The Inspector (General): Merimee and Gogol (1830s-1840s)

Two decades later, Merimee's contacts with the Slavonic world deepened when his cousin Henri Merimee, a seeming personal and literary rival, vis­ited Russia, and wrote Une annee en Russie (1847) At that time, Merimee also came to know S.A.

But from the very start, Merimee's writings on Russia revealed a critical outlook on its autocracy and its serfdom, which made most of its people semi-slaves. In an early review of Baron von Haxthausens account of trav­els in that empire, Merimee condemned the system and predicted a great explosion, a peasant uprising, or “ jacquerie” that could destroy civilization in that part of the world.¹⁸

Such uprisings had long intrigued Merimee, who seemed fascinated with violence and was always trying to fathom the basic passions and inner character of life, especially in foreign locales and specifically documented examples. His historical studies of Castile's Don Pedro the Cruel (1848) and Russia's Peter the Great (articles, 1864-68) particularly reflect these inter­ests.

In treating of these hotly contested personalities and events, Merimee's habitual coolness might be said to have frozen - he had not lived through France's Terror of the early 1790s nor did he have a chance to experience the Russian “Red Terror” and Civil War. Like many rather naive Western intellectuals in the twentieth century, he came to see Peter and his reforms somewhat positively, just as later on some Western intellectuals saw some benefits to Stalinism.

In the 1830s Merimee also wrote on Gogol, who brought his attention once again to the Cossacks, on Mazepa, whom he thought the last Ukrainian ruler to act on behalf of independence, and on Marko Vovchok (1833-1907), born Mariya Vilinskaya, who, in such works as Narodni Opovidannia (Folk Stories, 1857), described the extreme hardships of peasant life. The French writer did not quite know what to make of Gogol, whom he compared to Balzac in his focus on the tragic and the ugly in life, and was appalled by the peasants' terrible living conditions as described by Vovchok, assumed they would cause the peasants to rise up and “disembowel their lords” (eventrer leurs seigneurs), and in the end would be “taken as socialist preaching in France.” Still, he was determined to translate her story Kozachka (The Cossack Girl), which he never published.²⁰

Merimee was fascinated by Gogol's stories of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in his Taras Bulba (1835) and, despite his imperfect knowledge of Russian and ignorance of Ukrainian, translated both Gogol and Vovchok into French, with the help both of Turgenev and of his renderings of Vovchok into Russian. Merimee wrote to Turgenev that he intended his translation of Vovchok to be read to his friend the Empress Eugenie herself, whom he had known as a child in Spain and continued to be friendly with during the reign of Napoleon III.²¹

He was not the only Frenchman puzzled by Gogol.

While in Paris in the winter of 1836-37, Gogol revealed quite different opinions from Turgenev about the Ukrainian nationality. A legend long existed that Gogol met Merimee during his stay in Paris. This legend origi­nated, as the Merimee specialist Henri Mongault points out, in the salon of one Mme Aleksandra Smirnova (nee Rosset), a great beauty, who was born and grew up in Ukraine and met Gogol that same year in Paris. They be­came quite close and soon spent a great deal of time together in Rome. She had earlier charmed both Pushkin and Lermontov and often entertained Russian writers at her home in St Petersburg. (Prince Viazemsky even called her “Notre Dame de Iitterature russe.”) After her death, her memoirs, edited and published by her daughter Olga, discussed Gogol at length.

Mongault, however, claims that Olga added much erroneous material, including the 1836 or 1837 Paris meeting with Merimee. He notes that the two men differed in character and political opinions so probably moved in different circles in Paris. In Paris, Merimee frequented liberal, Bonapartist circles, and Gogol probably the more conservative, religious ones of mystics like Mme Svetchine, or even Adam Mickiewicz and the liberal Catholic priest Hugues-Felicite de Lamennais. Scholars such as Thierry Ozwald believe that Gogol was quite a loner in Paris and lived quietly.²³

Other sources, however, report that Gogol did socialize in Paris, but with a small circle of intimate Ukrainian friends, and among Polish rather than Russian emigres, who kept apart because of the Polish insurrection of 1830-31.

But Merimee did develop a lively interest in Gogol and eventually translated some of his stories into French, despite their many unfamiliar ukrainianisms. He became the first French translator of Revizor (The Inspector General, 1836/42), previously rendered into literal French by some Russian emigres in Paris and corrected only by a native French speaker who knew no Russian.

Merimee's position as “inspector general” of historical monuments prob­ably piqued his interest in Revizor But Mongault points out that in 1845 the literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte Beuve reviewed Taras Bulba and oth­ers of Gogol's works favourably in the renowned Revue des deux mondes, in the issue in which Merimee's Carmen first appeared, so he almost certainly read it. Sainte Beuve singled out Gogol's story of the Zaporozhian Cossack leader Taras Bulba, who killed his own son for collaborating with the Poles for the sake of a beautiful Polish woman. Sainte Beuve repeatedly compared Gogol's style and interests to Merimee's. Mongault quotes Sainte Beuve:

When he briskly takes command, and gives his first absolute orders, the speech of the newly elected Kochevyi [Field Hetman, or Cossack Commander-in-Chief, Taras Bulba] reminds me of that spicy turn of realism that Monsieur Merimee could have written...

Mongault implies that it was this review that really sparked Merimee's interests in Gogol, similar in style and absorbed in people on the fringe of civilized life - in this case, the reputedly “wild” soldiers of the Steppe, the Cossacks.²⁵

French scholars have also compared Gogol's Taras Bulba and Merimee's Mateo Falcone, as Sainte Beuve did above - especially the endings, where a father kills a traitorous son - and wondered about possible borrowings. Mongault, following the renowned French Slavist Louis Leger, says publication dates - 1829 for Mateo Falcone and 1835 for Taras Bulba - rule out Merimee, and he also dismissed Gogol's borrowing it, since - here he agrees again with Leger - Gogol was not particularly interested in French literature. Mongault adds that fathers killing sons is common in all “primitive” literatures, and the two authors most probably came up with the same idea independently.²⁶

Early on, Merimee greatly admired Gogol. In an 1851 essay he compared him to Rabelais and to current English humourists. He understood that Gogol was enriching the Russian language with his southern speech and compared it to the influence of le Midi - the south of France - on French. He even compared Ukraine's role within Russia to the Midi within France, although he thought that Gogol's Ukrainian patriotism was unique - he had a kind of prejudice against “the rest of the Empire.” “For me,” he saga­ciously wrote, “I find him to be impartial enough and rather general in his criticisms, but [at the same time] too severe for those [Russians], who are the subject of his observations.”²⁷

As for other Slavonic writers, Merimee seemed to know nothing of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and his Kobzar (The Blind Minstrel, or The Kobza Player, 1840) and was left cold by the Russian authors Lermontov and Dostoevsky.