There are two modes of Gogolian exaggeration—that which is spoken by the narrator as a mode of description, rapid summary, or characterization, and that which directly occurs in the diegetic world, as dialogue. To best understand the former, one does well to start with the actual syntax of Gogol’s description—which is, to be sure, nearly always hyperbolic. Bruyov succinctly points out that Gogol does not deal in “comparative” quality; everything he describes is endowed with either “absolute” beauty, or vileness, filled with intense language and often littered with descriptors, like when he relates Akakii Akakievich’s newfound sense of purpose upon visualizing his coat (Bryusov 111 and Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales, 127). There is a sense of irony here, but not within the description itself, which reads almost romantically, and which has clearly been arranged with sufficient care to warrant appreciation as a poetic image. Rather, the irony comes from its context within the rest of the text, and the saturation of this sort of absurdly hyperbolic diction throughout the novel. When Gogol describes the reception of the titular overcoat as “the most memorable and festive day” in the clerk’s life,

only to say he “returned home in the best possible frame of mind”

just a few pages later, he is fundamentally degrading the realism of the narrative (Gogol 128, 130). This already poses a paradox in narration that is otherwise grounded in detail, internally consistent causal logic, and recognizable social typology (Gippius 80).
 

Narratorial exaggeration is rooted primarily in caricature; qualitative description in Mertvye dushi and the Petersburg tales, when it veers into the poetic, is ironic and absurd to the point of comedy, and always rooted in fixation on “key features” (Bryusov 106). More pointedly, Gogolian caricature involves the distillation of character or quality to one or two key characteristics, which dictate depiction from conduct to physical appearance, all forming a perfectly cohesive character that is both absurd and psychologically “effective,” capable of possessing motives and acting on them. There is, for instance, Akakii Akakievich, and the complete banality from which his whole being flows outward in a way that is both realistic and comically absurd. I think of his fondness for specific letters and how he cannot help but smile when he gets to hand-copy them in the tedious clerk job he adores (Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales, 118). When Gogol describes this little thrill, it is in a sense realistic: he has decided Akakii Akakievich is vigorously dull, and this is a specific and psychologically penetrative glimpse into how that dullness manifests itself. But naturally it is also patently ridiculous; such good-natured, active banality (and, indeed, such obsessive anxiety over the very possibility of anything interesting happening) simply do not translate into reality, and real people get bored. This particular incongruity is the most consistent source of comedy in this piece, and I would posit in Gogol at large. But it presents a tension between the real and the fantastic that Gogol makes no move to resolve or hide, and in fact foregrounds almost ceaselessly.
 

This uncanniness is always rooted in language—especially in the conflict it poses with other modes of sensory perception. And hyperbole is a particularly valuable tool for imbuing a fictional world with such uncanniness: its redolence throughout Mertvye dushi and Gogol’s short fiction conditions the reader to disregard the literal meaning of words (Bryusov 111). When he describes Chartkov’s reaction to the titular otherworldly portrait, he sees the artist so terrified that he stands literally speechless and wide-eyed, mouth agape, “more dead than alive,” in what is essentially the archetypal image of a person who is afraid (Bryusov 71). The reader does not take images like this entirely seriously, and reads them as intensifiers rather than actual fictional truth about what “really” occurred when, on another occasion in Mertvye dushi, the provincial official Ivan Antonovich is too “overcome by awe” to enter his superior’s office, and is compared to Vergil stopping before Purgatory (Gogol, Dead Souls). Gogol also tends to use the frequentative, as when Pirogov would “sometimes” throw himself on his divan, and proclaim a full three-line sentence about how everything is vanity. Surely, the reader intuits, the lieutenant does not mutter the exact same sentence every time he does this, least of all with a sentiment so melodramatic and hyperbolic. But Gogol has put this description into the iterative; even though the instance seems to be specific, with Pirogov saying a specific quote and languishing with a specific motion, this individual instance has been inflated and made metonymic; it serves as the distillation of this whole aspect of his personality (Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales, 26).

 

This technique certainly makes it harder to achieve a sense of fictional reality, and arrive conclusively at what exactly “happened” and what did not (and corollarily, what matters and what does not) in a Gogol narrative. But its grander result is that it greatly undercuts the authority of the narration. The frequency of hyperbole in Gogol’s style means the reader grows accustomed to reading e.g. “it seemed that the entire city wanted to be painted by [Chartkov]” as “Chartkov had steady business and was popular,” attributing the rest to simple poetic flair, with no import on the fictional world at all (Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales, 87). In essence, by sheer volume and magnitude of constant description, Gogol has diluted the power of his own voice. If a fictional character’s eyelashes truly were “as long as arrows,” certainly the reader would have no way of knowing, as Gogolian discourse essentially trains one to read descriptions as fictive, within fiction (Bryusov 116). There certainly exist those elements in Gogol’s fiction that are patently surreal. Kovalyov loses his nose and finds it assuming the identity of a state councilor, and Chartkov acquires a painting that seems demonstrably Satanic. But the readerly mindset which Gogol cultivates through sheer repetition—that of a distinctly casual (not even active or suspicious) “distrust” of narrated language—renders even the concrete aspects of the setting ambiguous, uncanny, and often fantastical, all through sustained exaggeration.

 

By working to erode language’s authority, Gogol sets the psychological stage for conflict between the sensory and verbal. While a reader might anticipate sight or sound to be the clarifying agent in otherwise hyperbolic description, firmly rooting an event or person in the realm of the concrete and sensory, this is simply not the case. As Chichikov reaches the village on Pliushkin’s estate, sense is compromised by metonym, and visually the roofs of the peasants’ huts “were as full of holes as a sieve” to him as he drives by (Gogol, Dead Souls, 112). This is a subjective statement of perception: it is focalized through Chichikov, and, while a ridiculous image, it is nevertheless one given through a character’s voice, obtained by his senses. Thus, one expects, as usual, that the hovels are simply decayed and shoddy, not literally letting water through like a strainer. But Gogol is adamant, and even asserts in the next sentence (and in his own narratorial voice) that the owner had literally removed many of the roofs and shutters from the village (Gogol, Dead Souls, 112). The reader is left unsure how to imagine the space, despite the vehement clarity of Gogol’s descriptions, which are as absolute as ever. So it goes when Gogol uses hyperbolic descriptions to capture visual or auditory information, in addition to his stylized treatment of character. Never do these descriptions of sensory information resolve this central ambiguity, nor does Gogol place them in a context in which the reader might arrive at the fictional truth. Rather, exaggerated detail will often spin out and create further embedded fiction, introducing unnamed background characters who even have histories and apparent inner lives.
 

Nabokov identifies one such instance concerning the black-jacketed officers’ coterie at the governor’s ball in Part One of Mertvye dushi (Nabokov 78-79). According to Gogol, they are “like flies,” buzzing around a sugar-loaf as an old housekeeper with cataracts (made worse by the dazzling sunlight) splits it into lumps while the children of the estate surround her, watching, intrigued (Gogol, Dead Souls, 13). This image certainly provides (through the dirty stickiness of the sugar, the unpleasantness of the buzzing, the vulgarity of the swarming, and the nuisance of the flies’ intrusion) a keen sense of how the officers conduct themselves; but it also spirals off into two generations’ worth of distant peripheral
characters, succinctly and incisively evoking their provincial lifestyles and histories, and then shuffles them off without so much as a name. Here, sensual experience—related through the hyperbole of comparing annoying officers at a ball to meddlesome black flies—is a vehicle for the demonstration of language’s looseness. And when Gogol exaggerates a trait of these men, he does so in a way that takes the narration (and consequently the reader) off even further into fantasy and unreality, where this country scene can play out completely independent of the plot matter (Nabokov 79). This hyperbole is at once Gogol’s re-assertion of the vitality of his own descriptive language, and a demonstration of its complete inutility.

 

This sort of ambiguity in Gogol’s language is not limited to that which is “spoken” by the narrator. Characters, too, speak to each other (and themselves) in exaggerated manners that nudge the narrative (and thus, the reader) toward the uncanny, and the fantastical. On the very first page, two peasants have an exchange about Chichikov’s chaise that is the very picture of banality: one asks the other if the wheels would carry it to Moscow, and the other affirms it; the former supposes they would never support the chaise all the way to Kazan, and the latter agrees (Gogol, Dead Souls, 1). Nabokov archly characterizes this as a sort of “primitive ‘to be or not to be,’” emphasizing its speculative character and the active abstraction that the characters perform. I disagree only slightly; I posit the real tenor of this conversation is that it is perfectly phatic. The language here transmits no real meaning, but it establishes a distinct uncanniness in the exaggerated mundanity of the peasants’ thoughts, and their contentedness in their preoccupation. Furthermore, it shows how language in Gogol can actually lead to concord: so long as a speaker and interlocutor are voiced by the same hyperbole, they can get along flawlessly. This patently vacuous conversation is aptly compared with the one between Chichikov and Manilov, as the former deftly plays to the latter’s effusiveness, and walks away from the transaction with his first batch of expired serfs (Gogol, Dead Souls, 36).
 

For contrast, one might examine Mme. Korobachka, whose absurdly rigid understanding of language utterly prevents her from grasping the principle behind “selling” intangible dead souls to a merchant until Chichikov finally cajoles her into viewing them as living and material again, taking their names, nicknames, and professions by dictation as he writes up his own bill of sale (Gogol, Dead Souls, 50-52 and Maguire 223). Likewise, there is Nozdrev, whose vulgarity and brute forcefulness Chichikov cannot match, and whose type prevents him from buying into the latter’s cunning language (Woodward 46-47). It is too simple to say that in these cases characters “talk past” one another. Rather, Gogol’s hyperbole has so thoroughly defined his characters that they become impenetrable to all language that does not directly describe them or engage on their plane—like when the hapless police officer threatens Nozdryov, and distracts him, or like when the curious townspeople indulge Mme. Korobachka’s senility, apparently having barely more sense than she does (Gogol, Dead Souls, 88). Hyperbole effectively dictates fantastical terms; exaggerated characters insist on being engaged with according to their type, and in so doing reinforce the sense that all people and events in Gogol are stylized and somehow uncanny. Here he offers more than just an undermining of realism, or of narratorial authority; it is an undermining of communication, itself.

 

Thus, in describing the relationship between Gogol’s use of exaggeration and his tendency toward fantasy, perhaps it is more useful to say that hyperbole is the vehicle through which fantasy enters the world. Exaggeration in Gogol is not just a rhetorical device designed to describe surreally; it represents his whole artistic ethos. Further, it is a tool by which he injects frequent reminders of the inadequacy of language while still suggesting enough ambiguity and uncertainty to force the reader to rely on the narrative voice nonetheless. This mode allows for description that is both hypersensual and fantastical, and— more than any other single formal characteristic—accounts for that uncanniness that is so uniquely Gogolesque.

Works Cited

 

Bryusov, Valery. “Burnt to Ashes.” In Gogol from the 20th Century, edited by Robert Maguire, 105-31. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Gippius, Vasiliy Vasilevich. Gogol. Translated by Robert Maguire. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981.

Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Books, 2005.

Gogol, Nikolai. Plays and Petersburg Tales. Translated by Christopher English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Maguire, Robert A. Exploring Gogol. Stanford University: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions Books, 1961.

Woodward, James B. Gogol’s Dead Souls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.