The portrait (Gogol)

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The portrait . Snapshot from the silent film . The young Tschartkow dreams: “The old man suddenly moves and leans on the frame with both arms. Then he pulls himself up, sticks both legs through and jumps out. "

The portrait ( Russian Портрет , Portret ) is a short story by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol from the Petersburg Novell series . Created in 1833/1834, the text appeared in the first part of the two-part Arabesques collection in 1835 . A revised version was published in the Sovremennik in 1842 .

Plot (final version 1842)

1

The 22-year-old impoverished painter Andrei Petrovich Tschartkow buys a dusty portrait in a small Petersburg painting shop in Stschukin dvor for a ridiculous price of twenty kopecks. An aged Asian man in wide robes with a dark face looks at the viewer. At home in his rented, spartan furnished room on Vasilyevsky Island, at night by moonlight, Chartkov is frightened by the old man's lively face on the wall. Thousands of glittering gold ducats are hidden in the frame of the portrait. Tschartkow pays his rent, changes his clothes and moves into a luxurious apartment on Nevsky Prospect . Much can be arranged with money. A journalist points out the young painter as the Petersburg talent. Gradually, Tschartkow discovered the pose in which the wealthy Petersburgers he portrayed would like to be immortalized and advanced to become a fashion painter. He likes to pay applauders for praise for his work, which he thrown down fairly quickly, and gets drunk on their exaggerations. Tschartkow is getting on in years and is sometimes called "our deserved Andrei Petrovich" in the press. Looking back on his life's work, Tschartkow no longer allows most of his pictures to be used and removes them from the splendid studio. With such clearing out he comes across the above-mentioned portrait of the old man. This hated masterpiece also has to be removed from the studio immediately. From now on, Chartkov's hatred is directed towards every achievable painting by talented colleagues. He used his now significant fortune to buy such masterpieces. Once they come into his possession, these are torn, torn and trampled with laughter. Chartkov dies impoverished in hopeless madness.

2

The portrait with the Asian escaped destruction and went under the hammer at a Petersburg auction. When two aristocratic painting lovers consistently outbid each other in the auction finale, the well-known thirty-five-year-old painter B. silences the two opponents. In front of an assembled audience, B. tells the story of the painting: At the time of the French Revolution , under the rule of Catherine II , there lived a usurer in Kolomna who wore that wide Asian coat. Most of the Petersburg citizens who borrowed money from him died an unnatural death. B's father, who painted on behalf of the church at the time, found this Kolomna usurer to be a suitable model for the devil on his commissioned works. The childless, aging usurer had himself patiently portrayed because it was bound to be dying soon and he wanted to go on living in the picture. Apparently it succeeded - just think of the violence that shone from the eyes of the sitter. Really - soon the usurer died. His life, however, was kept in picture by supernatural power. When B's father tried to cut up the painting, a colleague of his friends begged it from him. The father breathed a sigh of relief at the time, but the new owner, this painter colleague who was by no means superstitious, was persecuted by the evil spirit of the usurer. The portrait changed hands several times. At the age of 20, the painter B. had been commissioned by his father to destroy the portrait - an apparition of the devil - at all costs. Well, after fifteen years of searching, B. finally found what he was looking for at the auction. When B. wanted to take action, the portrait was no longer hanging. Even the audience in the hall, distracted by B's captivating story, hadn't noticed the theft.

Adaptations

Emergence

Gogol took the figure of the Asian-dressed usurer from an incident from the Russo-Turkish War (1806-1812) , whereby the concealment of the chronology was a prominent compositional feature.

The auction described is said to have taken place in 1832.

From June 6, 1836 to the beginning of October 1841, Gogol had stayed in Rome several times . During this time he said he had rewritten the portrait .

The passages in the story concerning art and the artist were influenced by Wackenroder's fantasies about art, for friends of art ( Ludwig Tieck (ed.), Verlag Friedrich Perthes , Hamburg 1799). The composition of the text is vaguely reminiscent of ETA Hoffmann's Sandmann and The Unheimlichen Gast . The central motif - the supernatural power - shining from the eyes of the usurer - could go back to Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer .

reception

  • Belinski praised the first part of the story. The second part, however, is worth nothing.
  • In Schröder's essay Gogol's "Laughing Under Tears" , a detail not mentioned above is emphasized: The painter of the portrait, i.e. the father of painter B. from the second part of the story, only finds the strength of the "depicted" devil, i.e. the usurer, to “oppose a divine miracle” after he has thoroughly castitated himself in the desert like a Christian hermit.
  • The painter is to blame for the evil magic that emanates from the portrait because he wanted to depict the usury's “nature” as faithfully as possible.

Used edition

  • The portrait. P. 83–167 in Nikolai Gogol: Petersburg stories. With 35 reproductions after color lithographs by Vikor Vilner. Translated from the Russian by Georg Schwarz and Werner Creutziger . With an essay by Ralf Schröder from August 1982. Prisma Verlag, Gütersloh 1883 (1st edition), ISBN 3-570-09111-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 97, 10. Zvo
  2. ↑ Russian Арабески
  3. ↑ Comments under The Portrait (Russian) in FEB on pp. 661–674
  4. ↑ Russian Щукин двор
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 127, 1. Zvo
  6. ↑ Russian Kolomna (Saint Petersburg)
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 156 middle
  8. ↑ Russian Портрет (фильм, 1915)
  9. ↑ Russian Андрей Антонович Громов
  10. ↑ Russian Иван Лазарев
  11. ↑ Comments under The Portrait (Russian) in FEB on pp. 661–671
  12. ↑ Comments under The Portrait (Russian) in FEB on p. 672
  13. ↑ Schröder in the edition used, p. 309 above
  14. ↑ Schröder on p. 312 in the edition used
  15. ↑ The translation is based on the 1842 version, see Schröder's note on p. 311, 8th Zvu of the edition used