MOORE
471
as a gross caricature. As even that choral paragraph acknowledges, he is
less interesting than a housefly. Who sympathizes with houseflies?
But Akaky as insect won't do either. That is merely the view of his
shallow co-workers, who are themselves merely figments of Petersburg's
empty dreamworld. Neither of these views fit with what is clearly the
central passion of Akaky's existence:
One would be hard put
to
find a man anywhere who so lived for
his work. To say that he worked with zeal would be an under–
statement: no, he worked
with love.
In that copying of his he
glimpsed a whole varied and pleasant world of his own. One could
see the enjoyment on his face. Some letters were his favorites, and
whenever he came to write them out he would be beside himself
with excitement, softly laughing
to
himself and winking, willing his
pen on with his lips, so you could tell what letter his pen was care–
fully tracing just by looking at him. Had his rewards been at all
commensurate with his enthusiasm, he might perhaps have been
promoted to state councillor, much to his own surprise.
He even brings his office copying home with
him
and copies other things
"for his own personal pleasure." Business and pleasure are the same; there is
no work for him: life is all play, as it was for Adam before the Fall. Akaky
lives in a state of blessedness. Even thinking of copying, he notices nothing
else. Only when horses bump into him and breathe on him, does "he realize
that he was not in the middle of a sentence but in the middle of the street."
Sentence and street, art and life: does Akaky's copying stand for
Gogol's art? The relish in the description quoted above suggests it.
Gogol was a wonderful mimic and performer of his own work. Appar–
ently it was that mischievous urge to imitate-that child's play, accord–
ing to Aristotle-that, more than any intellectual endowment or social
commitment, was his imagination's driving force. Gogol's contempo–
raries complained about his irresponsible lack of social concerns and
positive messages, and he himself was evidently troubled by these fail–
ings. Mere mimicry, like Akaky's mere copying, was clearly a lower
form of mental activity than that usually practiced by mature and
socially aware adults. Surely this resemblance between mimicry and
copying cannot have escaped Gogol, and it plays a major role in the
story's complexities, which have been celebrated more recently by
Vladimir Nabokov (though with very little specific detail).
Clearly Akaky's ecstatic love of copying contradicts Gogol's choral
summary. Far from being "a shining visitor...brightening his wretched
