andy merrifield

Last Sunday, I took a rare outing beyond Rome, fifteen miles southeast to Ariccia, a historic small town in the Alban Hills, close to the picturesque volcanic lakes of Albano and Nemi. Contiguous to the larger Albano Laziale and a more famous Castel Gandolfo, site of the Pope’s summer residence, Ariccia has narrow streets with endless traffic and a main square, the Piazza di Corte, crammed with people sitting in glorious spring sunshine.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Ariccia, like neighboring Albano and Castel Gandolfo, was a destination, well-known for welcoming artists and writers, those fleeing Rome’s torrid summer heat as well as embarked on the “Grand Tour” of Europe. In its heyday, the Locanda Martorelli became the town’s famed stopover inn, with an impressive list of former frequenters: playwright Henrik Ibsen, children’s fabulist Hans Christian Andersen, American poet Henry Longfellow, artists Friedrich Overbeck and J.M. Turner (whose 1827 painting moodily depicts Lake Nemi), and a certain Russian scribe called Nikolai Gogol.

Nowadays, it’s easy to miss the Locanda Martorelli, a rather forlorn, tatty looking building in dire need of a rehab and refresh. A banner on one moldy window says it’s now the “Museo del Grand Tour”; yet its rusty mailbox dangles from the wall and the whole place looks like a while since it received any visitors. There’s a fading plaque at second floor level listing past luminary guests—one name missing, though, much to my chagrin, is Gogol’s, who’d been a regular at the inn, journeying often to the region with his Russian pals, artists Alexander Ivanov and Fyodor lorden, and the writer Pavel Annenkov.

Curious to see another one of his Italian haunts, Gogol was my principal reason for coming that Sunday; the other prompt was I was eager to catch the finale performance of a reading of his story “Rome,” staged that evening at Ariccia’s communal “Teatro Bernini.” The theater, I’d soon discover, is a little gem, charmingly novel, because it occupies a church commissioned by Pope Alexander VII, dating from 1665, appropriately named Saint Nicolas. It was deconsecrated in 1870 and acquired by the municipality a few years later. Since 2008, it has been the residence of a successful and vibrant repertory theater, with a seating capacity of around 100 people.

Gogol loved his visits to the Alban Hills. “A few hours later,” Annenkov writes in his Literary Reminiscences, “we were in Albano, and both during the journey and upon our arrival in the small-town Gogol seemed perfectly at peace…From the mountains of Albano, a magnificent vista opens out onto Rome and its surrounding countryside. A distant, silent plain, strewn with ruins and seemingly inhabited solely by the sun—which transforms the light and colors from hour to hour—set against the motionless backdrop of the city and the azure dome of St. Peter’s. Above all, in the evening, at twilight, when the shadows of the ancient tombs and aqueducts lengthened and deepened, the scene took on a stern grandeur that almost invariably had a mysterious effect upon Gogol.”

It seemed fitting, then, that the locale should be putting on Gogol, and in front of a packed house. Not a free seat anywhere. In fact, people were sitting impromptu in the aisles and on the stairwell of the steeply tiered seating structure. Entering the theater had been frustrating, a bit of an ordeal, standing outside under a blazing sun for half an hour or more, watching the line ahead inch painfully toward the door. Once on the inside, the slowness was revealed: admission was old style; nobody had purchased a ticket in advance, only made a reservation. At the door, names were ticked off, you paid, and each visitor received a handwritten ticket!

Before the lectern, a slim, tanned, bald Giacomo Zito stood, a dapper man in his fifties, with a manicured goatee; beside him sat cellist Chiara de Santis, who would strum soulful cords to Zito’s enactment of “Roma,” in all its unabridged fullness. For the next one and a half hours, he read, often at breakneck speed, he modulated his speech, he acted out scenes, paused, whispered, gestured, but most of all bellowed out a dramatic effusion of words, set against a background of evocative images of the Alban Hills of Gogol’s day and of the old Rome his young prince, freshly returned from Paris, would grow to adore.

And Gogol’s muse, Annunziata, was introduced, the stunning belle of Albano, whom we know was modeled on a real person—Vittoria Caldoni (1805-1890)—the most popular painters’ muse of the age; over 100 paintings of her survive. (Ivanov’s portrait is perhaps one of the most famous.) “Everything about her recalls those ancient times,” Gogol wrote of Annunziata (Caldoni), “when marble came to life and sculptors’ chisels gleaned. Her thick pitch-black hair rises in two rings of a weighty plait over her head and spills into her neck in four long curls. No matter which way she turns the radiant snow of her face, her image has been entirely engraved on your heart.”

Zito was at his most theatrically best expressing Gogol’s dialogue, a street scene where his young prince plunges into teeming working class Trastevere, seeking out the old servant Peppe.

“‘Does Sior Principe wish to see Peppe?’

He raised his head: Siora Tutta was sticking her head out of the window opposite…‘Of course he came to see Peppe, didn’t you, Prince? Didn’t you come to see Peppe? To see Peppe?’

‘What Peppe, what Peppe!’ Siora Susanna continued, gesturing with both hands…

‘There’s Peppe!’ Siora Susanna exclaimed.

‘Here comes Peppe, Sior Principe!’ Signora Grazia shouted energetically from her window.

‘Peppe’s coming, he’s coming!’ Siora Cecilia chimed in from the corner.

‘Principe, Principe! There’s Peppe, there’s Peppe (ecco Peppe, ecco Peppe!)! the urchins on the street shouted.

‘I see him, I see him’, the prince said, deafened by the lively shouting.

‘Here I am, eccelenza, here I am!’ Peppe said, taking off his cap…

This is what the prince was thinking about: Peppe can search out and learn the beauty’s name, where she lives, and where she’s from, and who she is. In the first place, he knows everyone and thus more than anyone else he can find friends in the crowd, he can have them investigate, he can drop into all the cafés and osterias, he can even talk about it without arousing any suspicion based on the figure he cuts. And although he’s sometimes a blabbermouth and a scatterbrain, if I bind him with his word as a true Roman, he will keep it all a secret.”

We know how Gogol wound up his tale: with his young prince, at the end of June carnival day, standing before the shining panorama of his eternal city, high up on the Janiculum Hill. “My God, what a view!” And so “the prince caught in its embrace, forgot himself, the beauty of Annunziata, the mysterious destiny of his people, and everything else in the world.” And so Zito capped it off beautifully, in solemn Italian, fading out along with the setting sun: “Dio, che vista! Il principe, preso nel suo abbraccio, dimenticò se stesso, la Bellezza di Annunziata, il misterioso destino del suo Popolo e tutto quanto c’era al mondo.”

Despite my still-meagre grasp of Italian, it was hard not to be taken by Zito’s performance, by his delivery of Gogol’s tale. Somehow, it went beyond language. I understood all. Afterward, I reflected upon what I’d seen, what I’d heard, and remembered something someone once said of Gogol: if you hadn’t heard him read, you didn’t really know his works. While this dramatically curtails any knowing audience (!), after listening to Zito, I sort of grasped what this might mean, began to understand the story in a somewhat different light, to appreciate more what I’d always thought overwritten, too laden with adverbs and adjectives, with over-the-top florid description.

Yet hearing the rhythm and breakneck cadence of Zito’s interpretation, those adverbs and adjectives and thick descriptive glosses now sound well-chosen. An exaggerated oral performance, a rapid-fire, manic explosion of words and intonations, voiced by an actor, seems to get Gogol right, brings him alive, mimics what many confirmed about how brilliant a reader he was of his own works. They need acting out and performed to tap their true glory.

Anybody who has ever enjoyed Gogol’s masterpieces like “The Overcoat,” “The Nose,” “How the Two Ivans Quarreled,” and certain sections of Dead Souls, or has ever read or seen performed “The Government Inspector,” will recognize that “Rome” is in the minor register, a markedly inferior piece in Gogol’s overall oeuvre—which is why he was reluctant to publish it as a “fragment.” Remember he was pissed off with his friend Pogodin who released it in 1842 in his journal The Muscovite, against Gogol’s wishes. Gogol clearly saw it as unfinished, as incomplete and unpolished, as a work in progress—a work in progress never consummated.

But there was something extra going on that evening, too, vividly apparent from audience reactions at the Bernini theater: everybody listened in hushed reverence, with hardly a splutter or whisper to be heard. The story had resonated with Italians, gripped them, seemed to enter their hearts and minds. If they’d never read any other Gogol tale, this one would be sufficient unto itself, because it touched them as a people. With real meaning and genuine authenticity, enough to convince a native, Gogol’s “Roma” evoked their city, their land, their spirit. Gogol had reached some part of the Italian psyche that went beyond St. Petersburg, even beyond Rome. They were on the scent of Gogol whether they knew it or not. And so was I. As our planet continues to go to pot, I sometimes stand on the same spot where his young prince once stood in Gogol’s imagination. I forget about myself and everything else in the world.

Over the years, there have been periods in my life when I’ve grown tired of reading, shocking as it may sound. I can’t find anything I want to read, and a lot on offer frankly bores me. When I lived in France, I read plenty in French, which helped freshen up the book world for me, and because I knew the language less well than my native English, everything sounded new and demanded much closer scrutiny in the act of reading. It became more interesting simply because it was a less passive experience, more interpretative. My mind was still churning over in English yet the texts before me were French. So the act of translation meant much greater focus and an active engagement with words and sentences. It was as if English were too easy, and in reading it I’d find myself drifting off or skipping words, sometimes skipping whole paragraphs since it all sounded too familiar. For a while, I found French sustaining.

I say this because it was often at these dead-end moments with English that I’d also pick up my faithful Finnegans Wake. Indeed, I should stress that there have been times in my life when Joyce’s book was the only text I could read, the only book that could keep my attention span, the only book I’d not drift off with. It was the only book I could read without being able to read it! You could perhaps say that it’s a book that somehow reads you, in the sense that you flick through it not knowing where you want to begin, when suddenly a word attracts you, catches your attention, gets you thinking, sends off buzzers somewhere in your brain. The engagement is thus more intimate, more instinctive, more an act of creation and re-creation, rather like looking at a painting or listening to music, when you’re stimulated emotionally in some unforeseen or unexpected way.

In a way, with Finnegans Wake you become child-like again, reading with pure wonderment, pouring over words that are compellingly new, sounding-out words as a young child does when they learn to read, hearing the meaning through the sound, placing the meaning in the context of what it might mean to you—not necessarily what it meant to Joyce himself. With Finnegans Wake, you, too, are able to be a literary creator and not just the recipient of a story told to you. It was at these moments when I began to understand what Samuel Beckett was getting at claiming Joyce’s writing in Finnegans Wake “isn’t about something; it is that something itself.” With Finnegans Wake, all content collapses into form, all form becomes content, and out of the dialectical synthesis the task of the reader is to write the book themselves, to ascribe meaning to the text that unfolds in their mind’s ear.

At such times, you’re no longer reading a book and following a narrative, being led along by the author’s hand, who’s insisting you follow his or her drift, their narrative flow; now, you must follow your own drift and it is words themselves that become the story; and there’s no strict way in which you can interpret them. Hence the beauty and delight with entering the infinite universe of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the splendor of its constantly expanding solar system, a universe that can never exhaust itself so long as it has people who open the book, who think with wonderment and abandonment, as if you were looking up observing the Milky Way.

No coincidences, perhaps, that when the quantum physicist Murray Gell-Mann was flicking through Finnegans Wake, he found the right word to name the elementary particle he’d just discovered, three-pronged matter, two up, one down, binding together protons and electrons, which he labeled “quark”—after “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” Gell-Mann said that “quark” sounded like what he’d found in the quantum world, an onomatopoeia phonetically imitating a new subatomic reality hitherto unknown.

There are many such words that I’ve recorded in my notebook devoted to Finnegans Wake, single words and groups of words that signify the something that Beckett spoke about. I’ve got my own personal favorites, yet one phrasing early on in Finnegans Wake is perhaps my absolute favorite. It’s when Joyce introduces Earwicker, sets the scene, saying his fallen man of the hod “lived in the broadest way immarginable.” I’ve used this as a sort of personal axiom, my own personal mantra that becomes a constant urging, a note to self. I also believe it becomes a kind of aide-memoire of what it means today to be on the Left, how a progressive person might live in a world increasingly hostile to their viewpoint.

I’ve used the phrase sometimes in my writings and usually, like all of Joyce’s puns and portmanteaus, it causes editors (as well as computer autocorrects) considerable difficulty. Frequently, the word “immarginable” gets altered to “imaginable.” No, no, no! I don’t mean imaginable: I mean immarginable. It sounds pretentious even though I’m not trying to be archly clever. I just think it fits beautifully mixing “imagination” with “marginality”; that to live on the margins of society, as a minority within a dominant order, to get on, to be happy, to achieve anything worthy, you have to be imaginative, ducking and dodging, inventing another way of life for yourself and your family.

And when I say “marginal” and “minority,” I mean someone off the mainstream radar, whose value system isn’t orthodox or conventional, and who somehow identifies themselves with the downtrodden; it’s a façon de vivre as well as a savoir-faire about life in capitalist society where life is always likely to be a struggle against something. And then there’s that other aspect of Joyce’s phrase: if you’re going to live immarginably, it requires your vision to be broad and open, your mind to be curious, not closed.

For me, one of great interpreters of this mode of thinking is the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), whose outlook incorporates the spirit of Joyce. It offers an instructive example of what living in the broadest way immarginable means. Deleuze, along with his colleague and co-author, the psychoanalysis Félix Guattari, were big Joyce enthusiasts. (If anything, Guattari was even more a Joyce obsessive, drawing on the Irish writer for his work on chaosophy. When Guattari died of heart failure in August 1992, sitting at his desk at La Borde clinic, nearby, apparently still open, was his well-thumbed English copy of Ulysses.) But it isn’t Deleuze’s explicit thinking on Joyce that interests me, so much as the series of quirky filmed interviews he did in the late 1980s with the Libération journalist Claire Parnet. Eight hours of documentary footage emerged, a so-called Abécédaire, in which Deleuze extemporizes on all things from A to Z, Animal to Zigzag.

Not long ago, I checked out Abécédaire again, relistening to what Deleuze had to say about the letter “G,” for “Gauche”—“Left,” wondering myself what Left might still mean today. Deleuze was asked by Parnet, “What does it mean for you to be ‘Left’?” “I’m going to tell you that there’s no government of the Left,” says Deleuze. “A government of the Left doesn’t exist,” he says, “because to be Left isn’t an affair of government.” Let’s begin with what it means not to be Left, he says. This is to think of the world “a bit like your postcode. You begin with yourself, the street where you live, the city, the country, other countries further and further away.” And yet, “to be Left moves in the opposite direction.”

It’s to perceive the horizon, to move inward from the outside, to imagine the planet, “the continent, your country, region, city, street, you.” It means to celebrate oneself as part of a much bigger reality–as a “humble indivisibles in a grand continuum,” as Joyce says– with a vast horizon, to affirm this horizon and not be afraid of its immensity as one’s home address. “Left,” says Deleuze, is an affair of perceiving that horizon, of keeping your vision of yourself and the world expansive. It’s to live with the vastness of the planet, to want to understand it, to keep its frame of reference and plane of immanence open. Problems the other side of the planet are, willy-nilly, our problems, my problem.

Deleuze says that there’s another criterion of what it means to be Left, defined not by your nature but by your “becoming” [devenir]: “To be Left,” he says, “is to never cease becoming a minority.” It’s to know that you’re probably never ever going to make up the majority—even if, in crude numbers, you are the majority. To be Left is to affirm your Being by Becoming a minority, alongside other minorities, to be proud of it, to wear it as a badge of honor, to do so in the broadest way immarginable. Deleuze reckons that “the minority is the becoming of everybody, one’s potential becoming.” It’s very Joycean. He’s clear that “majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian.”

It’s to assemble and form an ensemble with your fellow minorities, to express your becoming out in the world together. It’s becoming a revolutionary [devenir-révolutionnaire] even when (especially when?) there’s zero prospect of revolution. It concurs with Joyce’s Professor MacHugh in Ulysses, when he says that smart people are “always loyal to lost causes,” that “success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination.” “We were never loyal to the successful.”

Maybe this is what Joyce was driving at in Finnegans Wake, his notion of “wake”: “Phall if you but will, rise you must.” Above all else, Left means to wake up, to be savvy enough to see through ruling class smoke screens and participate in your own process of becoming, doing it with others, forging alternative minority communities within and against the official majority community.

There’s something about James Joyce. Once you get into him, he becomes addictive, grabs you, inspires in you some obsessive devotion, a kind of fanaticism dedicated to the man and his works, a worship. When F. Scott Fitzgerald first met Joyce in person at a dinner party in Paris on July 27, 1928 (organized by Shakespeare & Company bookstore owner Sylvia Beach), he addressed his idol as “sir,” kneeling before him, suddenly announcing that, as a tribute to Joyce’s genius, to “St. James,” he was going to throw himself out of the window. Joyce managed to catch Fitzgerald, holding him back from falling, from disappearing over the apartment’s fourth floor windowsill, saying afterward: “That young man must be mad—I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury.”

And then there was Samuel Beckett, one-time Joyce’s personal assistant (and suitor of Joyce’s daughter Lucia), who was so beguiled by his mentor that he wore the same battered tennis shoes, in the same size, a good three-sizes too small for Beckett! And the stranger in a Zurich café, who seized Joyce by the hand, exclaiming, “may I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” Joyce responded, “No—that hand did a lot of other things, too!”

I plead guilty to my own Joycean obsessions. Off-and-on for forty-odd years I’ve been reading him, appreciating him, obtaining tremendous joy from his prose and probing insights he teaches us on the human condition. I make no claims as any expert of Irish literature, only as a self-avowed amateur, with no credentials other than an enormous admiration for the man. I’m not alone in this passionate embrace. Scattered around the globe, almost everywhere in the world, thousands of people, in numerous languages, dutifully meet and participate in assorted reading groups devoted to Joyce’s books, often reading them line by line, doing so for years on end, without fail. At the Venice branch of Los Angeles Public Library, a James Joyce reading group met every month to read Finnegans Wake, eventually finishing it in October 2023, twenty-eight years after they’d begun it.

Reading Joyce has been a no-strings attached labor of love for me, nothing instrumental, a quirky devotion, including an almost squirrel-like compulsion of collecting different editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I’ve got dozens of different versions on my bookshelf: “corrected” editions and abridged editions, old editions and new “special” editions, anything and everything that might have a different cover. Each time I see a Ulysses or a Finnegans Wake in a used bookstore, in an edition or version I haven’t got, with a cover that’s novel to me, I nab it, shelve it under my ever-expanding collection. Curiously, afterward, I reread this newly acquired version, making fresh annotations in it, often discovering lines, ideas, and words I hadn’t noticed before, as if the new clear copy, perhaps with a different font, helped me see things anew.

Pride of place is a 1940s Faber & Faber red hardback Finnegans Wake, a fourth printing of the text, the nearest I have to a first edition. Everything resembles the first edition anyway, a red hardback cover, quite plain. It’s all the more charming because it is literally falling apart at the seams, its pages dropping out. I love this copy but it isn’t my most affectionate version of Finnegans Wake. Dearest to my heart, is an ordinary Penguin publication, from 1999, with its Book of Kells cover and an introduction by the late John Bishop (of Joyce’s Book of the Dark fame), which I purchased at the “Murder Ink” bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I bought it on my fortieth birthday, in the millennium year, a little gift to myself, when I lived around the corner on West 93^rd Street. I remember six-years on reading with poignancy an article in The New York Times (December 20, 2006), reporting “Many Suspects Seen in the Death of a Mystery Bookstore,” as Murder Ink finally went out of business after thirty-four years of trading. The rent was increasing five percent, and the current eighteen thousand dollars a month was already crippling the small independent, devoted to crime and mystery fiction, yet not entirely. Jay Pearsall, the owner, lamented its closing. “When I see the books that I can’t order again, it’s hard. Whether it’s Finnegans Wake or Pat the Bunny, it seems impossible,” Pearsall said, “that we won’t order or sell those again.”

I also recall, after purchasing that copy of Finnegans Wake, meeting up later the same day with my friend, the writer Marshall Berman, himself a Joyce devotee—Stephen Dedalus’s “shout in the street” in Ulysses, after all, plays a pivotal role in Marshall’s own modernist masterpiece, All That is Solid Melts into Air. When I told Marshall I’d just bought a nice copy of Finnegans Wake, we went on to have a lengthy conversation about the relative merits of Ulysses vis-à-vis Finnegans Wake; Marshall always preferring Ulysses whereas I, despite also loving Ulysses, had a bit of penchant for Finnegans Wake.

Marshall liked the fact that Ulysses was a novel, challenging for sure, but its narrative could be read from start to finish, whereas Finnegans Wake was something else again, neither a novel nor readable in English. Above all, Ulysses brought together twin themes that preoccupied Marshall’s Marxist imagination, that animated his scholarship: it’s not only preeminently an urban book, it’s equally a book about urban everyday life. With this unity (and wholeness), Ulysses expressed the kind of democratic modernism that lit Marshall’s fire, the opposite of the oppressive, top-down modernization espoused by the likes of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier; Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s nighttime (and nightmare) book, would never speak to Marshall in the same way.

Ulysses voiced Marshall’s 1960s generation’s modernism, taught them where to look, how to find nourishment in a place where few modernists at the time ever dreamed of looking: in the everyday street. This is the life that Joyce’s Stephen points to with his thumb, “the apparently inchoate random shouts that drift in from the street.” Each time I pick up this edition of the Wake, with great nostalgia I think of the late Marshall, of Murder Ink, of New York’s Upper West Side, of my younger self, and of a past life gone forever.

***

The most recent acquisition in my expanding Joyce library is a massive, blockbuster brick of a text of Ulysses, coupled with the strikingly vivid artwork of the Spanish artist Eduardo Arroyo, released by New York’s Other Press in 2022 at the hundredth anniversary of Ulysses. Arroyo wanted to illustrate Ulysses twenty-five years ago, but Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, the writer’s last living relative, had blocked it.

When Stephen died in 2021, Arroyo had his chance. Yet it had it be done posthumously, on his behalf, because the artist himself had passed away in 2018. All the while, Arroyo had privately pursued his Joycean passion, illustrating Ulysses with his brightly colored, surreal images, some almost pop art in their depiction. Joyce’s offbeat eighteen episodes have found suitably offbeat graphic representation. The net result is a rather beautiful specimen.

The publisher’s preface relates the story of Arroyo’s Ulysses, of the artist’s fascination with the Irish writer. In the late 1980s, Arroyo suffered a serious, near-death illness. But over a long recovery period he said his health ordeals were immeasurably aided by his work illustrating Ulysses. He had the intention of using his paintings to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Joyce famous day, but that wasn’t to be. It was one of Arroyo’s dearest projects, alas something he never saw come to fruition, yet he would have surely been delighted had he seen Other Press’s offering.

Arroyo is important for me, too, because he embodies another one of my little Joycean obsessions, helping define what my blogs in the future, those to follow over the next few months, will really be all about: a dialogue between Joyce and Marx. The artist was a chip off the old block, a Joycean drawn to Marx, a Marxist drawn to Joyce. I find the encounter inspiring. Since the late 1950s, after fleeing Franco’s fascist Spain, Arroyo moved to France, where he embraced French critical thought. He was on friendly terms with the philosopher Louis Althusser and his creative imagination was animated by Althusser’s 1960s Marxism. It would culminate in 1969 with one of Arroyo’s best-known canvases, “La Datcha,” a group portrait, neo-Soviet Socialist Realist style, of French maitres à penser, the most eminent structural and post-structuralist scholars of the post-war period.

The painting, executed with Gilles Aillaud, was a satire, with a touch of David Hockney’s Californian house motif thrown in: a late afternoon interior, a setting sun, illuminating a seated Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault, with Jacques Lacan looking on and Roland Barthes doing the honors, acting as a waiter, bringing on a tray of petit fours. Meanwhile, a ghostly silhouetted presence lurks on the outside terrace, beyond the large glass sliding door: it’s Louis Althusser, a reluctant guest or intellectual pariah, or maybe both, a Groucho Marxist not quite wanting to belong to any club that has him as a member. Decades later, in 1991, Arroyo would give us another neo-figurative parody, and the title of this brilliant and intriguing artwork squares the circle for me: “The Marxist Brothers’ Cabin, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

Three years ago, on New Year’s Day 2023, I published a blog post about the avant-garde movement DADA and what it might mean for us today. It struck me that the essay is worth another airing, so please forgive the indulgence, the repetition; another attempt to instigate a DADA New Year! Best to you all for 2026!

I know I’m not the only one thinking our world has lost its mind. It’s not easy being some relatively sane person nowadays. At the best of times, politics is bankrupt. At its worst, it’s toxic, dominated by demagogues, liars and cheats. Their falsehoods fly wholesale, rarely disgruntling masses of people, let alone damaging a demagogue’s political career. On the contrary, it seems to assure this political career, guarantees it somehow, because now there’s a “popular” willingness to believe in falsehoods, falsehoods decoupled from any reality. That’s where the madness resides. In my sixth decade on earth, I can’t ever remember life being so miserable and desperate.

A little while ago, though, I read something that oddly cheered me up, revealing to me that our world has often been miserable and desperate. It was written by one of the pioneers of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara, an essay called “Some Memoirs of Dadaism,” published in July 1922 in an unlikely Vanity Fair. It’s amazing to think that the now-glossy Condé Nast publication once aired its likes; it’s equally amazing, reading Tzara, how much his time sounds a lot like our time. Listen to him scene-setting the birth of Dada, in Zurich, circa 1916, as Great War carnage raged:

DADAISM is a characteristic symptom of the disordered modern world. It was first inspired by the chaos and collapse of Europe during the war. To the exiled intellectuals of Switzerland, humanity seemed to have gone insane–all order was crashing to destruction, all values were turned upside down–and, in accordance with this spirit, we began a set of wild practical jokes, elaborately silly meetings and fantastic manifestoes which burlesqued, in their violence and absurdity, the absurdity and violence of the life around them.

Tzara was barely twenty years old when absurdity and violence surrounded him. Dada, he said, grew out of disgust for this world, for its war and politicians, for its businessmen and values. “Dada,” he said, “took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety, for it regarded this system as inextricably bound with human stupidity, the stupidity which culminated in the destruction of man by man.” A group of young people, Tzara included–exiled painters and poets, draft dodgers and deserters, Bohemian castoffs and plotting revolutionaries–began meeting in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, an obscure nightclub along an obscure street, across from where an obscure Lenin lived.

For six months, the joint came alive, begat Dada, “the virgin microbe.” Discussions and outlandish performances quickly became legendary, the talk of the town, the talk of all Europe. Nights at the Cabaret Voltaire became “Dada nights,” nights of intoxication, of music and dance, of manifestoes and poems, of paintings and passions, of carnivalesque theatrics. Hugo Ball, the Cabaret’s co-founder, played the piano; partner Emmy Hennings, the other founder, sang, read, and danced; ditto Sophie Taeuber; Richard Huelsenbeck banged a giant drum; a balalaika orchestra struck up the band; Hans Arp, Hans Richter, and Marcel Janco provided artworks, and designed collages, costumes and masks.

Tzara, a small, monocled, intellectually uninhibited young man, recited Dada manifestoes and read poetry in French and Romanian from the scraps of paper he’d pull out of his pocket. His performances were animated by screams, sobs, and whistles. One time Tzara read a newspaper article while an electric bell kept ringing–so loudly that no one could hear what he said. Missiles were often tossed at those on stage; so were eggs and cabbages, together with the odd beefsteak. Exasperated audiences shouted and insulted performers; exasperated performers shouted and insulted audiences. Dada nights meant raucous laughter and frequent barnies. “In the presence of compact crowds,” said Tzara, “we demanded the right to piss in different colours.”

Legend has it that he and Lenin used to play chess together at another favourite Zurich haunt for dissidents, the Café de la Terrasse. (Apparently, Lenin sometimes went to the Cabaret Voltaire, an unassuming presence with a goatee and “Mongoloid features,” sitting on the second row, laughing along at the high jinks.) If we can believe Tzara’s testimonies, this stuff of legend and of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties was actually true. In the late 1950s, Tzara said: “I knew Lenin personally in Zurich, played chess with him. But to my great shame, I have to admit, at the time I didn’t know Lenin was Lenin. I only learnt it much later.”

Tzara probably wasn’t very accomplished at chess. Too many rules, too strict a movement of the pieces, too much cunning strategy–all poorly suited to the impetuous twentysomething’s poetic sensibility. Lenin, on the other hand, already then well into his forties, was likely a savvier player, more formidable: after all, he was always strategizing, always biding his time, coolly planning moves ahead, forever assessing an opponent’s strengths, preying on their weakest links. Tzara, by contrast, would have felt straightjacketed by the game’s mechanics. He’d have wanted his pawns to move sideways and backwards, his bishops to jump like knights, rooks to shift diagonally, his king to be a queen.

And if Lenin was at the board trying to forge a heroic “new man,” Tzara’s archetypal anti-hero was an “approximate man,” a person with a slippery identity, incomplete, stuttering, elusively located between language and nationality, shrugging off anything essential or logical, anything rational or normative, moving in the cracks of those black and white chequerboard squares. “Take a good look at me,” Tzara’s approximate man would taunt his audience. “I am an idiot, a clown, a faker./ Take a good look at me!/ I am ugly, my face has no expression, I am small./ I am just like you all!”

Lenin was discrete, cagily plotting behind closed doors; Dadaists made explicit public nuisances of themselves, reminding the world that there were independent men and women beyond war and nationalism, and who live for other ideals. Tzara said poetry was political because it was anti-literature, a whole way of life, a mode of being-in-the-world, intense and corrosive, a profound scream, a kick up society’s ass. “We repudiated all distinctions between life and poetry,” he said, “our poetry was a manner of living.” Poetry meant scandal, meant “sabotaging the realisation of the exterior world and its unacceptable manifestations.”

One disarming weapon of Dada sabotage was the “sound poem,” with its unsettling noises and auditory sensations, utterances and stammers, fulfilling Dadaists’ insistence that “thought is made in the mouth.” The sound poem was a provocative linguistic experiment, marking a shift away from the meaning of words to the meaning of sounds, freeing words from syntax–indeed, freeing language from language itself. Language had been misused and abused, corrupted and fabricated by politicians and demagogues, whose words manipulated mass audiences. So, said Dadaists, let’s refrain from using words, let’s not enter their linguistic terrain of engagement. Thus, for Tzara, to strip language of meaning was to create new language with fresh meaning. It was to negate ruling class language-games, to say NO to their rules, to their terms of reference, where meaning had lost meaning because it voiced lies.

Tzara wanted to break with modern forms of expression. He liked to recite, alongside Huelsenbeck’s beating drum, his own drum beat, inspired by authentic African chants: “boomboomboomboom drabatja mo gere, mo drabatja boooooooooooo.” Meanwhile, “Toto-Vaca,” repeating the idea of voicing “unknown words,” became Tzara’s take on a Māori poem, which, he said, he discovered in an anthropology magazine. Its verses appear on a recording called Dada Manifesto: Poèmes, Délires & Textes, and we can now hear for ourselves the amazing, haunting sounds that once haunted audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire. “Toto-Vaca” invents sound, Tzara said, and tries to mimic the caws, chirps, and guttural cries of the native New Zealand bird, the Kiwi.

“La Panka” is another Tzara poem with disturbing phonics, literally sounding-out the tumult and seismic tremors of the earth, of our eruptive society, emphasising long, prolonged and rattling enunciations: “De la teeee ee erre mooooooot/ Des bouuuules,” as in “tremblement de la terre,” or “earthquake” in English. To hear La Panka read aloud is to shudder, to shiver at its foreboding: “je déchiiiiiiire la coliiiiiiiiiii/ ine” (“I tear up the hill”); and “iaoai xixixi xixi cla cla clo/ drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” It’s a sound that gets under your skin, like the terrifying stuttering of the ghost of Christmas past, or maybe like the sound you’d make if you covered your ears, creating your own background noise, screening out something you don’t want to hear, the sort of thing a child does to avoid hearing, to avoid being scorned. Maybe it’s like drowning out somebody else’s obnoxious noise, some obnoxious ad or message, the ideological white noise that invades our lives.

Decades after his first hearing, the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre vividly remembered the impact of Tzara’s sound poems. “Dada made a tabular rasa of the past,” Lefebvre impressed, and reconstructed language on the basis of “a kind of stuttering spontaneity,” which “challenged scholarly language and the art of discourse.” Lefebvre’s first published article, in 1924, in the Philosophies journal he helped found, was an insightful and positive review of Tzara’s Dada Manifestoes, and afterwards the two twenty-year-olds got to know one another (Tzara, born 1896, was five years Lefebvre’s senior); later they reconnected, fighting together for the Resistance movement in Toulouse; by then, each man was a card-carrying Communist, a ticket Tzara would never relinquish.

“From its first manifesto in 1918, Dada,” Lefebvre said, “condemned the West’s logocentrism and eurocentrism with a deliberately infantile formula: Dada was the first and final stammer. When Tristan Tzara, young and fiery, proclaimed that Europe–its thought and politics and all it had once been–was nothing but boom-boom-boom, this went very far. It was a puerile term that stunningly evoked the drums of infancy, grand military bands, politicians’ rhetoric, and exploding bombs. Dada was negativity on the threshold of the modern world; three knocks that strike its door are the boom-boom-boom of Tristan Tzara. Period.”

Lately, we might add the boom-boom-boom of assault rifles spraying bullets in public schools and shopping malls across America, and the louder and faster beatings of our hearts under stress. Indeed, our world continues to be punctuated by exploding bombs and military bands, by guns shots and political incantation–by the din of a Trump rally and the anxiety of our economically and ecologically crisis-ridden age. Our airwaves, too, are overwhelmed with explosions, of loud yet hollow words. We’re literally saturated with visceral language: from Twitter feeds and commercial news channels to imbecilic incumbents and political wannabes broadcasting fake facts and bawling insults. People en masse have been dumbed down by words, seduced by their ubiquity, lobotomised by their inanity. Ironically, too few words collectively stack up to saying too much. They over-multiply as they over-simplify. Nonsense goes viral.

Decent people have responded by invoking reason, tempering the tonality of debate and discussion, suggesting that we should try to uphold the truth and correct misconception. But you have to wonder if this modus operandi is really fit for purpose anymore. Maybe progressives need something more radical instead, something more Dadaist, something that drowns out their noise with our noise. Maybe it’s time to kick up a scandal, Dadaist-style, and create a new spirit of negativity, start afresh by creating a tabula rasa, sweeping everything away of this miserable status quo. “Everything?” an older generation of liberal fathers enquired of Turgenev’s young “nihilist” Bazarov. “Everything,” repeated Bazarov, “with indescribable composure.” “At the present time the most useful thing is negation—so we deny … The first thing is to clear the field.”

Tzara said that Dada “was born of a revolt common to youth in all times and places.” Whenever he said “we,” it was this generation Tzara had in mind, an adolescent generation, his own, a generation of twentysomethings who’d suffered during the 1914-18 war, “in the very flesh of its pure adolescence suddenly exposed to life, at seeing the truth ridiculed, clothed in the cast-off garments of vanity or base class interest.” Today’s youth are likewise seeing their pure adolescence exposed to life and liars; they, too, are watching the truth being ridiculed, clothed in the cast-off garments of political vanity and crass class interest. Thus, we might wonder, are there budding young revolters waiting in the wings somewhere now, heirs of Dada, plotting a scandal in the ruins of our society?

Could an avant-garde ever be invented again? A critical, revolutionary avant-garde, neo-Dadaist, pioneered by the many disgruntled young people the world over who know, as Johnny Rotten knew in 1977, that there’s no future? Is there anybody, any group or collectivity that can follow the lead of those youngsters who lit up the night at the Cabaret Voltaire? Dada, the movement the most provocative and most volatile, the most destructive yet most creative… where are its latter-day offspring, prising open a new future?

Maybe what this offspring lacks are sites of incubation, cradles to nurture a new movement, places where young people can congregate, can encounter one another, get politicised, entertain themselves, cafés and bars and youth centres that might mimic the sort of freedoms that neutral Switzerland (and Zurich) supplied during the war years, where outcasts and kindred found comradery, expressed themselves freely, and where Dadaists built a global movement without really recognising it–a movement that reminded us that there are independent young people who reject war and nationalism, and who live for other ideals, still live for them.

A key lesson that Tzara taught Henri Lefebvre remains key: “that a real work of art is lived out, that a written oeuvre subordinates itself to a style of life.” Tzara’s oeuvre was his life, his life his oeuvre, a certain manner of living and being in the world. Creating new Cabaret Voltaires in person is also to create Cabaret Voltaires of the mind, to live out this radical sensibility with others, everywhere, at all times, to bring poetry to life, to sound it out in the streets and in daily life. Guy Debord always said it was modern poetry that led him and the Situationists into the street. “We were a handful who thought it necessary to carry out its programme in reality, and certainly to do nothing else.”

Part of that programme united two prongs that over time have been ripped apart: desire and refusal, a will to live an alternative, authentic, passionate and adventurous life, at the same time as refusing to submit to the unfortunate rules and ideological norms of current society, to its dullness and sadness, to its inauthenticity. It’s a refusal to believe in its beliefs, in its lies; not to be “proud” but indignant, to be disgusted. We could say that it is to be all ears for the three knocks at its door: the boom-boom-boom of Tristan Tzara. Period.

I don’t usually get invited to these things. I’m standing in the delightful grounds of Rome’s Villa Wolkonsky, the British Ambassador’s residence, a stone’s throw away from the Basilica San Giovanni in Laterano, full of imposter syndrome. It’s a gorgeous summer’s evening, mid-June, and I’m here as a so-called “plus-1,” the guest of a guest, to celebrate the King’s birthday—that King being Charles, the current British monarch. Everybody knows it’s not his real birthday—well, I think everybody knows—which is in November; but any excuse for Rome’s elite to have a good old bash, a rollicking time, is never forsaken. Apparently, for a long while, it’s been a British royal tradition to stage an al fresco commemoration of a monarch’s birthday, in mid-summer, usually around the solstice, when there’s a better than average chance that, in Britain at least, it won’t rain.

There are hundreds of people here, decked out to the nines, sipping champagne, prosecco, beer, and white wine, all on the house—diplomats and employees from Rome’s numerous international organizations and missions, as well as dignitaries from the Italian government. It’s the biggest “public” event of the year, a showcase for Britain, with giant Union Jacks hanging around and projected against walls. It’s hobnobbing with anybody who is anybody in Rome. I’m a fly on the wall and can’t help myself from taking photographs, snapping away at everything and everybody, at the goings on, at the marvelous garden that envelops us, at all the beautiful people around me. I make small talk with the people I meet, chatting as if I was one of them; little do they know I’m here by default, that it’s really my wife who’s the guest, and she had to get special permission for me to be allowed in.

I keep it to myself that I’ve zilch interest in British royalty, whether it’s the King’s birthday or whatever; and I’m not terribly concerned about the copious amounts of free booze on offer, either—thank the British taxpayer (none present!) for that—nor the cuisine, which mercifully is Italian. I chat with the guests and ask them, in passing, if they knew anything about the history of the place. A few knew that during the early 1940s, the villa was the wartime headquarters of the Gestapo. I enquired about whether they knew about its older Russian past, and if they’d ever heard of a writer called Nikolai Gogol.

No, not really, most people said. I mentioned that the writer used to hang out here; that he was the guest of the Russian princess Zinaida Volkonsky, the eponymous founder of the villa, the woman who organized the landscaping, had the original villa built in the 1830s. This smaller property, now dwarfed by the much larger, grandiose house, the current home of the British ambassador, has a little parapet on top of one side, and on this little parapet Gogol once sat, looking over the nearby Basilica, and composed Dead Souls. There’s a pencil sketch from the early 1840s of him, sitting on the parapet’s low wall, wearing in hop hat, with the San Giovanni Basilica in the near distance. In those days, there was a clear, unbroken view of it.

Elsewhere in the villa’s grounds, Gogol lay down on grass, marveling at the bright blue Roman sky. He’d nestle up against the wall of what is the villa’s most distinctive feature: the thirty-six spans of a majestically ruined Roman aqueduct, dating from Nero’s time, from the First-Century A.D, traversing the villa’s ground. It’s a sight to behold. Under one of its arches, the princess created a cool little grotto for her friend, the famed writer Gogol, who worked there during the summer. Ordinarily, unlike this evening, Villa Wolkonsky is an oasis of peace and quiet in the incessant humdrum of the Eternal City.

***

Zinaida Volkonsky was the wife of Tsar Alexander I’s personal assistant, his aide-de-camp, Prince Nikita Volkonsky. It’s a long story of how she ended up in Rome, but she arrived here in February 1829. A year on, Zinaida purchased five-hectares of agricultural land on Esquiline Hill and proceeded over the next few years to create her very own enchanted magic kingdom, studded in banksia roses and purple coils of wisteria, lined with hedges and scores of different species of plants and trees (reputed to be near two hundred today). Meanwhile, she commissioned the architect Giovanni Azzurri to build a simple villa within three bays of Nero’s aqueduct, becoming the nucleus of the whole property, Zinaida’s summer retreat. (In the winter, she rented an apartment in the Palazzo Poli, at the back of the Trevi fountain.)

She also rearranged ancient statues and artifacts reclaimed from the tombs that were embedded in the aqueduct. “The villa itself,” wrote one early visitor, Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of the composer, “isn’t a palace, but a dwelling house built in the delightfully irregular style of Italian architecture. Roses climb up as high as they can find support, and aloes, Italian fig trees and palms run wild among capitals of columns, ancient vases and fragments of all kinds…The beauty here is of a serious and touching type.”

After the princess’s death in 1862, Alexander, Zinaida’s son (named after Tsar Alexander I), inherited the property, enlarged it, and excavated more of the Roman tombs in the ground. In the 1880s, he sold off a lot of the land to the Campanari family (Nadia Campanari was a descendent of Alexander’s), who built for themselves the larger, more regal mansion, the centerpiece of today’s villa, and Zinaida’s house became the servant’s quarter. In the early twentieth century, the villa went through a somewhat checkered period. In the 1920s, it was owned by the German government, home to their Italian ambassador until 1943. Until the end of the Second World War, the Gestapo ran the place; its torture chambers were housed in the main Villa’s basement. In 1947, two-years after war’s end, the British embassy rented the property and its grounds from the Italian government (after a Zionist bomb had destroyed the British embassy at Porta Piazza), and in 1951 Villa Wolkonsky—its “V” now transformed into a “W”—was purchased by the Brits as the official home of the British Ambassador to Italy, remaining so ever since.

Princess Volkonsky was a fascinatingly brilliant woman. Born in Dresden into one of Russia’s oldest aristocratic families, young Zinaida became the Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen of Prussia, assuming close relations with her husband’s boss, Tsar Alexander I. Alexander and Zinaida maintained a lively correspondence with each other and it was rumored they were onetime lovers. (A bust of Alexander haunts the gardens of Villa Wolkonsky today.) When she was in her twenties, Zinaida moved to Russia, settling in Moscow in 1822. Before long, bored as simply a housewife, her mansion along Tverskaya Street began hosting literary and musical salons, fast assuming notoriety—Pushkin was a regular. Zinaida adored the celebrated poet; he called her “the queen of music and of beauty.”

According to Zinaida’s biographer, Maria Fairweather (see The Pilgrim Princess: The Life of Princess Zinaida Volkonsky), Zinaida shone in the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Her many talents and lively intelligence were infectious, drew admirers and followers from the arts and political life. She was the life and soul of the party, and soirées modeled themselves on the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris, with marked liberal and progressive leanings, embracing European enlightenment thought. Evenings staged readings and political discussions, performed poetry, songs, and theater, played games of charade. The princess became a veritable magnet for Moscow’s artistic circles and brains community. She was rich, beautiful, and smart, with literary talents of her own, as well as a singing voice apparently as sweet as a nightingale’s. She played an accomplished piano and harp, too, composed music and later befriended Rossini. University types and philosophers likewise began partaking, among whom were historians and critics like Stepan Shevyrev and Mikhail Pogodin, both close to Gogol.

The sudden death of Tsar Alexander from typhoid in 1825 changed things. While the last years of his reign had disappointed many liberals—serfdom, after all, was still operative and basic freedoms were thin on the ground—the incoming emperor Nicolas I was a lot more oppressive, obsessed with order, peddling a mantra of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. As a counter, Zinaida participated in the Decembrist oppositional movement, coined after the attempted revolt against this new Tsarist regime, in St. Petersburg on December 26, 1825. Some of Zinaida’s friends and former associates would be exiled or imprisoned, occasionally executed—her brother-in-law Decemberist activist, Sergei, spared death, was shipped off to Siberia.

“For me,” she wrote Prince Peter Viazemsky, a close friend known since childhood, “Russia has been defiled and bloodied. I can’t bear it here, I feel stifled. I cannot, I do not wish to live peacefully in this place.” Her salons soon became clandestine gatherings of Decembrist sympathizers, conducted in the shadow of suspicion; Tsarist spies closely monitored proceedings. Russia began to feel like a prison for her, and she explored ways out, exit routes. Italy became an obvious answer, a country she’d visited often in her childhood, Rome especially.

Antagonisms with the Tsar were compounded by Zinaida’s religious beliefs, her turning away from Russian Orthodoxy in favor of Catholicism—she was a recent convert—all which prompted accusations that she was really a Jesuit agent. Thus, on February 28, 1829, Zinaida had had enough: she quit Russia for good, returning only twice for short visits, but never living there again. She exited with her elder sister Madeleine, assorted household servants, as well as Stepan Shevyrev, whom she convinced to leave his academic position and become the personal tutor of Zinaida’s son, Alexander. Punitively, the incumbent Tsar refused permission for Zinaida’s husband to travel. He would have to remain in Moscow. “What bliss,” Zinaida would nonetheless write in her journal, “to be streaming toward Italy.”

One of her first friendships in Rome at the Palazzo Poli was the popular Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who, for a while, lived practically next door, at via Poli, 91. (It’s more than likely that Gogol initially met Belli at one of Zinaida’s salons at the Palazzo, a tradition she continued to pursue with vigor in Rome.) Another early guest at her Palazzo apartment was Prince Viazemsky. Other notables were Victor Hugo, Stendhal, the American novelist James Fennimore Cooper, and Walter Scott, who, recovering from a stroke, fleeing another damp and dreary Scottish winter, stopped by, enchanting his host. Then, in June 1837, another vagabond man of letters arrived, Nikolai Gogol, with a letter of introduction to Zinaida penned by Prince Viazemsky, their mutual friend, a sort of uncle figure for Gogol, ensuring him fast-track entry into the princess’s inner court. Zinaida was thrilled; Gogol already had a reputation of a writer of genius.

The rapport between the two was immediate. Zinaida seemed one of the few women, besides his mother, with whom Gogol felt entirely at ease. He and Zinaida had plenty in common: both were deeply spiritual, each suffered periodic bouts of depression, oscillating between melancholy and excess, and both were idealists and impassioned lovers of Rome, living and breathing Italy. In 1837, the year of Gogol’s arrival, the pairing shared another event, the devastating breaking news of Pushkin’s death, at the age of thirty-eight, mortally wounded in a duel, passing away two-days later as Prince Viazemsky held a vigil around the poet’s bed. “All the joy of my life has disappeared with him,” Gogol told his friend Pletnev from Rome. “I never undertook anything without his advice. I never wrote a single line without imagining him before me—my present work [Dead Souls] was suggested by him. I owe it entirely to him. I can’t go on—I am broken-hearted.” (We know, of course, that for Gogol it was something of a case of Samuel Beckett’s: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on…”)

Gogol was a regular at Zinaida’s apartment near the Trevi fountain, and, especially, at the Villa Wolkonsky, whose gardens became one of his cherished spots to write in the whole of Rome. Zinaida’s villa soon had an added attraction for Gogol, on account of one of the princess’s guests, which revived Gogol’s spirits: a young prince called Iosif Vielhorsky, whose father was an old family friend of Zinaida’s and wanted his son, recently diagnosed with tuberculosis, to winter in Rome at the villa.

In December 1838, Gogol, hardly thirty himself, met the young prince, four-years his junior, and they rapidly fell head over heels for each other. They were inseparable all winter. Gogol was completely in love with the handsome, serious, and studious prince, who’d been at work compiling a bibliography of Russian history. The prince reciprocated Gogol’s affections, a rarity for the writer. But his health took a turn for the worst over the following spring. Gogol, grief-stricken at his partner’s rapidly failing health, came to live temporarily at the villa, at Zinaida’s behest, and he passed many hours at Iosif’s bedside, tending the sick young man. He later wrote about it, his only openly gay piece of writing, unfinished, barely three-pages long, a poetic and poignant account of his “Nights at the Villa.” (The manuscript fragment was only discovered in the archive of Pogodin after the historian’s death in 1875, and for a long while lay buried, apparently censored because of its explicit content.)

“I’m now spending sleepless nights at the bedside of my sick and dying friend Iosif Vielhorsky,” Gogol wrote Maria Balabina (May 30, 1839). “Without doubt you have heard of him…but no doubt you didn’t know his beautiful soul or his beautiful feelings or his strong character (too firm for his tender years) or his extraordinary soundness of his mind, and all this is prey of inexorable death; and neither his youthful age or right to life (doubtless a beautiful and useful one) will save him. Now I live his dying days, watch his minutes. His smile or his expression when it brightens for a moment are epochs for me, an event in my day which passes monotonously.”

“They were sweet and languid those sleepless nights,” Gogol began Nights at the Villa. “He sat sick in a chair. I was next to him. Sleep dared not touch my eyes. Silently and involuntarily he seemed to respect the sanctity of my night vigil. It was so sweet to sit beside him, to look at him. It was already two nights since we had said to each other: thou. How nearer he became to me after that! He sat still meek, quiet, submissive. God, with what joy, with what cheerfulness I would have taken on his illness, and if my death could have brought him back to health, with what readiness I would have rushed to it.”

“At ten o’clock I went down to him,” Gogol continues, ratcheting up the intimacy of his descriptions. “I had left him three hours earlier to rest a little…He was sitting alone, the languor of boredom expressed on his face. He saw me. He waved his hand slightly—‘you are my savior!’ he said to me. They still echo in my ears, those words. ‘My angel, did you miss me?’—‘Oh, how I missed you!’ he answered me. I kissed his shoulder. He offered me his cheek. We kissed. He was still shaking my hand.”

Gogol seemed to have had an epiphany that final night beside Iosif, “my life was strangely new then,” he says. “It is difficult to give an idea of it,” he says: “a charge, a fleeting fragment from my youth,” he writes, grappling to define it, “coming back to me, when a youthful soul seeks friendship and brotherhood among his young peers, and a friendship resolutely juvenile, full of sweet, almost infantile trifles, intermittent signs of tender affection, when it is sweet to look into another’s eyes, and when one is ready to make sacrifices…And all these feelings, so sweet, so young and fresh, which inhabit an irretrievable world—all these feelings returned to me. God! Why? I looked at you, my sweet young flower!” But the reality of death stared Gogol full in the face, as that young flower withered before him. “Was it necessary for this fresh breath of youth to envelop me suddenly, only to sink again into the vast cold where my feelings become numb, so that with even more distress and despair I see my life vanish. Thus the dying fire casts one final flame, illuminates the dark walls with a flickering glow, to then disappear forever and…”

Here Gogol’s manuscript trails off, ending with an “and.” Was it intended as a longer work? An autobiographical account of his friendship and homosexuality, hitherto kept under wraps, even if he never disguised it? Yet this wasn’t a fecund “and” like the flowing “the” of James Joyce, figuring at the end of Finnegans Wake, which duly marked a beginning, a rebirth, an eternally reoccurring universe; nor was it the affirmative “yes” concluding Ulysses. Rather, Gogol’s “and” fades away into negativity, into oblivion, and marks a punctuation, the closure of a chapter of life, perhaps the conclusion of his youth, now irretrievable. Only the inexorable passage into middle-age awaited him.

He’d henceforth bury himself in the distant land of his imagination, provincial Russia, its poshlost world of philistinism, of “bogus profundities, crude, moronic dishonesty” (Nabokov’s words), epitomized by the inscrutable Chichikov. The atmosphere of Dead Souls is full of poshlost, dreary banalities created in the tasteful bliss of Villa Volkonsky. Pushkin always said Gogol was the master craftsman who brought banalities to life, making them readable and enjoyable, worthy literary subject matter. But when Gogol read aloud early draft chapters of Dead Souls to Pushkin in St. Petersburg, rather than laughing joyfully as per usual, Pushkin became gloomier and gloomier, until, completely somber, uttered in an anguished voice: “My God, how sad our Russia is!”

After Iosif’s death on June 2, 1839, the proximity between Gogol and Princess Volkonsky dissolved. Iosif’s last hours were fraught. Zinaida said she saw the young man’s soul leaving his body, “and it was a Catholic soul.” There seemed to be then some attempt on her behalf to convert Gogol to Catholicism, but, offended, he’d have none of it. Indeed, “I will begin by saying,” he later wrote Shevyrev, “that your comparison of me to Princess Volkonskya with regard to religious exaltation…I will tell you that I came to Christ by the Protestant path rather than Catholic.”

Zinaida made a last-ditch effort to inveigle Gogol over to the church of Rome, in front of his dying friend, which caused a rift between her and the writer. Afterward, Gogol fell into a deep depression. “A few days ago,” the maudlin writer told Danilevsky, “I buried my friend, one whom fate gave me at a time when friends are no longer given—I mean my Iosif Vielhorsky. We have long been attached to each other, but we became united intimately, indissolubly and absolutely fraternally, only during his illness, alas. The man would have adorned the reign of Alexander II. The rest of those who surround him haven’t a grain of talent. The great and beautiful must perish, as all that is great and beautiful must perish in Russia.”

It took a while before Gogol and Zinaida made up, repaired their relationship, though it never would assume the previous level of intimacy; she always said this was the moment when the gloomy Gogol began his “spiritual education,” spending hours on the villa’s terrace, gazing at the sky, and at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. He and Zinaida undertook their own private religious mania, eventually parting their spiritual ways, their fanaticism taking on radically different forms. He, Maria Fairweather notes, “began to see his work as part of a process of Russia’s redemption…she of her special mission in the general regeneration of the world.”

A decade after Gogol’s passing, his “Overcoat” took on a dramatic twist. One winter’s day in February 1862, Zinaida was making her way home on a particularly bitterly cold Roman day. She spotted a beggar woman shivering on the street. Pitying her, Zinaida offered her petticoat and continued on. When she returned home, thoroughly chilled to the bone, Zinaida caught a cold herself, which turned feverish; several days on, she was gone, aged seventy-three.

***

Gogol loved Villa Volkonsky, but it was hard for me to comprehend this, to appreciate it fully, during the night of the King’s birthday, this deep past, the story of Gogol and the princess at the villa. Yet the more I read about his time there, the more I felt an inexorable urge to return, to see the place under calmer circumstances, in a quieter, more reflective mood, as Gogol would have experienced it. More particularly, I wanted to stand in the Villa’s grounds, get inside the original villa, if I could, discover Gogol’s grotto, if it still exists, look out at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, as he had looked at it, look out over Rome, over Russia, up at the sky.

Over the proceeding months, I inveigled my wife to pull a few strings. She said she’d get in touch with Fiona, a colleague she knows at the British Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office, explaining my request. Fiona told my wife I should reach out to Terry, the villa’s Residence Security Manager, which I did, and, in time, all was arranged: on a gorgeously sunny, mild November afternoon, I stood at the iron-grilled entrance of the villa again, passing soldiers from the Italian military guarding the outside. At an internal sentry post, I was buzzed in through two gates, the second slowly opening as the first slowly closed. Terry greeted me on the inside. He said he was born down the road yet sounded like he’d been raised in London’s east end. Terry explained he couldn’t show me around as something had cropped up, but instead one of the Italian security guards, Giovanna, speaking excellent English, would supervise my tour.

Giovanna, in her late fifties, was a delight, telling me, apologetically, that she’d been on the job at the villa for only two days, having worked for over thirty on security at Fiumicino airport; it’s the same contract company deployed at the villa (ADR Security). She didn’t know anything about the villa’s history, nor about Gogol, but said she was excited to walk around with me, happy to be out of her office confinement. Both of us followed the informative “Plan of the Gardens,” a little map and guide Terry had equipped us with, produced by the UK government. Without further ado, we were off on our afternoon’s exploration, and what an afternoon! 

Alas, I couldn’t enter Zinaida’s original villa, Terry said, because it is occupied by British diplomats, who live inside the converted apartments, and, as private residences, the building was off-limits to me. At first, my heart sank but soon I realized the gardens themselves were a cornucopia of treasures, especially Gogol’s grotto. Created by the princess, with its Latin and Greek inscriptions, the granite bench had Gogol sit scribbling lines of Dead Souls, in peace and tranquility, in the freshness of his orange-colored niche. A headless, life-sized statue of a woman stood in the middle (point to note: most, if not all, of the thousands of the ancient statues scattered around are headless). Needless to say, thrilled, I took plenty of photos. Nearby, to the left, adorning Nero’s aqueduct, were fragments of lion motifs, little sculptures dating from the Second and Third Centuries A.D. A bit further along from Gogol’s grotto, also on the aqueduct’s wall, was a marble plaque in Russian commemorating Pushkin, something I never knew existed, beautiful in its simplicity, glistening in the magnificent light enveloping the gardens.

I felt very privileged: a private viewing of these wonderfully preserved artefacts, of the pristine green lawns in their radiant glory—with turf apparently shipped in from Britain, and, in a far corner, near the temple (built in 1931), we came across that bust of Tsar Alexander I, looking a bit ruined yet still remarkably stately; the “Plan of the Gardens” says he was Zinaida’s “first great love.”

I passed a lovely hour in the grounds, and in Giovanna’s company, who told me she was born in Sardinia though grew up from an early age in Ostia, a working-class coastal town (site of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder) a half-hour or so away (traffic permitting). Giovanna seemed pleased when I mentioned that my last book was on the Sardinian Antonio Gramsci. As we headed toward the gate, the villa’s resident cat, Elizabeth, joined us (no guesses after whom she’s named), and before long I had passed through the security gates again, exiting onto via Ludovico di Savoia.

Five minutes later, zipping along on a Lime scooter, I was back home at my apartment, shaking my head in wonderment, in disbelief that I live here, in Rome, and just up the road, quite literally, had been where Gogol wrote a good chunk of Dead Souls. It was kind of amazing, and for a while I reflected on this amazement. On that stone seat, surrounded by beautiful gardens, in a romantic grotto nestled in Nero’s aqueduct, not far from here, Gogol sat, and there he wrote. I thought about what the American critic (and Gogol fan) Edmund Wilson had said when visiting Rome in the mid-1940s, a century after Gogol’s time, marveling in letter to another Gogol fan, Vladimir Nabokov, about how Gogol invented Chichikov “in clear Italian light—all that world of Dead Souls seems so far away.”

In a sense, it couldn’t have been truer. In another sense, thinking about it now, having seen what I’d seen, having felt it, perhaps the provincial Russian estate of Manilov in summer is closer to the Villa Wolkonsky than you might think. “Over the master’s house,” Gogol wrote, “were strewn, English-fashion, two or three flower beds with bushes of lilac and yellow acacia. Five or six birches in small clumps raised their small-leaved tops here and there. Beneath two of them could be seen a gazebo with a flat green cupola, blue wooden columns and an inscription: THE TEMPLE OF SOLITARY REFLECTION.”

Was Gogol thinking of Zinaida and her villa when he had Chichikov address Manilov’s wife? “‘Madame, here’, said Chichikov, ‘here is the place—and with that he put his hand over his heart—‘yes, it is here that the agreeableness of time spent with you will abide! and believe me, there could be no greater bliss for me than to live with you, if not in the same house, then at least in the nearest vicinity. Oh! that would be a paradisal life!’ said Chichikov, sighing.”

Somehow, in this bliss of the villa’s paradisal life, Gogol created the scoundrel Chichikov, the very definition of mediocrity, “neither too fat nor too thin, nor could he be described as either old or young.” His arrival caused no commotion in the town, says Gogol, nor anything special, “except for a few comments exchanged between two peasants standing by the entrance to a tavern opposite the inn, which, as a matter of fact, concerned the carriage rather than the occupant.” Yet Chichikov’s real forte resided in the fact that he is a deceiver and fraud, a cagey conman who’d have functioned effortlessly in our own times, which might be Gogol’s deeper point. Chichikov’s lies and deceptions would gladly make our world go around.

“The newcomer,” says Gogol, “seemed to avoid saying too much about himself, and, if he did, it was only in general terms and with marked modesty.” In his conversations with the town’s dignitaries, “he displayed great skill at flattery.” After a while, everybody who makes his acquaintance heartily agreed that he is “an extremely pleasant fellow”—even those who seldom have a kind word for anyone. “Such was the general impression made by the newcomer,” writes Gogol. “It was quite flattering and lasted until a strange peculiarity came to light. But we are soon to learn about this matter, which all but threw the entire town into confusion.”

Chichikov identifies the vicinity’s largest landowners, and one-by-one pays them a visit. He politely butters them up, and they wine and dine him and he’s full of compliments and not without a certain charm. When he raises the matter of dead souls to Manilov, the latter is speechless: he “opened his mouth and his pipe dropped to the floor. He remained with his mouth gaping for several minutes.” It’s another “dumb scene,” resembling the finale of The Government Inspector. Manilov hadn’t heard anything stranger, “more unusual than any that had ever reached human ears before.” Why would anybody want to buy dead souls? The souls in question are serfs, and every landowner who has an estate of any significance has a posse of serfs laboring for them. The richer the landowner, the more serfs they own, the more “souls” they possess, an emblem of wealth and standing in the region.

Yet these souls must be documented and are subject to a poll-tax. The tax system operative in those days was desperately skewed, because the squires themselves were exempt from paying taxes: it was the serfs who paid up! All the landowners did was assume responsibility, collecting taxes from their serfs, and then sending them off in accordance with the number of living serfs at the time of the last census. If the serfs died before the next census, landowners themselves remained liable for their poll tax. Thus, selling a dead serf liberated them of the burden of having to pay, and the new owner became responsible for payment. As such, why would anyone be stupid enough to want to buy “dead souls” and become liable for their poll tax? It seemed utterly bizarre, preposterous, hence Manilov’s gaping mouth, his dumb scene. It isn’t clear to anybody, and it’s only much later, near the end of the first part of the finished Dead Souls, that Chichikov’s motive becomes clearer.

So it goes that Chichikov does the rounds of the local squires, driving a hard bargain, acquiring their dead souls at a peppercorn price. That is until he encounters Nozdrev, a wily, ruffian squire, an uncouth, aggressive, and crooked landowner, a lying businessman; it takes one to know one. Chichikov had met his nemesis. By then, he had purchased hundreds of dead souls and, in the eyes of the town’s elite, is a proven big shot, a rich gent who is planning to snap up a large estate, somewhere nearby, where his apparently living souls would graft. When the legal exchange is signed and sealed at the town hall, nobody mentioned that the listed souls were in fact all dead, and nobody apparently cared.

And yet, when Chichikov attempts to obtain Nozdrev’s dead serfs, the latter smells a rat. “Why d’you want ’em, then?” he enquires. Chichikov hadn’t been confronted like this before and didn’t know how to respond. He claims he wants to marry somebody and needed the souls to emphasize his social standing, to convince the bride’s father of his worth. “You’re lying!” Nozdrev says. “You’re a liar, friend!” And so he was. “I know it very well,” Gogol has Nozdrev exclaim, “you’re a monumental fraud.” Right again. Chichikov quickly realizes it’s a grave error to have set eyes on this character Nozdrev; he’s set to scupper Chichikov’s best laid plans. “He will gossip, lie, and spread rumors,” muses Chichikov. “It wasn’t good at all…his business wasn’t of a sort that could safely be entrusted to a man like Nozdrev.”

It’s all true, because bit by bit we discover Nozdrev effectiveness at spreading false news about Chichikov. Lies becomes a liar’s downfall. Nozdrev doesn’t only spill the beans about those acquired souls being in reality dead—not false, of course—but that Chichikov is really after the governor’s daughter, that he plans to abduct her, which is not true. Busybodies soon arouse the whole town and before long, “everything was astir,” Gogol says. It took a little more than an hour before the fake news to run rampant, to assume verisimilitude. So it became fact that Chichikov planned to elope with the governor’s daughter. “Amplifications, additions, and revisions were added to all this,” says Gogol, “as it trickled down to the humbler parts of town.” Who needed social media with hearsay like this!

“No one actually knows who Chichikov really is.”  Even Gogol himself starts to wonder who this person is he’s created; and then, near the book’s end, we find out, in a sort of author’s confession. “I haven’t chosen a man of virtue for my hero,” admits Gogol. Our narrator is tired of positive heroes, he says, of virtuous men, who usually figure as hypocrites anyway, “and now I feel the time has come to make use of a rogue. So let’s harness him for a change.” Is Gogol talking about us, even about himself? Maybe I’m Chichikov, he says at one point. Chichikov is a serial loser that seems to succeed by taking everybody in. He hops from one failing to another, yet seems to gain esteem each time, finding his way through it all, showing at least one talent: resilience, overcoming blows with his amazing drive to succeed, believing the lies he tells and the yarns he spins. He’s a man of our age, all right!

Entering middle-age, Chichikov concocted the hairbrained idea of buying up dead souls, knowing that estate owners would be only too happy to let him have them, releasing them of their per-capita taxes. “If I offered, let’s say, a thousand rubles for the lot,” Chichikov reasons to himself, “I could get a mortgage from the National Treasury of about two hundred rubles per soul, which would bring me around two hundred thousand rubles!” We might say that Chichikov hatches a scheme to revalorize dead labor. That’s the way I like to view Dead Souls, as something akin to what Marx used to call dead labor. For that’s what dead souls essentially are, living-labor that created value, yet now have expired, becoming dead labor, no longer value creating—or are they? Because, here, we can see how a title to dead labor is in fact something that helps accumulate capital.

“The over-worked die off with strange rapidity,” Marx said in Capital. “But the places of those who perish are instantly filled, and a frequent change of person makes no alteration to the scene.” When Marx spoke about “dead labor” he wasn’t always, despite this quotation, speaking literally. More usually, dead labor for him represented past labor accumulated in machinery and technology, those acts of labor embodied in means of production that now set in motion living labor—an actual human workforce. Marx said these instruments of labor “confront” the worker during the labor process and come to dominate, “soaking up” living labor; dead labor thus sets the rhythm and dictates of the conditions of living labor. Marx’s prose in Capital is graphic: “dead labor, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.”

Chichikov is vampire-like in his thirst for dead souls, for dead labor—which, for him, came to dominate living souls, dominate in the sense that instead of owning real capital he could valorize fictitious capital, much handier as a pure financial asset than any living soul. “Best of all,” Chichikov says, “is that the commodity to be transacted is too unusual to raise anyone’s suspicions.” He knows all-too-well how the art of the deal reigns. We’ve exhausted the virtuous man, Gogol reminds us; virtue doesn’t seem to get you far in this world.

Near the end of Part 1 of Dead Souls, Gogol’s narrator intervenes again, addressing us, his readers, taunting us, challenging us, posing questions of us and about the book we’ve just read, as our narrator had recounted—as Gogol had written it. It’s a strange intervention, self-exoneration. “The reader ought not blame me,” he says, “if the people we’ve met so far aren’t exactly to their taste: blame Chichikov, for we must follow him wherever he decides to go. “What triumphs and failures he’ll experience, how he’ll cope with even more difficult obstacles, how great will be the stature of the characters who’ll appear in the narrative as it gains momentum, how its horizon will expand, and how it’ll acquire lyrical overtones—this the reader will discover later.”

But Gogol doesn’t give us a chance to find out: in the intervening years—the five years that would pass since Part 1 of his novel—he’d destroy much of its continuation. Instead, he leaves us with Chichikov hurtling out of town in his carriage, fleeing the gossipers, the rumor-spreaders, watching the houses, the walls, the fences, and the streets skipping up and down as they recede “and God alone knew whether he would see them again in his lifetime.” And then the tops of pine trees float away in the mist, the sound of church-bells fade, and, finally, the endless horizon opens up. “The whole road is flying,” Gogol signs off, famously, “everything is flying…And you, Russia—aren’t you racing headlong like the fastest troika imaginable?…And where do you fly to, Russia? Answer me!”

*Coda: In 1984, Russian TV audiences had the chance to watch Mikhail Schweitzer’s marvelously other-worldly rendering of Dead Souls, a lot filmed in soft focus. Shown in five-parts, Gogol himself starred—well, a disturbing lookalike actor played by Alexander Trofimov, narrating his own book from Rome (we know it’s Rome because of the rooftops glimpsed out of the open window, together with the sound of church bells). There’s a deliciously camp and risqué (for Soviet TV) scene, early on in the first episode, of a boot fetish lieutenant preening and admiring his polished leather high footwear; it’s a genuinely hilarious extract of the close of chapter VII in Gogol’s actual text.

When everybody at the inn is asleep, a single light remains on, as the lieutenant from Ryazan is mesmerized by his pair of new boots, inspecting them in the mirror, unable to take them off and go to bed. “The boots were so wonderfully constructed,” Gogol writes, maybe revealing his own boot mania, “that he kept lifting a foot again and again, to examine the beautifully shaped heel.” In Schweitzer’s film, this scene becomes even funnier because he has Chichikov, in an adjacent room, peer through a secret crack in the wall, eavesdropping on the lieutenant’s private fetish; Chichikov seems moderately turned on by his peep show. (Chichikov himself wears mascara.) One can imagine Russian audiences rolling about with laughter, chinking glasses of vodka, amazed at what they were watching on the box…

Almost two-centuries after its opening night, Gogol’s five-act satirical play, The Government Inspector, continues to create a stir each time it airs anew, seemingly no matter where. Maybe because corruption and self-serving double-talk aren’t just familiar features of nineteenth-century Russia but have become ingrained facets of all systems of government, of officialdom pretty much everywhere, recognizable to Gogol’s audiences whatever their language and culture.

In our own times, truth, justice, and temperance (virtues Plato said political systems needed to enshrine to call themselves “good”) have been shamelessly manipulated; scamming is normalized, a built-in feature of modern “democracy,” wallpapered on the corridors of political power. Elon Musk haunted recently as a latter-day government inspector, another character who smacks of a Gogolian gag: a shameless imposter pulling rank, beyond the pale, maybe beyond any laughing matter. Gogol probably would have seen it otherwise. He always tried to laugh this stuff off. He’d laugh nowadays, too, doubtless. Searching online for his name, I’m asked: do I mean “Google”? No, I don’t mean Google.

Gogol freely acknowledged that his friend Alexander Pushkin provided the initial spark for The Government Inspector. “Do me a favor,” Gogol wrote the poet (October 7, 1835), “send me some subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy…give me a plot and I’ll knock off a comedy in five acts—I promise, funnier than hell. For God’s sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.” Though, as per custom, Gogol might have nabbed the tale without Pushkin’s realization. “One has to be very wary with this Ukrainian,” Pushkin later cautioned, “he robs me before I have time to shout for help.”

Since the early eighteenth-century, government inspectors roamed Russia with the intent of rooting out small-town corruption and mismanagement. Petersburg officials were dispatched to the provinces, journeying in cognito vast distances to isolated backwaters that were usually pre-warned of the inspector’s coming. But nobody knew when, exactly, often not even the inspectors themselves. Over the years, rumors became rife of how lone travelers would try to pass themselves off as government officials, if only to be wined and dined by unsuspecting locals. In 1833, when visiting Orenburg province to research The History of Pugachev, about the Cossack insurrections that almost unseated Catherine the Great, Pushkin himself had been mistaken for a Petersburg official doing his rounds.

Pushkin’s experience was reappropriated by Gogol, touched up, embroidered with his own unique slapstick magic, transforming it into one of Russia’s best-known comic pieces—funnier than hell, as he said. He never gives a name to the town where the action takes place; we know, though, it’s really somewhere, outside the Russian capital, miles away from the glitz of Petersburg, a generic smalltown Gogol knew firsthand, from his upbringing. “Why, you might gallop three years away from here,” someone says in The Government Inspector, “and still end up nowhere.” In the play, the town’s mayor, an old fogey who’s a little bent, gets wind of the visiting government inspector, an official who’ll arrive anytime soon from the capital. The announcement causes great commotion—everybody knows the district isn’t the most honest.

Gogol’s cast comprises the town’s cronies—the mayor, the judge, the school inspector, the chief of police, the doctor, warden of charities, postmaster, and a few lackies, together with the mayor’s wife and daughter. The mayor frets that shopkeepers and townsfolk will spill the beans on his administration. “They’ve been complaining that I squeeze them hard,” he says, “but as God is my witness if I do sometimes accept a little trifle from them I do it without any ill feeling.” The judge warns everybody that “you better watch out, or we’ll find ourselves in hot water!” Thus the stage is set for the inspector’s imminent arrival, and town leaders cover their backs, gloss over the bribes and petty extortions, sweep the streets, and try to stay sober. “Damn it,” says the mayor, “if the inspector asks why the hospital chapel—you know, the one for which funds were allocated five years ago—hasn’t been built yet, don’t forget to say that we did start it, but it burned down.”

Gogol’s own sketch of an interior for “The Government Inspector”

After a while, somebody notices that the young man from the city, along with his manservant, have been running up a hefty tab at the inn. Pretty soon minds begin to run away with themselves. “You know that young gent,” one yokel says, “is an official from Petersburg. His name is Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov. There’s something fishy about the way he’s been behaving. Been here for a fortnight and never sets foot outside the place, has everything charged to his account and won’t pay a copeck for anything.”

And so Gogol’s play advances, in vaudeville fashion, with a case of mistaken identity, that the featherbrained wastrel from Petersburg, a cash-strapped, non-entity on his way to cadge money off his father’s estate, becomes the said government inspector. (In Ronald Wilks’s Penguin translation, the script is refreshingly idiomatic and slangy, true to Gogol’s, underscoring the genius of his wordplay and ear for the language spoken by real people.)

When Khlestakov first encounters the town officials cozying up to him, buttering him up, he’s oblivious to what’s happening. It’s his foot servant, Osip, more intelligent than his master, who cottons on, and warns Khlestakov not to milk it for too long before they’re outed as imposters. Get out while the going is good. But Khlestakov has none of it. Hilarious scenes unfold. A spread is put on for him, and he’s invited to lodge at the mayor’s house, shown around the charitable institutions and schools. Bemused, he meets personally one-on-one each town official, touching them up for a few hundred rubles here and there, for which they gladly oblige. Before long, Khlestakov grows into the role, begins to believe in his own lofty status, starts laying it on thick about his importance as a departmental head, honored and respected by the Tsar, hobnobbing with his “old pal” Pushkin.

The townsfolk are enamored by such an illustrious personage; and, like Chichikov, that other imposter from Dead Souls (a tale, incidentally, also sparked by Pushkin), fawn over him, anointing their own egos in the process. Khlestakov winds up the mayor’s wife, flirts with her, then glibly proposes to their daughter Marya, playing and preying on everyone’s delusions of grandeur. The mayor tells the town’s storekeepers, who’ve hitherto been griping about the squeeze the mayor put on them: “I’m not marrying my daughter off to some little jerk, but to a man of the likes of whom the world has never seen, a man who can do anything. Anything!”

Sounding a little like someone in office we know, wreaking revenge on all and sundry who’ve crossed him, “I’ll teach those sneaky bastards complaining about me, eh.,” the mayor says, “I want the names of all those who’ve been moaning about me—especially those filthy scribblers who concocted petitions for them.” He calls a meeting of the town officials, announcing to everyone how his luck has changed, how from now on he and his wife will be installing themselves into a plush Petersburg pad, henceforth mingling in higher circles, with aristocrats, and that his new son-in-law will ensure he’s promoted to some important post. The mayor’s wife is already bragging about her husband becoming a general, grumbling that “the air here is, I must say, so very provincial” (Gogol’s emphasis). Meanwhile, Khlestakov and Osip split the scene, supposedly exit on business, vowing to return the next day, or the day after that—but we know it’s not true.

The fantasy world Gogol creates comes crashing down when the postmaster rushes in with an opened letter in his hand, written by Khlestakov, addressed to a journalist friend of his in Petersburg. It was about to be dispatched special delivery, yet the postmaster couldn’t resist peeking inside it, breaking the seal, and reading its contents. “I was driven by some supernatural force,” he says. “I was about to send it off, but curiosity the likes of which I’d never felt before got the better of me. ‘I can’t open it, I can’t’, I thought, but then something kept tugging at me, drawing me on.”

The mayor is livid: “How dare you open the private letter of such a powerful personage!” “Well, that’s just it,” the postmaster says, “he’s not powerful at all and he’s not even a personage! He’s a complete nobody, just a little squirt.” Reading the letter aloud, the postmaster says: “the whole town took me for some governor general…You’d die laughing—they’re all such dreadful freaks. Now, those little sketches you write for the magazine—why not stick them in? Take the mayor, for example. He’s as stupid as a mule.”

It all hits like a bombshell. “Well,” says the mayor, head in hands, “he’s finished me off! I’m a broken man, played out. All I can see are pigs’ snouts everywhere instead of faces.” Everyone is bewildered. Then the judge wonders, asking a question that is perhaps the whole point of Gogol’s play, maybe even the whole problem with contemporary politics: “How did it happen, gentlemen? How could we have blundered like that?”

“See how your mayor’s been duped,” says the mayor to himself. “Fool! Imbecile! Blockhead! [Shaking his fist at himself.] You thick-nosed idiot—taking that little squirt, that bloody pipsqueak for a powerful personage.” “I can just picture him [Khlestakov] now, bowling along to the sound of jingling bells, letting the whole world know about it! And if that’s not bad enough being a laughingstock already, along will come some hack, some miserable pen-pusher and stick us all in a comedy…Ooh—you lot! I’d like to get my hands on all you blasted scribblers. Ooh, you lousy hacks, damned liberals, devil’s spawn! That’s what really hurts! The scribbler won’t give a rap for rank or reputation as long as the audience grins from ear to ear and claps his hands. [Stamps furiously on floor.] What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves, that’s what!”

These lines were Gogol’s coup de grace, words that in the performance of The Government Inspector the mayor turns to the audience, addressing their laughter. It was Gogol’s killer ploy. As audiences watched a tale of corruption and misdeeds in office, they found themselves implicated in the plot, bearing the brunt of Gogol’s jokes, of his lampooning and pillorying. In laughing at the mayor, they were laughing at themselves, and this, for Gogol, was the crux of his comic theater: the shock of recognition.

Gogol’s famous finale act is his so-called “Dumb” (or “Mute”) scene. A gendarme enters the stage, just as the mayor has taunted the audience, proclaiming the following news: “The official who has just arrived from St. Petersburg by Imperial command requires your presence at the inn immediately. [These words strike like a thunderbolt. All the ladies cry out at once in astonishment. The whole group suddenly changes position and stands as if turned to stone.]” Each actor assumes a speechless pose, arms stretched out, heads thrown back; others squat on the floor or stand toward each other, mouths gaping, eyes popping, transformed into pillars. “The petrified group maintains this position for about a minute and a half. [Curtain.]”

***

When Gogol wrote his notes on The Government Inspector, his “after-thoughts” upon fleeing Russia in 1837, he’d corrected several scenes, added and subtracted from his original text. He’d especially reworked Act V, disappointed by how poorly the dénouement had been interpreted in earlier performances, rectifying it with instructions about its proper enactment. He didn’t like the over-the-top vaudeville nature of the acting and scripting, either. He wanted a comedy that was genuinely funny, yet somehow deep, its laughter profound—it wasn’t mere amusement he wanted to create, something entertaining only for an evening out.

Gogol was clear that the play shouldn’t be over-acted. “Beware of falling into caricature,” he says. It was message for his actors. “The actor,” he says, “must make a special effort to be more modest, unpretentious, and dignified than the character he is playing. The less the actor thinks about being funny or making the audience laugh, the more the comic elements of his part will come through. The ridiculous will emerge spontaneously through the very seriousness with which each character is occupied with his own affairs…Only the audience, from its detached position, can perceive the vanity of their concerns. But they themselves [the actors] do not joke at all and have no inkling that anybody is laughing at them.”

The character of Khlestakov, the bogus inspector, bothered Gogol most of all. While an evident mediocrity, frivolous and deceitful, Khlestakov is also cunning and malicious. There is, in short, something sinister about him. To create him solely as a laughingstock is to miss the point, miss the menace of a character who isn’t only a buffoon and clown. He is that, too, of course. And yet, says Gogol, Khlestakov “doesn’t bluff. He forgets he’s lying and believes what he says. He has become expansive…people are listening to him…He’s sincere, completely frank, and in telling lies shows the stuff he’s made of…he lies with calculation, like a theatrical braggard; he lies with feeling; his eyes convey the pleasure it gives him.”

Khlestakov is a “man who tells cock-and-bull stories enthusiastically, with gusto, who’s unaware how words spring from his lips, who, at the very moment he’s lying, has absolutely no idea that he is doing so. He merely relates his perpetual fantasies, what he would like to achieve, as if these fantasies of his imagination had already become reality.” It sounds disturbingly like somebody we know, the head of a large country vowing to make it great again.

Gogol says he chose an anonymous town for the play, a town of the imagination, largely because dishonesty and double-talk is everywhere in human society. The real point here is the consummate ease with which political systems can be hijacked and debased, replaced by a pretense wherein higher up officials, as well as lower down minions, feather their own nests, line their pockets with favors and finance. Scamming becomes institutionalized at all levels, the functioning logic of the system itself, so widespread that it gets embedded in everybody’s minds. Honesty gets you nowhere. The only honorable character, says Gogol, is laughter. Indeed, laughter for Gogol is the sole positive character in the play. But then again, whose laughter? What are you laughing at? Well, you’re laughing at yourselves, that’s what—or else you should be. “Let us banish corruption from our souls!” says Gogol. “There exists a weapon, a scourge, that can drive it out. Laughter, my worthy countrymen! Laughter, which our base passions fear so! Laughter, created so that we might deride whatever dishonors the true beauty of humans.”

Could there ever be real laughter and the shock of recognition again in theater? Is there still some way art the likes of which Gogol wrote can be performed to help transform how people think about politics and our political leaders—about ourselves? Is there a point in our lives when the shock of recognition signals enough is enough and that this absurdity on stage, in our political life, has to stop, that we’ve been duped by imposters for long enough now, that it’s high time we laugh at them and laugh at ourselves for believing them, for applauding their antics in mass adulation. Maybe what Gogolian theater can bring us isn’t just the shock of recognition but misrecognition: those lies aren’t going to reach their ideological target anymore; we can fend them off by not recognizing ourselves in them.

In this respect, misrecognition becomes vital, the reluctance of spectators to identify with the spectacle being watched. There’s no complicity between the two, no pity or sentimentality, no anger or disgust—only a sort of distancing that counteracts any possible emotional empathy audiences develop with the characters. Gogol never lets this happen. His scenes move too rapidly, never let anybody reflect. There are no heroes in his plays, no moralizing, no dichotomy between good guys and bad guys, between the deviants and the virtuous; rarely is there a moment on stage when sanity prevails, when everybody seems on solid ground.

Gogol wants laughter to prompt a thinking response from his audiences, laughter that fosters not hot feeling outburst but critical interpretation. Maybe this critical interpretation comes afterward, after the audiences go home. Gogol was a fan of Aristophanes’ drama yet sought no classical ideal of theater, where repressed energy erupts into what Aristotle called catharsis—a stirring emotional release, usually at the play’s finale. That all sounds like the din of demagogic rage. Gogol wants to snub any hyperbolic triumph. In laughing at the cast, and in laughing at oneself, a public might cease to identify with what they’re watching. They might find a critical position on the outside and not get taken in on the inside. It’s precisely this critical distance that needs to be carried over into real life, where it might promote a more resilient human value.

***

Circa 2025, one can’t help but think of a rescripting of The Government Inspector. The daily news makes ugly reading and yearns to bring Gogol’s play back to life—daily news about DOGE and its shenanigans, about its falsehoods and scams. Muskesque government inspectors slash and burn federal coffers, ax workforces, eliminate social security agencies and overseas development organizations, seize control of technology across government agencies, dismantle regulatory frameworks, close down helplines and the Financial Protection Bureau, stripping away safeguards against ordinary people getting ripped off, even ruined. Obscured by crude, make-believe accounting and White House maneuvering, it’s impossible to know how much DOGE actually shaved off the federal budget—and, moreover, what ever happened to that money.

Even the name “Department of Government Efficiency” sounds like an obscure nineteenth-century Gogolian throwback! Remember how he starts his story The Overcoat, “in one of the government departments, but perhaps I better not say exactly which one. For no one’s touchier than people in government departments, or, in short, any kind of official body…And so, to avoid any further unpleasantness, we had better call the department in question a certain department” (Gogol’s emphases).

When I say “rescripting” of Gogol, I mean role reversal. What if the whole logic of Gogol’s play is reversed? What if the townsfolk, the public, were honest, doing their jobs, maybe dragging their feet a bit here and there, making errors at the workplace and in life—but basically upright and conscientious. Instead, it’s the government inspectors of a certain department who are corrupt, who’re on the make, who’re the real imposters. They have no real mandate; it’s a sham that they’re able to wield power. Everybody they hunt down is legitimately scarred, running around and wanting to show everything in the best light, even while privately knowing they’ve nothing to hide. The arbitrariness of the system comes from the top, from the alleged government inspectors, from “officials” without official credentials, their edict ideologically driven to root out political opposition. Wastage and efficiency are ruses to cost-cut and dismantle the public sector, that as they turn a blind eye to corporate welfare. (Elon Musk’s business empire—Tesla, SpaceX, etc.—has sucked up thirty-eight billion dollars of government funding in one shape or another, through contracts and loans, subsidies and tax credits.)

“Rescripting” means retitling Gogol’s play, The Citizen Inspector. A message resounds through the corridors of a certain department, that an audit is going to take place, a people’s audit, that a representative of the people, of the tax paying public, “The Citizen Inspector,” will be arriving anytime, soon, to monitor corruption and to root out the inefficiency of DOGE “efficiency.” They’ll be delving into the books and accounts of this faraway unaccountable office buried in the bowels of this certain Washington department. On behalf of the people, the Citizen Inspector demands absolute transparency and cooperation.

One suspects that the comic antics of the play would derive from the natural idiocy of the cast involved, by its bumpkin nature, that DOGE is running around not really knowing what they’re doing—or else maybe they know full well what they’re doing and it’s precisely that which is the sick joke, a gag Gogol could tell well. Laugher would arise from the serious absurdity they proclaim. In the end, we can laugh aloud at the cast and laugh at ourselves for letting ourselves be taken in by this cast. (Was anybody really taken in?) We’ll die laughing at such dreadful freaks. At the play’s finale, they’ll be another dumb scene. A petrified group of “officials” maintains its position for a minute and a half; a gendarme has just stormed in announcing the illegality of their activities, and that all are summoned before the People’s Court to be tried for crimes against humanity…

Gogol was passionate about food, reached obsessive proportions with it—in the portion sizes he consumed, in the elaborate descriptions around the dinner table in his stories. Zolotarev speaks of Gogol’s “stupendous appetite.” He and Gogol dined together often in Rome, tucking away at big dinners. Yet if another of Gogol’s friends happened to enter the restaurant, Gogol would stick around, eat with them, ordering the same meal again. Friends marveled at how such a modest body could put away so much food.

When Pogodin visited Gogol in March 1839, he and other friends spied on the writer at his regular haunt, the Falcone, near the Pantheon; Gogol apparently ate there most nights. Hiding in a backroom, they heard him order “macaroni, ravioli, and broccoli,” Pogodin recalls. “The waiters went running all over the place, fetching this and that. His face all aglow, Gogol took the dished and ordered still more. Now before him stood green salads piled high, flagons filled with pale liquids. There was agrodolce, spinach and ricotta ravioli, melanzane impanate, pesto chicken wings, zuppe, frittura mista. An enormous plate of spaghetti was brought before him, and thick steam rose from it when they removed the lid. Gogol tossed a lump of butter onto the pasta, liberally powdered it with parmesan, assumed a pose of a priest about to offer sacrifice, seized a knife and dug in. That’s when we flung open the door and rushed in, laughing, ‘Ah-ha, so your appetite’s gone, and your stomach’s all upset?’”

It’s clear that Gogol loved food, good food, hearty food, nothing fancy, homely cooking. He was passionate about eating and cooking, about dining with friends, about entertaining friends around food, about preparing meals for them—“I’m mad about good food,” he had his rogue Khlestakov say in The Government Inspector, “what else is life for except to pluck the blossoms of pleasure?” “More than anything,” Khlestakov’s manservant Osip says of his master, “he likes warm hospitality and good grub.” Gogol’s characters speak for their author, whose mind seems as frequently on food as that other rogue, Chichikov, who muses about his next meal as much as amassing dead souls. Food crops up so often in Gogol’s writings that it almost becomes a character in itself.

Part of Chichikov’s delight in visiting provincial estates is how he might satisfy his belly, how he might feed his face. In fact, Gogol toys with his readers with Chichikov, writing “the author admits that he is quite envious of the appetite and the stomach of this type of human.” It’s a far cry from prissy urban aristocrats who daintily pick at their food with old silver forks, popping a pill before eating; Gogol’s heroes are hearty eaters like Chichikov, ordinary and middling rural and provincial folk. “No, gentry have never aroused his envy,” says Gogol’s narrator. “But he is envious of certain persons of intermediate status who at one way station will order ham, at the next suckling pig, at a third a slice of sturgeon or salami with garlic, after which, as though they hadn’t eaten a thing, they’ll sit down at any time and have a fish soup with eels and roe and everything with it, which hisses and gurgles in their mouths, followed by all sorts of pies—well, these people have an enviable, heaven-sent gift indeed!”

“Got any suckling pig”” Chichikov asks a peasant woman at an inn. “’Right’. ‘With horse radish and sour cream?’ “With horse radish and sour cream’. ‘Bring it here then!’” When Chichikov dines at Sobakevich’s estate, he knew he’d met his culinary match, his gastronomic equal. “This one’s no novice when it comes to eating,” Chichikov thinks, “he helped himself to about half of a saddle of mutton and proceeded to gnaw it clean and suck dry every last bit of bone…The saddle of mutton was followed by round cheese tarts, each larger than a good-sized plate; then a turkey, about the size of a calf, stuffed with all sorts of things—eggs, rice, liver, and God knows what; all of which formed a heavy lump in the eaters’ stomachs. When they rose from the table, Chichikov felt himself about forty pounds heavier.”

Marc Chagall’s illustrations from Dead Souls

Gogol hadn’t finished with food by the time he worked on Part 2 of Dead Souls, before he threw much of it in the fire. What survives as drafts feature food, and Chichikov is still munching his way across provincial Russia, still dining with provincial gentry, freeloading as ever. On one occasion he’s the guest of an obese foodie, Piotr Petukh, who eats himself and invitees out of house and home. Good job he lives in the cheaper countryside, Chichikov muses to himself; in Petersburg or Moscow, his generous hospitality would fast render him a pauper.

“The servants kept coming and going with remarkable speed,” writes Gogol, “constantly bringing something in a covered dish from which the sound of sizzling butter could be heard…Chichikov ate virtually twelve pieces of something and was thinking, ‘Well now our host isn’t going to add anymore’. Quite wrong: without a word, Petukh put on his plate a rack of veal, with kidneys, spit-roasted, and what a calf, too. ‘I reared it on milk for two-years’, said the host. ‘I looked after it as if it were my own son’. ‘I can’t’, said Chichikov. ‘Try it first and then say I can’t’. It won’t go down. I’ve no room’.” Still, Chichikov does try it and, rather inevitably, found room, “when it seemed that no more could be crammed in.”

Our hero went to bed with his stomach “taut as a drum.” And even then, lying there, he could hear his host Petukh talking in the kitchen with his chef about next day’s lunch, making plans for another feast, giving precise instructions about its preparation. “’Make the fish pie with four corners’, Petukh said, sucking his teeth and taking a gulp of air. ‘Put the sturgeon’s cheeks and dried spine in one corner, put the boiled buckwheat in the second corner, with mushrooms and onion, and some sweet milk and the brains and a bit of this and that, you know what…And make sure it is browned on one side, you know, and a bit less done on the other side. And bake the underneath so that everything is absorbed, so that all the taste comes through, so that it all, you know, not crumbles but melts in your mouth, like snow, so that you don’t notice!’ As he said this, Petukh smacked his lips and chomped.”

“And to garnish the sturgeon,” he adds, “cut the beets in the star shapes with smelts and milk-cap mushrooms, and add some, you know, turnip and carrot and broad beans and a few other things, so we have a garnish, as big a garnish as possible. And put a bit of ice into the pig’s belly to make it swell up nicely.” “And Petukh ordered many more dishes. All that Chichikov heard was ‘and fry it and roast it and let it stew nicely’. When Chichikov got to sleep, turkey was being discussed.”

This is hilarious, deadpan humor, written clinically and matter-of-factly; but it’s Gogol at his comic best, the master of satire, its darkest. (I’ve always thought it a pity that André Breton never included Gogol in his masterly collection of surrealist black humor, Anthologie de l’humour noir.) Like Petukh, Gogol is obsessed by food, but his parodies of his characters’ obsessions seem equally a parody of himself, of his own obsessions, because he’s able to see through them, recognize them, pull tongues at himself. One of his weirdest tongue pullers is Diary of a Madman, where even the dogs have their minds’ fixated on food. About having nothing to eat, one says: “I must confess that would be no life for me. If I didn’t have woodcock done in sauce or roast chicken wings, I don’t know what would become of me…Sauce goes very well with carrots or turnips, or artichokes…” Remember, Gogol’s eponymous madman hears dogs talking to each other in human language.

But Gogol’s catalogue of gastronomic delights also exhibits real insight into food, into its preparation and meaning in life. He fretted about noses, especially his own, another obsession; and yet without a sense of smell, there’d be no sense of taste, nothing to salivate about. And Gogol lets us sniff the culinary gorgings he presents for us. For good reason did Nabokov say that “the belly is the belle of his stories, the nose their beau.” Perhaps not unsurprisingly as well, Gogol not only loved to eat; he took enormous satisfaction cooking for others, for his friends, finding in Italy a culture with a deep sensitivity and appreciation of food, of its conviviality, one of the joys of collective life, pure and simple, like eating cabbage soup around the rural Russian kitchen table.

In Rome, meanwhile, he’d mastered the art of how to prepare baked macaroni, something of a house specialty when friends came over to via Sistina. He was fanatical about his macaroni, ritualistically make masses of it, piping hot, sizzling from the oven, drooling with copious dollops of butter and grated parmigiano. He’d never skimp on making it as creamy and delicious as possible, with calories galore. Gogol’s spirits would rise whenever he had the chance to serve up his macaroni to friends. “Opening the lid, with an especially bright smile for everyone at the table,” Pogodin remembers, “he’d exclaim: ‘Now fight over this, people!’”

The only problem was that while Gogol loved food, food didn’t always love him. He suffered over it, suffered some mix of constipation and diarrhea, compounded by (and related to) his arch-complaint: hemorrhoids. Was this prompted by overeating? Too much of the wrong foods? Too much fat? Too much butter and cheese? Gogol would pile on the butter, devour parmesan, indulge in the most indulging foods—and afterward complain about his stomach. Go figure…

Was it a genuine nervous stomach? Or just Gogol at his most hypochondriacal, always super-sensitive about his own health? “I’m afraid of the hypochondria,” he wrote Prokopovich from Geneva (September 19, 1837), “which is changing me and is right on my heels.” “My stomach is nasty,” he says, “to an impossible degree; and although I eat very moderately now, it absolutely refuses to digest. After my departure from Rome, my hemorrhoidal constipation began again, and would you believe it, if I have no bowel movement during the whole day I feel as if my brain had some kind of cap pulled over it, which befogs my thoughts and prevents me from thinking. The waters didn’t help me at all, and now I see that they are terrible rubbish, I just feel worse, my pockets are light and my stomach heavy.”

You have to know who your real friends are to write them letters like this.

Elsewhere, to Pogodin from Naples (August 14, 1838), he says: “my hemorrhoidal disease has turned all its force on my stomach. It’s an unbearable disease. It’s drying me up. It tells me about itself every minute and hinders my work.” Gogol seemed trapped in a vicious cycle of real ailment and imagined ailment; the latter hypochondria triggered the former, and the two probably fueled each other. As Gogol wrote a few years earlier (1836), from Paris: “my doctor found symptoms of hypochondria in me, resulting from the hemorrhoids; and he advised me to amuse myself…there are a multitude of places for walks…enough for a whole day’s exercise—which is essential for me now.” Sometimes, says Gogol, “I feel awful crap in my stomach, as if someone had driven a whole herd of horned cattle in there.”

***

In an insightful essay, “The Hunger Artist: Feasting and Fasting with Gogol,” published in The Global Gourmet (June 28, 2008), the food scholar Darra Goldstein assesses Gogol’s digestive torments. Her theory is that Gogol suffered from what today has been diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), “which presents itself in a number of different ways,” Goldstein says. “Some people endure constipation,” she says, “others diarrhea; some, like Gogol, suffer from both. In all cases, IBS causes great discomfort and distress and can be disabling.” “Emotional conflict or stress is often believed to trigger the condition,”Goldstein says, “though most likely IBS results from both stress and improper diet.”

Gogol’s IBS might have been triggered by the fattiness of his diet, by all that cheese and butter, by all the rich food he seemed drawn to; his nervous reactions and hypochondria sought only to make compound matters. He seems to realize this himself, writing to Pogodin from Rome (October 17, 1840): when his stomach plays up, he says, “the nervous disorder and irritation increased terribly; a heaviness and pressure in the chest which I had never before experienced grew strong. Fortunately,” Gogol goes on, “the doctors found that I haven’t consumption, that this was an extreme irritation of the nerves and a stomach disorder which stopped digestion. This didn’t make me feel any better…A painful anguish which has no description was combined with this. I was brought to a state that I absolutely didn’t know where to turn, where to find support. I couldn’t stay calm for two minutes in bed or in a chair or on my feet. Oh, it was terrible.”

“There’s still no cure for IBS,” notes Goldstein, “and apart from recommended moderation in diet—something Gogol seems to have been temperamentally incapable of—there is no real treatment.” Moderation around food was especially hard for Gogol, thinks Goldstein, doubtless correctly, as “his illness, his gut feelings, fed his art. His source of torment—his appetite—became his inspiration, his muse, transforming into literature the hunger that affected his whole being. His gourmandizing bespoke something beyond a mere physical urge; his hunger was existential, not easily satisfied.” All of which strikes as a more wholesome and accurate assessment of Gogol’s gastric literature.

I say this because it’s suggested that Gogol’s obsessions with food are really transferences of his repressed obsessions with sex. Gogol was a strange man, for the most part a-sexual though with evident homosexual tendencies; yet there’s nothing repressed about his obsessions with food. It is what it is. Nabokov made the same point of Gogol’s nose fetish, locating it as much in Russian folkloric history and culture as in psychology and psychoanalysis.

To that degree, Gogol’s foodie manias reflect the experience of growing up, of a rural upbringing—quite the reverse of anything repressed: these Russian festivals and village fairs from his childhood, source material for his early Ukrainian stories, abound with food and drink, and toast life’s pleasures. If anything, they were more collective “blow-outs,” what François Rabelais in sixteenth-century France called “ripailles.” This medieval tradition had its own vitality in the Russian rural provinces, defined seasonality and collective memory, the good fortune of being alive, that you can enjoy it, if only for a day. Who knows or cares about tomorrow?

What took place weren’t simply meals shared by the townsfolk but celebrations of conviviality and appetite, celebrations of terrestrial life itself. Affirmed was abundance and generosity, gorging and over-indulgence in the absence of moderation. Three-cheers to excess! It’s surely not too far removed from how Gogol implicitly used his prodigious food and feast scenes. Food, for him, was more anthropology than sexology, something more personally cultural and historical. Food gave Gogol, the writer, insights into the Russian psyche, into everyday cultural life, especially everyday provincial life. (Food never figures in the same way for an urban Petersburg gentry; there it really does become something repressed.)

A meal, in this provincial context, could be something soothing, an act of diplomacy, a moment when you sit around the dinner table, perhaps with an enemy. When the two Ivans—once dear friends, neighbors so close and intimate they were like brothers—had their great tiff, falling out over a trifle, with one Ivan calling the other Ivan a “goose”—the town tried to reconcile the quarrel by organizing a sumptuous dinner. Food was taken as something placatory, a ritual that could bring people together.

“I will not describe the courses,” Gogol’s narrator says, before going on to describe the courses: “I will make no mention of the curd dumplings with cream sauce, nor of the dish of pig’s fry that was served with the soup, nor the turkey with plums and raisins, nor the dish which greatly resembled in appearance a boot soaked in kvass, nor of the sauce, which is the swan’s song of the old-fashioned cook, nor the dish which was brought in all enveloped in the flames of spirit.” Still, even this great feast couldn’t bring the former friends together, such was their animosity toward one another; even food couldn’t make this little world less gloomy, says Gogol, at the end of his story.

Gogol was a great populist when it came to food, a democrat who wanted to share his meals with others, with friends, who enjoyed cooking for others, and dining out amid people, oftentimes with “the people.” (He rarely dined alone.) This was particularly so in Rome, where he was fond of the more plebian, down-to-earth taverns, rubbing shoulders with the common folk. The Russian historian and memoirist, Pavel Annenkov, who wrote an early Pushkin biography, remembers visiting Gogol in Rome in the 1840s. “My friend Gogol took me to the famous Lepre tavern, where at mealtimes, at long tables, crossing the filthy floor, a diverse crowd gathers: painters, foreigners, abbots, citizens, farmers, and princes join in a general conversation, devouring the very dishes that, in truth, thanks to the chef’s long experience, are impeccably cooked.” (Annenkov lived with Gogol for two months in Rome and in his reminiscences said that he copied large sections of Dead Souls, listening and trying to follow Gogol’s rapid-fire dictation.)

Interestingly, at the same time as Annenkov was visiting and dining with Gogol in Rome, he was also engaging in a lively dialogue with a certain Karl Marx in Paris. The twentysomething Marx and Annenkov (1813-1887) were practically contemporaries, and seemed to find agreement in their criticism of anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Annenkov met both Marx and Engels in Brussels in the spring of 1846, witnessing a fierce public debate between Marx and Weitling. Later, in December 28, 1846, from Paris, Marx wrote Annenkov a very long letter in what Marx admitted was his “bad French,” addressing the defects of Proudhon’s Philosophie de la misère. Annenkov told Marx on January 6, 1847, that “your opinion of Proudhon’s book produced a truly invigorating effect on me by its preciseness, its clarity, and above all its tendency to keep within the bounds of reality.”

When Annenkov published his reminiscences of an Extraordinary Decade, 1838-1848, he was perhaps the only man alive to have rubbed shoulders with both Gogol and Marx. Turgenev called Annenkov “a master at crystallizing the specific character of a period.” That extraordinary decade, of course, was to produce not only dramatic political upheavals throughout Europe, but also, and maybe not uncoincidentally, texts like The Communist Manifesto (1848), as well as some of Gogol’s best short stores, especially “The Overcoat” (1842).

No matter where he went, whether eating high or low, Gogol was forever fastidious about his food. Annenkov remembers he often asked Orillia, Lepre’s legendary old waiter, rumored to have been in Moscow with Napoleon’s army, to change any dish he didn’t find to his liking. Fyodor lorden (always lower case “l”), a Russian engraver friend of Gogol and sometime via Sistina neighbor, recalled that at the Lepre (“hare” in Italian) “you could meet people from all parts of the world; at every other table another language was being spoken, of which Russian reigned over the rest, outmatching them in the noise of loud arguments.” By all accounts, the Lepre was the cheapest and most democratic of Rome’s trattorias, with one of the best cuisines. (In the 1850s, a decade on from Gogol, Herman Melville, a regular, marveled at the quality and price of a full meal: nineteen-cents.)

Nothing remains of the Lepre today. There are no images (apart from a painting of a mother with her two daughters, lunching heartily at an establishment thought to be the Lepre), and no physical remnants left inside the courtyard of the Palazzo Maruscelli Lepri, where the Lepre was located—via Condotti, 9-10, exactly opposite Caffè Greco. The palazzo itself was constructed in 1660 for the Maruscelli family, who sold it later in the eighteenth-century to the Lepri family, wealthy Lombard merchants who’d settled in Rome a century prior. But the Lepris fell on hard times during the nineteenth-century, and the marquis, on the verge of financial ruin, began renting out rooms in the palazzo’s courtyard. The family’s cook had always dreamed of opening his own restaurant and offered to feed the marquis and his entire family for five sous each, provided they let him open a small trattoria in the kitchen on the ground floor of the building. The marquis agreed.

The trattoria, inaugurated as “Trattoria della Barcaccia”—on account of the “Fountain of the Barcaccia” [Longboat] facing the Spanish Steps—later changing its name to “Trattoria della Lepre,” quickly became one of the most famous eating houses frequented by tourists and émigrés. The Lepre was famous for another reason, because it’s reputed to have served supplì, the famous Roman street food, its first recorded mention in Roman history, in 1874, when the deep-fried, golden and crispy risotto rice croquettes, filled with mozzarella, minced beef and tomato sauce, were listed on the Lepre’s antipasto menu. It’s the sort of snack Gogol would have doubtless wolfed down.

Gogol lapped up the tavern’s raucous atmosphere, its culture and honest cuisine. Before long it became a surrogate members club for Russian expats, especially Russian painters, where they could listen to articles from the Russian press read aloud. It was at the Lepre where Gogol first heard and appreciated the Romanesco sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, voiced by the renegade poet himself, in Roman dialect, in the speech of Trasteverines—i trasteverini. Belli satirized the clerics and the popular classes of his day, castigating the hypocrisy of the former and the passivity of the latter. His verse, unpublished in his lifetime, was rooted and voiced in the language of his chosen constituency: the unflinching everyday reality of Rome’s underclass.

(Anthony Burgess, a fan, translated some of Belli’s sonnets, putting them into Mancunian slang in his 1977 novel, Abba Abba, emphasizing cultural translatability if not literary accuracy. Burgess said “Belli was the great master of the dialect and scholarly recorder of Rome’s filth and blasphemy.” Abba Abba, a fictional account of Belli meeting the English poet John Keats, another Rome denizen, presented seventy-one of Belli’s Roman sonnets in its second part, translated by J.J. Wilson, a pseudonym for Burgess himself—his full name is actually John Anthony Burgess Wilson. Burgess wanted to call his novel Belli’s Blasphemous Bible, but publishers Faber & Faber, fearing libel, balked, talking Burgess out of it.)

Gogol was privileged to hear Belli reading at the Lepre and expressed his enthusiasm in his letters. He wrote Maria Balabina (end of April 1838): “Not one event takes place here without some witticism or epigram being made up by the people. But you probably haven’t happened to read the sonnets of the present-day Roman poet Belli, which, however, one must hear when he reads himself. In them, in these sonnets, there is so much salt, so much totally unexpected wit, and the life of present-day Trasteverines is so faithfully reflected in them that you will laugh, and the heavy cloud which so often floats down on your head will float away together with your tiresome and annoying headache.” High praise indeed!

Gogol sang Belli’s praises in 1839, on a Roman steamboat bound for Marseille, when he encountered the French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Gogol seemed to have made a big impression on Sainte-Beuve, who felt compelled to write about his maritime brush with the Russian writer, about his conversations, reviewing at the same time the recent French publication of Gogol’s Cossack novel, Taras Bulba: “Monsieur Gogol told me of having found a true poet,” Sainte-Beuve recalled, “a popular poet, called Belli, who writes in the language of trasteverines, but makes sonnets follow and form poems. Gogol spoke to me in depth and in a manner to convince of the original and superior talent of this Belli, who rests so perfectly unknown to all travelers.”

Sainte-Beuve commented “it is doubtful that any Frenchman had ever read one of Monsieur Gogol’s original productions; I, in this case, was like everyone else. I can, however, claim the advantage of having met the author in person, and I had, after his precise and strong conversation, rich in observations of morals, grasped a foretaste of what must have been original in the works themselves. And Monsieur Gogol, in effect, seems to attach himself before all else to the fidelity of morals in the reproduction of the true and of the natural, whether in the present time or in the historical past; the popular genius preoccupies him, and no matter where its look reveals itself, it pleases Gogol to discover and study it.”

It was at establishments like the Lepre where Gogol consumed popular history, quite literally, keeping his eyes peeled for popular geniuses, for artists such as Belli. But like many things with Gogol, this didn’t last forever. The Lepre was his favorite only for a while, until he switched to the Falcone not far away. “I no longer dine at the Lepre,” he told a friend, “where you don’t always find quality ingredients. Better is the Falcone,” he said, “near the Pantheon, where the mutton rivals those from the Caucasus.”

Thinking of food as ever.

***

Indeed, thinking of food, I decided I needed to get out into Rome myself, needed to see traces of Gogol’s culinary world, remnants of his dining dens. It’s late July, a hot and sunny afternoon; Rome is inundated with its summer tourist season. Everywhere seems insanely busy. Today, I look like a tourist myself, dressed in shorts and baseball cap, armed with a camera; an intellectual tourist with a mission. I’m standing outside Gogol’s old apartment again, at via Sistina number 125, about to follow the path he likely took to dine. I begin the steady climb toward the Spanish Steps, then down the steps, past la fontana della Barcaccia, immediately accessing via Condotti. Soon the Caffè Greco appears to the right, shuttered, closed for its habitual summer recess.

Facing are numbers 9 and 10 via Condotti, a regal looking five-story building, once the Palazzo Maruscelli Lepri, with its grand entrance arch still remaining, leading you into a darkened courtyard. Gogol would have walked through this doorway, into this darkened corridor, on his way to the Lepre, situated somewhere inside. I’m lucky today, because the doorway is open. So I wander in, take a nose around; the portiere doesn’t seem bothered by my taking photos. There’s absolutely nothing remaining here of any popular eating place, zilch remnant. The tone of the present Palazzo resembles the rest of via Condotti, these days super-upscale and wealthy: Gucci is to the left, Bulgari is to the right, each either side of the entrance arch. Would Belli have pulled tongues at this in his verse? Would the flamboyant Gogol ever have worn Gucci?

I continue along Condotti, toward via del Corso, which I head down, southward. I’m on my way to Gogol’s other favorite eating joint, the Falcone, at Piazza dei Caprettari, not far from the Pantheon. It’s incredibly crowded, uncomfortably so, and I dodge people along the pedestrianized section of Corso, watching out for scooters and bikes. I make a right turn, walk southwest. The Falcone was fifteen minutes away from the Lepre. I’m not sure which route Gogol would have taken, but have a hunch he would have wanted to stroll past the Basilica San Lorenzo in Lucina. I go down via di Campo Marzio, onto via della Maddalena. In the 1840s, there’d be no need to avoid the Pantheon; you could walk in front of it unjostled, unharrassed by crowds of people: you could stop, briefly, admire, look on in awe. Those days have passed.

A couple of minutes east of the Pantheon is the Piazza dei Caprettari; on one corner is number 56, the Falcone. I never realized the site is next door to my beloved Roman pen store, the Antica Cartotecnica, which has repaired some of my old fountain pens with patient, artisanal care. Such a low-tech, independent, labor-of-love enterprise is a rarity in the center of any capital city, That’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no more Falcone, nothing left of it, replaced by a fancy looking new restaurant called “Idylio.” Its three-course lunch menu starts at seventy euros. The restaurant, headed by the acclaimed Italian chef Francesco Apreda, has one Michelin star, and is run in conjunction with the nearby Pantheon/Iconic Rome Hotel. Gucci-clad Gogol might’ve loved to dine here, devoured probably great cuisine; at someone else’s expense, though. (“Idylio,” incidentally, is a short poem that idealizes peaceful rural life, focusing on everyday simplicity and beauty.)

It’s hard to know whether my Rome is more or less interesting than Gogol’s. Things change, have to change; he knew that, I know that. So much of Rome’s physical landscape remains, however, has hardly changed, and I’m conscious I can walk streets Gogol walked through, am surrounded by buildings that surrounded Gogol. Nothing has been razed and rebuilt—it is impossible to knock anything down in much of Rome, given its strict historic preservation laws, just as it’s impossible to build anything new. The route I’ve just taken is comparable to Gogol’s, and I feel blessed to be able to follow in his footsteps.

When it comes to content, to what lies within, Rome’s central city fabric has been flattened by mass tourism; almost everything that was once “popular” with Romans themselves has been wiped out. The center is less diverse, culturally and socially, largely emptied of popular characters, of struggling artists and poets, of émigré dissidents arguing over politics, of a cheap fare nourishing them alongside the city’s working classes. Am I disheartened? Not really. I’m just glad to be here, in a Rome that today is what it is. Gentrification has taken place. Yet compared to the other big cities I’ve lived in—London and New York especially—it hasn’t wiped out everything. My old pen store, after all, neighbors a Michelin star restaurant and where else in the world would that be the case?

To hear Belli’s verse, in its modern day incarnate, you’d have to journey elsewhere in the city, somewhere peripheral, marginal. For the moment, I’m off walking again, in what is still an eminently walkable urban environment, not despondent in the sunshine. I head across town, across the Tiber, over the Ponte Garibaldi, into Trastevere. I’m off to see the last trace of Belli, of the poet himself, a prominent statue of the man in his very own piazza—Piazza Giuseppe Gioachino Belli—posthumous immortalization. Belli was born on September 7, 1791, and died, aged seventy-two, of a sudden apoplectic fit, on December 21, 1863. He led a bizarre double-life: a shadowy clandestine writer of vernacular verse, hanging out in rough and tumble dive Roman taverns by night, reading his obscenities aloud; by day holding down a respectable job, a theatrical censor in the papal court.

Belli’s statue has a commemorative wreath on it; I’m not sure why. The poet dandy is dressed in a suit and waistcoat, his greatcoat wide open and flowing. He’s donned in a distinguished looking top hat. But the structure looks a bit worse for wear, maybe a bit unstable, because it is wrapped in a supporting brace, perhaps heralding some kind of renovation. Still, it’s a wonderful re-creation of the poet; up close you can see that his smart garb is shabby, rumpled, though his gaze is vivid, wistful. Head dipped, he’s lost in thought, crafting some risqué line in his head. The statue was consecrated in 1913 and is dedicated to Il Popolo di Roma—to “the People of Rome”—who are lovingly evoked at the back of Belli: a half a dozen or so grizzled and gnarled figures, Trastevere’s working populace, the subject matter of his sonnets. I snap away at their faces, worn but not worn-out, faces still somehow beautiful, authentically real.

It’s often said that Belli’s poetry dealt with Rome’s six “Ps”—pope, priests, princes, prostitutes, parasites, and the poor. Here we have the poor, the forgotten people in history that Gogol once spoke about—though here they’re not entirely forgotten. We could imagine these characters snuggled around the Lepre, with Gogol lurking somewhere in their shadow, smiling, laughing at the elemental verse of his poet friend, feeding Gogol’s stomach with “proper” words and scoff: “Yeah, when it comes to cooking, lard’s best…puts hairs on your chest! With bacon it’s a dream, with rarebits it’s the business, chicken too, and roasted meat, and as for stews and sauces, works a treat.”

‘Now, Doc, this fever what I’ve got,’ I went;

‘it means I have to watch out what I scoff?’

He goes, ‘One’s fine when eating wholesome stuff,

my man—one has to eat, mm? Excellent!’

So I eats, whole, some stuff, just like he said:

whole cantaloup, whole cheese, whole loaf of bread,

salami, watermelon and a hen…

Sod it, he should’ve spoken proper when

he came that day to brandy words about:

‘Scoff top-notch tucker pal, but don’t pig out’.”

A fifteen-minute stroll from Caffè Greco, west toward the Tiber, north in the direction of Piazza del Popolo, takes you to Via di Ripetta, which I head up, a narrow corridor running parallel to the river. I pass the Mansoleum of Augustus, the Academia Belle Arti Roma, and a few artisanal artist stores that look like they’ve been here forever, maybe even around when Gogol paced this beat. After a few minutes, the cobbled passageway of Via del Vantaggio bisects Ripetta, and I turn left along it, toward number 7, at the river end of the street. On the building’s wall, at first-floor level, is a plaque, faded over time, announcing that “the great Russian painter Alexander Ivanov, lived and worked here from 1837 to 1858.”

Ivanov, one of Gogol’s closest friends, perhaps his most intimate of intimates in Rome, spent twenty-eight-years living in the city; arriving in 1830 on a student scholarship to study renaissance painting, he never returned. His building along Via del Vantaggio is everything you’d imagine for a struggling artist: a garret-studio, on a little street, romantically rundown and worn, a quaint, quiet corner of Rome’s historic center, off the beaten tourist track. Tourists cram the city all the year round, treading very well beaten tracks; yet usually you don’t have to stray too far, wander into some unsuspecting and unspectacular corner of city, to find the coast clear. As I snap photos, I’m the sole person about.

Ivanov worked here day and night on his great religious masterpiece, “The Appearance of Christ to the People,” twenty-years in the making, much admired and encouraged by Gogol, finished only a year before Ivanov’s untimely demise with cholera in 1858. Gogol never saw it completed. In Rome, he and Ivanov became an inseparable couple, inspiring one another. In Gogol, Ivanov saw a writer-prophet, a verbal messenger from God; in Ivanov, Gogol acknowledged the conveyor of the spiritual image, an artist-prophet, the incarnation of the writer’s faith in the power of art and image. Gogol became a staunch advocate of Ivanov’s, writing letters of support for the painter, requesting funds for him to finish his great masterwork. Gogol often tagged on appeals for money for Ivanov with appeals for money for himself, maintaining that artists were better patronized than writers; scholarships and grant organizations (like the Russian Society for the Encouragement of Artists) existed for them, whereas for struggling writers there was nothing.

Gogol’s profile, “The Historical Painter Ivanov,” appearing in the notorious Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, reads one part eulogy, another part cap in hand appeal to find alms for his artist friend, starved (sometimes literally) of resources. “He goes his own way,” writes Gogol of Ivanov. “He isn’t only not seeking a professorial post and worldly advantage, but he seeks absolutely nothing, because for a long time he has been dead to everything in the world except his work…This lesson is necessary so that others may see how it is to love art: that it is necessary, like Ivanov, to die to all enticements of life; like Ivanov, to instruct oneself and consider oneself an eternal student; like Ivanov, refuse oneself everything, even an extra dish on feast days; like Ivanov, to wear a simple pleated jacket when at the end of one’s resources and scorn vain conventions; like Ivanov, to endure all, despite one’s lofty, delicate spiritual makeup.”

Ivanov was a poor talker, only able to express himself in paint. Yet he was a good listener, and it was Gogol, despite being three-years Ivanov’s junior, who did most of the talking, who assumed the lead role. The painter was infatuated with the writer, holding the latter in enormous esteem, so much so that Ivanov even included Gogol in his epic canvas, as an old man in the extreme left of the frame, standing in the water with a walking stick, an emaciated figure, uncannily resembling what the writer might have looked like had he grown old, had he made it into his seventies, wizened and stooped, piously devout, almost bald yet recognizable from his prominent snout. (Ivanov also added a discreet image of himself, sitting on the ground in the background, in Christ’s shadow, a bearded wanderer wearing a floppy hat, his profile looking upward, as youthful as he would have been when he began his painting.)

In the early 1840s, Ivanov painted two portraits of Gogol, as the writer had stipulated, “in great secrecy from everyone,” together with numerous pencil sketches, mini masterpieces in their own right. The first portrait was undertaken in September 1841; the second, more famous image of Gogol, executed in 1843, is an intimate rendering of the writer looking disheveled and dissolute, like it was painted the morning after a late night; Gogol lounges in his red dressing gown; his hair and moustache are tousled and roughed up, his eyes a little glassy, almost bloodshot. Did Gogol wander over in his dressing gown to pose in Ivanov’s studio? Or did Ivanov come to Gogol, to Via Sistina, working there from sketches of his friend, relaxed, in his domestic habitat, comporting himself without pretense, his public mask removed?

Gogol trusted Ivanov’s brush, had confidence in the discretion of his friend, portraying a purer image of how Gogol looked when he stared into his bathroom mirror each morning. When Gogol saw Ivanov’s picture, he admired and appreciated it, yet dreaded ever seeing the portrait reproduced. After Pogodin received a lithograph, the editor reprinted it without permission in his review The Muscovite for its readers to see, and Gogol’s dread of seeing himself paraded before the world, in casual garb, reached pathological proportions. He felt betrayed by a man whom he thought was a friend.

He wrote Shevyrev on December 14, 1844: “it cannot be comprehensible to someone else, why the publication of my portrait is so unpleasant to me…I am depicted there as I was in my own den. I gave this portrait to Podogin as a friend, in no way suspecting he would publish it. Judge for yourself whether it is useful to exhibit me before the world in a dressing gown, disheveled, with long rumpled hair and moustache…but it is not grievous to me myself that I was exhibited like a debauchee.” (After Gogol’s mother obtained a copy, son begged mother “to hide it in a back room, sew it up in a canvas and don’t show it to anyone to make a copy from it, not even my sisters.”)

Gogol’s attitude to portraiture was an odd mix of egoism and humility, an arrogance and a conceit of seeing himself portrayed, of wanting to see himself exhibited on canvas, immortalized and famous, yet horrified and paranoid about being displayed before the world. Portraiture, for him, became a mysterious dialectical force, both demonic and divine. He seemed unable to defy it, to avoid it, because Alexander Ivanov wasn’t the only artist he entrusted to paint him; Fyodor Möller (1812-1874), Baltic-born of German stock, was another, a painter who’d arrived in Rome in 1838 and for number of years was Gogol’s neighbor at number 43 Via Sistina.

An admirer of Ivanov, Möller soon entered Gogol’s inner fold, and he and Gogol spent a lot of time together, drinking tea and philosophizing, and Möller accompanied Gogol on his regular long jaunts around Rome and its environs. Möller recalls how they’d sometimes walk for hours on end without ever saying a word to each other; Gogol was content merely to have a companion by his side, feeling no reason to talk, humming to himself merrily.

It was out on one of their walks in 1840 when Möller made his first portrait of Gogol. This initial alla prima effort shows a radiant Gogol dressed in travel-cloak, face illuminated by rays of setting sunshine. Head lowered, his expression is sly, somewhere in between a smile and a frown. For many years, Möller kept this portrait in his own possession, eventually selling it in 1870 to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, where it hangs today.

Möller’s second portrait, made in April 1841, mimics Ivanov’s, and captures the writer at home, wearing another dressing down, a fawn stripped one, with his pajama top open, revealing part of Gogol’s bare chest. This time, though, Gogol’s hair is neatly coiffed, his little moustache coquettishly manicured. His face is plumper than Ivanov’s image, pink round cheeks giving him a healthier looking glow, highlighting how, despite literary fame and prominence, Gogol was still rather baby-faced.

Möller’s best-known portrait was his third, painted at the end of 1841, commissioned by Gogol’s mother, Maria Ivanova Gogol-Yanovskaya. A more classical, formally-posed Gogol looks neat and dandy, smartly dressed in elegant button-downed frock-coat and silk scarf, stylishly knotted at the neck, with a classy looking gold chain dangling around his front. This is the writer with a glint in his eyes, and just a hint of a grin, ready to dine with mother in some fancy restaurant.

Möller’s portrait was highly acclaimed, reckoned to capture Gogol’s true appearance, something seemingly accessible only to an intimate. In 1845, Gogol said “Möller’s portrait was the only one to give a good likeness.” Until 1919, the portrait remained in the Gogol household, whereupon it was transferred to the Yaroshenko Museum in Poltava, Ukraine. During World War II, though, it disappeared; thought destroyed, it never showed up again. This image of Gogol that Möller created in Rome, today likewise displayed in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, is thus a copy.

***

Interestingly, and surely not uncoincidentally, while Ivanov and Möller were painting portraits of Gogol, Gogol himself was immersed in creating (and re-creating) his own Portrait, one of his best-known short stories. He’d originally published it almost a decade earlier, in Arabesques (1835), “a mishmash” collection (according to Gogol) of fiction and non-fiction, of essays on art and architecture, on the Middle Ages, on Pushkin, alongside two other brilliant stories, The Nevsky Prospect and Diary of a Madman. On March 17, 1842, Gogol wrote Peter Pletnev, editor of The Contemporary (Pushkin’s journal): “I’m sending you my story, ‘The Portrait.’ It was printed in Arabesques, but don’t let that worry you. Read it through and you will see that only the canvas of the former story remained, and everything is embroidered on it anew. In Rome, I reworked it completely.”

The Portrait (Take-1) had been written before he’d met either Ivanov or Möller; it’s fascinating to speculate whether in Ivanov Gogol had found a real life reincarnation of the fictional artist who cameos near the end of the story, and who embodies Gogol’s own artistic ideals, or if Ivanov had himself became a creation of Gogol, mimicking and fulfilling this ideal, the spiritually pure artist whose canvas left viewers gasping in awe.

Vissarion Berlinsky, the well-known liberal critic, thought the supernatural in Take-1 too clumsy, not leavened by the story’s brilliant realism, a feature, Berlinsky said, that made Gogol’s most unbelievable and incredible moments believable and credible. Gogol, as ever, took only part of Berlinsky’s critique to heart; in Take-2 he’d never abandon his torquing of reality, never expunge the surrealist flourishes that made his ordinary so extraordinary, his satire so biting, his creations so idiosyncratic and original. He was much too subtle an artist to capitulate to either the dullest period-piece realism or the most contrived and fantastical surrealism. Gogol would forever work against predictability, often turning his own inventiveness against itself, just when we’d least expect it, having us, his readers, twist and turn as his characters twist and turn, as he himself twists and turns, gyrating to some weird cosmic force.

Indeed, Gogol’s The Portrait once had a powerful gyrating effect on me, too, a ghostly presence when I think about it now, remembering the mornings, years gone by, when I used to walk my daughter to school. Along a narrow old lane, near the town center, by the cathedral, we’d pass a little pub called “The Prince Albert.” On a pole sticking out above the pub’s entrance hung a portrait of the said Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, painted by royal artist John Partridge in 1840. On windy days, the prince oscillated in the breeze. Every morning I’d grin, laugh to myself, sometimes laugh out loud. It got a bit boring for my daughter, for she knew what I was laughing at. After all, I’d tell her every day, “you know, that Prince Albert up there, he’s a dead ringer for Gogol.” She knew, too, that I meant Nikolai Gogol, a longtime favorite of mine. The thin prominent nose, the vivid eyes, the little well-groomed moustache, the general affected air, camp despite the military regalia—all that was Gogol to a T!

I’d actually seen for myself Möller’s best-known image of Gogol in 2016, not knowing then it was a copy, at London’s National Portrait Gallery, displayed at an exhibition called “Russia and the Arts.” This was Gogol at his most Prince Albertian—or was it Prince Albert at his most Gogolian? The notion that Gogol had a doppelgänger, that Prince Albert was secretly Gogol, or that Gogol was secretly Prince Albert, sneaking out of Russia, condemned for his mockery of provincial officialdom in the rollicking drama Government Inspector, eloping clandestinely into British royalty, struck me as itself quintessentially Gogolian.

Roaming Europe under an assumed identity was as bizarre and surreal as only Gogol could render believable. “There was always something bat-like or shadow-like in his flittings from place to place,” Nabokov says. “It was the shadow of Gogol that lived his real life.” His antics when traveling were legendary, often assuming fictitious names like Gogel and Gonel, hating having to show his passport. Play-acting was a standard repertoire, feigning losing his documents, rummaging through his suitcase, causing a scene and getting angry, swearing, manically throwing out his clothes until customs officials finally gave up and let him pass. (When younger, Gogol sometimes signed himself off “0000,” four-zeros stemming from the four “o”s in “Nikolai Gogol-Yanovsky,” his full name. “The selection of a void,” suggests Nabokov, “and its multiplication for concealing his identity, is very significant on Gogol’s part.”)

Maybe I’d read too much Gogol to think up such a pairing, even though Gogol and the German-born Prince Albert (1819-1861) were actual contemporaries, both dying relatively young, each aged forty-two. Yet it was seeing Prince Albert with his bird-like nose, and glimpsing Gogol’s image in London’s Portrait Gallery—with his own famous beak—that had me recall The Portrait; and I’m having a déjà vu sensation here in Rome thinking about it, standing outside Ivanov’s old building, remembering how Prince Albert’s eyes used to stare out like the eyes that leapt out on Gogol’s poor young artist Chartkov, The Portrait’s (Take-2) protagonist.

Gogol has Chartkov rifling through dusty worn paintings one day at a cheap Petersburg art shop. There he stumbles across a portrait of an old man, with a gaunt, high-cheek-boned face and bronze skin. Most extraordinary of all were the eyes. After much deliberation, and bargaining with its owner, the young artist parts with his last few kopecks and staggers back with the canvas to his draughty studio in the grungiest part of town. Once there, says Gogol, “the two terrible eyes fixed directly on him, as if preparing to devour him.”

At nightfall, trying to doze on the sofa, Chartkov can’t bear the thought of those eyes staring at him like some terrible phantom. He tosses a bedsheet over the portrait. But the moonlight only intensifies its whiteness and ghostly presence, “endowing it with a strange aliveness.” As Chartkov falls asleep, Gogol’s quill springs into action. The white sheet is no longer there; the old man has stirred. Suddenly, leaning on the frame with both hands, he thrusts both legs out to free himself of his confinement. Chartkov attempts to scream yet has no voice. The old man steps down, takes out a sack containing packets of fabulous golden rubles. One pack drops to the floor; Chartkov runs over, clutches it, tries to prize it open but can’t. He cries out—and wakes up.

Chartkov’s heart pounded “as if the last breath was about to fly out of it.” Could it have been a dream?” he wonders. “My God, if I had at least part of that money,” he sighs. Awake, he removes the sheet and sees the old man still inside his frame, his “living, human eyes peering straight into him.” Sweat dripped from Chartkov’s brow, cold sweat. He wanted to back away from those eyes, “but felt as if his feet were rooted to the ground. And he saw—this was no longer a dream—the old man’s features move, his lips begin to stretch toward him, as if wishing to suck him out…With a scream of despair, Chartkov jumps back—and woke up.” “Could this, too,” Gogol asks, “have been a dream?”

Now, his heart is pounding so intensely, it’s on the point of bursting. Terrified, Chartkov dared look again at the portrait; the sheet was still over it. So perhaps it had been a dream after all? And yet, as he continued to look, the sheet began to move once again, hands fumbling under it, inside it, desperately trying to throw off the cover, doing so with menace and impatience. “Lord God, what is this!” Chartkov cries, not believing his eyes, and, crossing himself desperately, suddenly wakes up.

By morning, the room is bleak and gloomy; “an unpleasant dampness drizzled through the air.” It seemed “that amidst the dreams there had been some terrible fragment of reality.” Then a knock at the door heralds the arrival of the landlord and a police inspector, “whose appearance,” Gogol says, “as everyone knows, is more unpleasant for little people.” The landlord, a retired civil servant, “an efficient man, a fop, and a fool, who had merged all these sharp peculiarities in himself into some indefinite dullness,” wants the unpaid rent. Chartkov, with little else, offers him his paintings. But the landlord scoffs, uninterestedly. Meanwhile, the inspector examines the portrait of the old man. As he clumsily picks it up, its frame splits apart. One side falls to the ground along with a packet, wrapped in blue paper, with the inscription “1,000 Gold Rubles.” Chartkov, like a madman, rushes over, seizes the heavy packet.

His woes are over, or so it would seem. Now he has a fortune—as foreseen in his dream. He pays off the landlord, installs himself in a swanky bourgie apartment along the Nevsky Prospect, gets his hair curled, begins sporting fashionable tailored suits, dines at fancy French restaurants, and struts along the sidewalk admiring himself like the most elegant of dandies. Strangely, too, Chartkov’s reputation as a great artist soars. He gets a Petersburg newspaper to publish an article he’d written himself, about his own extraordinary talents, a brilliance worthy of any Titian or Van Dyck. Petersburg’s elite become mesmerized by a new genius in town, and flood him with commissions.

At first, his portraits glow with subtle brush strokes and masterful shading. But sitters want less, are thrilled by cliched images, by empty smiles and upper-crust stiffness. The shallower the portrait, the better—and the more he’s in demand. He’s rewarded with everything: money, compliments, handshakes and kisses, invitations to dinners, to glamorous soirées. Soon, says Gogol, “it was quite impossible to recognize in him that modest artist who had once worked inconspicuously in his hovel.”

The years pass, and slowly but surely the luster of riches and finery wears thin. Chartkov tires of churning out hundreds of the same portraits, of the same faces, whose poses and attitudes he knows now by rote. “His brush was becoming cold and dull, and he imperceptibly locked himself into monotonous, predetermined, long worn-out forms.” What’s more, “he was already beginning to reach the age of maturity in mind and years and already began to gain weight and expand visibly in girth.”

By midlife, Chartkov had become blasé, banal in his state of mind, banal in his state of brush. “Even the most ordinary merits,” Gogol writes, “were no longer to be seen in his productions, and yet they still went on being famous, though true connoisseurs and artists merely shrugged as they looked at his latest works.” He’d “touched upon the age when everything that breathes of impulse shrinks in a man,” says Gogol,

when a powerful bow has a fainter effect on his soul and no longer twines piercing music around the heart, when the touch of beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burnt-out feelings become more accessible to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little allow it imperceptibly to lull them completely. Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turned toward gold. Gold became his passion, his ideal, fear, delight, purpose.”

Still, one event shook Chartkov deeply, and “awakened all his living constitution.” When the Academy of Art invites him to judge a new work by a young Russian artist, an Ivanov figure, already being hailed a great genius, he’s skeptical. After seeing the canvas in the gallery, surrounded by hordes of visitors, he’s stunned: the purest, most immaculate conception hangs on the wall, a painting so modest, so divine that tears flow down the cheeks of onlookers. Chartkov is blown away, stands motionless, “open-mouthed before the picture.”

His whole being, says Gogol, “is reawakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again.” The blindfold suddenly falls from his eyes, and he realizes he hadn’t heeded his wily old professor’s advice from long ago. He’d ruined his best years, neglected the long, arduous lesson of gradual learning. Instead, he’d become that dreaded species: a fashionable painter. (One wonders if John Partridge, Prince’s Albert’s depicter, ever felt the same way, ever regretted his life as a court artist, whipping off those fawning portraits of royalty and society people?)

Chartkov could no longer bear those lifeless pictures, the portraits of buttoned-up hussars and state councilors, of eternally tidied ladies; he orders them out of his studio. Then he remembers the strange portrait he’d purchased, which had kindled all his vainest impulses, and heralded his demise. A rage bursts into his soul. Bile rises up in him whenever he sees a work marked with the stamp of greatness. He begins to buy up great masterpieces, hauling them back to his room, where he tears them apart, shreds them, cuts them to pieces in a savage orgy of destruction that portends Chartkov’s auto-destruction, bizarrely mimicking Gogol’s own auto-destruction. A cruel fever, compounded by galloping consumption, eventually sees our artist off. “His corpse was frightful,” Gogol notes. “Nothing could be found of his enormous wealth; but seeing the slashed remains of lofty works of art whose worth went beyond millions, its terrible use became clear.”

***

In his epilogue to The Portrait (Take-2), Gogol tells us that the old man with those terrible eyes had been a dreadful moneylender, a loan shark who extorted Petersburg’s poor, sometimes extorting even Petersburg’s rich. Calamity befell upon everybody who took money from him. He possessed some dark curse, damning him and anyone he touched. Even the artist who painted his portrait was struck down by demons, managing to cast them off only by becoming a repentant hermit monk. The painting similarly imparted devilish forces, and tragedy afflicted everyone who owned it, who felt its burning eyes. At the story’s close, as the painting is about to be auctioned off, the painter’s son suddenly appears, demanding the thing be burned, destroyed at all costs—or else.

Gogol worked over The Portrait many times, adding and amending, chopping and changing, deftly touching it up in Rome, reshaping it into one of his finest stories, with some of his best writing; still only in his early thirties, he seemed to have reached the peak of his literary powers, a maestro of the shorter vein. His evocations of Chartkov’s dream phases are so vivid that they capture in prose exactly the blurring of Rapid Eye Movement sleep from wide-awake experience, the imagining of real life, sounding like we’re reading Chartkov in real time, only to find that Gogol wakes us up to the fact it had been a dream all along.

Gogol, meantime, tells us plenty about the role of the artist in our society, about the dichotomy between artistic integrity and everyday materialism, between the art of pure creation and the act of earning a living. It equally says a lot about Gogol’s own plight in the world, too, about his allegiances with “little people,” about how art for him ought to make the highest service toward the moral good. He knew that in a society dictated by money values and governed by shallow, buttoned-up people, genuine artistic passion will always be up against it. Artists like the young Chartkov (and Ivanov) are isolated and destitute, dedicated to their creation, yet fair game to be bought off, commissioned as hired hands, seduced by all the trappings of high society. (Ivanov never relented, of course, was never bought off, never sold out his great romantic dream for art, and that’s likely why Gogol admired him so.)

In 1844, two-years on from Gogol’s Portrait, we might recall Karl Marx in his Parisian garret, a young man not much older than a struggling Chartkov, pillorying, with Gogolian irony, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.” Money, says Marx, “is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples,” the “inversion of all human and natural qualities.” Marx calls money a “divine power,” “as the estranged and alienating species-essence of man which alienates itself by selling itself.” Money turns one thing into another, inverts everything it touches, converts people and objects into their opposites, into “contradictory qualities” antagonistic to their own qualities.

As such, money “transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into reason and reason into nonsense.” And a money tag transforms bad art into a good art, the rich artist into a veritable genius. With its implicit disdain for how money corrupts, The Portrait exhibits more than a hint of young Marx’s romanticism, cautioning us about wish-fulfilment, that we better watch out what we dream for in youth because we might get it later in life. Dreams, needless to say, are a motive force of our lives; yet in a society that conjures up canned dreams, they’re also dark places where danger lies to ambush, where manufactured dreams are available to anyone—at a price. Which reinforces something I suspect I knew all along laughing each morning at Prince Albert long ago: that Gogol’s Portrait is really a picture of ourselves.