STANLEY MITCHELL

Nikolai Gogol

DEAD SOULS Translated by Donald Rayfield; illustrated by Marc Chagall 366pp.

Garnett Press. £29.99. 978095358 787 8

Chagall's illustrations to Dead Souls were the artist's first commission after leaving Russia for good and settling in France. They represent the most important turning point in his life. They are not only illustrations to Gogol, they are a farewell to Russia - to the Jewish shtetl and to Chagall's brief political service to the Bolsheviks in the new Art Academy of his native Vitebsk. The etchings are often extraordinarily grotesque and belong to a turbulent stream of grotesque art in the early years of the Revolution. Bely, Bulgakov and Babel were among the writers of the time who felt a particular kinship with Gogol, and had Chagall remained in Russia he might well have become the artist of Meyerhold's scandalous production of Gogol's Inspector General in 1926. He had already sketched figures for the play when Moscow's Theatre of Revolutionary Satire visited Vitebsk. So, too, with Gogol's other plays, The Gambler and The Marriage; and to the same year belongs a watercolor, "In Honor of Gogol" (1919). The Russian satirist was in his blood. There is also the coincidence that Gogol left Russia for twelve years in order to write Dead Souls. This, too was a kind of farewell, for although Gogol returned to his homeland he was never able to settle there again. Shortly before his death in Russia in 1852, he burned the drafts of the second part of his masterpiece; only fragments have survived.

This is the first edition of Dead Souls to include all Chagall's illustrations since their original appearance in Paris in 1948. However important the etchings, they have remained the Cinderella of Chagall's work. His dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had commissioned him to illustrate the Fables of La Fontaine and his sketches for the Bible (sending him to Palestine for the purpose), kept them in a cellar for twenty years. They were published by Tériade nine years after Vollard's death and were awarded a grand prix at the Venice graphics biennale immediately afterwards. They have been routinely ignored by curators and scholars ever since.

The illustrations marked a new direction for Chagall. With the one exception, an earlier experiment in autobiography, he was etching for the first time, searching exuberantly for new techniques that ranged from drypoint to aquatint. To quote from Marx in a different context: all that is solid melts into air. When Chichikov visits the landowner, Manilov, the two men are done in aquatint and look relatively human. When they part, their bodies become transparent, as if they are themselves the dead souls. Magnitudes vary crazily and the humor is magnificent. A monstrous Sobakevich prepares to settle into a diminutive armchair. The clerks in the court office are reduced to tiny heads, wielding matchstick pens at barely visible desks, or faces floating in a void. A giant condescending Chichikov appears before the Lilliputian guests at a ball. A similarly huge Nozdryov unmasks Chichikov on the same occasion. The physiognomy of the characters changes from one illustration to another. The effect is a diabolical carnival of masks. Gogol does nothing like this, and his metaphorical flights are by comparison realistic. For this reason, a commentary on the relationship of the images to the text would have been welcome. Gogol himself refused any request to illustrate his work, commenting that any illustration could only "sweeten" the novel. In his short introduction, Donald Rayfield claims that Gogol found in Chagall his true illustrator, calling Chagall's imagination "surreal". Yet in his comments on the novel, Rayfield sides with the nineteenth-century "realist" interpretations. Gogol's characters, he suggests, are alive and well in today's Russia. All the more reason, then, to shed some light on the notable nineteenth-century illustrators of Dead Souls, Alexander Agin and Pyotr Boklevsky. Boklevsky's portraits of Sobakevich and the miser, Plyushkin, are marvellous satires in the spirit of the writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Chagall's Plyushkin is very similar to Boklevsky's. Rayfield accompanies the etchings with a new translation which has a twofold aim: to correct the mistakes of previous translators and to make the novel sound like a theatrical text in which even the longest sentences (and there are many) can be read out loud without loss of breath. Certainly, he succeeds with his first aim, and his translation is fresher and more energetic than the best previous version, by David Magarshack (1961). In other respects it is not a marked improvement. Magarshack's rendering of Gogol's famous troika peroration, for instance, is no less effective than Rayfield's.

Rayfield makes much in his introductory comments of the importance of the salvaged Part Two, arguing that his version is mort inclusive than any other. In fact, Christophel English's translation (1987) includes both the stories that Rayfield misses in earlier translations. More importantly, Rayfield suggest that Part Two prefigures the novels of Goncharov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Since Part Two sets out on the road of redemption, where we behold a freshly burnished Chichikov, accompanied by figures who on the whole are less imaginative than those in Part One, we are unlikely to find the future Russian literature germinating here. Nor can I imagine Chagall wanting to illustrate Part Two. Nikolai Dobrolyubov spotted the only convincing connection between Part Two and later Russian fiction in his essay What is Oblomovvism? (1859-60), where he linked the landowners Tentetnikov and Platonov with Gonchaarov's hero, Oblomov. But in Part One, Gogol had already characterized an idle dreamer in Manilov who is much more perniciously comic than this pair. The famous remark often attributed to Dostoevsky that "We all emerged from Gogol's overcoat" (a reference to Gogol's story of 1842) remains more accurate.

TLS JULY 10 2009