin cannot read Aglaia’s face yet, however, for he claims he
is not entirely ready for “beauty”—an especially enigmatic claim since Na-
stasia Filippovna, whom he adjudges more beautiful than Aglaia, he can
read. Perhaps by “beauty” with no qualifications Myshkin means beauty
that has not suffered.
29. Certain contradictions in Myshkin’s attitude toward love and com-
passion are discussed by Kasatkina.
30. Dostoevsky has Myshkin tell a somewhat different condemned-
man tale to the house-servant so we can see how he tailors his narratives to
the audience at hand.
31. The most interesting examination of the meaning of the term
“idiot,” both etymologically and as understood by Dostoevsky’s contempo-
raries, is Murav, 88–90.
32. The shortcomings of Ganya’s imagination are on display when he
worries how his father might act at his wedding to Nastasia Filippovna:
“Sometimes, to bait and fret himself, he would try to imagine [his father]
255
during the wedding ceremony, but he could never complete the picture and
abandoned it as quickly as possible” (8:90).
33. Fanger, 216–18. See also Morson, 8–9; and Jackson, The Art of
Dostoevsky, 262–64. I would not dispute Jackson’s claim that for Dosto-
evsky, artistic forming “does not involve invention or fabrication,” but only
if invention and fabrication are understood in their negative sense, as the
willful or arbitrary assertion of untruths (263). Like Karamzin, whom he fol-
lows in many of his aesthetic views, Dostoevsky never stipulates exactly
where the boundary lies between truth and falsehood, between genuine
aesthetic imagination and false imagination, but he clearly allows for a type
of controlled and responsible fabrication that is on the side of truth.
34. Miller examines the narrator’s trustworthiness passim; the partic-
ular passage in question is treated on 127–30.
35. The train connection is thoroughly explored by Bethea (62–104).
36. For an interpretation of decorum as a form of “inertia” tanta-
mount ultimately to death, see Knapp, especially 97.
37. The two other characters with vivid imaginations are Lizaveta
Prokofievna and Aglaia, and they differ from Myshkin and Nastasia Filip-
povna in important regards. Above all, neither knows what it means to suf-
fer poverty. In addition, Lizaveta Profievna’s literary education is suspect
(she cannot even identify a famous Pushkin poem); Aglaia’s is somewhat
better (though she is proudest of the two trashy Paul de Kock novels she
managed to acquire on the sly), but, as she reveals in her tête-à-tête with
Myshkin, she wants to go out and do things—a desire that would be laud-
able if she did not mean simultaneously to demean the power of fiction
(8:356–58). In what may be a class reflex, she makes fun of Myshkin’s belief
in the value of imagination by calling it quietism, and intimates insultingly
that if she had been Myshkin, she would have visited Naples not in thought
but as the rich do, in person, for a proper tour (8:51). Aglaia’s further belief
that she must run away from home to be useful to society is a reminder that
her attitude toward the fantasy stems from her possession of a patrimony
which is both financially and familially viable—sometimes more so than she
would like.
38. Epshtein notes that even the salary Epanchin says Myshkin could
expect to earn (35 rubles per month) is as close as one can come in round
figures to Akaky Akakievich’s 400 a year (136). Dostoevsky, however, de-
cides to cut off this narrative line of development with the rather weakly
motivated fortune that drops in Myshkin’s lap. The rejection of the parallel
after one has been invoked serves as an implicit acknowledgment of the
poor man’s restricted scope of action; the type of Christ-like self-giving
Dostoevsky has in mind for his hero requires a self that is free to give.
Akaky Akakievich, for all his meekness, has to spend most of his day at his
desk, not by the side of the sufferers.
256
39. Perelozhenie na nashi nravy (literally, “adaptation to our mores”)

was eighteenth-century Russian writers’ practice of substituting Russian re-
alia for foreign ones in their translations of Western plays.
40. Marie, the fallen Swiss woman the novel parallels with Nastasia
Filippovna, likewise refused to forgive herself (“to the very end she consid-
ered herself a great criminal” [8:62–63]), but with her different psychology,
was not driven to hate others or herself or seek vengeance.
41. Note also the contrast between Cleopatra’s shameless bartering
for her favors and Nastasia Filippovna’s tossing of Rogozhin’s 100,000
rubles into the fire, designed to intimate that she requires money only to
make a public display of its unimportance.
42. Perhaps the fullest exploration of Nastasia Filippovna’s very vari-
ously interpreted self-hatred is Fridlender’s, minus the Soviet Marxist bi-
ases (229–37).
43. Bakhtin’s reading is slightly different. He argues that Nastasia Fi-
lippovna cannot resolve on a self-image and so dares others to do so for her,
thereby underscoring her own right to disagree (Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics, 243, 257).
44. The Christliness precisely of Myshkin’s failure was already noted
by Wasiolek (109) and Frank, The Miraculous Years (328). (Frank’s chapter
on The Idiot in this book is a slight adaptation of a 1969 article.)
45. Those who flaw Myshkin ally themselves with the Grand Inquisi-
tor, who lays the blame for human suffering and evil at the feet of Christ
himself. There is as well inconsistency to the dissatisfaction with Dostoev-
sky’s hero, for he is simultaneously accused of monologizing others and of
not preventing a variety of misdeeds by others, interfering both too much
and too little.
46. Mochulsky suggests an alternate lineage: “The image of ‘the pos-
itively beautiful individual’ did not attain its complete embodiment in the
novel The Idiot. But Dostoevsky did not renounce the ‘immeasurable’ task.
The pilgrim Makar Dolgoruky in A Raw Youth, Bishop Tikhon in The Dev-
ils, the Elder Zosima and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov—all bear
witness to the author’s incessant effort to achieve ‘the miracle of embody-
ing beauty’ ” (380–81).
47. Wasiolek has shown how the motifs of selfishness and money are
interwoven in the novel and interpreted by Lebedev (who amply illustrates
them himself ) as signs of the coming Apocalypse (85–87).
48. Whether Tatiana deserves to be called poor in the literal sense is
another question. Despite her markedly low-class name, shocking to con-
temporaries (on the semiotics of which, see Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina,
196–98), her family is provincial gentry, clearly not wealthy by the standards
of their class, but, on the other hand, never unambiguously declared poor.
After her marriage, she and the narrator retrospectively describe her youth
257
with the epithet bednyi (“poor”). The Slovar’ iazyka Pushkina (Dictionary
of Pushkin’s Language), which set itself the thankless task of distinguishing
the meaning of these sometimes ambivalent examples—it lists “poor” in the
objective sense separately from “poor” in the sentimental sense—regards
the reference to the “poor abode” (bednoe zhilishche; 6:188) of Tatiana’s
childhood as objective (though the combination makes it inconclusive for
our purposes) while curiously taking the lines “But all evening my Onegin /
With Tatiana alone was occupied, / Not that timid girl, / In love, poor, and
simple, / But the indifferent princess . . .” (6:177) purely in the sentimental
sense (Slovar’, 1:72–73). In fact, the reference to “the previous Tania, poor
Tania” when she is reading Onegin’s missive and weeping is more probably
sentimental (6:185). Dostoevsky, who will attribute the shape of Tatiana’s
psyche to the influence and memory of her (objectively) poor nurse, clearly
invests his references to poor Tatiana with the financial meaning, however,
for he finds absolutely nothing to pity in Pushkin’s heroine, who is always,
in his reading, strong, confident, and at peace with herself.
49. The speech also concludes with a related image. The final sen-
tence has Russia struggling to divine the enigmas not of another’s character
and fate but of its own: “Pushkin died with his powers at their fullest and
unquestionably carried off to the grave a particular secret. And here we are
now without him, trying to unravel that secret” (26:149).
50. In the selflessness of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin, we see refracted the
ancient concept of kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ, but updated to im-
ply an artist’s openness to other selves, rather than the acceptance of suffer-
ing the term traditionally connotes. “Kenosis” is an interesting choice as the
new Russian word, since in its original Russian source, the death of Boris
and Gleb, it was not only one of the nation’s oldest cultural achievements,
“the great discovery of the first Christian generation in Russia” (Fedotov,
Russian Religious Mind, 1:131) but also derived from an almost identical
context of belatedness and anxiety of imitation in a cultural rivalry with a
more distinguished foreign power, Byzantium, when Russia had, in the
terms of Nestor’s “Lection on the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb,” entered
the Christian world like the workers of the eleventh hour (“Chtenie o svi-
atykh,” 3–4). For a recent examination of Dostoevsky’s understanding of
kenosis, see Kotel’nikov.
51. The novelty of Dostoevsky’s final conception in the speech should
not obscure the degree to which its materials had long been available. Dos-
toevsky admits as much himself, though perhaps with overmuch modesty:
“Besides, this idea has been expressed more than once. I am not saying any-
thing in the least new” (26:148). The commentaries in PSS and Levitt trace
the main sources. The tripartite division of Pushkin’s career is from Kireev-
skii’s “Something on the Nature of Pushkin.” In “A Few Words on Pushkin,”
Gogol makes Pushkin into a ventriloquist whose countrymen feel themselves
258
speaking when they read his words (8:51). The image of the protean Push-
kin, at home in any identity, is found in Gogol’s “What Ultimately Consti-
tutes the Nature of Russian Poetry and What Its Uniqueness” (8:383–84),
as well as Belinskii’s fifth Pushkin article (7:333), while the unique adapt-
ability of the Russian national character, an observation Belinskii attributes
to the Slavophiles (under the name of “slavianoliuby”) but agrees with, ap-
pears in the seventh Pushkin article (7:436–37). Belinskii’s 1846 survey of
Russian literature asserts it is easier for Russians to mime French views on
any matter than to have a Russian one, because they are so aware of the for-
mer and mystified by the latter (10:20–21). Dostoevsky himself had voiced
somewhat similar views to those in the speech in an 1861 discussion of
Pushkin (19:105–16). Nonetheless, these scattered materials come together
eloquently in the oration as they do in none of the sources.
52. The quotation is from Tiutchev’s 1855 poem “These Poor Settle-
ments . . .”
53. The distinction of an impoverished Russia from a rich Europe—
now finally come full circle, back to the economic realm—is a bit arbitrary,
even if Russia’s relative poverty was indisputable. There were both poor in
Europe (Dostoevsky discusses them at length in Winter Notes on Summer
Impressions), and rich in Russia (quite a few in The Idiot alone). But what
is essential is that whereas Winter Notes proclaims the prosperous bour-
geois to be the true European, the one whose behavior holds the key to the
collective, Dostoevsky’s quintessential Russian is poor.
54. The speech was wildly popular upon its delivery, but the ecstatic
reaction was soon replaced by a powerful critical backlash. See PSS,
26:459–63, 475–91; Levitt, 138–44.
55. If Kabat is right that Dostoevsky himself—notably while working
on The Idiot, when he was very nearly destitute himself and living in Europe
to escape debtor’s prison at home—nonetheless did not find the necessary
calm and resolve to undertake the task of writing until he had squandered
on gambling what very little money he and his wife had left, then poverty
was for him indeed an effective stimulus for the imagination (95–99).
56. The novel and the speech, incidentally, could also be read in the
reverse order, to very different consequences. Perhaps Myshkin’s final in-
sanity should be taken not as a reminder of the reader’s responsibility to
carry on his labors, but as a damning commentary on Dostoevsky’s Pushkin,
one which suggests that the customary poor imaginer’s descent into mad-
ness is the price to be paid for a complete selflessness that has no reserves
of stubborn selfish strength to fall back on in an emergency.
57. It is in this sense that Ivan Karamazov delights when his Jesus’
kiss is mimicked by Alyosha, for both instinctively sense that copying in-
deed has something Christ-like about it and, further, that clever imitation
demands real creativity.
259
CONCLUSION
1. From a purely practical standpoint, of course, it remains an open
question how laudable such projection deserves to be held. Merely experi-
encing another’s sensations does nothing to help meet anyone’s material
needs, and for some the exercise in emotional stimulation may usurp ener-
gies and salve consciences that might have worked toward more concrete
ends. Further, as far as empathy is concerned, one might want to prefer ex-
periences like that of John Coleman, a one-time college president, who
lived on the streets of New York City with homeless people for 10 days in
the 1980s to gain a greater appreciation of their existence. Coleman clearly
assumed intuition alone could not begin to unlock the full depths of the ex-
perience. However, as might be expected, he was later criticized by some of
those same people for play-acting, that is, experiencing a necessarily inau-
thentic homelessness. Such objections suggest that only imagination—im-
perfect as it is—can put one in another’s shoes, and that real-life emulation
is valid only as an aid to the fantasy. In either case, all the writers assembled
here coincide in regarding mere sympathetic emotion as a means of dis-
placing the self so powerful that it can even destroy the self.
2. An assumption about the special relevance of poverty to what it
means to be Russian came to be shared by many thinkers of varied ideo-
logical stripes in the nineteenth century. Indeed, though objections were
occasionally voiced (for example, by Tolstoy, speaking through Levin in
Anna Karenina, and Belinskii, though both writers seem to retreat from
these positions somewhat later in their careers), almost everyone was will-
ing to attribute a higher degree of authentic Russianness to the poor—
though there is less agreement whether that meant the peasants, or the
urban underclass, or the few remaining spiritually motivated renunciates of
earthly wealth.
3. In retrospect the question may arise why Gogol, uniquely in the
tradition, labors along one narrative line, that of the copyist, while seeming
not even to notice the other, of the improvisor. In fact, Gogol too perceived
the second line, but may have preferred not to speak of it in his art since he
felt it so indelibly overwritten upon his art. Judging by his descriptions of
his own method of creation (for example, in “An Author’s Confession”),
Gogol saw himself as essentially an improvisor, borrowing from others
themes, suggestions, factual observations—anything to spur on his fancy.
Despite his seemingly inexhaustible imagination, he was distinctly uncom-
fortable when left to his own devices. The outlines of his two largest works,
Dead Souls and The Inspector General, were proposed to him by Pushkin.
Meanwhile, from his requests that his mother send him lists of Ukrainian
vocabulary (to impart a local flavor) to the overheard kernel of the Peters-
burg tales, from the real-life letters incorporated into Selected Passages to
260
his nagging pleas while in Rome that correspondents describe in complete

detail their daily doings or Russian current events for him, Gogol seems to
have been constitutionally unable to create without some outsider’s input.
4. If there is a limitation to Dostoevsky’s interrogation of poverty, it is
the same one that marks all of his fiction. His deprived heroes are inevitably
driven to ideological extremes: either so outraged they undertake rebellion
and crime or, on the contrary, so humble that they long to save the world.
Missing are the indifferent poor, those who draw no far-reaching conclu-
sions from their impecunity but simply live their lives as they come.
5. In its entirety, the note—the very first entry in the plan for the new
novel—reads: “The Slavophiles are a nobleman’s conceit. Their opinion of
Pushkin (the poverty of Russian literature). What Kireevskii says about the
icon” (11:64). It was primarily Westernizers who asserted Russia’s literary
poverty, so for a Slavophile to voice the view would have made it doubly of-
fensive. On the Slavophiles’ view of Pushkin, disappointing to Dostoevsky,
see Dostoevsky, 26:465.
261
Bibliography
NOTE ON EDITIONS
Primary texts (particularly Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky) are cited from the
author’s Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, or commonly, PSS, except as specifically
noted. Two of the exceptions deserve special comment. Karamzin’s Letters
of a Russian Traveler is cited according to Pis’ma russkogo puteshestven-
nika, ed. Iu. M. Lotman, N. A. Marchenko, and B. A. Uspenskii (Leningrad,
1984); the editors of this edition retain certain conventions of Karamzin’s
original orthography, arguing that they are semiotically meaningful. Quota-
tions of other Karamzin works (including “Poor Liza”) are from Izbrannye
sochineniia, ed. P. Berkov, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1964), except when otherwise
noted. Because of a difference in the versions of “Egyptian Nights” (dis-
cussed in chapter 2), quotations of “Egyptian Nights” come from Polnoe so-
branie sochinenii, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (Moscow, 1957–58), vol. 6. All other
quotations from Pushkin, including the same story’s drafts, come from the
Jubilee Edition: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 16 vols. (Moscow, 1937–59).
Akhmatova, Anna. O Pushkine. Stat’i i zametki. Leningrad, 1977.

Alissandratos, Julia. “Some Holes in Gogol’s Not Wholly Unholy ‘Over-
coat.’ ” Slavonic and East European Review 68 (1990): 22–40.
Anikin, A. V. Muza i mamona: Sotsial’no-èkonomicheskie motivy u Push-
kina. Moscow, 1989.
Annenkov, P. V. Literaturnye vospominaniia. Moscow, 1960.
Antsiferov, N. P. Dusha Peterburga. Petersburg, 1922.
Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism: Second Series. London: Macmillan,
1935.
Bakhtin, M. M. “The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Ra-
belais and Gogol).” In Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the
Soviet Union. Ed. Henryk Baran. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts
and Sciences Press, 1974. 284–96.
———. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability:
Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov.
Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990. 4–256.
263
Bibliography
———. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael

Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Univ. of
Texas Press, 1981. 259–422.
———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1981.
Bate, Walter Jackson. “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century
English Criticism.” English Literary History 12 (1945): 144–64.
Belinskii, V. G. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 13 vols. Moscow, 1953–59.
Belyi, Andrei. Peterburg. Moscow, 1981.
Bernheimer, Charles. “Cloaking the Self: The Literary Space of Gogol’s ‘Over-
coat.’” Publications of the Modern Language Association 90 (1975): 53–61.
Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, A. A. “Vzgliad na staruiu i novuiu slovesnost’ v Rossii.”
In Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Moscow, 1958. 521–39
Bethea, David M. The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989.
Bitov, Andrei. “Being Buried Alive; or, Gogol in 1973.” Trans. Susanne
Fusso. In Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word. Ed. Susanne
Fusso and Priscilla Meyer. 14–18.
Blagoi, D. D. Istoriia russkoi literatury XVIII veka. 3rd ed. Moscow, 1955.
———. “Klassovoe samosoznanie Pushkina.” In Sotsiologiia tvorchestva
Pushkina. Moscow, 1929. 7–68.
Bowman, Herbert. Vissarion Belinski 1811–1848: A Study in the Origins of
Social Criticism in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954.
Briusov, V. Ia. “Egipetskie nochi.” In Moi Pushkin. Moscow-Leningrad, 1929.
———. Sobranie sochinenii. 7 vols. Moscow, 1973–75.
Brissenden, R. F. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from
Richardson to Sade. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974.
Brooks, Peter. “Narrative Desire.” In Reading for the Plot: Design and In-
tention in Narrative. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984. 37–61.
Burgin, Diana Lewis. “The Reprieve of Nastasja: A Reading of a Dreamer’s
Authored Life.” Slavic and East European Journal 29 (1985): 258–68.
Chaadayev, Peter Yakovlevich. Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Mad-
man. Trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press,
1969.
Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power
of Fiction. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Chernyshevskii, N. G Chto delat’? Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh. Liter-
aturnye pamiatniki. Leningrad, 1975.
———. Izbrannye sochineniia. Moscow-Leningrad, 1950.
Chirpak-Rozdina, El’vira. “ ‘Egipetskie nochi’ A. S. Pushkina.” Studia Slav-
ica 19 (1973): 373–90.
264
Bibliography
Chizhevsky, Dmitry. “About ‘The Overcoat.’ ” In Gogol from the Twentieth

Century. Ed. and trans. Robert Maguire. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1974. 295–322.
Cross, Anthony. “Karamzin’s Versions of the Idyll.” In Essays on Karamzin:
Russian Man-of-Letters, Political Thinker, Historian, 1766–1826. Ed. J. L.
Black. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. 75–90.
———. N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literary Career (1783–1803). Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971.
Dal’, V. I. Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka. 2nd ed. Moscow,
1956 [1880–82].
Dällenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley with
Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
Debreczeny, Paul. The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s
Prose Fiction. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1983.
Dostoevskii, F. M. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 30 vols. Leningrad, 1972–90.
Driessen, F. C. Gogol as a Short-Story Writer: A Study of His Technique of
Composition. Trans. from Dutch by Ian F. Finlay. Slavistic Printings and
Reprintings. Ed. C. H. van Schooneveld. The Hague: Mouton, 1965.
Driver, Sam. Puškin: Literature and Social Ideas. New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1989.
Eidel’man, N. Ia. Pushkin: Iz biografii i tvorchestva 1826–1837. Moscow,
1987.
Eikhenbaum, Boris. “How ‘The Overcoat’ Is Made.” In Gogol from the
Twentieth Century. Ed. and trans. Robert Maguire. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1974. 269–91.
Emerson, Caryl. Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme. Bloom-
ington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986.
———. “Problems with Baxtin’s Poetics.” Slavic and East European Jour-
nal 32 (1988): 503–25.
Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Brockhaus and Efron). Ed. I. E. Andreevskii.
86 vols. Petersburg: 1890–1904.
Epiphanius the Wise. “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and
Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh.” In Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chroni-
cles, and Tales. Rev. ed. Ed. Serge Zenkovsky. New York: Dutton, 1963.
262–300.
Epshtein, Mikhail. “O znachenii detali v strukture obraza (‘Perepishchiki’ u
Gogolia i Dostoevskogo).” Voprosy literatury 12 (1984): 134–45.
Fanger, Donald. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1979.
———. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism. Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1965.
Fasmer [Vasmer], Maks. Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka. Trans.
O. N. Trubacheva. Ed. B. A. Larin. 4 vols. Moscow, 1964.
265
Bibliography
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1966.
———. Sviatye drevnei Rusi. New York: Russkii Pravoslavny Bogoslovskii
Fond, 1959.
Filippova, T. E., ed. Obraz “malen’kogo cheloveka” v literature. Moscow,
1995.
Finke, Michael. Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov.
Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences. New York: Vintage, 1973.
Frank, Joseph. The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1995.
———. The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1976.
Fridlender, G. M. Realizm Dostoevskogo. Moscow-Leningrad, 1964.
Garrard, John. “Poor Erast, or Point of View in Karamzin.” In Essays on
Karamzin: Russian Man-of-Letters, Political Thinker, Historian, 1766–
1826. Ed J. L. Black. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. 40–55.
Gasparov, B. M. “Funktsii reministsentsii iz Dante v poèzii Pushkina.” Rus-
sian Literature 14 (1983): 317–50.
Gerstein, Linda. Nikolai Strakhov. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971.
Gillel’son, M. I. P. A. Viazemskii. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo. Leningrad, 1969.
Ginzburg, L. Ia. O psikhologicheskoi proze. Leningrad, 1971.
———. “Pushkin i liricheskii geroi russkogo romantizma.” In Pushkin.
Issledovaniia i materialy 4. Moscow-Leningrad, 1962. 140–53.
Gippius, V. V. Gogol. Ed. and trans. Robert Maguire. Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1981 [1924].
Gofman [Hofmann], M. L. “Vdokhnovenie i trud.” In Pushkin: Psikhologiia
tvorchestva. Paris, 1928. 51–86.
Gogol’, N. V. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 14 vols. Leningrad, 1937–52.
Reprint. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1968.
———. Razmyshleniia o Bozhestvennoi liturgii [Meditations on the Divine
Liturgy]. Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1952.
Gor’kii, Maksim. “Lev Tolstoi.” In Sobranie sochinenii v 18 tomakh.
Moscow, 1963. 18:54–93.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Improvisation of Power.” In Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1980. 222–54.
Greenleaf, Monika. Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Ori-
ent, Irony. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994.
Grigorovich, D. V. “Peterburgskie sharmanshchiki.” In Fiziologiia Peter-
burga. Part 1. Petersburg, 1845. 133–92.
266
Bibliography
Grimsley, Ronald. The Philosophy of Rousseau. London: Oxford Univ. Press,

1973.
Groys, Boris. “Russia and the West: The Quest for Russian National Iden-
tity.” Studies in Soviet Thought 43 (1992): 185–98.
Gukovskii, G. A. “Karamzin.” In Istoriia russkoi literatury. 11 vols. Moscow-
Leningrad, 1941. 5:55–105.
———. Realizm Gogolia. Moscow-Leningrad, 1959.
Gustafson, Richard. Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. Princeton: Prince-
ton Univ. Press, 1986.
Hammarberg, Gitta. From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimental-
ist Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991.
Heine, Heinrich. Buch der Leider. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1990.
Herman, David. “Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina
and Kreutzer Sonata.” Slavic Review 56 (1997): 15–36.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Indus-
trial Age. New York: Vintage, 1983.
Hippisley, Anthony. “Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’: A Further Interpretation.”
Slavic and East European Journal 20 (1976): 121–29.
Hofmann, M. Egipetskie nochi. Paris: Serge Lifar, 1935.
———. “Les ‘Nuits égyptiennes’ de Pouchkine et leur héroïne.” Le monde
slave 4 (1933): 346–59.
Holquist, Michael. Dostoevsky and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1977.
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions. New
York: Harper and Row, 1990.
Izmailov, I. V. “Mitskevich v stikhakh Pushkina.” In Ocherki tvorchestva
Pushkina. Leningrad, 1975. 125–74.
Jack, Ian. Introduction to A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy,
by Mr. Yorick, by Laurence Sterne. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968.
Jackson, Robert L. The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. Prince-
ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981.
———. Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Physsardt,
1978.
Johnson, Leslie. “The Face of the Other in Idiot.” Slavic Review 50 (1991):
867–78.
Kabat, Geoffrey C. Ideology and Imagination: The Image of Society in Dos-
toevsky. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978.
Kanunova, F. Z. Iz istorii russkoi povesti (Istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie
povestei N. M. Karamzina). Tomsk, 1967.
Karamzin, N. M. Izbrannye sochineniia. Ed. P. Berkov. 2 vols. Moscow,
1964.
———. Izbrannye stat’i i pis’ma. Moscow, 1982.
267
Bibliography
———. “Letter to the Spectateur du Nord about Russian Literature.” In

The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia. 2 vols. Ed. and trans.
Harold B. Segel. New York: Dutton, 1967. 1:430–41.
———. Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika. Ed. Iu. M. Lotman, N. A. Mar-
chenko, B. A. Uspenskii. Leningrad, 1984.
———. Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii. Biblioteka poèta. Moscow-Leningrad,
1966.
———. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Leningrad, 1984.
———. “Zapiski starogo moskovskogo zhitelia.” In Sochineniia. 3rd ed. 9
vols. Moscow, 1820. 7:161–70.
Karlinsky, Simon. The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1976.
Kasatkina, T. A. “ ‘I utail ot detei . . .’: prichiny nepronitsatel’nosti kniazia
L’va Myshkina.” Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura 4 (1995): 48–53.
Khrapchenko, M. B. Lev Tolstoi kak khudozhnik. 3rd ed. Moscow, 1971.
Kireevskii, I. V. Kritika i èstetika. Moscow, 1979.
Kirpotin, V. Ia. Dostoevskii v shestidesiatye gody. Moscow, 1966.
Knapp, Liza. The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics.
Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1996.
Kochetkova, Natalya. Nikolay Karamzin. Boston: Twayne, 1975.
“Kolin i Liza.” In Russkaia sentimental’naia povest’. Ed. P. A. Orlov. Mos-
cow, 1979. 27–32.
Komarovich, V. “Dostoevskii i ‘Egipetskie nochi’ Pushkina.” Pushkin i ego
sovremenniki 8, no. 29–30 (1927): 36–48.
Kotel’nikov, V. A. “Kenozis kak tvorcheskii motiv u Dostoevskogo.” Dosto-
evskii: Materialy i issledovaniia 13 (1996): 194–99.
Kovacs, Arpad. “The Poetics of The Idiot: On the Problem of Dostoevsky’s
Thinking about Genre.” Trans. Caryl Emerson. In Critical Essays on
Dostoevsky. Ed. Robin Feuer Miller. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.
Koyré, Alexandre. La Philosophie et le problème national en Russie au
début du XIXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [1929].
Krueger, Derek. Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s “Life” and the Late An-
tique City. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996.
LeBlanc, Ronald. “Teniers, Flemish Art, and the Natural School Debate.”
Slavic Review 50 (1991): 576–89.
———. “Teniersism: Seventeenth-Century Flemish Art and Early Nine-
teenth-Century Russia Prose.” Russian Review 49 (1990): 19–41.
Lednicki, Waclaw. “Pochemu Pushkin ne okonchil ‘Egipetskie nochi.’” Novyi
zhurnal 90 (1968): 244–55.
Les Mille et une nuits. Contes arabes. New ed. Trans. [Antoine] Galland.
Paris: Ernest Bourdin, 1860.
Levitt, Marcus. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of
1880. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989.
268
Bibliography
Lincoln, W. Bruce. The Romanovs. New York: Dial, 1981.

Lindenmeyr, Adele. Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society and the State in
Imperial Russia. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996.
Lotman, Iu. M. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin: Biografiia pisatelia. 2nd ed.
Leningrad, 1983.
———. “Gogol’ and the Correlation of ‘The Culture of Humor’ with the
Comic and Serious in the Russian National Tradition.” In Semiotics and
Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union. Ed. Henryk Baran. White
Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1974. 297–300.
———. “Gogol’ i sootnesenie ‘smekhovoi kul’tury’ s komicheskim i
ser’ëznym v russkoi natsional’noi traditsii.” Materialy vsesoiuznogo sim-
poziuma po vtorichnim modeliruiushchim sistemam I (5). Tartu, 1974.
———. “Ob odnom chitatel’skom vospriiatii ‘Bednoi Lizy’ N. M. Karam-
zina (K strukture massovogo soznanie XVIII v.).” In Rol’ i znachenie lit-
eratury XVIII veka v istorii russkoi kul’tury. Moscow-Leningrad, 1966.
280–85.
———. “Ocherk dvorianskogo byta oneginskoi pory.” In Roman A. S. Push-
kina “Evgenii Onegin.” Komentarii. Leningrad, 1980. 35–110.
———. “Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian
Culture.” In The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History. Ed. Alexander D.
Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1985. 67–94.
———. Roman A. S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin.” Komentarii. Leningrad,
1980.
———. Roman v stikhakh Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin.” Tartu, 1975.
———. Sotvorenie Karamzina. Moscow, 1987.
———. “The Stage and Painting as Code Mechanisms for Cultural Behav-
ior in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In The Semiotics of Russian Cul-
ture. Ed. Ann Shukman. Michigan Slavic Contributions, 11. Ann Arbor:
Michigan Slavic Publications, 1984. 165–76.
———. “The Theater and Theatricality as Components of Early Nineteenth-
Century Culture.” In The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Ed. Ann Shuk-
man. Michigan Slavic Contributions, 11. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic
Publications, 1984. 141–64.
Lotman, Iu. M., and B. A. Uspenskii. “Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika i
ix mesto v razvitii russkoi kul’tury.” In Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika,
by N. M. Karamzin. Leningrad, 1984. 525–606.
Maguire, Robert. Exploring Gogol. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994.
Mann, Iurii. Poètika Gogolia. 2nd ed. Moscow, 1988.
Marshall, David. The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith,
and George Eliot. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986.
———. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau,
and Mary Shelley. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988.
269
Bibliography
Mashinskii, S., comp. N. V. Gogol’ v russkoi kritike i vospominaniiakh

sovremennikov. Moscow-Leningrad, 1951.
McLean, Hugh. “Gogol’s Retreat from Love: Towards an Interpretation of
Mirgorod.” In American Contributions to the Fourth International Con-
gress of Slavists. The Hague: Mouton, 1958. 225–44.
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry. “Gogol and the Devil.” In Gogol from the Twenti-
eth Century. Ed. and trans. Robert Maguire. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1974. 55–102.
Meyer, Priscilla. “False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: ‘A May Night’
and ‘The Overcoat.’ ” In Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word.
Ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer. 63–74.
Meynieux, André. Pouchkine, homme de lettres et la littérature profession-
nelle en Russie. Paris: Librarie des Cinq Continents, 1966.
Miller, Robin Feuer. Dostoevsky and “The Idiot.” Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1981.
Mirsky, D. S. Pushkin. New York: Dutton, 1963.
Mochul’skii, Konstantin. Dukhovnyi put’ Gogolia. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1976.
Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Trans. Michael
Minihan. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967.
Modzalevskii, B. L. Biblioteka A. S. Pushkina. (Bibliograficheskoe opi-
sanie). Moscow, 1988 [1910].
Mollat, Michel. The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History.
Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986.
Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a
Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. Evanston: Northwestern
Univ. Press, 1981.
Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the
Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Murav, Harriet. Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of
Cultural Critique. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992.
Nadezhdin, N. I. “Letopisi otechestvennoi literatury. Otchet za 1831 god.”
Teleskop 7 (1832): 147–59.
Nebel, Henry M., Jr. N. M. Karamzin: A Russian Sentimentalist. The
Hague: Mouton, 1967.
Nekrasov, N. A. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem. 15 vols. Leningrad,
1981–.
Nestor. “Chtenie o sviatykh muchenikakh Borise i Glebe.” In Die Altrussis-
chen Hagiographischen Erzählungen und Liturgischen Dichtungen über
die Heiligen Boris und Gleb. Ed. Ludolf Müller. Munich: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, 1967.
———. “Life of St. Theodosius.” In Treasury of Russian Spirituality. Ed.
G. P. Fedotov. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1948. 15–48.
Nikitenko, A. V. Dnevnik. 3 vols. Leningrad, 1955.
270
Bibliography
O’Bell, Leslie. Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”: The Biography of a Work. Ann

Arbor: Ardis, 1984.
Odoevskii, V. F. Russkie nochi. Ed. B. F. Egorov, E. A. Maimin, M. I.
Medovoi. Leningrad, 1975.
Orlov, P. A. Russkii sentimentalizm. Moscow, 1977.
Orwin, Donna. Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1993.
Ouspenskii, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Ed. Urs
Graf-Verlag. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Boston:
Boston Book and Art Shop, 1952.
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, D. N. Gogol’ v ego proizvedeniiakh. 2nd ed. Peters-
burg, 1911.
Paperno, Irina. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism. Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1988.
Peace, Richard. The Enigma of Gogol. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1981.
Petrunina, N. N. “ ‘Egipetskie nochi’ i russkaia povest’ 1830-kh godov.” In
Pushkin. Issledovaniia i materialy 8. Leningrad, 1978. 22–50.
Pevear, Richard. Introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, by F. M. Dosto-
evsky. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vin-
tage, 1990.
Piksanov, N. K. “ ‘Bednaia Aniuta’ i ‘Bednaia Liza’ (K bor’be realizma s sen-
timentalizmom).” In XVIII vek 3. Moscow-Leningrad, 1958. 309–25.
Piper, William Bowman. Laurence Sterne. New York: Twayne, 1965.
Pogodin, M. P. “Nishchii.” In Povesti, drama. Moscow, 1984. 39–46.
Polevoi, K. A. “Zapiski o zhizni i sochineniiakh Nikolaia Alekseevicha Pole-
vogo.” In Nikolai Polevoi. Materialy po istorii russkoi literatury i zhur-
nalistiki tridtsatykh godov. Ed. Vl. Orlov. Leningrad, 1934.
Popkin, Cathy. The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko,
Gogol. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993.
Porfir’ev, [S. I.?]. “Povesti Karamzina: ‘Bednaia Liza’ i ‘Natal’ia, boiarskaia
doch’.’ ” In Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin: Ego zhizn’ i sochineniia. Ed.
V. I. Pokrovskii. 3rd ed. Moscow, 1912. 94–99.
Prendergast, Christopher. The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval,
Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986.
Pukhov, V. “Pervaia russkaia povest’ o bednoi Lize.” Russkaia literatura 1
(1965): 120–22.
Pushkin, A. S. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 10 vols. 3rd ed. Moscow, 1962–66.
———. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 16 vols. Moscow, 1937–59.
Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European
Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969.
Rozanov, V. V. “Kak proizoshel tip Akakiia Akakievicha.” In Legenda o ve-
likom inkvizitore. 3rd ed. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970 [1906].
271
Bibliography
Rzhevskii, L. “Strukturnaia tema ‘Egipetskikh nochei’ A. Pushkina.” In Alex-

ander Puškin: A Symposium on the 175th Anniversary of His Birth. Ed.
Andrej Kodjak and Kiril Taranovsky. New York: New York Univ. Press,
1976. 126–34.
Schillinger, John. “Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ as a Travesty of Hagiography.”
Slavic and East European Journal 16 (1972): 36–41.
Seemann, Klaus-Dieter. “Eine Heiligenlegende als Vorbild von Gogol’s
‘Mantel.’ ” Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 33 (1967): 7–21.
Segel, Harold B., ed. The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia. 2 vols.
New York: Dutton, 1967.
Setchkarev, Vsevolod. Gogol: His Life and Works. Trans. Robert Kramer.
New York: New York Univ. Press, 1965.
Shchegolev, P. E. Duel’ i smert’ Pushkina. Moscow, 1987.
Shcherbatov, M. M. O povrezhdenii nravov v Rossii. 1858. Reprint (with
A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu). Moscow, 1983.
Shore, Rima. “Scrivener Fiction: The Copyist and His Craft in Nineteenth-
Century Fiction.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1980.
Sidiakov, L. S. “K izucheniiu ‘Egipetskikh nochei.’ ” In Pushkin. Issledo-
vaniia i materialy 4. Moscow-Leningrad, 1962. 173–82.
Sipovskii, V. V. Ocherki iz istorii russkogo romana. Vol. I, parts 1–2. Peters-
burg, 1909–10. Reprint. Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975.
Skaftymov, A. P. “Tematicheskaia kompozitsiia romana ‘Idiot.’ ” In Tvor-
cheskii put’ Dostoevskogo. Ed. N. L. Brodskii. Leningrad, 1924. 131–85.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D. D. Raphael and
A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
Sobel, Ruth. Gogol’s Forgotten Book: “Selected Passages” and its Contem-
porary Readers. Washington: University Press of America, 1981.
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Mr.
Yorick. Ed. Ian Jack. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968.
Strakhov, N. N. Bednost’ nashei literatury. St. Petersburg, 1868.
Sumarokov, A. P. “Epistle on the Art of Poetry.” In Selected Aesthetic Works
of Sumarokov and Karamzin. Trans. Henry Nebel, Jr. Washington: Uni-
versity Press of America, 1981. 73–86.
———. Izbrannye proizvedeniia. 2nd ed. Biblioteka poèta. Leningrad, 1957.
Terëkhina, V. N., and A. P. Zimenkov. Russkii futurizm: Teoriia. Praktika.
Kritika. Vospominaniia. Moscow, 1999.
Theunissen, Michael. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. Trans. Christopher Macann. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1984.
Thompson, Ewa. Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture.
Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987.
Todd, William Mills. Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin. Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1986.
272
Bibliography
Tolstoi, L. N. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 90 vols. Moscow, 1928–58.

Tomashevskii, B. V. Pushkin. 2 vols. Moscow-Leningrad, 1961.
———. “Tekst stikhotvoreniia Pushkina ‘Kleopatra’ ” Uchenye zapiski LGU
200 (1955). Seriia filologicheskikh nauk, vyp. 25. 216–29.
Toporov, V. N. “Bednaia Liza” Karamzina: Opyt prochteniia. Moscow,
1995.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1971.
Tseitlin, A. G. Povesti o bednom chinovnike Dostoevskogo (K istorii odnogo
siuzheta). Moscow, 1923.
Turgenev, I. S. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 15 vols. Moscow, 1960–68.
Tynianov, Iu. “Dostoevskii i Gogol’ (k teorii parodii).” In Arkhaisty i nova-
tory. [Leningrad], 1929. 412–55. Reprint. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985.
Uspenskii, B. A. Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVIII - nachalo
XIX veka. Iazykovaia programma Karamzina i ee istoricheskie korni.
Moscow, 1985.
Val’be, B. “Egipetskie nochi.” Zvezda 3 (1937): 143–57
Veresaev, V. Gogol’ v zhizni. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983 [1933].
Viazemskii, P. A. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 12 vols. Petersburg, 1878–96.
Viise, Michelle. “The Status of the Body in Gogol’s Works.” M.A. thesis,
University of Virginia, 1994.
Vinogradov, V. V. “Shkola sentimental’nogo realizma (Roman Dostoevskogo
Bednye liudi na fone literaturnoi èvoliutsii 40-x godov).” In Evoliutsiia
russkogo naturalizma. Leningrad, 1929. 291–390.
———, ed. Slovar’ iazyka Pushkina. 4 vols. Moscow, 1956–61.
Vogüé, E.-M. de, The Russian Novel. 11th ed. Trans. H. A. Sawyer. London:
Chapman and Hall, 1913 [1886].
Vladimir Monomakh. “Instruction to His Children.” In Medieval Russia’s
Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Rev. ed. Ed. Serge Zenkovsky. New York:
Dutton, 1963. 92–100.
Walicki, Andrzej. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative
Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Trans. Hilda Andrews-
Rusiecka. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1989.
Wasiolek, Edward. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1964.
Zeldin, Jesse. “Herder and Some Russians.” In Western Philosophical Sys-
tems in Russian Literature: A Collection of Critical Studies. Ed. Anthony
Mlikotin. Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California Press, 1979. 11–24.
Zelinskii, V., comp. Russkaia kriticheskaia literatura o proizvedeniiakh
N. V. Gogolia. 3rd ed. 3 vols. Moscow, 1907.
Zhukovskii, V. A. Sobranie sochinenii. 4 vols. Moscow-Leningrad, 1959–60.
273
Index
Acquisition of desired object (in Gogol), Begging (beggars), 82, 96, 106, 110–11,
84–86, 88–89, 92, 98–99, 102, 116, 119, 121, 131, 147, 153, 155, 165, 180
122–29, 206 Belinskii, V. G., x, xvi, 38, 79, 95, 113, 117,
Acquisitiveness (in Gogol), 86–88, 92, 94, 146, 149–50, 158, 172, 209–10
99, 118–19, 128, 130–34, 200 Belyi, Andrei, 208
Agriculture, ix, 10, 159, 209 Blok, A. A., 208–9
Akhmatova, Anna A., 65 Borrowing money, 45–46, 153
Alterity, x–xiv, xvi–xvii, 1, 3, 6–7, 11, 15, 20, Brissenden, R. F., xiii, 17
24–26, 29, 33–35, 52–53, 57–58, 61–63, Briusov, V. Ia., 38, 65
71, 73–74, 77, 144, 162, 165, 174, Buddha, 88
176–77, 181–83, 187–99, 211 Bulgarin, Faddei, 97
Ambiguity of poverty, viii–x, xv, 79–82, 94, Byron, Lord George Gordon, 195
107–10, 113, 137, 139, 141–42, 159; as
sign of Gogol’s failure, 86–88, 107, 113, Catherine the Great, 10, 90–91
134, 136–37, 142; as threat to Chaadaev, P. Ia., 146–47, 150, 205
philanthropists, 135–37 Chenier, André, 195
Amorphousness (poverty of form): of the Chernyshevskii, N. G., ix–x, xii, 209–10
poor, ix, xi, xv, 36, 41–43, 49, 53, 131, Chizhevsky, Dmitry, 79, 86, 92, 94, 99
158–60, 164, 204, 206; of Russia, 131, Christ, xvii, 110–11, 138, 171, 177–81, 190,
133, 139, 151–52, 158–60, 173–76, 192–93, 196–98, 201, 207, 209, 211
184–85, 206 Christianity, xvi, 29, 68, 79–82, 90, 102,
Annenkov, P. V., 84 112, 121–22, 136–37, 140, 156, 165–66,
Apocalypse (Final Judgment), 80–81, 165, 169–70, 173, 177–78, 193, 196, 207;
177, 181, 184, 194, 198 attitude towards poor, 90, 109–11
Arabian Nights, 70–71 Church. See Christianity
Aristocracy (see also Karamzin, N. M., Chuzhoe (alienness), 60–62, 76, 162–65,
works: “Poor Liza”), xii, xv, 23–26, 51, 63, 188–89
108, 116, 134, 150, 155–56, 179–80, 198; Chuzhoe slovo (someone else’s word), 127,
aristocratic privilege, ix, xi–xii, 54, 58, 72, 137; in Dostoevsky, 176, 180, 189–91,
108, 164; aristocrats’ “poverty,” xi–xii, 47 194–97, 203, 207; in Pushkin, 40, 48, 50,
Arnold, Matthew, 143–44 55, 57–58, 60
Audience (improvisors’), 43–44, 56, 61–62, City. See Countryside vs. city
71–72, 74, 76, 154–55, 161–67, 173–74, Class: social and class differences, xi, 10–18,
177, 180, 193, 212 20–26, 37, 42, 45–46, 51–54, 67, 75–76,
Aurelius Victor, 65 79, 87–89, 109, 111, 113–19, 127–28, 138,
159, 160, 170, 197, 201; class conflict,
Bakhtin, M. M., xiii, 40, 58, 196 63–64, 67, 164; class envy, 84, 86–88,
Baudelaire, Charles, vii 114, 122–23, 128, 130, 132–32; class
275
Index
reconciliation, xv, 1, 3, 6–9, 15–16, 21, 25– 173, 176–77, 180–83, 187–91, 193–95,
26, 31, 67–68, 71–72, 76–77, 108, 166, 197–99, 201; in Gogol, 85, 98–99, 101–2,
190; class reconciliation as a threat to the 104, 111, 126–27, 132, 140; Russian
social order, xvi, 67–68, 79, 108, 119–24 writers’ copying of Russian writers, xvii,
Clerk (see also Gogol, N. V., works: 21, 23–26, 111, 150, 155, 159–62, 164,
“Overcoat”), xii, xvii, 84, 97–99, 114–17, 168–69, 173–74, 177–82, 185–90,
126–27, 129; in Dostoevsky, 169–71, 193–94, 198, 203, 207, 211; as sensitivity
177, 181, 187–88, 191, 195; as metaphor to alterity, 187–90, 194, 201
for Russia, 159–60 Countryside vs. city, viii–x, 11–15, 24, 27,
Clothing, 24–25, 40, 48, 59, 92, 96, 98–99, 45, 185–86
105–6, 121, 123–27, 129–30, 141, 179, Crime (see also Prostitution), viii, xiv, 111,
199 128, 164, 170–71; murder (see also
Comedy. See Laughter Execution), 62, 170, 180, 184–85,
Communism, 208–9 191–93; murder of one’s lovers, 63–74,
Communist Revolution, 208 76, 178, 185, 190–91; robbery, 62, 82,
Compassion (shared emotion), xvi, 3–4, 98, 100, 107, 114, 118, 123–24, 126,
5–8, 8–9, 12–13, 25, 28, 34–35, 69, 129–30, 139, 141, 153, 170, 176
73–74, 77, 78, 108, 111, 121–22, 136,
141, 144, 154, 161, 174–75, 180–83, Dal’, V. I., 92, 100
185–86, 190, 193–94, 197–99, 200, 201, Deception: imagination as, 23–26, 126,
205; definition of, xii–xiv 134, 136–38, 140–41, 180, 185, 200,
Compassion/identification (see also 205, 210; in Karamzin, xv, 1–3, 8–9, 11,
Compassion/identification in Gogol): as a 14–15, 17–23, 19, 23–26, 27–35, 159
crime, 123–24, 187; as essence of Derzhavin, G. R., 49, 55, 169
Christianity, xvii, 68, 165–66, 174, 178, Determinism, ix, 10–11, 37, 52–53, 60, 74
181–83, 192–94, 196–99, 201–2, 207; Devil, 112, 137, 141
noncompassion for the poor as a good, Dickens, Charles, 159
xvi, 119–24, 135–36, 140, 165, 176–77; Dissolution of authorial self (see also Self-
noncompassion for the poor as loss and death), 54–56, 137, 210
European trait, 162–66, 184; and Dmitriev, I. I., 146–47, 155
Russianness, 162–66, 194–99, 201 Dostoevsky, F. M., xiv, xvii, 38, 65, 110,
Compassion/identification in Gogol (see also 144–45, 150, 152, 161, 165, 168–201,
Compassion/identification): characters’, 205–6, 209, 211; conception of
with poor heroes, 82, 95, 129; conversion improvisation, 194–99, 201, 207;
of first person into third, 104–5, 122; dreamer type in, 176, 183, 195; poverty
Gogol’s, with poor heroes, 78–80, 90, narratives’ underlying plot, 170–72;
92–99, 106–7, 139; Gogol’s, with nonpoor, works: “Bookishness and Literacy,” 201;
120; Gogol’s, with real poor, 79–81, 114, The Brothers Karamazov, xiv, 153, 160,
118–22, 135–36; noncompassion, 170, 172, 178, 192; Crime and
characters’, with Gogol’s poor heroes, Punishment, 111, 133, 152, 170–72, 176,
92–94, 96; noncompassion, Gogol’s, with 184, 200; Diary of a Writer, 169, 196;
poor heroes, xii, 78, 80, 90, 94–95, The Double, 171, 204–5; The Idiot, xi,
140–42; noncompassion, Gogol’s, with xvii, 111, 152, 155, 171, 177–95, 197,
real poor, 79–80, 87–88, 118–19; 199, 204, 212; The Idiot, Myshkin’s
noncompassion, readers’, with Gogol’s resemblance to Christ in, 177, 179–81,
poor heroes, xvi, 106, 121; 190, 192–93; The Idiot, Nastasia
noncompassion, by real poor, with Filippovna’s resemblance to Cleopatra
themselves, 121, 136; readers’, with poor in, 177–82, 185–87, 190–91, 193; Notes
heroes, 79, 90–91, 96, 107 from the Underground, 152, 164, 191;
Copying (see also Clerk), xvii–xviii, 145, Petersburg feuilletons, 173–76, 181;
158–60, 203–7; in Dostoevsky, 169–71, Poor Folk, xiv, 170, 172; Pushkin
276
Index
Speech, xvii, 193–99, 201, 203, 212; 80–81, 90–91, 107, 140; The Inspector
“Series of Articles on Russian General, 80–81, 91, 114, 137; “Leaving
Literature,” 198 the Theater after the Performance of a
Doubling: identification with poor as, New Comedy,” 89–92, 98, 105, 114–16;
23–26, 105, 171, 204–5; improvisor and letter about Khar’kov clerk, 115–16, 120;
Charskii (“Egyptian Nights”), 41–42, 48, Meditations on the Divine Liturgy, 141;
51, 58, 60–64, 70, 76–77; singer and “Nevsky Prospekt,” 82, 84–87, 90–91,
narrator (“Lucerne”), 163–64 96, 99–100, 104, 112, 119, 122, 127–28,
131–32, 134, 136–37, 139, 141, 158, 204;
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 78–79, 97 “Nose,” 82–85, 89, 91, 93–94, 100,
Empathy. See Projection 104–5, 112, 128, 158, 171, 204; “Notes
Epshtein, Mikhail, 159, 187 of a Madman,” 82, 84–86, 93–94, 104,
Estate: legal, xi–xii, 20, 51 112, 122–24, 127, 130, 140–21, 153, 158,
Europe: xv–xvii, 4–6, 14–16, 19, 21, 24, 170, 204; “Overcoat,” xii, xiv, xvii,
105, 110, 143, 150, 156, 159, 173, 177, 82–107, 109–13, 117–19, 121–30,
184, 189, 195, 205; as audience, 154–55, 132–33, 136–37, 139–42, 152–53, 158,
161–67, 169, 172–74; centrality to 169–70, 174, 177, 179, 187–90, 204;
Russian poverty narratives, 157–60; as a “Overcoat,” ambiguity of, as sign of
cultural model, xv, 4–9, 13–15, 18–19, Gogol’s failure, 80, 90, 99–107, 124–25,
21, 26, 147, 156–58, 169; cultural 139, 153; “Overcoat,” ambiguity of,
wealth, 145–51, 154, 161, 165, 175, 183, readings of, 78–79, 94–95, 99–103;
194–95, 202–3; material wealth, 147, “Overcoat,” pathetic passage, 78, 92,
160, 162–65, 179, 197–98; view of 94–97; “Overcoat,” as travesty of
Russia, 145, 169, 173 hagiography, 100–6, 113; Petersburg
Execution (see also Murder), 180, 182, 189 tales, xvi, 78–80, 82–107, 111–12, 117,
119, 128, 133, 135–36, 157, 161;
Filth, 97, 101, 131, 210 Petersburg tales, centrality of poverty in,
Folklore, 149–50, 157, 159 82; Petersburg tales, underlying plot,
Food and eating, 97, 101, 126, 140, 171, 84–86, 98–100, 128, 131, 133; “Portrait,”
176, 180 82–86, 101–4, 119, 131–35, 153, 158;
Foucault, Michel, 12 Selected Passages from Correspondence
French Revolution, viii, 35, 63, 155 with Friends: xiv, xvi, 79, 88, 106, 108–9,
Futurists, 208 113–15, 118–22, 124, 134–36, 139, 161;
“On Helping the Poor,” 119–20, 135–36;
Ginzburg, L. Ia., 15, 65 “On the Nature of the Word,” 139;
Gofman [Hofmann], M. L., 38 “Rural Judgment and Punishment,”
Gogol, N. V. (see also Laughter), x, xii, 121–22; “What a Wife Can Be for Her
xvi–xvii, 82–142, 145, 151–52, 161, Husband . . .” 118–19; “What Ultimately
168–71, 173–75, 195, 200, 207, 211; Constitutes the Nature of Russian
absurdity in, 78, 91, 97, 100, 102; Poetry . . .” 134; “Woman in Society,” 115
attitude towards money and economic Golden age, 1, 11
matters, 80–82, 118–19; conception of Goncharov, I. A., 145, 152, 209
the civil service, 114–17; conception of Greenblatt, Stephen, 14
financial restraint, 118–19; confusion of Griboedov, A. S., 43
class and ethical value systems, 81–82, Groys, Boris, 146
89–91, 100–7, 116, 135–36, 140, 142;
fantastic in, 130, 183; final days, 140–42; Hammarberg, Gitta, 1, 20–23
image as defender of little man, 79, 94, Health and illness, 97, 111, 188
123; spiritual crisis, 138–42; works: Heine, Heinrich, 145
Dead Souls, 80–81, 90, 99, 137–38; “The Herder, Johann Gottfried, 6
Denouement of The Inspector General,” Herzen, A. I., 148
277
Index
Holquist, Michael, 153, 192 Insanity and poverty, 86, 104, 110–11,
Holy fool, 102, 110 122–23, 129–30, 132–33, 160, 170–71,
Hume, David, 6 185, 200, 206
Humor. See Laughter Inspiration, 41, 49, 56–59, 65, 68, 131, 158
Invention, viii, 5, 8, 18–22, 27–28, 30–34,
Identification. See Projection 38, 44–45, 47–48, 65, 69, 71–72, 74, 78,
Identity: of poor at mercy of rich, 53–54, 125–34, 152, 156–57, 160, 174–76, 180,
63–64, 75–77, 139, 191; social, 36, 183–85, 195–96, 209; definition of,
50–55, 63–64, 75, 105, 160, 171, 176 xiii–xiv
Idyll, 1, 11–15, 18, 22, 26 Irony. See Laughter
Illiteracy (see also Imagination, lack of), xv,
15, 23, 25–30, 36, 53, 156–57, 159–60, Karamzin, N. M., xvi–xviii, 1–36, 59, 62,
201, 206 66, 74, 77, 79, 108, 114, 129, 146–47,
Imagination (see also Compassion [shared 151–53, 167–68, 175, 210; his reader, 3,
emotion]; Compassion/identification; 5, 11–12, 25–29, 31; works: “I was born
Deception; Invention; Projection; Self- to the world in poverty,” 154–55, 159,
aestheticization): acquisition of by poor, 163, 166, 177–78, 206; “Letter to the
xvi–xvii, 25, 29–34, 86–87, 126–34, Spectateur,” 9; Letters of a Russian
152–61, 168–72, 177, 200, 203, 206, 212; Traveler, xv, 3–9, 13, 15–21, 26, 28, 147,
acquisition of by Russia, 150–60, 150–51, 155–56, 161, 163, 174, 178;
168–70, 173–75, 206, 212; and death in “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter,” 24, 30,
the poor, 29–34, 125, 127–29, 158, 160; 156–57, 159; “Poetry,” 154; “Poor Liza,”
as defect in representations of poverty, xiv–xv, 1–4, 7, 9–36, 53, 88, 108, 122,
208–10; intertwined with poverty, 128–29, 152–53, 155, 157, 159, 161,
xii–xiii, xvii, 1, 37–38, 74, 79, 131–35, 170, 177, 185–86, 191, 198, 206–7, 210;
144, 165, 169, 174, 176–77, 181, 202, “Poor Liza,” introduction of, 13, 20, 34;
207, 210; lack of (see also Illiteracy), “Poor Liza,” narrator of, 3, 12–13, 29;
128–29, 158, 160, 174, 184; as “Poor Liza,” narrator’s similarity to
metaphoric wealth, xiii, xvii, 27, 33–34, Erast, 19–23, 26, 34; “To the Poor Poet,”
70, 130–34, 144–61, 170, 175, 198, 202, 8, 155–56, 159, 206; “Proteus,” 18, 33;
208; by the poor, vii , xiii, xv–xvi, 21, “Thoughts on Solitude,” 20
41–43, 47–49, 57–58, 60–63, 75–76, 84, Keats, John, 55
114, 122–34; as redemption of poverty, Kenosis, xvi–xvii
148, 151, 154–56, 161, 165–66, 168, Kireevskii, I. V., 148, 151, 169, 172
170, 174, 198–99, 201, 207, 212; as sin Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 154
and suffering in the poor, xvi, 84, 86–87, Konstantinovsky, Father Matvei, 138,
114, 122–34, 161; as threat to social 140–41
order, 113–22 Krylov, I. A., 41, 169
Imitation: cultural, of Europe, xv, xvii–xviii,
4–5, 7, 9, 143, 145, 148, 156–58, Laughter: and correction of morals (satire),
169–72, 175, 177, 189, 194–95, 197–98, in practice, 80–81, 91–100, 106–7,
203, 205 112–13, 121–22, 124, 134, 139, 142; and
Improvising, xvi–xvii, 36–77, 204, 207; in correction of morals (satire), in theory,
Dostoevsky 180–83, 188, 194–97, 201; in 89–91; as cruelty, 89–90, 93–100, 139;
Tolstoy, 162–66 derisive, in depictions of poverty, xvi, 9,
Inarticulateness, 55, 126–27, 129, 139, 15, 23–27, 53–54, 63–64, 78–79, 137,
168–72, 179, 188, 192 163, 179; by Gogol’s characters, 82; at
Inheritance. See Patrimony oneself, in practice, 91–94; at oneself, in
Innocence, 53, 87, 100–7, 110, 126, theory, 90–91; in satire, abused, 99–100,
128–29, 159, 185, 191; in Karamzin, 9, 106–7, 112–13, 117, 121, 124–25, 129,
12, 14–15, 21, 27–33 134, 139, 142
278
Index
Literacy and cultural literacy, x, xv, 1, 3–9, Namelessness of poor, 41, 48–49, 68, 100,
11–37, 62, 74, 147, 160, 168–70, 174, 112, 116, 153, 164, 171, 203, 205–6
185, 199–202, 205–7, 210; Gogol’s Narratives about poor copiers (see also
objections to, 108–9, 122–37, 139 Gogol, N. V., works: “Overcoat”),
Literary aristocracy: debate on, 51–52 xvii–xviii, 127, 159, 168–69, 173, 189,
“Little Man,” 152 191, 203–4, 206–7, 212
Locke, John, 157 Narratives about poor improvisors (see also
Lotman, Iu. M., 44 Pushkin, A. S., works: “Egyptian
Nights”), xvii–xviii, 173–74, 188–89,
Maguire, Robert, 139 193–94, 203–4, 206–7, 212
Maikov, A. N., 183 Narratives about poverty: other schools,
Mandelstam, O. È., 55 209–10; underlying plot, 160, 168–69,
Mann, Iurii, 79, 98, 107 202–3
Marie Antoinette, 118 National identity. See Russianness and
Marivaux, Pierre, 3 degrees of Russianness
Marketplace: literary, 37, 47–50, 56, 65, Nekrasov, N. A.: “Petersburg Corners,”
69–71, 74 204, 210; “The Poor Woman and the
Marx, Karl, 86, 116 Elegant Woman,” 205–6
Marxism, 208 Nikitenko, A. V., 46
Material poverty (money problems), ix, Novikov, N. I., 10, 90
xi–xii, 10–11, 16, 18, 26, 28, 45, 52–53,
57–58, 67, 109–11, 117, 119, 125–26, Odoevskii, V. F., 209
146–47, 149, 153, 160, 168, 170–72, Orientalism, 70–71
176, 185, 188, 191, 200, 205 Originality and unoriginality, xvii–xviii, 127,
Melville, Herman, 159 131–34, 143, 145, 148–49, 158–60,
Merchants, xi, 52, 93–94, 194 169–77, 180–81, 184–87, 189–90,
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 78, 94, 112, 137 195–97, 199, 201, 205
Metanarrative of poverty, xvii–xviii, 153–55, Orlov, P. A., 22
159–161, 194, 206; plot, 202–3, 206, 212 Orphanhood, 147, 152–55, 161, 185
Metaphor: of Russia’s cultural maturation, Orthodoxy. See Christianity
146–49, 152, 169; of Russia’s cultural Othello (Shakespeare and Voltaire), 59, 61,
poverty, xvi–xviii, 131, 138–39, 143–61, 68, 70, 73
168, 175, 177, 194, 197–98, 201–6, Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, D. N., 95
211–12; of Russia’s cultural poverty in
twentieth century, 207–9; of Russia’s Passion (see also Sexuality), 18, 36, 64,
cultural poverty, Pushkin’s objections to, 66–72, 103, 123, 176, 204; as essential to
150, 160, 203, 205–7; of Russia’s cultural art, 59–60, 66–67, 75, 178
poverty, sources of, 146–48; of a writer’s Past, the Russian (see also Peasants,
poverty, 134, 138 associated with the past), 20, 29, 153,
Mickiewicz, Adam, 43 156–57, 159, 188
Money and wealth, 10, 31–34, 54, 153 Patrimony, 146, 153–56, 169–70, 176–77,
Monks and monasteries, 10, 13, 20–21, 29, 188, 195, 197–200, 203, 205–7
83, 101–2, 105–6, 109–10, 114, 133, 153, Peasants, xv, 1, 10–11, 18, 23–26, 29, 31,
156, 159–60, 172, 177, 190, 200 106, 121, 131, 152, 156, 159, 166, 197,
Murder. See Crime, murder 201; associated with the past, 13, 156,
Mutual possession, 61–63, 66–71, 73, 159
75–77, 166, 189, 207, 212 Peter the Great, 5, 109, 111, 114, 127, 143,
157, 160
Nadezhdin, N. I., 149 Philanthropy, ix, xii, 62, 109–12, 118–22,
Name (see also Zvanie [calling]), 41–43, 163, 177, 200; giving admonitions
49, 51, 101, 164 instead of, 135
279
Index
Physiological sketches, 79, 152, 203–4, ix, xvi, 109, 113–19, 122–26, 128–30,
209–10 132–34, 161, 202; universal poverty,
Pletnev, P. A., 46 Gogol’s claim of, 87–88, 122, 127–28,
Pogodin, M. P., 152 136; as victimization, see Social
Polevoi, N. A., 52 injustice; as vileness, 111
Poverty: ambiguous terms for, 89–90, 94, Pretender theme, 62, 93, 104–5
107, 109; ambiguous terms for, “Progressive School,” xii, 209
“Honorable,” 89–90, 92, 115–17; Projection (see also Compassion/
ambiguous terms for, “Honorable identification), vii–viii, xv–xvii, 1, 3–7,
poverty,” 139; ambiguous terms for, 14, 25–35, 41, 55, 62, 68, 73–78, 92,
“Low,” 89–91, 98–99, 101, 107, 109, 108, 114, 121–22, 148–50, 161–63, 168,
134, 137, 140, 142; ambiguous terms 174, 180, 183, 186, 189, 194–202, 204,
for, “Noble,” 60, 107, 115–16, 120, 131, 210–11; definition of, vii–xiv; as essence
149; as authentic being, x; as beneficial of art, xv, 42, 57, 74–76, 162–65, 174,
to imagination and art, xv, xvii–xviii, 181–83, 194, 196–99, 201–2, 207
36–37, 56–60, 68–9, 83–85, 132–34, Prophethood (see also Pushkin, works:
144, 156, 159–61, 202, 206–7; as “The Prophet”), 42, 47–49, 51, 55, 61,
beneficial to imagination and art, in 151, 184–85, 192, 194–98
Dostoevsky, 181, 183, 185, 187–90, Prostitution (see also Crime), 69, 71, 74,
194–96, 197–99; as civic virtue, 12, 85, 131–32, 180, 200, 204–6; literary,
80–88, 111, 114–20, 124, 127, 131; as 66–67, 69–71, 74, 204; of nobility, 67
civic virtue, and Akaky Akakievich, 100, Purity. See Innocence
103, 113; as close to essence of poetry, Pushkin, A. S. (see also Pushkin, A. S.,
36, 57–58, 161; cultural constructions “Egyptian Nights”), xi, xiii, xvi–xvii,
of, vii–xi, xviii, 108–9; definition of, vii, 23–26, 36–77, 79, 98, 108, 129, 134, 140,
xi, 27–28; as freedom, xv, 36, 42, 54, 145, 150, 168–169, 203, 210–11;
56–58, 74–76, 176–77; as hindrance to aristocracy as inimical to poetry, 36,
imagination and art (see also Illiteracy), 47–48, 57–58; concept of aristocratic
xv, xvii, 36, 54, 84–85, 131, 133, 139, independence, 45–46, 51, 54–60, 62, 66,
156, 159–61, 168–69, 202, 206; as 70; concept of improvisation, 38, 42–43,
holiness, viii, x, xvi, 80–83, 102, 109–11, 61, 71; concept of poetry before
117–18, 120, 124–27, 131, 133, 140–42, “Egyptian Nights,” 36, 46, 48–49, 52, 54,
159–60, 179, 190, 200, 211; as holiness, 59, 66; Dostoevsky’s representation of,
and Akaky Akakievich, 100–7; as xvii, 194–99, 201, 212; finances, 44–47,
holiness, definition of, 110; intertwined 64; freedom, poet’s, xv, 36, 54–58, 61,
with imagination, xii–xiii, xvii, 1, 37–8, 65, 72; Gogol’s representation of, 134;
74, 79, 131–5, 144, 165, 169, 174, passion vs. workmanship, 59; poetry vs.
176–7, 181, 202, 207, 210; as laziness, prose, 38, 52, 58, 75; and Tsar, 44–47,
111; pun of “poor” (unfortunate/needy), 71; unpopularity as a writer in 1835, 44,
x, 9–10, 27–8; as punishment, 81, 47; works: “Bookseller’s Conversation
86–88, 135–36; as punishment, and with a Poet,” 46, 48–49, 54, 66; The
Akaky Akakievich, 90, 112–13; as self- Bronze Horseman, 157; Evgenii
loathing, 190–91; as sensitivity to Onegin, 195–6, 201; “A Fragment,” xi,
alterity, 57, 68–69, 144, 181, 183, 185, 40, 50, 57–58; “The Gentlewoman
187–91, 194–96, 197–99, 200, 207; as Peasant,” 23–26, 168, 198, 204; The
sin, xvi, 79–82, 87–88, 91, 111–13, Gypsies, 195; Mozart and Salieri, 69;
135–36, 211; as sin, and Akaky “The Poet,” 54; “The Prophet,” 42,
Akakievich, 90, 92–94, 97–100, 102–4; 54–56; Queen of Spades, 52, 205; “The
suffering of poor deserved, xvi, 86–91, Stationmaster,” 21; Stone Guest, 198;
94, 97–100, 112–14, 120–24, 126–36, “The Undertaker,” 205; “We Were
161; as a social good (social immobility), Spending the Evening . . .” 185
280
Index
Pushkin, A. S., “Egyptian Nights” (see also Rebellion, x, 114, 122, 172, 209
Pushkin, A. S.; Chuzhoe [alienness]; Religion. See Christianity
Chuzhoe slovo [someone else’s word]; Repetition (see also Copying; Imitation),
Sobstvennoe, sobstvennost’ [one’s own, 32, 125–26, 133, 140–42, 159, 171, 175,
property]), xiv–xv, xvii, 36–77, 108, 200, 204–5
121–22, 128, 137, 150, 155, 157, 161–62, Richardson, Samuel, 24, 28
164–66, 177, 179–80, 182, 185–86, Riurik, xi
188–89, 192–99, 203, 206, 211; Romanticism: and its conventions, 6, 134,
aristocratic poet’s ability to identify, 197, 209, 210; vs. Realism, 48–49
49–51, 53–64, 68–70, 211; aristocratic Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 5, 9, 15, 52, 92,
poet’s approach to poetry, 37, 39–40, 157
47–49, 55–61, 65–66; aristocratic poet’s Rozanov, V. V., 78
attitude to compassion, 59–60, 72; Russia: cultural backwardness, 131, 134,
aristocratic poet’s attitude to financial 138–39, 143–58, 161, 165, 175, 188,
dependence, 47, 54, 57, 60, 64, 66; 195–98, 202–3, 207, 210; Italy as
aristocratic poet vis-à-vis alterity, 39–43, metaphor for, 155, 161, 198–99; material
48–49, 54–62, 69, 76–77; Charskii’s poverty, 161, 197–98
resemblance to Cleopatra, 69–70; Russianness and degrees of Russianness,
Dostoevsky’s reading of, 38, 65, 68, 178, xv, xvii, 14–15, 21, 24, 110, 143–48,
180–81; first improvisation, 39, 54–59, 151–66, 168–77, 184, 189–91, 194–99,
61, 65–67, 70, 211; fragmentariness of, 201–6, 208, 211; similarity to poverty,
38–39, 62, 70–76; fragmentariness, 148, 152, 159–61, 163–64, 166, 202, 211
readings of, 38–39, 65, 68; improvisor as
projection of Pushkin’s anxiety, 37–38, Saint Petersburg (and the Saint Petersburg
47, 49, 71, 74, 194; love for low, 39, myth), 104–5, 131, 152, 157–59, 164,
58–59, 63, 65, 76, 161; love for low as 175, 205
rejuvenation for lofty, 69–70, 74; love for Salon, 4–5
low as threat to social order, 42–43, Satire. See Laughter
67–71, 74, 164, 166, 207; mise en abyme Self-aestheticization, 1, 4–9, 14–15, 19,
as structural principle, 38, 63, 65, 71, 75; 23–34, 129, 174–75
poor poet vis-à-vis alterity, 42–44, Selfhood, ix, 59–64, 70, 73–74, 122–23,
48–49, 52–58, 62, 76; poor poet’s ability 128, 141, 144–46, 170, 172–74, 176–77,
to identify, 41, 48–49, 57, 211; poor 189, 195, 204
poet’s approach to poetry, 37, 43, 47–49, Selflessness, xv–xvi, xviii, 41–43, 49, 53,
57–61, 65–66; poor poet’s attitude to 97–100, 104–5, 110–12, 131, 143, 153,
financial dependence, 46, 48–49, 51, 158, 164, 183, 187–91, 196–97, 201, 204
53–54, 57, 66, 69; Pushkin’s self- Self-loss and death (see also Dissolution of
portrayal in Charskii, xv, 37, 40–41; authorial self), 30–35, 52–58, 60, 63–64,
second improvisation, 39, 59, 63–74, 67, 71–75, 82–86, 88, 104–5, 122–23,
71–74, 178, 211; separation of 127–30, 132–33, 158, 171, 191–93, 200,
aristocracy and poetry, 39–44, 49–51, 212
59, 76 Senkovskii, O. I., 46
Pushkina, Natalia Nikolaevna, 46–47 Sentimentalism: and its conventions, xv, 1,
4, 10–11, 14–27, 31–32, 34–35, 59, 95,
Radishchev, A. N., xii, 10, 209–10 168, 208, 210; encounters with poor girls
Rank, 51, 82–83, 86, 93, 96–97, 104, in, 15–17; philosophical underpinnings
112–14, 117, 122, 128, 131, 160 of, 6–9
Raznochintsy, xi Serfs, ix, xi, 29, 46, 81
Realism: and its conventions, 133–34, Sergius of Radonezh, St., 104–6
183–84; and determinism, 38, 52, 58; Sexuality (see also Passion), 15–18, 28, 31,
depictions of poverty, 209–10 153, 178, 185–86, 191, 204
281
Index
Shakespeare, William, 14, 197–98 Tolstoy, L. N., x, xiii, xvii, 38, 88, 110,
Slavophiles, 110, 152 143–45, 161–67; Cossacks, 12;
Smirdin, A. F., 46 “Lucerne,” xvii, 17, 155, 161–67, 177–78,
Smith, Adam, 6–8 211; “Lucerne” as retelling of “Egyptian
Sobstvennoe, sobstvennost’ (one’s own, Nights,” 164; views on poverty, 166–67;
property), 60–62, 76, 153 What Is Art? 163
Social climbing, 88–89, 94, 104, 113–17, Tomashevskii, B. V., 48
122–23, 128, 132–34, 155, 175 Transparency of poor to rich, 25–26, 32, 127
Social injustice, viii–x, 9, 79, 86–88, 94–97, Turgenev, I. S., x, 145, 157, 159
109, 137, 161, 190–91, 200, 208–10
Social order: compassion/imagination as Umilenie (tenderness), 178
beneficial to, 6–9, 168, 172, 174–75,
183; vs. social chaos, xvi, 79, 81, 111 Viazemskii, P. A., 41, 51–52
Social reformism, ix, xii, 10–11, 109, 117, Viise, Michelle, 114
173, 191, 200, 208–10 Vladimir Monomakh, 109
Soloviev, V. S., 208
Sorrow (sentimental), 6, 10–11, 13, 17, Wealth: as defense against acquisitiveness,
19–20, 23, 26–29, 31, 33–35, 94–97, 137 88–90, 116; as insensitivity to alterity,
Spiritual impoverishment, xvi, 79, 88, 91, 57–58, 162–64, 166, 195, 199–200, 208;
112, 137–42 as virtue, 88–90, 118–19
Sterne, Laurence, 4, 7–8, 16, 18, 23, 175 Westernizers and their project, 5, 13, 143,
Strakhov, N. N., 144–46, 151, 175 210
Sumarokov, A. P., 12, 101 Women (see also Karamzin, N. M., works:
Svoe slovo (one’s own word), 168–73, “Poor Liza”), 15–17, 85, 104, 111, 185,
175–77, 184, 187–88, 190–91, 196–97, 196; as object of wealth, 85–86, 97, 99,
201, 203, 207, 212 128, 130–31, 175, 180, 185–87
Symeon, St., 101
Sympathy. See Projection Zhukovskii, V. A., 7, 9, 14, 31, 41
Zvanie (calling), 41–43, 49, 54–60, 62, 70,
Tancrède (Voltaire and Rossini), 49, 70 75, 113–15, 137–38; as encounter with
Theater, 7–9, 13–15, 27, 30–32 alterity, 73–74, 188–89; related to
Tiutchev, F. I., 197 determinism, 51–58, 60, 76, 137
282

Poverty of The Imagination

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Poverty of The Imagination

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Poverty of the Imagination

Northwestern University Press

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

Copyright © 2001 by Northwestern University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herman, David, 1962–

Introduction: Poverty and Imagination ix

Chapter One Expelled from the Garden of Poverty:

Chapter Two The Call of Poverty: Learning to Love

Chapter Three The Meaning of Poverty: Gogol’s

Chapter Four Gogol against Sympathy 108

Chapter Five “The Poverty of Our Literature” 143

Chapter Six By His Poverty: Dostoevsky and

Conclusion: The Wealth of the Russian Imagination 202

The writing of this book taught me what it means to be indebted, by which

We had promised each other that all our

of clear governing conventions (quintessentially, though by no means only,

Though highly marked, poverty nevertheless possesses boundaries

THE IMAGINATION OF POVERTY

We begin with “Poor Liza,” the immensely popular inaugurator of the

Expelled from the Garden of Poverty

Sympathy and Literacy in “Poor Liza”

The thought of our amiable poet’s final years is

KARAMZIN’S “POOR LIZA” tells a story simple

ration, or just plain wonderment, Karamzin opened immense new poten-

For a story so widely considered hackneyed, “Poor Liza” is curiously

CROSSING THE BORDERS OF ALTERITY:

literacy, imagination, and the sentimental project of learning to see our-

Karamzin travels with books, sometimes ignoring a sight to read about

For the thinkers around sentimentalism, then, other-directed emotion was

guarantee our collective well-being. This will be Karamzin’s point of depar-

tionship between poverty and role-playing. Karamzin encounters the diffi-

We are all, my friend, liars [lzhetsy]:

The same aesthetic stands behind Karamzin’s recommendation that writers

“POOR LIZA”: POVERTY AS APHRODISIAC

ger, it should be noted, emanates from a sympathy that would genuinely

Strangely enough, what holds all the victims in thralldom to misfor-

Since the Karamzinian gentleman is expected to know his culture’s standard

lass of seventeen” (370). Karamzin soon finds that communication across

IMAGINING THE POOR TO DEATH

Karamzin’s apparent proponency of rationality, however, should not be

Then [the poet] together with Gessner summons

With the predilection for journeys implied by “transported himself,” with

FALSE INNOCENCE AS DOUBLE DECEIT:

thought and speech. “The Gentlewoman Peasant” restages Karamzin’s story

for their putative class).45 Pushkin is sensitive enough to Karamzin’s text to

POVERTY OF THE IMAGINATION

SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION, A VENEREAL INFECTION

As a trained practitioner himself, Erast naturally fears the things that

that it is warranted by the circumstances, proffering money where love is

CONCLUSION: TAKING PART

the mechanisms of representation we use as we seek to bind our hearts to

The Call of Poverty

Learning to Love the Low in “Egyptian Nights”

A lowly matter continually

THE NARRATIVE OF “POOR LIZA” provided

Written in the fall of 1835, “Egyptian Nights” has fascinated readers

sionately devoted to his verse. Fastidious in public dress, Charskii neglects

This key letter of 21 September 1835 to Natalia Nikolaevna fairly

downtrodden, and impoverished, but through it all, brilliant—the Italian is

ANSWERING THE CALL: POETRY AS POVERTY