Having recently finished Dead Souls I was hungry for more Gogol, and so I turned (naturally) to his short stories. This, "The Old-Fashioned Farmers" is the first of his short stories that I have read, and it is a really beautiful and sad story. For readers of Proust, this little tale, which touches on memory, change and habit may draw to mind In Search of Lost Time, and readers of Dead Souls might be delighted by the narrator of this work, who is not as playful and self-conscious as the narrator of that later work, but an enjoyable companion nonetheless.
The narrator begins by painting for us with his words a picture of an "old-fashioned" (in 1835) village in Little Russia (Ukraine) and in this village one particular house "with its veranda of slender blackened tree-trunks, surrounding it on all sides, so that in case of a thunder or hail storm, the window-shutters could be shut without your getting wet; and behind it, fragrant wild-cherry trees, whole rows of dwarf fruit-trees, overtopped by crimson cherries and a purple sea of plums." And he tells us "All this has for me an indescribable charm, perhaps because I no longer see it, and because anything from which we are separated is pleasing to us." Already we (especially those like myself who tend to romanticize the past) have a connection to this narrator and the little village he describes for us springs to life in our minds, only to grow richer in detail as his story progresses, adding to it an older couple, the sixty-year-old Afanasii Ivanovich Tovstogub, tall and never without a smile, and his wife, Pulcheria Ivanovna Tovstogubikha, aged 55, who was "rather serious, and hardly ever laughed; but her face and eyes expressed so much goodness, so much readiness to treat you to all the best they owned, that you would probably have found a smile too repellingly sweet for her kind face."
They are a kind couple, generous hosts, taken advantage of by those around them but unaware of it because they have so much abundance to meet their needs. They live in a house with "singing doors," which the narrator tells us with some detail is the "most noticeable thing about the house":
Just as soon as day arrived, the songs of the doors resounded throughout the house. I cannot say why they sang. Either the rusty hinges were the cause, or else the mechanic who made them concealed some secret in them; but it was worthy of note, that each door had its own particular voice: the door leading to the bedroom sang the thinnest of sopranos; the dining-room door growled a bass; but the one which led into the vestibule gave out a strange, quavering, yet groaning sound, so that, if you listened to it, you heard at last, quite clearly. 'Batiushka [Little Father], I am freezing.' I know that this noise is very displeasing to many, but I am very fond of it; and if I chance to hear a door squeak here, I seem to see the country; the low-ceiled chamber, lighted by a candle in an old-fashioned candlestick; the supper on the table; May darkness; night peeping in from the garden through the open windows upon the table set with dishes; the nightingale, which floods the garden, house, and the distant river with her trills; the rustle and the murmuring of the boughs,… and, O God! what a long chain of reminiscences is woven!
But after we meet the old couple, become acquainted with their characters, their richness of spirit, their kindness, Afanasii's teasing nature toward his wife, after we become acquainted with this charming little house and its particularities, sadness strikes, as it does sooner or later in every life, and without spoiling the plot I will only say that this sadness highlights just how content the couple were beforehand in their simple happiness. And this sad event ultimately leads us, as readers (modern readers especially who are unfamiliar with the time and place of Gogol's story), to get an understanding of just what this bucolic little village is being compared. And having become acquainted with the old couple and their home we, like the narrator, can lament how it has all changed and what has been lost in the name of "progress."
Throughout, with little details here and there, it is easy to see (as in Dead Souls) why Gogol is often considered the Father of Realism in Russian Literature (comparable in this sense to Balzac who is considered to be one of the main founders of Realism in European Literature). And it makes me eager to continue exploring his other short stores.