Gogols Petersburg Tales Essay Example for Free

Gogols Petersburg Tales seekComp ar Nikolai Gogols The overcoat with the other St. Petersburg tales. Nikolai Gogols St. Petersburg stories have been interpreted as tales of social in honestice, urban and human isolation, psychological studies, love stories, moralistic fables and social satires. In keeping with emerging trends of naturalistic writing, the stories plug with relatively lowly members of the social strata in the Petersburg bureaucracy the everyman. This essay will compare The Overcoat with daybook of a harum-scarum and The Nose and examine how each of the main events in Gogols stories survives in the plainly unnatural and fabricated world of St. Petersburg. The principal character in The Overcoat, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin buries himself so deeply in his paltry work of write documents that his work almost supersedes the actual reality in which he inhabits, he is described walking through the streets of St. Petersburg oblivious to the people around him or the rubbish being impel out windows onto him, he sees nonhing but a line of beautiful words to copy.He ulterior does the same when obsessing about the coat which he is having made to shield him from the bitter Russian winter. This need to veil and insulate oneself from the cold harshness of modern society is an idea which runs through these three stories, and seemed to preoccupy Gogol himself. He was a secretive person about which very little is known, he said himself in his letter But how can one judge about a secretive person in whom everything is inside, whose character hasnt even interpreted shape but who is still educating himself in his soul and whose every melt produces only misunderstanding? How can one make conclusions about such a person basing oneself on a few traits which have inadvertently stuck themselves out? Wont this be the same as to conclude about a book by a few sentences torn out of it non in order either, but from different passages. Gogol was interested in how the character and worth of manyone is judged by others, the characters in The Petersburg Stories are all defined, both by themselves and by others, by their professions, which are comically insignificant, Akaky Akakievich copied pages and Poprishchin in Diary of a Madman was in charge of pencil sharpening.These characters are defined by the usage they serve as part of the bureaucracy rather than by any kind of individual identity. Gogol paints a picture of a society in which values the most superficial aspects of a person, an idea which is taken to comical new heights in The Nosewhen the preposterous and vain main character major(ip) Kovalyov loses something which serves no great purpose other than normalising ones appearance his nose. Escapism is essential for Gogols characters. Each of the main characters feels happiest when they are detached from reality, when they have some sort of rosy, imaginary insulation amidst them and the inescapable monotony of their lowly liv es. Akaky Akakievich is described garnering a disproportionate amount of joy from his work copying documents, smiling to himself as he coppied letters he particularly liked, going home and copying just for fun and when all strive to divert themselves going to bed smiling at thought of coming day.Akaky puts all of his faith and love and passion into something arbitrary and ultimately meaningless as a coping mechanism, for how else would he survive his pitiful life? The main character in Diary of a Madman Poprishkin is driven to a similar detachment from the real world as his lowly and socially immobile position as a titular councillor becomes too much to bear. He loses his sanity but arguably gains something of greater value confidence and social mobility. In creating a world for himself where he is no longer one of many middle aged, poorly paid low ranking civic servants but the King of Spain he frees himself from his suffocating ties to societal norms, he no longer believes in th e inbuilt superiority of those of a higher social status, he even has the audacity to call his employer as an nondescript doornail, a simple doornail, nothing more. The kind used in doors. Similarly, Kovalyov deludes himself to give his life a sense impression of importance and significance.He gives himself the title of Major and struts down Nevsky Prospect making eye contact with everyone and imagining assist from ladies that he passes. The key difference between the coping mechanism employed by Akaky and the methods used by Poprishkin and Kobalev is that Akakys world is not one which elevates his social status. His extremely introverted behaviour does not cut out the status quo. It is arguably their obsession with class and how they appear to others which causes all of both Kovalev and Poprishkins strife. Contrastingly, Akaky just wants to be left alone, he doesnt care that people often see him with trifle or convert stuck to the back of his cape, this makes Akaky a more lik eable, sympathetic character, he is completely harmless and innocent a ideal victim. This is the only story in which Gogol allows us to be fully sympathetic with a character. There areindeed moments in Diary of a Madman which could and should stir sympathy for Poprishkin in the reader, but Gogol of all time undermines these moments with a humorous or nonsensical comment.In The Overcoat however, the narration tone flips from heart wrenchingly sorry to funny and light hearted and then back again in the space of a page Gogol displays his endowment fund for evoking sympathy and emotion in a reader and his gift for comedy side by side. It is not just the characters who seek to cover themselves up and conceal the truth from the reader there is a overleap of reliability coupled with nonsense running through all three of the narratives which obstinately refuses to make sense. The Overcoat introduces us to this immediately, it begins with a digression In the department of but it is b etter not to mention the department. The fibber continues in this vein, using a conversational, unreliable tone, often forgetting the facts or losing their place in the story.Gogols heedful elusiveness undermines the idea of the omniscient authorial voice of the narrator and injects suspicion and confusion into the narrative. Gogol uses a similar narrative voice in The Nose. The narrator of The Nose is similarly uninformed and forgetful and makes no plan of attack to elucidate the reason for all the bizarre occurrences in the story. Things in these stories can often just thaw into a puff of smoke, Gogol increases the confusion, and elusiveness with the use of a lot of mist and smoke imagery, he is like a magician, cloaking his intentions, keeping himself safe behind a cloud of nonsense and a mist of confusion.Gogols St. Petersburg stories give many different types of characters, but pervading through the stories and uniting them is this sense of heightened self-consciousness a need to defend oneself from a befuddling, cold harsh world. Gogol himself put it best in another St Petersburg story Nevsky Prospekt It had seemed as if some demon had crumbled the world into bits and mixed all these bits indiscriminately togetherBibliographyGogol, Nikolai translated by Macandrew, Andrew R and Meyer, Priscilla The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories SIGNET CLASSICS, January 2005, New York, NY/US One Of The Oldest Cases Of Schizophrenia In Gogols Diary Of A Madman Eric Lewin AltschulerBMJ British Medical Journal , Vol. 323, No. 7327 (Dec. 22 29, 2001), pp. 1475-1477 promulgated by BMJ Publishing Group word Stable URL http//www.jstor.org/stable/25468632 Cloaking the Self The Literary Space of Gogols Overcoat Charles C. Bernheimer PMLA , Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 53-61 Published by Modern Language Association denomination Stable URL http//www.jstor.org/stable/461347 The Laughter of Gogol R. W. Hallett Russian Review , Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct., 1971), pp. 373-384 Published by Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review Article Stable URL http//www.jstor.org/stable/127792