Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol's "A Terrible Revenge"

commentary by Jim Rockhill

   

"We have another story-teller, but this one - better not even think about him at night -- has a store of terrible stories that make your hair stand on end. I have left him out on purpose: good people might be so scared that they would be as afraid of the bee-keeper as they are of the devil. If God spares me to live to the New Year & bring out another volume, then I may scare my good readers with some of the ghosts & marvels that were seen in the old days in this Christian country."
-Nikolai Gogol "Preface to Part One," Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka translated by Ovid Gorchakov (Frederick Ungar Publishing, n.d.), p. 15.

   

Nikolai Gogol's "A Terrible Revenge," also translated as "A Terrible Vengeance," "The Terrible Vengeance," "The Sorcerer" & other variants, is a terrific story in all senses of that word. Unfortunately, although it is not that difficult to locate, it appears in no English-language anthology devoted to the weird & is mentioned in only a few such histories & references works, notably making no appearance in E.F. Bleilers The Guide to Supernatural Fiction.

The weird tale in translation presents challenges which make it even more difficult for the aficionado than locating those rare volumes from the ghost story's golden age now being so assiduously reissued by Ash-Tree Press & others. It is regrettable that with the exception of occasional difficult-to-locate volumes by @las, Dedalus, Midnight House & a few others, no one is doing for weird literature in translation what Ash-Tree Press is doing for the ghost story in English.

Most of the standard anthologies the beginning collector uses as a guide offer little indication of where to look outside the weird tradition in English. If we consult the largest, most readily available, most widely recognized anthologies of weird fiction, we find most authors not writing in English overlooked. Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser Cerf (eds.) Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural includes one non-supernatural tale by Honore de Balzac in a selection of twenty & two supernatural tales by Guy de Maupassant in a selection of thirty-two. The eight books of Great Ghost Stories Robert Aickman edited for Fontana between 1964 & 1972 include 76 tales by 76 authors, as well as six by the editor, of which only two, the tales by Alexander Pushkin & Ivan Turgenev - three if we include Vladimir Nabokov - represent weird fiction that was not originally written in English. David G. Hartwell (ed.) The Dark Descent contains one tale by Ivan Turgenev in a selection of thirty-six. Hartwell's follow-up anthology, Foundations of Fear, includes one tale each by Carlos Fuentes, Jean Ray & E. T. A. Hoffmann in a selection of thirty. Marvin Kaye's resourceful anthologies offer delightful selections from non-English weird traditions, but these are scattered over several volumes & are still seriously outweighed. Exceptions are either difficult to find, such as the Dedalus anthologies, or long out of print. Only Alberto Manguel's two Black Water anthologies of fantastic literature, much of which is not weird in the "ghost story" sense, are not only easily located, but offer an almost equal mix between writers inside & outside the English language.

Equally, if not even more, frustrating is the issue of translation, which ranges in quality from the inspired to the ludicrous. This is where scouring through used bookstores & finding titles available only through university presses can either pay off handsomely or send you into the lowest circle of Hell known to those who read for pleasure. Weeping, wailing & the gnashing of teeth has accompanied many a tale rendered dry & flat, plump & greasy, prim & proper, or loose & slangy by a translator who feels compelled to reproduce figures of speech or patterns of syntax in the original that are unintelligible in English, who knows the original language better than English, or who feels no qualms when distorting the original tale out of laziness, contempt or the perceived prejudices of the English audience. To pick one example limited to Russian literature, I find Isabel Hapgood's translations of Ivan Turgenev, cited in Jack Sullivan's article in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror & the Supernatural, virtually unreadable, because with their tortuous syntax & attempts at reproducing proper forms of address for which there has been no acceptable equivalent in the English language since the 18th century, they read more like halting attempts at literal translation than intelligible English prose. As much as Constance Garnett has been maligned for a certain lack of strict accuracy in her translations, her skills as a prose stylist in English at least lend her translations the illusion of accuracy.

Knowing this, the English reader approaches the work of Nikolai Gogol with apprehension, especially after considering Prince Dmitri Sviatropolk Mirsky's famous assessment of Gogol's prose:

"(H)e is always either elaborately rhythmical or quite as elaborately mimetic. It is not only in his dialogue that the intonations of spoken speech are reproduced. His prose is never empty. It is all alive with the vibrations of spoken speech. This makes it hopelessly untranslatable - more untranslatable than any other Russian prose."
-D.S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature (Vintage, 1958), p. 155

The translation of "A Terrible Revenge" available to me, Ovid Gorchakov's edition of Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka for Frederick Ungar Publishing, is fortunately a reliable one. Although subtleties & cadences have doubtless been lost, it at least reads well as English. Gogol's attention to the language as it was spoken offers perils galore to the translator. As Raymond Chandler says,

"The literary use of slang is a study in itself. I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language & slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe'f before it gets into print."
-Frank MacShane (ed.) Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler (Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 155.

There are, admittedly, a few awkward or dated phrases in the translation at hand. Foma Grigoryevich's grandfather, who narrates "St. John's Eve," & is the protagonist in "The Lost Letter" & "A Place Bewitched," tends to mumble & grumble like Popeye in the middle of a good fight, once his passions are aroused, but the character is, after all, a bit of a blusterer & no one ever comes off sounding like a refugee from an Ed Wood Jr. movie or, even worse, like Yosemite Sam. I recall reading a translation of Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin's "A Bracelet of Garnets" in which one of the characters actually shouts, "Great horned toads!" How anyones willing suspension of disbelief could be expected to survive such an onslaught is beyond my comprehension.

   

"A Terrible Revenge" first appeared in the second installment of Nikolai Gogol's Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka in 1832. Supernaturalism of one sort or another is nearly ubiquitous in both volumes, but is most frequently handled with the lightness of tone & inconsequentiality of the folk tale. Even the horrific events chronicled in "St. Johns Eve" in Part One are offset by the more jocular narrative frame. The bee-keeper who introduces both volumes promises near the end of his preface to Part One (c.f. the quotation that opens this article) to redress this situation in any future volumes. "A Terrible Revenge" does this with a vengeance. To quote Prince Mirsky again,

"(It is) a creation of the purest romantic imagination. Strongly redolent of foreign Romanticism & full of reminiscences of the Cossack songs, A Terrible Vengeance is, in a certain sense, a masterpiece. It is Gogol's greatest effort in purely ornate prose. The beautiful rhythmical movement is sustained without breach or flaw from beginning to end. The story is gruesome & creepy, & at first reading almost intolerably impressive."
-D.S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature p. 157.

From the opening line, Gogol plunges us into a world of furious activity & emotion:

"There was a bustle & an uproar in a quarter of Kiev . . ."

The mood then becomes progressively darker & the action increasingly violent. Soon, it becomes clear that no character is safe. The earth shudders as if alive. The dead rise from their graves, grinding their teeth in famished agony. Treachery & deceit, murder & incest are rampant. Not yet able to take his daughter physically, a sorcerer ravishes her soul by night. Cossack & Pole, Orthodox & Catholic battle to the death while other forces look on & bide their time. For all & over all hangs the pall of doom: an atrocious curse as malevolent as that placed over the House of Atreus, damning innocent & guilty with equal efficiency.

The language Gogol uses to describe this is marvelously rich. If the voice of the village story-teller regularly appears in several tales, here the narrative recalls the older, more exalted form of heroic poetry. It is full of dramatic speeches, laments, songs & lyrical interludes. The Homeric extended simile even makes an occasional appearance, as in this description of the river Dnieper in storm:

"Then its mountainous billows roar & fling themselves against the hills, & flashing & moaning rush back & lament in the distance. So an old mother laments as she lets her Cossack son go to war. Bold & reckless, he rides his black steed, arms akimbo & jaunty cap on one side, while she, sobbing, runs after him, seizes him by the stirrup, catches the bridle, & wrings her hands over him, shedding bitter tears."
-Op. Cit., p. 217

Although, the language is exalted, the heights it scales will allow of little light. The wealth of incident & richness of the prose might at times remind us of Lord Dunsany, but you will not find his crystalline clarity & restraint here. The tale seethes with hatred. Tolerance & mercy are perceived, & demonstrated, as signs of weakness by unsympathetic & sympathetic characters alike. With rare exceptions everything is marked by ferocity & fear. Even the long, beautiful descriptive passages devoted to the landscape around the river Dnieper do not destroy this mood or interrupt the narrative flow, rather they throw it into relief just as the choruses in Greek tragedy or the orchestral interludes in the operas of Mussourgsky, Rimsky Korsakov & Prokofiev. Often through simile or metaphor, these passages even presage or provide commentary on the gruesome incidents around them. It is difficult not to hear music when reading this tale -- noble & tragic music.

It is a remarkable performance. Nonetheless, one element of this tale, the entrance of the avenger, has been singled out for criticism in some quarters. Unlike Michael Blaine in his brief description of this tale in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror & the Supernatural, I do not find the mounted warrior unconvincing. Gogol is careful to first introduce him incompletely, as a face staring out of smoke, then shows him in the distance, approaching inexorably over the vast distances separating the tales present from its legendary past. As he becomes ever more prominent, we realize that this is no mere deus ex machina, but a terrifying figure in its own right.

Gogol then delivers his final, & worst, coup as the blind singer, again reminiscent of Homer, steps forward to reveal the frame for the curse as a morality play, presided over by a ghost & God Himself, in which the moral force driving the characters to their doom is even more repellant than the actions of its greatest villain. Providence has been content to sacrifice generation after generation here on earth & throughout eternity for a deed committed by a distant ancestor. And, no longer merely victims of the sorcerer & the curse that has created him, these ancestors, & perhaps the sorcerers progeny as well, are compelled to gather & gnaw his flesh forever. Only the original parties in the tragedy are denied this satisfaction. As with Le Fanu's monkey & hanging-court, what is implied about how responsibility & justice function in this world is anything but reassuring. If Gogol intended this vision to be reassuring - & we cannot be sure from the text that he did not - such later products of his imagination as "The Overcoat" & the self-destructive, overwrought spirituality of his final years becomes that much more terrible.

   

Copyright © 2000 by Jim Rockhill, all rights reserved

   

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