A Comparative Study of the Literary Output of Nikolai Gogol
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The Aesthetics of Effacement: A Comparative Study of the Literary Output of Nikolai Gogol and Oscar Wilde PhD Thesis 2019 Brigit Katharine McCone Student no. 09129731 1 I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university and it is entirely my own work. I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional repository or allow the Library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgement. Signed ___________________________________________________ 2 SUMMARY This thesis marks the first comprehensive comparative study of the literary output of Nikolai Gogol and Oscar Wilde, from an intersectional perspective blending genre theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory and Jungian psychoanalysis, to examine the authors as sexually and ethnically closeted while estimating the impact of this closeting on their fiction. The thesis concludes that Nikolai Gogol and Oscar Wilde have significant parallels in their conception of the artistic process, explicable by a shared exposure anxiety, significant stylistic parallels, explicable by a shared imperative to generate interpretative suspense and facilitate plausibly deniable self-expression, and significant thematic parallels in their treatment of sexuality, ethnicity and identity, explicable by a shared experience of sexual and ethnic closeting. By establishing that all major sexual themes in the fiction of Nikolai Gogol have direct parallels in the fiction of Oscar Wilde, this thesis contributes to the contextualization of Gogol as a closeted writer, while proposing new aesthetic frameworks for the evaluation of Oscar Wilde. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful for the advice and encouragement of my supervisor, Dr Sarah Smyth, of the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies of Trinity College Dublin, and my co-supervisor, Dr Paul Delaney of the School of English, and my two examiners Jarlath Killeen and Claire Whitehead. My research was made possible by a Foundation Scholarship and Studentship from Trinity College Dublin. I also received guidance on Ukrainian perspectives from Professor Vladimir Zviniatskovsky while at the 2012 Nyzhin Conference on Gogol Studies. Any errors or misunderstandings remain my own. 4 Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................. 6 Chapter 1 – Literature Review ................................................................... 18 PART 1 - THE HAUNTED PORTRAIT ................................................ 43 Chapter 2 – The Artistic Process As Faustian Gothic Horror .................... 44 Chapter 3 - Artwork As Site of Exposure ................................................... 61 Chapter 4 – Artistic Creation as Destroyer of Artist .................................. 73 Chapter 5 - Aversion to Spectators ............................................................. 84 Chapter 6 - The Aesthetics of Effacement ................................................ 101 PART 2 - THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE NOSE ............................ 129 Chapter 7 - Diagnosis of Sexuality and Ethnicity .................................... 130 Chapter 8 - 'The Garden of Eros': Lost Paradise ...................................... 168 Chapter 9 -'The Burden of Itys': Dissociation ........................................... 201 Chapter 10 -'Charmides': Realization of the Shadow .............................. 231 Chapter 11 -'Panthea': Individuation ....................................................... 256 Chapter 12 -'Humanitad': Regressive Restoration of Persona ................. 282 Conclusion ................................................................................................ 304 Bibliography ............................................................................................. 311 5 Introduction “The highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of art what the artist had not put there” - Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist1 2 “None but an Irishman should ever try tackling Gogol” - Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol The goal of this thesis is to make the first comprehensive review of stylistic and thematic parallels in the literary output of Nikolai Gogol3 and Oscar Wilde, including drama and poetry, within an interpretative framework that potentially explains their correspondence as the result of a shared experience of sexual and ethnic closeting. The fact that Gogol and Wilde belong to two distinct geographical regions, literary traditions and time periods, lessens the possibility that their aesthetic similarities derive from a common culture. The works of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) are not cited by critics, or by the author himself, as a major influence on Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), although Wilde wrote approving literary criticism of the work of Dostoevsky,4 who has been noted for his creative debt to Gogol.5 Wilde's first performed play, in August 1883 1 Wilde, Oscar, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings, p. 243 2 Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol p. 38, referring to Gogol's colloquial and absurdist use of the Russian language which Nabokov considers paralleled only by Hiberno-English and therefore suited only to an Irish translator. 3 The standard transliteration from the Russian Николай Гоголь, 'Nikolai Gogol', is used throughout this work in preference to the Ukrainian variant 'Mykola Hohol' (Микола Гоголь), partly because Gogol published in the Russian language, but particularly because this variant is familiar to an English-language readership. 4 Wilde, 'Injury and Insult' (Pall Mall Gazette, 2 May 1887) in Jackson ed., Aristotle at Afternoon Tea: The Rare Oscar Wilde, pp. 88-90 5 Early works directly inspired by Gogol include Dostoevsky's Poor Folk, a reworking of 'The 6 in New York, first published 1880, was Vera, or the Nihilists, set in Russia and influenced by translations of Russian literature and anarchist propaganda, specifically Sergei Nechayev's Catechism of a Revolutionary. Although Wilde's literary appreciation for the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky was mainstream in Victorian Britain,6 his romanticization of anarchist terrorism as a form of idealism in Vera and his idealization of the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in De Profundis (written 1895-97, first published 1905) as “a man with the soul of that beautiful white Christ that seems coming out of Russia”7 was sharply discordant with the dominant Victorian discourse on the danger, bloodthirstiness and criminality of anarchism, which tended to deny or downplay its political idealism.8 Considering the absence of references to Gogol within the writings of Wilde, major parallels in the stylistics of the two can more easily be attributed to "convergent evolution", a biological term for unrelated organisms which acquire similar forms due to similar environmental influences. A similar view is adopted by Marina Romanets, who compares Irish and Ukrainian literary traditions through the lens of their shared experience of colonial assimilation pressure and defensive nationalism, rather than claims of direct influence by one literary tradition upon the other.9 This study adopts Romanets' concept of colonial assimilation pressure as a force productive of literary parallels between the Ukrainian and Irish, while considering its intersection with, and operational Overcoat', The Landlady, which Karlinsky has attributed to the influence of Gogol's 'Terrible Vengeance' (The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, p. 44), and 'Notes From The Underground', whose conception as a first person narrative of mental collapse is closely related to Gogol's 'Diary of a Madman'. 6 Beasley and Bullock eds., Russia in Britain, 1880–1940 7 Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings, p.84 8 Shpayer-Makov, 'The Reception of Peter Kropotkin in Britain, 1886-1917' 9 Romanets, Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions 7 resemblance to, the assimilation pressure of heteronormativity. Each from a minor gentry background, growing up on the periphery of 19th- century empires, in Ukrainian or Irish cultures stereotypically viewed as comically provincial by the imperial culture, both journeyed to the cosmopolitan capital of Empire - St. Petersburg for Gogol and London for Wilde - as young men, and won their greatest acclaim as playwrights satirizing the imperial culture in its own language. The peaks of their careers were followed by periods of social attack and exile which, in many ways, illustrate the dangers of self-revelation for both men. In Wilde's case, social attack and exile followed the revelation of his homosexuality through public trial and imprisonment. Gogol's case was more complex, with self-imposed exile in western Europe following perceived misinterpretation of The Inspector General, first performed on 19th April 1836 in St. Petersburg, but he too faced scathing social attack after an attempt at philosophical self-revelation with the 1847 publication of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. In Part One of the thesis, titled 'The Haunted Portrait', both authors' attitude to the artistic process and its impact on their aesthetics is examined and compared. Strikingly, in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (first serialized 1890, published 1891) and Gogol's short story 'Portrait', the writers choose an identical device in the image of the haunted portrait, and in each case use this device to explore issues of artistic