Selected Short Stories

Perhaps lesser known than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol was crucial in influencing the later golden period of Russian literature with his stories on the supernatural, the irrational, and his depictions of laypeople. Gogol was from Ukraine, and many of his earlier, Ukrainian stories had strong supernatural and horror elements in them, such as Viy, The Terrible Vengeance, and St. John’s Eve (which was the inspiration for Mussorgsky’s tone poem Night on the Bald Mountain). Gogol later moved to St. Petersburg, and his later Petersburg stories had less of the rural, folktale tone; Gogol instead took on an urban voice as a keen observer of the city’s people. Of the later Petersburg tales, I enjoyed most Nevsky Prospect, The Portrait, and his best-known short story, The Overcoat. Reading Gogol at first felt odd since I’ve already read the authors that came after him, but nevertheless I could see how those later authors learned from Gogol and even adopted some of Gogol’s tone he used in his later stories.

The Portrait is a story that combines both of his Ukrainian-folklore-horror style with his Petersburg-social-critic style. The story describes Chartkov, a poor but talented painter, who acquires a portrait of the devil incarnate – this diabolical portrait led Chartkov to suddenly gain a great sum of money. Instead of using the money to further his artistry, Chartkov became a vain spendthrift and spent his time among similarly vain socialites. When his patrons would come ask for a portrait of themselves, he would produce a fake but flattering image that made the patrons happy and earned himself praise, even though the flattering image didn’t resemble the patron at all. As a photographer this struck me saliently because the modern overediting trend is exactly the path that Chartkov took, one which destroyed his developing talent and made him into a “fashionable” commodity-maker of portraits instead of an artist. The answer isn’t to under-edit or show unflattering images, though – my current belief is that art should be the precise middle between attractiveness and authenticity. Too much attractiveness without authenticity makes the image a fake commodity, but too much authenticity without attractiveness makes for an ugly image that doesn’t warrant artistic observation (the only exception is with images so ugly that they acquire aesthetic shock value). It’s a natural tendency to lean toward attractiveness than to lean toward authenticity because beauty is inherently alluring, and to offset that I think every visual artist has to consciously lean a bit more toward authenticity to achieve the right artistic balancing point.