Gogol

A poem by Tomas Tranströmer translated from Swedish by Daniel Carden Nemo

Photo by Nick Sorockin on Unsplash

The jacket worn thin like a pack of wolves.
His face a shard of marble.
Surrounded by his letters in a grove rustling
with scorn and errors,
the heart blows like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable
passages.

Now sunset prowls like a fox across this land,
igniting the grass in a flash.
The sky is full of hooves and antlers, and below it
the carriage glides, shadowlike, between my father’s
lit-up homesteads.

St. Petersburg lies at the same latitude as annihilation
(did you see the beauty from the leaning tower)
and, floating like a jellyfish around the icy city blocks,
there’s the drifter in his overcoat.
And here, wrapped in fasts,
is the one who was once surrounded by herds of laughter,
though they’ve long since faded into regions far above the treeline.
Humanity’s unsteady tables.
Look out: darkness burns a Milky Way of souls into the air.
So climb on your fire-chariot and leave the earth behind.

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“Gogol,” the fourth poem of Tranströmer’s first book, 17 Poems, presents a haunting portrait of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol in a tribute that affirms the enduring awe one artist can feel toward another. The piece stands at a tilt between ruin and beauty, creating a breathtaking fusion of the worldly and the otherworldly that allows us to peer into the abyss and perceive a strange sense of grandeur. Tranströmer once remarked that poems arise when “a strong outer pressure suddenly meets a strong inner pressure.” In “Gogol,” the outer pressure is the historical life of Nikolai Gogol, with its dramatic extremes of comedy and tragedy, genius and madness, and the inner pressure is Tranströmer’s own imaginative and spiritual response to it. The collision produces deep, rich layers. The poem sheds light on Gogol’s journey by reimagining it. Each stanza moves through liminal spaces: the first between a living man and his looming demise, the second between day and night, reality and memory, and the third between life and afterlife.

The vision of the writer ravaged by hardship and hunger is memorialized in stone—“his face a shard of marble”—yet emotionally shattered, halfway to ghosthood. Each one of the images is the meaning. The wolf-worn jacket, the face, the paper heart are not just descriptions of Gogol, they embody the man’s fragility and vulnerability, his reality, in compressed, surreal form. The grove of letters “rustling” with scorn captures the atmosphere of self-criticism and public censure, the very papers around him seeming to whisper reproach, echoing the “pack of wolves” and mirroring his torment, his inner demons as well as the sense of threat, of feeling surrounded.

The sudden burst of fire in the grass from the second stanza symbolizes a brief creative or spiritual illumination at the end of a life, a moment of vivid brilliance in the approaching darkness, alluding perhaps to Gogol’s final flicker of insight, the intensity with which he approached art and faith in his last days. The natural imagery also widens into a broader landscape that transcends Gogol’s immediate room of letters. We are in an open country across the land, as if following a journey, the sky “full of hooves and antlers,” and below it “the carriage glides, shadowlike, between my father’s lit-up homesteads,” a striking scene that blends the real with the fantastical. Hooves and antlers filling the sky call up a phantom herd. It is a wild hunt or stampede in the heavens, an eruption of primal energy in the clouds. The shadow-carriage, reminiscent of the 19th-century setting of Gogol’s stories, takes us back to the troikas and carriages that populate Dead Souls, where a traveler roams from estate to estate. Here, the traveler’s carriage eerily glides through the poet’s own familial surroundings, a dark shape from another realm, silently moving past. There is a narrative shift as a personal memory intrudes into the journey and roots the poem in Swedish childhood, revealing the influence of Gogol’s stories on the young Tranströmer, a crossover of literature moving between worlds, a resonance that implies that artists like Gogol travel beyond their time into the lives of future generations who become spiritually connected to them. Also, it underscores the distance, the carriage only a shadow between houses of light—a sign of Gogol’s status as a spectral outsider, unable to stop and join the living.

The final movement of the poem plunges fully into Gogol’s world and beyond. “St. Petersburg lies at the same latitude as annihilation,” Tranströmer writes, aligning the real city with a metaphysical void, as if it occupies a coordinate on the map of existential erasure. The line about “the drifter in his overcoat” summons the ghost from Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat,” in which a poor clerk’s prized new overcoat is stolen; after his death, his restless ghost is said to wander the frosty streets of St. Petersburg, snatching coats off strangers. The line revives the drifter, now a translucent jellyfish-like figure, bobbing through the frigid air among “icy city blocks.” By featuring this figure, the poem literally populates the Petersburg night with Gogol’s fictional world. It’s a moment of literary homage and psychological mirroring, the ghost both Gogol’s creation and a projection of Gogol’s own lost soul, floating in search of warmth it can never find.

A literary comedian and satirist par excellence, Gogol provoked gales of laughter in his audiences and readers in his prime, but now, the images of laughter turned to silence invite us to consider the toll of artistic vision and the fate of the human soul. The poem’s penultimate line, “Humanity’s unsteady tables,” which stands alone, has a universal ring to it, hinting that all human enterprise and comforts rest on shaky foundations. The table is where we commune and sustain ourselves, but for Gogol and perhaps for mankind at large, this fundamental stability is prone to upset—a reminder of how quickly Gogol’s life went from feast to fast, from fame to fatal isolation. The poem doesn’t expound further; it just lets those three words resonate as a sober truth about the human condition.

The darkness of annihilation is the backdrop against which the spirit shines. The Milky Way, traditionally associated with the path of souls in many mythologies, is explicitly made of souls here, emphasizing that from mortal darkness comes immortal light, as though each departed soul becomes a bright point in an expansive galaxy, seared into its fabric by the very intensity of its human struggles. Against the starry background, the poem addresses the spirit of the artist in an imperative: “Climb on your fire-chariot and leave the earth behind,” a clear echo of the Biblical story of Elijah, the prophet taken to heaven in a chariot of fire, bypassing death. The artist’s soul belongs to the cosmos now, not to the cold streets or inhospitable passages of the world, and the last command, “leave the earth behind,” rings with both sorrow and joy in the acknowledgment that this brilliant, tormented artist could not find a home among humanity’s unsteady tables, yet there is something undying in the creative spirit.