"The Portrait" by Nikolai Gogol

This shop, indeed, presented the most heterogeneous collection of marvels: the pictures were for the most part painted in oils and covered with a dark green varnish, in gaudy, dark-yellow frames.

Moreover, the doors of such a shop are usually hung with sheaves of popular prints on large sheets, which witness to the innate giftedness of the Russian man.

Some bibulous lackey is sure to be there gaping at them, holding covered dishes from the restaurant for his master, who without doubt will sup a none-too-hot soup.

Most extraordinary of all were the eyes: in them the artist seemed to have employed all the force of his brush and all his painstaking effort.

This would come to his mind not when, all immersed in his work, he forgot drinking and eating and the whole world, but when he would finally come hard up against necessity, when he had no money to buy brushes and paints, when the importunate landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent.

Most finished of all in it were the eyes, at which his contemporaries were amazed; even the tiniest, barely visible veins were not omitted but were rendered on the canvas.

First of all he stopped at a tailor’s, got outfitted from top to toe, and, like a child, began looking himself over incessantly; bought up lots of scents, pomades; rented, without bargaining, a magnificent apartment on Nevsky Prospect, the first that came along, with mirrors and plate-glass windows...

The next day, taking a dozen gold roubles, he went to the publisher of a popular newspaper to ask for his magnanimous aid; the journalist received him cordially, called him “most honorable sir” at once, pressed both his hands, questioned him in detail about his name, patronymic, place of residence.

Everyone agrees that there are many most beautiful physiognomies and most beautiful faces among us, but so far the means have been lacking for transferring them to miracle-working canvas, to be handed on to posterity; now this lack has been filled: an artist has been discovered who combines in himself all that is necessary.

He began to pace the room rapidly, ruffling his hair, now sitting down on a chair, now jumping up and moving to the couch, constantly picturing himself receiving visitors, men and women, going up to a canvas and making dashing gestures over it with a brush, trying to impart graciousness to the movement of his arm.

He picked up every nuance, a slight yellowness, a barely noticeable blue under the eyes, and was even about to catch a small pimple that had broken out on her forehead, when suddenly he heard the mother’s voice at his ear.

Unfeelingly, he began to lend it the general color scheme that is given by rote and turns even faces taken from nature into something coldly ideal, such as is seen in student set pieces.

The artist saw that it was decidedly impossible to finish his works, that everything had to be replaced by adroitness and quick, facile brushwork. To catch only the whole, only the general expression, without letting the brush go deeper into fine details—in short, to follow nature to the utmost was decidedly impossible.

Bundles of banknotes grew in his coffers, and he, like everyone else to whom this terrible gift is granted, began to be a bore, inaccessible to anything but gold, a needless miser, a purposeless hoarder, and was about to turn into one of those strange beings who are so numerous in our unfeeling world, at whom a man filled with life and heart looks with horror, who seem to him like moving stone coffins with dead men instead of hearts in them.

He was not concerned if people commented on his character, his inability to deal with people, his nonobservance of worldly proprieties, the humiliation he inflicted upon the estate of artists by his poor, unfashionable dress.

He could not have cared less whether his brethren were angry with him or not.

With a sense of involuntary amazement, the experts contemplated this new, unprecedented brush.

Every least object in the picture was pervaded with it; law and inner force were grasped in everything.

...when at last they turned to him with the request that he tell them what he thought, he came to himself; he was about to assume an indifferent, habitual air, was about to produce the banal, habitual judgment of a jaded artist...

At every step he was pulled up short by want of knowledge of the most basic elements; a simple, insignificant mechanism chilled his whole impulse and stood as an insuperable threshold for his imagination.

No monster of ignorance ever destroyed so many beautiful works as did this fierce avenger. Whenever he appeared at an auction, everyone despaired beforehand of acquiring a work of art. It seemed as if a wrathful heaven had sent this terrible scourge into the world on purpose, wishing to deprive it of all harmony.

This terrible passion lent him some frightful coloration: his face was eternally bilious.

Their appearance and the expression of their faces was somehow more firm here, more free, and not marked by that cloying subservience so conspicuous in the Russian merchant when he is in his shop with a customer before him.

Here they dropped all decorum, even though there were in this same hall a great many of those counts before whom, in some other place, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in on their own boots.

A great many paintings were thrown around without any sense at all; they were mixed in with furniture and books bearing the monogram of their former owner, who probably never had the laudable curiosity to look into them.

The rooms in which they are held are always somehow gloomy; the windows, blocked by furniture and paintings, emit a scant light, silence spreads over the faces, and the funereal voice of the auctioneer, as he taps with his hammer, intones a panikhida over the poor arts so oddly come together there.

...finally, that whole class of people who may be called by one word: ashen—people whose clothing, faces, hair, eyes have a sort of dull, ashen appearance, like a day on which there is neither storm nor sun in the sky, but simply nothing in particular: a drizzling mist robs all objects of their sharpness.

...one of those natural-born wonders whom contemporaries often abuse with the offensive word ‘ignoramus’ and whom the castigations of others and their own failures do not cool down but only lend new zeal and strength, so that in their souls they go far beyond the works that earned them the title of ‘ignoramus.’

Both inner sense and personal conviction turned his brush to Christian subjects, the highest and last step of the sublime.

He was of firm character, an honest, direct, even crude man, covered on the outside with a somewhat tough bark, not without a certain pride in his soul, who spoke of people at once sharply and condescendingly.

But as soon as he began to penetrate and delve into them with his brush, there arose such a strange revulsion in his soul, such inexplicable distress, that he had to lay his brush aside for a time and then begin again.

He fell at his feet and beseeched him to finish the portrait, saying that his fate and his existence in the world depended on it, that he had already touched his living features with his brush, and that if he conveyed them faithfully, his life by some supernatural force would be retained in the portrait, that through it he would not die entirely, and that he had to be present in the world.

As soon as I turned nine, he enrolled me in the Academy of Art and, after paying off his creditors, withdrew to an isolated monastery, where he was soon tonsured a monk.

There he amazed all the brothers by his strictness of life and unremitting observance of all monastery rules.

The superior of the monastery, learning of his skill with the brush, requested that he paint the central icon in the church. But the humble brother said flatly that he was unworthy to take up his brush, that it had been defiled, that he would have to purify his soul with labors and great sacrifices before he would be worthy of setting about such a task.

A beard white as snow and fine, almost ethereal hair of the same silvery color flowed picturesquely down his breast and the folds of his black cassock, falling to the very rope tied around his poor monastic garb; but the most amazing thing for me was to hear from his lips such words and thoughts about art as, I confess, I shall long bear in my soul, and I wish sincerely that every brother of mine could do likewise.

He paused, and I noticed that his bright countenance suddenly darkened, as if some momentary cloud passed over it.

A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes.

He blessed me and embraced me. Never in my life had I been so sublimely moved. With veneration rather than filial feeling, I leaned on his breast and kissed his flowing silver hair.

He blessed me and embraced me. Never in my life had I been so sublimely moved. With veneration rather than filial feeling, I leaned on his breast and kissed his flowing silver hair.