SOURCE: Obolensky, Alexander P. “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.” In Food-Notes on Gogol, pp. 11-31. Winnipeg: Trident Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, Obolensky discusses Gogol's descriptions of food and its association with love and affection in his collection of short stories Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.]

Gogol's life and works are so much of a piece that it is almost impossible to separate them. This is particularly true in the case of his first successful literary venture, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, a collection of stories based on the folklore of his native Ukraine. According to the title page the stories were “edited by Beekeeper Rudi Panko,” but the disguise was too thin, the identity of the true author was plainly evident and Gogol, at the age of twenty-two, and after less than three years in the capital, found himself welcomed into an elite circle of poets and painters in Petersburg.

His authorship of these tales could not be mistaken. The very title proclaims the birthplace of the writer: Nikolai Gogol was born on March 20, 1809, in Sorochintsy, near the village of Dikanka, the exact location of Vasilevka, his family's modest estate. Moreover, the personality of the author, almost the sound of his voice, can be seen and heard in the monologues of Red-Headed Panko, whose comments at the beginning of the book and in the first and last paragraphs of the initial story, “The Fair at Sorochintsy”, could only have been made by an epic poet such as the youthful Gogol was by way of becoming.¹

Gogol was forging his style in these tales of Ukraine; by trial and error he was discovering that a story need not have a plot, if the protagonists are interesting and are involved in a sufficient number of incidents. As Henry James put it, “What is character but the determination of incidents? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Apparently Gogol found that food determined character and that the main incidents in life were eating and discussing food—and the preparation of food. These were his own obsessions as well.

According to one of his contemporaries, Gogol, while still a schoolboy at the Nezhin gymnasium, “always carried in his breeches' pockets a substantial amount of … candies and honey-cakes” and “was constantly munching, even during classes …”², “he was fond of sweets and of kvas …³ which he either concocted himself or bought at the town market … Anything that he retrieved there of an edible nature, he simply devoured.”⁴

He regarded the production of food as a noble pursuit, and in one of his letters to his mother, the schoolboy boasted: “I have now become a real landowner. I know how to distinguish grains … I can even argue the whole day long with the harvesters about the sowing of the winter crop of buckwheat.” (4/12/1826) Twenty years later, when Gogol had become an inveterate wanderer, forever travelling to and fro across Europe, mainly between Russia and Italy, he still believed, as he told his friend Pletnev in a letter, “I was born to be a landowner, I have always felt a fondness for the landowner's activities and have even acquired many qualities of a landowner.” (12/12/1846)

His father had died in 1825 and the young theoretical agriculturist, as the male head of the family, began to fill his letters to his mother and sisters with information and advice regarding the farm work on the small family estate. He also kept them informed as to food-prices in the capital. In one letter, for instance, he mentioned the costliness, in Petersburg, of “potatoes, onions and turnips.” (1/3/1829)

During his first trip outside Russia in August 1829, when, angered by the ridicule heaped upon his first publication,⁵ he decided to emigrate to America and got only as far as the Baltic port of Lübeck, the most important thing he found to write home about was this: “Here, fruit ripens later than in the province of Poltava.” (9/13/1829)

After one month in Germany he returned to Petersburg, and in a letter written from there, dated April 2, 1830, he devoted twenty-six lines to potatoes. Again, in June of the same year, he was urging his mother to plant potatoes. It should be recalled that potatoes were at that time only beginning to be widely known in Europe where they were first profitably grown in Germany.⁶

In his life as in his writings, women seem to be associated mainly with food, the growing of food products and the preparation of food in the kitchen. The twenty-six-year-old bachelor was continuously instructing the women of his family in these matters. On December 8, 1835, he wrote to his mother saying that his two younger sisters, Anne and Elisabeth (whom he had placed in a young ladies' school in Petersburg), were sending packets of seeds to her as a New Year's gift: “The seeds are meant as a symbol, with our best wishes for a fruitful New Year.”

Food and affection were closely linked in Gogol's mind. He was never happier than when offering to his friends a dinner cooked with his own hands. Was the inveterate traveller and confirmed bachelor a home-body? Not at all. For nearly always the meals which he provided were cooked in the kitchen of some friend or other with whom he was staying briefly.

As a native of Ukraine, Gogol's preference in food—and he was both a gourmet and a gourmand—were naturally those edibles for which Ukraine is famous, especially melons and their cousins the pumpkins and cucumbers and other members of the Curbitaceae family, along with the culinary confections derived from grain, for example galushki (dumplings), bliny (pancakes), and kasha.⁷

With this in mind, it is interesting to see how much of himself Gogol put into the Ukrainian tales. He is obviously present in the monologue by the fictitious author: “Panko, the Red-Headed Beekeeper.” This despite the fact that Panko is an old man who has lost his teeth: “If anything soft comes my way I manage to chew it, but I can't tackle anything hard,” says he. Gogol also speaks through the mouth of the chief story-teller in the first part of this collection, Foma Grigorievich, the deacon of the Dikanka church. Like Gogol himself, Foma, too, is something of a dandy, always well turned out “in a gabardine of fine cloth, the color of a cold kisel',⁸ and wears boots polished with the best of fat, such as many a peasant would be glad to put in his kasha.” The deacon recalls with pleasure the native foods he had eaten in his boyhood: “Sometimes we ate so many cucumbers, melons, turnips, onions and peas that, I swear you'd have thought roosters were crowing in our stomachs!” And he recalls how his grandfather had liked to chat with the passing wagoners, for their stories “were like dumplings to a hungry man.” As for the conversation at table, when there are visitors: “We never talk about trifles … we discuss how to pickle apples.” (Food was never a trifling matter to Gogol!) Indeed, Foma Grigorievich is Gogol's mouth-piece who not only recalls with delight the author's favorite food, but employs one of his much-liked devices, that of exaggerating through exclamations. Foma's comments almost comprise a dialogue between Gogol and himself. As does Panko's introductory monologue which follows:

“… when you do arrive, we will give you the best melons you've ever tasted; and, mark my words, you'll find no better honey in any other hamlet. When you bring a honeycomb into the house, the scent⁹ is something unimaginable … And oh, the pies my old woman will feed you! They're simply pure sugar! And the butter fairly melts in your mouth when you taste them. Bless my soul, these women can do anything!¹⁰ Have you ever tasted pear kvas flavored with juniper berries? Or grape and plum vodka? Or frumenty boiled with milk? My goodness, what dainties these are! As soon as you taste them, you know it's a treat and no mistake … Only come to see us, as quick as you can; we'll give you so many good things that you'll tell everyone you meet about them.”

Following this lyrical introduction, Gogol gives a glossary of Ukrainian terms that would be unfamiliar to Petersburg's readers.¹¹

Then, in the epic manner, the scene is set for the first story, “The Fair at Sorochintsy”. The time is late summer; above the fields where “golden sheaves of grain are arranged like tents” is a cloudless sky. Nearby are “the broad branches of cherry,¹² plum, apple and pear trees bending under their load of fruit.” From early morning “wagons full of fish and salt have trailed in an endless chain along the road.”

The confusion and bustle of the fair is several times depicted by a favorite Gogolian device: a heterogeneous listing of objects thrown together. The jostling crowds and the haste are thus described: “Oxen, sacks, hay, Gypsies, pots, peasant women, honey-cakes …”; the noise is conveyed in “two fishwives bandying abuse and crayfish.” A pervasive evening smell: “… over the hushed lanes floated the savory steam from boiling dumplings.”

Drinking as well as eating plays a part in the festive atmosphere. A flirtatious young fellow, Gritsko, gets on the good side of a pretty girl's father, Tsibulya (Onion) Cherevik, by having a drinking bout with him, and when he asks for the girl's hand in marriage Cherevik consents, saying to his daughter, “See what a fine husband I've found for you! Just see how he drinks!”

At sundown, a tableau: “mountains of melons and pumpkins looking as if cast in dark copper or gold …”

Such also, with some insignificant changes, will be the setting of the remaining Ukrainian tales. The season is usually late summer (only one of the stories, “Christmas Eve”, is a winter tale). And although some of them begin in sunlight the darkness of night finally envelops all of them.

Besides these similarities, the devil in one form or another plays a predominant part in key incidents that affect the plot. And for a strictly Gogolian reason, the devil, in these tales, is closely associated with food.

FOOD AND THE FANTASTIC

The peaceful pastoral landscape of “The Fair at Sorochintsy” is suddenly disturbed by the irruption of a devil, who first appears to an old woman selling bagels. This intrusion of the supernatural into the lives of the peasants seems calculated to give verisimilitude to the marvellous. The naiveté of their belief in the devil is stressed by Tsibulya, who scoffs at their superstition. “Who is Satan?” he asks rhetorically, “I say, spit on him!” Nonetheless, another peasant notices that Tsibulya's face, usually as “red as a beet,” has grown pale at the mention of the devil.

Thus a fantastic element easily and almost imperceptibly slips into the framework of a tale that pretends to depict reality. The diabolic forces which Zhukovsky prudently contained within the limits of his romantic ballads, now blaze forth in Gogol's picturesque and exuberant tales of Ukraine. Gogol was to succeed in presenting Satan and his cohorts in a variety of forms hitherto unknown in Russian literature. Contrary to the romantic tradition, Gogol imagines the devil as having been contemptuously “kicked like a dog out of hell” and sent to roam the earth, where he never ceases to pine for his lost domain. To drown his sorrows, the devil has taken to drinking and once ran up such a bill in a tavern that he had to deposit his red shirt (or jacket) as security. In “The Fair at Sorochintsy” this garment passes from hand to hand, exercising diabolical powers wherever it turns up or is found. When, for instance, someone thrusts it into the butter-woman's cart, she sells no butter that day. The escapades of Red Jacket become the supernatural theme of this first tale and in one form or other, often a prankish carnival-devil, but sometimes also a dreaded and dreadful apparition, is present in all of these folk-tales.

Almost invariably this devil is associated in some way with food—food consumed or avoided or bewitched. Often too, he is placed in a ridiculous light. For example, the devil who is playing pranks in the sky suffers acutely from the cold night air, “and small wonder that the devil should be cold, accustomed as he was to the hot atmosphere of hell where, putting on his chef's bonnet and standing before the hearth like a real cook, he roasts sinners with as much enjoyment as a peasant woman roasting sausages at Christmas time.”

In Gogol's life also the devil was certainly associated with food; time and again in his letters he repeated in more or less the same words: “A devil sits in my stomach.” Writing to his friend Shevyrev in 1847 (sixteen years after the publication of the first Ukrainian tales), he said, however, that it had always been his intention “to render the devil ridiculous.”

On some occasions, nonetheless, Gogol places him in a climate of unmitigated horror, and never more so than when the Evil One assumes human form, as in “A Terrible Revenge” and “St. John's Eve.”

“A May Night, or the Drowned Maiden” is somewhat out of key with the other stories, since it is in the genre of German Romanticism, and abounds with step-mothers who are witches, persecuted step-daughters who drown themselves and become water-nymphs, and with a lovelorn youth who lacks any kind of “reality.” But here, too, food is associated with the fantastic, a drunken Cossack puts in an appearance, and an unforgettable incident occurs in which the ubiquitous dumplings play a part. The Drowned Maiden relates this incident, which occurred when her father and step-mother and five children were at supper:

“My step-mother shook some dumplings out of a big cauldron into a bowl to cool them. Everyone was too hungry to wait and, picking the dumplings up on long skewers we all began to eat. Suddenly a strange man appeared … and asked to be allowed to sit at table. There was no refusing a hungry man food, so they gave him a skewer. The visitor stowed away the dumplings like a cow eating hay. While the others had eaten only one dumpling each, the bowl was soon cleaned out … My step-mother dished out some more and … the visitor set to, gulping them down faster than ever, soon emptying the second bowl. ‘May you choke on the dumplings!’ muttered my step-mother. And all of a sudden the man choked and fell dead on the floor.”

This was clear proof that the step-mother was a witch. But the dead man had his revenge. His ghost returned to persecute the step-mother. “As soon as night fell,” the narrator continues, “he appeared and sat astride the chimney, holding a dumpling in his teeth.”

In a lighter vein “The Lost Letter” has as its hero a young Cossack who later became the grandfather of the narrator, Foma Grigorievich. Throughout the story, the narrator refers to him as Grandad, with comical results, since only a very young and energetic fellow could have engaged in such enterprises. The association of food with the fantastic is at once made clear in Foma's preamble: “Oh yes, I'll tell you how the witches made a fool of my Grandad. But, good friends, don't interrupt me or I'll make a messy kisel' of it, not fit to put in anyone's mouth.”

The story relates how Grandad, entrusted with a letter which he must take to the Tzarina, is enabled by demonic powers to carry out his mission, after encountering many difficulties. One night he approaches a group of demons gathered round a fire and banqueting. He is invited by them to share in their meal, which is comprised of “pork, sausages, onion minced with cabbage, and many other dainties.” The food itself is bewitched and try as he will, Grandad cannot manage to swallow it:

“… he pulled a bowl of sliced bacon and smoked ham towards him, took up a fork slightly smaller than the fork peasants use to pitch hay, picked out the biggest slice, laid it on a piece of bread—and lo and behold!—when he raised it to his mouth it shied away and entered another mouth beside his very ear, and immediately the sound of another fellow's jaws chewing it and clacking his teeth could be heard by everyone. Grandad tried again … Taking another slice he almost managed to get it into his mouth but did not manage to do so. The same thing happened then, and on a third try. Then Grandad flew into a rage …”

Fortunately these were good-natured demons, and after laughing uproariously at Grandad's discomfiture, they kindly provided him with a horse that might as well have had wings, for it fairly flew through the air, reaching the palace in time for him to hand the letter to the Tzarina herself. He found her in the throne-room, “wearing her gold crown, a new gown, and red boots, eating golden dumplings.”¹³

Bewitched food again plays a part in “Christmas Eve”. In one scene self-propelled turnovers obligingly fly into the mouth of Patsyuk, a demon in human form. He merely “opened his mouth, stared at a turnover, and it immediately popped out of the bowl, splashed into the cream, flopped over on its side, then flew directly upward into his mouth.” This performance is repeated until the bowl is emptied. Food and the fantastic, food and even references to love-making abound in this story. (In no story by Gogol is there a love scene in the strict sense of the word). The Christmas Eve carol singing by the young people in the village provides the thread holding together this story, for they expect to be rewarded with food. As Red-Headed Panko the Beekeeper explains: “Among us it is the custom to sing, under the windows on Christmas Eve, carols that are called kolyadki.¹⁴ Whoever is at home … always opens the window and drops into the singers' waiting bag some bread or sausage, or a coin or whatever else is at hand” and the priest “has forbidden people to sing kolyadki since they honored Satan by doing so.”

The demon is omnipresent here. Tormented is the Ukrainian night! An infernal glimmer illumines the snowy landscape, reflecting the eerie light of a moon obscured at times by a passing cloud—or by the devil and a witch who are sailing together through the sky, whispering sweet nothings! They are up to some mischief. The devil has his reasons for wanting to do away with the moon and leave the night in pitch darkness, so he finally pockets the moon! Now, says the narrator, “what motive led the devil to this lawless act? The explanation is this: he knew that Chub, the rich Cossack, had been invited by the sacristan to a supper of frumenty … with, besides, mulled vodka, saffron vodka, and good food of every kind.” With Chub away, his beautiful daughter Oksana would be left alone, and this would inevitably lead Vakula, the young blacksmith who is in love with her, to pay her a visit—and to get himself into trouble when the drunken Chub returned and caught him.

The devil detests Vakula, who is described as so strong that “he could twist a five-kopek piece and horseshoes in his hand as if they were pancakes.”¹⁵ The young blacksmith is an artist; he paints the “wooden bowls for borsch” used in the village. He has also painted a mural in the church showing the devil being driven out of hell on Judgment Day in a way that makes him look ridiculous. Infuriated, the devil is determined to be revenged on him.

As foreseen, the blacksmith visits his beloved Oksana, left alone by her father Chub. But his efforts to kiss her are repulsed: she will be his, only if he can accomplish an impossible task, that is, to bring her back from the capital a pair of slippers identical to those worn by the Tzarina. Vakula sets forth on his mission; he compels the devil to carry him piggy-back through the air to Petersburg. The moon escapes from the devil's pouch and once more in the sky sheds an eerie light upon the wintry scene, unveiling some uncanny sights such as: “a demon dancing … a broom flying home … and many nasty things besides.”

The blacksmith is received with a group of Cossacks by Potemkin and the Tzarina, whose first question to the Cossacks is “Are you well fed here?” To which they reply, “Yes indeed, they give us excellent provisions, though the mutton here is not at all what we have in Zaporozhye.” Vakula the blacksmith admires the Tzarina's embroidered slippers and declares, “Your Majesty's feet in them must be made of pure sugar, at least!” He then inquires of her “whether it is true that tzars eat nothing but honey, fat bacon, and the like,” and he so ingratiates himself with her that the Tzarina gives him a pair of her very own slippers, which he triumphantly takes back to Oksana.

In “A Place Bewitched”, Foma Grigorievich's “Grandad” is again the chief protagonist, but is now depicted as a hearty old man who can still dance with the best of the Cossacks. This story includes all the Gogolian variations on the demonic—the nose figures prominently with much sneezing and blowing, pig-snouts and so on, all of these directed toward a bewitched melon patch: “It's wonderful ground and there's always a big crop on it, but nothing good has ever grown on that bewitched place. They may sow it properly, but there's no telling what will come up: it's not a melon or pumpkin or a cucumber, the devil only knows what to make of it.”

Interestingly enough, Gogol, while still a student at Nezhin, wrote to his mother on September 12, 1827, about a melon he considered more than strange: “How are affairs going down there? Pavel Petrovich writes telling me that on one of the melon patches there was found a melon with a belly button rather than a stem. I am bewildered by such an unusual phenomenon, and I would very much like to find out the cause of it.”

FOOD AND LOVE

In the world created by Gogol, man seems to be led by his most primitive instinct, hunger, and by the most primitive of pleasures, the enjoyment of food. By comparison the reproductive instinct (the seeking of a mate and amorous activities) is weak and, as has been said, is always associated closely with food in Gogol's writings.

Food and love are, in turn, almost invariably linked to the devil and his temptations: time and again in these Ukrainian tales, lovers trade their souls, their personalities, in order to obtain the favors of the loved one. Petro, for instance, in “St. John's Eve” does so, as does Vakula the blacksmith (to a certain extent) in “Christmas Eve”. The abdication of their personalities renders them vulnerable to the devil's temptations. And they themselves are puzzled at their own behavior. “This foolish love has made me behave stupidly,” says Vakula.

In “The Fair at Sorochintsy” Cherevik's unfaithful wife, the red-faced woman who looks like a witch and may be one, hurries home to keep an assignation with her lover, the priest's son, confident that her husband is so drunk at the fair that he won't disturb them. The “love scene” is pure farce and might be termed an orgy of eating and talk about food. She greets her lover with “I hear your honorable father has had a run of good luck!” And he replies, “Oh, nothing to speak of, during the entire fast Father received nothing but fifteen sacks or so of spring wheat, four sacks of millet and a hundred bread-rolls. As for chickens, there were no more than fifty, and the eggs were for the most part rotten. But the truly sweet offerings, Khavronya Nikiforovna, can only come from you, I might say!” She fulfills his expectations. “Here is my offering for you, Afanasy Ivanovich! … Here are curd doughnuts, wheaten dumplings, buns, and cakes!” she says, setting some bowls of food on the table, “and coyly fastening the buttons on her blouse as though they had not been undone purposely …”

The “love scene” then continues: as the priest's son immediately sets to work upon the cakes and with the other hand draws the doughnuts toward him, he speaks of love! “Though, indeed, Khavronya Nikiforovna, my heart thirsts for a gift from you sweeter than any buns or doughnuts!”

They are still eating when the woman's husband comes home unexpectedly and “the doughnut stuck in the young man's gullet” as he hears a loud knocking at the door …

In “Christmas Eve” Solokha, the witch who is much sought after by the swains of the village, returns home by way of the chimney, closely followed by the devil who takes the same route. Solokha has for some time managed to receive the amorous attentions of all the important men in the village without any of them finding out that there are rivals for her favors. Her most attractive feature was, Gogol evidently believes, the food she provided; her lovers “liked to eat her curd dumplings with sour cream.” The wealthy peasant Chub is one of the suitors, his wealth being apparent in the “eight stacks of grain” that stand in front of his cottage and the many cattle in his barn, and his kitchen garden where “poppies, cabbages, and sunflowers grow”—(it must be recalled that sunflower seeds are a favorite edible of the peasants, and that poppy-seed rolls were much esteemed by them). He arrives, “very drunk on the mulled vodka” he has been drinking and correctly blames “some devil” for his drunken state: “May he never have a glass of vodka to drink in the morning, the cur!”

Meanwhile Chub's daughter Oksana is entertaining Vakula, the young blacksmith. She eludes his efforts to kiss her, saying, “Anything else you want? When there's honey, a man needs a spoon!” She is haughty and flirtatious—and Oksana is one of the few women in Gogol's writings who have any semblance of reality.

“St. John's Eve” is a tale of horror in which a penniless lad sells his soul to the devil, who promises him a wealth of buried treasure which will enable him to marry the rich girl with whom he is in love. Here the devil is in human form, a much-feared stranger by the name of Basavryuk. The diabolic bargain leads to a series of tragic incidents, both before and after the marriage. The union brings no happiness and the tale ends with the death of the young man, and his bride taking the veil. That is to say, the love-story ends at this point. “But this,” says Gogol, “was not the end of it all,” and the terrifying sequel follows. One day, as the village elders are feasting on “a whole roast ram,” the ram suddenly comes to life, winks evilly, and “its face was seen to sprout a black bristly mustache.” They recognize Basavryuk, and realize there is no escaping the devil! And other strange things occur as well in the locality. For example, the church-warden's wife, “while mixing the dough in a huge tub” is scared nearly to death when the tub leaps away from her and solemnly dances all over the hut. The elders and their families abandon their homes, their houses fall into ruins. But still, years later, much to the fear of the passerby, smoke is seen to roll out of the chimney of the ruined inn …

This story is exceptional in the sense that food is not a motivating force in it, nor are its characters depicted in the act of eating, aside from the one scene of the bewitched roast ram at the banquet. But food-metaphors and food-similes do occur: an old woman is described as having a face “wrinkled like a baked apple,” and the lover's eagerness to be with his loved one is compared to the eagerness of “chickens waiting for the goodwife to bring their grain.”

FOOD AND RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES

“A Terrible Revenge” is hard to classify, for this story goes far beyond the chimney-corner stories of the Ukrainian cycle and, like “St. John's Eve”, but even more so, its aim is to frighten rather than to entertain the rustic listeners.

Here all comical effects disappear and the fantastic becomes horrible and tragic. It is a diabolical fantasy without any ambiguity. Satan manifests himself at once and in broad daylight at the very beginning of the story, abruptly. The power of Evil appears during the festivities attending a country wedding, just as the guests are being “regaled with mulled vodka flavored with raisins and prunes, and a wedding-loaf.”

The Evil One appears in human form, as a Cossack unknown to the wedding guests. At the moment of the benediction “his nose grew bigger and twisted to one side, his brown eyes turned green, his lips became blue, his chin lengthened to a point like a spear and tusks showed between his lips.” Among the guests are Danilo Burulbash with his young wife Katerina who eventually recognizes in this wizard her own father, returned from the Turkish wars.

Here Gogol seems to carry to its extreme his vision of the devil; here also there is no distance between the possible and the impossible, between man and his diabolic double. In the course of the story, through the medium of a dream (Katerina's nightmare), this effacement of distance is emphasized, for Katerina is simultaneously in her bedroom and elsewhere, in a jail, in conversation with her diabolic and incestuous father. Gogol here proves his competence as a narrator of horror-tales.

Food, however, plays as important a part in “The Terrible Revenge” as in the other stories. The use or avoidance of a particular food serves to distinguish an individual from the rest of the group; thus it might be said to have a sacramental value. This is also true when any food is consumed on a religious fast-day. Gogol often uses food in this way to distinguish the devil and his myrmidons from the human beings in the Ukrainian tales. When, for instance, Grandad, in “The Lost Letter” encounters and joins a band of demons who are feasting, he comments sadly, “The hellish rabble don't keep the fasts, it seems.” And Vakula, the blacksmith in “Christmas Eve” is less astounded by the sight of the wizard eating bewitched turnovers than he is by the thought that the wizard is eating on a fast-day. Thus, in “The Terrible Revenge”, Katerina's father is shown to be possessed by the devil when he refuses to eat dumplings and roast pork! But there the reasons for rejecting the regional foods are somewhat different. (This devil-in-human-form here is “not a Christian devil” like the others; he is “an Infidel devil” with pagan, or Oriental, characteristics.)

The irrational conclusions which people draw from this wizard's prejudices about food are always those of Christians who see pagan influences at work in him. “He would not drink mead!” says Danilo, scandalized when his father-in-law rejects the honey-wine offered him. “He won't even drink vodka! … I truly believe that he does not believe in Christ!” And Danilo, an Orthodox Christian Cossack, adds: “yet even the unclean (Roman) Catholics have a weakness for vodka. It is only the Turks who do not drink.” When the diabolic father-in-law refuses dumplings it is an even worse scandal. “I don't like dumplings,” the wizard says, pushing them away. To which Danilo replies, “It is a Christian food. All holy people and godly saints have always eaten dumplings.” Then, when the roast wild-boar is served—it has been “cooked with cabbage and prunes”—the wizard will taste only a spoonful of the cabbage. “I don't like pork,” he says. Whereupon Danilo comments, “It is only Turks and Jews who won't eat pork.”

After more sinister facts have been discovered about Katerina's father, Danilo quarrels with him and the diabolic interloper warns him: “Have a care! I leave my opponents cut to pieces, in bits smaller than the grain used for kasha.”

At length Danilo comes to a terrible conclusion: “Do you know,” he says to his wife, “that your father is the Antichrist?”

So much for that. But the quintessence of the macabre is reached toward the end of this story, when an executioner casts the wizard into a chasm where living corpses are devouring each other, and “seize him in their teeth.” This grisly epitome of cannibalism is heightened by the following words: “And often in the Carpathians a sound is heard as though a thousand mills were churning water with their wheels: it is the sound of the dead men gnawing a corpse in the fatal chasm …”

This gloomy and tragic tale of Cossacks, the scene of which is laid in Kiev, foretokens in certain details the epic of “Taras Bulba” that Gogol was to write in later years. It is followed by the hilariously farcical tale, “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and his Aunt”, which marks an entirely new departure, since here, for the first time, Gogol leaves behind him the world of ignorant peasants, and enters the world of the country gentry, that of his own background, which he first parodies here. In this story food is the be-all and end-all of the characters, and practically the entire “action”—if there is any—is the description of a dinner-party. In a way this story anticipates Dead Souls. It is, Panko tells us, only a fragment of a longer story he had asked the narrator to write down. The written story became mislaid: the missing pages had been used to line the pans in which Panko's wife had baked some pies. “She's a great pie-baker, you'll never taste better pies anywhere,” he says. Thus the prefatory remarks set the mood for the feasting, or rather gormandizing, that follows.

In the story itself, Shponka is depicted as a bachelor with a distinct fear of females and a horror of marriage. Quite a lot of autobiographical details can be glimpsed through the farcical masks of this story, which marks another departure for Gogol: pancakes, one of his favorite foods, here supplant the dumplings of the stories dealing with peasants. And certainly an incident that is recounted from Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka's schooldays could well be a recollection of Gogol's schooldays in Nezhin.

As monitor in his class, Shponka was bribed by one of the students to give him good marks he did not deserve. The bribe was “a pancake soaked in butter and wrapped in paper.” Ivan Fyodorovich could not resist the temptation. “Taking the pancake and holding a book up before him, he began to eat it, and was so absorbed in what he was doing that he did not notice the frightened silence that had fallen over the classroom until a terrible hand reached out, seized him by the ear, and dragged him into the middle of the room. It was the fearsome schoolmaster. ‘Hand over that pancake, you rascal!’ he ordered, and seizing the buttery pancake he flung it out the window …”

Such an incident might well leave an indelible memory!

While serving in his regiment, Shponka corresponded with his aunt. He scarcely knew her, and his only memory of her was of the occasion when, in his childhood, she had sometimes brought him “dried pears and extremely nice honey-cakes she made herself,” dainties which she had continued later to send him. The letters they exchanged are marked by their brevity, but also by their frequent references to food items: “There are wonderful turnips in our kitchen-garden,” writes the aunt in a postscript, “They look very strange, more like potatoes than turnips.” In a similarly short note Shponka informs her: “As to your commission in regard to the seed wheat of the Siberian variety, I cannot carry it out; there is none here. As regards pigs in this province, they are mainly fed on brewers' mash together with a little beer when it has grown flat.”

After being discharged from the army, Lieutenant Shponka returns to his lands. For the journey by post-chaise he provided himself with “two bundles of bread-rings and a sausage.” This was indeed a wise precaution, since the peasants who patronized the inns where he stopped “ate their soup with cockroaches in it.”

At one of such inns Shponka meets a fat and prosperous country gentleman who “looked as if all his life he had rolled in butter” and who can talk of nothing but food. When Shponka arrives home he learns from his aunt that his fellow-traveller is none other than his neighbor Grigory Grigoryevich Storchenko, whose mother is “a very sensible woman and a great hand at pickling cucumbers.” And as for Shponka's aunt, she too is a very capable woman, “racing to the kitchen, brewing kvas, making jam with honey” and, like Ivan Ivanovich (in the story “The Two Ivans”) she knows “the exact number of melons in the kitchen garden.” Under her tutelage, Shponka soon gives signs that he has “the makings of an excellent farmer.” In connection with a real-estate controversy he must pay a call on Grigory Grigoryevich. Of course, as can be expected from Gogol, such a meeting can only take place during a meal! So Shponka is invited to dinner, and the remainder of the story is about that dinner; the story is indeed a foretaste of Dead Souls, again to use a food-metaphor as Gogol would. Present at the dinner are two young ladies, sisters of the host, but the bashful Shponka scarcely exchanges a word with them. (The composition of the family—mother, son, and two daughters—recalls that of Gogol's family.) “How many cucumbers have you pickled for the winter?” is Shponka's opening remark upon being introduced to the host's mother.

As everyone gathers around the table for “some bread and pickled mushrooms” the dead father of Shponka is eulogized by one of the guests who, drawing Shponka aside, imparts a nostalgic recollection: “He used to have melons such as you never see anywhere now. Here,” he adds in a low voice, “they'll set melon before you such as you won't care to look at! Whereas your father used to have watermelons as big as that”—flinging wide his arms! At last the dinner is served and a chorus of voices goes on. “Don't take the bishop's nose, Ivan Fyodorovich!” the old lady urges Shponka … “It's a turkey! Take the back!” … “Ivan Fyodorovich, do take a wing, the one with the gizzard!” … “Why do you take so little? Take a leg!” Even the servants are drawn into the act: “Go down on your knees, you rascal!” the host shouts at one of them: “Say at once ‘Ivan Fyodorovich, take a leg!’” The servant obeys: “Ivan Fyodorovich, take a leg!” Meanwhile another guest mutters to Shponka in a low voice, “Well! Do you call this a turkey! You should but see my turkeys! I assure you there's more fat on one of them than on a dozen of these.”

“For a while the clatter of knives, spoons, and plates took the place of conversation, not to mention the noise made by Grigory Grigoryevich as he sucked the marrow out of the mutton bones.” Thus Gogol provides a background for all this talk. Finally the dinner ends on a conversation about growing “cucumbers and potatoes” and how to make “pear kvas,” and of the size of melons and the fatness of the geese … and …”

When Shponka reports on the visit after his aunt has asked about the real-estate controversy and learned that Grigory Grigoryevich has proved to be adamant in the matter, she gets down to the important subject: “Was the dinner good?” She prods Shponka to describe it in detail, for “The old lady is a great hand at cooking, that I know.” Shponka obeys. “We had curd fritters with sour cream … and stuffed pigeons in a sauce …” His aunt interrupts: “And a turkey with prunes?” Shponka replies: “Yes, and some handsome young ladies … especially the fair-haired one.” And here, inadvertently, Shponka challenges his fate! Indeed, these few words are quite enough for his aunt to start making plans for a possible wedding, visualizing the cakes she will bake for it and even the infant grand-nephew, offspring of that marriage!

Immediately, she pays a visit to the mother of the fair-haired young lady, but of this we know only that the two women talked about food—buckwheat, the pickling of cucumbers, the drying of pears. Back home she makes it clear to her nephew that she expects him to marry the young lady. And that same night Shponka has a nightmare in which he is already married and notices that his wife has “the face of a goose.” Then suddenly the Gogolian grotesque unfurls: this goose-faced wife in Shponka's dream becomes “a kind of woolen material” and the tailor tells him, “You had better take a wife, everyone is having coats made of it now” and he “measures and cuts off a wife” for our hero, who wakes up in terror. At this point both the story and the dream end abruptly, or rather, the story ends like a dream, in an awkward and unfinished way, providing as well a most unexpected ending to the Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

In these early stories, only about two-thirds of the many references to the motif of food have been mentioned. Time and again Gogol returns to the delight of melons and evokes the bucolic peace that fills the countryside as the steam rises from cauldrons in which luscious dumplings are cooking in the soup for the evening meal. At a later occasion, we shall return briefly to some of the items mentioned above, but at this point, we will leave behind these early tales based on folklore and published when Gogol was barely twenty-three. Another epoch in his life and art is now at hand: a time of tremendous creativity and turmoil.

Notes

1. In most of these early stories, published in 1831 and 1832, Gogol already employs the stylistic device he was to bring to perfection in his masterpiece, Dead Souls, a decade later. That is to say, the author-narrator comments on the characters and events he describes, his comments being in his own style; he intervenes in the telling of the tale, instead of remaining “outside.” To quote again the authors of Theory of Literature, “The central problem of narrative method concerns the relation of the author to his work … The epic poet tells a story as a professional story-teller, including his own comments … There are two ways of deviating from the mixed mode of epic narration” and “the romantic-ironic style … deliberately magnifies the role of the narrator.” 222-223).

   This literary device had been used by Cervantes and by Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy had enjoyed great success throughout Europe, as had Don Quijote in earlier years. And although Guilbert Guerney, in the foreword to his translation of Dead Souls, discounts “any foreign influence on Gogol,” Sterne's influence, at least, seems to be clearly visible. And Guerney finally admits that “Cervantes did influence Gogol—but only indirectly, through Pushkin … Cervantes and Gogol stride through time side by side as satirists of the same stature.”

2. V. Veresaev, Gogol v zhizni, Gogol's Contemporaries' Testimonies, Academia, Moscow-Leningrad, 1933, 37.

3. Kvas is defined in Webster's Dictionary as: “a thin sour beer, commonly made by pouring warm water on rye or barley and letting it ferment.”

4. Veresaev, 64.

5. Hants Kükhelgarten, a narrative in verse. There is little mention of food in it and the one that occurs is clumsy, to say the least: “Louise fed bread to the cat with her own hands, and the cat, purring, approached stealthily, ‘hearing’ the smell.”

6. The first indications of the cultivation of potatoes in Russia occurred during the reign of Catherine II. Nonetheless, during the reigns of Paul I and Alexander I, some measures were taken toward the dissemination of the South American tuber that had already become a staple food in Ireland. (Hence the appellation in English of “Irish potato.”) The development of potato-cultivation was at first resisted by the population. It was only in 1840, after a poor grain harvest, that Nicholas I imposed, by decree, the planting and cultivation of potatoes on government lands propitious to its growth, establishing as well a system of recompenses to landowners who grew potatoes on their lands. According to the Encyclopedia F. Brokkhaus and A. Efron, vol. 28, p. 629: “The potato-mutiny in 1842 was the most important popular revolt in the 19th century.”

   This revolt against the cultivation of the potato preceded the revolts in Ireland which occurred in 1846-1847, following the “potato-famine” (caused by potato-blight), which resulted in a mass-migration of Irish people to America. The Russian population wanted nothing to do with the potato, while the Irish people wanted and needed the humble tuber!

7. There is no equivalent in Anglo-American cookery for kasha, which has often been rendered in English as “porridge,” implying that it is a breakfast food, to be eaten with milk. In fact, it is a cereal dish, prepared sometimes with the addition of fat, “and is served with meat or incorporated in liberal amounts in soups and stews … Buckwheat is the grain preferred … but kashas are also made from wheat, barley, millet, maize, or rice.” (H. C. Sherman, “The Food Supply of Russia”, Political Quarterly, 33, ed. of the Faculty of Political Science of Columbia Univ., New York, 1918, 217.)

8. Kisel' is a dessert having the consistency of custard, made with a native red berry, thickened with potato flour.

9. Note how the nose intrudes here, the olfactory sense amplifying the sense of taste, and also note how sweets predominate in the list of table delights—Gogol had a very sweet tooth.

10. The implication is that women can “do anything” when it comes to culinary accomplishments.

11. The glossary, however, is far from adequate. Of the 72 words listed, 19 relate to food, drink, and kitchen utensils. The definitions are only approximate. For instance, pampushki are defined as “food made out of dough”!

12. The soi-disant landowner mistakenly has cherry trees and apple trees bearing fruit simultaneously!

13. This story contains all the “trademarks” of Gogol. There are numerous heterogeneous lists, such as “a woman-pedlar with flints, packets of bluing, small shot and bagels”; the nose is as usual ubiquitous; the same woman pedlar is “snoring where she sat”; the narrator interrupts the story several times with his comments; etc. The wagons laden with salt and fish that appeared in the story of the Sorochintsy country fair come to mind when a gypsy is seen, “lying under a wagon from the Crimea laden with fish …” Gogol, in a letter, describes a plan he had of benefitting his native Ukraine by importing “wagons of fish and salt from the Crimea.” (6/1/1835) And graphic food-similes abound. For example, Grandad reflects that if he were to use his fists on the Cossacks, “they would fall to the ground like so many pears.” The demons have as usual “pig-faces, dog-faces, goat-faces.” And the very act of eating food forbidden during Lent is wicked, for the events recounted all occur in Lent.

14. On Christmas Eve, it used to be the custom in Ukraine for the boys and girls of the village to go from house to house, carrying empty bags, and singing kolyadki—songs perhaps pagan in origin but adapted to the Christian festival, and corresponding to Christmas carols. The old folks in the houses would drop into the bags some food, such as sausage or bread. Thus, to anyone acquainted with the custom, the very word kolyadki suggests food.

15. This is apparently the first reference to pancakes, which were later to figure so importantly in Gogol's writings.