The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

  There he amazed all the brothers by his strictness of life and unremitting observance of all monastery rules. The superior of the monastery, learning of his skill with the brush, requested that he paint the central icon in the church. But the humble brother said flatly that he was unworthy to take up his brush, that it had been defiled, that he would have to purify his soul with labors and great sacrifices before he would be worthy of setting about such a task. They did not wish to force him. He increased the strictness of monastery life for himself as far as possible. Finally even that became insufficient and not strict enough for him. With the blessing of his superior, he withdrew to the wilderness in order to be completely alone. There he built himself a hut out of branches, ate nothing but raw roots, dragged stones on his back from one place to another, stood in one place from dawn till sunset with his arms raised to heaven, ceaselessly reciting prayers. In short, he seemed to seek out all possible degrees of endurance and that inconceivable self-denial of which examples may be found only in the lives of the saints. Thus for a long time, over the course of several years, he exhausted his body, strengthening it at the same time with the vivifying power of prayer. Finally one day he came to the monastery and said firmly to the superior, 'Now I am ready. God willing, I will accomplish my work.' The subject he chose was the Nativity of Jesus. For a whole year he sat over it without leaving his cell, barely sustaining himself with strict fare, praying ceaselessly.

  At the end of a year, the picture was ready. It was indeed a miracle of the brush. You should know that neither the brothers nor the superior had much knowledge of painting, but everyone was struck by the extraordinary holiness of the figures; the feeling of divine humility and meekness in the face of the most pure Mother leaning over the Child, the profound intelligence in the eyes of the divine Child, as if they already perceived something in the distance, the solemn silence of the kings, struck by the divine wonder and prostrate at his feet, and, finally, the holy, inexpressible silence enveloping the whole picture—all this was expressed with such harmonious force and power of beauty that it produced a magical impression. The brothers all fell on their knees before the new icon, and the superior, moved to tenderness, said, 'No, it is not possible for a man, with the aid of human art only, to produce such a picture. A higher, holy power guided your brush, and the blessing of heaven rests on your work.' "Just then I finished my studies at the Academy, was given a gold medal and along with it the joyous hope of going to Italy—the best of dreams for a twenty-year-old painter. It only remained for me to bid farewell to my father, from whom I had parted twelve years earlier. I confess, even his very image had long since vanished from my memory. I had heard something about the strict holiness of his life and imagined beforehand meeting a hermit with a hard appearance, alien to everything in the world except his cell and his prayer, wasted away, dried up with eternal watching and fasting. What was my astonishment when there stood before me a beautiful, almost divine elder! No traces of exhaustion were to be seen on his face; it shone with the brightness of heavenly joy. A beard white as snow and fine, almost ethereal hair of the same silvery color flowed picturesquely down his breast and the folds of his black cassock, falling to the very rope tied around his poor monastic garb; but the most amazing thing for me was to hear from his lips such words and thoughts about art as, I confess, I shall long bear in my soul, and I wish sincerely that every brother of mine could do likewise.

  "'I have been waiting for you, my son,' he said when I approached to receive his blessing.

  'The path which your life will henceforth follow lies before you. This path is pure, do not deviate from it. You have talent, and talent is God's most precious gift—do not ruin it. Seek, study everything you see, submit everything to your brush, but learn to find the inner thought in everything, and try most of all to comprehend the lofty mystery of creation. Blessed is the chosen one who possesses it. No subject in nature is low for him. In the lowly the artist-creator is as great as he is in the great; for him the contemptible is no longer contemptible, for the beautiful soul of the creator shines invisibly through it, and the contemptible is given lofty expression, for it has passed through the purgatory of his soul. For man, art contains a hint of the divine, heavenly paradise, and this alone makes it higher than all else. As solemn peace is higher than all worldly trouble; as creation is higher than destruction; as an angel in the pure innocence of his bright soul is higher than all the innumerable powers and proud passions of Satan—so is a lofty artistic creation higher than anything that exists in the world. Give all in sacrifice to it and love it with all your passion. Not passion that breathes of earthly lust, but quiet, heavenly passion, without which man is powerless to rise above the earth and is unable to give the wondrous sounds of peace. For artistic creation comes down to earth to pacify and reconcile all people. It cannot instill murmuring in the soul, but in the sound of prayer strives eternally toward God. But there are moments, dark moments . . .'

  "He paused, and I noticed that his bright countenance suddenly darkened, as if some momentary cloud passed over it.

  “‘There was one event in my life,' he said. 'To this day I cannot understand what that strange image was whose portrait I painted. It was exactly like some diabolical phenomenon. I know the world rejects the existence of the devil, and therefore I will not speak of him. I will say only that I painted it with loathing, that I felt no love for my work at the time. I wanted forcefully to subject myself and to be faithful to nature, soullessly, having stifled everything. It was not a work of art, and therefore the feelings that overcome people as they look at it are stormy, troubling feelings—not the feelings of an artist, for an artist breathes peace even in the midst of trouble. I have been told that this portrait keeps changing hands and spreading its tormenting impressions, producing feelings of envy in an artist, a dark hatred for his brother, a spiteful yearning to persecute and oppress. May the Most High preserve you from such passions! Nothing is more terrible than they. Better to endure all the bitterness of possible persecution than cause even a shadow of persecution for someone else. Save the purity of your soul. He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show.'

  "He blessed me and embraced me. Never in my life had I been so sublimely moved. With veneration rather than filial feeling, I leaned on his breast and kissed his flowing silver hair. A tear glistened in his eye.

  “‘My son, fulfill one request for me,' he said at the very moment of parting. 'Perhaps you will chance to see somewhere the portrait of which I have spoken. You will recognize it at once by its extraordinary eyes and their unnatural expression. Destroy it at all costs . . .'

  "You may judge for yourselves, how could I not promise to fulfill it faithfully? For all of fifteen years, I have never chanced to come across anything the least bit like the description given by my father, but now, suddenly, at this auction . . ."

  Here, before finishing what he was saying, the painter turned his eyes to the wall in order to look at the portrait again. The whole crowd of his listeners instantly made the same movement, seeking the extraordinary portrait with their eyes. But to their great astonishment, it was no longer on the wall. A vague stir and murmuring went through the crowd, and after that the word "Stolen!" was clearly heard. Someone had managed to take it, seeing that the listeners' attention had been carried away by the story. And for a long time all those present remained perplexed, not knowing whether they had indeed seen those extraordinary eyes or it had merely been a dream, imagined just for an instant, by their eyes weary from the long examination of old paintings.

  THE OVERCOAT

  IN THE DEPARTMENT of.
. . but it would be better not to say in which department. There is nothing more irascible than all these departments, regiments, offices—in short, all this officialdom. Nowadays every private individual considers the whole of society insulted in his person. They say a petition came quite recently from some police chief, I don't remember of what town, in which he states clearly that the government's decrees are perishing and his own sacred name is decidedly being taken in vain. And as proof he attached to his petition a most enormous tome of some novelistic work in which a police chief appears on every tenth page, in some places even in a totally drunken state. And so, to avoid any unpleasantness, it would be better to call the department in question a certain department. And so, in a certain department there served a certain clerk; a not very remarkable clerk, one might say—short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal. . . No help for it! the Petersburg climate is to blame. As for his rank (for with us rank must be announced first of all), he was what is called an eternal titular councillor, at whom, as is known, all sorts of writers have abundantly sneered and jeered, having the praiseworthy custom of exerting themselves against those who can't bite. The clerk's last name was Bashmachkin. From the name itself one can already see that it once came from bashmak, or "shoe"; but when, at what time, and in what way it came from bashmak—none of that is known. His father, his grandfather, even his brother-in-law, and absolutely all the Bashmachkins, went around in boots, merely having them resoled three times a year. His name was Akaky Akakievich. The reader will perhaps find that somewhat strange and farfetched, but he can be assured that it was not fetched at all, but that such circumstances occurred of themselves as made it quite impossible to give him any other name, and here is precisely how it came about.

  Akaky Akakievich was born, if memory serves me, during the night of the twenty-third of March. His late mother, a clerk's widow and a very good woman, decided, as was fitting, to have the baby baptized. The mother was still lying in bed opposite the door, and to her right stood the godfather, a most excellent man, Ivan Ivanovich Yeroshkin, who served as a chief clerk in the Senate, 1 and the godmother, the wife of a police officer, a woman of rare virtue, Arina Semyonovna Belobriushkova. The new mother was offered a choice of any of three names, whichever she wished to choose: Mokky, Sossy, or to name the baby after the martyr Khozdazat. "No," thought the late woman, "what sort of names are those?" To please her, they opened the calendar2 to another place; again three names came out: Trifily, Dula, and Varakhasy. "What a punishment," the old woman said. "Such names, really, I've never heard the like. If only it were Varadat or Varukh, not Trifily and Varakhasy." They turned another page: out came Pavsikakhy and Vakhtisy. "Well, I see now," the old woman said, "it's evidently his fate. If so, better let him be named after his father. His father was Akaky, so let the son also be Akaky." Thus it was that Akaky Akakievich came about. As the child was being baptized, he cried and made such a face as if he anticipated that he would be a titular councillor. And so, that is how it all came about. We have told it so that the reader could see for himself that it happened entirely from necessity and that to give him any other name was quite impossible.

  When and at what time he entered the department and who appointed him, no one could recall. However many directors and other superiors came and went, he was always to be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, in the same capacity, as the same copying clerk, so that after a while they became convinced that he must simply have been born into the world ready-made, in a uniform, and with a balding head. In the department he was shown no respect at all. The caretakers not only did not rise from their places when he passed, but did not even look at him, as if a mere fly had flown through the reception room. His superiors treated him somehow with cold despotism. Some chief clerk's assistant simply shoved papers under his nose without even saying "Copy them," or "Here's a nice, interesting little case," or something pleasant, as is customary in well-bred offices. And he took them, looking only at the papers, without regarding the one who put them there or whether he had the right to do so. He took them and immediately settled down to copying them. The young clerks poked fun at him and cracked jokes, to the extent that office wit allowed; told right in front of him various stories they had made up about him, about his landlady, a seventy-year-old crone, saying that she beat him, asking when their wedding was to be, dumping torn-up paper over his head and calling it snow. But not one word of response came from Akaky Akakievich, as if no one was there; it did not even affect the work he did: amidst all this pestering, he made not a single error in his copy. Only when the joke was really unbearable, when they jostled his arm, interfering with what he was doing, would he say, "Let me be. Why do you offend me?"

  And there was something strange in the words and in the voice in which they were uttered.

  Something sounded in it so conducive to pity that one recently appointed young man who, following the example of the others, had first allowed himself to make fun of him, suddenly stopped as if transfixed, and from then on everything seemed changed before him and acquired a different look. Some unnatural power pushed him away from his comrades, whose acquaintance he had made thinking them decent, well-mannered men. And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?"—and in these penetrating words rang other words: "I am your brother." And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! even in a man the world regards as noble and honorable. . .

  It would hardly be possible to find a man who lived so much in his work. It is not enough to say he served zealously—no, he served with love. There, in that copying, he saw some varied and pleasant world of his own. Delight showed in his face; certain letters were his favorites, and when he came to one of them, he was beside himself: he chuckled and winked and helped out with his lips, so that it seemed one could read on his face every letter his pen traced. If his zeal had been rewarded correspondingly, he might, to his own amazement, have gone as far as state councillor; yet his reward, as his witty comrades put it, was a feather in his hat and hemorrhoids where he sat. However, it was impossible to say he went entirely unnoticed. One director, being a kindly man and wishing to reward him for long service, ordered that he be given something more important than the usual copying—namely, he was told to change an already existing document into a letter to another institution; the matter consisted merely in changing the heading and changing some verbs from first to third person. This was such a task for him that he got all in a sweat, rubbed his forehead, and finally said, "No, better let me copy something." After that he was left copying forever. Outside this copying nothing seemed to exist for him. He gave no thought to his clothes at all: his uniform was not green but of some mealy orange. The collar he wore was narrow, low, so that though his neck was not long, it looked extraordinarily long protruding from this collar, as with those head-wagging plaster kittens that foreign peddlers carry about by the dozen on their heads. And there was always something stuck to his uniform: a wisp of straw or a bit of thread; moreover, he had a special knack, as he walked in the street, of getting under a window at the precise moment when some sort of trash was being thrown out of it, and, as a result, he was eternally carrying around melon or watermelon rinds and other such rubbish on his hat. Not once in his life did he ever pay attention to what was going on or happening every day in the street, which, as is known, his young fellow clerk always looks at, his pert gaze so keen that he even notices when someone on the other side of the street has the footstrap of his trousers come undone—which always provokes a sly smile on his face.

  But Akaky Akakievich, even if he looked at so
mething, saw in everything his own neat lines, written in an even hand, and only when a horse's muzzle, coming out of nowhere, placed itself on his shoulder and blew real wind from its nostrils onto his cheek— only then would he notice that he was not in the middle of a line, but rather in the middle of the street. Coming home, he would sit down straight away at the table, hastily slurp up his cabbage soup and eat a piece of beef with onions, without ever noticing their taste, and he would eat it all with flies and whatever else God sent him at the time. Noticing that his stomach was full, he would get up from the table, take out a bottle of ink, and copy documents he had brought home. If there chanced to be none, he made copies especially for his own pleasure, particularly if the document was distinguished not by the beauty of its style but by its being addressed to some new or important person.

  Even in those hours when the gray Petersburg sky fades completely and all clerical folk have eaten their fill and finished dinner, each as he could, according to his salary and his personal fancy— when all have rested after the departmental scratching of pens, the rushing about seeing to their own and other people's needful occupations, and all that irrepressible man heaps voluntarily on himself even more than is necessary—when clerks hasten to give the remaining time to pleasure: the more ambitious rushing to the theater; another going out to devote it to gazing at silly hats; another to a party, to spend it paying compliments to some pretty girl, the star of a small clerical circle; still another, and this happens most often, simply going to his own kind, to some fourth or third floor, two small rooms with a front hall and a kitchen, with some claim to fashion, a lamp or other object that cost great sacrifices, the giving up of dinners, outings—in short, even at that time when all clerks disperse to their friends' small apartments to play cutthroat whist, sipping tea from glasses, with one-kopeck rusks, puffing smoke through long chibouks, repeating while the cards are being dealt some gossip blown over from high society, something a Russian man can never give up under any circumstances, or even, when there is nothing to talk about, retelling the eternal joke about the commandant who was brought word that the horse of Falconet's monument 3 had had its tail docked—in short, even when everything strives for diversion—Akaky Akakievich did not give himself up to any diversion. No one could say he had ever been seen at any party. When he had written his fill, he would go to bed, smiling beforehand at the thought of the next day: What would God send him to copy tomorrow? So flowed the peaceful life of this man who, with a salary of four hundred, was able to content himself with his lot, and so it might have flowed on into extreme old age, had it not been for the various calamities strewn along the path of life, not only of titular, but even of privy, actual, court, and other councillors, even of those who neither give counsel nor take any themselves.