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The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

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The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

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Content THE CHINOVNIK AND THE ROND-DE-CUIR:
BUREAUCRATIC MODERNITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN AND FRENCH
LITERATURE
by
Michaela Mallory Telfer
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE))
August 2022
Copyright 2022 Michaela Mallory Telfer
ii

Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my committee co-chair
Professor Natania Meeker for her unwavering support, guidance, and belief in this project. Her
rigorous feedback and encouragement were integral to the completion of my dissertation. I
would also like to offer my sincere thanks to my other committee co-chair Professor Sally Pratt
for her thoughtful comments and advice and for helping me develop my knowledge of Slavic as
a field.
My thanks as well to my committee members Professors Antónia Szabari and Neetu
Khanna for their feedback, support, and thoughtful questions. I would also like to extend a thank
you to my honorary committee member Professor Greta Matzner-Gore for her feedback and
support on some of the major foundations of this project. I truly could not have asked for a better
committee or better co-chairs.
I also want to express my deep gratitude for the collegiality and generous spirits of my
fellow graduate workers at USC. I have received so much useful feedback and many kind words
of encouragement from my graduate colleagues, both inside and outside of coursework. In
particular, I want to thank my past and present writing group compatriots Kendra Atkin,
Noraedén Mora Méndez, Zoe Kemp, and Amanda Jordan as well as Edith Adams for creating an
inclusive online writing space. A special thanks to Kendra and Nora for taking on the extra work
of giving me feedback on my writing and for keeping my morale up during the homestretch.
There are far too many other USC faculty members and graduate students who have my
gratitude for helping me become a better scholar that I cannot name them all here. While
inadequate, I hope a general thank you to the CSLC, Slavic, English, Thematic Option, and
Writing Program departments at USC will still express my feeling of indebtedness.
iii

Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their love and support and for putting up
with unnecessary lectures on Russian and French bureaucracy. My deepest and most enduring
thanks to my partner Matthew Curran. For everything.

iv

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Images v
Abstract vi
Introduction: 1
Chapter 1: “Les Tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux:” Bureaucratic Failure in Balzac’s Les
Employés 30

Chapter 2: “A Kind of Unnatural Force:” Bureaucratic Assemblage in Nikolai Gogol’ 80

Chapter 3: “Thousands of Dirty and Greedy Mouths:” Bureaucratic Mythologies in Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s Gospoda Golovlevy 135

Chapter 4: “Non comme homme de lettres, mais comme ‘rond-de-cuir:’” Bureaucratic Modernity
in Joris-Karl Huysmans 196

Conclusion 250
Bibliography 253
Appendix: The Table of Civil Ranks 265
v

List of Images
Chapter 1: “Les Tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux:” Bureaucratic Failure in Balzac’s Les
Employés
Image A: Neat character map from Les Employés 63
Image B: Messy character map from Les Employés 67
Image C: Des Lupeaulx’s coat of arms from the Armorial 71

Chapter 2: “A Kind of Unnatural Force:” Bureaucratic Assemblage in Nikolai Gogol’
Image D: Memo from Н. В. Гоголь материалы и исследования 82
Image E: Memo from Н. В. Гоголь материалы и исследования 82
Image F 1 & 2: Memo from Н. В. Гоголь материалы и исследования 83

Chapter 4: “Non comme homme de lettres, mais comme ‘rond-de-cuir:’” Bureaucratic Modernity
in Joris-Karl Huysmans
Image G: Example of Huysmans writing on torn-up Ministry paper 228
Image H: Example of Huysmans writing on torn-up Ministry paper 228
Image I: Description of Victor Godefroy Jean Huysmans’ naturalization dossier 239
Image J: Partial naturalization paperwork for Victor Godefroy Jean Huysmans 239
Image K: Extract from the Register of Marriage Certificates for V. G. J. Huysmans 240
Image L: Two pieces composed by Huysmans in 1878-79 on the named Carrias,
convicted insurrectional 242
Image M: Two pieces…: Police 242

vi

Abstract
The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: Bureaucratic Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Russian
and French Literature examines how government bureaucracy influences the social and cultural
frameworks established by Russian and French literary writers and public intellectuals to define
European modernity. This project demonstrates how nineteenth-century authors put pressure on
bureaucratic ideas of rationality and order, challenging the cultural narrative of modernity as a
clean break from the past that would usher in a progressive march toward civilizational
perfection. In particular, I focus on the ways in which bureaucracy takes on both a destructive
and creative force in nineteenth-century fiction. I argue that state bureaucracy is not just a key
element of nineteenth-century literary constructions of modernity, but also that in the literary
unraveling of bureaucratic tropes and absurdity, the authors I examine locate ways in which
bureaucracy becomes affective or animating despite typical stereotypes of bureaucracy as
deadening. Through case studies of canonical Russian and French texts published between the
1830s and 1880s from Honoré de Balzac, Nikolai Gogol’, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and
Joris-Karl Huysmans, in this project I use an eclectic methodological approach to trace the
shared bureaucratic tropes and representations across these two national contexts without
constructing the kind of enclosed conceptual systematization that my chosen authors point to as a
failure of bureaucratic structures. While engaging with these texts promises to offer a more
complicated picture of nineteenth-century life and bureaucracy, this project is also especially
relevant to concerns that persist across disciplines about the role that bureaucratic structures have
had and still have in shaping state and corporate power.

1

Introduction
“‘Forgive me…if one looks at this in accordance with
the rules of duty and honor…you yourself can
understand…’
‘I understand absolutely nothing,’ the nose answered.
‘Express yourself in a more satisfactory manner.’
‘My dear sir…’ Kovalyov said with a feeling of his own
dignity, ‘I do not know how to understand your
words…The whole affair seems to be quite obvious…Or
do you want to…After all, you are my very own nose!’
The nose looked at the major, and his brows knitted
slightly.
‘You are mistaken, my dear sir. I am my own separate
self. Moreover, there cannot be any intimate relations
between us. Judging by the buttons on your uniform,
you serve in a different department.’”
1

Led by the Nose: By Way of Introduction
Like Gogol’’s civil servant Major Kovalev in his short story “Nos” (“The Nose”) (1836),
I have come to this project by following a nose on the loose. When the nose disappears off
Kovalev’s face, transforming into a human-sized civil servant, and insists on its own personhood,
claiming to be “my own separate self,” it is as though bureaucracy itself has come alive and
started wandering the city.
2
The nose becomes pure bureaucratic agency: the concept of rank and
department traipsing across Petersburg boulevards, initiating frenzied rumors, a flurry of activity,
and a deep anxiety about what it at all means. However, the nose in the story is perhaps not the
type of thing one might expect to find in a story about bureaucracy. When most people imagine
bureaucracy, they might see dreary offices stuffed with stacks of papers and stone-faced
bureaucrats beaten down by soul-crushing monotony. And yet, in nineteenth-century literature,
bureaux and the bureaucrats who fill them come alive in visceral ways. Noses turn into civil

1. Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose,” in The Nose and Other Stories, trans. Susanne Fusso (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2019), 205.

2. Gogol, “The Nose,” 205.
2

servants who make a mad dash to flee the city, shipworms stage an office coup, a new class of
vampires drains the old gentry, and the hemorrhoidal bureaucratic body feeds a century-defining
affective crisis. Like the citizens of St. Petersburg gathering in parks or in front of shop windows
trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious nose, by following “Nos” and the literature around it,
we can trace a different impression of bureaucracy, one that frames bureaucracy and its
influences as aberrant and unruly, that takes account of bureaucratic matter and influence as they
wind through the streets, drawing to them all kinds of material and affective
3
responses and
animating everything around them in unexpected ways. Like Gogol’’s runaway nose, who dons
the look of a well-established civil servant, while the bureaucracy may appear or claim to be
rational and ordered, it instead tends to operate on irrationality, absurdity, and chaotic energy. It
is, in fact, these precise qualities that allow state bureaucracy in particular to become an
indispensable part of modern, European life, which operates under similarly illusory narratives of
rationality and order.
While there are a good number of scholarly publications examining bureaucracy in the
Russian and French context from various perspectives, and while recent texts like David
Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules have called for further discussion of bureaucracy as a political
practice, the links between bureaucracy, literature, and modernity in the nineteenth century
remain underexamined given the prominence of bureaucracy in some of the most canonical
Russian and French texts of the time period. There are plenty of historical and sociological
overviews of the state of the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century.
4
Historical

3. I use “affect” to refer both to the point where the emotional and the physical meet and to the larger
atmospheres this meeting point may autonomously create. As Ben Anderson defines it, affective atmospheres “are
singular affective qualities that emanate from but exceed the assembling of bodies.” See Ben Anderson, “Affective
Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space, and Society 2, no. 2 (December 2009): 80.

4. See, for example, George Yaney’s The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the
Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905, Heide Whelan’s Alexander III & the State Council:
3

overviews of the bureaucracy during the mid- to late-nineteenth century are relatively rarer in the
French context as most of the focus falls on the ministerial system pre-Revolution, the French
Revolution itself and its immediate aftermaths, or the end of the nineteenth century leading into
the first World War.
5
However, books and articles in both contexts focus specifically on the
interaction of bureaucracy and literature as well, notably Irina Reyfman’s Rank and Style:
Russians in State Service, Life, and Literature, Michael Hughes’ “Samovars and Quills: the
Representation of Bureaucracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” and Cyril
Piroux’s Le Roman de l’employé de bureau ou l’art de faire un livre sur (presque) rien.
6
These
texts have laid an indispensable foundation for understanding the influence of bureaucratic
rhetoric and practice on literary representations of the bureaucrat and his milieu. My dissertation
builds on this work by examining how government bureaucracy influences the social and cultural

Bureaucracy & Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia, Bruce Lincoln’s The Great Reforms: Autocracy,
Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia, Karl Ryavec’s Russian Bureaucracy: Power and
Pathology, Eugenie Samier and Jacky Lumby’s “Alienation, Servility and Amorality: Relating Gogol’s Portrayal of
Bureaupathology to an Accountability Era,” and Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon.

5. See Clive Church’s Revolution and Red Tape: the French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770-1850,
Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture in particular.

6. Irina Reyfman’s Rank and Style: Russians in State Service, Life, and Literature traces the influence of
authors’ opinions about civil service on their fiction as well as on particular approaches to style during the
nineteenth century, but her focus is broader than just the civil service. Michael Hughes’ article “Samovars and
Quills: the Representation of Bureaucracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature” and Emil Draitser’s
Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Ščedrin also examine the representation of bureaucracy in literature but
the length of Hughes’ article limits his insightful analyses to a more general overview focused on the ways in which
representations of bureaucrats in Russian literature relate back to debates over Western influence and opinions about
the tsarist government. Draitser’s main concern rests more with Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satirical techniques, as
promised by the book’s title, rather than his representation of bureaucracy specifically. Cyril Piroux’s Le Roman de
l’employé de bureau ou l’art de faire un livre sur (Presque) rien traces the figure of the employé across the
nineteenth century, demonstrating the need for further examination of characters often treated as “insignificant,”
while Dean de la Motte’s “Writing Fonctionnaires, Functions of Narrative” argues that bureaucracy serves as a
model for narrative and reconciles the dichotomy between the mimetic and the textual. For more on the daily life of
the bureaucrat figure and character in the French context, see Guy Thuillier, “Sur la vie quotidienne des bureaux de
ministère au XIXe siècle,” La Revue administrative 161 (Sept.-Oct. 1974) as well as his several full-length books on
the topic.
4

frameworks established by Russian and French literary writers and public intellectuals to define
European modernity.
In particular, I want to pay attention to the ways in which bureaucratic writing and
practice matter, both literally and figuratively. What do the material circulation and archival
accumulation of bureaucratic documents do? What happens to humans within and in relation to
bureaucratic labor and classification? With these questions in mind, I consider state bureaucracy
as a productive force: an organizational system that creates affect, bodies, detritus, myths,
empires, and even nineteenth-century modernity itself. This creation happens both through the
material reality of bureaucratic labor and practice and in the literary representations that
narrativize bureaucratic labor within the cultural and intellectual contexts of the period. Rather
than thinking of bureaucracy as a deadening force that strips language of meaning, projects of
efficiency, or bureaucrats of affective community, I focus instead on bureaucracy as
simultaneously destructive and creative, empty and full. The bureaucracy may take certain things
away, and is often an indispensable aspect of oppressive rule, but it also produces things when it
does so. The authors I engage with in this dissertation—Honoré de Balzac, Nikolai Gogol’,
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Joris-Karl Huysmans—grapple with this simultaneous
destruction and production in their fictional writing as they attempt to situate bureaucracy within
their own ideas of European modernity. However, as the authors in the following chapters
discover in different ways, what they expect bureaucracy to do and what they expect modern life
to promise are not the outcomes that they see directly in their own labor or in their interactions
with the bureau. Given the prevalence of bureaucratic themes in nineteenth-century Russian and
French literature and bureaucratic labor among literary authors, I argue that state bureaucracy in
particular is a key element defining nineteenth-century literary constructions of modernity and
5

that, in the literary unraveling of bureaucratic tropes and absurdity, we can locate ways in which
bureaucracy becomes affective or animating despite typical representations of bureaucracy as
deadening. By tracing these qualities across national and cultural borders, through both Russia
and France, we can follow the particular effects of bureaucracy’s affective and material
influence, and how literary representations contribute to that influence, where the system remains
similar but the particulars change. Looking at bureaucracy through a literary lens reveals
underacknowledged characteristics of bureaucratic practice that influence how literary authors
understand the larger intellectual frameworks around them like naturalism and positivism. It also
shows how literary and other public reactions to bureaucracy help to reciprocally shape
bureaucracy and public definitions of bureaucracy in turn.
The purpose of this project is not to serve as an internally unified general critique of
bureaucracy as a practice nor to provide some kind of practical alternative to bureaucratic
organization. Similarly, and more importantly, this project in no way advocates in support of
neoliberal calls for increased privatization and deregulation as supposed solutions to inefficiency.
Bureaucracy is certainly prevalent in private, “free market” institutions with little functional
difference from public state counterparts, at least historically, and the professional bureaucratic
state has developed in ways that are “very closely related to the modern capitalist development,”
based in similar forms of rationalism, calculation, and predictability.
7
The connected
development of the professional bureaucracy and capitalism, in the Weberian sense of a drive
toward profitability, and the similarities between public and private bureaucratic practice suggest
that at best privatization would offer very little meaningful change in public complaints about
bureaucracy and at worst would undercut the public services delivered through state bureaucracy

7. Max Weber, Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity, ed. Stephen Kalberg (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2008), 65.
6

or produce even less transparent and consistent practices in favor of ever-increasing attempts to
maximize profits.
8
Rather than offer a critique of bureaucratic practice, this project is meant to
robustly explore the integral links between bureaucratic writing and labor, modern life, literature,
cultural exchange, affect, and matter and offer a clearer sense of what these links produce and
how they have shaped nineteenth-century Russian and French definitions of bureaucracy and
modernity.

Definitions

The two most important terms undergirding this project, both of which are slippery in
their own ways, are, of course, bureaucracy and modernity. While the exact usage of each term
may shift in certain ways from chapter to chapter—French nineteenth-century modernity is, after
all, not equivalent to Russian nineteenth-century modernity although there is overlap due to
cultural exchange—I want to set out core definitions for these concepts up front that will serve as
touchstones throughout the dissertation. Given that the aim of this project is to trace the literary,
material, affective, and intellectual influences of government bureaucracy on contemporary
notions of modern life, one of the implications of such a project is that bureaucracy and
modernity are inseparable. In light of this inseparability, I will define both terms in relation to
each other through the work of Max Weber, who sees a similar level of codependence between
bureaucracy and, at least, Western modernity. In particular, state bureaucracy in the nineteenth
century and the key strategies undergirding cultural attitudes and practices attributed to

8. Despite the public anti-bureaucracy position of neoliberalism, in her relatively recent book The
Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era: An International and Comparative Perspective, Béatrice
Hibou argues that bureaucratic practice actually makes neoliberalism possible or at least serves as a key facet of
neoliberalism. This is not to say that, like Graeber, I intend to engage in a leftist critique of bureaucracy—such a
critique is beyond the scope of this project. Rather, it is to say that although certain critiques of bureaucracy that
appear in this dissertation, often in the words of the authors or public intellectuals I engage with, may parallel
neoliberal concerns in certain ways, these kinds of critiques do not offer a full picture.
7

modernity are mutually reinforcing and seem to have developed in parallel rather than
establishing a clear line of influence between one and the other.
Before more fully teasing out the integral connection between bureaucracy and
modernity, let’s begin with Weber’s definition of what bureaucracy should look like. Weber
outlines the most basic structure of an ideal bureaucracy, which functions in a way that adheres
to the following three rules:
(1) The regular activities required for the purposes of the bureaucratically governed
structure are assigned as official duties.
(2) The authority to give the commands required for the discharge of these duties is
distributed in a stable way and is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coercive
means, physical, sacerdotal, or otherwise, which may be placed at the disposal of
officials.
(3) Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these
duties and for the exercise of the corresponding rights; only persons who qualify under
general rules are employed.
9

However, he also lays out other important conceptual requirements. For Weber, a fully
developed state bureaucracy may only arise “in the modern state, and in the private economy
only in the most advanced institutions of capitalism”
10
and must follow a clear hierarchy of
“super- and subordination” between higher and lower offices.
11
Furthermore, the management of
the office relies on documents, requires specialization in training and duties, and “follows
general rules, which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be
learned.”
12
Unlike in earlier ministerial systems, which were often only open to what Weber calls
“notables” and offered what amounted more to a hobby, in the ideal professionalized
bureaucracy, every bureaucrat’s position requires his full dedication as though it were his main

9. Weber, Max Weber, 194.

10. Weber, 194.

11. Weber, 195.

12. Weber, 195, 196.
8

occupation.
13
Weber’s definition of bureaucracy, then, is based solidly in a kind of regulated
rationalization, a term that he effectively uses synonymously with systematization,
14
and relies
on consistency and order as key components of how it functions.
While Weber was writing after the authors I take up in this dissertation, his definition of
bureaucracy is useful for understanding nineteenth-century ideas of what bureaucracy was meant
to look like and do. His work on bureaucracy is a shared source for many, if not most, major
studies of bureaucracy. As Karl Ryavec acknowledges in his book on Russian bureaucracy, “any
definitional statement regarding bureaucracy must give the ‘master,’ Max Weber, his due.”
15

Although writing in the twentieth century, Weber’s explanation of bureaucracy is often used to
define bureaucracy in the nineteenth century as well, post-professionalization, and while he is
often focused on his present moment, his descriptions of bureaucratic practice do have earlier
roots in the nineteenth century. For example, in Clive Church’s examination of the French
ministerial bureaucracy and its shift to a professional bureaucracy during the course and
aftermath of the French Revolution, he adopts Weber’s definition in order to acknowledge the
continuities that did exist from the seventeenth century onward in the structure of the
governmental administration, while, more importantly, highlighting the major breaks in
continuity that accompanied the Revolution. For Church, the use of the word ‘bureaucracy’ in
relation to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French government elides the shift that takes
place from the end of the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century. While
political figures like de Tocqueville may have used ‘bureaucracy’ to define the governmental

13. Weber, 196.

14. Kalberg makes this point in a footnote (Max Weber, 63n.6).

15. Ryavec, Russian Bureaucracy: Power and Pathology (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2003), 4. Ryavec
ultimately strays from Weber’s definition primarily because Weber is defining an ideal bureaucracy rather than a
bureaucracy in practice, but he does adopt Weber as his baseline.
9

structure prior to the Revolution, Church suggests that this term was used without sufficient
definition and clarity.
16
In adopting Weber’s bureaucratic model as a starting point, like Ryavec,
I could point to all of the particularities of French or Russian bureaucracy to suggest how they
may fit Weber’s model, but doing so would be beside the point. Ultimately, it does not make a
huge difference if we decide to use ‘bureaucracy’ as the effective name of the state structures in
nineteenth-century France and Russia or not; the main concern is whether or not the early
nineteenth century marks a certain turning point in the structure of the French and Russian
governments and their interaction with the everyday citizen. Along with Church and other
historians like Alexander Polunov,
17
I would argue that this moment is indeed a watershed, one
clearly delineated in the professionalization of bureaucracy and its growing role in the everyday
life of increasing numbers of civil servants.
Weber’s sociological approach to the issues of bureaucratic development and the
difficulty of defining modernity, which rests on the creation of ideal models against which
individual local practices can be compared and contrasted, offers a nonsystematic way for
defining the basic qualities of each term without foreclosing on the possibility of variation. That
being said, the creation of Weber’s ideal models does suggest, although unintentionally, that
there is some kind of ideal “bureaucracy-ness” to which a bureaucracy could perhaps aspire. His
ideal models, like the one for bureaucracy included above, are not meant to make a moral
judgement regarding whatever institution he is modelling, but by becoming a model, they do
engage in a kind of classification even if that classification is intended to fail in certain ways.

16. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770-1850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981), 9.

17. See Alexander Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change,
1814-1914, trans. Marshall S. Shatz, ed. Thomas C. Owen and Larissa G. Zakharova (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,
2005).
10

Weber also draws certain relatively hard lines between Western and Eastern bureaucracy and
modernity that become complicated in a case like Russia. While Weber himself often seems to
group Russia in with the West, Western Europeans in the nineteenth century would largely
consider Russia the East, defining it through Orientalized images of Asia as discussed below.
Still, Weber’s definition of bureaucracy offers a useful base for setting up the specific kinds of
bureaucracy that I am focusing on and for meaningfully linking together bureaucracy and
modernity as concepts. Weber’s goal is to highlight the cultural uniqueness of Western
modernity, but I additionally want to trace how these culturally unique qualities spread and
become warped or adapted in other cultural contexts, in this case Russia. So, while Weber’s
definitions of bureaucracy and modernity are more directly useful in the French case, they do
offer a starting point for teasing out Russia’s national identity crisis due to the encroachment of
Western influence. They also allow for further tracing of the Eastern elements of European
modernity that are often overlooked.
By drawing on Weber’s ideal bureaucratic model as a starting point, I am precisely
focused in this dissertation on professional bureaucracy and bureaucrats, which is a key element
of Weber’s definition and a particular quality of nineteenth-century bureaucracy in contrast to
eighteenth-century ministerial systems. My focus on professional bureaucracies also specifically
relates to public, government bureaucracies rather than, for example, bureaucratic structures one
might find in private businesses. As Weber explains, bureaucracy extends across public and
private institutions and between types of organizations whether those be political, sacerdotal, or
economic; he does not draw meaningful differences between each type of bureaucracy and how
it functions. The rising expansion of church and corporate bureaucracy alongside government
bureaucracy is certainly important to the development of modernity as a concept and lived
11

experience, but the literature around bureaucracy in France and Russia is most often specifically
focused on the public state bureaucracy. Of the four authors I write about in this dissertation,
Balzac, Gogol’, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Huysmans, only Balzac’s personal work in a bureau
environment was outside of government institutions—he worked as a clerk in a law office—and
his major bureaucracy novel Les Employés is still focused on government bureaucracy in
particular.
Weber’s definition of the ideal professional bureaucracy, in this context, helps to clarify
the overlapping of public, state bureaucracy with modernity in the nineteenth century largely
through an appeal to rationalization. The turn to rationality in the bureaucratic sphere is not just a
key quality of the bureaucracy itself, but also of Weber’s definition of Western modernity. That
is, he views modern Western society in comparison to the ideal model of “modern Western
rationalism,” a model
18
that points to the ways in which Western societies adopt scientific,
systematized, and calculable methods of understanding the world.
19
However, as Stephen
Kalberg helpfully summarizes in his introduction to Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on
Modernity, “Weber’s sociology strictly opposes holistic modes of analysis that view societies,
for example, as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern,’”
20
and argues that “the pathway to modernity can
neither be characterized as an inevitable evolutionary development […] nor as a unilinear ‘march
of rationalization.’”
21
Rather, modern societies are made up of a combination of the past and the
present—there are no truly clean breaks between eras even if there are shifts or turning points

18. Stephen Kalberg, “Max Weber: The Confrontation with Modernity,” in Max Weber: Readings and
Commentary on Modernity, 30.

19. Kalberg, 28.

20. Kalberg, 20.

21. Kalberg, 21.
12

and modernity is not one, unified consistent thing, but rather a constellation of various forces that
come out of the developing and imperfect turn to science and rationality as privileged lenses
through which to understand the world.
22
That is, “modernity” is not the set result of an
evolutionary social development across centuries, despite the promises offered by a rationalist
approach. The bureaucracy, as a key organizational tool for implementing rationality and
scientific thinking in social, political, and economic contexts, is what helps to give the false
impression of modernity as a kind of break with the past, but it also contributes to the
continuations and fragmentations that make modernity not actually fit into the system that is
expected.
There’s a tension in the literary works that I examine in the following chapters between
the rational framework for understanding modern life and what actually persists into the
nineteenth century. In this sense, the literary authors in the following chapters anticipate Weber’s
critiques through their own lived experiences and discomfort with narratives about modernity
and rationality and their implementation. The tension between expectation and reality manifests
as a dissatisfaction with bureaucracy in the novels of my chosen authors, but it is perhaps more
accurately a dissatisfaction with the larger rationalist approaches that make bureaucracy fit
within the project of Western modernity, a dissatisfaction with the failure of modernity and the
inability to rationally homogenize human life, governance, and everything in between. What is
actually persisting in bureaucratic modernity then, is a kind of shared affective response to
attempts to rationalize away affect even as it permeates the government bureaucracy and other
modern structures. Bureaucracy and modernity, through an adherence to rationality, are both
self-affirming. If rationality is the best, most methodical approach for understanding the world,

22. Kalberg, 21.
13

then hyper-rational structures and an emphasis on rationality as history’s guiding principle are
the necessary results of social development. As Weber contends, it is this insistence on and
development of hyper-specialized rationality that make bureaucracy, and perhaps modernity with
it, “‘escape-proof’”
23
and that allow bureaucracy to more effectively develop over time.
24

However, unlike in Weber’s model, the nineteenth-century literature I examine further suggests
that bureaucracy and modernity both seem to persist in and emerge out of their failure. In
practice, bureaucracy is often irrational, affective, visceral, and imbued with belief, but it is
precisely these qualities that allow it to continue and become further embedded as an
indispensable feature of modern life. Surely, the rational approach would be to discard a system
that did not work in the (rational) manner it was supposed to, but the attachment to bureaucracy
and modernity as frameworks has an affective valence, even if it’s a negative one. This is not
necessarily to say that bureaucracy or rational frameworks of modernity should be discarded, but
rather that they could be reimagined and that the literature of the nineteenth century already
contains the seeds for this reimagining. My main concern here is to engage with the possibilities
as with the tensions and dissonances that nineteenth-century literary and bureaucratic authors
have left behind. Weber’s models serve, as they have for many before me, as a useful launchpad,
but in the following chapters these models will be stretched to their limits. While writing before
Weber, the authors in the following chapters do expect something akin to Weber’s model to
represent the actual character of the state bureaucracy. It is the failure of this explanation that
often drives affective, physiological, and narrative reactions to bureaucratic labor. Through these
reactions, bureaucratic labor is reproduced and further embedded into everyday life in the

23. Weber, Max Weber, 216.

24. Weber, 200.
14

modern European state. Affective attachments to the bureau and what it produces solidify its
status as something that cannot be given up and insist on its continuation in perpetuity.

Scope
Time Range: 1830s to the 1880s
This project will specifically focus on texts published between the 1830s and the 1880s.
Due to the development in the early to mid-1800s of a specifically professionalized state
bureaucracy, the 1830s through the end of the century are an especially fertile period for the
bureaucracies in France and Russia as well as for literature about those bureaucracies. It was
under Nicholas I in Russia, who ruled from 1825 to 1855, that the ministerial system solidified
by Peter I in the early eighteenth century and perpetuated by Nicholas’ more immediate
predecessors, like Alexander I (who ruled from 1801 to 1825), not only grew, but became
combined with “the formation of a professional bureaucracy.”
25
This major change in the
makeup of the national government created a class of “enlightened bureaucrats” who unified
under “a common ethos, which included the demand for strict observance of the law, a worship
of science, and a desire to understand the changes taking place in the West and to prepare Russia
to absorb them.”
26
With a rationalist approach akin to those advocated in Western Europe, many
of Russia’s tsars attempted to map Russian modernity onto a specific Western standard of
civilization based in science and rule-based administration. However, in their shared goal of
privileging the well-being of the state, these professional bureaucrats became critical of
Nicholas’ regime and, despite attempts to regulate administration and use it as a tool for social

25. Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century, 42.

26. Polunov, 43.
15

advancement, in practice the professional bureaucracy did not live up to its expected promises. In
reality, “the confused state of the laws severely hampered procedures in the administration and
the courts, opening the way for unscrupulous officials to manipulate contradictory legal norms”
and creating a burgeoning but corrupt and ineffective bureaucratic apparatus.
27
In this sense, the
mid- to late-1800s serves as a convenient period for tracking the promise of a professionalized
bureaucracy and its eventual failure to deliver, particularly highlighted by the hardships of freed
serfs after their supposed liberation, an issue to which I will turn more robustly in chapter three.
Similarly, according to Clive Church, France’s administration began as a ministerial
organization before the French Revolution, but it was the Revolution itself that transformed the
administration into a proper bureaucracy. Prior to the Revolution, the French government
certainly boasted “a strong, complicated, and centralized administrative structure” but it “was
dominated by superior officials and the patrimonial characteristics deriving from the way they
had begun as, and indeed still remained, direct servants of the king.” So, while the pre-
Revolutionary “administration had some bureaucratic dimensions,” it did not quite reach the
level of a full bureaucracy in the Weberian sense.
28
The most noticeable shift in the
administrative structure of the French state, a shift that, in Church’s view, developed the French
ministerial government into a fully bureaucratic government, came in the form of the
professionalization of the bureaucracy. While between 1794 and 1830 the structure of the French
state became increasingly bureaucratic, going through waves of purges and structural changes, it
was the July Monarchy of the 1830s and 1840s that pushed the burgeoning bureaucratic system
into a full-fledged professional bureaucracy. The July Monarchy, perhaps unwittingly,

27. Polunov, 43, 49.

28. Church, Revolution and Red Tape, 9.
16

established the bureaucracy as a permanent aspect of French political life by taking on the
problems identified by the Restoration’s struggle with bureaucratic organization and investing in
the bureaucracy as a political player.
29
While the public did not have access to the inner-
workings of the bureaucracy, they were forced to acknowledge its right to exist and to advocate
for its political interests.
30
Prior to the Revolution, the figure of the fonctionnaire
31
dominated the
civil service, but this dominance shifted with the professionalization of the administration. While
fonctionnaires enjoyed some level of authority and responsibility, especially over the employés
working under them, they “were often deemed not to need a salary.” It was only after the
Revolution that the salaried employee “began to exercise an influence which could balance that
of the fonctionnaires.”
32
For Weber as well as Church, the shift to a regulated and monetarily
compensated workforce of officials served as a crucial step in the development of the state
bureaucracy.
33
Even if Church’s division between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French
administrative structures seems arbitrary or too solid of a boundary to draw between the two in
the grand scheme of defining bureaucracy, the shift to a professional bureaucracy marks a clear

29. Church, 305.

30. I do not mean here to suggest that the bureaucracy acted as a monolithic block—just that from the
outside it could often give this impression or at least did often give this impression to the unsympathetic.

31. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the working definition of a fonctionnaire, according to
Church, was “someone exercising a political role, authority, and responsibility in his own right,” that is, a person in
a higher-level administrative role rather than the basse administration. “Such officials, elected or nominated, were
very clearly distinguished from employés, the subaltern officials who worked for them” and, unlike the professional
bureaucrats whose numbers began to increase in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, their service was based on a
sense of duty and the financial means to take on an administrative role without remuneration (10).

32. Church, 10.

33. Weber, Max Weber, 197.
17

turning point in the structure of the state government and in the public view and understanding of
the bureaucracy and its intended purpose.
34

For both Russia and France, then, the 1830s served as a particularly formative decade in
terms of the growth and shape of the bureaucratic state. The development of the bureaucratic
state had material consequences in terms of things like governance and class distribution, and it
left a strong impression on public intellectuals and writers. The regime changes that ultimately
cemented the role of the Russian and French bureaucracies for almost a century to come
provided writers like Gogol’ and Balzac with a particularly fertile source of literary inspiration.
Just as the burgeoning state bureaucracies produced things, including literature, the literary
representations of state bureaucracy produced certain material influences on the bureaucracy in
turn, challenging the intellectual frameworks that helped it run.
Beyond the political context of the 30s and its influence on literary representations of
bureaucracy in particular, the 1830s can also serve as a kind of literary ‘starting point’ for this
project on a broader scale. Besides the fact that Gogol’ and Balzac, as the authors of my earliest
chosen texts, both wrote directly and critically about the bureaucracies in their respective
countries, they both have significant roles in launching or establishing major cultural movements
and literatures of the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, as Russian critics and
writers began increasingly to define eighteenth-century Russian literature as an attempt to imitate
European, and especially French, literature, there were widespread complaints among the
intelligentsia “about the lack of a Russian literature” in general.
35
The growing need to establish

34. Sarah Maza also highlights a shift in the perceived purpose of the French administrative structure
before and after the Revolution. Pre-Revolution, “administrative positions were personal business assets” and
viewed as sources of private financial gain whereas, post-Revolution the fully bureaucratized system produced “new
elites” whom “intellectuals saw...as public servants,” that is, their perceived concerns shifted to public concerns
rather than personal concerns (128). See Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social
Imaginary 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

18

a stable Russian national identity and, with it, a national literary tradition, seemed to highlight a
cultural vacuum. Despite the initially convoluted responses to Gogol’’s early work, lamenting its
‘Ukrainianness,’ requesting more ‘Ukrainianness,’ questioning his rights and role in the Russian
literary scene, for some, like the nineteenth-century literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, Gogol’
became, at least at times, what Donald Fanger calls the “‘sole hope for the future of Russian
literature’” and his work launched the literary trends that would ultimately lead to nationally
celebrated nineteenth-century writers like Fedor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and beyond.
36

Gogol’, and the 1830s in general—which also produced some of the most celebrated works of
Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov—then, offers a productive moment for thinking
through how the bureaucracy fully emerged and evolved as a point of literary concern in the
Russian context.
Akin to Gogol’, Balzac served as an important literary figure for France, and for Europe
more generally, as one of the primary players in establishing realism as a major literary genre
and in representing the literary and cultural realities of the nineteenth century for his readers.
Echoing Oscar Wilde, Peter Brooks goes so far as to suggest that “Balzac ‘invented’ the
nineteenth century by giving form to its emerging urban agglomerations, its nascent capitalist
dynamics, its rampant cult of the individual personality.” For Brooks, Balzac “initiated his
readers into understanding the shape of a century” and even if this praise is a little overblown, it
seems fair to say that the importance of Balzac’s role in the French literary scene mirrored that of
Gogol’’s role in Russia.
37
While Balzac continued a tradition of bureaucratic stereotypes already

35. Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 218.

36. Fanger, 204. In Belinskii’s 1824 letter to Gogol’, he tells him that “вы у нас теперь один.” See V. G.
Belinskii, “Из письма Гоголю Н. В., 20 апреля 1842 г. С.-Петербург.” In Н. В. Гоголь в воспоминаниях
современников, ed. S. I. Mashinskii (Москва: Гос. издат. худож. лит., 1952), 357. “‘you are now the only one
among us’” (qtd. in Fanger, 267n.6).

19

well-known in France, he did so in a new generic context, as part of the gestational period of
realism.
38
Given the rise of the professional bureaucracy across Europe in the early nineteenth
century, which allowed non-nobles to take on paid bureaucratic positions as their sole source of
income, it isn’t very surprising that the bureaucracy became a satirical target of realist writing in
particular. As the bureaucracy became an increasing part of the everyday, the genre tasked with
representing daily life filled it increasingly with the bureaucracy. The 1830s witness the
intersection of governmental reorganization and literary creation in the space of the bureau.

France and Russia
In this dissertation I focus specifically on writers from Russia and France rather than a
broader swath of works. This combination is not meant to give a complete picture of European
bureaucracy as a whole, although these two countries do offer exemplary images of Western and
Eastern Europe as connected but in many ways culturally separate in their approaches to
administration. With France often historically serving as the cultural model for Western
European culture, especially for Russians, and Russia as one of the most notable national powers
in Eastern Europe (although it is more accurately defined as a Eurasian country), bringing these
two examples together gives a better sense of how the East-West cultural dichotomy especially
important in the nineteenth century is particularly blurred in the realm of administration even if
there are culturally specific influences at play in each context.
Franco-Russian exchange serves as a particularly appropriate intercultural zone in which
to examine what state bureaucracy produces, both because government bureaucracy has so

37. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 22.

38. Michael Hughes, “Samovars and Quills: The Representation of Bureaucracy in Mid-Nineteenth-
Century Russian Literature,” Archival Science 14, no. 1 (March 2014): 57.
20

noticeably inscribed the political and literary identity of these countries, and because these
countries are so inextricably linked together as Russians persistently looked to French literature
and culture as models, especially beginning in the eighteenth century. Historically, bureaucracy
has shaped the structure of the state and become tangled in questions of national identity. In their
adoptions of bureaucratic organizational structures, both countries’ administrations purport a
commitment to a certain version of rationality and “civilization” that relies on a top-down
definition of what a citizen is and does. For Russia, though, there are additional questions: are we
still Russian if we adopt a European-style bureaucracy? Is it better to be Russian or European? It
is these types of question that fueled the heated and highly visible debate between Westernizers
and Slavophiles throughout the century as they attempted to locate and define Russia’s national
identity, especially in relation to the East-West dichotomy. To oversimplify the Westernizer-
Slavophile cultural debate, which will reappear in a more nuanced version in chapter three, this
point of tension in the nineteenth century was essentially a disagreement over whether Western
Europe should be the cultural model for Russia or vice versa.
39
These concerns are at the
forefront of discussions over institutions like bureaucracy that were often attributed to Western
influence and seemingly focused on progress to the detriment of traditional views of Russian
identity based in the narod.
40
While in France the professional form of regulated state
bureaucracy came out of the French Revolution and its appeals for citizenship and thus
supposedly out of the political desires of the French people, Russian state bureaucracy’s roots in
Peter I’s civil service, which was based in an attempt to adopt Western cultural frameworks as a

39. See Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century, beginning page 58. See also Susanna Rabow-Edling,
Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006)
and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian
Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) in particular.

40. People, in the sense of the common people.
21

part of Russia’s modernization, made it seem like a cultural interloper or an imposition that had
nothing to do with Russian national identity at all. In this sense, the cultural exchange between
France and Russia was heavily lopsided and seemed to reenforce Western cultural hegemony in
Russia.
That is, it isn’t just that these countries engaged in cultural exchange: France and Russia
create a specific relational network based on power dynamics and forms of imperial discourse.
Russia has long experienced what many have considered a national identity crisis as the
intelligentsia has continued to debate Russia’s place in the East-West dichotomy, especially in
the nineteenth century in the form of the Westernizer-Slavophile debates. So, while Westernizers
pushed, in large part, for Russia to adopt Western ideologies in order to cure its so-called
‘backwardness,’ the Slavophiles extolled the unique and savior-like role that Russia would play
on the world stage by spreading its Russianness, and especially Orthodoxy, to the materialist,
self-involved West. France, and much of the rest of Western Europe, saw Russia as the
Orientalized Other, while Russia saw itself often as either the backwards proto-European or the
privileged Slavic model. In this sense, Russia was caricatured by, and often participated in, its
othering at the hands of Europe. Its links to France are not necessarily those of equal cultural
exchange, but rather often stem from the absorption of paternalistic and Orientalizing Western
ideas about Eastern Europe and Asia.
That being said, Russia is no stranger to cultural paternalism or to violent imperialism as
the ongoing invasion of Ukraine clearly demonstrates. The nineteenth-century state bureaucracy
in Russia may have carried with it a certain denigration of Russian culture, but Russian state
bureaucracy also made possible, in part, the expansion of Russian empire by offering it the false
legitimacy of a “civilizing” mission in the same way that Western Europe could claim
22

civilizational dominance and rational reform as weaponized justifications for taking control over
imperial and colonial holdings. Beyond France’s literary influence on Russian culture and
thought, the influence of the professional bureaucratic model coming out of Western Europe
lends a familiar framework to earlier tsarist policies of territorial expansion as well as the
nineteenth-century obsessions with pan-Slavism and the narod. The development of professional
bureaucracy in Russia also allowed for shared cultural and literary tropes with France around
what bureaucracy is and does and the expectations of the imperial state that then became
embedded in Russian culture in more specific ways. The following chapters trace this network of
influence and power by bringing French and Russian literary representations of bureaucracy
together in the form of individual case studies.

Methodology
Canonical Case Studies
As the chapter outlines below will make readily apparent, this dissertation is organized
around four case studies of individual, canonical French and Russian writers: Balzac, Gogol’,
Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Huysmans. These case studies include footnotes and other brief
references tying together the ideas in the chapters where appropriate, but they each deal with
different frameworks and offer different arguments about government bureaucracy as a
productive force and about its links to literature. The eclecticism of this project is thus in line
with the project’s conclusions. As I argue in chapter one, attempts at top-down systematization
or classification will always fail. Explanatory systems that claim to completely encapsulate their
subjects, which in chapter one include both the French state bureaucracy and naturalist
approaches to taxonomy, cannot truly address everything, while the illusion of a unified totality
23

obscures whatever, or whoever, exceeds the attempt at systematization. In this sense, an attempt
to create a unified framework that would somehow fully and consistently address not just the
similarities between French and Russian experiences and representations of bureaucracy but also
the differences in these contexts would perhaps draw too grand a portrait of nineteenth-century
European bureaucracy. Like Gogol’, who leaves room for the unruly inanimate matter that he
locates in and around the Russian state bureaucracy in St. Petersburg with his renegade nose, I
want to leave openings and passages between chapters that gesture towards shared tropes,
affects, and material experiences without synonymizing them or presenting government
bureaucracy, and the literature about it, as a monolith. In this way, just as Gogol’ presents
Russian empire as more of an assemblage than a clearcut inside/outside model, as I discuss in
chapter two, these chapters are meant to make up an assemblage of case studies that are
connected in amorphous ways not easily defined by direct lines of influence. For example,
chapters one and two, focused on Balzac and Gogol’, take on the nonhuman stuff that gathers
around and shapes bureaucracy, but Balzac adopts a naturalist approach while Gogol’’s approach
could better be described as proto-new materialist. Chapters three and four, on Saltykov-
Shchedrin and Huysmans, specifically focus on public narratives about bureaucracy and their
affective consequences, but Saltykov-Shchedrin is more concerned about mythical thinking
while Huysmans is more invested in the shared experience of the mal du siècle. As will become
apparent in the chapters themselves, there are further connections to be made between the case
studies both on relatively small scales—the repetitions of tropes like the hemorrhoidal civil
servant—and on much broader scales—like the question of national identity—but through this
loose construction, each case study can exist as a part of the whole of this project while
simultaneously preserving its singularity. In constructing this assemblage of case studies, I have
24

opted to focus on canonical authors and works to drive home how prevalent images of state
bureaucracy were in the literary scenes of Russia and France. The number of works from well-
known writers taking on this topic in the nineteenth century suggests that this assemblage of
tropes and texts reflected a larger cultural preoccupation for Europe more generally but
especially for France and Russia.

Chapter Summaries
Ch. 1 : “Les Tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux :” Bureaucratic Failure in
Balzac’s Les Employés
Chapter one, entitled “‘Les Tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux:’ Bureaucratic
Failure in Balzac’s Les Employés” focuses on Honoré de Balzac’s novel Les Employés (1838) in
order to think through the ways in which systematization, and by extension bureaucracy and
modernity, fails. Balzac’s novel, a narrative about a bureaucrat who is passed over for promotion
in favor of his less-qualified colleague for political reasons, attempts to neatly classify and
systematize the French government bureaucracy of the 1830s according to frameworks that
Balzac has adopted from eighteenth-century naturalists like Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in particular. As he works through his naturalist vision of the
bureaucracy, however, he also anticipates the evolutionary logic of Charles Darwin even before
On the Origin of Species is published. Through these frameworks, Balzac characterizes the
bureaucracy as a kind of ecosystem wherein the civil servants working for the division follow a
set of environmental rules based on their own essential, natural qualities. However, rather than
establishing a properly encapsulating natural-social system that Balzac’s reader can adopt to
better understand the bureaucracy and how it functions, Balzac’s novel instead demonstrates
25

where the bureaucrats, and the bureaucracy itself, instead exceed or veer away from this system.
The bureaucrats in the novel, whom Balzac often describes as shipworms, a type of mollusk that
eats through wooden structures, use small, insistent acts of writing to shape the bureaucratic
space and its possibilities around them. This writing, though, does not just mold the bureaucracy,
but rather renders it unstable from the inside; even while the bureaucrats are creating the
bureaucracy, they are also simultaneously destroying it. In this creative destruction, Balzac
unintentionally predicts the failure of bureaucracy and, by extension, modernity itself as a certain
kind of project based on progress and a consistent movement towards perfection. The failure of
his own attempts at systematization reveals the ways in which failure becomes a prerequisite for
bureaucracy, modernity, and the realist novel even in the acts of their creation.

Ch. 2: “A Kind of Unnatural Force:” Bureaucratic Assemblage in Nikolai Gogol’
Building on Balzac’s revelations about the failures of bureaucracy as a force of
systematization, in chapter 2, entitled “‘A Kind of Unnatural Force:’ Bureaucratic Assemblage in
Nikolai Gogol’,” Nikolai Gogol’ instead focuses on what this failure produces. Rather than
approaching bureaucratic writing and classification as deadening forces that always take
something away, Gogol’’s short stories “Nos” [“The Nose”] (1836) and “Shinel’” [“The
Overcoat”] (1842) instead highlight the ways in which the Russian government bureaucracy is
both oppressive and expressive through the production of visceral affect. Diverging from
Balzac’s ecological image of the bureaucratic space, Gogol’’s bureaucracy and the social world
around it are full of matter and bodies that should be inanimate or regulated in certain ways but
are instead animated and unruly. While bureaucratic tools like the Table of Ranks—the guideline
setting out different civil, military, and clerical positions, their titles, and their place on the
26

bureaucratic hierarchy—purport to organize the bureaucratic space and social status by
establishing set official identities, they instead create excess around the bureaucracy, a space
where people and things that don’t clearly fit within bureaucratic guidelines and definitions
gather and exert agency. This agency is expressed through infectious affect that is passed
between inanimate material, writing, and bodies and that undermines official expressions of
identity and destabilizes both individual and national identity as concepts by locating the
trappings of identity everywhere. Systematization and the drive for official identity ultimately
make Russian imperialism possible as a kind of urge to solidify national identity by taking in
more land and communities and imposing strict boundaries between what does and does not
count as “Russian.” However, imperial attempts at regulating identity necessarily fail along with
other forms of systematization, and Gogol’ instead characterizes Russia, its bureaucracy, and its
empire as an assemblage model rather than one based on clear borders between what is inside
and what is outside.

Ch. 3: “Thousands of Dirty and Greedy Mouths:” Bureaucratic Mythologies in Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s Gospoda Golovlevy
Chapter three, entitled “‘Thousands of Dirty and Greedy Mouths:’ Bureaucratic
Mythologies in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Gospoda Golovlevy,” takes Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s
novel Gospoda Golovlevy [“The Golovlevs”] (1880) and the writing he produced when he
worked for the state bureaucracy himself as case study materials for examining the failure of the
bureaucratic archive and what that failure produces. While the Russian state bureaucracy in the
nineteenth century attempted to rigorously document every element of life in Russia through
inspections of local bureaucratic branches in the provinces as a kind of rationalist drive to
27

organize information about the country and systematically address bureaucratic inefficiency or
social problems, Saltykov-Shchedrin instead locates the ways in which this kind of rationalist
project is more precisely based in mythological thinking. By drawing on Slavic folklore, which
was having a resurgence in the nineteenth century, Saltykov-Shchedrin reveals the myths behind
government projects of rational organization and highlights the ways in which gaps in the
bureaucratic archive become reproduced and undermine the entire archival project even in its
creation. In the post-Great Reforms bureaucracy, Saltykov-Shchedrin argues, similar problems of
irrationality and authority persist from the pre-Great Reforms bureaucracy and wreak real havoc
on the lives of the newly freed serfs meant to benefit from the reform period the most. Casting
the two main characters of Gospoda Golovlevy, an ex-civil servant named Porfirii and his
domineering gentry-era mother Arina, as a vampire and witch respectively, Saltykov-Shchedrin
highlights the ways in which powerful forms of arbitrary authority persist across the century, but
also the ways in which bureaucratic authority remains unstable and impossible to pin down.
Through the slow descent of the two characters, and all the characters around them, to their
eventual death, he uncovers a kind of death drive in the Russian bureaucratic archive that makes
impossible the utopian promises of rationality and civilizational advance that enlightened
bureaucrats attribute to their own work. Furthermore, he demonstrates the ways in which these
future-oriented promises are actually based in a nostalgia for a past that never existed.

Ch. 4 : “Non comme homme de lettres, mais comme ‘rond-de-cuir :’” Bureaucratic
Modernity in Joris-Karl Huysmans
Chapter four, entitled “‘Non comme homme de lettres, mais comme ‘rond-de-cuir:’’
Bureaucratic Modernity in Joris-Karl Huysmans,” puts Huysmans’ novel À vau-l’eau
28

[Downstream] (1882) and short story “La retraite de Monsieur Bougran” [“Mr. Bougran’s
Retirement”] (1888) in conversation with the writing he produced while working for the state
bureaucracy in order to trace what happens to the bureaucrat’s body in particular under
nineteenth-century bureaucratic organization. In this chapter, I argue that the collapse of modern
writing into bureaucratic writing in the nineteenth century helps to create the affective crisis at
the end of the century, a crisis that is particularly marked by disgust and ennui and that is
inseparable from the petty bureaucrat’s experience of working in the bureau. The bureaucrat’s
body is transformed into a grotesque, dehumanized object that produces the dual affective
valence of disgust and ennui both through an individual reaction to his own labor, and by
drawing the ire of a public dissatisfied with real or perceived bureaucratic inefficiency and over-
expansion. This affective crisis is particularly fueled by anti-fonctionnarisme at the end of the
century and serves as an integral part of the shared century-defining mal du siècle or pessimisme.
In particular, the mal du siécle is a result of the (bio)political policing carried out by the
government bureaucracy that synonymizes the political, or potential, criminal’s body with their
textual existence in the archive. This same collapse of body into text applies beyond the
“criminal” to every aspect of life that the state bureaucracy presides over, including the body and
life of the bureaucrat which is caricatured and dehumanized by the public and the state, but also
complicit in state policing. The figure of the bureaucrat in this context, and particularly of
Huysmans, represents a kind of hybridity that bureaucratic labor and oversight create between
the body and text, a hybridity that leaks out to code all of life and living in modernity as
bureaucratic structures expand or become more integral to the workings of the state and daily
life.

29

On the Scent: Bureaucratic Legacies
Despite the importance placed on rationality and calculability by professionalized state
bureaucratic structures in the nineteenth century and, by extension, by many of the defining
intellectual frameworks meant to establish modernity as a hard break from a traditional past, in
practice rationality and calculability were often decidedly irrational and incalculable, saturated
with affect. Stewing in the chaotic affective soup of the cluttered bureau and its environs,
bureaucrats and authors of fiction in nineteenth-century Russia and France put pressure,
sometimes even unintentionally, on the new paradigms of modern life that promised a kind of
social and technological evolution into civilizational perfection, highlighted the imperfections of
bureaucratic systems, and teased out the ways in which bureaucracy and modernity are
inextricably intertwined. While engaging with these texts promises to offer a more complicated
picture of nineteenth-century life and bureaucracy, this project is also especially relevant to
concerns about the role that bureaucratic structures have had and still have in shaping state and
corporate power that persist across disciplines to this day.
Like Kovalev, in following fictional accounts of bureaucratic absurdity, I am following a
nose, or rather, what the nose represents—the nineteenth-century state bureaucracy come to life:
autonomous, material, and prone to anxiety about the role of modernity in daily life.
30

Chapter 1 : “Les Tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux :” Bureaucratic Failure in Balzac’s Les
Employés
In November 1730, the people living on the (former) island of Walcheren in the
Netherlands discovered a major problem. The storm that hit the coast on the 18
th
of the month
prompted a routine follow-up inspection of the sea dikes and, through that inspection, revealed
that the dikes were riddled with Teredo navalis, also called the “shipworm.”
41
These so-called
shipworms, which are more accurately a kind of mollusc, had eaten through all of the wooden
parts of the dikes that they could find, causing many of those pieces to break apart during the
storm.
42
As the inspectors would discover in the following months, this damage was not limited
to Walcheren, but rather spread across a massive amount of the coastal Netherlands.
43
It is this
particular disaster, and the bivalve culprits that made it possible, that Honoré de Balzac adopts as
a metaphor to launch his cast-of-characters introduction of the ensemble bureaucratic
personalities at play in his 1838 novel Les Employés [The Bureaucrats] (originally titled La
Femme supérieure):
S’il était possible de se servir en littérature du microscope des Leuvenhoëk, des Malpighi,
des Raspail, ce qu’a tenté Hoffmann le Berlinois ; et si l’on grossissait et dessinait ces
tarets qui ont mis la Hollande à deux doigts de sa perte en rongeant ses digues, peut-être
ferait-on voir des figures à peu de chose près semblables à celles des sieurs Gigonnet,
Mitral, Baudoyer, Saillard, Gaudron, Falleix, Transon, Godard et compagnie, tarets qui
d’ailleurs ont montré leur puissance dans la trentième année de ce siècle. Aussi voici le
moment de montrer les tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux où se sont préparées les
principales scènes de cette Étude.
44

41. Adam Sundberg, “An Uncommon Threat: Shipworms as a Novel Disaster,” Dutch Crossing 40, no. 2 (3
May 2016), 122, 123.

42. Sundberg, 123, 122.

43. Sundberg, 123.

44. Honoré de Balzac, “Les Employés,” in La Comédie humaine, vol. 6, Études de mœurs: scènes de la vie
parisienne, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 919. “If it were possible in literature to make use of the microscopes of the
Leeuwenhoeks, Malpighis, and Raspails, as was attempted by Hoffmann from Berlin, and if we magnified and drew
those teredos, those shipworms that placed Holland within inches of disaster by eating away at her dikes, then we
31

Just as the Teredos, in French the tarets, left Holland’s wooden structures in shambles, so,
Balzac argues, France’s bureaucrats also put their country “à deux doigts de sa perte” [“within
inches of disaster”] by gnawing holes in the very institutions upon which the state is built. In
order to see these holes, however, we would need Leeuwenhoek’s microscope to peer through
the “vitre ovale qui ressemble à un oeil” [“oval panes of glass like eyes”] of each bureau door
into the “corridors obscurs” [“dark corridors”] within.
45
That is, in order to see the French
bureaucrats of the nineteenth century, we must spend the novel among the “worms.”
First, though, a bird’s-eye view will help us situate these worms within Balzac’s oeuvre
and the historical and conceptual forces influencing his work. To start with, Les Employés does
have the qualities of a standalone work with an independent plot, but it is also one of the many
novels that makes up Balzac’s larger La Comédie humaine [The Human Comedy]. The shipworm
metaphor that Balzac adopts to introduce the minor bureaucrats of the novel is specific to Les
Employés and its bureaucratic characters, but it also speaks to Balzac’s attempts, through La
Comédie humaine, to systematize and classify the social. By casting the bureaucrats in the image
of tarets, the figures “qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux” [“who were crawling around in the
bureaus”] and “ont montré leur puissance dans la trentième année de ce siècle,”
46
he suggests
that this metaphor can accurately depict a certain type of person who fits within a larger social
system. In a letter to Madame Hanska on October 26, 1834, Balzac explains the purpose of La

might discover figures in some ways resembling those of Gigonnet, Mitral, Baudoyer, Saillard, Gaudron, Falleix,
Transon, Godard, and company—worms who have demonstrated their power in the thirtieth year of this century.
And so, now is the time to expose the worms who were crawling around in the bureaus that are the principal scenes
of our study.” Honoré de Balzac, The Bureaucrats, trans. Charles Foulkes, ed. Marco Diani (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 70.

45. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 919, 920. Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 73.

46. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 919. “have demonstrated their power in the thirtieth year of this century.”
Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 70.
32

Comédie humaine as such: “quand tout sera fini, ma Madeleine grattée, mon fronton sculpté, mes
planches débarrassées, mes derniers coups de peigne donnés, j’aurai eu raison ou j’aurai eu tort.
Mais après avoir fait la poésie, la démonstration de tout un système, j’en ferai la science dans
l’Essai sur les forces humaines.”
47
That is, La Comédie humaine would not just present an
interesting collection of stories, but would serve as a poetic ground upon which Balzac could
build a scientific system to explain humanity and social interaction. In the letter he breaks down
the collection of novels into three parts, the Études des moeurs [Studies of Manners], Études
philosophiques [Philosophical Studies], and Études analytiques [Analytical Studies], which set
out the facts, causes, and principles of humanity and society respectively.
48
While Les Employés
falls under the Études des moeurs and, therefore, under the section of La Comédie humaine
meant to lay out the details of social reality rather than set down the larger principles of the
world, the ways in which he lays out those details reveals the methodology behind them. In the
particular metaphors he adopts to describe the employés, their bureau, and their work, he reveals
that the approach he is taking to define the social type of the bureaucrat, and through that
definition, to critique state bureaucratic practice in nineteenth-century France, is less
sociopolitical than ecological.
49

47. Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à l’étrangère, t. 1: 1833-1842 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989), 205-206. “When
everything is finished, my Madeleine scraped, my pediment sculpted, my boards cleared, my last strokes of the
comb given, I will have been reasoned or I will have been wrong. But after having made poetry, the demonstration
of a whole system, I will make science of it in the Essay on Human Forces.”

48. Balzac, Lettres, 205-206.

49. While the word “ecology” here is strictly anachronistic—the OED traces the word to Ernst Haeckel’s
Generelle Morphologie der Organismen published in 1866—the definition of the word does apply to Balzac’s
project and to the image of the bureaucracy that he presents. That is, as the OED defines it, he is “deal[ing] with the
relationships between living organisms and their environment” by looking specifically at how the bureaucrat and the
natural world of the government bureau interact. This is especially true because this term is used in more modern
contexts not just in the natural sciences but also in broader senses to talk about the operations of any system within
its environment or about the relationship between the human and the natural. Thus, this term captures Balzac’s
project to bring natural sciences and natural history together with social structures, particularly bureaucracy and
literature. Furthermore, as I explain in this paragraph, my argument is focused on the ways in which Balzac
33

Or, rather, the sociopolitical is still at play and the locus of Balzac’s concern, but his view
and systematization of the sociopolitical are framed by and absorbed into a particular
understanding of the natural world that is influenced by the naturalist work of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Balzac’s bureaucracy is not merely a government institution, it is the
ecosystem for his tarets and, because it is an ecosystem, can be exhaustively classified and
systematized according to the same principles that contemporary scientific reference texts have
used to classify and systematize the different organisms making up the natural world. He is
trying to create a system for understanding the social, but he ties the social types he attempts to
organize and define to essentialist natural qualities that, in his schema, should consistently
govern and explain how each type moves in the world, both socially and physically. However,
even as Balzac adopts naturalist models to try to contain the shipworms he has created, he cannot
fully control their gnawing. Every aspect of the bureaucratic ecosystem in Les Employés, how
the organisms interact with each other and their environment, how they reproduce both
themselves and their ecosystem, how they evolve within that ecosystem, is determined by
writing, the gnawing of the “shipworms,” which has its own simultaneously creative and
destructive agency. Just as the actual shipworms gnaw through Holland’s sea dikes, Balzac’s
metaphorical tarets gnaw through the boundaries of his natural-social system even as he
simultaneously creates it. As the writing, the gnawing, of the tarets gets away from him,
Balzac’s ecosystem becomes less of a system, at least in the unified sense of the échelle des
êtres, and more a mélange of loosely hierarchized bodies that consistently transgress their
boundaries and the boundaries between human, animal, nature, and the humanmade. By

anticipates later intellectual frameworks of modernity, particularly Darwinian ideas of evolution, as well as
modernity’s failure, so drawing in a word that crops up later in the century but still describes relatively accurately
what Balzac is writing about mirrors the temporality and conceptual pattern of this argument. Oxford English
Dictionary (March 2022), n. “ecology.”
34

struggling to house his bureaucrats under a kind of enclosed and exhaustive social taxonomic
system, Balzac fails in his act of systematizing creation and, in doing so, anticipates the failure of
a modernity that he is also, simultaneously, helping to create. Anticipating the work of Darwin
and yet demonstrating how his frameworks for understanding nature prove inaccurate before
they have even been published in their best-known form, Balzac creates a kind of failed text that
introduces a sub-narrative into the grand ideological frameworks of modernity. Namely, rather
than being undercut by an eventual sense of failure, modernity—as a project of rationalism and
systematization that aims for social progress and scientific and technological innovation—and
modern literature are produced out of failure. For Balzac and more generally, bureaucracy, both
as a concept and as a material practice, is a defining feature of nineteenth-century modernity but
as the internal damage done by the shipworms suggests, it is also destroyed in the act of its
creation. He acknowledges the failure of systems even as he clings to them, and it is in the
circular act of failed systematization that he locates bureaucracy, the realist novel, modernity,
and the ties that bind them.
While Balzac’s focus is on a French government bureaucracy that has progressively
gotten more professionalized since the first years of the French Revolution, the habits of the
ministerial system in France in the eighteenth century do not just disappear in the nineteenth.
Political reformers of the ministerial and then bureaucratic structures organizing the French
government attempted to minimize the arbitrary nature of ministerial appointments and to make
that system less class restrictive, but these attempts had not properly succeeded by the time
Balzac published Les Employés. The Napoleonic administration in particular focused on the
creation of a state bureaucracy that was “based on the application of enlightened reason to the
body politic.” In order to meet this goal systematically, the Napoleonic administration focused
35

on increasing “the […] centrality and legitimising of the executive bureaucracy.”
50
One of the
driving intellectual frameworks behind this shift was the “conviction that systematic
classification of empirical facts provided the basis for the identification and demonstration of the
social interest” behind this legitimization.
51
The bureaucratic approach to state government in the
early nineteenth century echoed the drive to classify and systematize the natural world that
Balzac draws on as a means for organizing his own natural-social system of bureaucracy.
However, despite the attempts to approach state administration through rational systems—an
approach that will also fail for Saltykov-Shchedrin and his contemporaries in different ways in
chapter three—the roots of this supposedly new bureaucratic system were still grounded in the
arbitrary practices of the past ministerial system. In the 1790s, before the Napoleonic
administration had a chance to implement their rational approach, the Directory “created an
amalgam of Ancien Régime and revolutionary administration by reinserting the new
revolutionary bureaucracy within the old ministerial framework” and this decision was “essential
to the consolidation of the former.”
52
With this combination of approaches as the base, even as
the Napoleonic administration attempted to move away from the arbitrariness of past
organizational frameworks, it was still similarly indebted to nepotism and class preference both
due to the administration’s obsession with the elite
53
and in some cases because nepotism and
class preference were the expectation of the administered themselves.
54

50. Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991), 12.

51. Woolf, 12.

52. Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770-1850 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981), 7.

53. Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, 107.

54. Woolf, 124.
36

These practices continued into the period when Balzac was writing Les Employés. In the
post-Napoleonic period, in the 1820s, the Restoration renewed the “expansion of the eighteenth-
century core departments”
55
and after the fall of the Restoration, the July Monarchy, which was
the prevailing government when Balzac was writing Les Employés, restored “dispossessed
Napoleonic officials” to their old positions, bringing back officials who operated under older
administrative expectations into what was supposed to be a new regime.
56
As Clive Church
explains, while “the improvement in entry procedures that began in the [eighteen-]thirties” did
create a shift in the kind of people who were accepted to bureaucratic positions,
57
it wasn’t until
the forties that bureaucratic positions became more of a career opportunity for qualified
applicants admitted by exam.
58
Even then, while “family relationships inside the bureau fell to
only a fraction over the Imperials levels and there was also a fall in the number of very wealthy
entrants,” there were still significant influences of elitism and preferential treatment at work.
59

That is, in a partial continuation of the ways in which the eighteenth-century ministerial system
offered positions preferentially to favored aristocrats, the nineteenth-century bureaucracy
“recrute de préférence, par l’effet du népotisme bourgeois” [“recruits preferentially, through the
effect of bourgeois nepotism”].
60
The promise of merit-based advancement may have appealed to
potential bureaucrats of lower economic classes, but in reality their chances of success were still

55. Church, Revolution and Red Tape, 291.

56. Church, 297.

57. Church, 303.

58. Church, 304.

59. Church, 304.

60. Anne-Marie Bijaoui-Baron, “L’Employé bel-homme. De la réalité à la fiction,” L’Année Balzacienne 0
(Jan. 1, 1979), 183.
37

often limited by their connections within a particular bureaucratic division. While the
professionalized bureaucracy, supposedly rational and well-regulated, of the nineteenth century
held the appeal of a promised opportunity for class mobility and equalization,
61
it did not fully
realize these goals because political and familial ties continued to disrupt the system’s intended
regulations. Even when employés were able to achieve a position without help, many were paid
insufficient salaries that made social expectations around, for example, what officials should
wear, all but impossible.
62
In fact, bureaucratic positions in the government often appealed to
“employés qui ont les moyens de gagner peu” [“bureaucrats who have the means to earn little”],
directly undermining the supposed goal of class mobility.
63
While the government bureaucracy
in the nineteenth-century, especially in the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period, claimed a
kind of systematic consistency that would ensure equal career opportunities for all applicants and
rational governance, regulations were not exhaustively enforced.
It seems to be this lack of exhaustiveness and enforcement that Balzac attempts to rectify
in Les Employés by bringing the social and the natural underneath one unified system of
organization. After all, the core plot of the novel centers around Xavier Rabourdin, a chef de
bureau and aspirational chef de division, who has the perfect plan to stop up the gaps in the leaky
nineteenth-century government bureaucracy in order to run the perfect tight ship through true
rational systematization. The only thing standing in his way is his main rival for the chef de
division position, Isidore Baudoyer, who ultimately steals the position from the significantly
more qualified and competent Rabourdin through a combination of the above-mentioned flaws of

61. Church, Revolution and Red Tape, 303.

62. Bijaoui-Baron, “L’Employé bel-homme,” 180.

63. Bijaoui-Baron, 183.
38

the nineteenth-century government bureaucracy: nepotism and political intrigue. Unlike
Baudoyer, Rabourdin is not a taret but an especially intelligent and competent man with a rich
inner life whose plan to reform the bureau, Balzac seems to promise, would solve all of the
typical problems with French government bureaucracy in the 1830s almost immediately.
However, he makes the mistake of writing this plan, which involves the dismissal of several
employés whom he deems incompetent or ineffective, down on paper; after the plan is leaked he
is forced into disgraced resignation. By demonstrating the promise of Rabourdin’s plan for
administrative reform and its failure due to arbitrary manipulation of the supposedly
professionalized government bureaucracy, Balzac calls for increased systematization and
regulation and tries to provide a model for what this might look like by bringing together the
social and the natural into one grand framework for understanding the modern world. In order to
make this case, he draws both on the penchant for “systematic classification of empirical facts”
64

coming out of the Napoleonic administration and the scientific drive to classification and
categorization coming out of the work of naturalists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. As Richard Somerset argues, Balzac’s approach to nature, taxonomy,
and evolution comes particularly out of Lamarck and Geoffroy, although Georges Cuvier was
certainly an important influence as well. Somerset describes Geoffroy’s approach as ascribing
every species to an Ideal of Animality that is eternal and unchangeable, an “original germ of
life—the unitary original source of all existing forms” that determines the innate qualities of
every individual. Based on this concept, “Geoffroy hoped to reach a Newton-like closure on the
principles of organised being,”
65
a project that Balzac then applies to the social especially in Les
Employés.

64. Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, 12.

39

Lamarck’s ideas fit neatly with Geoffroy’s approach to individual organisms by
introducing the concept of a stable, unified system. Just as the individual organism comes back
to an ideal, ecological systems are stable and “invulnerable to external factors” so that “the
ontological structures of the organic Being remain untouched by Time.” There is some room for
environmental influence, “but the action of environmental factors has a local effect” and not an
effect on the inherent qualities of the system as a whole.
66
By melding these two approaches,
Geoffroy’s unity of organism with Lamarck’s unity of ecological system, Balzac presents a
vision of modern life where every aspect of the social world is part of a relatively self-contained
whole, just like the Lamarckian and Geoffroyan views of the natural world. By attempting to
bring together the social aspects of the bureaucracy and the natural world, Balzac draws on the
systematizing and classifying drive of both to attempt to create one master system that can
account for both the social and natural world as one interconnected whole. Such a methodology,
he seems to suggest, would rectify the ongoing problems with the government bureaucracy and
allow for a more efficient road to societal progress and order.
Balzac establishes the justification for his methodology through the metaphor of the
tarets, which evokes a parallel between the low-level bureaucrat and an organism that, through
naturalism, could be classified, explained, and reduced to a fully explainable and stable life form
with unchangeable, essential qualities. In this same metaphor, the bureau itself becomes a unified
and enclosed ecosystem that can fully explain the relationships between organisms within the
ecosystem and promises ongoing internal consistency. That is, for Balzac’s employés, the bureau
is not just the place they work, it is the whole of Nature. It is the ecological, biological, and

65. Richard Somerset, “The Naturalist in Balzac: The Relative Influence of Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire,” French Forum 27, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 2002), 98.

66. Somerset, 100, 99.
40

ontological setting in which the bureaucratic body is shaped and determined and from which the
larger structure of bureaucratic government takes its shape. In this space, abiotic pieces of
furniture and tools of the trade become elements of the bureaucratic ecosystem that determine
how the employés can, and do, behave and interact within the bureaux. As the narrator describes
it:
la Nature, pour l’employé, c’est les Bureaux; son horizon est de toutes parts borné par des
cartons verts; pour lui, les circonstances atmosphériques, c’est l’air des corridors, les
exhalaisons masculines contenues dans des chambres sans ventilateurs, la senteur des
papiers et des plumes; son terroir est un carreau, ou un parquet émaillé de débris
singuliers, humecté par l’arrosoir du garçon de bureau; son ciel est un plafond auquel il
adresse ses bâillements, et son élément est la poussière. L’observation sur les villageois
tombe à plomb sur les employés identifiés avec la nature au milieu de laquelle ils vivent.
Si plusieurs médecins distingués redoutent l’influence de cette nature, à la fois sauvage et
civilisée, sur l’être moral contenu dans ces affreux compartiments, nommés Bureaux, où
le soleil pénètre peu, où la pensée est bornée en des occupations semblables à celle des
chevaux qui tournent un manége, qui bâillent horriblement et meurent promptement
[…]
67

Rather than the earth, the office has fields of tile or parquet covered in dust; rather than air, it has
stagnant exhalations, yawns, and the smell of paper; rather than the open sky, it has ceilings and
poorly lit compartments like a kind of artificial forest floor. These natural details are not neutral

67. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 954. “nature to a bureaucrat is the bureau: his horizon is bordered on all sides
by green boxes; for him, atmospheric conditions are the air of the corridors, the masculine fumes trapped in rooms
without ventilators, the smell of paper and quill; his soil is tile or parquet, strewn with a curious litter moistened by
the office boy’s watering can; his sky is the ceiling toward which he yawns; and his element is dust. The observation
about the villagers applies to the state employees identified in terms of the nature of the milieu in which they live. If
several distinguished doctors doubt the influence of this ‘nature,’ at once savage and civilized, on the moral being
trapped in those dreadful compartments called bureaus, where the sun seldom penetrates, where thought is tied down
to tasks similar to that of horses who turn a merry-go-round, who yawn distressingly and die quickly…” Balzac, The
Bureaucrats, 112-113.
As Somerset suggests, Balzac distinguishes in his language between “capital N” Nature, an inherent
ontological aspect of the world or of humanity/animality, and “lowercase n” nature which describes either the
essence of a certain “type” or the physical space of the world outside of the manmade (the natural world). So, for
example, when describing Sébastien’s suspicion that Dutocq stole and copied Rabourdin’s plans for the bureau, the
narrator describes him as having one of those “natures vierges” [“virgin natures”] that “ont plus que toutes les autres
un inexplicable don de seconde vue dont la cause gît peut-être dans la pureté de leur appareil nerveux en quelque
sorte neuf” [“have the inexplicable gift of second sight, the reason for which lies perhaps in the purity of their
nervous systems, which are, in a way, brand new”] (Balzac, “Les Employés,” 931; Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 86).
Sébastien is of a certain type of person who possesses such an ability of discovery, but his type is housed under and
shaped by the inherent Nature of personhood and of the bureaucracy.
41

either. The narrator reveals a real fear over the “être moral” [“moral being”] of the bureaucrats
and the fact that their mental state is dehumanized like that of merry-go-round horses. It seems
that it is the inherent Nature of the bureau itself that has created these qualities, which are now
inherent to the being of each employé. Within this burrowed, all but sunless space, the
bureaucrats become shipworms, they become “identifiés” [“identified”] with the artificially
natural world surrounding them. This influence does not just act on them as a collective, they
also “se pénètrent insensiblement des idées et des sentiments qu’elle [the nature of the bureau]
éveille et les reproduisent dans leurs actions et sur leur physionomie, selon leur organisation et
leur caractère individuel” like the unknown villagers Balzac mentions as comparison.
68
In this
way, he identifies the space of the bureau as one that effects not only social changes upon its
working population, but also biological changes that persist in the expression of their very
physical and natural traits. These changes do not happen all at once, but as a consistent,
repetitive force of the bureaucratic environment shaping its inhabitants over time. The
bureaucratic ecosystem and the behavior of the shipworms within that ecosystem reciprocally
ensure that each individual organism reflects the essential qualities of the bureaucrat or the
shipworm, and that the bureau remains the ideal space for shipworms to live. And, if the
characteristics of the shipworm, as a specific type of organism, remain consistent and predictable
and the basic principles of their ecosystem remain consistent and predictable then, as Balzac’s
reasoning seems to suggest, this kind of consistency should equally apply to consistent and
predictable social types and spaces.

68. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 954. “unconsciously absorb the ideas and feelings their environment projects
and express them in their actions and their appearance in accordance with their organization and individual
personality.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 112.
42

Just as Lamarck and Geoffroy offered organizational models that claimed to exhaustively
explain the natural world, Balzac attempts in Les Employés to offer an equally exhaustive
organizational model of the government bureaucrat, suggesting that, like an animal, his innate
qualities could be broken down into a set of immutable truths about who and what he was. By
drawing a connection between the natural, animal world and the social, human one, Balzac
effectively argued that “a person’s outward appearance is produced by the intimate imprint of
their inner-most nature” and that he could express these realities in his writing through an ability
“to deduce a whole personality from a single gesture.”
69
This approach “was not a new one in
Balzac’s day:”
70
many writers, including Balzac himself, participated in what Anne O’Neil-
Henry identifies as a “phenomenon of the physiologies.”
71
This particular genre was especially
popular during the July Monarchy and provided “a series of short, comical and inexpensively
printed pseudo-scientific tracts depicting and typologizing popular Parisian phenomena.”
72

Authors of physiologies during this time period, as scholars have suggested, “sought to classify,
and, thus, to understand cultural codes and types”
73
and although these definitions of social types
were perhaps presented tongue-in-cheek, as O’Neil-Henry argues, Balzac’s own approach to the
physiologies does seem sincere even if sometimes comical or even parodic in its presentation.
74

O’Neil-Henry, however, does see ambivalence around this kind of typification in Les Employés

69. Somerset, “The Naturalist in Balzac,” 98.

70. Somerset, 98.

71. Anne O’Neil-Henry, “‘[Le] Besoin de définir’ and ‘le danger de s’embrouiller’: Balzac’s Les Employés
and the physiologies,” Dix-neuf 20, no. 2 (April 2, 2016), 163.

72. O’Neil-Henry, 162.

73. O’Neil-Henry, 163.

74. O’Neil-Henry, 172.
43

and, as I will discuss later in the chapter, part of what makes Balzac’s attempt at applying
naturalist frameworks to social situations interesting is that his novel ultimately reveals the
failure of such a methodology even as it attempts to enact it. Rather than seeing Balzac’s failure
to categorize in the novel as ambivalence, I argue that the tension in his attempt at defining and
categorizing bureaucratic types comes out of the impossibility of his naturalist metaphor to bear
itself out. While other writers were attempting to categorize the social world contemporaneously
with Balzac through their own physiologies, his “way of thinking about Humanity is directly
derived from Geoffroy’s way of thinking about Animality” and his specific goal was “the
discovery of the Newton-like principles of social organization.”
75
Following this particular line
of thinking would supposedly allow him to neatly explain and reflect back reality to his readers
as one enclosed system that, with the right organizational tools, could be fully understood.
Looking at Les Employés alongside Balzac’s Physiologie de l’employé, which was
published a few years before the final iteration of the novel in 1841, makes clear the direct
connections between these projects. In some cases, Balzac even uses the same text verbatim, or
close to verbatim, in both texts. For example, Balzac’s definitions of the country bureaucrat
versus the city bureaucrat are inserted into Les Employés from his Physiologie almost exactly,
although the qualities of country and city bureaucrat are flipped and slightly reworded in the
novel,
76
and Balzac copies verbatim the image of a bureaucrat sitting on a “rond en maroquin”

75. Somerset, “The Naturalist in Balzac,” 99.

76. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 933. In Les Employés, the quote reads as: “Enfin, l’employé de province est
quelque chose, tandis que l’employé de Paris est à peine quelqu’un” [“Finally, the state employee in the country is
something, while the state employee in Paris is hardly even someone.”] Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 89. In the
Physiologie, it instead reads: “L’employé de province est quelqu’un, tandis que l’employé de Paris est quelque
chose” [“The state employee in the country is someone, while the state employee in Paris is something”] (34). M de
Balzac, Physiologie de l’employé (Paris: Aubert et Cie, Lavigne, 1841).
44

[Moroccan leather round cushion]
77
from the Physiologie as well.
78
Beyond these direct
connections, however, the narrator of Les Employés also directly reminds the reader of the
categorization attempted in the novel and, particularly, of the connection between social and
natural categorization. When he introduces the reader to Rabourdin’s wife Célestine as but one
of the many types of women and men presented in the novel, the narrator explicitly addresses the
connection between the natural and the social when he muses over whether or not she has found
the proper social place and physical habitat in which to flourish. As he takes this question under
consideration, the narrator observes that “dans l’Ordre Social comme dans l’Ordre Naturel, il se
trouve plus de jeunes pousses qu’il n’y a d’arbres, plus de frai que de poissons arrivés à tout leur
développement: beaucoup de capacités, des Athanase Granson, doivent donc mourir étouffées
comme les graines qui tombent sur une roche nue.”
79
That is, when thinking about social types,
Balzac suggests that there are immutable qualities that must be nurtured by their social
environment, but the particular metaphors and parallels he draws between the social and natural
worlds also suggests that there is something akin to a “nature of Animality” governing each
social type so that the essential qualities of each social type cannot be changed and have
biological implications both for their individual person, which is governed by type, and for what
kind of physical and social environment fits that particular individual person.

77. We will see this image return as the more general “rond-de-cuir” [round leather cushion/pencil pusher]
when we get to Joris-Karl Huysmans in chapter 4. Huysmans also makes a point of contrasting the life of the
bureaucrat born in the city with that of the bureaucrat born in the country. Joris-Karl Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” in
Romans et nouvelles, ed. André Guyaux and Pierre Jourde (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), 500.

78. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 930. Balzac, Physiologie, 87. As another example of crossover between the
two texts, O’Neil-Henry offers the definition of Sébastien as an instance of the “surnuméraire” [supernumerary] type
(168).

79. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 869. “in the social order, as in the natural order, there are more young shoots
than trees, more spawn than full-grown fish, and much of the potential, the Athanase Gransons, must die withered,
like seeds fallen on stony ground.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 10.
45

In order to create this link between natural and social categorization, beyond the kind of
humorous sketches of the physiologies that often took social taxonomy as an opportunity for play,
Balzac expands on his taxonomic writing in Les Employés to turn it into something very much akin to
the taxonomic organization of actual animals. By the time that Les Employés was published, European
naturalists had already taken the time to properly codify Teredo navalis taxonomically and Balzac
adopts similar methods of codification to introduce his cast of bureaucratic characters. The 52
nd
volume
of the Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, published in 1828, offers the following summary breakdown
of the categories defining the taret/Teredo by the appropriate scientific names: “Genre de malacozoaires
acéphalés, lamellibranches, de la famille des adesmacés de M. de Blainville, établi depuis long-temps
par Linné et adopté par tous les zoologistes pour des animaux fort singuliers, en ce qu’ils ressemblent à
de longs vers inarticulés.”
80
The entry goes into a long description of the taret’s anatomy before
explaining the damage it causes to ships and dikes, particularly in the case of Holland, which the
Dictionnaire identifies as “le pays où cela pouvait avoir les résultats les plus fâcheux.”
81
Just as these
shipworms were catalogued and broken down by bodily feature and behavior, so Balzac assigns this
same kind of taxonomic energy to an analysis of set bureaucratic “types.” His descriptions of each
bureaucrat even mirror the style of the encyclopedic descriptions that help define the shipworm in
naturalist texts. Of course, the Armorial général de France, in which “from the time of Colbert each
family was theoretically required to register its coat of arms,”
82
predates this naturalist style of taxonomy

80. Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, dans lequel on traite méthodiquement des différens êtres de la
nature, considerés soit en eux-mêmes, d’après l’état actuel de nos connoissances, soit relativement a l’utilité qu’en
peuvent retirer la médecine, l’agriculture, le commerce et les arts. Suivi d’une biographie des plus célèbres
naturalistes, t. 52, ed. F. G. Levrault (Paris: Le Normant, 1828), 259. “Genus of acephalous malacozoa,
lamellibranchs, of M. de Blainville’s adesmacea family, long established by Linnaeus and adopted by all zoologists
for very unique animals, in that they resemble long inarticulate worms.”

81. Dictionnaire, 265, dikes mentioned page 267. “the country where it could have the most unfortunate
results.”

46

and serves as a very similar kind of encyclopedic document, listing nobles’ names followed by their
defining titles. While Balzac is certainly bringing in naturalist approaches to help define his characters,
then, he is also likely drawing on the preexisting social guidelines for doing the same, blending social
and naturalist forms of organization into his character descriptions. For example, he introduces La
Billardière with a list of his titles that mimics the presentation of an organism’s domain, kingdom,
phylum, and so on:
CHEF DE DIVISION
‘Monsieur le baron Flamet de La Billardière (Athanase-Jean-François-Michel), ancien
Grand-Prévôt du département de la Corrèze, Gentilhomme ordinaire de la Chambre, Maître des
requêtes en service extraordinaire, Président du grand Collège du département de la Dordogne,
Officier de la Légion-d’Honneur, chevalier de Saint-Louis et des Ordres étrangers du Christ,
d’Isabelle, de Saint-Wladimir, etc., Membre de l’Académie du Gers et de plusieurs autres
Sociétés savantes, Vice-président de la Société des Bonnes-Lettres, Membre de l’Association de
Saint-Joseph, et de la Société des prisons, l’un des Maires de Paris, etc., etc.
83

He begins with a fully capitalized name of the category into which La Billardière falls, the CHEF DE
DIVISION, just as the Dictionnaire and others like it begin the taret entry with a fully capitalized
TARET. Then, similarly to the taret entry, he begins to list each of La Billardière’s taxonomic ranks in
the context of the bureaucratic ecosystem. So just as the shipworm in the nineteenth century falls under
the genus of “malacozoaires acéphalés” and the family of “adesmacés,” La Billardière, as a particular
species under the type of the chef de division falls under various social taxonomic ranks such as the
“ancien Grand-Prévôt du département de la Corrèze” and the “Vice-président de la Société des Bonnes-
Lettres.” These titles may not be quite as obscure as the scientific terms selected for the taret’s

82. David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge,
1996), 140.

83. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 922-23. “Chef de Division Monsieur le baron Flamet de la Billardiere
(Athanase-Jean-Francois-Michel), formerly Provost-Marshal of the Department of the Correze, Gentleman in
Ordinary of the Bedchamber, Master of Petitions for outstanding service, President of the College of the Department
of the Dordogne, Officer of the Legion of Honor, Knight of Saint Louis and of the Foreign Orders of Christ,
Isabelle, Saint Wladimir, etc., member of the Academy of Gers, and other learned bodies, Vice President of the
Society of Belles Lettres, member of the Association of Saint-Joseph and the Society of Prisons, one of the mayors
of Paris, etc., etc.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 76.
47

taxonomy, but they do have a formality and opacity about them that evoke the feeling of reading a list of
unfamiliar jargon. They also may not exactly follow the same kind of pattern as taxonomic categories
like kingdom, phylum, class, etc. that define an organism through smaller and smaller groupings, but
they do indicate the various groups to which La Billardière belongs and therefore, in Balzac’s version of
social nature, reveal La Billardière’s inherent typical qualities. By arranging social and professional
titles through a blend of social and naturalist patterns of classification, Balzac attempts to implicate the
social in the biological and vice versa. This type of classification continues for the rest of Balzac’s
shipworms, particularly the employés.
While Balzac’s descriptions of the lower-level bureaucrats do not follow this stylistic pattern
quite so literally, they do fit the basic format of an encyclopedic entry wherein each thing is named and
then described in detail as a reference for the reader. Each entry is even listed one after the other as one
might expect of an encyclopedia. After the introduction of La Billardière, Balzac begins a succession of
these entries for each bureaucrat giving each one at least a paragraph-long description as a necessary
introduction before diving more robustly into the novel’s plot. Even though each description does not
follow the typographic pattern of the La Billardière description and even though the lower-level
bureaucrats do not have the same bevy of titles that mirror the taxonomic ranks of animals, they are still
described by their relationships to the other organisms around them as well as their physical qualities
and their typical set of behaviors. So Joseph Godard, a bureaucrat in Baudoyer’s bureau, for example
has an entry that begins: “cousin de Mitral par sa mère, avait fondé sur cette parenté avec Baudoyer,
quoique assez éloignée, des prétentions à la main de mademoiselle Baudoyer.”
84
By giving these
relationship markers that explain briefly where Godard fits in the social landscape around him, Balzac
mirrors the way in which a taxonomic chart maps out where a particular species fits in the biological and

84. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 929-930. “a cousin of Mitral on the mother’s side, based upon this kinship
with Baudoyer, however remote, pretensions to the hand of Mademoiselle Baudoyer.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 84.
48

ecological landscape around it. These descriptors do not have the same kind of scientific formality of
official titles, but they fit the same purpose of classification and description and they draw the same
parallels between the social and the natural. Just as a naturalist might describe and taxonomically
organize a particular ecosystem, Balzac attempts to do the same but runs into a tension between the mass
of shipworms who are, scientifically, undifferentiated from each other as they fall under the same
species, and the social individuality of each bureaucrat. In his schema, he has to account for both the
analogy of organisms trying to survive through competition and the added dimensions of social factors
like legal kinship ties and business relationships.
It is in these ways in which the natural does not quite fully encapsulate the social that the tension
between Balzac’s intended project of classification and the reality of how the bureaucrats in Les
Employés operate begins to emerge. As O’Neil-Henry argues, Balzac demonstrates in the novel “on the
one hand a desire to classify and define types, on the other an acknowledgement of the ultimate
impossibility of defining types.”
85
Balzac aims for a consistent and eternal kind of system that could
explain the types of bureaucrats completely, but his bureaucrats do not actually remain as consistent as
such a system would require. As Alex Woloch points out of Balzac’s attempts at typification, he “seems
to subsume many different individuals under a single taxonomic rubric” but “also represents individual
characteristics and emotions as they emerge in-and-through collective structures.”
86
In Les Employés,
along with Balzac’s other work, “a large number of people share a given characterization” but the
characters in his texts are also “shaped by the existence of a large number of people” so that “there is a

85. O’Neil-Henry, “[Le] Besoin de définir,’” 163.

86. Alex Woloch, “A qui la place?: Characterization and Competition in La Père Goriot and La Comédie
humaine,” in The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 255.

49

sudden inversion of figure and ground.”
87
While Balzac’s bureaucrats take on the same characteristics as
shipworms and they share these common characteristics as a group, the intended Balzacian system
cannot quite account for the details of individual variation or the ways in which his employés exert a
kind of purposeful agency in order to alter their natural habitat or the makeup of their population. In
applying taxonomic principles to the bureaux, he attempts to arrange France’s employés into a relatively
enclosed, unified system but finds his own narratives at odds with this attempt as his tarets take on a life
of their own, simultaneously shaped by and shaping the bureaucratic ecosystem and the other tarets
around them.
In this way, Les Employés is certainly looking back to the physiologie genre and the natural
scientists of the eighteenth century, but it also anticipates the evolutionary models emerging in the
nineteenth century and particularly championed by Charles Darwin in the middle of the century.
Although writing before the popularization of Darwinian theories of natural selection and competition,
“Balzac dresse la tableau d’une société humaine livrée à la compétition permanente, à la lutte pour la
survie: l’adaptation au milieu, la sélection du meilleur sont des enjeux vitaux.”
88
Like organisms in the
natural world outside of the bureau, Balzac’s employés must struggle against their colleagues to move up
the bureaucratic hierarchy and to determine the direction of the division moving forward. In attempting
to exhaustively define the social world through the naturalist structures of the past, Balzac blends
exhaustive definition with a kind of selection model akin to the one Darwin posits in On the Origin of
Species in 1859
89
that ultimately demonstrates the failures of both the older eighteenth-century models

87. Woloch, 255.

88. Sandra Collet, “L’évolution des espèces sociales dans La Comédie humaine de Balzac,” Arts et savoirs
12 (Dec. 20, 2019), 1. “Balzac paints the picture of a human society given to permanent competition, to the struggle
for survival: adaptation to the environment, selection of the fittest are vital issues.”

89. Similar and nascent ideas about evolution were, of course, in the air before Darwin’s book was
published, particularly in the work of Lamarck and Geoffroy, and so Balzac was also, of course, drawing on the
50

and the Darwinian one. Taking natural selection as one of the main mechanics of evolution, Darwin
defines it as the “preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations”
90
and
suggests that natural selection is concerned primarily with the “work of improvement.”
91
In his schema,
natural selection always acts in the best interests of the organism selected for and its environment. It
also, in this sense, mirrors the concept of progress—whether political, social, technological and so on—
attributed to modernity as a particular point in time and as a project. Alongside his contemporaries
thinking about what progress might look like in the human and humanmade world, Darwin focuses on
locating the impetus for progress in the natural one. In fact, he pointedly attributes progress to nature
rather than to human will. Darwin’s artificial selection, that is, involves making adaptations that are
suited “not indeed to the animal’s or plant’s own good, but to man’s use or fancy.”
92
Unlike Darwin’s
version of natural selection, artificial selection is not geared toward a certain kind of progress or
improvement, but rather one of human desire wherein the human selector “make[s] for himself useful
breeds.”
93
Thus, to Darwin’s mind, natural selection was a consistently perfecting process while any
attempts to artificially select species were arbitrary and led to unforeseen consequences. By adopting or
anticipating both of these models, pre-Darwinian and Darwinian, in order to exhaustively systematize
the social under the natural but also to account for the movement inherent in his observations of the
social, the way the bureaucracy must change as organisms move in and out of it, Balzac reveals the
limitations within both types of frameworks and the failure of his own project. Armine Mortimer

intellectual zeitgeist contemporary with his novel’s composition, but his understanding of evolution does also seem
to map closely enough onto Darwin’s that it’s worth thinking about this connection as Sandra Collet demonstrates.

90. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 63.

91. Darwin, 64.

92. Darwin, 25.

93. Darwin, 26.
51

highlights this point in affirming that “the very definition of the type in Balzac is determined by the
tension between a fixist view and an evolutionary one” and this tension plays into the desire, and
inability, to place the employé into an easily and consistently explained ecological system.
94
The
eighteenth-century naturalist frameworks of Cuvier and even of naturalists who do provide limited
models of local evolutionary changes like Lamarck and Geoffroy rely on a particular level of fixism so
that the integrity of the explanatory system is not threatened by change. The Darwinian approach to
evolution addresses this fixism, but frames naturally driven evolution as a perfecting process, a force
that, as some of his contemporaries might claim about modernity itself, always moves towards progress.
While his attempt to systematize the natural world through theories of evolution and selection allows for
more movement and change than the systems of his predecessors, it still does not account for the
messiness, contingency, and horizontal movements of the natural world, nor for Balzac’s metaphorical
explanation of the social. The failure of naturalist models and assumptions in Les Employés, in some
cases before they have even been put properly in print, however, further suggests that these particular
models are not producing material—literary, social, bureaucratic, scientific or whatever else—from their
success and illumination of the modern world, but rather from their failure to describe and categorize the
world as promised, particularly in the case of Darwin, even before their articulation. It is in and from

94. Armine Kotin Mortimer, For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism (Columbus: The Ohio
State University Press, 2011), 298. As Collet further explains: “En outre, l’intérêt de Balzac tient essentiellement à
un point de la doctrine de Geoffroy: le principe d’unité de plan et de composition; pour le reste, le romancier s’en
éloigne. Sur le fond, il est loin de partager les idées les plus avancées du naturaliste, en particulier sur tout ce qui
touche à la question de l’évolution; et les textes plus tardifs du romancier font apparaître des principes plus proches
des fixisme de Cuvier que de l’évolutionnisme de Geoffroy” (“L’évolution des espèces sociales,” 3). “Besides,
Balzac’s interest essentially stems from a point in Geoffroy’s doctrine: the principle of unity of plan and
composition; for the rest, the novelist moves away from it. Basically, he is far from sharing the naturalist’s most
advanced ideas, in particular on everything related to the question of evolution; and the later texts of the novelist
reveal principles closer to the fixism of Cuvier than to the evolutionism of Geoffroy.” Here Collet points out that
Balzac does not follow Geoffroy’s particular evolutionary theories, preferring fixism instead, but as I argue, this is
because he is instead anticipating the selection evolutionary model of Darwin and attempting, unsuccessfully, to
balance these two modes in his work.
52

this space of failure that Balzac unintentionally defines bureaucracy and, through bureaucracy,
nineteenth-century modernity.
Although Balzac’s social-natural model for understanding the operations of the bureaucracy and
the characteristics of the individual bureaucrat does ultimately make room for evolutionary change even
as he tries to foreclose on the limits of this system, in his bureaucratic space, the “sélection du meilleur”
quality of the Darwinian model is not often borne out in practice. There is a messier, more horizontal
form of evolution at play through the shipworms. The gnawing shipworm employés play the major role
in determining which types get to move up in the hierarchy of the ecosystem, ascending the evolutionary
chain to the next level of organism, and thus which types survive into the next iteration of the
bureaucratic ecosystem and, therefore, determine how that ecosystem will look and function in the
future. Their actions are a kind of natural selection determined by the will of each taret to “survive,” that
is to keep the ecosystem hospitable for their own kind, rather than by a will to ameliorate the species by
selecting the best types to continue on. In this way, the tarets ensure the survival of the mediocre. It is,
in fact, the gnawing writing of the worms, both inside and around the bureaux, that ultimately eats away
at Rabourdin’s all-but-guaranteed appointment. It is through these small persistent movements all
around him that he is ultimately undermined even if each act of writing would be inconsequential on its
own. Hired on the side by Dutocq, one of Rabourdin’s employés, and the general secretary of the
ministry Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx to discredit Rabourdin, for example, Bixiou agrees to draw and
label a caricature of Rabourdin as a butcher who will execute in turn each of the employés, depicted in
the image as various kinds of fowl.
95
This image obviously puts Rabourdin on a different level from the
other bureaucrats: unlike them, he is depicted as human and as a predator. He is a figure who does not
belong and who will violently disrupt this population of birds of a feather. It is, in part, the fact that this

95. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 965.
53

caricature is circulating throughout the offices, further turning the public opinion of the bureaux against
Rabourdin after his plans to restructure the bureau are stolen and revealed, that helps solidify his
resignation. After seeing the caricature, Rabourdin lightly scolds Bixiou for turning “la pointe de votre
crayon contre” [“the point of your pencil against”] the wrong person, suggesting that it is, in part, the act
of Bixiou’s pencil that has pulled him down.
96
Even the early stages of this downfall were enacted by
writing, even if it was not always coming out of the bureau itself. It is Baudoyer’s wife Élisabeth, after
all, who makes all of the strategic moves leading to her husband’s success: she is the one who arranges
favorable newspaper articles to demonstrate outside support for Baudoyer’s placement, particularly to
show support from the Church. It is Baudoyer’s familial legacy, his belonging to this particular
ecosystem of tarets, that Élisabeth emphasizes in the newspaper articles she arranges as part of their
campaign for La Billardière’s position. As the article proclaims, “Monsieur Isidore Baudoyer,
représentant d’une des plus anciennes familles de la bourgeoisie parisienne, et chef de bureau dans la
Division La Billardière, vient de rappeler les vieilles traditions de piété qui distinguaient ces grandes
familles.”
97
Baudoyer’s rightful place in the bureau is backed up by the kind of encyclopedic and
taxonomic writing that Balzac uses to introduce his characters. Like La Billardière, who also received
his place above the more deserving Rabourdin,
98
Baudoyer is the right type: he is one of and belongs
with the tarets. The environment of the bureau creates the shipworm bureaucrat, but these shipworms

96. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 1062. Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 233.

97. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 995. “Monsieur Isidore Baudoyer, representing one of the oldest bourgeois
families of Paris and bureau chief in Monsieur de La Billardière’s division, has lately revived memories of the old
traditions of piety that distinguished these great families.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 155.

98. As with Baudoyer and La Billardière’s son who works in his father’s division and Baudoyer’s bureau,
the elder La Billardière received his position due to his connections: “Deux ans avant la mort de Leprince
[Célestine’s father], la place de Chef de Division, devenue vacante, avait été donnée à un monsieur de La
Billardière, parent d’un député de la Droite, fait ministre en 1823” (Balzac, “Les Employés,” 867). “Two years prior
to Monsieur Leprince’s [Célestine’s father] death, the vacant position of division chief had been given to a certain
Monsieur de La Billardière, who was related to a deputy of the Right made minister in 1823” (Balzac, The
Bureaucrats, 8).
54

also maintain this environment by preserving the same qualities of the ecosystem that helped to produce
them. Far from following Darwin’s ideas of gradual perfection, this kind of selection and its outcomes
are less predictable, with the real possibility of regression or lateral movement.
Through this process of selection, Balzac demonstrates in Les Employés that the gnawing of the
shipworms, the slow work of the bureaucrats that selects for certain types over others, actually does
things, whether that be putting Rabourdin’s rival Baudoyer into the position of chef de division
undeservedly or pushing Rabourdin into an unplanned resignation after he loses the opportunity of
attaining the chef de division position. But Balzac’s bureaucrats are, of course, not literally gnawing the
wood of their office desks. The gnawing of the employé is, rather, the incessant force of bureaucratic,
and often non-bureaucratic, writing, particularly the Rapport. As the narrator of Les Employés laments,
“en France” there are “un million de rapports écrits par année” and this overabundance of writing that, to
Balzac’s mind, stalls any real action, bleeds out to create all of “les dossiers, les cartons, les paperasses”
necessary to support the “pièces sans lesquelles la France serait perdue.”
99
The main action of the
bureaucrat is an “action écrite” which they use to create “une puissance d’inertie appelée le Rapport.”
100

Here Balzac identifies writing as simultaneously material and ephemeral. It is related materially both to
the paper it’s written on and to the bodies and tools that produce it but it itself is also not just material. It
appears physically on whatever media contains it, but it also has a meaning and force beyond its
physical form. It enacts both by physical exchange, the trading of bureaucratic memos, and by
intellectual exchange, the conveying of ideas, but physical exchange is often more important in the

99. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 874. In “France” there are “a million Reports […] written every year” and this
overabundance of writing that, to Balzac’s mind, stalls any real action bleeds out to create all of the “records,
statistics, documents, without which France would have been lost.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 16.

100. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 873. “written work” which they use to create “a power of inertia named ‘the
Report.’” 15

55

novel. As Marco Diani puts it, the writing in Les Employés, “like modern life itself, becomes tiny and
monotonous…surrounded by things—words, objects, people—without meaning, rather with a meaning
but no dimension to it.”
101
The important element of this kind of writing is not necessarily what it
signifies, but what it does, whether that effect does come out of the ideas it presents or merely out of the
fact of its circulation. It is a shared kind of matter and behavioral pattern that determines the shape,
qualities, and cycles of the bureaucratic ecosystem.
However, Balzac’s employés do not stick just to the writing necessary for their careers. In fact, to
judge based on what is depicted in the novel, they do very little strictly bureaucratic writing at all.
Instead, the bureaucratic patterns of writing that Balzac attaches to the Rapport become part and parcel
of extracurricular forms of writing that the employés bring into the bureau and with which they occupy
most of their time. It is this ongoing, gnawing action of writing that Balzac’s employés leverage to shape
the evolution of the organisms within their ecosystem. By writing prophecies and caricatures, vaudeville
music and newspaper articles, they carve out paths within the space of the tile dirt floors and the green
boxes that make up their horizons. For even beyond the Rapport itself, Balzac points to writing more
generally as the medium through which bureaucracy happens and through which every organism inside
that bureaucracy is tied together. Given that he is dealing with social dynamics, and particularly with the
bureaucracy that operates primarily through writing, Balzac forces himself to take writing into account
as an ecological force by adopting an ecological metaphor. However, there is no clear corollary to
writing in the ecological models he adopts, which would generally exclude the humanmade, and while
writing itself is part of the stuff, the content, of the bureaucratic ecosystem, it is also the force that
shapes and drives that system. This multivalent role of writing, which operates on the level of both form
and content, means that Balzac cannot actually succeed at enclosing the social and the natural into one

101. Marco Diani, “Balzac’s Bureaucracy: The Infinite Destiny of the Unknown Masterpiece,” L’Esprit
créateur 34, no. 1 (1994): 48.
56

unified whole that functions based on inherent qualities. The bureaucrats working within the government
bureaucracy need to produce writing as an end product of their labor, but that writing is also used to
establish the rules and systems of the bureaucracy and to implement those rules and systems.
Furthermore, writing is the thing that allows Balzac to then represent and define bureaucracy on his own
terms. Unlike the Lamarckian or Geoffroyan ecological systems, there is the possibility of an ontological
threat to the inherent characteristics of the bureaucracy as an ecosystem because writing determines
what it is: writing does not have to follow the rules of the system because it creates the rules of the
system and can easily manipulate the structures around it to fit even individual wills. Further, it is the
technology through which Balzac must represent, organize, create, and theorize the social and natural
worlds, and so it presents a problem for the idea of a social-natural order.
Just as bureaucratic writing operates at these several organizing levels at once, threatening the
internal integrity of an enclosed bureaucratic system, even the non-bureaucratic writing of the tarets
introduces possible points of incursion as they bring this non-bureaucratic writing into the space of the
bureau and use it as a means for selection. In this sense, bureaucratic writing branches outwards into
literary writing and literary writing penetrates into the supposedly regulated pathways of the
bureaucratic ecosystem. Rabourdin, although not a taret and not participating in this kind of gnawing
writing himself, recognizes what power the circulation of small bits of writing might have:
Rabourdin, qui se disait: ‘On est ministre pour avoir de la décision, connaître les affaires et les
faire marcher,’ vit le rapport régnant en France depuis le colonel jusqu’au maréchal, depuis le
commissaire de police jusqu’au roi, depuis les préfets jusqu’aux ministres, depuis la Chambre
jusqu’à la loi. Dès 1818, tout commençait à se discuter, se balancer et se contre-balancer de vive
voix et par écrit, tout prenait la forme littéraire.
102

102. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 873-74. “Rabourdin, who said to himself, ‘A minister is minister in order to
make decisions, to know public affairs and manage them,’ saw ‘the Report’ rampant throughout France, from the
colonel to the marshal, from the police commissioner to the king, from the prefects to the ministers of State, from
the Chamber to the courts. After 1818 everything was discussed, compared, and weighed, orally and in writing;
everything had to be written down.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 16.
57

Everything in the bureaucracy, every decision and discussion, comes back to writing. Like the
anonymously described villagers Balzac references in comparison, the bureaucrats themselves are “le
livre le plus intéressant et le plus vrai pour quiconque se sent attiré vers cette partie de la
physiologie.”
103
Their biology can be read on their body, through their physiology, as though it were
literally written by the environment around them. Given that, in the case of the employés, the
environment surrounding them is made up of all the tools one needs for writing, the act of writing and its
physical manifestations and effects are inherent to their ecological surroundings and to their own natures
and bodies. What this connection to recreational writing suggests is both that anything written in service
to the bureau and in the nineteenth century more generally comes back to the gnawing of the tarets.
Through this gnawing, a product of the minor forms of writing that add up to create the
bureau and the bureaucratic system that houses it, Balzac’s attempted social-natural system falls
apart. In the novel, he seems to oscillate between the controlled, static writing of classification,
and the loose bits of writing that pervade the novel and lead to the downfall of the main
character. Building on the taxonomic entries that Balzac provides for all of his tarets, he adds
horoscopes based on anagrams of important names as though he is attempting to break down
each name into some kind of core clue to that thing’s ontology. These horoscopes, which in the
novel are written by Colleville, a chief clerk in Baudoyer’s bureau, make up most of the non-
bureaucratic writing in the text and seem to be at odds with the rest of the writing of the tarets
because they suggest some kind of stable nature behind each thing rather than the dynamism and
physical effect that the rest of the taret writing has, a dynamism and effect that I will turn to
shortly. The anagrams that Colleville creates from the names of “hommes célèbres” [“famous

103. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 954. “books most interesting and true to life for whoever feels himself drawn
to this aspect of physiology.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 112.
58

men”]
104
either allege to foretell some inevitable future event inherent in the very being of the
name examined or to reveal something hidden about the name and its subject. The “révolution
française” becomes “un corse la finira,” supposedly pointing to Napoleon’s rise to power, while
“Marie de Vigneros” becomes “vierge de son mari” and confirms the chastity of the woman in
question.
105
Each of these examples suggest that there is an essential quality to the French
Revolution and Marie de Vigneros, respectively, and that the classification, the name, of each
event or person is materially tied to that essential quality. In this sense, classification and
creation become intertwined. The most important of these anagrams, however, is the one
attached to Rabourdin’s name, which foretells his failure to take over the chef de division
position after La Billardière’s death. As Colleville explains, “Xavier Rabourdin, chef de
bureau”
106
in anagram produces the following: “D’abord rêva bureaux, E-u fin riche.” In case
there is any confusion on the part of his fellow employés, Colleville spells the meaning out:
“D’abord rêva bureaux, E-u…Saisissez-vous bien?...ET IL EUT! E-u fin riche. Ce qui signifie
qu’après avoir commencé dans l’administration, il la plantera là, pour faire fortune ailleurs…”
107

Here then, Colleville suggests that there is something inherent in Rabourdin’s name that will

104. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 959. Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 102.

105. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 945. Charles Foulkes does not translate these anagrams and their
transformations, but they basically adhere to the following: the “French Revolution” becomes “a Corsican will finish
it” while the name “Marie de Vigneros” becomes “her husband’s virgin.” The anagram about Marie de Vigneros
appears to be from an old story about the Cardinal de Richelieu trying to convince the comte de Soissons that his
niece Marie de Vigneros was a virgin and, therefore, worthy of marriage. The Cardinal’s strategy for proving her
virginity is to reveal this anagram of her name which, he suggests, is a window into her sexual status. See Vittorio
Siri, Mercure de Vittorio Siri, conseiller d’État et historiographe de Sa Majesté très chrétienne, contenant l’histoire
générale de l’Europe, depuis M. DC. XL. jusqu’en M. DC. LV, t. 1, trans. Jean-Baptiste Réquier (Paris: Didot and
Durand, 1756-1759), 209 and Auguste Couvret de Beauregard, Calembours et jeux de mots des hommes illustres,
anciens et modernes, t. 1 (Paris: Aubry and Petit, 1806), 188.

106. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 961.

107. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 961. “D’abord rêva bureaux, E-u…Get it?...And he had! ‘E-u fin riche,’
which means that after having begun in the Administration, he left it to go make his fortune elsewhere.” Balzac, The
Bureaucrats, 120.
59

determine his future before it has happened. The written form of his name and title in the bureau,
transformed into its anagrammatic secret meaning, ultimately creates the shape of Rabourdin’s
life. As soon as he takes up the position of chef de bureau, he is doomed to be expelled from the
bureaucratic ecosystem because, by his inherent properties, he does not belong in this
environment peopled by gnawing shipworms. Just as the title chef de division indicates a
particular type that Balzac has encyclopedically recorded, “Xavier Rabourdin, chef de bureau” is
a particular species that does not quite belong in this particular ecosystem as Balzac has
classified it and so, for the character of the system to remain intact, he must be removed. It may
seem from these anagrammatic horoscopes as though it is a type’s inherent characteristics that
establish an unchangeable future for that type, like Rabourdin’s fated resignation, but through the
course of the novel, it isn’t some unexplainable force of nature that ensures Rabourdin’s failure,
it is the direct actions of the tarets. They perhaps act according to some kind of immutable
characteristic that Balzac applies to them, but the process is one of natural selection through
writing, which suggests that the actions they take will have effects with future implications. The
key conceptual problem with Balzac’s application of the immutable nature of Animality to social
types in the bureau, an application that also assumes an immutable nature of Humanity and the
Employé, is that because the bureaucracy is built by and maintained through writing, writing can
maintain its structure but can also pose an ontological threat to what the bureaucracy is and does.
What a bureaucrat is and does is not quite as immutable as he seems to propose, and it’s at least
in part because the biological role of writing in the natural space of the bureau needs to be
accounted for, for his metaphor to work. While writing may be humanmade and ephemeral and,
thus, often left out of new materialist definitions of ecology, Balzac’s ecological view of the
bureaucracy, and his sense that the bureaucracy is specifically driven and shaped by writing,
60

particularly the Rapport, mean that he must account for it as an ecological force and that his
particular schema for understanding the link between the ecological and the social reveals certain
biological qualities to writing that might otherwise be ignored or overlooked.
The threat of writing to the enclosed system in the novel is primarily personified in
Rabourdin, who has the potential to undermine the natural status quo mainly because he is an
outsider on several levels: biologically, socially, and authorially. Notably, he and his wife
Célestine are not included in the list of shipworms and Rabourdin’s name in Colleville’s
anagram indicates that he does not truly belong to the bureaucratic ecosystem. He is, to follow
the Darwinian analogy, the human element that attempts to artificially control the ecosystem he
has stepped into. In this sense, Rabourdin is also placeless in Balzac’s schema—if everything
social is also natural but Rabourdin is the human element that would normally not be included in
the natural, he becomes a troubling paradox. Certainly, humans exist in naturalist models of the
world, but by dehumanizing the other humans in his novel, Balzac either suggests that only a
certain class or type of human is actually human or removes the human from the social world
completely. The advantage that Baudoyer has over Rabourdin and the reason he is able to secure
his position, lies in Rabourdin’s outsider status, which is revealed when his reform plan is stolen
and because Baudoyer is one of and at home among the tarets. It is Baudoyer, the lower-ranking
employés in the division, and Baudoyer’s familial posse who are described as molluscs and, in
the case of Baudoyer’s wife Élisabeth, as the possessor of “cette force du ver qui ronge un
ormeau en en faisant le tour sous l’écorce.”
108
The Baudoyer name, and his in-laws’ name
Saillard, indicate his and his wife’s proper taxonomic lineage both in terms of what they are and
where they came from. These aspects of Baudoyer’s family ties and his bureaucratic positions, as

108. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 919. “that power of the worm that nibbles away under the bark of the elm.”
Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 70.
61

well as the position of his father-in-law Saillard, are presented as inherent and immutable
qualities that Rabourdin could not possibly possess and that make Baudoyer suited, by nature, to
the position, whereas Rabourdin would be a kind of imposter or outside species coming in to
decimate the local population. The particular form of natural selection adopted by the
shipworms, a selection that Élisabeth notably participates in despite not being a part of the
bureau proper, expels Rabourdin to prioritize the continuation of their own species despite, as
Balzac argues, their incompetence and the damage they have done to government institutions. As
a part of his biological outsider status, as this quality is tied in to the social, Rabourdin’s
genealogical background also does not quite fit what is expected of the bureaucratic type and
seen in practice in the employés in his division. While these other bureaucrats often gained their
positions through the influence of well-connected relatives and family members, Rabourdin’s
biological pedigree is an open question. When Baudoyer is introduced individually for the first
time, he is identified as his father-in-law Saillard’s “compagnon” and as “Chef de bureau dans la
Division de monsieur La Billardière et partant collègue de Rabourdin, lequel avait épousé
Élisabeth Saillard, sa fille unique, et avait naturellement pris un appartement au-dessus du
sien.”
109
Despite serving as a major, even indispensable, character to the plot of the novel,
Baudoyer is here described solely through his relations to other characters. Although Baudoyer is
demonstrably less qualified than Rabourdin, because he has the Saillard line behind him, along
with all the supporting players that bolster the Saillard line, he fits into the desired evolutionary
schema of the bureaucracy where Rabourdin does not. After all, unlike Rabourdin, Baudoyer is a
“représentant d’une des plus anciennes familles de la bourgeoisie parisienne” [“[representative

109. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 897. “companion” and as “bureau chief in Monsieur de La Billardière’s
division and consequently one of Rabourdin’s colleagues, who had married Élisabeth Saillard, his only daughter,
and naturally took the apartment above his own.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 43.
62

of] one of the oldest bourgeois families of Paris”] —his biological history is known, categorized,
and desired even if his biological tie to the Saillards is one of marriage not of blood.
110
This is,
after all, where the natural order overlaps the social order. By contrast, Rabourdin “n’avait
jamais connu son père” and, although his mother had the advantage of a luxurious lifestyle, she
“lui avait donné l’éducation vulgaire et incomplète qui produit tant d’ambitions et si peu de
capacités” and died when he was only sixteen.
111
Even Rabourdin’s physiognomy and self-
presentation, which does not seem to have necessarily molded itself to match the ecosystem of
the bureau around him, sheds no clear light on this question of his biological qualities. He
possesses “un front et un nez à la Louis XV” but he presents himself in “un gilet croisé à la
Robespierre” suggesting a disconnect between how he presents himself and his inherent
qualities.
112
As an unknown external agent that has taken root within the bureaucratic ecosystem,
Rabourdin threatens to disrupt the evolutionary flow with his grand plan for reshaping the bureau
and expelling those who seem unfit for their positions to his mind.
Rabourdin’s outsider status is especially marked because, in the social ties that affect the
tarets and their place in the bureau, the actual boundaries of the bureau and what it contains or
does not become blurry. Given the messiness of this social-natural ecosystem, which does not
quite function reliably like a system, and in order to track how all of the organisms in and around
this bureaucratic ecosystem interact, I’ve created a diagram that represents all of the professional
and familial ties between each character (See Image A). Most of these ties are officially
recognized in the novel, but some of them are aspirational or merely metaphorical. By tracing

110. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 995. Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 155.

111. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 865. “had never known his father.” “had given him that incomplete and all
too common education which produces so much ambition and so little ability.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 6.

112. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 864, 865. “a forehead and nose a la Louis XV” but he presents himself in “a
waistcoat crossed a la Robespierre.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 5.
63

Image A
64

character relationships in this chart, however, we can easily see where the external and the
internal overlap, how they collapse into each other, and how aspirational ties create further
connections between individuals that, then, shape the character of the whole ecosystem. For
example, des Lupeaulx’s aspirational ties to Célestine, his desire to begin a romantic affair with
her and take her as his spouse, are the driving force behind his initial support of Rabourdin.
When Célestine fails to follow through on their potential affair, his desire to begin a romantic
relationship with her in earnest is the motivation behind his recanting of that initial support.
Bixiou, a clerk in La Billardière’s division, emphasizes just how much Célestine’s rejection
influences Rabourdin’s failure to advance when explaining that Rabourdin lost the position due
to “un coup de sa femme” [“his wife’s work”].
113
Des Lupeaulx’s changed opinion plays a major
role in ensuring that the chef de division position goes to Baudoyer and his opinion is based both
on a biological desire, for a promising mate, and a social one, for romantic kinship ties. Due to
his desire for Célestine, who is adjacent to the bureau through her marriage to Rabourdin, but not
properly a part of it, des Lupeaulx demonstrates where the lines of social relationships make
Balzac’s natural framework waver in its integrity and reveals how these social ties have
unexpected effects on the writing that makes bureaucratic selection possible and that also moves
freely into and beyond the boundaries of the strictly bureaucratic. Here a relationship that is both
internal and external to the bureau, and not even founded in material reality, destabilizes the
entire plan for bureaucratic succession and, as such, forecloses a significant change in the
ecosystem and its organisms.
The role of these muddled internal/external relationships and the writing accompanying
them in undermining both Balzac’s social-natural system and, as he purports, the government

113. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 1064. Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 235.
65

bureaucracy itself, is especially clear when we compare Rabourdin’s side of the diagram to
Baudoyer’s. On Rabourdin’s side, there are noticeably fewer connections in general, with his
relationships limited to Célestine, his parents, and his basic professional contacts. On the
Baudoyer side, however, there is an entire criss-crossing array of professional, familial, and
aspirational relationships, all at play through and around Baudoyer. This is the point where it
becomes important to recall how Balzac introduces the tarets of the novel. Notably, not only is
Rabourdin left out of this group, the first tarets listed by name are Baudoyer and his allies, even
those who are not in the bureau. As the narrator puts it, the powerful tarets of the day, who are of
the same kind as those who once almost destroyed Holland, include “Gigonnet, Mitral,
Baudoyer, Saillard, Gaudron, Falleix, Transon, Godard et compagnie.” As I have indicated on
the diagram, all of the characters on this list are tied to Baudoyer through family, with some
extra bureaucratic connections thrown in. His father-in-law Saillard is also the cashier of the
ministry, for example, while Godard, who is Baudoyer’s uncle’s cousin, works in Baudoyer’s
bureau. While I have tried to keep the lines connecting each character as neat as possible, they
still necessarily intersect each other and seem to explode out with an unpredictable energy into
various directions, taking up random lines of flight into and out of the bureaucratic structure.
These lines, which could easily serve as a visualization of the tunnels created by gnawing
shipworms, demonstrate the energy that is produced and exchanged and the relationships that are
made and unmade in order to keep the bureaucratic ecosystem running. Rabourdin, unlike the
tarets, does not participate in the ongoing gnawing that characterizes this ecological space. But
this gnawing appears materially on this diagram as it represents all of the small connections
made to help secure Baudoyer’s new position. The crisscrossing shipworm tunnels of this
diagram unveil the kind of frenetic energy behind the working of a division that might seem
66

opaque without Leeuwenhoek’s microscope. This is the energy that keeps the bureaucratic
ecosystem growing, but it is also the energy that bores holes into the bureaucratic structure that
Balzac is representing and that Rabourdin is attempting to construct, just as the shipworms in
Holland bored holes in the sea dikes that undermined their ability to withstand severe storms.
While Rabourdin’s side of the chart seems relatively empty and straight forward, Baudoyer’s
side of the chart possesses a kind of chaotic frenzy around him. This frenzy is even more obvious
in the “messy” version of the diagram (See Image B) wherein a lot of the relational lines
connecting around Baudoyer also seem to come together over his name as though he signals
some kind of gravitational center that bends the shape of the structure around him.
114
It is this
energy that ensures that the true meilleur, in this case the most qualified and most competent,
does not move forward in the natural selection process. Even as Balzac attempts to systematize
these relationships, they resist full encapsulation and instead speak to future possibilities of how
the bureau might continue to expand outward or face destabilizing, external threats.
Rabourdin’s writing, which does not carry the same gnawing character as the writing of
the tarets, aims to shore up these burrowed holes that destabilize the enclosure and efficiency of
the bureaucratic system, but he is expelled before he has the opportunity to enact anything
meaningful. While Rabourdin also adopts writing as a means to alter the bureaucracy around
him, he is ultimately no match for “le travail sourd des tarets” [“the silent work of the teredos”]
around him.
115
His writing is not a persistent and collective gnawing, but rather a focused grand
plan that should be put in place in one fell swoop. He is not tunneling through bureaucratic

114. I would be remiss if I did not mention that this kind of diagram cannot, of course, encapsulate the
entirety of Balzac’s character system, especially because it extends into La Comédie humaine more broadly. The
messy version of the diagram is meant to indicate the impossibility of this kind of classification while also providing
a visual map of the different possibilities produced by the different proximities and intimacies made possible by the
bureau and the kinship or other personal ties that overlap those professional relationships.

115. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 1008. Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 169.
67

Image B
pathways through Rapports, but rather keeping his plan in one unified document that ought to
remain secret until the moment it is enacted. Because, in Balzac’s estimation of the
68

administration, the bureau is the whole of Nature for the bureaucrat, it is also the source of what
the bureaucrat is and of the inherent bureaucratic qualities that are passed down biologically and
socially through the bureaucratic ranks. Each new bureaucrat is the product of cultural, social,
and natural descent that fits neatly into the “system of which they are a part.”
116
That is, in
Balzac’s proposed system they are a part of the eternal taxonomy of the bureaucratic type and fit
within the larger “domain of the Social Being,” which “is invulnerable to environmental
changes…because its form is given by Nature,”
117
and so may evolve or shift in terms of the
specificity of the individual but will never evolve away from the inherent qualities that make
them suited to the bureaucratic ranks. Rabourdin challenges this essentialist characterization of
the bureaucratic world through his plan to reconfigure the state bureaucracy’s actual structure
and the makeup of its “types” by proposing a version of artificial selection that will select for
different qualities and that will further shift the frame of what evolution looks like in this
context.
Unlike the typical changes wrought by environmental forces that, if Balzac relies on the
older naturalist models of the eighteenth century from Lamarck and Geoffroy, “can…cause only
a limited degree of deviation from the ‘norm’” created by Nature and that are “defined by the
innate tendency to complexification,”
118
the changes that Rabourdin proposes rest on a principle
of simplification. And, as Rabourdin theorizes, “simplifier, c’est supprimer un rouage inutile”
and thus will require necessary “déplacement.”
119
“Son système reposait-il sur un déclassement”

116. Somerset, “The Naturalist in Balzac,” 100.

117. Somerset, 100.

118. Somerset, 100.

119. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 871. “To simplify is to eliminate unnecessary machinery” and thus will
require necessary “cuts.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 13.
69

but, even further, “il se traduisait par une nouvelle nomenclature administrative.”
120
Rabourdin is
not merely proposing layoffs of ineffective bureaucrats, but a full recategorization and therefore
a full restructuring of its very Nature, which will ultimately shape what, and who, it produces. He
undertakes a taxonomic project that, far from just classifying types, would also artificially
rebuild the ecosystem of the bureau into a completely different type of thing. It’s a taxonomic
process that goes beyond identification to actually create biologically through writing, which is
also the project that Balzac is undertaking on a narrative scale. The very presence of Rabourdin
in the bureaucratic system in the first place—the threat he poses that the tarets must select
against in order to keep their own places—undermines the supposed enclosure, exhaustiveness,
and consistency of Balzac’s classificatory system. If it is possible to threaten the integrity of the
system through supposedly beneficial reform, then Balzac has moved beyond both the fixism and
integrity of earlier naturalist models from Cuvier, Lamarck, and Geoffroy, and beyond the
Darwinian understanding of natural selection as a force of progress.
Where the tarets and the writing they produce act as forces of natural selection,
Rabourdin
121
and the writing he produces are an attempt at artificial selection that hopes to
perfect the bureaucratic system by preserving only the most qualified and best-suited employés
for undertaking the work of bureaucratic governance. That is, while some of the employés at
least are purposefully creating writing to select for or against bureaucratic successors, they do so

120. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 871. “his system rested upon a weeding-out process” but, even further, “the
establishment of a new administrative order.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 13. Foulkes translates “nomenclature” as
“order,” but the direct cognate is more fitting for the sake of my argument. Balzac uses vocabulary that fits well with
the taxonomic naturalist project to describe the changes that Rabourdin’s reforms would usher in.

121. It is worth noting also that Rabourdin is the only character who is sincerely metaphorized as a divine
figure, generally either a parallel to God or Jesus Christ, without apparent ulterior motive or sarcasm. These
comparisons seem to position Rabourdin in between older naturalist models, dependent on the échelle des êtres that
places God as the divine creator above every other natural being, and Darwinian artificial selection that is its own
kind of intelligent design although on a lower, human level.
70

out of a need for survival and as a gut reaction rather than a well-formed plan and that writing
takes on a life of its own beyond what they can control or predict. Certainly, des Lupeaulx is
methodical in his role in putting the plan into motion, but he is largely acting with a view to
gaining Célestine as his mate, not with the good of the bureau in mind, and the rest of the so-
called shipworms behave simply according to their “nature” as Balzac has written it.
Furthermore, this writing, this force of natural selection, has its own agency that escapes beyond
the intentions of the bureaucrats who create it. Rabourdin creates his plans for the bureau
intending to reform the bureau’s structure and efficiency through a kind of artificial selection,
determined by one specific man, focused on rewarding the qualities that Rabourdin considers
valuable to establishing a successful bureaucratic state system. However, while these plans do
ultimately shape the future of the bureau, they do so in unintended ways. Rather than creating the
possibility for Rabourdin to enact the actual content of his plans, the leaking of his plans to other
bureaucrats instead ensures that those plans are never realized. Rather, the bureaucrats threatened
by termination based on Rabourdin’s preferences enter into a survival response to preserve their
place within the system. His writing does ultimately shape the natural bureaucratic world around
him, but its effects ultimately take on a life of their own, generating even more writing in
response, like Bixiou’s caricature, that create a defensive response that Rabourdin specifically
tries to guard against by hiding his plan. The bureaucrats certainly set these forces of writing into
motion, both in the act of unearthing and sharing Rabourdin’s plan and in the act of creating
more writing, but the writing has major consequences beyond its original scope or intention.
Even Rabourdin’s released plan and the caricature created to smear his reputation go beyond
removing Rabourdin from the office. Bixiou, for example, leaves the bureau after Rabourdin and
des Lupeaulx is elevated to a new social position, not necessarily changing his type but perhaps
71

branching off from a common ancestor to establish a new iteration of his old genus or species as
he gains a new title and his list of identificatory labels and social markers expands. At the
moment of his promotion, Balzac includes a description of des Lupeaulx’s family coat of arms

Image C
and mentions the source of his nobility, drawing together his social family line with his natural
evolution within the bureaucracy.
122
Once Rabourdin’s plan has leaked and Bixiou’s caricature

122. As the minister, who holds a lot of sway over new positions and titles, reassures him, “vous serez
nommé comte” and “je trouverai l’occasion de vous faire nommer pair de France dans une fournée.” Balzac, “Les
Employés,”1075. “‘you’ll be made count’” and “‘I’ll find a way to submit your name in a group to be named for the
peerage” and “this is how it came to pass that Clément Chardin des Lupeaulx, whose father was ennobled under
Louis XV, who quartered bore a ravishing silver sable wolf carrying a lamb in its mouth; second, in purple, three
silver clasps, two and one; third, play of twelve, gules and silver; fourth, gold on a pale endorsed, three batons fleur-
de-lises gules; supported by four movable griffon’s claws from the sides of the coin […], was able to surmount these
rather satirical arms with a count’s coronet.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 246. It’s worth noting here that Balzac
created the Armorial de la Comédie humaine, with illustrations done by his friend Fredinand de Gramont, which
72

has made its rounds, the plan takes care of itself because the shipworms populating the
bureaucratic ecosystem react to this internal threat in the way that best reflects the qualities
cultivated in them through the characteristics of their environment.
As Darwin suggests, in artificial selection “man can act only on external and visible
characters” while nature “can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional
difference, on the whole machinery of life.”
123
On the surface, Rabourdin’s plan attempts to trim
the fat and increase efficiency, but he does not realize the effect his reforms would have on the
root of the problem—what the bureaucratic system is in terms of its ontology. Much like the
exemplary man who keeps pointers in Darwin’s explanation of artificial selection, there is an
“Unconscious” element to Rabourdin’s artificial selection. He focuses on “trying to possess and
breed from the best individual animals” in order to improve the quality of the existing system on
an individual level, “but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed” in the
sense that he does not expect to make any kind of essential changes to the core of what a
bureaucrat is or what the system governing the operation of the government bureaucracy actually
looks like; his aim is one of reform within the existing structure.
124
However, his particular plan
for the bureau would alter the fundamental qualities of the bureaucratic ecosystem shaping and
shaped by the tarets by getting rid of the social ties and gnawing writing that, although not
officially part of the bureaucratic system de jure, govern that system on a de facto level. The
writing of the employés is what constitutes and defines that ontology and preserves it through

contains family coats of arms for every noble family in the Comédie humaine. The book includes detailed accounts
of where the characters from these families appear in Balzac’s novels and how they relate to other noble characters
in the books. I’ve included des Lupeaulx’s coat of arms above as Image C. See Fernand Lotte, Armorial de la
Comédie humaine (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1963).

123. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 65.

124. Darwin, 29.
73

natural selection even as it is actively undermining the official, professionalized system at the
same time. In Balzac’s version of the bureaucracy, it is defined by its state of crisis and almost
collapse. This is not an exceptional situation. Balzac’s version of natural selection does not strive
towards improvement as Darwin will describe natural selection a couple of decades after the
publication of Les Employés, but rather undermines any chances for improvement to prioritize
lateral moves and the preservation of the current status of the species. Part of Darwin’s reasoning
behind assuming that natural selection will always work to the advantage of the particular plant
or animal in question is that, if natural selection were to preserve unfavorable traits, it “would
cause the extinction of the species.”
125
Balzac’s version of bureaucratic selection and evolution,
though, does precisely what Darwin suggests is impossible for natural selection to do: it
preserves injurious qualities in species, including qualities that put the entire ecosystem at risk.
Like Holland’s sea dikes, the holes bored through the bureaucratic system, metaphorically, by
the writing of the tarets in Balzac’s depiction of the bureau, render the government inefficient,
ineffective, and maliciously arbitrary leaving the professional bureaucracy promised in the
nineteenth century vulnerable from the inside out. Like the sea dikes, these supposedly
professionalized bureaucratic systems seem sound from the outside, but when one takes the time
to look through with Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, the descriptive framework that Balzac adopts
to represent the world of his novel, they can locate the damage that has already been done and
can see that they have found it too late. In this way, despite, like Rabourdin, trying to classify the
French government bureaucracy exhaustively under an enclosed systematic framework, Balzac
instead unintentionally suggests that the shipworms cannot be properly contained and that they

125. Darwin, 68.
74

create impossible possibilities like the continuation of a system that is always at risk of imminent
collapse.
Rabourdin, then, is trying to take on Balzac’s project of classification; in his failure to
systematize the bureaucracy, he reflects Balzac’s own failure. Maddeningly for him and perhaps
for Balzac, the actions of the shipworms and the many outside influences that find entry into the
bureaucratic world, including the worms like Élisabeth and Gaudron who live on the blurry
edges of the bureaucratic ecosystem, suggest that the bureaucracy in practice is not a unified,
complete system at all; these same forces work to ensure that it does not become one. True, the
division is hierarchized and each shipworm is assigned his given title, but such a hierarchy only
matters as a system insofar as it creates meaningful separations, pathways, and levels. As the
continuing appointments of incompetent wealthy fonctionnaires through nepotism or general
favor suggest, however, this hierarchy is largely meaningless or can, at least, be undermined with
enough persistence. Balzac even directly recognizes this lack of true hierarchy in the
bureaucratic ranks through a recounting of Rabourdin’s personal critiques of the nineteenth-
century government bureaucracy:
Autre plaie engendrée par les mœurs modernes, et qu’il comptait parmi les causes de
cette secrète démoralisation: l’Administration à Paris n’a point de subordination réelle, il
y règne une égalité complète entre le chef d’une Division importante et le dernier
expéditionnaire: l’un est aussi grand que l’autre dans une arène d’où il sort pour aller
trôner ailleurs.
126

While a nominal order, and process for ordering, might exist, in practice it did not mean much
because the de facto status of bureau employés was no different than those of their chefs,

126. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 875. “Another evil, brought about by modern customs, which Rabourdin
counted among the causes of this secret demoralization, was the fact that there is no real subordination in the
Administration in Paris; complete equality reigns between the chief of an important division and the humblest copy
clerk: one is as important as the other in an arena in which things are lorded over others.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats,
18.

75

especially if they held external or internal connections further up the supposed bureaucratic
chain. Rabourdin’s plan attempts to create “un nouveau système d’administration” because he
believes that “en toute chose la perfection est produite par de simples revirements.”
127

That is, he is not just looking for a better system, but a perfect one that will perhaps, reflect in
some ways the previous, simpler and smaller, ministerial machine controlled by the king but
through the rational framework of the Napoleonic administration. For Rabourdin and Balzac, this
older system perhaps had its flaws, but, by comparison, it was at least a confined whole with
clear borders unlike the chaotically expanding bureaucracy of the tarets. In depicting
Rabourdin’s failure, Balzac represents his own failure as he is actively creating it. Just as
Rabourdin fails to implement a reorganization and recategorization of the bodies in the
bureaucracy into one whole coherent system, Balzac fails to create a whole, perfect taxonomic
system from the bureaucratic types he describes in the novel. Even in his metaphorical definition
of employés as tarets and his attempts to encyclopedically break them down into more and more
specific organisms, something always escapes the taxonomic impulse. The failure to contain, to
exhaustively put everything under one enclosed system, a system that although it comes out of
naturalist work does not fully contain the natural or the social, produces both Balzac’s novel
itself and the contradictions inherent in defining what nineteenth-century modernity looked like,
and how it failed, for Balzac and his contemporaries.
While Balzac attempts to produce the same kind of writing as Rabourdin, an efficient,
complete, and encapsulating system of (re)organization, the writing in his novel takes on more of
the effects and qualities of the writing performed by his bureaucratic tarets. As Woloch argues in
relation to what he calls the “weakness of [the] character-system” in Les Employés, “when the

127. Balzac, “Les Employés,” 871. “a new system of civil administration” because he believes that “in all
things, perfection is brought about by changes made in favor of simplicity.” Balzac, The Bureaucrats, 13.
76

narrator enters La Bureaux in part 2, plot becomes subordinated to social observation, and the
narrative literally dissolves into a strange form of drama, offering several ‘scenes’ of office life
that feature unremarkable individuals in banal conversation.”
128
Like the writing—the
metaphorical gnawing—of the employés Balzac is depicting, his own writing creates
destabilizing tunnels into his supposedly unified plot, revealing the places where it becomes
weak and lacks support. Reflecting this dissolution of the plot, there are moments in the novel
where Balzac’s style itself seems to dissolve. While he begins with the robust paragraphs of a
typical nineteenth-century novel, in some of the moments when the employés are engaged in
often banal conversation, the novel instead takes on a script-like format akin to a play. Instead of
the typical em dash indicating a moment of dialogue, the speaking character’s name is written in
all capital letters with their unmarked dialogue below. Just as the bureaucrats cannot stick to the
bureaucratic “genre” even within the bureau and during their working hours, Balzac’s novel
seems to be destabilized in its core qualities: plot and style. Unlike the detailed paragraphs of a
typical contemporary novel that aim to describe even the small details of a given moment in the
story, these pieces of dialogue leave space for the shipworms to interact with each other and
within their shared ecological space without rigid guidelines.
Insofar as the form of the novel generally adheres to its own kind of system, one that
creates a self-contained plot that governs the possibilities of the world and characters contained
within, Balzac has undermined this system both by dismantling the regulating force of plot and
by reworking the typical expectations of novelistic form. What’s more, the fact that Les
Employés exists as one part of the larger body that is La Comédie humaine and that it, as such,

128. Woloch, “A qui la place?,” 309.
77

points outside of itself to that larger network through the character of Poiret,
129
whose brother
appears in Le Père Goriot [Father Goriot], opens up further lines of flight beyond the limits of
the one novel. Not only are there forces outside of the bureau that can influence its structure and
rules, there are forces outside of the novel itself that enact a kind of organizing influence. Just as
the gnawing of the shipworms through Holland’s sea dikes creates the impetus for the natural
disaster that disassembles the manmade structures, Balzac’s gnawing employés de-solidify the
government structures and ideological divides of the past by dissolving the hard lines defining
them. Then, in turn, Balzac’s own writing dissolves the very systems he is trying to create,
whether they be taxonomic or narrative. Given Balzac’s cultural position as a veritable founder
of the European realist novel, the dissolution of his bureau novel indicates a potential instability
in the cultural foundations of the nineteenth-century realist novel more generally. Mirroring the
way that the government bureaucracy in Les Employés is undermined and made vulnerable even
as it is being created by the same shipworms who are creating it, Balzac starts to dissolve the
very literary foundations he is attempting to establish. The ties between writing, bureaucracy,
and naturalist frameworks of classification and the question at the heart of Balzac’s novel about
the status of writing in the modern, and specifically bureaucratic, world are then inextricably
linked and integral to understanding where narratives of organization and progress fail to hold up
in the nineteenth century.
The failure of the realist novel does not, however, mean that it fails in the sense that it is
meaningless or only produces nonsense, an accusation made of both bureaucratic and modern
writing, and one specifically made of modern writing because of its connection to bureaucratic
writing. Rather this failure is what produces the realist novel and modernity more generally.

129. As I note on the character map images, Poiret is a bureaucrat in La Billardière’s division but his
position is not further specified.
78

Rabourdin’s failed attempt to artificially select for an improved and perfected type of system
drives the shipworms into a frenzy of gnawing: from Élisabeth’s newspaper articles to Bixiou’s
caricature. While this gnawing, the writing that ultimately determined how the division
continued forward and what it would look like in its next iteration, was not a part of the master
plan, it produced both bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic material that formed an evolutionary
network allowing the bureaucracy to live on, even in its precarious state, through lateral natural
selection. In the failure of his framework, Balzac finds himself caught between fixism and
evolution, the natural and the social, rational systematization and the things that exceed this kind
of systematization, and classifying and creative writing. It is from this in-between space, from
the place where he attempts to affirm the rational and progressive project of modernity while
grappling with the impossibility of such a project, that he produces a representation of modern
life particularly defined by a government bureaucracy that his contemporaries and successors
would stereotype along similar lines for the rest of the century. In showing where
systematization, which he attempts through naturalist frameworks, will not succeed in containing
everything, even as proponents of a certain kind of rational progressive modernity will claim that
it can, and in demonstrating that progress will not always logically bear out and will not function
as a consistent force of increasing perfection, Balzac calls into question this particular approach
to society and nature. More specifically, because bureaucracy, especially beginning with the
Napoleonic administration, takes this particular rationalist framework as its starting place and
becomes the preferred organizational structure for all major elements of government and even
aspects of the private sphere, he links modernity and bureaucracy, and their mutual failure,
together as well. That is, Les Employés seems to unintentionally make the case that failure is a
defining feature and driving force of both modernity and bureaucracy—the impossibility of the
79

systematizing of progress as a means for explaining and organizing all of modern life is what
produces the material and conceptual realities of modern life, including the modern realist novel.
What Balzac’s novel, his attempt at classifying bureaucrats and their bureaucratic
ecosystem, offers, then, is a rumination on how failure might persist as a defining quality of
important systems. In particular, in the ways in which he anticipates later century-defining
theories, like Darwinian evolution, that focus on progress while still drawing back on the static
models of the past, he demonstrates how the forever-imminent collapse of failed systems and
concepts allow them to reproduce and become the failed space that makes up everyday life. In
this chapter I have focused on Balzac’s set-up of this failure—particularly the failure of
bureaucratic projects that are supported by the same conceptual drives as modernity and that are
a defining feature of the nineteenth century—his inability to fully grapple with it even as he
performs it in his own writing, and how that failure reproduces. In the following chapter, focused
on Gogol’’s short stories “Nos” and “Shinel’,” I will extend this reading by demonstrating how
Gogol’ embraces this failure and demonstrates what the failure of bureaucracy, and modernity,
produces, and particularly what it animates.

80

Chapter 2: “A Kind of Unnatural Force:” Bureaucratic Assemblage in Nikolai Gogol’
As V. V. Gippius highlights in his editorial notes for the volume Н. В. Гоголь—
материалы и исследования [N. V. Gogol’—material and research], Nikolai Gogol’’s path into
the civil service, despite his background as a lyceum student and some beneficial social
connections, was not a straightforward one. Nor was he particularly fond of the bureaucratic
milieu he found himself in for the sake of his career. Despite the progression of letters and
memos exchanged between Gogol’ and members of the government bureaucracy regarding
salary and potential open positions, during the process of trying to gain a place in the
administration, Gogol’ went abroad, complaining that incompetent civil servants received jobs
while he could not. Although he likely received some help himself in ultimately successfully
achieving his position, he lamented that there were people acting against him along the way.
130

Describing the bureaucratic world into which he was entering, in a letter from April 30, 1829,
Gogol’ complained that “все толкуют о своих департаментах да коллегиях, всё подавлено,
всё погрязло в бездельных ничтожных трудах.”
131
His frustration with the perceived triviality
of bureaucratic work is not surprising given his many works lambasting the nineteenth-century
Russian government bureaucracy including, but not limited to, Ревизор [The Government
Inspector], Мертыве души [Dead Souls], and the two short stories that I will be focusing on for
this chapter: “Нос” [“Nos”/”The Nose”] and “Шинель” [“Shinel’”/”The Overcoat”]. However,
while he may have found bureaucratic work to be largely insignificant and while he often

130. As Gippius suggests, Gogol’ may have made these complaints in part to justify his desire to go abroad
anyway, but his other concerns over the government bureaucracy suggest that the expressed frustration was likely
more than just a strategy for explaining his travel plans. See Н. В. Гоголь—материалы и исследования, edited by
V. V. Gippius (Москва: Издательство академии наук СССР, 1936), 289.

131. “everyone goes on about their own departments and government offices, everything is suppressed,
everything is mired in idle, insignificant work.” N. V. Gogol’, “Письмо Гоголь М. И., 30 апреля 1829 г. С.-
Петербург,” in Т. 10. Письма, 1820-1835, 1940, Т. 10 of Гоголь Н. В. Полное собрание сочинений в 14 т.,
edited by V. V. Gippius (Москва: Изд-во АН СССР, 1937-1952), 139. Н. В. Гоголь, qtd. 289.
81

represented government bureaucrats as broadly incompetent or even malicious, he certainly
experienced in his own appointment to a bureaucratic position that bureaucratic writing did have
the power to do things.
It is in the repetition of writing, the reiteration of seemingly minute details, their
circulation and rearticulation, that bureaucratic writing does things and that it gains power, rather
than in some one-time proclamation that might, for example, be enacted immediately by a tsar
whose words are imbued with a more inherent and divine power. This kind of repetition of
minute details characterizes the documents that ultimately allow Gogol’ to enter into the civil
service himself. Gippius includes copies of the archived letters and memos sent by Gogol’ and
other civil servants to the appropriate recipients about Gogol’’s desire to enter into the civil
service as part of the Department of Appanages. In this set of correspondence,
132
the memos are
generally split between a column that lays out the matter at hand and a column that offers new
information about the resolution reached by the recipients of the memo. That is, each memo
meticulously repeats the information from each previous memo so that the recounting of the
matter at hand appears at least twice in the archival record. In some cases, the wording of the
recounting is even functionally verbatim and there are even documents where the restating of the
case runs longer than the description of the new information, the resolution, itself. For examples
of this repetition, see Images D and E which are scans from Н. В. Гоголь материалы и
исследования. The first document in Image D is a letter from Gogol’, dated March 27, 1830,
requesting the civil service position, which is followed by what appears to be an internal notation
on the letter that reexplains Gogol’’s request and offers a solution only to be followed by another

132. Н. В. Гоголь, 295-302.
82

memo that first reiterates the issue at hand before offering a new decision. The repetitions are
easy to pick out between the documents. In Gogol’’s letter he requests a position

Image D Image E
“в департамент уделов в число канцелярских чиновников по II-му отделению оного”
133
and
the author of the notation on the letter, Panaev, reiterates that Gogol’ is requesting to be placed in
a position “в число канцелярских чиновников департамента уделов по 2-му отделению.”
134

Similarly, Panaev offers that Gogol’ could be appointed “на имеющуюся во временном столе
вакансию старшего писца, с жалованьем по 600 рублей в год”
135
and one of the authors of

133. Н. В. Гоголь, 295. “in the department of appanages and among the clerical officials in the second
division of this department.”

134. Н. В. Гоголь, 295. “among the clerical officials of the department of appanages in the second
division.”

83

the following memo, dated April 10, 1830, Al. Frantsen, repeats that Gogol’ could be appointed

Image F 1 & 2
“на имеющуюся во временном столе вакансию старшего писца с жалованьем по 600 руб. в
год.”
136
The resolution column of the memo from April 10, 1830 even includes directions for
where to send the matter further to ensure that action is taken to address it, indicating that the
chain of repetition will continue.
137
In Image F 1 & 2, it’s clear how such a pattern can produce a
situation where the explanation of the matter at hand grows even longer than the new
information conveyed in the memo, so that it almost seems like the main focus of the document.
In this insistent repetition, each step of the appointment process is willed into being even as the
repetition of explanations makes the words themselves seem small and meaningless. Although
the amount of detail and repetition in the documents gives a sense of order, instead the insistent

135. Н. В. Гоголь, 295. “to the existing vacancy for a senior scribe in a provisional department, with a
salary of 600 rubles a year.”

136. Н. В. Гоголь, 296. “to the existing vacancy for a senior scribe in a provisional department with a
salary of 600 rub. a year.”

137. Н. В. Гоголь, 296.
84

repetition of the minute creates a kind of imbalance where the restating of the case threatens to
get out of hand. When taken together, these documents do represent a real accounting of actual
events, but also take on the cast of a parody of bureaucratic copying. On its own, each
explanation is only that, but in a chain of circulation from person to person, like the insistent
gnawing of the shipworms in Honoré de Balzac’s novel Les Employés discussed in the previous
chapter, there is a chaotic energy and power behind these bureaucratic memos even if the writing
itself seems devoid of any real substance.
As a writer, Gogol’ is, of course, no stranger to the repetition of minute details and this
repetition can sometimes earn him similar accusations of linguistic emptiness. His writing style
has been alternatively described as “distended with details and digressions that threaten to
swamp sense and impede narrative progress,”
138
grotesque,
139
parodic,
140
and several things in
between. As Cathy Popkin contends, unlike many of the realists of the time, Gogol’ does not
adopt expansive amounts of seemingly needless detail for the sake of “augment[ing] the
verisimilitude of their representation, to approximate the ‘really real,’” but rather to create chaos.
As she puts it: “decorum is suspended, hierarchies of importance are abrogated, and structures
collapse.”
141
Rather than fitting into literary conventions, Gogol’ presents an often opaque
assemblage of literary material that pushes back on generic limits or expectations. While, in line

138. Cathy Popkin, “Distended Discourse: Gogol, Jean Paul, and the Poetics of Elaboration,” in Essays on
Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, edited by Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1992), 185.

139. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere offers a useful list of how the grotesque has been applied to “Shinel’” in
particular. See Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Out from Under Gogol’s Overcoat: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1982), beginning on pg. 31.

140. Gary Saul Morson, “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics,” in Essays on Gogol:
Logos and the Russian Word, edited by Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1992), 238.

141. Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 142.
85

with these characterizations, Gogol’’s work is often dismissed as “nonsensical” and even
revealing of a certain emptiness or meaninglessness behind his depictions of everyday life,
142
it
is also portrayed in other places as creative. Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, points to Gogol’’s
writing as producing a carnivalesque laughter that explodes the boundaries of rank and official
discourse, replacing it with something tangible.
143
In certain of these readings, then, Gogol’’s
style might seem to fall into a kind of writing that “like modern life itself, becomes tiny and
monotonous…surrounded by things—words, objects, people—without meaning, rather with a
meaning but no dimension to it.”
144
In that sense, it might be said to align with common
characterizations of bureaucratic writing as empty and meaningless. In the Bakhtinian sense,
however, Gogol’’s work stands in direct opposition to bureaucratic discourse due, it seems, to
the assumption that official writing must only be ordering, emotionless, and subtractive rather
than affective or productive.
Gogol’’s bureaucratic fiction, though, seems to suggest an alternative reading of
bureaucratic writing and of what bureaucratic systematization produces. While his language may
often appear to offer a clear image of the mundane and rationally ordered bureaucratic world, a
world with which he takes great issue, it also reveals the visceral affective force of bureaucratic
writing and systematization. As I examined in chapter one, Balzac attempts to apply naturalist
frameworks to bureaucracy in a totalizing way, clearly marking out the boundaries of what each

142. See Morson’s contention in “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation” that “Gogol must be regarded as one of
the greatest writers of nonsense, if not the greatest, in the history of world literature” (203). See pg. 238 for
Morson’s take on the meaninglessness of everyday life in Gogol’. These contentions, of course, do not suggest that
Morson finds Gogol’’s work to be unimportant or impossible to analyze, just that there is a certain opacity in his
style and plots.

143. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Rabelais and Gogol: The Art of Discourse and the Popular Culture of Laughter,”
trans. Patricia Sollner, Mississippi Review 11, no. 3 (winter/spring 1983): 45-46.

144. Marco Diani, “Balzac’s Bureaucracy: The Infinite Destiny of the Unknown Masterpiece,” L’Esprit
créateur 34, no. 1 (1994): 48.
86

thing is and is not and how it can behave within the administrative space, but his project of
systematization fails. The implication of his failure is that the systematizing force of bureaucracy
will necessarily also fail. While Balzac unintentionally demonstrates the failure of bureaucratic
attempts at classification and organization, and by extension the failure of modernity, Gogol’
focuses on what this failure of systematization
145
produces through the circulation of writing,
matter, and affect. Rather than characterizing the government bureaucracy and its writing solely
by what it prohibits or takes away, like meaning, he focuses instead on how the oppressive top-
down attempt to organize Russia socially and politically is also expressive. While he
characterizes bureaucratic work itself as insignificant, as Gippius highlights, Gogol’’s fiction
also recognizes the places where this work creates affective forces that animate the bodies and
matter that fall outside of official categories in unexpected ways. In this sense, his fictional work
on the bureaucracy parallels Balzac’s by focusing on what bureaucratic writing and labor do to
the material within and around them.
Unlike Balzac, however, Gogol’’s approach is not a naturalist one nor one of
systematization, but rather a proto-new materialist approach that puts the human body on the
same level as other nonhuman matter. In his depiction of the world—especially in his short
stories “Nos” (1836) and “Shinel’” (1842)—Russia is a materialist space wherein the ties and
relations that actually order the metropole and its environs are strains of affective infection that
travel between human bodies and material objects through the agency of supposedly inanimate
matter. In this model of modern Russia, the bureaucratic government system, rather than neatly

145. As Popkin observes in The Pragmatics of Insignificance, Gogol’’s absurdist descriptions of characters
and things that claim a certain level “of universality about features so specific that they drastically limit the field of
reference rather than constituting a useful generalization” “[seem] to be parodying the idea of the ‘type,’ that great
goal of realist prose, the sense that the typical could be discovered through astute observation of the particular”
(168). Just as Balzac’s attempts at typification fail, Gogol’’s work seems to suggest the impossibility of such a task
as well.
87

hierarchizing the populace and relegating individual identity to neat visually-ordered categories
as it claims to do, creates a kind of assemblage of bureaucratic offices and officials, unruly
bodies, and animated inanimate objects, both natural and humanmade, that blurs artificial
boundaries between official categories of rank and matter, destabilizing the concepts of both
individual and national identity. The failure of supposedly totalizing systems, the limitation to
what a system can actually include and categorize in meaningful ways, and the unacknowledged
viscerality of bureaucratic writing only serve to produce forms of individual and national identity
that are rooted much more in affective assemblage than anything visually or officially legible.
Furthermore, it is by establishing the illusion of order where there isn’t any—Russia’s imperial
borders are very much contested in the nineteenth century and to this day—that the state
bureaucracy makes imperialist expansion possible and necessary, extending its reach however
tenuously into new and potential imperial holdings. Russian imperial borders continually expand
in a vain attempt to solidify national identity by extending clear separations of what is “Russian”
and what is not to its geographical surroundings via oppressive rule, but this expansion only
creates further instability. Both imperial and individual identity become determined less by hard
borders, whether those borders be human versus nonhuman, Russian versus non-Russian,
animate versus inanimate, inside versus outside, center versus periphery or anything else, and
more determined by fluid and infectious affective forces, both communal and individual. The
constant destabilizing of identity through failed bureaucratic classification and imperial
expansion ultimately produces the justification for bureaucracy and imperialism in the first place,
turning their failure into a feature that allows them to persist indefinitely.
While bureaucratic documents and labor are typically considered boring, mundane, or
constructed of bits of empty form language and thus incapable of doing anything but dulling the
88

mind or turning civil servants into mindless automatons, the failure of bureaucratic systems to
actually encapsulate everything under one framework of order while simultaneously claiming its
success in creating a perfectly ordered society, creates a kind of affective dissonance that
viscerally moves bodies and affect. Despite appearances, then, bureaucratic writing and
structures do “[pertain] to, or [touch] deeply, inward feelings.”
146
Even where the affect at hand
is something like boredom or obsequiousness, it is still strong and affecting. However, this
bureaucratic force is also visceral in a more bodily sense of viscera, wherein the visceral is
something that “[affects] the viscera or bowels regarded as the seat of emotion.”
147
In Gogol’,
affect is tied to the bureaucrat’s or citizen’s body, even if not to the literal bowels, and the state
of the body has a direct effect on how affects can and cannot manifest. As we will see in “Nos”
and “Shinel’,” bodies are taken apart physically, but they also have the means to manifest
internal affect on the outside and move or arrest other bodies. In this sense, the visceral in Gogol’
does not take on an expected form but rather is a force that is constructed of a hodgepodge of
bodily and affective valences set off by bureaucratic labor. Rather than stifling affect, the
bureaucratic writing undertaken by Gogol’’s characters instead produces or serves as a launching
point for forms of both individual and collective affect that move around and reshape bodies
from the inside out, including the national imperial body.
That is, in Gogol’’s version of the Russian bureaucracy, administration is not rational and
neatly ordered as promised, but rather a kind of assemblage of bodies and matter that enacts its
own affective force and induces infectious affect in individual members of the assemblage.
While Gogol’ is still primarily focused on the human, which is why I’ve termed his version of

146. Oxford English Dictionary (March 2022), adj. “visceral.”

147. OED, “visceral.”
89

Russia “proto” new materialist, he does seriously consider the trivial matter of the bureaucratic
world alongside affect alongside natural forces alongside bodies that range from animal to
clearly human to dehumanized or thingified. To get at what the bureaucratic Russian city
actually looks like in Gogol’’s estimation then, Jane Bennett’s version of “assemblage” serves as
a useful starting point. For her, building on Deleuze and Guattari, “assemblages are ad hoc
groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts” that “are able to function despite
the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” and that “have uneven
topographies” given that the various forms of matter and affect contained within a given
assemblage are “not distributed equally across its surface.”
148
Again, unlike Bennett, Gogol’ is
still primarily focused on the human and, in these two stories in particular, on bureaucracy.
However, as I will expand on below, in the ways in which he depicts the body as part of a
larger world of inanimate and animate matter and demonstrates the failures of bureaucratic
hierarchy and organization, he suggests that a larger field of forces than just the individual
human or bureaucratic authority is at play in the events of his stories and in the larger imperial
concerns that hover at the edges of his work. While Bennett’s version of affect is “not specific to
humans, organisms, or even to bodies,” Gogol’’s affect is more human but also attaches itself to
different kinds of matter as well.
149
For him, affect becomes the core force produced by the
assemblage within and around the state bureaucratic system that allows individuals and the
nation as a whole to take agential action. However, the animating effects of bureaucratic writing
and labor on matter that make up this larger assemblage, particularly the animation of the body

148. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),
23-24.

149. Bennett, 61.
90

of the bureaucrat, do begin with oppression, with what is taken away, before they can produce
the expressive affective force of the assemblage as a whole.
That is, before the bureaucratic body can become equivalent to inanimate matter and
brought to life alongside that matter, it must be dehumanized. It is in this sense that the
oppressive aspects of Gogol’’s version of bureaucracy help to set off its expressive aspects. At
the smallest level of bureaucratic writing, dehumanization happens through the act of copying, a
type of writing akin perhaps to the kind of writing that the civil servants handling Gogol’’s
application for an administrative position might have had to undertake in their memos when
reiterating the details of the case at hand for the next bureaucrat down the line.
There is perhaps no place in Gogol’’s oeuvre that demonstrates this kind of empty
copying as well as Akakii Akakievich’s devoted labor in “Shinel’.” Even beyond Gogol’’s own
oeuvre, Akakii Akakievich is often taken as the epitome of the tragic petty bureaucrat
150
in
nineteenth-century literature alongside Herman Melville’s disinclined scrivener Bartleby. Akakii
is, in fact, undone by nothing more complicated than trying to get a new overcoat so he can more
comfortably make the winter trek to his offices. While he does manage to secure a much-too-
expensive new overcoat that gains him a new level of respect from his coworkers, when the
overcoat is stolen from him on his walk home, his search to get it back ultimately leads to his
death. His disastrous fall from his middling bureaucratic life to his death demonstrates his level
of devotion to and investment in his status in the bureaucracy, but despite this devotedness to his
labor as a copy-clerk, Akakii cannot or does not want to advance beyond his entry-level position.

150. As Janet G. Tucker and Harold A. McFarlin point out, while Akakii is often read as a “low-level” civil
servant, he is actually more in the middle in terms of his rank (See Appendix A). Janet G. Tucker, “Genre
Fragmentation in Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 46 (2012), 89. Harold A.
McFarlin, “‘The Overcoat’ As a Civil Service Episode,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 13, no. 3 (fall 1979),
253.
91

Although Akakii is consistently tormented by his coworkers, one of his directors does try to
reward his hard work by giving him a marginally more difficult assignment requiring him to
change first-person verbs into third-person verbs in a particular document.
151
The attempt of
reworking grammar “задало ему такую работу, что он вспотел совершенно, тер лоб” and he
insists that he must return to merely copying.
152
Any attempt at engaging with actual content, it
seems, no matter how minor, creates an insurmountable obstacle for a character who was, by all
accounts, the epitome of the government civil servant: “родился на свет уже совершенно
готовым, в вицмундире.”
153
But while Akakii prefers and even enjoys copying, it is the
dissonance between the perceived meaninglessness of this work and his own affective
attachment to it that dehumanizes him even for his colleagues. In his department, Akakii’s
“начальники поступали с ним как-то холодно-деспотически” and “сторожа
́ не только не
вставали с мест, когда он проходил, но даже не глядели на него, как будто бы через
приемную пролетела простая муха.”
154
Akakii is not merely treated with distance or
indifference, but like nothing more than an insect. His body may be present in the bureau, but for
the majority of his coworkers it is an object meant to be ignored or trifled with and that cannot
exist beyond copying. Seemingly born for the bureau and his life of endless copying, even
Akakii’s first name and patronymic, Akakii Akakievich, reflect a kind of dehumanizing

151. N. V. Gogol’, “Шинель’,” in Т. 3 Повести, 1983, Т. 3 of Гоголь Н. В. Полное собрание сочинений
в 14 т., edited by V. L. Komarovich (Москва: Изд-во АН СССР, 1937-1952), 144.

152. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 144. “this caused him so much effort that he was covered in sweat, he wiped his
brow.” Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” in The Nose and Other Stories, translated by Susanne Fusso (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2019), 283.

153. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 143. “he had apparently been born into the world completely finished, wearing a
civil service uniform.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 281.

154. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 143. “The supervisors treated him in a kind of coldly despotic manner” and “the
guards not only didn’t get up from their seats when he went by, they didn’t even look at him, as if an ordinary fly
had flown through the anteroom.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 281.
92

reiteration as “the recurring ka[k] readily forms into the word kaka, or ‘feces,’ which also helps
establish Akaky as an ‘anal’ (or, in Gogol’s term, ‘hemorrhoidal’) character”
155
and, as plenty of
scholars have already observed, his last name Bashmachkin, while not repeated, does mean shoe.
Akakii’s connection to copying—a form of labor that appears insignificant and requiring little in
the way of skill—transforms his body into something equally insignificant, something below the
human.
The parallel of Akakii’s body with stuff becomes most obvious, though, in the amount of
detritus that he seems to attract or even take into his body. In fact, Akakii acts almost like a
detritus magnet. He cannot even walk in the street, as the narrator explains, without gathering an
assortment of leftovers on his person. There was “всегда что-нибудь да прилипало к его
вицмундиру: или сенца кусочек, или какая-нибудь ниточка”
156
and as he walks anywhere in
the city, “он имел особенное искусство […] поспевать под окно именно в то самое-время,
когда из него выбрасывали всякую дрянь, и оттого вечно уносил на своей шляпе арбузные
и дынные корки и тому подобный вздор.”
157
It seems as though he almost attracts it to himself
by his physical presence. A physical presence of detritus that is only added to by his tattered old
“cape,” the cloth of which “истерлось, что сквозило, и подкладка расползлась,”
158
and by his
coworkers who “сыпали на голову ему бумажки”
159
in the office. Beyond just attracting this

155. Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 201. As I will
discuss in chapter four, labelling bureaucrats as hemorrhoidal was a common dehumanizing trope in France as well
as in Russia.

156. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 145. “something […] always getting stuck to his uniform, either a piece of straw
or a little thread,” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 283.

157. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 145. “he had a particular knack of getting under a window at the precise time
when someone was throwing all kinds of trash out of it, and so he was eternally bearing away on his hat watermelon
rinds and melon rinds and that kind of rubbish,” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 283.

158. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 147. “had become so worn out that you could see through it, and the lining was
shredded,” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 286.

93

detritus to his body however, Akakii further takes it into himself. He becomes a kind of
receptacle for waste to the extent that he becomes the waste itself. When eating at his house,
along with his usual beef and onions, he also “ел всё это с мухами и со всем тем, что ни
посылал бог на ту пору.”
160
Akakii eats flies but is also, as mentioned above, described as one.
He isn’t just surrounded by inanimate objects, specifically objects that would most likely be
treated like trash, and nonhuman bodies, he is made up of them like a kind of living trash pile.
The mention of God alongside Akakii’s eating habits, mirroring Gogol’’s many references to the
devil in phrases like “чорт знает” [devil knows] suggests some kind of supernatural element at
play that lends Akakii a physical magnetism for scraps of waste that litter the world around him
and begin to make up his body. His body even stands in as a kind of bureaucratic detritus in that,
as the narrator explains when giving Akakii’s background, “когда и в какое время он поступил
в департамент и кто определил его, этого никто не мог припомнить.”
161
Just as he pulls in
all of the little bits and pieces that would normally gather at the edges of messy rooms or littered
alleys, Akakii seems to just drift into the bureau like a leftover scrap pushed along by the wind.
Furthermore, his status as a leftover scrap comes out of his inherent bureaucrat-ness, his affective
and physical adherence to copying and the sense that, like a piece of office furniture, he belongs
to the background of the bureau.
While Akakii’s body is akin to the other inanimate objects littering the world of “Shinel’”
however, he is not motionless nor lifeless and neither is the detritus gathering around him. Like
the pieces of trash and insects that find their way onto and into his body, as though governed by a

159. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 143. “would sprinkle bits of paper on his head,” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 282.

160. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 145. “would eat all this along with flies and anything else that God happened to
send at that moment,” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 284.

161. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 143. “When and at what time he started work in the Department and who had
appointed him, no one could recall,” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 281.
94

set intention, Akakii’s body finds its own animating intention in the bureau. In fact, the bureau
seems to be the impetus for all of these unnatural animations as the detritus seems to be attracted
mostly to his uniform, the visual marker of his position, and his uniform itself, at least the old
tattered “cape” that he later replaces with the titular overcoat, becomes one of the many pieces of
garbage that adheres to Akakii’s body. Everything is given motion by his labor and even as this
labor seems as though it should be a regulating force—it does lend his life a consistent
schedule—it instead pulls everything around it into a frenzy of activity. In particular, his
animation comes directly out of the act of copying, and the seemingly insignificant language that
copying reproduces, that also dehumanizes him and turns him into a piece of waste. That is, the
writing that happens within the bureau itself animates previously inanimate objects precisely
through its perceived absence of meaning. As the narrator himself observes about Akakii, “вне
этого переписыванья, казалось, для него ничего не существовало.” Even when Akakii gets
home from work, he spends his free time copying material from the bureau or anything else he
can find and it seems that as his body moves through the streets, he “видел на всем свои
чистые, ровным почерком выписанные строки” as though he is mimicking the act of copying
through his walking, moving from letter to letter, stroke to stroke.
162
His body itself becomes part
and parcel with the letters he writes out, as “в лице его, казалось, можно было прочесть
всякую букву, которую выводило перо его.”
163
In place of the core marker of Akakii’s
humanity and individual identity, his face, there instead appears empty bureaucratic language. In
these moments, what the language might signify doesn’t matter, it is as though Akakii’s body is

162. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 145. “Outside of this copying, it seemed that nothing existed for him.” “he saw on
everything his own clean lines written out in his even handwriting.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 283. It’s worth noting
that in chapter four, we will find another bureaucrat who spends his free time copying at home and who, ultimately,
dies as a result of his bureaucratic labor in the person of Monsieur Bougran.

163. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 144. “it seemed you could read on his face every letter his pen was tracing.”
Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 283.
95

brought to life solely by the fact of writing in and of itself. Although writing about “Nos,” Sergei
Bocharov points toward this affinity of the human body in Gogol’ with the world of stuff,
suggesting that the “disintegrating into parts and members, losing form, seems to be striving in
the opposite direction from the face, toward confusion and identification with inanimate
materiality” so that “the flesh is mixed up, as if by contiguity, with the world of things.”
164
While
the human body in “Nos” more obviously loses its form when the main character’s nose
disappears off his face, a similar loss of form occurs with Akakii. His face becomes the letters he
writes, his body becomes no more than a fly, in his unending copying he becomes as empty and
unsignifying as the writing he produces but, like that same writing, which does circulate around
the office and lead Akakii through the streets, he is still animated. His body, as it becomes
synonymous with copied bureaucratic writing, also becomes a node for animation because his
body itself is no longer something special or separate, but just another object in the office that is
behaving erratically.
In “Nos,” this destabilization of the body is literal and, similarly to Akakii’s fate,
transforms the main character’s body and body parts into superfluous waste products. Kovalev, a
collegiate assessor, wakes up one day to find that his nose has mysteriously disappeared, and his
detached nose begins his degradation into detritus and launches his unruly animation. At first
Kovalev’s barber Ivan Iakovlevich finds Kovalev’s detached nose as an unwelcome addition to
the loaf of bread his wife has made; she accuses him of ripping it off Kovalev’s face as though it
is a wasteful byproduct of a too-aggressive shave. Ivan transforms the nose even more resolutely
into a piece of waste, however, when he attempts to get rid of it. After wrapping the nose in a

164. Sergei Bocharov, “Around ‘The Nose,’” in Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, translated
by Susanne Fusso, edited by Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992),
28.
96

rag, he wanders along the street, hoping to “его куда-нибудь подсунуть: или в тумбу под
воротами, или так как-нибудь нечаянно выронить”
165
and when he does finally work up the
courage to drop it in the street, a police officer yells to him that he “что-то уронил” [“‘dropped
something’”] as though the nose is an indistinct inanimate object one could easily misplace.
166

When Ivan, who is described as a “почтенный гражданин” [“estimable citizen,”]
167
finally
determines to get rid of the nose by throwing it off St. Isaac’s bridge after his attempt to drop it
in the street fails, he “швырнул потихоньку тряпку с носом”
168
into the water, tossing away
both the rag and nose as though they are equivalent, before being accosted by another police
officer. The reader, of course, knows that the nose originally comes from Kovalev, which Ivan
and his wife also guess, and while the nose becomes a piece of detritus in Ivan’s hands, later in
the story the nose transforms into a human-sized civil servant in its own right. Once the nose
gains individual agency, Kovalev becomes the waste product, the broken excess. He cannot
continue existing properly without his nose, as he laments on several occasions,
169
and after the
nose becomes a full-fledged civil servant, or at least a very good fake, he makes it clear in his
unwillingness to interact with Kovalev that Kovalev is merely an unwelcome leftover. The nose
becomes a walking, talking person, one that is indistinguishable from an actual person without
further scrutiny or even visual aid given that the police officer who finally apprehends the nose

165. N. V. Gogol’, “Нос,” in Т. 3. Повести, 1938, т. 3 of Гоголь Н. В. Полное собрание сочинений в 14
т., edited by V. L. Komarovich (Москва: Изд-во АН СССР, 1937-1952), 51. “stick it under something, either to
stick it under a bollard near a gate, or to drop it somehow accidentally.” Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose,” in The Nose
and Other Stories, translated by Susanne Fusso (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 199.

166. Gogol’, “Нос,” 51. Gogol, “The Nose,” 199.

167. Gogol’, “Нос,” 51, 59. Gogol, “The Nose,” 200.

168. Gogol’, “Нос,” 52. “threw in the rag with the nose in it.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 200.

169. I will address these moments in more detail further down.
97

admits that he was only able to do so because he “были со мной очки,”
170
which allowed him to
finally see the nose for what it was. The fact that the nose could so easily be mistaken for a
bureaucrat, a bureaucrat who is able to ride around town in a carriage and visit the church and so
on, suggests that the nose gains almost the same level of personhood that Kovalev has, a
personhood which, as Tucker argues about Akakii in “Shinel’,” is not a “true personhood” but
merely a hollow being somewhere on the Table of Ranks, the official hierarchical listing of civil,
military, and sacerdotal positions introduced by Peter I.
171
In this sense, like Akakii, who is
dehumanized but also animated by his copying, Kovalev becomes equivalent to the matter
around him that is meant to be inanimate, in this case his own nose, but remains animated in
erratic ways.
While ordering systems like the Table of Ranks attempted to categorize civil servants by
positioning them into a set hierarchy that concretized the key aspects of their social identity, in
Gogol’’s stories they have the opposite effect. Far from ordering characters into clearly bounded
and defined official positions and social categories, bureaucratic systematization instead
destabilizes identity and creates anxiety around its proper fulfillment. While this anxiety is clear
in Akakii’s quest for his stolen overcoat and his eventual theft of a more highly ranked civil
servant’s overcoat as a means to gain rank at the end of the story, it is especially apparent in
Kovalev, who, unlike Akakii, received his position in the government bureaucracy by working
his way into the civil service in the Caucasus. “Nos” more directly takes on the influences of the
Table of Ranks than “Shinel’,” but it also more directly ties the issue of rank to that of empire.
Kovalev is not like the “ученые коллежские асессоры” [“learned collegiate assessors”]
172
who

170. Gogol’, “Нос,” 66. “had my glasses with me.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 216.

171. Tucker, “Genre Fragmentation,” 93.

98

receive their training in St. Petersburg, but rather, because he received his rank by working in the
Caucasus, and thus becomes a “кавказский коллежский асессор” [“collegiate assessor of the
Caucasus”], Kovalev is one of “два совершенно особенные рода” [“two quite particular
types”].
173
Although he attempts to play down his real status by referring to himself as a маиор
[major]—the equivalent military rank to his civil one—Kovalev cannot quite escape the modifier
of “Caucasian” socially affixed to his title in thought if not always in word. Although the
Caucasus are only directly mentioned four times in the short story, three times in relation to
Kovalev and once in relation to an acquaintance of his who is also a “Caucasian” collegiate
assessor, Kovalev’s connection to the region affects his thinking throughout. It is, first and
foremost, the motivation for his obsession with rank.
174
He is only a “Caucasian” collegiate
assessor and the fact that his training occurs outside of an official academic setting puts him
below even those of similar rank, so he must find a way to officially shed this regional
attachment. In this sense, it is the very question of rank, the attempt to organize civil servants by
position type, that causes his anxiety over and destabilization of identity in the first place, even
while it should, theoretically, solidify that identity. The Table of Ranks is circulated bureaucratic
writing like the copying that is created within the bureau by copyists like Akakii, but its
circulation happens through and on the movement of bodies that visually signal their ranks and

172. Gogol’, “Нос,” 53. Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.

173. Gogol’, “Нос,” 53. Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.

174. It’s also worth noting that although there are few direct references to empire in “Nos” more generally,
when Gogol’ references St. Petersburg or Russia in the story, he does so with an acknowledgement of the larger
imperial body. For example, as he begins to wrap up the narrative, the narrator reaffirms that “вот какая история
случилась в северной столице нашего обширного государства!” Gogol’, “Нос,” 75. “So that is the story that
happened in the northern capital city of our vast nation!” Gogol, “The Nose,” 226. By describing Petersburg as a
specifically “northern” city and part of a “vast nation,” the narrator alludes to the far-flung provinces and colonized
parts of the empire as well to the south and the east in particular. The use of “northern” here reminds the reader that
this story takes place where it’s not “supposed” to—in the well-regulated, European parts of the country.
99

interact with other bureaucrats based on the expectations of their respective positions. Like the
copying of the bureau though, it is the circulation of the Table of Ranks rather than its
signification that lends it power and leads to unexpected animation because what the Table of
Ranks signifies is only meaningful up to a point.
As Akakii’s quest for a new overcoat and Kovalev’s frantic search for his nose suggest,
the visual serves as the ordering logic of the bureaucracy, particularly in the case of the Table of
Ranks, and thus offers the criteria for establishing a set social identity in the modern imperial
Russian capital. As Maksym Klymentiev points out, the European Enlightenment especially
began the process of prioritizing vision among the senses in earnest, a shift that became
particularly important in the development of panopticon-centred disciplinary practices and that
attempted to forcibly shape each individual citizen to fit within the new order as a visual subject
beholden to particular expectations of behaviour and even hygiene.
175
Klymentiev argues that
Gogol’ instead prioritizes smell as a primary sense rather than vision, undermining what
Klymentiev calls the “deoderization” of European and Russian culture and critiquing what
Gogol’ likely saw as unwanted Western influence on Russia. Still, in the animation of the
characters’ bodies, smell seems to be only one other kind of meaning-making in the Gogolian
world.
176
The kind of official, professional identity bestowed by bureaucratic systems through
the Table of Ranks depends on the inanimate remaining inanimate and on rigid boundaries of
relation. For a titular councillor to be a titular councillor, he must be clearly different than a
collegiate assessor and must follow the visual markers and behaviors expected of a titular
councillor. He cannot fulfill these requirements if he is wrapped in a tattered cape or if his actual

175. Maksym Klymentiev, “The Dark Side of ‘The Nose’: The Paradigms of Olfactory Perception in
Gogol’s ‘The Nose,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers 51, no. 2/3 (June-September 2009): 227, 228.

176. Klymentiev, 233, 227.
100

title is unclear. Similarly, for a citizen to be a citizen, he must not be a citizen of somewhere else
and he must fit within the parameters of citizenship. These classificatory borders were especially
important in light of Russia’s imperialist expansions into surrounding areas. By moving away
from the visual and toward other forms of interacting bodily with the world, though, Gogol’ also
undermines the supposition that official, bureaucratic forms of identification can properly
encapsulate an individual even on an official level and opens up other possibilities for
establishing and maintaining identity. Smell is one of these possibilities, but identity can also be
found anywhere outside of the official world in Gogol’’s stories because the body is the marker
of bureaucratic identity and in that same context the body is no different than detritus. If the body
is detritus and, furthermore, if the detritus around the body that is meant to be inanimate becomes
animate or even becomes a part of the body, further blurring the lines between body and matter,
then identity is no longer attached to the body but rather to a multiplicity of assembled parts.
Kovalev’s anxiety around rank appears immediately in his reaction to his nose’s
transformation when he attempts to classify the nose, to define it once more as a part of his body
and identity. When Kovalev insists to the nose after following it into a church, that it is, in fact,
“мой собственный нос” [“‘my very own nose,’”] the nose curtly responds that “я сам по себе”
[“‘I am my own separate self’”] and further insists that “между нами не может быть никаких
тесных отношений”
177
because Kovalev is of a lower rank, based on his uniform, and is a
Caucasian collegiate assessor rather than a scholarly one. In this way, the nose itself argues for
its independence and separation from Kovalev, its ability to take actions and make decisions
without Kovalev’s input. The separating of the nose at once raises the nose to the level of a
human body, and even above that level due to its position on the Table of Ranks as a “статского

177. Gogol’, “Нос,” 56. “‘there cannot be any intimate relations between us.’” Gogol, “The Nose,” 205.
101

советника” [“state councillor,”]
178
three ranks above Kovalev, and lowers Kovalev’s actual
human body to the level of waste like the smaller version of the nose that Ivan threw away. This
loss and the reduction of Kovalev’s body transform him into an improperly animated object that
now moves around erratically from bureaucratic office to bureaucratic office as he tries to get
assistance with recapturing his nose, separated from a key piece of his face and from his
aspirations to a higher rank that are now more properly fulfilled by his nose without his
participation. The nose can be understood or defined on some level through the Table of Ranks,
but Kovalev then becomes the pesky remainder that makes that classification incomplete.
Neither Kovalev’s definition of his nose as his own nose nor the nose’s definition of himself as
his own person is truly complete or encapsulating even if it seems to be. And these attempts to
classify the nose are further reflected in similar attempts by the citizens of St. Petersburg who try
to make the nose more easily understandable by defining it through familiar rational frameworks.
Two men, upon failing to find the nose at the expected place, determine that it is merely a rumor
meant to hoodwink the masses, and one of these men even laments that such a rumor could gain
traction in “нынешний просвещенный век” [“this enlightened age”] and that the government
had not yet intervened to stop it.
179
Meanwhile, an aristocratic woman sees the nose as an
educational opportunity for her children, describing it as a “редкий феномен” [“rare
phenomenon”] that could, with proper explanation, prove to be “наставительным и
назидательным для юношей,” and surgical students make their way to the nose’s last known
location presumably to gain some kind of medical insight.
180
None of the Russian onlookers is

178. Gogol’, “Нос,” 55. Gogol, “The Nose,” 204.

179. Gogol’, “Нос,” 72. Gogol, “The Nose,” 223.

180. Gogol’, “Нос,” 72. “instructive and edifying for youths.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 223.
102

able to actually catch sight of the nose or to really comprehend the situation at hand and so their
definitions or explanations remain inadequate. The onlookers attempt to understand the situation
and the nose itself as a piece of social deception or a scientific marvel as these frameworks best
adhere to a rational approach to the problem that seems to neatly explain the entire matter
without actually doing so. Kovalev, the other characters, the reader, and the narrator all remain
ignorant of what has actually transpired even at the end of the story.
Even Kovalev tries to understand his loss and how it affects his identity through the
visual and rational logic of his bureaucratically ordered society. As he makes clear, his concern
about his situation is not just about the fact that a body part is missing, but also about the
visibility of the body part that’s missing and the implications of how its absence will affect his
social life. At one point, he laments that the nose was not removed in a way that could play into
his favor, complaining: “пусть бы уже на войне отрубили или на дуэли, или я сам был
причиною; но ведь пропал ни за что, ни про что, пропал даром, ни за грош!”
181
It seems
that, as long as there were some kind of visible marker, one gained through an act of bravery,
Kovalev could incorporate this loss into his identity by using it to manipulate his social status.
However, the mystery around how the nose even disappeared and the fact that he “увидел, что у
него вместо носа совершенно гладкое место”
182
undermined any chance he might have had at
social deception. Furthermore, his noseless face is often described as being “гладкою, как блин”
[“smooth as a pancake”],
183
which suggests not just that the removal of his nose has left no
explainable visible trace, but also that it has reduced him to something else, something as

181. Gogol’, “Нос,” 64. “‘it would be one thing if it had been cut off in war or at a duel, or if I myself were
the cause, but it disappeared for no reason at all, it disappeared in vain, for nothing!’” Gogol, “The Nose,” 214.

182. Gogol’, “Нос,” 52-53. “he saw that instead of a nose he had a completely smooth space!” Gogol, “The
Nose,” 201.

183. Gogol’, “Нос,” 65. Gogol, “The Nose,” 215-216.
103

inconsequential as a normally inanimate food item. The nose’s abscondence does not just take
something away from Kovalev’s body, it changes what his body is made up of. The loss of the
nose, then, and the lack of visual legibility of that loss threatens his entire sense of being. But
while one might expect Kovalev’s anxiety over his body and identity to focus on his individual
sense of self, in his complaints he makes it very clear that his view of self is specifically official
and bureaucratic. As he says to himself: “Будь я без руки или без ноги—всё бы это лучше;
будь я без ушей—скверно, однакож всё сноснее; но без носа человек—чорт знает что:
птица не птица, гражданин не гражданин; просто, возьми да и вышвырни за окошко.”
184
In
this complaint, Kovalev worries over who and what he is, but this concern is specifically related
to his legal status rather than to an informal or personal sense of self. While a bird is not a bird
without its defining features, Kovalev’s choice of words doesn’t necessarily suggest that he is
not a person but rather, primarily, that he is not a citizen. In some sense, then, he is equating
personhood or humanity with citizenship and especially with his own sense of humanity. When
he loses his nose, Kovalev becomes an unacceptable body in the eyes of the state; he becomes
bodily detritus. The nose does not need Kovalev anymore, and indeed immediately becomes a
more valuable citizen than Kovalev according to the Table of Ranks. The bureaucracy that
Kovalev relies on to help him regain his sense of self almost completely fails him, turning him
away at every opportunity when he asks for help locating his nose. It is only because Kovalev’s
nose is a more outrageous imposter than he is that it is ultimately caught and returned. The nose
doesn’t quite pass the sight test when one really takes the time to look.

184. Gogol’, “Нос,” 64. “‘If I were missing an arm or a leg—all the same, it would be better; if I were
missing my ears—it would be terrible, but still bearable; but without a nose a person is the devil knows what: not a
bird, not a citizen, just take him and throw him out the window!’” Gogol, “The Nose,” 214.
104

Beyond the problems created by attempting to systematize in and of itself, though, part of
the reason for the destabilization of both Akakii’s and Kovalev’s identities, particularly in the
case of the Table of Ranks, is that in practice these kinds of systems become almost as arbitrary
as Gogol’’s distended stylistic details. While there was a certain meaning behind a certain rank,
generally that a person of that rank has a certain level of experience and certain kinds of
responsibilities, the rules of the bureaucracy itself reveal that arbitrariness was also built into the
system. As Igor Pilshchikov reveals by quoting from the “Statutes of Civil Service 1833,”
“according to the government’s decision, ‘to prevent a shortage of capable and worthy officials,’
the promotion to collegiate assessor in the Caucasus, ‘because of the remoteness of those places,’
was simplified in relation to the established order.” In particular, as he explains, “officials [in the
Caucasus] were promoted without taking a special exam and without obtaining a university
education.”
185
Here we can easily locate Kovalev’s anxiety around his rank in particular. Due to
the fact that he received his rank in the Caucasus, he is not only associated with the contested
borders of the empire rather than the supposedly well-regulated center, he also is, by his lack of
official training, less qualified than collegiate assessors who train and attend the Lyceums in St.
Petersburg. Furthermore, the depictions of rank in “Nos” demonstrate, at least in Gogol’’s
version of the bureaucracy, just how arbitrary the ranks are even beyond their attainment. At the
beginning of “Nos” the narrator highlights Kovalev’s self-importance by observing that he
“никогда не называл себя коллежским асессором,”
186
his actual rank, “но всегда маиором”
[“but always ‘Major’”].
187
To continue this pattern, the narrator offers that “мы будем вперед

185. Igor Pilshchikov, “Gogol’s ‘The Nose:’ Between Linguistic Indecency and Religious Blasphemy,”
Religions 12, no. 8 (July 24, 2021): 582.

186. Gogol’, “Нос,” 53. “never called himself ‘Collegiate Assessor.’” Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.

187. Gogol’, “Нос,” 53. Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.
105

этого коллежского ассессора называть маиором.”
188
In this choice, the narrator, who is in the
process of describing Kovalev for the reader, suggests that his rank is really immaterial. Kovalev
is ultimately a pretend Major, but he can easily live his life under this title with no real objection
made. The loss of his nose further allows him to realize how easy it is for him to lose the markers
of his rank. It seems to be Kovalev’s anxiety about how his rank will be perceived in St.
Petersburg, and about his opportunities for gaining in rank and respectability, that is manifesting
in the nose’s escape and reappearance. As the narrator explains, “Маиор Ковалев приехал в
Петербург по надобности, а именно искать приличного своему званию места: если
удастся, то вице-губернаторского, а не то — экзекуторского в каком-нибудь видном
департаменте,” and his nose is the one who ultimately fulfills this desire to gain rank-based
prestige as though the desire for rank were so strong that it took hold of Kovalev’s nose and
animated it right off of his face.
189
Kovalev’s deep anxiety around and desire for rank and status,
a better, more advantageous adhering to the ranking system, is what causes the disarticulation
and animation of his body—both in terms of the nose’s newfound agency, and in terms of
Kovalev’s desperate journey around the city to try to recapture the nose. In this sense, Kovalev’s
affective attachment to rank and prestige, created by the social and official importance of the
Table of Ranks, explodes viscerally out of his body, taking a piece of his body with it, and
begins circulating throughout the city as the personification, and nosification, of rank anxiety. If
not just Kovalev but also what is ultimately an inanimate body part, his nose, can pretend
relatively unnoticed to a different rank, the value and definition of those ranks come immediately

188. Gogol’, “Нос,” 53. “we will henceforth call this collegiate assessor—major.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.

189. Gogol’, “Нос,” 54. “Major Kovalyov had come to St. Petersburg out of necessity, namely to find a
position becoming to his rank: if he could manage it, a position as vice-governor, and if not, then as administrator in
some prominent department.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.
106

into question. Furthermore, because rank is one of the defining features of identity in the context
of the modern bureaucratic world, once rank comes into question, personal identity comes into
question with it.
It is in the failure of the ranking system, and of the other systematizing elements of the
bureaucracy like the repetition of circulating documents, that it produces animated excesses:
bodies, matter, and affect that don’t neatly adhere to official categories and instead move around
in unexpected ways. The body of the bureaucrat and typical citizen that looks like and behaves
the way it’s supposed to can operate within official limitations, but bodies that relate to the
bureaucracy in unexpected ways, whether by trying to go around the ranking system, eschewing
bureaucratic process, or, like Akakii, affectively identifying too closely with the act of mindless
copying, become animated by bureaucratic labor and systematization. Through this unruly
animation, an animation that creates material assemblages that bridge boundaries between
Akakii’s body, which becomes mere waste material, and actual inanimate objects and insects,
Akakii gains some kind of power or agency even as he is limited in his official power and agency
by his middling rank. Just as he seems to hold a supernatural ability for attracting detritus, he
also harnesses an almost supernatural ability to generate affect and to infect other bodies with it.
That is, Gogol’’s stories do not represent bodily viscera and viscerality in traditional ways. The
Gogolian “visceral” is bodily but it is expressed through the affective visceral. The affect
produced by bureaucratic bodies and matter in his stories is so strong that it becomes a
contagious, agential force that drives the events of each story and creates bodily mayhem. This
form of contagion appears in “Shinel’” first in a more localized, immediate form when the ever-
tormented Akakii pushes back against his workplace bullies. After he finally reaches the point
where he can’t endure any further abuse, he protests, “‘оставьте меня, зачем вы меня
107

обижаете?’” and for one of his colleagues, there was “что-то странное заключалось в словах
и в голосе” and “в нем слышалось что-то такое преклоняющее на жалость.”
190
Due to the
affective charge of Akakii’s exclamations, the man “вдруг остановился как будто
пронзенный, и с тех пор как будто всё переменилось перед ним и показалось в другом
виде,” and “какая-то неестественная сила” pushes him away from his colleagues who had
tormented Akakii alongside him.
191
Akakii’s words do not just stop one of his tormentors in his
tracks, they completely transform his view of the world around him and not just in this one
moment, but for the rest of his life. As the narrator explains, “долго потом, среди самых
веселых минут” the man would remember Akakii’s protestation, alongside the implied words
“‘я брат твой’” [“‘I am thy brother’”] and would fall into despair over the realities of human
nature.
192
While Akakii does not yet have the power to take everything he wants, he does bear a
kind of power due to his bureaucratic animation. He is the bureaucrat par excellence and is part
and parcel with the bureaucratic copying he produces. He can wield his own kind of animating
force, but this power is not specific to him.
This same kind of affective charge underscores the words of the Important Personage
later in the story, a civil servant newly minted to a higher position and determined to play the
part of petty despot. He scolds Akakii for attempting to bypass the usual channels of bureaucratic
appointment-making when Akakii demands immediate access to the Important Personage so he

190. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 143. “‘Leave me alone, why do you offend me?” and for one of his colleagues,
there was “something strange […] contained in the words and in the voice” and “in it one could hear something that
inspired such compassion.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 282.

191. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 144. “suddenly stopped as if he had been pierced, and from that time it was as if
everything had changed for him and appeared in a different form” and “a kind of unnatural force.” Gogol, “The
Overcoat,” 282.

192. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 144. “for a long time afterward, in the middle of the happiest moments.” Gogol,
“The Overcoat,” 282.
108

can request aid with locating his stolen overcoat. The force of the man’s scolding for going
around procedure results in a sudden illness that ends Akakii’s life. Unlike Akakii, who is
perfectly happy with his copying, the Important Personage is anxious about his bureaucratic rank
and the impression it gives off to his friends and colleagues. He takes advantage of bureaucratic
process by overapplying it, requiring all visitors to jump through unnecessary hoops before
seeing him, to boost the perceived importance of his own rank. In this sense, he too does not
quite fit with official expectations and his words, like Akakii’s, gain a certain kind of affective
power. These words, which are fatal to Akakii, are an attempt to reinstitute the order of
bureaucratic hierarchy that Akakii has violated by bypassing the Important Personage’s rules.
The Important Personage reminds Akakii of the proper way he should have requested an
appointment and complains about Akakii’s insolence, rhetorically asking “что за буйство такое
распространилось между молодыми людьми против начальников и высших” and “знаете
ли вы, кому это говорите? понимаете ли вы, кто стоит перед вами?”
193
Akakii has attempted
to undermine the regulating order of the bureaucratic hierarchy, to move outside of the set
borders and pathways of the bureau, and the Important Personage intends to keep him in line.
However, the ultimate consequence of the Important Personage’s scolding is Akakii’s ability to
gain a new kind of agency to defy bureaucratic guidelines through the animation of his dead
body.
That is, the agency that Akakii does gain in his animation—as a body that is too much
like detritus and too affectively invested to neatly adhere to official guidelines—cannot truly
function freely and gain precedence over official forms of power until he escapes from his

193. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 167. “‘What sort of riotous conduct has spread among young people against their
supervisors and superiors!” and “Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you understand who is standing in front of
you?” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 308.
109

official limitations. The unruly animation of his body and the items around it, launched by his
contact with the bureau and the writing circulating within, lends a kind of agency to inanimate
objects, including his body which fully becomes an unusually animated inanimate object after his
death. In his corpse
194
state, Akakii is not constrained by the same limitations and is able to
terrorize other civil servants in hopes of taking back what was stolen from him. As an animated
corpse, he even seems to gain a kind of supernatural agency over his surroundings, an extension
or full realization of his supernatural ability to attract detritus to his body when he was alive.
Unlike in life, however, in death Akakii is not a passive copyist but rather bent on revenge and a
reclamation of his stolen overcoat and the boost in consideration that it falsely promised him. In
death, as an unnaturally animated dead body, Akakii is now able to fully go around the red tape
that once seemed to place limits on his social and professional life and take his revenge directly
on the Important Personage who refused to help him and caused his death. Right before Akakii’s
reanimated corpse attacks the Important Personage, the icy Petersburg wind that once tormented
Akakii into the decision to buy a new overcoat takes on what seems like a targeted attack of the
Important Personage. As he rides in his carriage, he talks to himself,
изредка мешал ему однако же порывистый ветер, который, выхватившись вдруг,
бог знает откуда и нивесть от какой причины, так и резал в лицо, подбрасывая ему
туда клочки снега, хлобуча, как парус, шинельный воротник, или вдруг с
неестественною силою набрасывая ему его на голову и доставляя таким образом
вечные хлопоты из него выкарабкиваться.
195

194. As Jesse Zeldin observes, while many scholars treat Akakii’s dead body as a kind of ephemeral ghost,
Gogol’ specifically uses the word “мертвец,” which is more akin to a physical corpse than a spirit. This word choice
means that Akakii is still a form of matter in his death, a type of matter that is supposed to remain motionless in the
ground but that, in the case of Akakii, instead walks and talks its way around St. Petersburg. See Zeldin, Nikolai
Gogol’s Quest for Beauty: An Exploration into His Works (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 58.

195. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 172. “From time to time, however, he was bothered by the gusty wind, which
appeared from God knows where and for goodness knows what reason, and slashed at his face, throwing up lumps
of snow into it, blowing up the collar of his overcoat like a sail or suddenly throwing it onto his head with unnatural
force, and thus causing him endless efforts to extricate himself from it.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 314.
110

The suggestion that the wind comes from “бог знает откуда” [“from God knows where”] and
that it has a force that rises to the level of being “unnatural” lends it a mysterious power beyond
that of the normal winter winds that plague the city. Further, the wind’s apparent focus on the
Important Personage’s face and cloak, the two major markers of his identity as a civil servant of
a particular rank, implies some kind of intention behind the gales.
This intention is potentially given a source with the sudden appearance of Akakii’s
corpse immediately after the description of the wind. Like the wind, he grabs at the Important
Personage’s cloak before he ultimately succeeds at stealing the cloak away and presumably
donning it himself. Akakii, though, also takes on the qualities of the natural elements around
him. His face is “бледно, как снег” [“pale as the snow”]
196
reflecting the snow blowing around
in the air, and as he talks to the Important Personage his “рот…покривился и, пахнувши на
него страшно могилою”
197
as his breath hits the Important Personage’s face like a subdued
version of the wind that attacks his face earlier. It is only when Akakii becomes as much a part of
the seemingly inanimate world as possible—as a corpse he is very literally detritus himself—and
is able to harness the force of the inanimate world to his own ends rather than just attract waste
to his body that he gains full agency over his place in the world. Just as the Important
Personage’s scolding of Akakii causes him to lose consciousness, fall ill, and ultimately die,
Akakii’s theft of the Important Personage’s overcoat and the scolding he wields back against the
Important Personage when stealing the overcoat scares the Important Personage to the point that
he “чуть не умер” [“almost died”].
198
Here, by gaining some level of control over the inanimate

196. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 172. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 315.

197. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 172. “mouth twisted and, breathing on him the terrible breath of the grave.”
Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 315.

198. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 172. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 315.
111

world around him and his own, supposedly inanimate body, Akakii is able to flip his place in the
bureaucratic power hierarchy even if only in death. As Janet Tucker points out, by stealing the
Important Personage’s overcoat at the end of “Shinel’,” Akakii takes on the higher rank of the
Important Personage and even takes on a new appearance to better match the official
expectations of that rank—tall with a large mustache.
199
Here he finally achieves the boost in
respect that his own new overcoat was meant to give him while he was alive. It was the way his
body was animated in life, through an over-adherence to bureaucratic copying, that gave him this
affinity for inanimate matter, but he cannot gain his own agency over this animating force until
he becomes something that is supposed to be inanimate, until he properly becomes a part of the
material assemblage gathered around him. His attainment of the Important Personage’s cloak
finally stops his undead rampage because it brings him into the bureaucratic fold in a way he
hasn’t been before, transforming him into a typical and unremarkable bureaucrat befitting, in
appearance and behavior, his actual rank.
Just as official bureaucratic documents and systematization create the animation of
Gogol’’s Akakiis and Kovalevs and inanimate objects, they also stir up an alternative source of
circulating language that amplifies and distorts the official one. While bureaucratic copying and
the Table of Ranks cause Akakii and Kovalev to physically move around the city and even
affectively influence the people around them, this physical movement and affective force creates
greater animation among the general population of St. Petersburg. Despite the regulation and
rationalization promised by bureaucratic systems and documents, in these short stories,

199. Tucker, “Genre Fragmentation,” 93. Tucker points out that the corpse that the policeman sees at the
very end of the story, who doesn’t look like Akakii because he is too tall and moustached, could be Akakii
transformed by his acquiring of the cloak. That is, it’s the cloak itself that makes him into a certain rank of civil
servant and that gives him a stature worthy of the position (Gogol’, “Шинель,” 93). It’s also Akakii’s face, of
course, and uniform that make him recognizable to the Important Personage. He sees Akakii’s face but also his
stature and the fact that he’s wearing his “старом поношенном вицмундире” [“old, worn-out uniform”] (Gogol’,
“Шинель,” 172; Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 314).
112

bureaucratic matters launch rumors that spread information unofficially, inaccurately, and with a
strong affective valence across the city. In fact, the rumors in the stories, which supposedly make
up the basis for the stories themselves, come directly out of the unusual animations created by
bureaucratic writing and turn this animation into something contagious, amplifying it to citizens
who don’t work in the bureau themselves. In particular, the rumors come out of Akakii’s new
overcoat and Kovalev’s nose, although there are other rumors of unusual bureaucratic animations
as well;
200
through their circulation, they turn the overcoat and nose into affective fomites. In this
sense the inanimate objects brought to life by bureaucratic language and regulation, including
Akakii and Kovalev’s bodies which are transformed into improperly animated inanimate objects
themselves, gain an ability to generate affect and to infect other bodies with it.
After his death, Akakii’s affective power becomes much more widespread. He creates
terror throughout the city through the rumors of his attacks on civil servants and their cloaks, and
even the police become overtaken by this affective force. The path of affective infection between
Akakii’s corpse and the police is even directly physical. After a police officer apprehends him
and attempts to take a pinch of snuff, Akakii’s corpse “чихнул так сильно, что совершенно
забрызгал им всем троим глаза,” allowing him to escape as the officers wipe their eyes.
201

After this moment, “будочники получили такой страх к мертвецам, что даже опасались
хватать и живых, и только издали покрикивали: „эй ты, ступай своею дорогою!“ и
мертвец-чиновник стал показываться даже за Калинкиным мостом, наводя немалый страх

200. For example, part of the reason that the newspaper Kovalev appeals to refuses to publish a wanted ad
for his nose is that earlier they had published a similar ad that claimed to be looking for a runaway poodle but turned
out to be about a treasurer from an unknown department (Gogol’, “Нос,” 61). Whether this ad was in reference to
another mysterious transformation and animation along the same lines as Kovalev’s or merely a practical joke, the
newspaper assumes it must be libel and that Kovalev’s ad is likely the same.

201. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 170. “sneezed so powerfully that he splattered all three of them in the eyes.”
Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 312.
113

на всех робких людей.”
202
Akakii’s ability to arrest bodies in their tracks has evolved from
merely stopping one of his office bullies to causing various citizens and police officers alike to
fearfully freeze or keep a distance in his presence. His affect viscerally explodes out of him in
the form of a sneeze, as though by getting hit with his bodily fluids, the police officers also
absorb a kind of affective force that keeps them at a distance and forever afraid so that Akakii’s
body can move freely. The rumors of these acts of defrocking move bodies and affect around the
city, spreading a particular affective atmosphere and moving everyone in relation to the corpse’s
reported location and behaviors as they attempt to avoid his wrath.
In the animation of all these bodies and pieces of matter, Gogol’ represents the
bureaucratic world not as one of rigid boundaries and emotionless guidelines, but rather as a
moving affective and material assemblage of bodies and matter that can jump around the ranking
hierarchy, trying on and abusing official identities as their own internal identities or definitions
become murky and formless. Akakii and Kovalev are tied to and able to influence all of the
matter around them just as the matter around them influences them and even changes what they
are. Gogol’ reflects this assemblage not just through his characters and plots, however, but also
through his writing itself, which is similarly animated by bureaucratic writing. Like his
characters who seem to, knowingly or otherwise, push back on the limitations imposed on them
by bureaucratic systematization, Gogol’ seems to push back on the perceived limitations of
modern writing that has been influenced by bureaucratic writing. His too absurd and detailed
writing style is excessive in that it literally exceeds what bureaucratic writing seems to lay out as
the limitations for writing in the modern world. His stories are constructed from a gathering of

202. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 170. “policemen conceived such a terror of corpses that they were even afraid to
grab the living and would just shout from a distance: ‘Hey, you over there, move along!’—and the corpse-civil
servant starting appearing even beyond the Kalinkin Bridge, inducing serious terror in all timid people.” Gogol,
“The Overcoat,” 312.
114

verbal detritus rather than offering a seemingly polished and unified narrative. Certainly, this
effect is constructed; Gogol’ is likely not putting together bits and pieces of actual rumors he has
heard like his narrator is for example, but he presents the stories as though they were a kind of
dustbin that has caught bits and pieces of stories or choppy dialogue or unnecessary lists and
jumbled them together into a coherent string of events. Both stories are told as though they were
bits of gossip that the narrator has heard somewhere and repeated for the audience in narrative
form. The narrator of each opens the story by presenting it as though it were something that
actually happened in St. Petersburg that was passed on to him by a third party. Often this effect is
created most clearly when the narrator references his own imperfect retelling of a story by
leaving out identifying information like Akakii’s exact department,
203
referencing a possible
failure in his memory of the events,
204
or stating that certain aspects of the event have been lost
to the general public and, thus, cannot be passed on with the retelling. In this sense, Gogol’’s
stories about unruly matter and bodies are also made up of unruly language, an unruly language
that is similarly animated by the circulation of bureaucratic language. While the administration
turns away the unruly matter it has created, scolding Akakii to death and refusing to help
Kovalev recover his nose, Gogol’ mimics the overly detailed nature of bureaucratic language
while simultaneously adopting the kind of unruly language that would not make it into
bureaucratic documents like the documents establishing his new civil service position—the
details that don’t fit into official categories of what a narrative is or what the modern Russian
world looks like—to insist on the importance of the unruly animations that the oppressive top-
down organization of something like the Table of Ranks creates.

203. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 141.

204. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 142.
115

Unlike a “traditional” nineteenth-century story, Gogol’’s short stories are made up of
scraps—the pieces of stories that fall by the wayside and gather in public spaces as they are
passed around mouth to mouth, never quite coherent or believable. At the end of “Nos” the
narrator pointedly acknowledges the impression that such a story might give off. As he cycles
through the questions still plaguing his mind at the tale’s close, he indignantly states that the
strangest aspect of the whole event is “как авторы могут брать подобные сюжеты,”
205
which
certainly offer “пользы отечеству решительно никакой.”
206
“Shinel’” does not end with the
same level of judgment, but it does wrap up with loose ends, a kind of narrative open-endedness
that allows for the erosion of the story that came before. With the final detail of the last reported
sighting of what is supposedly Akakii’s living corpse, which a watchman describes as “гораздо
выше ростом” and a man who “носило преогромные усы,”
207
the reader is left with the image
of this supposed corpse disappearing into the night. Unlike some of the previous sightings of
Akakii as the living corpse, in particular the sighting by the Important Personage who is certain
of the corpse’s identity, this ending casts doubt on all of the fantastical elements of the story that
have come before. While, as discussed above, this ending seems to give Akakii his deserved
bureaucratic reward, bestowing upon him a new rank and appearance, at the same time, it
suggests not just that the corpse may not have been Akakii, but also that the presence of a corpse
at all could just be an exaggerated or made-up by-product of a very ordinary story about a civil
servant who suddenly dies. This ending chips away at the core of the story just as the metatextual
judgment at the end of “Nos” casts the story as a kind of amalgamation of meaningless and

205. Gogol’, “Нос,” 75. “that writers can choose such plots.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 227.

206. Gogol’, “Нос,” 75. “absolutely no benefit to the fatherland.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 227.

207. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 174. “much taller” and a man who “had an enormous mustache.” Gogol, “The
Overcoat,” 316.
116

valueless nonsense. However, by leaving ambiguous the veracity of each story, for example by
ending “Nos” with the assertion that “кто что ни говори, а подобные происшествия бывают
на свете; редко, но бывают”
208
and ending “Shinel’” with the hint that the other civil servant
wandering around in the dark could be a transformed Akakii, Gogol’ leaves open the possibility
for some kind of value or agency. He reclaims or refashions the detritus into something living, if
not “properly” ordered, in its own right. The stories may not be true in a precise sense, but they
certainly reveal a kind of truth about the status of the body and both individual and national
identity in modern Russia—that they are always already tied to the bureaucratic Table of Ranks
but that this system is inadequate and destabilizes identity rather than solidifying it. In this sense,
given the connection between rank and appearance or even just the arbitrary words of description
that a character or the narrator choose to adopt to identify themselves or another person, rank
becomes no better than rumor.
209
Like the pieces of stories that the narrators piece together to tell
their farfetched tales, rank is not necessarily trustworthy and relies more on appearance than
contextualized fact. Kovalev’s “true” rank, even, from the perspective of a St. Petersburg
educated bureaucrat, could be viewed as inaccurate or undeserved based off the rules around
gaining ranks in the Caucasus. Like the lists of other random things in the stories, the Table of
Ranks becomes a relatively unruly list—the detritus of the bureaucratic system created by
breaking up social status into something measurable and categorical and insisting falsely on its

208. Gogol’, “Нос,” 75. “No matter what you say, such events do happen in the world—they happen rarely,
but they do happen.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 227.

209. Warren Johnson, discussing the role of rumor in Gogol’ more generally, describes it as “becom[ing] a
force in itself” and claims that, for Gogol’, “whatever the apparent cause of rumor […] the real culprit is the sort of
distorted language we have seen, self-generating, self-perpetuating, and self-adhesive, which, once stuck in people’s
skulls, is devilishly difficult to extirpate.” Johnson, “Spontaneous Generation: The Rumor in Gogol’,” Russian
Language Journal 37, no. 126/127 (Winter/Spring 1983): 93. This description, it seems, could easily apply to the
bureaucratic language that Akakii copies or the Table of Ranks and how it circulates as a self-generating source of
social capital in the Russian empire.
117

accuracy and rationality. As Gogol’ suggests however, no matter how rational the Table of
Ranks appears, in reality it turns out that a given title can apply to anything, even a nose.
Herein lies the impetus for bureaucratic and, further, imperial expansion. This
assemblage that Gogol’ is representing and stylistically mirroring, an assemblage of unruly
matter, affect, and language, is the product of bureaucratic failure. The attempt to house
everything under set rational systems and the claim that this type of systematization is effective
and beneficial even where there is evidence to the contrary establishes a kind of shared national
anxiety that calls for a concretizing of official Russian identity and hard borders of official
meaning. While the animation of bureaucratic excesses gives new life to the bodies and matter
that don’t fit within the bureau, it also creates the justification for bureaucratic expansion.
Furthermore, even for the bodies, like Akakii’s and Kovalev’s, that do gain new life, their energy
is often put into finding a way to readhere to the bureaucracy rather than to undermine it or live
outside of it. Akakii uses his newfound agency to raise his ranking by stealing the Important
Personage’s overcoat while Kovalev falls back in line as soon as he retrieves his missing nose. In
their animation, both characters, or at least their attendant objects or body parts, viscerally spread
their internal affective modes across the city, driven by their bureaucratic desires, and this
infectious spreading creates a need for order. As the one man in “Nos” puts it, he is surprised that
“не обратит на это внимание правительство” and even though he “принадлежал к числу тех
господ, которые желали бы впутать правительство во всё,”
210
the fact that after this moment,
the narrator insists that nothing more is known about the situation before moving into a scene
that appears to show Ivan Iakovlevich’s and Kovalev’s lives back to normal, suggests that
something along these lines has, in fact, taken place. This is especially the case in that Ivan

210. Gogol’, “Нос,” 72. “the government did not turn its attention to it” and even though he “belonged to
the category of gentlemen who would like to get the government mixed up in everything.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 223.
118

returns into the story “как кошка, которую только-что высекли за кражу сала”
211
after being
apprehended by a police officer earlier, when he throws away Kovalev’s nose as though he has
been beaten into submission by the state after his own unruly animations. In this call for order
and organization of the myriad bodies and matter brought together by the infectious affect stirred
up by circulating bureaucratic writing, there is also a broader call for the order and organization
of the national body that has been disrupted by the importation of bureaucratic, read “Western,”
forms of governance alongside traditional forms of Russian autocracy and Orthodoxy. In
Gogol’’s satirical lamentation at the end of “Nos” that such a story cannot benefit the fatherland
in any way, he pokes at the official view that there is instead a need for order, a need to bring
everything clearly under state control in a way that will benefit the fatherland and its imperial
projects.
In the same way that the characters and animated objects in Gogol’’s stories are animated
by a kind of visceral affective spillage, a turning inside out of the affective body so that affect
shoots out in various directions, infecting other bodies along the way, the national body enacts a
similar kind of visceral spillage, one that is driven by the bureaucratic project of imposing order
through administration and defined rank. The bureaux of the government administration serve as
the hidden viscera of the national body. The documents that are its lifeblood circulate to keep it
going, to keep it “organ”-ized, but as the state expands outward through imperial domination,
those insides are opened up and expanded by adding in new organs or sending civil servants
outside of it to gather information and make imperial inroads into contested territories. By
establishing a sense of national anxiety around the solidity of Russia’s cultural and political
identity through, in particular, the Table of Ranks, the state bureaucracy then pushes that

211. Gogol’, “Нос,” 73. “as a cat who’s just been whipped for stealing fatback.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 224.
119

affective force out past its borders through imperial administration, destabilizing the geographic
and cultural guidelines that concretize what counts as “Russian” when one looks at a map or
establishes national and imperial citizenship. In this sense, the Russian state simultaneously
attempts to absorb places like the Caucasus while keeping them conceptually and culturally
separate as though, even in erasing the imaginary national borders that separate each political
entity, they can maintain a “pure” category of “Russian.” In opening up and expanding, the
bureaucratic reach of the state that allows for more local administration within its imperial
holdings or contested imperial spaces opens up bloody, not-quite-enclosed, national borders, as
though bursting through a kind of metaphorical skin of the national body, that, through war and
conquest, expose the literal viscera of literal human bodies.
While these territorial clashes physically take place on the borders, out of sight of most of
Gogol’’s Petersburg citizens, they make their way into the center by other means. As the crowds
in “Nos” desperately dash across the city, hoping for a glimpse of the rumored nose-become-
bureaucrat, one of the rumors that emerges about the nose stands out. While most of the gossip
around the runaway nose is limited to establishing the nose’s most recent location, the rumor that
the nose was strolling in Taurida Gardens rather than along Nevskii Prospekt goes a step further
by suggesting not just that “он давно уже там” [“he’d been there for a long time now,”]
212
but
also that “когда еще проживал там Хосрев-Мирза, то очень удивлялся этой странной игре
природы.”
213
This rumor does not just create added confusion by suggesting that Kovalev’s nose
somehow appeared in the streets before it went missing, but also by reminding the reader of a
contested imperial border: the border between the southern Caucasus and Iran. This reference

212. Gogol’, “Нос,” 72. Gogol, ‘The Nose,” 223.

213. Gogol’, “Нос,” 72. “when Khosrow Mirza had still been residing there, he had been quite amazed at
this strange sport of nature.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 223.
120

carries with it an especially poignant hint at the violence around Russia’s imperial projects.
Khosrow-Mirza, who is also mentioned in Gogol’’s “Портрет” [“The Portrait”], was an Iranian
prince sent on an “apology mission” to St. Petersburg in 1829 after a group of Iranians killed the
prominent diplomat and writer A. S. Griboedev and his entourage at the Russian embassy in
Tehran.
214
Although not offering a specific reason or tipping point as a motivation for the
uprising, Rudi Matthee suggests that the motivations for this attack are likely related to the
common Iranian worldview, starting with the Safavid period and continuing into the nineteenth
century, that saw Russians as “a primitive and barbarian people who posed a direct threat to
Iran’s territorial integrity.”
215
Although there were Iranians who, to some extent, saw Russian
rule as better than the Qajar regime for economic or security reasons, many saw the Russians
negatively in terms of their rumored disposition and religious habits due to the wars between
Russia and Iran in the early nineteenth century and Russia’s violent imperial designs on the
area.
216
While these Iranians did hold certain exaggerated beliefs
217
about Russians as a people
due to wartime rumors, their view of Russia as a violent threat was certainly based in the reality
of Russia’s attempts at physical and political domination. As Matthee sums up the official
Iranian position toward Russia:
The cruelty of the wars, the loss of land and the imposition of a crippling indemnity in
their aftermath, treaties that gave Russia the right to establish consulates in any Iranian

214. Firuza I. Melville, “Khosrow Mirza’s Mission to St Petersburg in 1829,” in Iranian-Russian
Encounters: Empires and Revolutions Since 1800, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2013), 69.

215. Rudi Matthee, “Between Sympathy and Enmity: Nineteenth-Century Iranian Views of the British and
the Russians,” in Looking at the Coloniser: Cross-Cultural Perceptions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Bengal,
and Related Areas, ed. Beate Eschment and Hans Harder (Wurzberg: Ergon Verlag, 2004), 320.

216. Matthee, 321, 320.

217. For example, as Matthee puts it: “during their 1827 campaign against Iran, […] the Russians were
feared and hated in the extreme because they had been portrayed as Christian fanatics who ransacked mosques, cut
the throats of mullahs, killed children and raped women. After the Russians had taken over part of the north,
however, people saw reason to revise their image of them” (320).
121

town and that even stipulated a role for the Russians in the determination of dynastic
succession, the arrogant behavior of Russian representatives who seemed to regard Iran
as little more than their protectorate—all combined to perpetuate the image of the
Russians as foes and oppressors.
218

Part of this view of Russia as colonizer came directly out of the observation of Russia’s
exploitative behavior in parts of the Caucasus.
219
The reference to Khosrow-Mirza, like the
reference to Kovalev’s professional background, reminds the reader of the ongoing struggles at
the border (“Nos” was published a mere six years after Khosrow-Mirza’s return to Iran after all),
and how easily those struggles could leak into and influence life in the center. Wrapped up in
Russia’s attempts at colonization, however, were associations particularly with the rational
promises of the bureaucracy. Abbas Mirza, Khosrow’s father, apparently held “great esteem for
Tsar Peter, who single-handedly turned a backward country into a mighty superpower, mainly
through his reforms of the government and army,” and in the early nineteenth century more
generally, there was a view among many Iranians that Russians were “brutal colonizers and yet
also a symbol of modern progress and civilization, worthy of sincere admiration and evoking a
desire to follow their miraculous example.”
220
In this sense the modern rational projects of
Russian bureaucracy are wrapped up inextricably with the violence of Russia’s imperial projects.
Here the affective dissonance between expectation and reality is one created by the supposed
promises of a “civilizing” mission and its violent means and implications.
Given that the reason for Khosrow-Mirza’s trip was not revealed to the public until he
reached St. Petersburg, the excitement and rumors around his visit mimicked in real life the

218. Matthee, 325.

219. Matthee, 326.

220. Melville, “Khosrow-Mirza’s Mission,” 71, 70.
122

excitement around Kovalev’s mysterious nose.
221
He “was greeted, to his own surprise, in all
provincial towns on his way to the capitals with great pomp as a royal person of special
importance,” and overblown rumors about his possible fate or his supposed activities in Russia,
such as the “curious gossip about [his] purchase of a Muscovite’s daughter for 40,000 roubles,”
circulated among the public, casting Khosrow-Mirza as a kind of exotic marvel much like the
nose that he himself sees as a strange freak creation of nature.
222
Furthermore, the particular
reference to Khosrow-Mirza in “Nos” grants him a privilege shared only by Kovalev himself and
by the police officer who recognizes the nose only after putting on his glasses: he actually sees
the nose in its form as a civil servant. Perhaps this is simply another absurd rumor about
Khosrow-Mirza, but it also suggests that the absurd realities of Russian bureaucracy can only be
properly apprehended when the imperial situation is taken into account. There is no way for sure
to know if this moment between Khosrow-Mirza and the nose is “true,” as true as anything can
be in “Nos,” but it raises the possibility that the escape of the nose is not an exceptional situation
but rather a manifestation of something already long established within the inner workings of the
capital, especially because it is specifically evoked alongside Khosrow-Mirza as the cultural
symbol of an ongoing conflict that likely only reached the center in bits and pieces
indistinguishable from the realities of daily life. That is, once Russia pushes on its surrounding
borders and begins to administrate its holdings, it incorporates these border areas and populations
more fully than it would like to admit. This is not just a subjugation, but also a taking in so that
once the imperial project has been started, the nations involved cannot be fully separated again;
separating at the border becomes no longer enough because the populations involved are

221. Melville, 80-81.

222. Melville, 80.
123

materially and affectively implicated within each other. The state administration marks this more
assembled layout as civil servants and their offices branch into the Caucasus or other colonized
spaces, shooting unextractable tendrils into what might seem, on a pre-imperial map, like distinct
national spaces.
Gogol’ represents this new indistinction between national and imperial space particularly
in “Shinel’.”
223
The pivotal moment of the story, when Akakii’s new overcoat is stolen from him,
occurs in a space that is simultaneously within St. Petersburg and, seemingly, at the edges of the
empire, as though these spaces are now inherently overlapping and inseparable. As Akakii walks
home from his colleague’s party and the fine houses and lanterns of the city center become rarer
and rarer, he finds himself on the edge of a “terrifying desert” and the only light he can see
comes from a watchman’s booth that “казалась стоявшею на краю света.”
224
As he enters the
square, he perceives it as a “море вокруг него” [“sea” that “surrounded him”], and after closing
his eyes in fear he is confronted suddenly by the two robbers, “какие именно, уж этого он не
мог даже различить,”
225
who seem to appear from nowhere in the middle of this wilderness.
The shift in landscape to one that, at least metaphorically, approximates the edges of the Russian
empire by evoking images of the ocean and the edge of the world, and the sudden encounter of
two men whose appearance seems unrecognizable even in terms of social type to Akakii,
suggests that Akakii has wandered not just into the edge of the city center, but also into a liminal

223. As Priscilla Meyer points out, there is also a xenophobic German motif in “Shinel’” and in “Nos”
associating Germans with the Antichrist, but the more important moment of the outside coming in in “Shinel’” is in
the moment of the overcoat’s theft. See Meyer, “False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: ‘A May Night’ and ‘The
Overcoat,’” in Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1992), 69.

224. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 161. “seemed to be standing on the edge of the world.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,”
302.

225. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 161. “what kind of people they were, he could not make out.” Gogol, “The
Overcoat,” 302.
124

space that transports him to the edge of the Russian empire. It is in this liminal space that Akakii
is stripped of the overcoat that grants him, as much as possible, an insider social status in his
department.
In this outside space that has been almost fantastically transported into the country’s
center, events become not as they seem. It isn’t that the watchman in the booth does not see the
theft of Akakii’s overcoat, but rather “как остановили его среди плошади какие-то два
человека, да думал, что то были его приятели.”
226
To the watchman, the theft becomes instead
a moment of friendship and Akakii’s account suddenly cannot be confirmed. It is characters
bearing the most obvious marks of subjects or imperial outsiders who make the cloak and seal
Akakii’s fate. Akakii’s tailor Petrovich is both a freed serf and compared to a Turkish pasha,
227

while the Important Personage was a “незначительным лицом” [“insignificant personage”] and
has only very recently received a new position in the bureaucracy.
228
It is these two outsiders
who have found their way in who set off the fantastical elements of the story. While the narrator
of “Shinel’” does not appeal to the larger empire directly at the end of the story as does the
narrator in “Nos,” there is a relegation of Akakii, who is now the ultimate outsider in his corpse
form, to a space simultaneously outside and inside the city center. Instead of stalking the same
St. Petersburg streets down which many important personages might ride in their fine cloaks, he
is rumored to appear only “в дальних частях города” [“in distant parts of the city”]
229
as though
he is out of sight but not quite out of mind—a looming threat that is now part of the geographic

226. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 162. “two people stop him in the middle of the square, but he thought they were
his friends.” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 303.

227. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 148, 149.

228. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 164. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 305.

229. Gogol’, “Шинель,” 173. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 316.
125

core but that carries the markers of being an outside threat. In this sense, like Russia’s contested
borders, Akakii’s corpse remains an ever-present affective and material piece of the city that
cannot be separated from this space. He becomes an integral piece of the ranked assemblage of
bureaucrats going about their daily lives, but because he is now a corpse and operating under a
stolen rank and identity, he also puts a constant pressure on that ranking system, serving as a
constant reminder of its illusory form of organization. In “Nos” and “Shinel’” the main
characters never physically appear in Russia’s actual imperial holdings, but, as is the case for the
rest of the Russians living in the empire, these imperial holdings are integral to their own lived
experience, especially in relation to the state bureaucracy.
More than most other Russian writers, Gogol’, who was a Ukrainian author attempting to
build a career writing in Russian for a Russian audience, exemplifies the blending of imperial
influences and both public and government attempts to impose an official sense of ethnic and
imperial identity. This detail is not meant to draw a direct causational line between biography
and the representation of empire in Gogol’’s fiction, but rather to suggest that Gogol’ as a
Ukrainian writer, like Caucasian-Russian citizens as well, may have been more aware of the
actualities of imperial expansion, consciously or otherwise, than his Russian contemporaries who
were not saddled with the burden of justifying their identity. Approaching the question of
Gogol’’s identity, and his public negotiation of this identity, from a postcolonial perspective,
Yuliya Ilchuk particularly focuses on reading Gogol’’s early work Вечера на хуторе близ
Диканьки [Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka], and its main character Rudy Panko, as evidence
of Gogol’s use of mimicry as a method of both creating an opening into Imperial Russian culture
and simultaneously critiquing it.
230
In order to make this argument, Ilchuk begins by calling

230. Yuliya Ilchuk, “Nikolai Gogol’’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective,”
Canadian Slavonic Papers 51, no. 2-3 (June 1, 2009).
126

attention to the ways in which Ukrainians in general, and more specifically Gogol’ himself, were
“racialized…as the colonial Other,” through stereotypes of exoticism and slyness which, in the
case of Gogol’, were often deployed by his own patron, Pavel Svin’in.
231
By promoting
stereotypes of inferiority and “establish[ing] a hierarchy between themselves as a civilized nation
and Ukrainians” as uncivilized, “the Russian elite” were able to “overcome their own sense of
inferiority” in comparison to Europe.
232
As such, Gogol’ found himself, according to Ilchuk, in a
position of otherness despite his ability to gain some level of acceptance by his Russian peers. It
is, in fact, this position, as a kind of “Ukrainian jester,” that Ilchuk argues allowed Gogol’ to
break certain societal expectations and engage in mockery for which “other members of society
would have been censured.”
233
The same kind of othering that played out in nationalist Russian
circles against Ukraine also came to bear in the case of the Caucasus and Russia’s other imperial
targets. While Gogol’ was able to become part of the national literary narrative and could bring
in messages around the edges of his stories that otherwise wouldn’t make it past a debilitating
level of social castigation, public intellectuals also effectively tried to bring his identity as a
writer underneath a kind of enclosed definition of Russianness that erased the Ukrainian element
of his writing and authorship even though it was core to his oeuvre.
234
However, the effect of this

231. Ilchuk, 206.

232. Ilchuk, 207.

233. Ilchuk, 221.

234. As mentioned in the Introduction, Vissarion Belinskii positions Gogol’ as the most promising figure in
Russian literature in an 1824 letter, seemingly attempting to house Gogol’’s Ukrainianness underneath Russian
literary nationalism with the effect of erasing the place of Ukraine in his estimation of Gogol’ as a writer by calling
on him as the lynchpin of the “настоящее и будущее в художественной жизни моего отечества” [“present and
future in the artistic life of my fatherland”] as though anything Gogol’ creates is for and in service to the Russian
empire. V. G. Belinskii, “Из письма Гоголю Н. В., 20 апреля 1842 г. С.-Петербург,” in Н. В. Гоголь в
воспоминаниях современников, ed. S. I. Mashinskii (Москва: Гос. издат. худож. лит., 1952), 357. Note the use of
the word “fatherland,” which commonly appears (either as отечество or отчизна) in imperial poems from the
eighteenth and nineteenth century like Derzhavin’s “На взятие Измаила” [“On the Taking of Izmail”] (1790/1791)
127

attempt to classify Gogol’ as an author was to portray him as simultaneously a great of Russian
literature and not Russian enough. The negative reactions to Gogol’’s critiques of Russian
bureaucracy and empire in The Government Inspector, for example,
235
indicated that while
Gogol’ was an integral part of the Russian literary scene, he was also in excess of his imperial
position in relation to the Russian state. That is, he serves as an exemplary personification of the
assembled nature of Russian empire: he is both inside and outside, characterized not just as a
Russian writer but even, at times, as the Russian writer, while still bearing the traces of his
Ukrainian past. He cannot be taken fully out of either Russia or Ukraine but rather serves as a
physical nexus point wherein the competing affective modes of empire meet. From this position,
he critiques Russian empire in his writing, but he is also moved to particularly critique Russian
bureaucracy as these concerns are generally overlapping in his work.
The references to imperial borders within the center of the empire in Gogol’’s stories
speak to the ways in which the Russian bureaucracy, through rank and rational documentation,
destabilizes Russian national identity through its attempt to regulate it but also to the ways in
which imperial conquering only brings in further destabilization of national and individual
identity. Who or what does Gogol’ become if Ukraine is a part of the Russian empire politically
and geographically but culturally rejected? The insecurity around Russia’s dual national identity
as both a Western and Eastern nation and the need to tamp down on the excesses created by
failed bureaucratic classification and organization drives an attempt to stabilize this national
identity through further bureaucracy and imperialism, specifically through rational “civilizing

or Pushkin’s “Кавказ” [“The Caucasus”] (1830) as a descriptor for a version of Russia that does or can include new
spaces like the Caucasus.

235. See Bojanowska beginning on pg. 197 for a full accounting of the audience reaction to the play and
Gogol’’s attempts to re-establish his perceived Russian patriotism. Edyta M. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol: Between
Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
128

projects.” However, the stability promised by these kinds of approaches is a false stability
ingrained through national narratives of Russian greatness and backed by literary images of
Orientalized southern and eastern backwaters that merely await Russia’s “civilizing” touch. As
in the case of Ukraine, “Russians conversant with Western orientalia and the European imperial
manner in Asia readily latched onto the Caucasus as their ‘own’ orient,” associating the area and
the ethnic groups it contained with exoticism and cultural inferiority.
236
As one might expect,
these stereotypical representations bled into much of the major literary production during
Gogol’s life: specifically we can easily point to works like Lermontov’s Герой нашего времени
[A Hero of Our Times] or Pushkin’s “Кавказский пленник” [“The Prisoner of the Caucasus”] as
demonstrative of the ambivalent and rarely clear-cut influence of imperial stereotypes about the
Caucasus.
237
In the modern Russian world, identity is officialized and tied to documentation and
appearance through conventions like the Table of Ranks. As many Russians saw it, bureaucracy
as a concept was more of a Western importation than anything natively Russian and so the use of
bureaucracy as an organizational approach and imperial tool would supposedly transform Russia
into a fully Western nation. However, as Gogol’’s short stories and his own biography suggest,
basing Russian identity in official categories and appearance leaves remains—excesses that do
not quite fit into any category. Instead, then, of encapsulating what doesn’t fit into official
categories, the Russian state rather animates it in unusual, unruly ways and so justifies the need
for more order, more expansion, more official definitions.

236. Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 1.

237. For further analysis of these texts and their representation of the Caucasus, see Layton’s Russian
Literature and Empire.
129

Khosrow-Mirza’s sudden appearance in the capital in “Нос,” and his privileged
connection to the nose, suggest not just the importance of considering Russian imperialism in
Gogol’’s depiction of the state bureaucracy, but also the importance of a model for
understanding Russia’s imperialist identity that does not draw such a rigid line between inside
and outside. As Edyta Bojanowska puts it, “Gogol’ establishes an indelible link between
Russia’s national and imperial identity; an invention of the national self becomes possible only
through gazing at distant mirrors in imperial peripheries.”
238
The outsides that leak into the
Russian center are not superfluous but rather constitutive of that center. In drawing on Robert
Maguire’s concept of unbounded space, she defines Petersburg as a space whose “borders are
porous and allow an intrusion of inimical foreign objects,” creating a kind of multinational
milieu that Gogol’ found, in her estimation, to be “unsettling and even demonic.”
239
However,
what the inclusion of this outside, through brief mentions and thematic undercurrents, in “Nos”
and “Shinel’” suggests is that the Russian empire, and the bureaucracy that drives it, function
less as an inside/outside model and more as an assemblage. This assemblage, of civil servants
and documents, regular citizens and the military, noses and flies, wields what Bennett calls
distributive agency: “an agency of assemblage” that does not come from one central point but
rather from groupings of matter exerting a collective force.
240
In this sense, “an actant [a source
of action] never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration,
cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces.”
241
Certainly, in actuality, in

238. Edyta Bojanowska, “Equivocal Praise and National-Imperial Conundrums: Gogol’’s ‘A Few Words
About Pushkin,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers 51, no. 2-3 (2009): 190.

239. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism, 176.

240. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 24.

241. Bennett, 21.
130

1830s and 1840s Russia, the country was autocratic, but Gogol’ does not focus on the tsar as the
sole source of authority or power in his version of Russia. Rather, he distributes agency among
various bureaucrats and even objects or natural forces even if his focus is much more
anthropocentric than Bennett’s.
By drawing on distributive agency to talk about how bureaucratic animation helps to
drive imperialism, like Bennett, I am not implying that every individual in an autocratic nation is
responsible for the nation’s violent actions. In any assemblage there are bodies and things
moving against the current as well, as in, for example, Akakii’s attempt to go around
bureaucratic procedure to retrieve his stolen overcoat. Rather, I mean to say that the material of
the nation, in this case bureaucratic paperwork and ranking systems, is also part of creating the
agency for the actions of the national body. This national body, as an assemblage of various
bodies and things organized by a particular bureaucratic framework, creates a specific kind of
affective atmosphere that is part of the distributive agency that leads to the obsessive and
anxiety-driven need for imperial expansion. Gogol’ reveals the ways in which even the minutiae
of everyday bureaucratic life in modernity contributes to these grand acts of violence that result
in the invasion of foreign nations and the social classifications that establish him as both a
Russian writer and as a “sly” Ukrainian who cannot be trusted to represent the Russian empire
favorably (as in the harsh critiques of both The Government Inspector and Dead Souls). As
Harsha Ram points out, Russia’s form of imperialism is unique in the sense that “unlike the
paradigmatic cases of Britain or France, Russia conquered contiguous rather than overseas
territories: its empire was thus a geographical extension of the nation.”
242
That is, “the quest for
empire was undertaken on the edges of the nation itself, whose geographical limits consequently

242. Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2003), 23.
131

appeared as a moving threshold, an infinitely receding horizon.”
243
As this contiguous view of
the Russian empire suggests, however, the idea of the border or the horizon does not quite
capture the makeup of Russian imperialist expansion, particularly in terms of the civil service
which spread its administrators into Russia’s imperial holdings in the hopes of solidifying
political order.
244
Even in the cultural center, St. Petersburg, Russia’s imperial connections
haunt, ever-present, and appear in unexpected places. These traces of contested borders come
from various directions as well—Iran, the Caucasus, Ukraine—and involve various levels and
kinds of integration.
For Kovalev, for example, the Caucasus become a part of his identity that he hopes to
somehow slough off once he returns to the center, but that he finds comes to define, even if
subtly, his actions and his view of his own selfhood. It is the Caucasus, after all, that inform and
create anxiety around his place, particularly his bureaucratic place, in the center. After reading a
letter he receives back from his acquaintance Aleksandra Podtochina after he accuses her of
stealing his nose in order to manipulate him into marrying her daughter, Kovalev bemusedly
concludes that “‘письмо так написано, как не может написать человек, виноватый в
преступлении’”
245
which he feels qualified to surmise because he had been “посылан

243. Ram, 23.

244. For an example of this conceptual approach to Russian colonization, and where it failed, see L.
Hamilton Rhinelander, “Russia’s Imperial Policy: The Administration of the Caucasus in the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 17, no. 2/3 (summer and fall 1975). Rhinelander identifies the
Caucasus as a test case for the Russian imperialist model wherein the “Russian bureaucracy” was “forced” “to
compromise to some degree with the accepted principle of imperial uniformity by taking a different approach to the
civilian problems in each region” (220). The disconnect between the Russian imperial project proposed by the
central bureaucracy and the reality of administering on the ground reveals the ways in which Russian colonization of
its imperial holdings were often much more destabilizing in terms of national identity and bureaucratization than
ordering.

245. Gogol’, “Нос,” 71. “‘The letter is written in a way that could not be written by a person who was
guilty of a crime.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 222.
132

несколько раз на следствие еще в Кавказской области.”
246
Given the long history of imperial
stereotypes against the Caucasus, and more personally for Gogol, against Ukraine, the fact the
Kovalev is introduced as a collegiate assessor of the Caucasus, due to his professional activity
there, serves as a significant but subtle undercurrent to “Nos.”
247
It becomes a reminder that
despite attempts to paper over the differences that keep Kovalev at a distance from his
professional desires, he must always first contend with the Caucasus and what his connection to
them means for his life in the center before he can settle, as his nose finally does at the end of the
story, into his “proper” place. The reference to his role in policing in the Caucasus also hints
subtly at the violent and visceral realities of imperial administration and how they become
attached to various bodies and matter. Kovalev was not just neutrally setting up rational forms of
administration, he was working to root out people presumed by the Russian state to be criminals.
The suggestion that he can determine the innocence of Aleksandra just from her writing suggests
that, like the rankings used to assess what type of civil servant an individual is, Kovalev carries
his own categories for determining criminality from subjective qualities, categories that are
likely based on stereotypical views of Russia’s imperial subjects given his own concerns over his
ties to the Caucasus. He “ни на минуту не мог […] позабыть”
248
his status and its implications.
Just as the bodies and matter within the imperial center that do not quite fit with official
bureaucratic classifications become excesses to the systems, and thus animated in unexpected

246. Gogol’, “Нос,” 71. “sent on investigations several times when he was still in the Caucasus region.”
Gogol, “The Nose,” 222.

247. The suggestion seems to be that, while Kovalev is not ethnically Caucasian, he has still temporarily
become Caucasian by association. As such, Kovalev is not properly the Other, but his body can carry the threat of
the Other under certain circumstances. He becomes a point of contact from which the negative qualities that Russian
writers and thinkers attach to the Caucasus and Russia’s other imperial targets threaten to infect the center of the
empire.

248. Gogol’, “Нос,” 53. “could not forget about it for a single moment.” Gogol, “The Nose,” 202.
133

ways, so too do the imperial excesses of the Russian national body. Ukraine and the Caucasus
may be officially considered part of the Russian empire, but they are not fully reduceable to
“Russian”—there is always an uncertainty around where they fit in terms of identity and that fit
is often based on affective responses to Russian imperialism and nationalism.
In this sense, both Russian state bureaucracy and the empire it makes possible create an
illusion of order and neat hierarchization when they actually constitute assemblages of human
and nonhuman bodies and matter that gather and separate according to the circulation of
bureaucratic material and infectious affective agencies. These assemblages actually create the
excesses, the bodies and matter that don’t fit within the proclaimed bureaucratic and imperial
projects of totalizing systematization and classification, that ultimately undermine official forms
of identity. This point is not to suggest that the animation and agency of excess matter is a silver
lining of oppressive rule, it is just a demonstration of how the failure of bureaucratic
systematization manifests materially and how both bureaucracy and the empire it produces
persist through and by failure. If there are excess bodies, matter, and affects to keep in line, there
is also an ongoing justification for further oppression and organization. The failure of
bureaucracy creates, in this sense, its own raison d’être through the affective dissonance
produced by bureaucratic writing and labor, which animate and assemble bodies and matter in
unexpected, and unofficial, ways. Approaching Russian state bureaucracy and empire as an
assemblage captures both the ways in which various elements of the Russian empire coexist in
the same spaces or under the same systems while also highlighting the ways in which the body of
the citizen collapses into the nonhuman matter of modern, bureaucratic life in Gogol’’s oeuvre.
This collapse, and the animation of bodies in assemblages, indicates moreover that the
bureaucracy is not solely a subtractive force: it produces matter and imperial violence, but it also
134

produces affect and visceral feeling despite the long running stereotypes of bureaucratic
emptiness and meaninglessness. In the next two chapters, the violence and affects produced by
state bureaucracy will expand alongside the relative growth of bureaucratic structures into grand
national mythologies on the one hand and the affective crisis of the century on the other.

135

Chapter 3: “Thousands of Dirty and Greedy Mouths:” Bureaucratic Mythologies in Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s Gospoda Golovlevy
Unlike the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, where I worked with the Lambert collection of
Joris-Karl Huysmans documents (see chapter four), the manuscript division of Pushkinskii dom
does not allow photography. Practically speaking, what this means is that instead of flipping
through documents and snapping pictures of any that seem useful in order to return to them later
for further study, like many of my predecessors I am compelled to write or type out any text I
wish to save word by word. Sitting in the reading room, squinting at Mikhail Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s often sloppy Russian cursive, and typing out every legible word of his bureaucratic
papers became an agonizingly slow, exhausting, and effectively unachievable task. While
Huysmans’ low status in the French civil service created a kind of lacuna in his body of written
work, the sheer volume of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s bureaucratic writing, which has been carefully
archived in various locations throughout Russia, presents a different problem. The amount of
writing Saltykov-Shchedrin produced for his “day job” creates an almost indecipherable archival
mass both in its volume and in its dispersion. By copying out his words into further iterated
versions, I cannot help but participate in this bureaucratic expansion by reenacting, in a way,
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own activities. In this mimetic action, I “run after the archive, even if
there’s too much of it” just as does Saltykov-Shchedrin and the nineteenth-century Russian
bureaucracy, only to find that “the point where it [the archive] slips away,” “right where
something in it anarchives itself,” is precisely at the point of its too muchness.
249
Beyond the
physical lacunae of missing or illegible documents created in the archive by the immensity of the
project and the lack of resources allotted to local functionaries, it is the systematic creation of

249. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2
(Summer 1995): 57.
136

unending bureaucratic documents that at once makes up and undoes the bureaucratic archive and
its projects.
In the civil service capacity in which Saltykov-Shchedrin helped create this kind of
bureaucratic documentation, between 1844 and 1868, he often performed inspections [revizii] in
provincial towns. These revizii would include reviews of the civil resources available to the
population and their upkeep, such as the state of the fire station and local courts, as well as
reviews and assessments of the bookkeeping of the local government and its services. What these
assessments mean is that Saltykov-Shchedrin is creating bureaucratic records that review and
reiterate already existing bureaucratic documents. That is, in the way the Russian bureaucracy
functions in the nineteenth century, it inherently self-reproduces to create an ever-growing and
more impenetrable archive of documents and meta-documents, a pattern that only continues with
the scholarly work of reviewing and assessing Saltykov-Shchedrin’s bureaucratic documents and
so creating a new branch of his and Russia’s bureaucratic archive built of notes and drafts. This
form of self-reproduction begins in Russia as early as Peter I’s rule (1682-1725) but becomes
increasingly common under Nicholas I (1825-1855), who regularly sent “imperial adjutants…to
areas suffering from famine, cholera, civil unrest, or, in many cases, simple governmental
paralysis, to collect information and report back with recommendations about what course of
action best suited local conditions.”
250
This process became further expanded as “imperial
ministers sent out agents of special commissions on more complex fact-finding assignments” for
extended periods of time.
251
While theoretically, the idea of running a bureaucracy based on facts
and the rule of law [zakonnost’] certainly sounds good on paper, as W. Bruce Lincoln suggests,

250. W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in
Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), 20-21.

251. Lincoln, 21.
137

in the case of nineteenth-century Russia, these fact-finding missions alone could not quell the
other shortcomings of the administrative system already in place.
252
At midcentury, in fact, there
really was no effective way to gain usable information from local and provincial archives
because the amount of necessary documentation meant that “no one could unravel the tangle of
papers, misfiled documents, and improperly prepared reports that clogged local government
files.”
253
Such patterns of reproduction continue into the Great Reforms era, the period between
1861 and 1874 when the Russian government launched a series of reforms ending serfdom,
restructuring Russian society, and more generally “modernizing” the country, for example, in the
realms of education and criminal justice. Despite the promise of these reforms, the bureaucracy
spearheading them instead ultimately creates an endless system of chatter that cannot fully be
consumed and organized into an easily understandable whole.
All of this chatter, which was screened behind a perhaps utopic promise of a “civilized”
Russian future based in zakonnost’, distracts from the undergirding mythologies that make the
Great Reforms and post-Great Reforms bureaucracy possible. Because documentary chatter is
concrete in that it presents recorded and specific information, it creates the illusion of a
rationalist approach even where one does not exist. In his novel Господа Головлевы [Gospoda
Golovlevy/The Golovlevs] (1880) Saltykov-Shchedrin casts the two major authority figures of the
narrative, the matriarch Arina and her son Porfirii, as familiar figures from folklore, Baba Yaga
and a vampire respectively. Folklore was having a resurgence during the nineteenth century, so
interest in these types of figures would have been renewed. By casting the two main characters
of the novel as folkloric monsters, Saltykov-Shchedrin highlights the mythical elements of

252. Lincoln, 21.

253. Lincoln, 93.
138

bureaucratic thinking, and the irrational chatter of the bureaucratic archive, while demonstrating
the ways in which the Great Reforms and post-Great Reforms era bureaucracy sustains similar
power structures and mythological thinking as in the pre-Great Reforms era, just in different
forms. Furthermore, the combination of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s bureaucratic activities and his
literary critique of bureaucratic practices, both of which are tied up in the incomprehensible
chatter of bureaucratic paperwork, calls attention to a bureaupathological expression of “archive
fever” within the Russian bureaucracy that weaponizes social myths like “rationality” and
“progress” while miring the country in nostalgic attachments to the past. The ephemerality of the
“rationality” myth, which comes packaged in a kind of imperialist affective baggage, belies the
physical and ideological effects its bureaucratic chatter induces in the social collective.
It is these effects that Saltykov-Shchedrin associates with the inveterate bureaucrat, and
vampiric predator, Porfirii in Gospoda Golovlevy. However, the image of bureaucrats as
parasites or predators, and even as vampires, is not unique to Saltykov-Shchedrin or to Russia.
Earlier in the nineteenth-century, Aleksandr Herzen drew a connection between blood drinking
and bureaucracy, describing Russian bureaucrats as “‘a kind of lay clergy…sucking the blood of
the nation with thousands of dirty and greedy mouths.’”
254
Philip Nord explains that, in the late
nineteenth century, “the functionary, in shopkeeper mythology, was a grotesque creature, an
indolent parasite without enterprise or virility.”
255
Similarly, during the debates over
fonctionnarisme in the late nineteenth century in France, the term budgétivore was often utilized
in reference to bureaucrats. Although not quite as visceral as Herzen’s imagery, this idea of

254. Qtd. in Michael Hughes, “Samovars and Quills: The Representation of Bureaucracy in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” Archival Science 14, no. 1 (March 2014): 62.

255. Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
c. 1986), 271.
139

devouring the budget has a similar predatory connotation. Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who is
not a bureaucrat himself, draws in and entraps his new solicitor, Jonathan Harker, with
paperwork and extensive chatter over the dinner table. Inherent in these images of predatory,
even vampiric, bureaucrats is a concern around how the bureaucrat affects the collective. And
regardless of the larger structures employing the bureaucrat, these concerns and any blame tend
to lie with the individual figure of the bureaucrat himself who serves as the medium of the state
or institution. This image of the predatory bureaucrat has persisted as a cultural trope across
national borders and time periods. Perhaps the most recent American iteration of the Porfirian
bureau-vampire would be Colin Robinson from the television series “What We Do in the
Shadows.” As Colin explains it, he is a psychic or energy vampire who “drain[s] people’s energy
merely by talking to them.” In order to do so, “we either bore you with a long conversation or we
enrage you” with annoying habits.
256
Not only does Colin work in a low-level office position
surrounded by paperwork, he establishes the typicality and banality of his character by asserting
that energy vampires are “the most common kind of vampire” and that the viewer “probably
know[s] an energy vampire” in their own life.
257
The universality and recognizability of the
Colin Robinson and Porfirii characters and the strong association between parasitism and
bureaucrats poses questions not just about the power of the individual bureaucrat but also about
the power behind that power and how the bureaucrat serves as a medium whereby the state
maintains a particular hierarchical power structure over the collective.

256. What We Do in the Shadows, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Taika Waititi, written by
Jemaine Clement, featuring Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, Harvey Guillén, and Mark Proksch,
aired March 27, 2019, on FX. https://www.hulu.com/series/what-we-do-in-the-shadows-0b10c46a-12f0-4357-8a00-
547057b49bac.

257. What We Do in the Shadows, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot.”
140

Just as bureaucrats become mythological creatures through social critique, including in
Gospoda Golovlevy, larger social myths drive the bureaucratic impulse of the state. Saltykov-
Shchedrin takes aim at this form of mythological thinking. The social myths
258
driving
modernization and so-called civilization of the Russian government and people came out of
what, in Russia, would be considered the Western European tradition. The supposedly
humanitarian and civilizing aims of Petrine and sympathetic post-Petrine policies and the
perceived rationalist approach of such policies were at least in part influenced by Peter I’s
exposure to European Enlightenment thought and the continuing influence of French
Enlightenment philosophy in particular under Catherine II (1762-1796).
259
W. Gareth Jones
traces the influence of the European Enlightenment on Russian thinking in the eighteenth century
beginning, in earnest, with many of the policies and educational institutions started by Peter I
and continuing through public defenders of Petrine policy like the Orthodox cleric Feofan
Prokopovich and Western-influenced Russian writers like Mikhail Lomonosov and Alexander
Radishchev. Despite the turn to Sentimentalism that Lincoln points to at the end of the century
260

258. By social myth, I specifically mean to pull from Gérard Bouchard’s definition of social myth, which
“rooted in the psyche, strategically produced and used,…is a collective representation that is hybrid, beneficial, or
harmful, imbued with the sacred, governed by emotion more than by reason, and a vehicle of meanings, values, and
ideals shaped in a given social and historical environment.” See Gérard Bouchard, Social Myths and Collective
Imaginaries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 25. He argues that myth is active and pervasive in
modern life, rather than solely a feature of primitive human society, that it has physical consequences, and that it
does not boil down merely to ideology, although ideologies may rely upon myth to operate in their intended fashion
(34). The Russian bureaucracy struggled with balancing established and emerging social myth in various iterations:
enlightenment, autocracy, proizvol vs. zakonnost’, glasnost’, equality of human life, and so on. Svetlana Boym
suggests a similar, though less specific, definition for mythology more generally that echoes Bouchard’s reasoning
and applies it to the Russian context in particular: “Mythologies are cultural common places, recurrent narratives
that are perceived as natural in a given culture but in fact were naturalized and their historical, political, or literary
origins forgotten or disguised. In Russia and the Soviet Union, where there is a long tradition of extreme political,
administrative, and cultural centralization, those mythologies played a particularly important role.” See Svetlana
Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4.

259. Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda
Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 1-2.

260. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 12.
141

and, as Michael Confino puts it, “the impracticality of the Enlightenment in Russia” due to a
perceived lack of applicability,
261
as Jones contends, “the concepts of the Enlightenment, if
eclipsed, lay dormant within the educated service class” even into the nineteenth century.
262
So
although it would be inaccurate to say that Russia’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment proper
continued unbroken, Andrzej Walicki does point out “the similarity between the ‘enlightenment’
of the [eighteen-]sixties and French eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy” which
“can…be traced in philosophical attitudes (‘human nature’ as opposed to various feudal
‘superstitions’) and in the movement’s philosophical style, which was deliberately critical,
aggressive, and always eager to underline the contrast between ‘what was’ and ‘what should
be.’”
263
These echoes of Russia’s past brushes with European philosophy translated into fact-
based bureaucratic policies, their “enlightening” goals, and the social myths that created
motivation for following European influence.
Perhaps one of the most relevant of these social myths when considering the logic of the
bureaucracy, particularly during the Great Reforms era, is that of rationality and its implications
of a kind of governance based in reason. While Peter I or other proponents of Enlightenment
ideals might present reason as a tool for achieving sound governance, such a suggestion is
certainly not without its emotional attachments or sacredness. Jones offers a nuanced view of the
ways in which the major Russian thinkers of the eighteenth century interacted with the European
Enlightenment, generally picking and choosing which ideas seemed best adaptable to the
Russian context. He points to some of the supporters of rationality as a political guide such as

261. Michael Confino, Russia Before the “Radiant Future:” Essays in Modern History, Culture, and
Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 25.

262. W. Gareth Jones, “Russia’s Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment,” in A History of Russian Thought, eds.
William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 92.

263. Walicki, Russian Thought, 186.
142

Radishchev who, in his Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву [Journey from St. Petersburg
to Moscow], espouses the belief that, as Jones phrases it, “freedom of the individual…was
derived from a social contract, defined by juridical relations based on rationality and self-
interest.”
264
Even in this short description Jones reveals some of the social myths commonly
attached to rationality like freedom and individuality. As George Yaney puts it, in the eighteenth
century, “a half-century of native Russian pretense, together with inspiration derived from
European philosophy, taught them to cherish the ideals of systematic control—associated in
some cases with the companion myths of freedom and justice—as values in themselves, quite
apart from their practical purposes.”
265
While Yaney presents the shifts of the pre-Great Reforms
and Great Reforms era as more of a myth of system rather than rationality, rationality is the
larger influence defining what system should look like in this case; when discussing the
systematization of the ministries in particular during this period Yaney frames it as a rise of
rational order.
266
Rationality is not merely an indifferent principle of rule but rather a kind of
achievable ideal that would magically save Russia, or any other country, from its
“backwardness” and “barbarity.” While the application of bureaucratic practices, supposedly
based in a non-mythical form of reason but often more mythical than not, were often packaged in
the language of humanitarian aims, such as the revizii or the Reforms themselves, they more
directly act as means of control. While Richard Stites does not use the language of myth, he
speaks to a kind of “administrative utopia” that comes out of these kinds of collective myths and
“was conceived as a rational light beamed into the perceived darkness of the barbarous village

264. Jones, “Russia’s Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment,” 91.

265. George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic
Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 33.

266. Yaney, beginning 294.
143

world.”
267
Rationality’s mythologization, during the Enlightenment and its afterlives, renders the
logic behind the Russian bureaucratic project unquestionable and hides the emotional
attachments of bureaucratic reasoning.
Sending bureaucrats to the provinces to gather information on quality of life and
bureaucratic operations carried the potential to undermine or bolster social myths, posing a
challenge to the inherent sacredness behind them, depending on what inspectors [revizory] might
find. It was, on its face, an attempt to combat emotionally based assumptions about the
provinces, many of which seemed to prevent Russia from making the same kinds of changes
they were seeing in Western Europe as many of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century tsars
desired, according to a form of bureaucratic rationality. By putting numbers and facts to paper, it
seemed that rationality could easily win the day over mythological strains of thought. However,
the mythical thinking around rationality itself instead drove such projects to buy into other, less
obvious forms of myth specific to the bureaucracy. Yaney identifies, for example, the “power of
paper” myth alongside what he called the “future-myth of Russian capital-city society.” He
attributes the “power of paper” myth to both before and after the abolition of serfdom in 1861
268

and the “future-myth” to the period between 1861 and 1905.
269
The “power of paper” myth
served to assure ambitious civil servants that while there was “no image of who was to carry out
reforms,” the “list of instructions…would somehow put themselves into effect simply by being
printed on paper.”
270
It is not difficult to see how such a myth, one that buys into the rationality

267. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 19.

268. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government, 202.

269. Yaney, 392.

270. Yaney, 202.
144

of the bureaucratic approach, could easily lead to stagnation and a lack of responsibility for true
reformation or even administration. The “future-myth of Russian capital-city society” suggested
an urbanized and modern Russian utopia that the Russian people could achieve if only the
enlightened bureaucrats
271
were there to guide them.
272
Alongside the “power of paper” myth,
the “future-myth” created a sense of “utopian expectation” that bureaucrats could lead the way
forward to a fully reformed, modern version of Russia based on ideologies of progress.
273
The
“future-myth” supplied the hope that a better version of Russia was possible while the “power of
paper” myth ensured that it would not, ultimately, be possible. That is, as Yaney succinctly puts
it, the combination of these kinds of social myths created “a powerful and continuing impetus to
develop an effective, centralized administration and at the same time to blame whatever central
administration there was for all the disappointment and frustrations that systematization
produced.”
274
So while the fact-finding revizii of the civil service might seem like weapons of a
non-mythologized mass rationality, what rationality they did offer became clouded behind
emotionally-driven myths about civilized society and the bureaucracy itself and its role in social
change.
In the same way in which autocracy served as a long-standing, mythologized mode of
power, rationality began to serve as a competing or complimentary mode of mythologized power
depending on the autocrat hoping to wield and to weaponize it. In the same way that the myth of

271. This is Lincoln’s terminology, and I am adopting it because it suggests the lingering effects of
Enlightenment attachments. Heide Whelan points out that the reformist officials in the 1870s were termed
“bureaucratic liberals” by contemporaries and “liberal bureaucrats” is used by other scholars as well. Heide W.
Whelan, Alexander III & the State Council: Bureaucracy & Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 32.

272. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government, 392.

273. Yaney, 392.

274. Yaney, 393.
145

autocracy sought to explain the innate qualities or “spirit” of Rus, the myth of rationality struck
at the heart of what Russia was and what it meant to be Russian. Conservatives in particular
positioned Petrine and post-Petrine bureaucratic structures as direct threats to unique qualities of
the Russian people and Russia’s “necessary” relationship with autocracy was often traced back
to the cultural origin story encapsulated in the Повесть временных лет [Primary Chronicle]
(ca. 1113) wherein the Slavs called foreign princes to create a Russian state.
275
The Chronicle is
a textual node both for the cultural anxiety around importation and for the professed need for
strong autocracy as a core element of the Russian state. While the exact connotation and context
for autocratic rule transformed under different tsars and political developments, this belief that
the strong will of the tsar was necessary for Russian government to function persisted through
most of the nineteenth century, particularly in conservative camps. During the counterreform era
in the late nineteenth century, Prince Meshcherskii, the editor of the periodical Гражданин
[Citizen] who grew personally close to Alexander III, reaffirmed in a letter to the tsar that
“‘autocracy…is the very spirit of Russia; Russia will die if you do not keep it firm.’”
276
Even
with the challenge posed by bureaucratic developments, proponents of autocratic government
were willing to make ontological arguments about Russianness and government. By coming up
against this historical pressure, the myth of rationality did not bring merely a different mode of
power, but a new claim about the Russian spirit for those inclined to essentialist arguments about
Russian identity. However, without a clearly attached “figurehead of rationality,” in parallel to
the autocratic tsar, or rather, with the multitudinous figurehead of the bureaucracy, the effects of

275. Alexander Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814-
1914, trans. Marshall S. Shatz, eds. Thomas C. Owen and Larissa G. Zakharova (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,
2005), 62-63.

276. Qtd. in Whelan, Alexander III & the State Council, 77.
146

this social myth were, and are, more difficult to locate. In pushing bureaucratic fact-finding
missions to necessary excess, however, the drive of rationalist thinking did not make the
bureaucratic process more manageable but rather encouraged employees to expend energy
endlessly for the sake of keeping the state going in perpetuity. The myth of rationality argued
that such a bureaucratic body was necessary and built it through the means of the forever-
scribbling revizor. That is, just as Colin Robinson drains the energy of his office mates through
constant, mind-numbing chatter, the bureaucratic state drains the energy of the collective through
impenetrable documentary chatter that at once promises a program of reform while
simultaneously undermining such a program to prioritize its own interests. The whole point of
rationality is to carry out its aims without consultation of feeling; it is meant to be a mechanical
systematization of how bureaucratic energy is spent and consumed. In practice, however, the
commitment to rationality is a very emotional affair.
Given that much of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s work, in line with that of his contemporaries,
tends to consist of reporting on the factual state of a given branch of the provincial bureaucracy
after visiting the area and gathering information, on the surface it seems as though he is actively
working against any falsely positive myths perpetuated by the bureaucracy even in his
bureaucratic work. He may be unveiling what is and is not working in each specific place, and by
doing so potentially contradicting stereotypes about provincial life on a small scale, but the
audience for this document is, of course, the bureau itself. True, the archivist or scholar working
at a later date may gain access to these documents, but at the time in which Saltykov-Shchedrin
is writing, his reports merely become subsumed back into the bureaucracy. The only way in
which the non-bureaucratic public might reasonably gain access to his ideas on bureaucracy is
through his fictional work, which is circulated rather than hidden behind the walls of the
147

bureaucratic archive that helped produce it. In some ways, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s literature is a
part of the bureaucratic archive: it is written by a bureaucrat, purposefully replicates bureaucratic
styles of writing, and offers inside information on the bureaucracy. It is also preserved for
posterity. However, it is archival material that is accessible to at least a section of the public and
so does not remain obscure in the same way that the documents from his revizii would. In his
literature, Saltykov-Shchedrin is able to reveal the flaws he locates within the state bureaucratic
system and how even the fact-finding revizii do not serve their expected purpose.
Although Saltykov-Shchedrin spent almost twenty-five years working in the civil service,
in his literature and personal writing alike he makes it very clear that his relationship to
bureaucracy, and to his own bureaucratic career, was largely one of disdain. Biographers agree
that financial dependence played a role in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s decision to remain in a
bureaucratic position and, drawing on a short autobiography he wrote for Mikhail Semevskii’s
collection Знакомые [Acquaintances], Irina Reyfman argues that he “presents the relationship
between service and writing as incongruous and slightly comical” by highlighting periods in his
service career wherein he neglected his literary writing.
277
Reyfman also points to a report
written by Semevskii that ends with Saltykov-Shchedrin’s assertion that “‘вообще повторяю: о
времени моей службы я стараюсь забыть. И вы ничего о ней не печатайте. Я—писатель, в
этом мое призвание.’”
278
By pairing the desire to forget his service career with the assertion
that writing is his calling, Saltykov-Shchedrin at once attempts to separate these two aspects of
his identity and experience and tries to permanently separate bureaucratic writing from literary

277. Irina Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks (Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 225, 181.

278. Qtd. in M. I. Semevskii, “Михаил Евграфович Салтыков (6 февраля 1882 г.),” in М. Е. Салтыков-
Щедрин в воспоминаниях современников (Москва: Государственное издательство художественной
литературы, 1957), 530. “‘in general, I repeat: I try to forget the time of my service. And you shouldn’t publish
anything about it. I am a writer, this is my calling.’” Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write, 181.
148

writing by their intrinsic qualities. However, the autobiographical piece in which Reyfman reads
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s attempt to render these two kinds of writing incongruous also enacts a kind
of collapsing of the two. He does highlight periods wherein he does not write while he serves in
the bureaucracy, but he also highlights more than one period in which he “служилъ и писалъ,
писалъ и служилъ” [“‘served and wrote, wrote and served’”] and later “писалъ и служилъ,
служилъ и писалъ” [“‘wrote and served, served and wrote’”].
279
He may have asserted an
inherent difference between bureaucratic and literary writing, but in these repeated phrases he
pushes them together into a kind of banal duality that repeats itself in the style of bureaucratic
writing. In this duality he actually creates a relationship between bureaucratic and literary writing
wherein one plays off of the other until he “совсемъ оставилъ службу” in 1868 “и
исключительно отдался литературе.”
280
As Reyfman and others suggest, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s
literary writing did get him into trouble in terms of his bureaucratic career, most notably
resulting in his exile to Viatka, and he was, as a result of his writing and opinions, moved around
to various positions fairly frequently.
281
Despite these difficulties and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own
distaste for his work, he “was one of very few state servants who—when he was in service,
however reluctantly—attempted to reform the Russian bureaucracy” and even used his power as

279. Mikhail Semevskii, Знакомые: альбом М. И. Семевскаго; книга автобиографических
собственноручных заметок 850 лиц, воспоминания, стихотворения, епиграмми, шутки, подписи, 1867-1888
(Санкт Петербург: Тип. V. S. Balasheva, 1888), 208. Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write, 181. The context of
the original quote makes it clear that Saltykov-Shchedrin did not refer to bureaucratic work when he said he
“wrote.” In this passage, he only uses the word “писалъ” [“wrote”] to refer to writing poetry or literature and only
uses the word “служилъ” [“served”] to refer to his bureaucratic work. He also, on this same page, refers to a time
when he “служилъ, но не писалъ” [“served, but did not write”].

280. Semevskii, Знакомые, 208. I have updated some of the spelling of the original Russian to eliminate
Slavonic letters. “‘left service for good’” in 1868 “‘and devoted myself entirely to literature.’” Reyfman, How
Russia Learned to Write, 181.

281. Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write, 179. As another example, A. Khrabrovitskii claims that some
satirical writing Saltykov-Shchedrin had done about governor Aleksandrovskii was the main reason he was
transferred to Tula in 1866. See A. Khrabrovkitskii, Русские писатели в Пензенской области, ed. D. D. Blagoi
(Пенза: Изд. Сталинское знамя, 1946), 72.
149

head of the treasury department to make actual financial reforms in the 1860s.
282
The tension
between his role as bureaucrat on the one hand, albeit one who did make meaningful attempts to
reform the bureaucratic system, and as literary satirist of bureaucracy on the other codes his
literary work but also poses questions about the relationship between state power, bureaucratic
writing, and literary critique in late nineteenth-century Russia.
Beyond his general distaste for the repetitive and proliferating paperwork of the revizii,
Saltykov-Shchedrin often found not only that these revizii were not fully achievable, but were, in
fact, essentially impossible, especially in terms of their desired effects. The Liberation Statute of
1861 attempted to improve the lot of now ex-serfs and peasants by creating self-governing
peasant villages and counties [volosti] while the zemstvo statute of 1864 created assemblies of
elected delegates [zemstva], ostensibly representing all classes, with the intention of creating a
small space for popular autonomy.
283
Although the reformers of the 1860s had high hopes for
increased public education both within urban centers and in the provinces, the problem of
illiteracy had improved very little even by the early 1880s. After inspections in 1880 and 1881, a
“broader study conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs showed that there were more than
four times as many illiterate village elders as there were literate ones, and only a few more
volost’ elders who could read than could not.”
284
This lack of education created problems at the
level of local government which, in turn, created problems for the zemstva and the larger
bureaucratic structure that consistently interfered in how they functioned. Even at the very outset
of the Great Reform era, Saltykov-Shchedrin experienced the results of this lack of public

282. Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write, 181, 180.

283. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 176, 230.

284. Lincoln, 183.
150

services despite attempts to establish more educational institutions, including a lyceum at
Tsarskoe selo specifically for future civil servants as early as during the reign of Alexander I
(1801-1825).
285
In an 1861 report on a county courthouse in Tver’ province, Saltykov-Shchedrin
complains not only about the slowness of processing, a common issue in his revizii of provincial
offices, but also that the resolutions written by administrators for the courthouse are written “до
крайности безграмотны и многие лишены всякого смысла” [“ungrammatically to the
extreme and many are deprived of any meaning”].
286
The fact that Saltykov-Shchedrin is faced
with documents that he essentially cannot read hinders his ability to carry out the job he was sent
to do. Often these hindrances came about merely from inconsistent paperwork or a lack of
following protocol. In his notes from 1861 on the Ves’egonskii zemstvo court, Saltykov-
Shchedrin comments on the operation of his inspection, claiming: “О положении этих дел по
ревизии делопроизводства собственно земского суда судить довольно трудно, ибо почти
все подлинные дела находятся у становых приставов, и, следовательно, ревизующему
остается только следить по докладному регистру за большею или меньшею быстротою в
движении бумаг.”
287
Due to the lack of properly filed paperwork, he is left, as the revizor, to
merely examine efficiency (or, more likely, the lack thereof). That is, he is reporting on an empty
efficiency, an efficiency (or lack thereof) for efficiency’s sake as he does not actually have
access to the contents of the archive. This is an indecipherability wrought by opacity and a lack
of organization rather than poor grammar, but one that nevertheless empties the archive of its

285. Lincoln, 17.

286. N. V. Zhuravlev, “М. Е. Салтыков-Щедрин – ревизор,” Красный архив 4 (1937), 172. English
translations from the Zhuravlev are my own.

287. “In fact, it is rather difficult to judge the status of these zemstvo court cases by an audit of the
paperwork, as nearly all of the original cases are located with the district police officers, and, consequently, the only
auditing that remains is to watch the report register for more or less speed in the movement of the papers.”
Zhuravlev, “М. Е. Салтыков-Щедрин – ревизор,” 180.
151

content even while it produces more content that merely replicates the lacunae produced by
missing or illegible documentation. He is faced with an archive that he is meant to summarize for
the sake of accurate, fact-based bureaucratic operations, but he cannot make any headway into
what effectively becomes a mass of wastepaper. The purpose of these documents, beyond their
initial effects, was to create an archive specifically for later review, but what happens when the
archive is indecipherable and what is the purpose of archiving it if it is?
Certainly, the most immediate consequence of indecipherability at one level of the
bureaucracy is the creation of a chain of indecipherability. Saltykov-Shchedrin cannot read the
documents he reviews and so their meaning becomes lost as he archives the gaps they produce in
yet more empty and possibly illegible documents. The mere claim of their indecipherability
obscures their content and presents them, and the archive in which they reside, as an unreadable
mass that cannot possibly provide any further meaning or information and yet is still necessary
for understanding the realities of the civil service on the ground level and for successfully
carrying out the requirements of the position of revizor. Although what are presumably the final
drafts of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s reports are meticulously written in neat, legible cursive, his
rougher drafts or more minor pieces of paperwork are not of the same quality. Some of his
documents in the Manuscript Division of Pushkinskii dom are all but illegible due to the
messiness of the writing and the quirks of his casual cursive such as his elongated “ж’s.” While
Saltykov-Shchedrin points out his boss’ joy “‘что в распоряжение его достался человек
молодой…и образованный,’” and so grammar or illiteracy are not issues in his bureaucratic
production, there is an element of the indecipherable preserved in his handwriting, likely as an
effect of the sheer volume of documentation required and the amount of time necessary to neatly
152

copy out information by hand.
288
Part of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s archive, then, threatens to blend
into the unreadable mass without significant care and time to decipher his manual quirks. This
required time and care becomes a luxury in the face of the volume of the archive and the
Manuscript Division’s limited hours.
The presence of the indecipherable, then, threatens to topple the entire bureaucratic
enterprise. The reliance on collecting local detail and its preservation for later review, and now
scholarly research, became a core element of the Russian bureaucracy in the mid-nineteenth
century and any lacuna in the archive wrought by the indecipherable thus derails the whole
system. If the strategy for addressing inconsistency, corruption, and ignorance in the bureaucratic
ranks, especially in the provinces, relies on obtaining all of the information necessary to make an
informed decision, then the indecipherable lacunae in the archive automatically undermine any
“informed” decision by rendering it that much less informed, especially considering that
Saltykov-Shchedrin is just one example of many revizory. The replicated indecipherability of
bureaucratic documents then renders these documents mere chatter: a kind of noise or
proliferation of words that consistently and insistently emit their sound into the world and yet
cannot be fully understood. It is this chatter that defines both Saltykov-Shchedrin’s actual
bureaucratic work and his critique of this work, particularly in the figure of Porfirii Golovlev
whose chattering bureaucratic habits vampirically drain his family and reveal the mythically
based, pathological drive of the pre-Great Reforms and Great Reforms bureaucracy.
Unlike some of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s other works, like Губернские очерки [Provincial
Sketches] or Помпадуры и помпадурши [The Pompadours], the critiques of serfdom and
bureaucracy, and as such the state, in Gospoda Golovlevy do not take center stage in the same

288. “‘that he had obtained at his disposal a man who is young…and educated.’” Qtd. in K. Tiun’kin,
Салтыков-Щедрин—Жизнь замечательных людей (Мосвка: Молодая гвария, 1989), 79.
153

way. In fact, echoing many other scholars who analyze the novel, Emil Draitser suggests that in
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s previous work he had “levelled his main satirical attack at the two pillars
of Russian society, private property and the state” and in Gospoda Golovlevy had instead shifted
his focus to satirizing the “third pillar” of Russian society: the Russian family.
289
However, this
third-pillar novel does not exclusively focus on the family, but rather recognizes the interplay of
the three pillars in the context of the larger organizational changes shaping the country in the
mid- to late-nineteenth century. Saltykov-Shchedrin does level a critique at the institution of
family in Gospoda Golovlevy, but this critique is underwritten by and dependent upon the
shifting contexts of serfdom and bureaucracy. The novel begins in the 1850s when serfdom,
although reaching its end, still served as a major hierarchical organizing force in Russian society,
particularly rural society.
At the beginning of the novel, Arina Petrovna, the domineering land and serfowner, holds
power over the estate and determines the means by which the Golovlevs relate to each other and
to their servants. However, with the emancipation of the serfs before the second chapter, Arina
quickly loses this power only to be usurped by her son Porfirii. In this transition, there is a shift
from the kinds of autocratic power and power structures that contemporaries would likely
attribute to Russian tradition to the kinds of “imported” bureaucratic power structures inherent to
modernity. As the representative of this bureaucratic power, Porfirii then continues to drive the
family decline that Arina had set in motion before him only adopting different means. Just as
family members, such as Porfirii’s brother Stepan, begin to drop dead under Arina’s rule and the
extreme moderation that accompanied it, any family members left alive after Porfirii takes over
the estate, like his brother Pavel, quickly meet the same end in the face of his relentless

289. Emil Draitser, Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Ščedrin (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994),
15.
154

bureaucratic chatter and false generosity. Many of the scholars working on Gospoda Golovlevy
do not focus as much on the bureaucratic elements of the text, generally mentioning Porfirii’s
ties to bureaucracy in passing, or do not treat the bureaucratic influences revealed by Porfirii’s
character as major concerns of the novel.
290
However, the focus on Porfirii for most of the novel
and the connections he has to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own bureaucratic experience offer room for
a reading that does center and interrogate the question of bureaucracy both as a continuation of
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s previous critiques of the civil service and as a critique that is specifically
contextualized by the move from serfdom to bureaucracy and the Great Reforms period.
While the reader is not privy to Porfirii’s exact position within the central bureaucracy,
291

Saltykov-Shchedrin makes it clear that Porfirii’s civil service career did have a noticeable effect
on his behavior. After “проведя более тридцати лет в тусклой атмосфере департамента,”
292

Porfirii “приобрел все привычки и вожделения закоренелого чиновника, не допускающего,
чтобы хотя одна минута его жизни оставалась свободною от переливания из пустого в
порожнее.”
293
Porfirii has spent thirty years getting into the habit of bureaucratic production and

290. It is worth noting that Milton Ehre makes the following observation regarding Porfirii’s bureaucratic
tendencies, which does acknowledge the larger social context captured in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel: "At times his
language falls into a degraded bureaucratese--Porfiry has just retired from a career in the civil service. He is
obviously intended as a consummate image of the Russian gentry, incorporating its traditional double role of master
of the manor and government official, as well as its double heritage of Byzantine religiosity and post-Petrine
bureaucratism.” See Milton Ehre, “A Classic of Russian Realism: Form and Meaning in ‘The Golovlyovs,’” Studies
in the Novel 9, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 6.

291. I. P. Foote suggests that Porfirii’s “claim to the title 'Excellency' (in 'Kith and Kin') suggests he had
attained the fourth grade in the Table of Ranks (the lowest which gave that title)” but his exact position is never
explicitly stated. See Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyovs: A Critical Companion, ed. I. P. Foote (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1997), 40n.22.

292. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Собрание сочинений в 20-и томах (Москва: Художественная литература,
1965-1977), т. 13, 104. “having spent more than thirty years in the dim atmosphere of a government office.” M. E.
Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, trans. I. P. Foote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 118. I will use СС to
indicate his Sobranie sochinenii from here on out.

293. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 104. “had acquired all the habits and cherished aspirations of the
confirmed bureaucrat who requires that every minute of his life should be filled with some futile activity.” Saltykov-
Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 118. The phrase “переливать из пустого в порожнее” can also be translated specifically
155

administration and these methods, the same forms of chatter that Saltykov-Shchedrin attributes
to the real Russian civil service, became his strategies for estate management as well. The
documentary practices of the civil service offer a general model upon which he can pattern his
personal administrative needs, realizing that the “мир делового бездельничества настолько
подвижен, что нет ни малейшего труда перенести его куда угодно.”
294
Saltykov-Shchedrin
confirms that he specifically adopts this model for the estate, when, upon his settlement back at
the family estate, Golovlevo, after his retirement, Porfirii “создал себе такую массу пустяков и
мелочей, которую можно было не переставая переворачивать, без всякого опасения когда-
нибудь исчерпать ее.”
295
The logic behind this application is not necessarily flawed, but the
problem with Porfirii’s transplantation of bureaucratic strategy is that he spent so long within it
that he cannot see its problems; instead of offering a useful tool for managing Golovlevo, Porfirii
condemns the estate and the family to deadly stagnation. Given that he served as a bureaucrat
during the mid-nineteenth century, Porfirii would have especially been used to the chaotic
overabundance of paperwork that the central and provincial administrations had to process and
exchange in order to get the smallest task accomplished. Lincoln tells the story, for example, of a
governor-general who had to wait for the processing of twenty-four reports in order to get his
office flue fixed, to say nothing of the “no fewer than 135 separate documents” required
“whenever a nobleman decided to sell a parcel of land.”
296
This extensive system of

as “to engage in idle chatter” according to Katzner. Kenneth Katzner, English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary
(New York: Wiley, 1994), 878.

294. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 104. “world of bureaucratic futility is sufficiently mobile to be
transferred without difficulty to any place you wish.” Salytkov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 118.

295. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 104. “created for himself such a multitude of petty, trivial functions as
to provide him with a constant routine which could never be exhausted.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 118.

296. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 93.
156

administrative chatter made for an overburdened and nonsensical conversation between the
central government and the provinces that took place exclusively in paper and ink.
Much like the documentary chatter that characterized nineteenth-century Russian
bureaucracy, Porfirii engages in mottled, mismatched language throughout Gospoda Golovlevy
that creates an indecipherable wall of speech (and text), mirroring the indecipherability of the
extensive bureaucratic archive. His faux idioms and disingenuous diminutives prevent his
listeners’ full understanding of what he is trying to say or do. Draitser, in fact, suggests that
“Porfirij seems to be deliberately making his speech both long-winded and senseless,” and any
endearing elements of his speech seem to always work cross-purpose to what he is attempting to
do or say.
297
His theoretically inviting words seem designed to put his family members at ease
but there is always a current of suspicion undercutting his relations with them. I. P. Foote, among
others, has examined in detail the various ways that Porfirii extends his speech indefinitely. The
main features of Porfirii’s speech, he claims, are repetition, listing, definitive statements
introduced by a question, contrasting statements, contrasting propositions, and augmentation and
reduction.
298
Draitser offers an example of Porfirii’s speech that demonstrates his propensity for
insincere diminutives, repetition, and listing all in one when Porfirii ignores his sick brother
Pavel’s pleas to leave him alone and instead unleashes unrelenting chatter upon him. In response
to Pavel’s request that he leave, Porfirii instead proclaims: “Уйди да уйди – ну как я уйду! Вот
тебе испить захочется – я водички подам: вон лампадка не в писправности – я и
лампадочку поправлю, маслица деревянненького подолью. Ты полежишь, я посижу; тихо

297. Draitser, Techniques of Satire, 114. Ehre makes a similar observation: “Saltykov crams his [Porfirii’s]
speech with emotionally nuanced affixes, either pejorative or affectionate, to catch his wheedling, insinuating,
complaining character—hardly a word he speaks is in the normative form—and lards it with folk proverbs and
maxims, expressive of the stereotyped moralizing of this Russian Tartuffe” (“A Classic of Russian Realism,” 8).

298. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyovs, 99.
157

да смирно – и не увидим, как время пройдет!”
299
To this small diatribe Pavel desperately
responds “Уйди, кровопивец!” [“Get out…Bloodsucker!”]
300
directly linking Porfirii’s chatter
with his deadly predation and calling out his false affection. In this small paragraph alone,
Porfirii unnecessarily repeats Pavel’s words in repeating variations of the word for “уйти” [“get
out”] three times, offers a small list of conditional statements declaring what he will do to care
for Pavel, and adopts overly affectionate language in diminutives like “деревянненького,” the
connotations of which clash with Pavel’s apparent terror of his brother. Foote offers a more
explicit example of Porfirii’s listing habits when he is discussing care for his son Vladimir, to
whom he refers with the diminutive nickname Volodka, and lists the many resources at a nearby
foundlings’ home: “кроватки чистенькие, мамки здоровенькие, рубашечки на детушках
беленькие, рожочки, сосочки, пленеочки...словом, все!”
301
As Foote points out, all of the
words in this list “have affective suffixes,” that is, they are all diminutives.
302
All of these verbal
strategies work to extend meaningless conversation and pressure his family members into
submission. “By paralyzing their ability to contradict him, [Porfirii] stupefies his interlocutors,
thus making them easy prey to victimize and exploit” and trapping them within the stagnant
estate.
303
By taking the most common forms of communication, speaking and writing, and

299. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 78. “‘Get out! Get out!’ – now how could I possibly leave you? You
might want a drink—I can give you some water; the lamp there might not burn properly—I can see to it, put in a
drop of olive oil. You lie there and I’ll sit here, all nice and peaceful, and we won’t notice how the time slips by!”
Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 86. The Russian uses some version of уйти three times which the English does
not reflect.

300. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 78. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 86.

301. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 197. “nice clean little cots, good healthy wet-nurses, nice white little
shirts for the babies, feeding-bottles, teats, napikins—all they need!” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 230.

302. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyovs, 99. There is not much space here to offer examples of every
single quality of Porfirii’s speech patterns, but Foote and Draitser, among others, offer extensive examples and
explanation of these qualities.

303. Draitser, Techniques of Satire, 114.
158

adopting each for its opposite purpose, that is, for blocking communication, Porfirii ensures that
the estate and its inhabitants cannot develop or move forward in the Great Reforms era.
Porfirii’s overly detailed bureaucratic habits and speech patterns, in fact, come straight
out of the kind of writing that Saltykov-Shchedrin performed in his role as revizor. Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s revizii of various provincial areas produced long, repetitive reports that organized
each section under the name of the area and then listed which civil services were working the
way they were supposed to, what elements seemed to be burdened by inefficiency, how many
unprocessed documents or court cases were jamming up the works, and any examples that might
illuminate the character of whichever local office he was examining. Two of the results of
organizing this kind of information, listing and drawing up accounts, mirror the kind of
expansive strategies that Porfirii uses to prolong a conversation or hold administrative sway over
family members. In Saltykov-Shchedrin’s feedback on the filing of reports in a courthouse in
Tver’ region he offers a lengthy list of examples to fully express the slowness and inefficiency of
the reporting process in this location:
Денежная отчетность в порядке, по делопроизводству замечается недостаток
наблюдения за своевременным представлением опекунами отчетов и медленность
в рассмотрении их: так например: а) отчет по имению Сутугина был представлен 4
июня и только по истечении месяца представлен в гражданскую палату; б) отчет по
имению малолетних Редькиных представлен был только 12 августа; в) по имению
купца Алексея Сутугина отчет представлен тоже 12 августа; г) отчет по имению
Ветошникова представленный 9 марта, отправлен в гражданскую палату 4 июня; д)
по имению Зубковой отчет представлен 12 августа; е) по имению Алексея Жданова
отчет представлен 15 июня; ж) отчет по имению Крапивиных представлен в палату
4 июня, но, когда получен в суде, не видно; з) по имению Митропольской и
Черешиных отчеты до сего времени не представлены, и со стороны суда не
принято никаких мер к понуждению опекунов.
304

304. The monetary accounting is in order, in the paperwork is noticed a deficiency in supervision of the
timely submission of accounts by the overseers and a slowness in their discerning: for example: a) an account for the
estate of Sutugin was submitted on June 4
th
and was only submitted to the civil chamber after a month; b) an account
for the juvenile Red’kins’ estate was submitted only on August 12th; c) an account for the merchant Aleksei
Sutugin’s estate was submitted on August 12th as well; d) an account for Vetoshnikov’s estate, submitted March 9
th
,
was sent to the civil chamber on June 4
th
; e) an account for Zubkova’s estate was submitted on August 12
th
; f) an
account for Aleksei Zhdanov’s estate was submitted on June 15
th
; g) an account for the Krapivins’ estate was
159

Similarly, in a reviziia of the Sloboda City Duma, he lists out the current civil service positions:
Гласный въ Думе, два Ратмана, двое Словесныхъ Судей, двое баварныхъ
Смотрителей, мещанский Староста, Смотритель городской больнищое, рядский
староста, депутать Квартирной Коммисии, депутать для отвода квартирь для
происходящихь боинскихь партий, двое оценщиковь, двое присяонныхь
свидетелей, депутать для поверки городскихь счетовь, двое учетчиковь мещанскаго
и рекрутскаго старость, 24 добросовестныхь, двое Смотрителей за городскими
лесами, четыро полосовщиковь, рамеаленный Голова, двое ремесленныхь
старшинь и восемь товарищей…
305

As in the case of Porfirii’s almost compulsive listing, although Saltykov-Shchedrin is reporting
in part on the documentary problems of whichever location he is visiting, the writing required of
him bogs down his own documentary trail. Full of such detailed lists, this fact-finding paperwork
becomes tediously extensive and difficult to parse for its key elements and claims. While such
documentation may have offered valuable information to a central office in theory, the volume of
detail necessary for providing this level of description for every locality in a country the size of
Russia would quickly produce an inscrutable archive.
In particular, Porfirii turns to the same kind of detailed accounts that Saltykov-Shchedrin
himself made in his position as revizor to control and overwhelm his declining predecessor,
Arina. In his revizii Saltykov-Shchedrin meticulously records errors in pricing and accounts that

submitted to the chamber on June 4
th
, but it is not clear when it was received by the court; h) accounts for the estate
of Mitropol’ska and the Chereshins have not yet been submitted, and no measures have been taken by the court to
compel the overseers. Zhuravlev, “М. Е. Салтыков-Щедрин – ревизор,” 170-171.

305. One magistrate in the Duma, two Ratmanns, two Slovesnye Judges, two Bavarian Overseers, one petit-
bourgeois Village Elder, one municipal hospital Overseer, one elder caretaker of the trading yard, one deputy of the
Housing Commission, one deputy for the allocation of barracks for ongoing military parties, two appraisers, two
sworn witnesses, one deputy for the roll call of the municipal accounts, two petit-bourgeois accountants and
recruited village elders, 24 foremen, two Overseers for municipal forests, four stripers, one ramealennyi Head, two
craftsmen and eight fellows... Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Записки о последстыяхь ревизии Слободской
Градской Думы,” Дело о ревизии С-а в Слободской городской думе, 1853-1857, Ф. 366, оп. 5, 27, 633, В118:
стр. 5. Пушкинский дом. English translations of archival material are my own.
160

have not been paid or even not been properly documented as well as court cases that have been
stalled in their processing:
Так например: на март месяц по книге земского суда ржи четверть показана — 4
руб. 50 коп., а в донесении станового пристава 1 стана — 5 руб. 50 коп., в июне за
перемол с четверти по книге показано 20 коп., а в донесении пристава 1 стана — 21
коп.; пуд сена на тот же месяц по книге показан — 35 коп., а у станового пристава
— 30 коп.; в июле за перемол с пуда по книге значится — 20 коп., а по ведмости
станового пристава — 21 коп. Притом от пристава 2 стана вовсе ведмости о ценах
не доставляются.” “Ко дню ревизии состояло незаконченных дел за приставом 1
стана: уголовных — 32, гражданских — 33, распорядительных — 47; за приставом
2 стана: уголовных — 46, гражданских — 49, распорядительных — 60; за другими
местами: уголовных — 2, гражданских — 1, распорядительных — 2; за другмим
местами; уголовных — 26, гражданских — 17 и распорядительных — 8.
306

He also calls attention to the kinds of tools available in firehouses to offer a closer look at the
resources of each department. I have recorded part of one such account below:
Заменыхь трубь.
Большихь съ летними и зимнили ходами ____________ Число 2
къ нимь рукавь: забирныхь ________________________ 2
поменыхь___________________________ 6
Стволовъ при нихь же медныхь_____________________ 2
Квартальная съ однимь летнимь ходамь______________ 1
къ ней рукавовъ: забирной_________________________ 1
Поменыхь___________________________ 3
къ ней же медныхь стволовь________________________ 2
Ручная__________________________________________ 1
къ ней руказовъ: забирной_________________________ 1
Поменой____________________________ 1
при ней же медный стволь_________________________ 1...
307

306. For example: for the month of March in the zemstvo court book a quarter of rye is shown [as costing]
4 rubles, 50 kopeks, but in a district police dispatch for mill 1 – 5 rubles, 50 kopeks, in the book for June the
grinding of a quarter is shown [as costing] 20 kopeks, but in a police dispatch for mill 1 – 21 kopeks.; a pood of hay
is shown in the book for the same month [as costing] 35 kopeks, but by the district police – 30 kopeks; for July it is
listed in the book that for the grinding of a pood [it costs] 20 kopeks, but in the register of the district police – 21
kopeks. Furthermore, from the police of mill 2, registers about prices are not given at all. By the day of the audit
there were unfinished police cases for mill 1: criminal – 32, civil – 33, administrative – 47; [unfinished] police
[cases] for mill 2: criminal – 46, civil – 49, administrative – 60; in other places: criminal – 2, civil – 1,
administrative – 2; in other places: criminal – 26, civil – 17 and administrative – 8. Zhuravlev, “М. Е. Салтыков-
Щедрин – ревизор,” 63. A pood is an “old Russian unit of weight equal to approx. 36 pounds.” Katzner,
Dictionary, 922.

307. Replacement pipes.
Large [quarters] with summer and winter passages _____ Quantity 2
Their hoses: intake ______________________________ 2
161

Here Saltykov-Shchedrin’s accounting directly reminds the reader of Porfirii’s new accounts for
Golovlevo, which detail how every resource ought to be used down to the last gooseberry:
К 18** году состояло кустов малины 00
К сему поступило вновь посаженных 00
С наличного числа кустов собрано ягод 00 п. 00 ф. 00 зол.
Из сего числа:
Вами, милый друг маменька, употреблено 00 п. 00 ф. 00 зол.
Израсходовано на варенье для дома Его
Превосходительства Порфирия
Владимирыча Головлева 00 п. 00 ф. 00 зол.
Дано мальчику N в награду за добронравие 1 ф.
Продано простому народу на лакомство 00 п. 00 ф. 00 зол.
Сгнило, по неимению в видку покупщиков,
а равно и от других причин 00 п. 00 ф. 00 зол.
И т.д. И т.д.
308

exchange_______________________________ 6
Their copper pipes ______________________________ 2
Quarters with one summer passage__________________ 1
Their hoses: intake ______________________________ 1
exchange _______________________________ 3
Their copper pipes ______________________________ 2
Manual_______________________________________ 1
Their hoses: intake ______________________________ 1
exchange _______________________________ 1
Their copper pipes ______________________________ 1… Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Записки о
последстыяхь ревизии Слободской Градской Думы,” Дело о ревизии С-а в Слободской городской
думе, 1853-1857, Ф. 366, оп. 5, 27, 633, В118: стр. 64.

308. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 63. Raspberry canes as at 18** 00
To which add newly planted canes 00
From which stock of canes fruit
gathered to the amount of 00 qu. 00 lb. 00 oz.
Of this:
Consumed by you, Mother dear 00 00 00
Used to make preserves for the
household of His Excellency
Porfiry Vladimirych Golovlev* 00 00 00
Given to the boy N. for good
conduct 1 lb.
Sold to common folk for their
indulgence 00 00 00
Gone to rot for lack of customers
and other reasons 00 00 00
Etc., etc. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 68-69.
162

It is upon receiving such an account that Arina realizes both that Porfirii is even more
withholding than she was and that he will use his bureaucratic micromanaging to control her and
the estate. It is telling that, as I have done in quoting Saltykov-Shchedrin himself above,
Saltykov-Shchedrin cuts off Porfirii’s account with the vague and trivializing “И т.д. И т.д.”
[“etc., etc.”] rather than create an entire detailed document. The rest of the fictional document is
left in obscurity because the details are not actually important. What is actually important is the
way in which Porfirii records and wields information and the consequences of his bureaucratic
strategies. Reading through Saltykov-Shchedrin’s revizii, there are often times when it feels as
though no difference would be made either to the reality of the situation or to the useful content
of the state bureaucracy’s archive were he to write “etc., etc.” rather than continuing with his
detailed account. In the realm of fiction, Saltykov-Shchedrin has temporarily curtailed the power
of the bureaucratic document to stagnate and mire by refusing to reproduce it in fullness while
also highlighting its real-world stagnating power by positioning it as the turning point upon
which Arina realizes her inevitable doom at the hands of Porfirii.
The element of Porfirii’s bureaucratic work that makes it so dangerous to the family and
estate, particularly Arina, is not that he is an inept civil servant, but rather that he is too good at
being a civil servant or at least the stereotype of one. That is, his pathological behavior, which
falls under the category of what many scholars of bureaucracy term “bureaucratism” or
“bureaupathology,” is marked by a too-strict adherence to the arbitrary rules imposed by
bureaucratic structures in nineteenth-century Russia, the familial governing of his estate, and his
own drive for control and documentation. Further, while he engages in stall tactics and
hypothetical “nonsense” work, he always does so within the parameters he has set for how the
estate ought to be run and how its administrative needs ought to be regulated. He does not break
163

any technical rules, but rather over-adheres to the rules in place. In his aptly named The
Demonics of Bureaucracy, Harry Cohen offers a range of examples of bureaupathology,
summarized concisely by Karl W. Ryavec in Russian Bureaucracy: Power and Pathology,
including “working to rule, ritualistic behavior, the ‘runaround’ to avoid taking action and risk,
[…] performance of useless or nonsense work, […] avoidance of solutions or the end game by
shunning conflict or unpleasantness, […] and being rigid and inflexible,” all behaviors in which
Porfirii engages at some point in the novel.
309
His attempts at control are often coded in
ritualistic, often nominally religious, behavior. When he visits Pavel on his death bed, attempting
to influence changes to his will, he “приблизился к образу, встал на колени, умилился,
сотворил три земных поклона.
310
The ritualistic show of kneeling to pray, and further of
bowing three times, three being a number important both to Christianity and folklore, suggests a
compulsive need to present a particular image to Pavel before preying on him. While this
religious behavior would be expected for a devout Orthodox Russian of the time, Porfirii does

309. Karl W. Ryavec, Russian Bureaucracy: Power and Pathology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2003), 109. See also Harry Cohen, The Demonics of Bureaucracy: Problems of Change in a Government Agency
(Ames: The Iowa State University Press, 1965), 15, 21, 226, 231.

310. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 77. “went up to the icon, knelt down, with a show of pious emotion
bowed three times to the ground” before sidling up to Pavel’s bed.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 85. The
Russian doesn’t necessarily make as strong a case for Porfirii’s false piety as Foote does as “умилился,” which
Foote translates as “with a show of pious emotion,” can really just be translated as “to be moved” in a sincere way.
However, in the context of the entire book, Foote’s translation helps reiterate Porfirii’s true character given that
Saltykov-Shchedrin articulates throughout the book that his religious piety is not genuine, at least until the end of the
novel when he apparently has a change of heart and freezes to death trying to visit Arina’s grave in the winter. See,
for example, this explanation of his religiosity: “Judas was praying. He was very pious and liked to devote several
hours a day to prayer. But he prayed not because he loved God and hoped through prayer to have communion with
him, but because he feared the Devil and hoped that God would deliver him from the Evil One. He knew a great
many prayers and, in particular, had an excellent mastery of the technique of praying. That is, he knew when it was
necessary to move his lips and to roll his eyes upwards, when it was proper to place his hands together and when to
lift them up, when it was appropriate to be emotional, and when to be staid and cross himself with fitting
moderation. At certain moments indicated by devotional practice his eyes and his nose turned red and moist. But
prayer did not restore him, did not clarify his feelings, did not bring any light into the dimness of his existence. He
could pray and perform all the requisite motions—and at the same time be looking out of the window to see if
anyone was going to the cellar without permission, and such like.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 143-144.
СС, т. 13, 125.
164

not engage in this behavior out of faith but rather for the sake of putting Pavel at ease before
beating him down with chatter. Even one of Porfirii’s many nicknames signals his false
religiosity as his family also calls him Иудушка [Little or Dear Judas] suggesting that his faith
can be “bought.” Adopting chatter as a paralyzing weapon, the same style of bureaucratic chatter
that makes Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own archive so indecipherable, not only helps Porfirii gain
physical and mental control over his victims, but also over administrative timeframes. When
Porfirii’s niece Anninka returns to Golovlevo after failing to make her way in the outside world
so that she can legally accept her inheritance from the late Arina, Porfirii’s talk and an incessant
string of meals successfully delay the entire process so that Anninka becomes a kind of captive
on the estate. The ritualistic behaviors and technically legitimate stall tactics that Porfirii adopts
with his family arise from skills that he has learned in the bureau and that, in the context of a
crumbling estate in Great Reforms Russia, have only intensified in their pathology.
Porfirii’s particular brand of documentary chatter does not quite take the same form as
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s revizii but rather goes beyond the iterative nature of meta-documents to
the pathological world of hypothetical documents. That is, Porfirii becomes consumed by a
seemingly compulsive drive to create and meticulously calculate fantasy accounts linked to
scenarios that are absurdly unrealistic. He imagines trying to sell all of the timber from one of his
forests and separates out each potential piece of the tree he could sell and for how much,
counting “мысленно, сколько стоит большой вал, сколько вал поменьше, сколько строевое
бревно, семерик, дрова, сучья. Потом складывает, умножает, в ином месте отсекает дроби,
в другом прибавляет” so that by the time he has written out all of these calculations, “лист
165

бумаги наполняется столбцами цифр.”
311
These unnecessary, overly detailed, administrative
calculations only increase as the novel continues until Porfirii becomes completely immersed in
what effectively equates to work for work’s sake. Even more so than the bureaucracy in which
Porfirii learned this form of labor, Porfirii’s work becomes self-perpetuating and endlessly
iterative and mimics, at a caricatured scale, the kind of empty meaninglessness of stagnating
overproduction. However, while the nineteenth-century Russian bureaucracy may not have
invented hypothetical documents wholesale, the kind of reasoning that required Saltykov-
Shchedrin to archive missing or illegible documents and to produce piles of minutiae is of a kind
with Porfirii’s pathological bureaucratic fiction. Both Porfirii and the real bureaucracy at large
attempt to hide behind the screen of rationality and systematization to justify documentary
proliferation as not only useful but necessary. By reproducing empty or fake documents, by
recording too many facts to be useful or chattering endlessly, both the bureaucracy and the
monster it created, Porfirii, engage in irrational forms of meaning-making that pretend at
rationality while undermining it.
The kind of bureaupathology and irrational meaning-making to which Porfirii subscribes
is more specifically driven by a form of archive, or perhaps bureaucratic, fever. His obsessive
attempts to control his family through unrelenting chatter and hypothetical administrative work
suggest not simply a grab for power, but also an overwhelming anxiety about the source of social
and political authority in the Great Reform era. That is, while Arina reigned as autocratic
matriarch, Porfirii, although similarly authoritative once he takes her place, cannot center or even
locate his own source of power much less identify from whence it comes. Nicholas I’s policy of

311. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 220. “in his head the price of a big shaft, the price of a smaller one, the
price of a house-beam, timber runs, firewood, and trimmings. Then he adds, multiplies, drops a fraction here, adds
one there” “the sheet of paper becomes covered with columns of figures.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 255.
166

official nationality helped to preserve autocracy as a central tenet of the Russian nation so Arina
can be secure in the type of power she wields, its history, its “Russianness,” and its divine roots,
but Porfirii’s power emerges in the context of modernity, leaving him on less stable ground.
Arina’s role as landowner replicates the same kind of autocratic power as the tsar, preserving a
strict social hierarchy that justifies her arbitrary rule or despotism [proizvol] and paints her as
enlightened if she engages in any minor humanitarian impulse. Porfirii, however, comes out of a
newer and more amorphous form of state power that threatens the status quo of autocracy even
while enforcing it and that projects a civilizing project onto Russia’s provinces. His power is
both planted with shallower roots and seemingly imported from foreign states like Prussia.
312
In
an attempt to ground and legitimize this power, Porfirii tries to return to the origin of the
bureaucracy, to its ontological being, to the arkhe:“the principle according to nature or history,
there where things commence—[a] physical, historical, or ontological principle—but also the
principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority,
social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given.”
313
He must obsessively reach
for this place of commencement, for this ontological beginning in order to feel secure in his
authority and its national place. For him, the bureaucracy is an action, specifically an archival

312. This bifurcative distinction between Arina and Porfirii’s power, however, is, as Daniel Field suggests,
largely paradoxical. Despite strongly antibureaucratic feelings among the nobility throughout the period leading up
to the Great Reforms, “all nobles enjoyed privileged status because their ancestors or they themselves had served the
state” in some capacity. See Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 9. As Field reasons, however, “the hereditary noble railed against the
functionary, even though the nobility and the upper bureaucracy were largely coextensive and never in conflict,
because by ‘functionary’ he meant upstart, or homo novus” (10). Regardless of the role of civil service in noble
status, that is, the nobility still saw subordinate bureaucrats as a distinct and recently created class of interlopers.
Even with this derision for subordinate members of the bureaucracy, however, “antibureaucratic sentiment and
deference to governmental authority went hand in hand” before the Liberation Statute; nobles could retain this
derision while also showing the kind of “flattery and deference” to the governor, for example, that would be “due to
an autocrat in miniature” (10). Essentially, Arina as established serfholding landowner meets the requirements for an
“autocrat in miniature” figure whereas Porfirii seems to have cast his lot with the upstarts.

313. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 9.
167

action, and one that he thinks he can satisfactorily recreate and so satiate his drive to return. The
bureaucracy is simultaneously a place of commencement, from whence the dictates of
governmental agencies emerge, and a place of authority and order. However, as an
organizational body, the bureaucracy itself enacts a kind of archive fever of its own as a
requirement of its own functioning and as a result of its mythology.
In the very act of producing the documentation that serves as medium between
bureaucratic will and its practical application, bureaucracy participates in the same kind of
bureaupathological archive fever adopted by Porfirii. That is, bureaucratic documents are made
for the archive. While Saltykov-Shchedrin’s fictional works are meant to circulate, be
republished, appear on bookshelves, and hold some place in literary discourse despite their
bureaucratic entanglements, the bureaucratic documents he produced are meant to be filed away.
His paperwork, as becomes obvious from the layout of many of the documents he produced, is
already formatted and coded in a regulated way so that in its inherent form it fits most neatly into
a systematic archive. This paperwork is outfitted with headings indicating what each document
is, who drafted it, what date it was created, from which department it was issued, and a document
number. For example, a report entitled “Дело о беспорядках замеченных С-ым при
обозрении им г. Вятки” [“Case about the riots observed by S-v during a review by him of the
province of Viatka”] from the Pushkinskii dom manuscript division contains a document that
indicates it is from the “М. В. Д. Вятскаго Губернскаго Правиленый” [“Ministry of Internal
Affairs of the Viatka Provincial Government”], was created on October 4
th
1850, was written by
Saltykov-Shchedrin, and has a document number of 12028.
314
These details offer the potential
future archivist a few options for filing away such documents by various categories and

314. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Документ 12028,” Дело о беспорядках замеченных С-ым при
обозрении им г. Вятки, 1850-1854, Ф. 366, оп. 5, 127, 616: стр. 4.
168

organizing each document individually within each category without having to alter it at all. The
archival scholar might find Saltykov-Shchedrin’s documents grouped by location and further
organized by date, or perhaps grouped by bureau and sub-grouped by date and then by document
number depending on the particular archive’s focus. Each document does convey information, of
course, and in the case of Saltykov-Shchedrin much of this information could be vitally
important to the state of provincial life in Russia, but most of the documents he produced were
created for a short-term goal of information correspondence and not made to be regularly
referenced after they reached the completion of this goal. Even the documents he produced
offering details on the state of the provinces, despite their stated importance to the mission of
nineteenth-century Russian state bureaucracy, would likely have lost their relevance not long
after their creation as (pre-)Great Reforms Russia continued to change and reorganize itself.
Assuming, of course, that they were consulted at all in the overwhelming flow of similar
documents to the central bureaux. By virtue of its creation by and for bureaucratic use, the
bureaucratic document contains its own right to preservation within itself, but also its own
relegation to a space beyond the eyes of the general public. In creating writing that is meant
almost solely for the archive, bureaucracy reveals “a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire
for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin.”
315
While Porfirii wants to return to
the element of the bureaucracy that temporarily solidified him as patriarch, to the core of
bureaucratic authority, bureaucracy attempts to return to the arkhe because in its structure it
inherently harbors the question of its own authority.
Where does bureaucratic authority commence? This is one of the same questions that
Russians have about Russian society going into the twentieth century as they continue to push

315. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 57.
169

back against the influence of proizvol and even, at times, autocracy. And because of the
mythology of autocracy in Russia, and its entanglement with the founding story of not just the
nation but the Russian people, the question of authority is not just one of power but also one of
essentialist ontology. The archive fever of the bureaucracy does not just maintain the stagnating
power of state bureaucratic hierarchies, but also threatens past and contemporary conservative
ideas about the truth of the Russian people, their being, and their purpose. In the figure of
Porfirii, especially in his bureaupathological archive fever, Saltykov-Shchedrin opens up the
flawed foundations of Russian bureaucracy, particularly post-emancipation, to his reader and
critiques the arbitrary nature of bureaucratic archiving.
The fact-finding missions that occupied bureaucrats like Saltykov-Shchedrin in the
nineteenth century engaged in this kind of archival fever but, in this case “fact,” rather than the
traditional Orthodox divine, was held up as the arkhe, as the place of commencement and
authority. Influenced by the Enlightenment’s focus on rationality, humanism, and the
rearticulation of the status and nature of truth, fact-based law became the point from which all
government, and thus all bureaucracy as its practical arms, must originate for leaders like Peter I
and his sympathetic successors. However, as Saltykov-Shchedrin himself discovered on
numerous occasions, often the traces of “fact” did not actually exist as substantive information
but rather as a lacuna in the archive. That is, upon attempting to return to the origin, the
bureaucrat often found no traces, or at least not enough, to guide such a return. However, civil
servants like Saltykov-Shchedrin would have to reproduce and preserve this lacuna in the
archive, this lack of a trace, in order to continue the fact-finding nature of their work to its
conclusion. Such an action reveals the obsessive pathology of archive fever but also suggests that
such pathology is inherent in Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. An obsessive need
170

to return to an origin that the bureaucrat knows has not even faithfully left its imprint and cannot
be encapsulated perfectly or in its entirety suggests both the nonsense work that Yaney ascribes
to the bureaucracy of the period and the emotional sacredness of the social myths undergirding
the drive for rational rule based in zakonnost’ rather than proizvol. Porfirii reproduces this form
of archival fever, as a version of bureaupathology, in his creation of hypothetical work. Like
Saltykov-Shchedrin and his civil service contemporaries, Porfirii is enacting the practice of
returning to the trace in an attempt to return to the originary source of bureaucratic authority, and
thus Russian state authority. In the case of the hypothetical sale of the wood from his forest, he
latches onto the factual number of trees he owns, but he is twisting it into something it is not by
transforming, for example, the number of trees he owns into the unrealistically viable number of
trees he can sell and off which he can profit. By taking a concrete trace of the originary “fact”
and distorting it into a narrative with which he can feed his obsession, Porfirii empties the trace
of its content and, further, warps the origin for which the bureaucracy is searching into
something unrecognizable and ever shifting. By taking “fact,” the point at which bureaucratic
authority should begin, and transforming it into something without clear boundaries or basis in
real life, he destabilizes the entire concept.
While the rationalist goals of the nineteenth-century Russian bureaucracy fueled the
obsessive and pathological “return” of archive fever, the social myths of the Great Reforms era,
and its attendant enlightened bureaucrats, provoked Saltykov-Shchedrin to a different kind of
return as well. Arina may stand in as the once proud, now defunct, serf-holding landowner and
Porfirii as the enlightened bureaucrat, but Saltykov-Shchedrin’s portrayal of them is also
couched in folklore. During the Great Reform era in particular, the myths that drove the
bureaucracy, held sacred by enlightened bureaucrats, were future-oriented and focused on
171

progress. By contrast, beginning in the early nineteenth century, and continuing until its end,
there was a renewed interest in the folktale and a desire to authentically experience the story-
telling of the common Russian people [narod], from hobbyist collectors of folklore like Pushkin,
to ethnographers like Aleksandr Afanas’ev and Ivan Khudiakov.
316
That is, there was a cultural
push to attempt to return to popular narratives and ways of understanding the world rooted in the
Russian past. Saltykov-Shchedrin perpetuates the incessant, nostalgic desire to return in the act
of bureaucratic archiving but he also mimics and critiques this return by leaning into the faddish
embracing of folklore which his contemporaries, and possibly he as well, exercise in an attempt
to access a past that one might romanticize as defined by the narod.
317
In its archival practices,
the Russian bureaucracy in which he participates attempts to control for and predict the future, as
defined by its forward-looking mythologies, by “determin[ing] the structure of” its “archivable
content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.”
318
Saltykov-
Shchedrin dips, instead, into a different and similarly imperfect archive and its disparate futures
to put pressure on the emotional attachments to bureaucratic mythology and the futures it
promises, manipulates, and calls into question. By drawing on familiar myth-systems and forms,
he clarifies for his audience the ways in which the new systems and reforms recast and repeat old
harms under the veil of progress.
While the references to folklore in Gospoda Golovlevy are subtle, Saltykov-Shchedrin did
include folklore more directly in other stories and appears to be familiar with Afanas’ev. In his

316. See Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, The Russian Folktale, trans. and ed. Sibelan Forrester (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2012) for discussions of all three as collectors.

317. An appeal to folklore also may have offered its collectors certain claims to indigeneity and thus
authenticity. This kind of appeal would then lend Saltykov-Shchedrin’s critique a level of authority, at least in
certain camps. My thanks to Veli Yashin for this observation.

318. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 17.
172

collection of connected stories, История одного города [The History of a Town], published in
1870, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s townspeople spread rumors that their “новый градоначальник
совсем даже не градоначальник, а оборотень” and “он по ночам, в виде ненасытного
упыря, парит над городом и сосет у сонных обывателей кровь.”
319
While it turns out that the
governor is really a kind of automaton with a removable head, a biting critique of provincial
government in and of itself, the specific references to common folkloric monsters demonstrates
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s familiarity with the folkloric tradition and that he assumes his readership
will be familiar with this tradition as well. More specifically, in “Первое мая” [“The First of
May”] from Круглый год [The Year Round], he references a story from Afanas’ev’s collection
Народные русские сказки [Russian Fairy Tales] which was originally published between 1855
to 1864.
320
The editors to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Собрание сочинений [Collected Works] from
1972 point to the phrase “подай то, неведомо что, иди туда, неведомо куда” [give that, with
no way of knowing what, go there, with no way of knowing where] as a clear mirroring of the
title of a story that Afanas’ev includes in his multivolume collection: “Пойди туда—не зная
куда, принеси то—не знаю что” [Set Out There—Not Knowing Where, Bring That—Not
Knowing What].
321
This particular collection of folklore includes multiple Baba Yaga stories as
well as a vampire story, both of which will become relevant in his representations of Arina and
Porfirii respectively. This turn to folklore served as a kind of nostalgic return to an originary
experience of the Russian people and local forms of meaning-making. During a period in which

319. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 8, 283. “new governor was not a governor at all, but a werewolf […] and
at night he was said to hover over the town in the shape of an insatiable vampire and suck the blood of the sleeping
inhabitants.” M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The History of a Town, trans. I. P. Foote (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws,
1980), 26.

320. Propp, The Russian Folktale, 36.

321. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 765.
173

the Slavophile and Westernizer
322
debates were raging and the Russian government was adopting
reforms that many Russians at the time would attribute to European values, looking to a populist
past offered a potential challenge to the proclaimed rationality of the state. Saltykov-Shchedrin
adopts this locally based mythology in order to reveal and challenge the social myths put forward
and perpetuated by the bureaucracy, which Slavophiles, at least, might consider to be imported,
and to demonstrate the ways in which the Great Reforms and post-Great Reforms bureaucracy
simply repeated the power structures of the pre-Great Reforms nineteenth century under a
different guise.
Saltykov-Shchedrin begins his novel with these pre-Great Reforms power structures
through his portrayal of Arina. This portrayal enacts a double-return, both to the idyllic literary
estate of Sergei Aksakov and to the folkloric authenticity of the narod. In this sense, she would
be a doubly legible character to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s readership who could recognize her
characterization both as a landowning type, a type that Saltykov-Shchedrin grotesquely warps in
his novel to challenge his readers’ expectations, and as a specifically Slavic folkloric type. In

322. As the too simplifying names of each camp would suggest, the Slavophiles could be broadly described
as those “promoting Russian customs and institutions” as models and “taking an interest in Russian history, folklore,
and the philosophy of the Eastern doctors of the church” (Rabow-Edling 1), while Westernizers, in the tradition of
Peter I and European “civilization,” aimed to push Russia in the direction of their European counterparts. In
particular, Walicki identifies “the ‘idea of personality’” as “the kernel of the Westernizing system of values” which
was “first worked out by the thinkers of the Philosophical Left in the late 1830s and early ‘40s and later developed
through confrontation with the philosophy of Feuerbach” (396). However, Walicki contends that the main source of
disagreement between each camp “was not so much over the issue of personality,” despite Slavophile critiques of
rampant individualism in Europe, but rather “over the role of ‘nation’ and ‘folk,’ the national and ‘folk’ character of
literature, and the philosophical meaning of Russian history” (396-397). Westernizer values may have gone hand in
hand with the bureaucratic projects of the state, but they brought with them a paternalist judgement of Russian
backwardness. Meanwhile, Slavophilism pushed back against such paternalism but also promoted essentialist views
of what it meant to be Russian through conservative reactionism. As Michael Confino puts it, “bred by German
romanticism, they [Slavophiles] were an ensemble of organicists, conservatives, and evolutionists who explicitly
rejected the rationalism and universalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment” (29), the French Enlightenment
being, in particular, an influence on Vissarion Belinsky, one of the most influential Westernizers of the nineteenth
century (Walicki 398). See Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a
Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and Michael
Confino, Russia Before the “Radiant Future.”
174

Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and the Gentry Decline, Ani Kokobobo argues
that Saltykov-Shchedrin borrows from, but grotesques, the idealized version of the gentry estate
modelled in Aksakov’s Семейная хроника [The Family Chronicle]. Bagrovo, the estate in The
Family Chronicle, “is…a microcosm made up of its own routines and rituals” and “virtually
everything that happens in…Bagrovo is a repetition of past actions, thus lending the chronicle an
aura of mythical cyclicality that protects it from history and linear historical change.”
323
Like
Bagrovo, Golovlevo is stagnant and self-contained, but rather than representing a traditionalist
idyll, Golovlevo is a “grotesque microcosm” wherein “all emotional bonds are degraded to the
level of physical exchange,” lending it a very different, and commodified, form of cyclicality.
324

Arina is the matriarch of this microcosm and Russian readers would likely recognize her as an
uncanny version of the literary landowner that Aksakov, among others, rooted in the Russian
canon.
Arina as grotesque landowner defines her family relationships through the dominant form
of economic exchange and gains control over the enclosed world of Golovlevo primarily by
starving her family to death. Like nineteenth-century Russian women more generally, as Darra
Goldstein argues, Arina holds power over the household due to her control of the larder, which
enacts a carnivalesque flipping of the household, allowing her to take mastery over the estate.
325

Arina wields this power over her family by refusing to mete out anything but the barest scraps of
rotting food. Her first victim mentioned in the novel, Aunt Vera, “умерла ‘от умеренности’,

323. Ani Kokobobo, Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and the Gentry Decline (Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press, 2018), 82.

324. Kokobobo, 90.

325. Darra Goldstein, “Domestic Porkbarreling in Nineteenth-Century Russia, or Who Holds the Keys to
the Larder?,” in Russia—Women—Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996), 137.
175

потому что Арина Петровна корила ее каждым куском, съедаемым за обедом, и каждым
поленом дров, употребляемых для отопления ее комнаты.”
326
While moderation in Arina’s
view is economical, it also has deadly consequences in stagnant Golovlevo. She may distribute
“pieces” [kuski] to her children out of a mild sense of obligation but if, as is the case with her son
Stepan, she feels that they have surpassed their deserved allotment, she will force them into a
deadly diet like Aunt Vera’s.
It isn’t just that Arina starves her family members, however, but that, because she gains
her authority over them by doing so, she metaphorically devours them. That is, as her victims are
drained, she gains nourishment in the form of power and vitality. Jenny Kaminer points to this
exact phenomenon when she suggests that, because “Arina Petrovna fails to provide her children
with any kind of nourishment” she is instead “consuming them metaphorically.”
327
She hoards
the family’s food in the belly of the estate, the cellar, metaphorically consuming it herself and so
consuming the bodies of her family members in turn. Moving ever closer to his death, Stepan
becomes characterized by his “больной организм с удушливым кашлем, с несносною, ничем
не вызываемою одышкой с постоянно усиливающимися колотьями сердца.”
328
The state of
his body betrays the decay that he has faced, slowly wasting away from a lack of nourishment.
Then, like all the other food on the estate, he plunges into a “бесконечная пустота” [“endless

326. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 29. “had died ‘of moderation,’ because every morsel she ate at dinner
and every billet of wood used to heat her room was an object of reproach from Arina Petrovna.” Saltykov-
Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 27.

327. Jenny Kaminer, “A Mother’s Land: Arina Petrovna Golovlyova and the Economic Restructuring of
the Golovlyov Family,” The Slavic and East European Journal 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009), 556. This is not a unique
observation, and she is largely drawing on Karl D. Kramer here. See: Karl D. Kramer, “Satiric Form in Saltykov’s
Gospoda Golovlevy,” in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s ‘The Golovlyevs’: A Critical Companion, ed. I. P. Foote (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1997), 119-35.

328. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 48. “ailing body—the choking cough, the intolerable breathlessness
that suddenly came over him, the ever increasing pains in his heart.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 50.
176

void,”] much like the void of the larder containing all of the estate’s uneaten food.
329
His wasted
body becomes the rotten food that must be eaten first, before fresher food, like his siblings, can
serve as nourishment for the devouring mother.
Through her cannibalistic devouring, Arina acts out a familiar role: that of Baba Yaga.
Like Baba Yaga, as described by Vladimir Propp, Arina rides the line between generosity and
violence, this world and another. While she has the capacity to serve as a donor and aid her
children by bestowing them with kuski, she will also try to “cook and eat” any children she may
“[drag]…to her hut” or any lost children who “come to her hut as they wander.”
330
As her
children use up their kuski and lose their way in the world, they return to the estate and right into
Arina’s jaws. While she does not harness the same kind of magic as Baba Yaga in folklore,
Arina also serves as a guardian of a “boundary of…[an]other world and the entrance to it,” in
this case the larder, and it is from this other world that she gains her power and capacity to
devour.
331
Arina controls who has access to this world and who may gain from it and, by denying
the contents of this other world to her starving children, she ensures that she may hoard its life-
giving power. Furthermore, because she controls the larder so closely, she “appears as a kitchen
wizard who wields an instrument of transformation.”
332
Her male family members, following the
social conventions of the nineteenth century, either “cannot (or choose not to) understand the
skill and science underlying menial domestic tasks,” instead admiring the finished product out of
context, and so “ascribe magical powers to those who carry them out,” like Arina herself.
333
Her

329. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 49. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 51.

330. Propp, The Russian Folktale, 158.

331. Propp, 158.

332. Goldstein, “Domestic Porkbarreling,” 134.

333. Goldstein, 134.
177

control over this other world and over the magical qualities ascribed to it by those who would
dismiss certain forms of household labor lends Arina an actual kind of transformative power
over the things around her, particularly her family members whom she transforms into rotten
food.
Unlike the children in the folktales, however, Arina’s family knows what she is from the
very beginning. Not only do they refer to her as a “ведьма” [“witch”] multiple times, but her son
Stepan knows his fate before he even returns to the estate itself. As he is completing this last
return trip and contemplating the destiny that lies before him, he lingers on the thought that “эта
старуха [Арина] заест его” [“this old woman [Arina] will do for him”].
334
Even his father
Vladimir, when Stepan greets him at the estate, seems to foresee his son’s fate when he laughs
and observes that “попался к ведьме в лапы” [“the witch has got you in her clutches”] and
follows up this judgment by repeatedly exclaiming “съест! съест! съест!” [“she’ll do for you!
She’ll do for you!”] in a foreboding prediction that Stepan will soon become food himself.
335

Like the institution of serfdom, which ran on the assumption “that the peasantry constituted a
natural resource” rather than a group of individuals deserving their own rights, Arina turns
human bodies into commodities, specifically into edible commodities.
336
In the enclosed
microcosm of Golovlevo and aided by the institution of serfdom, Arina mimics the autocratic
powers and values of the tsarist government and harnesses her legally mandated authority to
maintain a deadly power structure within the estate. During the early and mid-nineteenth century,

334. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 29. Salytkov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 28. Foote’s translation really
loses the meaning and full connotation of the Russian here. “Заест” in this context could mean something like to
torment or harass but it can also mean to chew or nibble to death which has important metaphorical resonances with
Arina’s character. See Katzner, Dictionary, 650.

335. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 31. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 29. Again, Foote’s translation
leaves out crucial connotations. “Съест” would most literally translate to “she’ll eat you” in this case.

336. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government, 129.
178

“serfdom provided the nobility with a virtual monopoly of” “control of men and goods.” It was,
in particular, “the coercive authority of the state” that “stood squarely behind the nobles’
authority over their serfs” and what that authority entailed “and the state’s economic policies
consistently favored their [noble] interests.”
337
This power structure allows Arina and her
contemporary nobles to hold unapologetic command over those below her in the social
hierarchy; if she decides to distribute kuski it is supposedly because she is a benevolent ruler
willing to give everyone their deserved share, their magical object to help them on their way. The
problem with these kuski, however, is that they are not magical objects and Arina is not a donor
Baba Yaga, but rather a carnivorous one.
The majority of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel, however, does not focus solely on Arina as
despotic, serf-owning Baba Yaga, but instead on the transition from Arina to her main heir,
Porfirii. After the first part of the novel, there is a changing of the guard from a provincial
landscape defined by land and serf owners like Arina, to the post-serfdom system of zemstva
ushered in by the Liberation Statute of 1861. After abusing her power over the larder and her
family and serfs alike by transforming everything on the estate into rotten food, Arina herself is
in danger of becoming foodstuff as well. As Goldstein observes, at the point when Arina
recognizes her loss of control, she exclaims that she is “не огрызок,”
338
which Goldstein
translates as “not gnawed remains.”
339
This statement works on two metaphorical levels: Arina
attempts to deny her slow transformation into soon-to-be-devoured food but also the
transformation of the landowning class into vestiges of a past age. Arina recognizes that

337. Field, The End of Serfdom, 19-20.

338. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 60.

339. Goldstein, “Domestic Porkbarreling,” 133.
179

Porfirii’s bureaucracy becomes the force binding her power when he draws up forms for the
management of the estate and she has the sinking realization that “все эти формы не что иное,
как конституция, связывающая ее по рукам и по ногам.”
340
As the Liberation Statute and
subsequent reform measures increasingly blurred the lines that once separated landowners like
Arina from their former serfs, in this case Arina’s former foodstuff, the line between Arina and
food becomes blurred in the novel. Closer to her death, she is even described as “сварило”
[“seen off”], which would more literally be translated as “boiled” or “cooked,” as though she has
become the food she once ate.
341
Along with the blurring of Arina’s place as matriarch of
Golovlevo, there is a general blurring of class and interpersonal relationships as Porfirii engages
in a romantic relationship with their former serf Evpraksia and attempts to act on his incestuous
attraction to his niece Anninka. As the hierarchies of the household are thrown into disarray with
the transition away from serfdom and into increased provincial bureaucracy, Arina is
transformed instead of transforming and a different form of devouring monster takes her place. It
is in this context, stripped of her familiar social hierarchy and subject to increased bureaucratic
influence, that Arina’s initial gut fear of her son Porfirii becomes materially realized.
In the place of the devouring Baba Yaga—the folkloric personification of the carnivorous
serf-owning class—after 1861, Porfirii takes over the Golovlevo estate as the folkloric
personification of a vampiric bureaucracy.
342
While the jump from witch to vampire may at first

340. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 63. “these forms were nothing more than a ‘constitution’ by which she
was bound hand and foot.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 69.

341. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 138. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 159.

342. To the best of my knowledge, despite the fact that scholars often point to Porfirii’s nickname
“Bloodsucker” and his parasitic, “blood” sucking qualities, there haven’t really been any full-scale studies of him as
vampire figure, either in English or in Russian. Ilya Vinitsky does mention “the motif of Iudushka’s vampirism” but
does not develop the idea further. See Ilya Vinitsky, Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture
in the Age of Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 113. Katherine Bowers’ recent article on the
gothic elements of Gospoda Golovlevy discusses the Golovlevs as living ghosts and Ani Kokobobo interprets the
180

seem large, there is a close connection between witches and vampires in Slavic folklore. Linda
Ivanits points out that vampires were often equated to dead witches in the Russian tradition as
“‘living’ corpses that rose from the grave to inflict harm,”
343
while Afanas’ev calls attention to
the Serbian belief that vampires were the children of witches or a witch’s soul leaving her
body.
344
Although the Serbian tradition was not necessarily fully integrated into Russian folklore,
Afanas’ev helped spread it to Russia with the full publication of Поэтические воззрения славян
на природу [Poetic Views of the Slavs Regarding Nature] in 1869. Moreover, according to
Afanas’ev, in the Russian Empire, the types of people who were thought to become vampires
after death included drunkards, those cursed by their parents, and heretics.
345
Porfirii has, like
much of his family, given in to drinking; he is also cursed by his witch-mother, and, while he
perhaps does not rise to the level of heretic, he certainly does not display sincerity in his
exhibitionist piety. While Porfirii is not literally dead and therefore not literally a living corpse,
the estate is often described as feeling like a coffin, suggesting an image of Porfirii rising from
his grave every day to feed. In fact, for Porfirii, “весь мир […] есть гроб, могущий служить
лишь поводом для бесконечного пустословия” suggesting not only that Porfirii’s entire
experience of the world is coded by a kind of living death, but also that this quality is linked
directly to his empty bureaucratic chatter and its deadly consequences.
346
He only fully comes

Golovlevs as monstrous human-animal hybrids and/or automatons in Russian Grotesque Realism, but neither
scholar delves into specific folkloric connections. See Katherine Bowers, “The Fall of the House: Gothic Narrative
and the Decline of the Russian Family,” in Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism, ed.
Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 145-161.

343. Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 121.

344. Aleksandr N. Afanas’ev, “Poetic Views of the Slavs Regarding Nature,” in Vampire Lore: From the
Writings of Jan Louis Perkowski, trans. Jan L. Perkowski (Bloomington: Slavica, 2006), 198, 201.

345. Afanas’ev, 195.

346. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 119. “the whole world […] is a tomb, fit only to serve as pretext for
his endless prattling.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 136.
181

into his own in the Great Reform era when the landowning class begins to face its previously
unthinkable decline and increased bureaucratic apparatuses, and with them chatter, become the
defining metrics for social hierarchy and political control.
Arina’s devouring, and the devouring of the Russian landowner more generally, is
inherently material—a using up or withholding of resources, whether those resources be food or
people, in order to sustain their own bodily well-being and autonomy. Despite Porfirii’s
nickname, Bloodsucker, the kind of devouring in which he engages initially occurs on a different
plane despite its physical consequences. Like vampires in Russian folklore, in Jan Máchal’s
words, Porfirii begins to “[encroach]…upon the vitality of his nearest relations, causing them to
waste away and finally die.”
347
Specifically, however, he takes on the form of what Jan
Perkowski calls a “psychic” vampire, someone “who feed[s] on others emotionally” through “the
giving of gifts, seemingly through altruism, but in reality for the purpose of establishing a feeling
of obligation” in order to feed off the victim’s resulting “guilt and fear.”
348
Porfirii attempts to
hide his devouring behind his falsely intimate diminutives and made-up folk sayings
349
but his
family members remain suspicious. Whereas Arina maintained her power and devours her family
by hoarding and limiting the kuski she was willing to throw to her children and serfs, Porfirii
maintains his power by feigning generosity in the form of lavish meals while simultaneously
draining the life out of everyone around him by wearing them down with his empty chatter.

347. Jan Máchal, “Slavic Mythology,” in Vampire Lore: From the Writings of Jan Louis Perkowski, trans.
F. Krupička (Bloomington: Slavica, 2006), 75. Afanas’ev attributes this belief to peasants trying to find causes for
plagues: “since the first to be infected by a deceased person who was afflicted with the plague are those among
whom he died, it is from here that there arose the belief that vampires first kill their relatives and then their
neighbors and other inhabitants.” “Poetic Views of the Slavs,” 205.

348. Alan Dundes, The Vampire: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 173.

349. Draitser, Techniques of Satire, 114.
182

It is this emptiness that drives Porfirii’s vampiric power. Drawing on Elena Molokhovets’
1861 cookbook A Gift to Young Housewives, Goldstein explains the emptiness behind Porfirii’s
offerings as an extension of the belief that material sustenance (food) and spiritual sustenance
must go hand in hand for a family to truly receive the nourishment necessary to survive. In the
Golovlevy household, she explains, “eating is merely an empty extension of power,” rather than
a form of emotional and spiritual nourishment, leaving the family to waste away.
350
Just as the
Golovlev estate hides the emptiness of a void into which all of the characters fall like dominoes,
the food and chatter Porfirii serves his relatives hide a similar void: Porfirii himself. In an
unending attempt to fill this void, an ultimately impossible task, he primarily drains his victims
affectively, and the affective consequences of his verbiage become so extreme that they manifest
in physical form. A level of indifference or apathy codes Porfirii’s affective engagements with
the people around him that helps lend the stagnant air to Golovlevo. As Anninka observes upon
returning home, not only is it “скучно в Головлеве” but “чем дольше вы будете здесь жить,
тем будет скучнее.”
351
Porfirii adopts the stagnating approach of the bureaucratic institution,
particularly defined by its proliferation of unnecessary documentation, and applies it to the estate
in both documentary and oral form, essentially embodying the pathology of bureaucratic archive
fever. Furthermore, his own emptiness is merely a personification of the emptiness hidden
behind the formulaic prose of the bureaucratic document and, ultimately, within the dusty boxes
of the bureaucratic archive. Just as Porfirii cannot fill the void within him by harnessing chatter
to devour his family members, the bureaucrat cannot return to the origin and, even with

350. Goldstein, “Domestic Porkbarreling,” 144.

351. Saltykov-Shchedrin, СС, т. 13, 163. “boring in Golovlevo,” but “the longer you stay, the more boring
you’ll find it.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlevs, 188.
183

obsessive documentation, cannot amend the lacunae produced almost necessarily by the Russian
bureaucracy’s archival project.
In fact, the vampire figure maintains its own kind of pathological behaviors that, at best,
could find an affinity with bureaucratic work and, at worst, could exacerbate many of the habits
constituting bureaupathology. Just as Porfirii engages in the creation of hypothetical documents,
effectively expanding the bureaucratic archive by filling it with emptiness, many versions of the
Slavic vampire suggested an insatiable need to count and organize. One of the common
suggestions for escaping a vampire, according to Alan Dundes, was to block the vampire’s path
with linen or drop millet seeds in his path as “he is” then “obliged to disentangle and straighten
out the threads of the linen…or count the millet seed.”
352
There is a similar kind of obsession
driving this unnecessary ordering behavior and Porfirii’s production of useless documents. There
is no true end to this kind of counting, but the pathological bureaucrat or the vampire cannot
extract themselves from the need to do it, whether “it” is endless archiving or organizing strands
of linen. Like Porfirii, who embraces and turns the empty, pathological force of the Russian
bureaucracy upon himself after his other victims are used up, the vampire may become the
vampirized. In the absence of other victims, the vampire’s feverish need to feed would cause him
to “suck the flesh of his own breast or gnaw his own body.”
353
In the drive to get back to a kind
of originary point through document production and chatter, Porfirii manages to consume not
only his family members, but his own body.
The stagnation of Golovlevo, which has a more sinister character than the comforting
stagnant idyll of Aksakov’s family estate, and Porfirii’s deadly habits suggest that the perceived

352. Dundes, The Vampire, 28.

353. Máchal, “Slavic Mythology,” 75.
184

progress of the Great Reforms era is not moving society forward in the way it claims. Rather, the
bureaucratic reforms of the state mire the country in similar patterns of social neglect,
inefficiency, and hierarchy, but disguise these older patterns behind utopian language just as
Porfirii disguises his vampirism behind diminutives. While Aksakov’s gentry idyll played on a
nostalgia for scenes of pastoral family life, as did many other textual estates of the time like Ivan
Goncharov’s Oblomovka, the rationalist language and projects of the bureaucracy enact a kind of
nostalgia for an undefined, mythologized period of Russian greatness that plays off the Petrine
era, Nicholaevan military might and imperialist official nationality, and an imagined common
past ethnographic space. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, familiar social and cultural
mores were upended as newly emancipated serfs and their past masters now struggled to build
new forms of social, political, and economic relationships outside of the given structure of
serfdom. It makes sense that just as the estate, as an institution, was beginning to crumble, the
gentry in particular might feel a romanticized “longing for home…that no longer exists or
perhaps has never existed,” and perhaps even a need to rebuild this mythical home.
354
And while
the estate was certainly a historical fact of nineteenth-century life, its affective attachments and
social implications reflected the kinds of mythos built up around the estate as shown in the
literature of writers like Aksakov and Goncharov. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s version of the estate in
Gospoda Golovlevy plays into the familiar stagnant temporality of both estate mythology and
nostalgia, but his folkloric returns to the past reveal the dark underbelly of many of the nostalgic
attachments of his contemporaries, which, were in turn influencing the decisions made around
bureaucratic reform.

354. Boym, Common Places, 284.
185

In the Russian case, however, this kind of totalizing rebuilding is complicated by the fact
that part of this nostalgia is based on Russia as a “civilized,” European power, an identificatory
alliance that shuts out even the non-essentialist and non-nationalist Slavophile views of Russian
culture and identity. That is, given the nineteenth-century debates over the place and attachments
of Russian identity, holding Russia up as a European power takes a stand on the side of the
debate that tends to belittle Russia’s other-than-European qualities rather than simply pointing to
the problematics of Slavophile reactionism. The question of bureaucratic reform as a means of
return accesses the prospective qualities of nostalgia that then go on to “have a direct impact on
the realities of the future,”
355
but, under the cover of looking to the future and moving forward,
the utopianism of these reforms is actually directed sideways.
356
It posits the Enlightenment era
of European civilization as a future period that Russia should have already reached but didn’t, so
that the vision of a future civilized Russia rests in a time period and imported cultural construct
that is at once past and future as well as noticeably absent in the present. Nostalgia for a period
of Russia as great, civilized power, and the future-oriented desire to return to this perhaps
partially imagined period through bureaucratic reform, posits Russia as a country that must also
repudiate locally constructed cultural and political ideals. It is a kind of nostalgia that looks back
to a utopian, but imported, “home.”
While Slavophilism, in reaction to Westernizing influences, adopted a “utopian notion of
Russian virtues rooted in the past and preserved in the peasantry” in order to access a different
kind of nostalgic past, this kind of essentialist Russian nostalgia became especially weaponized

355. Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 8.

356. Boym, 9.
186

in the Great-Reforms era.
357
Slavophilism may have rested on problematic beliefs steeped in
ethnographic stereotypes, but after 1861 “this static, peaceful unity gradually gave way to Pan-
Slavism, a more aggressive, militaristic idea that Russia would be the savior of a decaying
West.”
358
While there was certainly continuity between Slavophilism, what Walicki calls
“classical Slavophilism”
359
and Pan-Slavism, as Burry and Orr clearly state, there was a
noticeable distinction between these sets of beliefs. Slavophiles did share similar reactionary
essentialist and nationalist beliefs as Pan-Slavists, but the inward-looking democratic quality that
Walicki and Burry and Orr locate in Slavophilism morphs into a more imperial impulse. As a
privileged example, Burry and Orr point to the support of Pan-Slavists in the mid-1870s for the
idea “that the divine Russian mission justified force in the Ottoman Empire to support the
struggle of Orthodox Slavs against the Turks.”
360
Similarly, Richard S. Wortman points to the
rise of Pan-Slavism and, with it, a more robust commercial press, as pushing the “sentiment for
Russian intervention [against the Turks],” which “embraced a broad spectrum of Russian society,
from the empress, the heir, and figures in the court, to revolutionaries who sympathized with the
democratic aspirations of the Balkan peoples.”
361
While on the surface such support could take

357. Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh Orr, “The Railway and the Elemental Force: Slavophilism, Pan-
Slavism, and Apocalyptic Anxieties in Anna Karenina,” in Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of
Realism, eds. Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 71. It is worth
noting that unlike Walicki and, as she herself claims, “the general view,” Rabow-Edling does not see Slavophilism
as utopic, but rather “as an attempt to solve an identity crisis among Russian intellectuals” that therefore cannot be
seen “as an escape from reality.” See Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought, 2. However, I would argue that
Slavophilism, at least in its broad understanding, fits very well with Boym’s idea of utopian nostalgia which comes
out of a collective yearning for a common place and which “puts the emphasis on the return to that mythical place
on the island of Utopia where the ‘greater patria’ has to be rebuilt, according to ‘its original authentic design.’” See
Boym, Common Places, 284.

358. Burry and Orr, 71.

359. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 237.

360. Burry and Orr, “The Railway and the Elemental Force,” 72.

361. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the
Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 229.
187

on the air of a humanitarian mission, perhaps similar to the paternalist policies of Westernizers,
the call for direct military action more accurately relied on a desire to colonize, particularly in
the views of the more extreme proponents of Pan-Slavism like Fedor Dostoevsky.
362
This
increased tie to imperialism certainly lends credence to Svetlana Boym’s contention that “the
more rapid and sweeping the pace and scale of modernization, the more conservative and
unchangeable the new traditions tend to be.”
363
Great Reforms era Russian society turned back to
nostalgic mythological pasts, both in planning their bureaucratic modernization and in resisting
it. Regardless of which side of the debate one chose, Saltykov-Shchedrin seems to say, these
mythological pasts are rooted in totalizing power structures, whether these power structures
come in the form of literal autocracy, the knowledge systems of the Enlightenment, or imperialist
pan-Slavism under the guise of the communal narod.
While Saltykov-Shchedrin would likely not recognize these patterns of thinking as
“myths” per se, his presentation of the Golovlev family at least suggests some recognition of the
emotional and illogical drive behind them. It is through a different kind of mythological
thinking, then, that Saltykov-Shchedrin reveals these flawed patterns and the problems they
cause. That is, the ways in which Saltykov-Shchedrin saw inefficient paperwork leading to real
bodily harm becomes metaphorized in Porfirii as folkloric, bureaucratic monster. Just as some of
the reforms, or at least how they were handled, created real bodily consequences for peasants and
ex-serfs, Porfirii’s bureaucratic speech and documentary overproduction contribute to the

362. For very clear support of the imperialist Pan-Slavism project see Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s
Diary: Volume Two 1877-1881, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 1207-1208.
In particular: “How can Russia participate in the ownership of Constantinople on an equal basis with the Slavs if
Russia in every respect is unequal to them…?...Constantinople must be ours, conquered by us, the Russians, from
the Turks, and it must remain ours forever…and when we possess it, of course, we can admit all the Slavs and
whomever we like” (1208).

363. Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” 14.
188

profound sense of stagnation that all of the characters associate with Golovlevo and the actual
death of his family members. Porfirii as ex-bureaucrat embodies a warped or intensified version
of a typical civil servant trope that begins at least as early as the late eighteenth century and that
bridges national divides. The trope of the inefficient or ineffectual bureaucrat figures in literary
characters from Balzac’s ensemble in Les Employés and Gogol’’s Akakii Akakievich to
Huysmans’ ennui-ridden Jean Folantin to the absurd bureaucratic structures and their enactors in
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Kafka’s The Trial and on into the present. Saltykov-
Shchedrin adopts this trope, echoing his progenitors and successors in the bureaucratic “genre,”
so to speak, but twists it into a natively Russian figure that echoes both the generalities of the
trope and the particulars of the Great Reform era and Russian folklore. He adopts both elements
of historical realism and of grotesquerie to bend this trope into something at once familiar and
profoundly unsettling. Porfirii is not necessarily incompetent in the sense that Saltykov-
Shchedrin encounters in under-educated civil servants in the provinces who struggle with civil
service work through no fault of their own but rather due to a lack of resources. Rather, he is
ineffectual because his behavior goes beyond the ignorance of an ill-prepared bureaucrat who
cannot keep up with an inefficient and confusing system to become dangerously pathological.
By adopting his actual experience of bureaucratic labor in order to warp the typical
bureaucratic trope of the inveterate civil servant into something dark and potentially even deadly
in the figure of Porfirii, Saltykov-Shchedrin goes beyond the typical satirical jab at the average
civil servant into a critique of the bureaucracy as a system. That is, when presenting Arina and
Porfirii as detestable characters who effectively destroy their entire family, Saltykov-Shchedrin
is offering them up as the consequences of the systems, serfdom and bureaucracy respectively,
that made them. The novel is not merely an examination of the Russian family, but a biting
189

critique of the larger historical forces that cause not only familial crises, but also political,
economic, and much broader social crises as well. By shifting power from Arina to Porfirii but
keeping the effects of their control, the death of their family, the same, Saltykov-Shchedrin
suggests that the problems of the pre-reform bureaucracy only presaged an equally and similarly
problematic reform and post-reform system. Despite any promises the reforms and attendant
enlightened bureaucrats might have made about the power of bureaucracy to lift the provinces
out of a stereotypical idea of “backwardness,” the same kinds of problems that Saltykov-
Shchedrin tracks in his pre-reforms paperwork continue into the reform era at least in kind if not
in form. The zemstva’s focus on gentry issues, which increased the separation between the
peasant and gentry classes, and the new code of government regulation served to increase
bureaucratic oversight, inefficiency, and control outside of urban centers.
364
While Yaney,
perhaps too intensely, laments “a naked bureaucracy confronting a helpless society head on,”
365

Heide Whelan does confirm that the sudden shift to a reorganized, post-serfdom system created
problems for serfs and landowners alike, especially because landowners quickly became
outnumbered in the bureaucratic administration by non-landowning officials.
366

While under serfdom the political system and its agents used serfs as commodities with
the frequent result of their wasting away, in the Great Reforms era the state seemed to present the
Russian people with generous offerings: the end of serfdom, the creation of local political
representation in the form of volosti and zemstva, reforms aimed to improve living conditions
and criminal justice. However, while these offerings appeared satiating and magnanimous at

364. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 232, 233.

365. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government, 239.

366. Whelan, Alexander III & the State Council, 199.
190

their outset, like Porfirii’s chatter and meals they obscured a dangerous emptiness. The
Liberation Statute of 1861 may have freed serfs from their dehumanizing servitude, but it didn’t
necessarily improve their lot. After 1861, ex-serfs “received less land than they had used before
their liberation” and had to pay for its use.
367
In 1886 the government did implement redemption
payments that peasants would pay to eventually gain full ownership of this land, but they were
not meant to take ownership until 1931; about a decade later, this date was pushed back to the
1950s. It was only under the threat of peasant revolt in the early 1900s that “the government
finally cancel[led] all redemption payments” and “by that time, a third of the peasants’ land still
lay fallow each year,” maintaining high levels of poverty among liberated ex-serfs and their
descendants who, as such, did not gain any social mobility with their newfound freedom.
368

Similarly, the zemstva remained largely dominated by gentry issues, as mentioned above, and
during the 1870s when Saltykov-Shchedrin was beginning to publish pieces of Gospoda
Golovlevy, “the institutions of civic society that the Great Reforms had tried to create on the
local level had been kept firmly subordinate to the government and its bureaucracy,” so that,
despite all the talk of reform, the power of the Russian state was still rooted largely in ineffective
bureaucratic proliferation.
369

Through the violent actions of Arina and Porfirii, Saltykov-Shchedrin highlights these
kinds of bodily consequences produced by both serfdom and bureaucracy alike if in different
ways. At multiple points in his reports in Tver’, Saltykov-Shchedrin mentions prisoners who
have, due to incompetence or inefficiency on the part of local government and its bureaucratic

367. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 89.

368. Lincoln, 90.

369. Lincoln, 157, 158.
191

structures, been in limbo for long periods of time simply waiting for processing or some other
form of paperwork to be completed. In many of his reports on county courts, he takes specific
note of how many cases remain incomplete due to inefficiency or corruption. For example, in a
report from October 4, 1860, he identifies the following stalled cases in one location:
“уголовных — 4, гражданских — 6; за другими местами: уголовных — 21, гражданских —
11 и распорядительных — 4” [“criminal – 4, civil – 6; in other places: criminal – 21, civil – 11
and administrative – 4”].
370
He attributes these particular cases to a lack of necessary local
staffing in the court, observing that “в суде только двух членов очень много” and,
consequently, “часто долгое время невозможно составить полного присутствия, и дела
должны лежать без движения.”
371
It is a bureaucratic failure, although in this case not a
malicious one, that produces actual miscarriages of justice. Saltykov-Shchedrin, however, clearly
ties together the compounding effects of inefficiency, unintentional or otherwise, and blatant
corruption in other places. In a report on the Ves’egonskii zemstvo court, he bluntly observes that
“oбщий характер деятельности весьегонского земского суда по производству
следственных и судебно-полцейских дел заключается в непростительной медлительности,
вред которой нередко увеличивается еще злоупотребительными и произвольными
действиями.”
372
In this statement, Saltykov-Shchedrin directly addresses the material
connection between corrupt policing and inefficient bureaucracy. At a time when an attempt to
address commitments to rationality entailed a national shift from proizvol to zakonnost’

370. Zhuravlev, “М. Е. Салтыков-Щедрин—ревизор,” 166.

371. “there are very often only two members in the court” and, consequently, “it is often impossible to have
the court fully present, and cases must lie without movement.” Zhuravlev, 166.

372. “the overall character of the functioning of the Ves’egonskii zemstvo court in closing investigatory and
judicial-police cases is inexcusable slowness, the harm of which is quite often yet increased with abusive and
arbitrary force.” Zhuravlev, 175.
192

Saltykov-Shchedrin’s identifications of proizvol at its lowest, local level belied the supposed
project of fact-based bureaucracy and rational procedure. These identifications also suggest that
despite the indecipherability of the bureaucratic archive and its overwhelming flow of
documents, Saltykov-Shchedrin did not forget about the fleshy fodder of bureaucratic
incompetence. Although his attempts to root out proizvol and incompetency in his reports seem
to engage in a myth-busting project, his reports are also part of the bureaucratic project and their
mere creation helps to fuel a sense that bureaucratic proliferation is necessary and will,
eventually, fulfill its promises.
The backing of all of the supposedly generous offerings of the reforms, much like
Porfirii’s putative largesse, is really the empty chatter of bureaucratic documents and the all but
endless archive necessary to contain them. As with Porfirii’s chatter, which fills ears, time, and
the stagnant space of Golovlevo, the bureaucratic archive boasts a kind of empty fullness. While
revizory like Saltykov-Shchedrin filled the central bureaux with more paperwork than they could
realistically handle, this paperwork created an emptiness at the center of the archive as it
replicated unfillable gaps in documentation that undermined the fact-finding missions meant to
undergird these rationalist humanitarian reforms in the first place. In the obsessive collecting of
these empty documents, the bureaucratic archive and its agents enact a kind of death drive
wherein they destroy their own archives upon their conception, and as a condition of their
conception, thereby rendering the supposed project of fact-based reform largely moot. By
reproducing the lacunae emerging from the bureaucratic system’s own undereducation and
corruption, the state archive functions like the death drive, “with a view to effacing its own
‘proper’ traces,” and so “it [here: the bureaucracy] devours it [here: the archive] even before
193

producing it on the outside.”
373
That is, like Porfirii as folkloric vampire, the bureaucracy also
turns upon itself and adopts the empty chatter of documentary production as a means of gnawing
its own flesh. The repetition that “remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death
drive” constitutes a key element of any auditing process, and in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s paperwork
it manifests itself both in the act of auditing and in the style of writing that repeats its own
structure ad nauseum.
374
This act of obsessive repetition, which bears out the desires of the state,
takes over and devours Porfirii’s life and the lives of those around him just as the
bureaupathological death drive of the state devours its own archive upon which it aims to build
its utopian hopes for a mythological Russian future. It is this repetition that keeps Porfirii and the
bureaucracy going, but also simultaneously destroys them. It is only in breaking the repetition
that it at once falls apart and ceases its own destruction. At the end of the novel, Porfirii stops his
own archival fever when he looks back over his hand in Arina’s death and begins to turn,
seemingly sincerely, to God for forgiveness. He is compelled, in the middle of the night, to visit
Arina’s grave to atone for his sins but he freezes to death on the way there. By disavowing the
authority over the estate that gave him his deadly power, Porfirii disavows the authority of the
bureaucracy, and the entire thing falls apart. So too does the violent hold of Golovlevo on the
family as a whole.
It is, thus, in his circulated fictional work that Saltykov-Shchedrin pushes back against
the myths and the self-destructive writing habits that he cannot effectively challenge in his
bureaucratic work, despite its promises. He puts the different attempts at impossible return, to a
civilized Enlightenment or to an essentialist pan-Slavic past, in conversation with each other in

373. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 14.

374. Derrida, 14.
194

Gospoda Golovlevy by collapsing them into each other. He adopts the contemporary turn to
popular Slavic mythology to reveal the social myths, based both in the Russian tradition and in
imported ones, that undergird this turn to the past and the drive for bureaucratic reformation,
both of which are coded through future-oriented nostalgia. In the collapsing of these myth
systems, which overlap in the figures of Arina and Porfirii, he uncovers the new “monsters” of
the nineteenth century by conflating them with the old folkloric monsters of the past and then
with each other: meet the new bureaucratic boss, same as the old gentry boss. That is, he tells his
readers that they have the potential to recognize the kinds of arbitrary power that are forming in
the Great Reform era because they aren’t that different from the kinds of arbitrary power that
have come before, whether real or imagined. Arina and Porfirii, landowner and witch, bureaucrat
and vampire, are certainly distasteful characters, but they are also products of the systemic social
backgrounds from which they emerge. As such, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s critique reflects back onto
the structures that produced them: serfdom, represented by the estate, and bureaucracy,
represented by European modernity. In this reflection he directly opens the question of
bureaucratic authority, an authority that is tied inescapably to the archive and its arkhe. Without
the archive, the bureaucracy does not exist. It is made up of the documentary chatter that at once
establishes and undermines its authority and the authority that backs it. The Russian bureaucracy
can perhaps locate its authority in the tension of its national identity crisis that produces its
archive: a tension between so-called Western influence and the cultural touchstone of autocracy.
But just as Porfirii freezes to death when he lays the question of himself and the higher authority
of God at his own feet, alone, as the last patriarch in the direct Golovlev line, as the arbiter of
bureaucratic and archival authority on the estate, and as the last patriarch resident of the main
195

domicile of the novel, to push too hard at this question of bureaucratic authority is to risk
undoing it.

196

Chapter 4 : “Non comme homme de lettres, mais comme ‘rond-de-cuir:’” Bureaucratic
Modernity in Joris-Karl Huysmans
At the Archives Nationales’ (AN) Pierrefitte-sur-Seine location, the curious scholar may
request large boxes of paper piles from the Sûreté Générale. Due to the papers’ age, the edges
have often started to crumble so that even removing and cycling through the papers carefully
causes small pieces of yellowed debris to break off and fall into the bottom of the box. In such a
mass, each mummified remain appears inconsequential, but each page bears with it a singularity
that becomes buried in the national archival attic. Like the bureaucrat himself, in this case Joris-
Karl Huysmans, who remains impossible to find among his countless peers, each page is only
searchable en masse and only locatable by serendipity. Even without seeing the many boxes in
the archive, the weight of these masses looms heavy over the alienatingly large and aggressively
contemporary reading room. In the one small box of decaying paper, the task of finding seems
insurmountable and the task of searching seems unending. Despite Huysmans’ prominence as a
fiction writer, looking for his traces in the AN becomes an exercise in frustration. He was too
low-ranking to feature prominently in any bureaucratic archive despite having an archive
dedicated to his fictional and personal work in the Lambert collection at the Bibliothèque de
l’Arsenal (Arsenal), one of the branches of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). In order
to find anything in the AN, one must search in masses, and singular persons, even notable ones
like Huysmans, will likely not be found by searching in masses. It is against this anonymous
monotony of the bureaucratic archive, and the labor and documents that constitute it, that
Huysmans positions his fictional work and literary career, despite his complicity in producing
this selfsame archive.
197

Huysmans and his contemporaries certainly experienced the anonymizing force of
bureaucratic documentation when his superiors in the bureaucracy attempted to honor his
bureaucratic achievements, despite his renown as a literary author and his personal and literary
critiques of bureaucratic work, by awarding him the croix de chevalier of the Légion d’honneur
in 1893. The reaction to this recognition of Huysmans’ bureaucratic work reveals that the tension
between the two sides of his authorship, literary and bureaucratic, undermined and grotesqued
his position as celebrated writer, at least in the eyes of his sympathetic literary contemporaries.
In a congratulatory letter, Dr. Henri Benjamin applauds Huysmans’ reception of the award but
does so only “en exprimant le regret que ce soit le fonctionnaire et non l’homme de lettres qu’on
a récompense.”
375
While the Légion d’honneur may have theoretically been a boon for a lifetime
employé and while Huysmans may have appreciated the recognition, it may not have helped him
manage his disdain for his bureaucratic work to know that he received the award, as his friend
Jean de Caldain puts it, “non comme homme de lettres, mais comme ‘rond-de-cuir.’”
376
That
Caldain resorts to a caricatured description of the typical bureaucrat himself suggests just how
much the focus of the award undermined his contemporaries’ ideas about what constituted a
proper writer and what constituted the scribbling employé. In the awarding of the croix de
chevalier, and the long years spent in his repetitive career, Huysmans becomes reduced to a
caricature “du vieil employé célibataire,” as Caldain describes Huysmans’ character Jean
Folantin.
377
His individuality, his affective
378
experience, and his non-bureaucratic writing

375. “by expressing regret that it would be the fonctionnaire and not the man of letters that we reward.”
Docteur Henri Benjamin à Joris-Karl Huysmans, 7 July 1893, Ms Lambert, 29: 109, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

376. “not as a man of letters, but as a ‘rond-de-cuir’ [pen-pusher].” Jean de Caldain, Étude biographique
sur J.-K. Huysmans, Manuscrit autographe, Ms Lambert 91 (3): 4, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

377. “of the old bachelor employé.” Caldain, Ms Lambert 91 (3): 21.

198

become lost behind the image of the “rond-de-cuir,” and he becomes reduced to a stereotypical
mockery of himself, one used across national boundaries to satirize bureaucrats throughout the
nineteenth century.
This generalizing and caricaturizing phrase, through which Huysmans and his colleagues
are reduced to two-dimensional versions of themselves, takes on a more grotesque meaning at
second glance. While rond-de-cuir refers derogatorily to an ineffectual pen-pusher, it also
designates a leather pillow meant to relieve pain from hemorrhoids. In the late nineteenth
century, the connection to a cushion as well as a fonctionnaire was consistent, but this cushion
was not always tied to hemorrhoids. Pierre Larousse suggests that the nickname comes from the
“rond de cuir du fauteuil sur lequel ils [fonctionnaires] passent leur vie” in the Grand
dictionnaire universel published between 1866 and 1877.
379
In an article written by Hector
Pessard in the June 15, 1888 issue of Le Gaulois, he writes about “[un] Monsieur Chauve,
380

assis sur un rond de cuir” while acting in his administrative capacity.
381
As early as 1841, Balzac
drew a connection between the bureau, a rond-de-cuir (in this case a rond-en-maroquin),
indigestion, and hemorrhoids. In Physiologie de l’employé, he describes a scene where “au

378. As Ben Anderson defines it, affective atmospheres “are singular affective qualities that emanate from
but exceed the assembling of bodies” (80). In the case of Huysmans’ oeuvre and the affective crisis at the end of the
nineteenth century, it is the assembling of bodies and writing into and around bureaux that produce the “singular
affective qualities” that exceed the strictly physical realities of bureaucratic labor. The rationality that proponents of
bureaucracy often try to attach to it attempts to foreclose on affect as a supposedly necessary measure for abolishing
arbitrary and subjective forces from governance. In the dry language of the bureaucratic document, such a project
may even seem successful on the surface. However, as Huysmans’ work helps to reveal, affect is very much at play
in every level of bureaucratic endeavor and in the commitment to rationality. See Ben Anderson, “Affective
Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space, and Society 2, no. 2 (December 2009), 77-81.

379. “rond de cuir of the armchair on which they [fonctionnaires] spend their life.” Pierre Larousse, Grand
dictionnaire universel: Français, historique, géographique, biographique, mythologique, bibliographique, littéraire,
artistique, scientifique, etc. (Paris: Administration du grand dictionnaire universel, 1866-1877), 1793.

380. “Chauve” means bald or barren so there is another potential subtext planted in this name.

381. “[a] Monsieur Chauve, seated on a rond de cuir.” Hector Pessard, “Une grande première: l’ouverture
de la pêche,” Gaulois (Paris), June 15, 1888.
199

bureau, il a un fauteuil de canne, percé au milieu du siège, ou garni d’un rond en maroquin vert,
à cause de ses hémorrhoïdes [sic]” and the employé in question “se plaint de ses digestions.”
382

This derogatory term, then, goes from the relatively innocuous suggestion of inefficiency to a
grotesquely metonymizing reference to the employé’s body and the extension of that body to
include the objects in the bureau. Not only does the employé always use a rond-de-cuir of some
sort, he is a rond-de-cuir—an object meant to be sat on for the comfort of those above it and an
object, in particular, with associations to the “low” and unhygienic parts of the human body.
Huysmans suffered from digestive ailments for much of his life, but, regardless of their
actual medical cause, they are implicitly interpellated by and associated with his bureaucratic
position when Caldain applies the term rond-de-cuir to him. In the nineteenth century as today,
hemorrhoids were associated with both a sedentary lifestyle and with straining during bowel
movements.
383
The application of the term rond-de-cuir to employés and fonctionnaires focuses
on the physical act of sitting and implies an inherent pathology to Huysmans’ labor with the
suggestion that working in the bureau is akin to and inseparable from inactivity and, furthermore,
to living with hemorrhoids. The objectifying nature of the insult reveals the affective quality of
anti-fonctionnarisme
384
during the end of the century and earlier critiques of the bureaucracy,

382. “at the bureau,” a bureaucrat has “a cane armchair, pierced in the middle of the seat, or decorated with
a green rond en maroquin, because of his hemorrhoids.” “complains about his digestion.” Honoré de Balzac,
Physiologie de l’employé (Paris: Aubert, 1841), 87. It’s worth noting that while Balzac himself does not use the
exact phrase “rond-de-cuir” here, Thuillier transposes “rond en maroquin” as “rond de cuir” in “Sur la vie
quotidienne des bureaux de ministère au XIXe Siècle.” While this quotation is technically incorrect, it does convey
the same meaning, more or less, without the added detail that the leather is of Moroccan origin, which carries with it
interesting associations for those invested in France’s colonial activities and the administration that accompanied
those activities. See Guy Thuillier, “Sur la vie quotidienne des bureaux de ministère au XIXe siècle,” La Revue
administrative 161 (Sept.-Oct. 1974), 426.

383. Almire Lepelletier, Des hémorroïdes et de la chute du rectum (Paris: Germer-Baillière, 1834), 22-23.

384. Paul Sager helpfully defines the term “fonctionnarisme” in the following way: “alternatively
signifying the tendency for the number of state employees to grow, the predisposition of families and youth to aim
for careers in state employment, the propensity for state administrators to acquire an increasing amount of power in
society, and the state’s tendency to control more and more institutions to the detriment of individual
200

including Huysmans’ own. (One could perhaps even make the case of a graphic metaphor around
struggling to produce shit, but I won’t belabor the point). While there were critiques of the
bureaucracy from every political corner in the late nineteenth century, ostensibly for different
reasons and to different ends, Luc Rouban suggests that the complaints of an excess of
fonctionnaires were not often based on actual fact.
385
That is, the complaints may have been
valid in principle, but the driving force behind them seemed to be affective. There is a level of
disgust in this term, rond-de-cuir, but also in the more political complaints levelled against the
bureaucracy. Novelists like Émile Gaboriau described bureaux with “l’air nauséabond de
l’hôpital” that “soulève l’estomac”
386
while political critics like Jules Guesde spoke of employés
as “inclassables” [“unclassifiable”] with “dents longues” [“long teeth”] turning against their
“propre classe” [“own class”] whom they “dévorée du coup” [“devoured as a result”].
387
Rouban
also acknowledges the common trope of calling fonctionnaires “le parasitisme social” [“social
parasitism”].
388
The “outrageous claim for desirability” of the stable and salaried bureaucratic
position in the face of a hostile social and political public creates an atmosphere in which the
French citizen “cannot possibly remain indifferent” in the face of not just the bureaucracy as a

liberty…Another very common usage connotes qualities commonly ascribed to stereotypical bureaucrats who
appear hidebound, uncreative, unresponsive, and insensitive to the public’s needs.” He also addresses the fears he
associates with critics of fonctionnarisme which are: “the fear of a corrupted political system wastefully or
fraudulently creating public-sector jobs where they were not needed, and the fear of a public culture that denigrated
careers in commerce, industry, and agriculture and exaggerated the allure of state employment.” See Paul Sager, “A
Nation of Functionaries, a Colony of Functionaries: The Antibureaucratic Consensus in France and Indochina, 1848-
1912,” French Historical Studies 39, no. 1 (Feb. 2016), 150.

385. Luc Rouban, “Le nombre des fonctionnaires: Le débat autour du fonctionnarisme (1877-1914),”
Revue française d'administration publique 135, no. 3 (2010), 587.

386. “the foul smell of a hospital” that “upsets the stomach.” Émile Gaboriau, Les gens de bureau (E.
Dentu, 1874), 235.

387. Jules Guesde, “Fonctionnarisme obligatoire,” in Le socialisme au jour le jour (Paris: V. Giard and E.
Brière, 1899), 478-479.

388. Rouban, “Le nombre des fonctionnaires,” 593.
201

whole, but also the individual employé or fonctionnaire.
389
What is missing here, however, is the
affective and bodily experience of the bureaucrat himself, which becomes so reduced to
caricature, objectified, and generalized in the term rond-de-cuir, that it almost becomes a non-
entity or non-question. The contemporary anti-fonctionnarisme critic, in caricaturing the
fonctionnaire as a disgusting general type, loses sight of something like Huysmans’ specific
digestive and affective struggles as they related to the bureaucracy and his engagement with his
work, bureaucratic and otherwise. The term rond-de-cuir, in reflecting the affective dimension of
bureaucracy’s critics, also turns the bureaucrat’s body into a grotesquely mundane object that is
meant to mirror the grotesquely mundane reality of bureaucratic work. The contemporary anti-
fonctionnarisme critic, in caricaturing the fonctionnaire as a disgusting general type, reflects the
ennui and disgust of Huysmans back at him and contributes to a shared affective atmosphere that
ultimately stems from the bureaucratic habits that have leaked out to code all of modern living.
In this period of anti-fonctionnarisme, the physical body of the employé becomes bound up with
the psychological state of the nation as a larger shared body.
In his article “Writing Fonctionnaires, Functions of Narrative,” Dean de la Motte presents
the ways in which bureaucratic writing influenced fictional writing in the nineteenth century,
including in Huysmans’ work, and attributes nineteenth-century “fictional bureaucratic
characters and narratives” to “a more general crisis of representation (in both the political and
mimetic sense of the word).”
390
However, I would also like to attribute this kind of writing, and
the collapse of fictional writing and bureaucratic writing into each other, to a crisis of affect. This
crisis of affect in the nineteenth century, which for Huysmans largely signifies ennui and disgust

389. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 335, 336.

390. Dean de la Motte, “Writing Fonctionnaires, Functions of Narrative,” L’Esprit créateur 34, no. 1
(1994), 22.
202

but which other contemporaries may term the mal du siècle or pessimisme, is specifically
connected to the modern biopolitical state where, through bureaucratic structures, material life
and textual life overlap in ways that define both as meaningless creations of “fonctionnaires sans
function” [“fonctionnaires without function”].
391
Through his fictional and bureaucratic
production, Huysmans reveals the closed loop of bureaucratic biopolitics and policing whereby
he, and the bureaucracy more generally, produce the very bodies and material he polices, just as
he himself is caught, materialized, objectified, and reduced both by his bureaucratic labor and by
caricatured or official depictions of the employé or fonctionnaire. That is, Huysmans both
represents and experiences a hybridity between the bodily and the textual that characterizes the
bureaucratic French state and seeps out to code all of life and living in modernity.
Part of the problem in trying to get at the individualized experience of the bureaucrat is
that histories of the bureaucracy are often written officially through bureaucratic bodies
themselves. While there are historical treatments of other bureaucratic periods in French
history,
392
the period from 1870 to 1900 is largely only covered through articles about
fonctionnarisme that fail to delve into the details of the experience of working in a bureaucratic
position or through literary, often satirical, sources like Huysmans’ novels that might provide
some valuable insight into the realities of the bureau but that also do not meet the same criteria
for objectivity and evidence that academic historical works might.
393
Huysmans’ paperwork,

391. De la Motte, 25.

392. See in particular Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York:
Zone Books, 2012) and Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770-
1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

393. Although Thuillier’s article “Sur la vie quotidienne des bureaux de Ministère au XIXe siècle” does
deal with the daily realities of bureaucrats during this time period, the sources he cites fall into the latter category of
fictionalized sources. For example, he draws upon Gaboriau’s satirical novel Les gens de bureau for a lot of the
details around the physical state of bureaux in the late nineteenth century. He also draws on sources that are,
themselves, bureaucratic documents.
203

diaries, and fiction give a personalized view into bureaucratic work and help define the affective
attachments of this kind of work in ways that histories often do not. Despite the potential pitfalls
of adopting fictional sources as historical evidence, the combination of officialized histories and
external anti-fonctionnarisme critiques mean that fictionalized versions of the bureaucracy are
potentially the only ones without consistent, clearly defined vested interests in promoting certain
kinds of stories about the bureaucracy. Huysmans however is caught in between.
Often the sources we, as scholars, may designate as objective, in terms of gathering
information like increases in population or, more specifically, fonctionnaires, are the
bureaucratic institutions themselves. Ian Hacking traces the rise of statistics and its link to
bureaucratic bodies in the early nineteenth century, pointing to the “avalanche of printed
numbers that occurred throughout Europe”
394
and that presaged and made possible the French
“bureaucracy during the Napoleonic era which at the top was dedicated to innovative statistical
investigations, but which in the provinces more often perpetuated pre-revolutionary structures
and classifications.”
395
Questions of population, birth and death rate, and as Hacking particularly
highlights, rates of suicide fell to bureaucratic bodies, and still do, and so it is to these bodies that
one must turn for at least certain forms of statistical analysis, including statistical analysis related
directly to the bureaucracy itself. As Hacking’s description of the Napoleonic French
bureaucracy suggests, however, such statistics are neither objective nor harmless. Drawing on
Michel Foucault, he demonstrates the connections between bureaucratic statistics and
biopolitical state projects throughout his book The Taming of Chance. Considering bureaucratic
institutions as the most reliable sources for gathering this kind of information suggests that

394. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 35-36.

395. Hacking, 16.
204

histories of bureaucracy cannot even pretend at objectivity because they are ultimately defined
by bureaucratic institutions themselves and spurred on by biopolitical forms of state control.
Huysmans’ fictional work exists as a biased snapshot of bureaucratic life as an employé rather
than a broad history or analysis of bureaucracy and its development or even the everyday
experience of bureaucracy on a wider, more generalized scale. However, his personal experience
and complicity in biopolitical state projects and their institutional products, particularly given his
role in the Sûreté Générale, also ties him to larger questions around policing and the affective
side of biopolitics that bureaucratic statistics cannot quite reflect.
Huysmans’ depictions of civil servants drew heavily from his own experiences as a low-
level state bureaucrat. These experiences can offer what statistics and official histories of the
bureaucracy cannot: a more individualized picture of bureaucratic labor as an affective affair.
Huysmans spent about thirty years of his life, from 1866 to 1898, working in the civil service. He
began his career in the Ministry of the Interior in 1866 at the level of employé de sixième classe
earning 1500 francs per year.
396
Other than a brief position in the Garde Nationale Mobile of the
Seine
397
and the “Ministry of War as an invoicing clerk” during the Franco-Prussian War,
398

Huysmans maintained his position in the Ministry of the Interior until 1876, when he requested a
location transfer and was given a position at the Sûreté Générale where he remained for the rest
of his civil service career.
399
Primarily working as a rédacteur, Huysmans was responsible for

396. Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2006), 31.

397. Baldick, 40

398. Baldick, 48

399. Baldick, 55-56
205

producing various documents related to the bureau’s social and governmental responsibilities,
which, in the Sûreté Générale, meant paperwork related to policing and surveillance.
In his transfer to the Sûreté Générale office in the rue des Saussaies, Huysmans moved to
an office environment that contemporaries considered “over-crowded, squalid, depressing,
malodorous, and unhygienic.”
400
Beyond Huysmans’ affective and physical complaints about his
bureau work, the setting in which he had to complete this work certainly did not make it more
bearable. His contemporaries’ descriptions of the Paris police offices call attention to the
affective atmosphere of the bureau and to the connection between its physical state and affective
effects. Not only is the office over-crowded and unhygienic, it’s also depressing, presumably for
the civil servants themselves but also as an inherent affective quality harbored by and in the
space of the bureau. The body of the bureaucrat, caricatured as disgusting rond-de-cuir, is very
much at stake in the nature of their job which, in this case, is policing. The questions of hygiene
and odor
401
immediately center the body and its potential exposure while a concern about
overcrowding threatens to collapse the veritable piles of human bodies into the piles of paper
they produce. Again, these reported qualities of the bureaucratic offices reveal a sense of disgust
at its physical state. Huysmans even assigned affective qualities to the work and atmosphere of
the bureaucracy more generally. In a page of disjointed notes on his novella À vau-l’eau [With
the Flow], he jotted down the phrase “la folie douce de l’hystérie administrative.”
402
Here
hysteria becomes an inherent quality of the administrative world, but the word “sweet” [“douce”]

400. Malcolm Anderson, In Thrall to Political Change: Police and Gendarmerie in France, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 75.

401. It’s also worth noting that expectations of bodily hygiene are a form of policing and bodily discipline
in and of themselves.

402. “the sweet madness of administrative hysteria.” Joris-Karl Huysmans, “pg. 8 du Carnet Vert (inédit),”
vers fin 1886 – début 1887, Supplément 4: Ms 12728 à la fin, 15097: 2.
206

suggests a kind of draw to this professed “madness” [“folie”]. The administration may be mad
and unapologetically unhygienic, but there is also a sweetness in its affective atmosphere, an
attraction to the disgusting and to the hysterical.
For Huysmans, I imagine that this delimited space of the bureau had the same smell and
anonymizing quality as the AN. Within the already dirty and crowded space of the Sûreté
Générale offices, the state of Huysmans’ own office clearly showed that “the Civil Service
offered him no other amenities” than a view onto a modest garden.
403
Consistent with the Sûreté
Générale offices at large, “his office was fusty with the smell of files and inkpots” and “his
room-mate chattered endlessly about political events and the state of his health.”
404
In the context
of the unhygienic office and his low-level position, Huysmans blends into the crowd of
bureaucrats and into the background of the bureaucratic institution. It was within this suffocating
space that Huysmans was obliged to spend hours copying, only to spend his time away from the
bureau minding the family bindery, which threatened him with bankruptcy in 1886.
405

Huysmans’ contempt for the long hours he spent at the Rue des Saussaies was likely not helped
by the physical state of the office. His distaste was particularly piqued during periods of frenzied
police work, as in 1897 when the Sûreté Générale became consumed with surveilling suspected
French anarchists in response to the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister by an Italian
anarchist. In a letter to Abbé Ferret, Huysmans admitted: “I’m so bored here that I wonder
whether Heaven is not inflicting all this trouble on me to make me more appreciative of
Solesmes. What’s certain is that it’s a joy to follow the canonical hours and that the Liturgy is far

403. Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 101.

404. Baldick, 101.

405. Baldick, 147.
207

superior to the twaddle that the telephone spits and splutters into my ear.”
406
Compared to the
relative calm and beauty of the ecclesiastical retreats to which Huysmans gravitated later in his
life, the cramped rooms of the bureau only worsened his opinion of his bureaucratic career.
As these details suggest, commentators on Huysmans’ life and Huysmans himself
indicate that his bureaucratic career and the labor it required were not particularly near and dear
to his heart.
407
His experience with working in the state bureaucracy, in fact, is characterized by
the same kind of ennui and disgust that is leveraged against him by anti-fonctionnarisme critics
of the bureaucracy and his friends, disappointed about his relegation to the figure of a rond-de-
cuir. In the manuscript for Jean de Caldain’s Étude biographique sur Huysmans, he describes
Huysmans’ entry into the Ministry as “sur la demande de sa famille” [“at the request of his
family”] and claims that “il le fit à contre cœur” [“he did it reluctantly”].
408
Huysmans very
much followed in the footsteps of his grandfather by taking a position in the bureau, and while it
provided steady income and he had the necessary skills to carry out his work, he seemed to have
little patience for the mundanity and repetition of this kind of labor. In letters to the Dutch writer
Arij Prins from 1887 and 1886 respectively, Huysmans laments that his work in the bureau
leaves him “incapable de pouvoir travailler pour moi”
409
and complains of the “monotonie de ma
vie” where he is in the “bureau tout le jour, et le soir, chez moi,” resulting in an ennui that is

406. Baldick, 347.

407. René Turpin, “J.-K. Huysmans, fonctionnaire: Documents inédits,” Ms Lambert, 29: 160,
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

408. Caldain, Ms Lambert 91 (3): 4.

409. “unable to work for me.” J.-K. Huysmans, Lettres inédites à Arij Prins 1885-1907, edited by Louis
Gillet (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1977), 73.
208

“une huile brûlante qui abêtit.”
410
In Huysmans’ world, each day blends together because each
day is the same and delimited by the same boundaries of bureaucratic labor.
In a letter to Dr. Roger Dumas from 1892, he laments that, while literature “me soutenait
dans la vie médiocre, dans les ennuis du bureau ou les batailles d’argent,” and while he works to
combat “l’ennui” that “serait trop fort, si je bornais ma vie à des rédactions de ministère,” he still
cannot escape “le vide de tout celà, le vide!”
411
Unlike the caricatured bureaucrat who finds
meaning in, generally unearned, advancement through the bureaucratic ranks despite gross
incompetence, Huysmans dutifully carries out the labor required of him but attributes to it an
unbearable affective emptiness that threatens to overtake and consume his entire life. For
Huysmans, behind all of the labor and exchanged paperwork there is merely nothing, a
nothingness into which the bureaucrat threatens to fall. Not only does he take issue with the way
his bureaucratic career has shaped his daily habitual movements, at least in this period of his life,
he also directly connects the bureaucracy to the overly mundane or banal, the repetitive, and an
overwhelming feeling of ennui. In an 1882 letter he wrote to the naturalist French writer Léon
Hennique, Huysmans adopts particularly despairing language:
Je suis dans un noir ennui, avec mon damné Ministère. La combinaison dont je t’avais
parlé, la perspective d’un sous-chefat, tout est par terre, en miettes, quelqu’un est venu du
dehors, qui a pris la place de chef à laquelle avait droit mon ami. — Puis, mon bureau a
été coupé en tronçons, bref je suis tenu à l’attache comme un chien, je ne puis avoir un
congé, c’est l’enfer, et tout celà, sans profit, sans avenir.
412

410. “monotony of my life” where he is in the “bureau all day, and in the evening, at home,” resulting in an
ennui that is “a burning oil that dulls.” Huysmans, Lettres inédites, 51.

411. “supported me in a mediocre life, in the troubles of the bureau or the battles over money” and while he
works to combat “the ennui” that “would be too strong, if I limited my life to the editing of the ministry” he still
cannot escape “the emptiness of it all, the emptiness!” Joris-Karl Huysmans au Docteur Roger Dumas, 3 June 1892,
Supplément 4: Ms 12728 à la fin, 15150: 13. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

412. “I am in a black ennui, with my damned Ministry. The combination that I have told you about, the
prospect of sous-chef, all is on the ground, in crumbs, someone came from outside, who had taken the place of chef
to which my friend had the right.—And, my bureau has been cut in sections, in short I am tied up like a dog, I am
not able to have leave, it is hell, and all that, without profit, without future.” Joris-Karl Huysmans à Léon Hennique,
19 July 1882, Supplément 4: Ms 12728 à la fin, 15097: 8, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.
209

In this letter Huysmans emphasizes a feeling of imprisonment and hybridizing dehumanization in
his comparison of himself to a tied dog. In a different letter to Lucien Descaves from 19
February 1898, he further compares his work as a civil servant to “ma trotte de cheval d’omnibus
passant toujours par les mêmes rues.”
413
His position in the bureau is one without a future and
without any underlying meaning or benefit. He also reveals to Hennique that he has requested a
change in his position, but complains that “il parait que le succès dépend surtout du chef du
bureau du personnel, au secrétariat; c’est lui qui tient le damier des employés et fait manœuvrer
les pièces à sa guise.”
414
In Huysmans’ experience of the bureau, employés are powerless
political pawns with little control over their lives and must simply stew in their feelings of
existential malaise. In a letter from November 1885, Huysmans compares the time he spent
getting old in the bureau to the feeling that for twenty years “j’y suis plongé, la tête en bas”
415
as
though he has had no control over his body. Through these reactions, a reader can easily trace the
affective toll that Huysmans experienced in his bureaucratic work and that he genuinely
appeared to feel deeply. Furthermore, he codes these bureaucratic hardships through grotesque
images of animality and objectification based in the ennui of mundanity. Like the chained dog or
the omnibus horse, he must repeat the same actions ad infinitum and it is all he will ever know of
or strive for in the world.
While Huysmans’ depiction of the ennui plaguing his own life and that of his literary
characters certainly drew upon his own affective experience, his understanding of ennui, both

413. “having to plod along the same streets at the same times like an omnibus horse.” Qtd. in Lucien
Descaves, Les Dernières années de J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941), 18.

414. “it seems that success depends especially on the chief of the personnel bureau, in the secretariat; it is
he who holds the checkerboard of employés and maneuvers the pieces as he likes.” Joris-Karl Huysmans à Léon
Hennique, 19 July 1882, 15097: 8.

415. “I have been plunging there, upside down.” Joris-Karl Huysmans à Léon Bloy, Nov. 1885,
Supplément 4: Ms 12728 à la fin, 15150: Nov. 85, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.
210

real and literary, is filtered through his reading of Schopenhauer. He makes this influence clear
when quoting The World as Will and Idea at the end of the 1882 novella À vau-l’eau. As Thomas
West contends, Huysmans’ understanding of Schopenhauer before his religious conversion did
not address the optimistic, spiritual elements of Schopenhauer’s thought and instead clung to the
pessimism he found therein, which seemed to suggest the need for “unequivocal resignation to
life’s misery.”
416
Caldain considered À vau-l’eau, which focuses on the civil servant Jean
Folantin’s ennui-ridden life, as an indication that pessimism had won out as a defining force in
Huysmans’ life. Huysmans’ misreading of Schopenhauer not only saturates his writing, but
apparently defined his larger outlook on life as well. It is in this period of oversimplified
Schopenhauerism and pessimism that Huysmans grabs onto Schopenhauer’s depictions of ennui
in particular. The passage from The World as Will and Idea that Huysmans quotes in À vau-l’eau
specifically addresses the source of ennui, which arises when man “lacks objects of desire,
because [he] is at once deprived of them by a too easy satisfaction.”
417
While man is inherently a
being of pain and suffering because he must will and strive for existence, both material and
spiritual, if existence becomes a given then man suffers because he cannot strive for anything,
which creates the pendulum swing between pain and ennui, striving and empty satisfaction. It is
the experience of empty satisfaction that Schopenhauer particularly attributes to “the fashionable

416. Thomas G. West, “Schopenhauer, Huysmans, and French Naturalism,” Journal of European Studies 1,
no. 4 (December 1971), 321.

417. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Fourth Book. The World as Will. Second Aspect. The Assertion and Denial of
the Will to Live, When Self-Consciousness Has Been Attained,” in Vol. 1 of The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.
B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1909), 401. Nuancing this sense of lack,
Françoise Gaillard argues that pessimism becomes a masochistic comforting constant in the Schopenhauerian world
of Huysmans’ novella, which, rather than lacking completely in something to strive for, is governed by a need for
constant movement toward the worst-case scenario (“le pire”). This reading adds context to why Folantin, while
finding elements of his middle-class life lacking, returns to his painful but also, in a way, comforting sites of ennui
and disgust so often. See Françoise Gaillard, “Seul le pire arrive: Schopenhauer à la lecteur d’À vau-l’eau,” in
Huysmans, à côté et au-delà: actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle (Paris: Peeters, 2001).
211

world” of the middle class, the Sunday of the work week, which produces the sensation for man
that his “being and existence itself becomes an unbearable burden to [him].”
418
For Huysmans,
the emptiness of his bureaucratic work, which offers him a kind of empty satisfaction or lack of
striving for existence in the form of a steady job with a regular salary, is what invokes ennui in
both himself and at least some of his fictional characters. The creation of the professional
bureaucracy in France and throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
opened up the ministerial system once preserved for nobles to the masses and provided the
opportunity, at least, for an escape from abject poverty if not an entry into true middle-class life.
For Schopenhauer, and Huysmans, such an opening offered a new kind of suffering for a larger
proportion of the population: the empty satisfaction that leads to a lack of meaningful things to
aim for. Ennui as suffering, which Schopenhauer alternately describes as despairing, empty,
languorous, and desolate, is a kind of existential threat to the mind and soul but one that spills
over into the physical realm.
Reinhard Kuhn makes this argument by drawing on the work of Huysmans’
contemporaries. As he contends, the physical manifestation of ennui appears in Baudelaire’s use
of “spleen” and in Flaubert’s epistolary references to the relationship between nausea and ennui.
This relationship becomes even more literal in the twentieth century when Sartre equates the
nausea of ennui with “the same physical disgust that leads to vomiting.”
419
The affective
attachment of disgust to ennui evokes the disgust of and with the rond-de-cuir. Disgust, it seems,
arises both due to the ennui of the rond-de-cuir in the course of his bureaucratic work and in
response to the ennui of the rond-de-cuir, which, from the outside, is read as inactivity or

418. Schopenhauer, “Fourth Book,” 401.

419. Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976), 12.
212

incompetence. Conveniently enough, these physical manifestations attributed to ennui in
Huysmans’ cultural milieu, if not directly in Schopenhauer, echo the consistent digestive
ailments that plagued Huysmans for much of his life and that he bequeathed to the
Schopenhauerian Folantin and his affective successor in kind, if not form, Des Esseintes from the
1884 novel À rebours [Against the Grain]. As Huysmans was writing the semi-autobiographical
Folantin and Des Esseintes, he was filtering his own bodily and affective experiences of ennui,
despair, disgust, and dyspepsia through contemporary definitions of ennui and his own reading
of Schopenhauerian philosophy. Just as his lived experience became linked to ennui and its
philosophical attachments on the page through autobiography, they also became inextricably
linked beyond the page thanks to his bureaucratic career. Ennui was not just a subject of
Huysmans’ writing, it was “also a part of [the] temporal fabric and spatial structure” of his texts
and his actual experience.
420

Schopenhauer’s link between ennui and the middle-class working week suggests a deeper
link between ennui and modernity more generally. The large swath of articles from the late
nineteenth century addressing concerns over the mal du siècle or widespread pessimisme clearly
demonstrate that Schopenhauerian ideas and related anxieties over collective affective
experience in the context of modernity were shared beyond Huysmans’ work. Paul Charpentier
condemns the end of the nineteenth century as “une grande période de mélancolie” [“a great
period of melancholy”] filled with “amour de la solitude, habitude de la rêverie, impuissantes et
vagues aspirations, incurable scepticisme, ennui, désenchantement” and a host of other affective
shortcomings that in his article title, “Une maladie morale: le mal du siècle,” he ties directly to a
kind of societal moral failing.
421
Preferring the term pessimisme, Ferdinand Brunetière attributes

420. Kuhn, 5.

213

this affective force to “la limitation de notre être et de notre pouvoir d’agir.”
422
In the early
twentieth century, Marcel Arland even expands the influence of this affective atmosphere outside
of French territory by attributing it to Fedor Dostoevsky’s oeuvre; as he claims, “jamais l’on ne
s’était en France senti plus près de certains des héros des Possédés ou des Karamazov.”
423
While
not all of Huysmans’ contemporaries gave the same kind of uncritical credence to
Schopenhauerian ennui and suffering, the anxieties expressed in Schopenhauer’s work over the
affective state of France in the nineteenth century were shared in similar forms by
contemporaries. The connection between a societal affective crisis and modernity is certainly not
lost on Huysmans, whose Folantin and Des Esseintes both flounder in the face of a lack of
striving for anything beyond the empty commodity. Even Folantin’s striving for food is one of
desire and not of pure necessity, given that he is specifically looking for food that he enjoys
eating. Meanwhile, Des Esseintes collects overly luxurious artificial goods in order “à vaincre
l’ennui et la médiocrité de la civilisation industrielle.”
424
The Schopenhauerian view of ennui
continues into À rebours, but so does a larger link between ennui and modernity.
In À vau-l’eau and the largely obscure 1888 short story “La Retraite de Monsieur
Bougran” [“Mr. Bougran’s Retirement”], Huysmans makes a further connection between ennui,
modernity, and bureaucracy. Kuhn recognizes a consistent duality in the shifting definition of
ennui that allows it to refer to both the annoyances of everyday life and a “profound sorrow” at

421. “love of solitude, the habit of reverie, impotent and vague aspirations, incurable skepticism, ennui,
disenchantment.” Paul Charpentier, Une maladie morale: le mal du siècle (Paris: Librairie académique, 1880), 10.

422. “the limitation of our being and of our power to act.” Ferdinand Brunetière, “Les causes du
pessimisme,” Revue bleue (30 Jan. 1886), 140.

423. “never in France have we felt closer to certain heroes from The Possessed or from Karamazov.”
Marcel Arland, “Sur un nouveau mal du siècle,” La nouvelle revue française (1924), 158.

424. “to vanquish the ennui and the mediocrity of industrial civilization.” Rudy Steinmetz, “Huysmans
avec Schopenhauer: le pessimisme d’A rebours,” Romantisme 18, no. 61 (1988), 59.
214

an existential level.
425
In Huysmans’ use of “ennui” throughout his personal and literary writing,
he embraces both of these extremes and situates his experiences of his bureaucratic position
squarely within this crux. For Huysmans, as well as for Folantin and the retired civil servant
Bougran, it is the perceived mundanity of the everyday annoyances of the bureau that largely
shape their experiences of ennui. In the case of Bougran, he even replaces striving for existence
with an obsessive striving for the bureau, as though they were equivalent. For the employé in
capitalist modernity, the necessity for capital as a means to exist, both physically and spiritually,
thus positions the bureaucracy in the place of economic survival, but the stability and mundanity
of this career path offers a too easy satisfaction with no addition of spiritual meaning and, thus,
sacrifices the employé to ennui. Instead of an ongoing willing, it offers an ongoing copying, an
ongoing mechanistic activity under no real control of the employé himself. While ennui applies
to modernity and its affective crises more generally in the context of Schopenhauerian thought,
Huysmans’ experience and expression of ennui is mainly filtered through the bureau, which, in
turn, he reveals as a kind of affectively defining element of modern life in France. That is,
through the lived experience of and repulsion for repetitive, bureaucratic writing and the
perceived meaninglessness of middle-class bureaucratic labor, the expanding French
bureaucracy, its employés, and its detractors produce a shared affective crisis that plays a key
part in the cultural perception of French modernity.
Despite the length of his civil service career and his use of autobiographical detail in his
fiction, the vast majority of scholars working on Huysmans, including biographers, pay little
heed to this portion of his life.
426
Understandably, most scholarly work on Huysmans zeroes in

425. Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide, 5.

426. Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 31, 355. Biographies tend to only reference his civil service
career in passing when there is a major change in his position or to reference his dislike of the long hours spent at
215

on his fiction, but even more so on his conversion to Catholicism and his dalliance with the
occult. It isn’t surprising that Huysmans’ day job should be relegated to the margins, particularly
given that he himself seems to consider his bureaucratic work a marginal concern that
nonetheless eats up his extra time and produces no spiritual meaning in return. He considers the
life he has led in the bureau as “mediocre,” a condition for which literature is merely “une
duperie” [“a con”] rather than a true remedy.
427
However, neglecting to put a spotlight on
Huysmans’ career, very much centered as it is in writing, ignores much of the work that
Huysmans produced during his lifetime. While storylines around dark masses and secluded
monasteries may characterize some of Huysmans’ best-known texts like Là-bas [Down There]
and tales of love affairs and sex work may titillate the reader in novels like En menage [Married
Life], the heightened drama of such storylines also obscures the more mundane but sizable
influence that Huysmans’ relationship with bureaucracy had on his fictional works.
In the hopes of focusing specifically on Huysmans’ bureaucratic work, his fictional
depiction of it, and his affective experience of bureaucracy and writing, I will be setting aside
some of his best-known novels to analyze the two texts mentioned above: À vau-l’eau and La

the bureau. The bulk of their concern lies with his literary works and with his religious conversion. For example, in
George Ross Ridge’s Joris-Karl Huysmans, the references to Huysmans’ civil service career, as reflected in the
book’s index, appear only a handful of times and finish on page 33 of a 112-page book (not including notes and
other supplementals). See George Ross Ridge, Joris-Karl Huysmans (New York: Twayne, 1968): 121. Biographies
like James Laver’s The First Decadent, Henry R. T. Brandreth’s Huysmans, and Jean Borie’s Huysmans: Le Diable,
le célibataire et Dieu are similarly reticent on the topic. See, respectively, James Laver, The First Decadent: Being
the Strange Life of J. K. Huysmans (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), Henry R. T. Brandreth, Huysmans (London:
Bowes & Bowes, 1963), and Jean Borie, Huysmans: Le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu (Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1991). More targeted large-scale studies of Huysmans’ work and life tend to fall within a similar pattern of tracing
his religious conversion and the change in his literary topics over time from raunchy naturalist works to novels of
religious struggle or hagiographies. For example, see Robert Ziegler, The Mirror of Divinity: The World and
Creation in J.-K. Huysmans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004) and Marc Smeets, Huysmans l’inchangé:
Histoire d’une conversion (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). Barbara Beaumont frames a collection of Huysmans’ letters
in a very similar trajectory in J.-K. Huysmans, The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister: Selected
Letters of J. K. Huysmans, trans. and ed. Barbara Beaumont (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989).

427. Joris-Karl Huysmans au Docteur Roger Dumas, 3 June 1892, 15150: 13.
216

Retraite de Monsieur Bougran. Both of these texts feature main characters who work in the civil
service and plots that highlight their bureaucratic work and lifestyles. The details of the
characters and their experiences are largely pulled from Huysmans’ own experiences in the
bureau. Bougran specifically tells the story of one Monsieur Bougran’s forced retirement from
his civil service career and his attempt to recreate his bureaucratic office and lifestyle in his own
home by inventing fake work and correspondence. Ultimately his attempts are unsuccessful and
the effort to keep up this false façade seems to be the main cause for an early demise in his faux
home-bureau. À vau-l’eau may be less clearly centered on bureaucracy given that the main plot
points follow Folantin, a petty civil servant, in a seemingly hopeless quest for an appetizing meal
in a restaurant. He spends his days drudging through his bureaucratic paperwork in order to take
home an insufficient salary and unsuccessfully tries to break the monotony of this work, and the
existential malaise that accompanies it, through annoying social encounters such as a trip to the
theatre with an acquaintance. However, his perpetual affective slumps into self-fulfilling patterns
of disgust and ennui, which in turn define his relationship to food, commodities, and people,
always come back to the bureaucratic cycles that have come to define the everyday habits of his
life. These are the two fictional texts in which Huysmans most extensively and directly addresses
his anxieties around his bureaucratic career, which are normally reserved for his journals or
letters. Just as few scholars focus on Huysmans’ bureaucratic work itself, relatively few scholars
address Bougran at all,
428
and, despite the numerous articles on À vau-l’eau they do not tend to
offer much discussion of the role of bureaucracy in the novella. Instead, scholars working on À
vau-l’eau focus on the more personal aspects of Folantin’s life, particularly his strong and

428. For notable readings of “Bougran,” see in particular Ziegler, The Mirror of Divinity, Ch. 9, Jean-Marie
Seillan, “Monseur Bougran ou le rebelle involontaire,” Bulletin de la Société J.-K. Huysmans 85 (1992), and Alice
de Georges-Métral, “Pour une poésie administrative: La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran,” in Huysmans, ou comment
extraire la poésie de la prose, ed. Jérôme Solal (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015).
217

enduring feelings of ennui and disgust. Both of these texts capture the details of Huysmans’ daily
experiences in the bureau but also sift the mundanity of these experiences through a grotesque
affective atmosphere of existential dread. It is in this affective atmosphere, one that is inherent to
modernity, that Huysmans situates his bureaucratic labor.
In reading Huysmans’ work through his affective experience of bureaucracy as well as
the affective atmosphere of his time, I would like to bring questions around Huysmans’ writing,
nineteenth-century literature, a shared cultural experience of ennui and disgust, modernity, and
biopolitical forms of policing into the context of bureaucracy in order to further explore the
influence of bureaucratic institutions on the French literary canon and indeed the mere act of
living. While many scholars discuss Folantin’s alternation between ennui and disgust in À vau-
l’eau, there are few who put this ennui or disgust specifically in the context of his work in the
civil service.
429
Anthony Winner does specifically take stock of the role that Folantin’s status as
employé plays in the text.
430
However, Winner still brings back Folantin’s ennui and disgust to
the urbanization and modernity of Paris in the nineteenth century without speaking to what the
text or modernity may reveal about the author’s presentation of bureaucracy and its affective
attachments. The way in which Huysmans writes À vau-l’eau, its stylistic moves and thematic
choices, relate back to bureaucratic writing and Huysmans’ lived experiences within the
bureaucracy more explicitly than such a reading suggests. Although he does not deal as directly

429. Dalia Kandiyoti attributes Folantin’s ennui to a double exclusion created both by the modernizing of
Paris and to Huysmans’, and thus Folantin’s, “paranoia of invasion by the Other.” Dalia Kandiyoti, “Eating Paris: J.-
K. Huysmans’s ‘A vau-l’eau,’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 24, no. 1-2 (fall 1996): 173. Marco Modenesi,
Christopher Lloyd, and Anthony Winner, among others, recognize À vau-l’eau as influential commentary on literary
genres or trends and identify Folantin’s ennui and disgust as important elements in making these kinds of generic
moves. See: Marco Modenesi, “Le héros à la table. À vau‑l’eau ou le piège gastronomique,” Études françaises 23,
no. 3 (1987); Christopher Lloyd, “A vau-l’eau: le monde indigeste du Naturalisme,” Bulletin de la Société de J.-K.
Huysmans 71 (1980); and Anthony Winner, “The Indigestible Reality: J.-K. Huysmans’ ‘Down Stream,’” The
Virginia Quarterly Review 50, no. 1 (winter 1974).

430. See Winner, “The Indigestible Reality,” 43.
218

with the text’s references to ennui and disgust, de la Motte does address the surface-level
influences of bureaucratic writing on Huysmans’ stylistics in À vau-l’eau and À rebours, both of
which are “episodic, eclectic, ateleological” in the same way as bureaucratic writing and in the
tradition of art for art’s sake.
431
De la Motte further expands this reading to suggest the ways in
which “the bureaucratic phenomenon gradually becomes a model for narrative itself” in the
nineteenth century on a grander scale.
432
Expanding on these readings of Huysmans’ work by
considering his affective attachments to bureaucracy opens up larger questions not just around
the influence of bureaucracy on Huysmans’ writing, but also around the nature of bureaucracy
itself and its inescapable entanglement with modernity.
Given the slow temporality and low intensity of the affects that Huysmans associates
with bureaucracy, such as ennui, they are difficult to identify and articulate outside of the realm
of writing. Huysmans’ representation of his affective life in both his personal writing and in his
novels is largely marked by an ambivalent indifference and listlessness, which in turn give way
to physical nausea hovering, ever-present, in the background of his texts. These affective
experiences do not strike the characters suddenly and immediately after a direct trigger, but
rather wax and wane over time as he and his characters alike move through their everyday
activities and the mere act of living. They are not easily visible on the body or easily definable
even for the person experiencing them. In contrast to high intensity, fast-moving affects like
terror, then, Folantin’s and Bougran’s affective states only become visible through an internal
perspective made possible through writing. That is, Huysmans can only fully express his
affective experiences and project similar affective experiences onto other bureaucrats, through

431. De la Motte, “Writing Fonctionnaires,” 28.

432. De la Motte, 22.
219

his fictional and personal writing, where he establishes the affective side of his experience.
However, these affective modes are also shared in his society at large, assigned to all bureaucrats
by satirists or other bureaucrats themselves, and characteristic of outside critiques of
bureaucracy. That is, despite the individuality of Huysmans’ experience, these slow-moving
affective modes are both inherent to and shared in modernity and unwaveringly attached to the
lived experience of bureaucratic influence. It is only by paying close attention to the minutiae of
modern life and his own experience that Huysmans can draw out the tie between the affective
and bureaucratic qualities of his own life and those of his cultural milieu.
In particular, Huysmans seems to pour the anxiety over his bureaucratic work into both
Folantin and Bougran by characterizing them with semi-autobiographical detail. The most
obvious links between Huysmans and his characters Folantin and Bougran come in the form of
their shared profession and the frustration each expresses over the long hours spent copying
materials in the bureau. Huysmans even assigns his own 1881 “stipend of 3,000 francs” to
Folantin.
433
However, as Baldick affirms, Huysmans imbued Folantin in particular with more
personal touches. Like Folantin, who can barely overcome his nausea throughout the novel,
Huysmans expressed his own detailed complaints over Parisian restaurants and suffered as “a
life-long martyr to dyspepsia.”
434
Folantin and Bougran become obsessive versions of Huysmans
himself; his problems, monotonous bureaucratic work and indigestion in particular, slowly grind
his characters down into despair or even death. While Huysmans suffered from dyspepsia, his
digestive ailments manifest in Folantin as an inability to eat anything out of extreme physical
disgust. Bougran performs the same kind of office work as Huysmans, but in his forced

433. Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 101.

434. Baldick, 101-102.
220

retirement the fake office work that he performs is an absurd double of its real-life model and
leads, dramatically, to actual death.
435
These characters’ autobiographical qualities are
exaggerated, warped, and caricatured into even more unsettling versions of Huysmans’
bureaucratic reality. By highlighting the minor affects and banal details of Folantin’s and
Bougran’s lives and turning them into something unfamiliar and possibly deadly, Huysmans
succeeds in making the elements of daily habits that normally remain unseen because they are so
automatic into spaces for ambiguity, affective tension, and existential dread.
It is the extremity of the banality in Huysmans’ texts, an effect largely achieved through
the over-prioritizing of realistic and unremarkable detail and minor affects, that reveals the
connections between Folantin’s and Bougran’s suffering and the perceived pervasiveness of the
bureaucracy. The details of the characters’ lives are expounded at length, even to the point of
minor daily habits, and in this emphasis, something is always off. And these banal images are
especially produced in response to the representation of mundane, bureaucratic routine and
writing. For example, Huysmans shares with the reader Bougran’s daily waking ritual, now
defined by the absence of his bureaucratic obligations, “à la même heure que jadis” [“at the same
time as before”] and how “il se disait à quoi bon se lever, traînait contrairement à ses habitudes
dans son lit, prenait froid, bâillait, finissait par s’habiller.”
436
Bougran’s inability to live without
or beyond the realm of bureaucratic labor, which gives rise to his eventually fatal obsessive

435. In this way, Bougran’s obsessive hypothetical documentation mirrors that of the character Porfirii
from Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Gospoda Golovlevy, which I addressed in the previous chapter. One could find
the archive fever of the bureaucracy in Bougran’s practices just as easily, although the solely self-destructive nature
of Bougran’s actions establishes him as a more sympathetic character than the predatory Porfirii who successively
kills his family members before turning his fatal chatter on himself.

436. J.-K. Huysmans, “La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran,” in vol. 4 of Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Marie
Seillan and Alice de Georges-Métral (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), 70. “he asked himself what was the point of
getting up, continued to lounge in bed, quite contrary to his normal habits, started to feel cold, yawned, and finally
got dressed.” Joris-Karl Huysmans, With the Flow and M. Bougran’s Retirement, trans. Andrew Brown (London:
Hesperus Press, 2003), 69.
221

behaviors as he attempts to recreate his bureaucratic obligations at his home office, casts a dark
shadow over these otherwise perfectly banal details. In this moment, Huysmans creates an
affective tension and cognitive dissonance as the bureaucracy and bureaucratic patterns of living
are felt to hold more power than they should. Both novels are built on inconsequential plots that
almost rise to the level of non-plots: Monsieur Bougran is forced into retirement from his civil
service career and Folantin just wants to find a restaurant that doesn’t make him nauseous. Yet
despite their non-plots, À vau-l’eau ends with Folantin in an inescapable cycle of despair and
Bougran ends with the death of its main character. Bougran’s document production would, of
course, be perfectly normal for a career bureaucrat, but he is obsessively recreating his normal
habits in the absence of his career. In the creation of his faux bureau and the invention of made-
up work his seemingly mundane behaviors position bureaucracy as a hidden danger of
modernity, particularly in the disconnect between the normalcy attributed to boring bureaucratic
work and the life-and-death stakes for the character. What would have been familiar to a
bureaucrat in the context of an actual civil service job becomes both strange and deadly in the
hands of Huysmans’ retired civil servant. He invents a shadow version of the real world that
empties bureaucratic paperwork of its content (meaning), but not of its form (power). His body is
still regulated by the bureaucracy even after his forced retirement and it is this continued
subjugation to bureaucratic patterns of living and affect that Huysmans starkly extracts from
Bougran’s constructed office.
It is in solidifying the pervasiveness of bureaucracy, even in its apparent absence, in the
worlds of his characters that Huysmans materially ties together modernity, his own affective
experience, and the shared affective experience of the age. On the face of À vau-l’eau, it is the
poor quality of the food that seems to produce Folantin’s disgust, but as the novella continues,
222

the reader begins to perceive an ever-increasing connection made between his existential
melancholy, his physical malady, and his work in the bureau. The narrator describes Folantin’s
ennui as cyclical and highlights moments where even Folantin himself perceives the connections
between his sufferings, as in the moment when “ses ennuis moraux se joignait maintenant le
délabrement physique” and spurred on his inability to eat and function properly.
437
Furthermore,
although Folantin orients himself towards his eating habits when considering his ailments, he
associates “cette époque de souffrances” [“that period of suffering”] with a time “où il fallait
quand même aller à son bureau et quand même marcher” fairly early on in the novella.
438
It
seems that there is a similar mechanism whereby Folantin returns to the site of “les ennuis du
bureau” [“the tedium of office life”] over and over just as he returns to the site of the disgust
born of these “ennuis.”
439
He cannot stop his return because there is nowhere else, and no
“when” else, to go. Like Balzac’s narrator in Les Employès, the narrator in À vau-l’eau draws a
contrast between the work of the bureaucrats of the country and that of the bureaucrats of the
city. As a city bureaucrat, Folantin “copia et recopia, pendant des années, des monceaux de
dépêches, traça d’innombrables barres de jonction, bâtit des masses d’états, répéta”
440
without
end in the cyclical pendulum, as the narrator quotes from Schopenhauer, that swings between
“douleur et l’ennui” [“pain and boredom”].
441
The ongoing, repetitive work that does not seem to

437. J.-K. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” in Romans et nouvelles, ed. André Guyaux and Pierre Jourde (Paris:
Gallimard, 2019), 505. “to his mental pain was now added physical decrepitude.” Huysmans, With the Flow, 19

438. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” 499. “when he still had to turn up at his office and had to keep on walking.”
Huysmans, With the Flow, 11.

439. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” 527. Huysmans, With the Flow, 49

440. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” 500. “copied and recopied, year after year, piles of dispatches, drew up
innumerable columns of figures, built up masses of records, repeated.” Huysmans, With the Flow, 12.

441. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” 528. Huysmans, With the Flow, 57.
223

add any meaning to Folantin’s monotonous life elicits the existential dread of his ennui and the
affective and physical disgust that accompanies it. Although Folantin temporarily experiences
times of appetite and so may occasionally evade his disgust, “la stérilité des élans et des efforts”
and the idea that “il faut se laisser aller à vau-l’eau,” which reminds the reader of the book’s title
and its potential interpretations, suggest that Folantin will not escape these cycles regardless of
what actions he takes.
442
Just as Folantin’s basic bodily habits are affected by his bureaucratic
work, Huysmans specifically takes note of this connection in his own life as well. In a letter to
Hennique from 19 July 1882, he laments that “j’en perds le boire et le manger, et le travail avec
ces misères de bureau qui prennent malheureusement dans la vie, une part si considérable.”
443

Because the basis for Folantin’s livelihood, the bureaucracy, serves as the source of his
emotional, and then physical, anguish, Huysmans produces bureaucracy as a defining feature of
modernity and the affective crisis that accompanies it. In the time of modernity, the very act of
living, and its necessary correlative of eating, becomes coded through the banality of
bureaucratic labor. Such codification of the acts of everyday living, the intrusion of bureaucratic
habit and monotony into every aspect of society, is an expansion of biopolitical state power
through the medium of bureaucracy. Hacking attributes this expanse in part to the rise of
statistics, but bureaucratic writing and paperwork, which subsumes fictional writing into its
habits and stylistics, also serves as a necessary strategy for bureaucratic, and by extension state,
control of the everyday.

442. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” 533. “the sterility of all enthusiasm and all effort” and the idea that “‘you
have to let yourself go with the flow.’” Huysmans, With the Flow, 57.

443. “I cannot drink or eat, and the work with these office miseries, unfortunately, takes such a
considerable part in life.” Joris-Karl Huysmans à Léon Hennique, 19 July 1882, 15097: 8.
224

For Huysmans, bureaucratic writing, in fact, seems to evoke the most direct affective
responses for himself and his characters and, furthermore, reflects the devaluation of writing in
general in the nineteenth century. The description of Folantin’s work as a bureaucrat in the city
underscores the ways in which nineteenth-century views on writing are bound up in the
bureaucracy, a career that, much like that of the author, is dependent upon writing voluminously
although to different ends. As quoted above, the passage in À vau-l’eau differentiating the city
from the country bureaucrat emphasizes copying and repetition as the main modes of writing
demanded of the urban bureaucrat. Although writing about Balzac, Marco Diani’s depiction of
writing in Les Employès could apply equally to Folantin’s relationship with writing as well. In
Les Employès, “writing, like modern life itself, becomes tiny and monotonous…surrounded by
things—words, objects, people—without meaning, rather with a meaning but no dimension to
it.”
444
If writing, like modern life, is monotonous and dimensionless in Balzac’s bureaucracy, it
seems this view has carried over not only into Folantin’s writing habits, but also into the realities
of his life and even into Huysmans’. For de la Motte, this view of writing mirrors the art for art’s
sake movement and leads to fiction that “moves away from teleology and psychological depth,
and toward repetition, self-reflexivity, and textuality.”
445
These qualities, which he attributes to
bureaucratic writing, come to define writing more generally in the nineteenth century and, for de
la Motte, Huysmans in particular serves as a model of this influence.
446
Just as the ennui of
Folantin’s life is partially expressed and represented in his disgust over sub-par restaurant food,
so is the practice of bureaucratic writing. It is this repetition, the cyclical copying and recopying,

444. Marco Diani, “Balzac’s Bureaucracy: The Infinite Destiny of the Unknown Masterpiece,” L’Esprit
créateur 34, no. 1 (1994): 48.

445. De la Motte, “Writing Fonctionnaires,” 27.

446. De la Motte, 27.
225

that most mirrors the cyclical nature of Folantin’s bouts of existential dread and meaningless
wandering.
Moreover, images of nauseating food are even joined to the materials of writing. As
Folantin attempts to enjoy yet another restaurant, he finds that “le dîner était exécrable et que le
vin sentait l’encre.”
447
This image of dark ink becomes melded with the idea of rotted food,
decay, and even the “exécrable”—the smell of ink, a smell that must be all too familiar to a city
bureaucrat, adds to the nausea of both Folantin and the reader. By pairing the smell of ink with
the idea of the “exécrable,” a word that echoes “excrément” and perhaps might bring one back to
the disgust invoked by the rond-de-cuir, ink becomes viscerally attached to Folantin’s physical,
emotional, and existential ailments. As Edward Rossman suggests, one of Folantin’s major
concerns in relation to food is over spoiled meat, which Rossman considers “sinister” for
Folantin. In Folantin’s mind, he suggests, “meat is dead flesh, and eating it is an act which
smacks of necrophilia.”
448
With such a visceral image, a tying up of disgust and pleasure, in
mind, ink might seem tame, but piles of useless paper might have something of dead flesh about
them too. They become lifeless masses of material waste that slowly disintegrate in back rooms,
the potential intended for their ‘lives’ lost to time when their individual words become forgotten
and blend together with the formulaic language of the bureaucratic template. The same could be
said of the policed subjects of this paperwork and of the bureaucrats who created these lifeless
masses, who, like Huysmans in the AN, become anonymized and lost in the archival attic or
who, like Bougran, perish under the weight of meaningless paperwork. These are the lifeless

447. Huysmans, “À vau-l’eau,” 495. “the dinner was awful and the wine tasted like ink.” Huysmans, With
the Flow, 6.

448. Edward Rossman, “The Conflict over Food in the Works of J.-K. Huysmans,” Nineteenth-Century
French Studies 2, no. 1-2 (1973-1974), 64.
226

masses one must search in the AN with little hope of finding the individual contained therein. In
this sense, Huysmans suggests that modern writing, whether coming from the bureaucrat or his
detractor, whether created within or outside of the bureau, serves as the major generating force of
the affective crisis he represents in his literary work.
Huysmans’ fiction writing thus poses the following question in response to his
contemporaries’ concerns over the status of writing more generally: can writing exist without the
bureau? Beyond the stylistic similarities that de la Motte locates across Huysmans’ written
oeuvre, there is a material closeness between the kind of writing Huysmans did as an employé in
the Sûreté générale and the kind of writing he produced as part of his fiction. This closeness
emphasizes the connection between Huysmans’ dual acts of creation and the collapse of his
everyday reality into the world of the bureau. Because much of his drafted fictional writing
appears on the official paper of the Ministère de l’Intérieur, his fictional writing existed within
the same world and material economy as his bureaucratic writing. From what is preserved in the
collection alone, Huysmans wrote fragments of his “Carnet vert,” a notebook he used to draft
fictional work or write his ideas on various topics, En route, “Le Monstre,” “Gustave Moreau,”
La Cathédrale, and notes on various mystical or religious topics such as St. Brigitte and a
hiérarchie céleste all on the official paper of the bureau. Baldick confirms that beyond writing on
the same paper that he used for work, Huysmans also actually did this writing during work hours
and that this practice was common for writers of the time period who also worked as bureaucrats.
In recounting his typical workday, Baldick describes Huysmans “copying out official letters,
adding up columns of figures, and—like so many other young authors employed in various
French ministries—working on his own books and articles.”
449
Although the overlapping of

449. Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 100-101.
227

Huysmans’ fictional and bureaucratic writing habits likely stemmed from mere convenience, it
also has the consequence of creating a material connection between his two written worlds. That
is, at first glance, a distracted archivist might mistake a draft excerpt from En route as an official
letter or memo because it appears on official paper. At first glance, these fictional and
bureaucratic texts visually merge into one and the same thing and it is only with careful reading
and an eye for formatting that they become recognizably distinct. Huysmans even expressed his
frustrations with literature and the bureaucracy itself within this primary space of writing. In a
letter to Dr. Roger Dumas written on his Ministry letterhead, Huysmans describes “mon dégoût
de la littérature, du bureau, de l’existence solitaire ou mondaine,” sentiments clearly shared and
echoed by his fictional characters, including Folantin’s own cycles of disgust and ennui that arise
alongside the repetition of his bureau job.
450
The physical nearness of Huysmans’ bureaucratic
and fictional writing suggests that he at least thought through his official patterns of cordial
response and his complex reactions to the female body or his interest in Catholicism within the
same mental, temporal, and physical spaces. It is on paper, often, that his two worlds collide in
material ways, even if he or his contemporaries may have wished to designate them as separate
endeavors.
451

Along with drafted paragraphs of his fictional work, Huysmans wrote many of his notes
for his fiction or hagiographies on torn-up Ministry paper meant for drafting. The notes that
appear on this kind of paper are often arranged into little booklets in the Lambert collection, torn

450. “my disgust for literature, the bureau, solitary or mundane existence.” Joris-Karl Huysmans au
Docteur Roger Dumas, 2 June 1891, Supplément 4: Ms 12728 à la fin, 15150: 12, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

451. Just as Huysmans wrote some of his notes for his novels and thought pieces on Catholicism and
spiritualism on the drafting paper for the Ministry, he often wrote letters regarding the publishing of his novels on
his Ministry letterhead. It isn’t surprising that he would use this letterhead in his personal letters as well as any
official, external communication given that the letterhead identified him in relation to his career. However, it does,
once more, bring his bureaucratic career and writing career, and the material he produced in each of those capacities,
closer together in the world of paper.
228

up into squares so that the heading might appear sideways on the back of the page or so that the
notes might pass through and partially obscure the pre-typed space for indicating the bureau
number and the author of the draft (see Images G and H below for examples). There is a creative
energy not just in Huysmans’ fictional writing that appears on this paper, but also in the act of
disordering the paper itself. The paper, when seen fully formed and bearing memos he wrote
while working for the Ministry, has a separating line to designate the part of the paper meant for
the main text of the memo and a column meant for indicating who drafted the memo along with a

Image G Image H
space for notes. There is also a pre-typed space to fill in the date at the top of the page. These
ordering markers, meant to keep the exchanging of documents regimented, efficient, and easy to
contextualize, become background fodder in Huysmans’ notes as the words interrupt the
intended organization of the paper and create their own order, logic, and flow. There is an act of
229

disobedience, hybridization, and decategorization in this reordering and creative destruction, one
that pushes back against the mundanity of the formulaic document and attempts to break the
banal bureaucratic cycle by re-cycling. Furthermore, there is an attempt to privilege content
above form—for content to define the shape of the document on its own terms and nullify the
question of form entirely. However, despite this attempt at disruption, Huysmans’ writing is
produced within the bureau during his working hours and on the same paper that he uses for
drafting bureau documents. That is, Huysmans’ position as a writer, and the question of writing
in the nineteenth century more generally, are always coded through bureaucratic work and tie
him materially to bureaucratic systematization and its archives.
While Huysmans’ other work, related to the family bindery, required a similar form of
documentary labor as his bureaucratic post, so that “in the evenings I was stultified by figures
and accounts, quite incapable of putting two ideas or two words together,” these same habits
extended into his writing career as well.
452
Just as the mass of documents of the AN becomes
overwhelming to the scholar in their sheer number, Huysmans created his own overwhelming
archive of his drafted material. When working on La Cathédrale, he lamented in a letter to Abbé
Ferret “‘that it’s difficult to make anything out of these lists and quotations, squeezed together as
in a hydraulic press and then squashed into chapters.’”
453
That is, while Huysmans may prefer
that this kind of literary and spiritual work remain “a repository of erudition, a consommé of
ecclesiastical art” rather than a boring flurry of bureaucratic documents for him to draft and
process in the office, this high ecclesiastical art ultimately does not look, or feel, much different

452. Huysmans, The Road from Decadence, 27.

453. Qtd. in Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 339.
230

from the paperwork he produced for his job.
454
He may grasp on to literature as a potential
escape or catharsis, but it does not ultimately offer anything new.
Unlike Huysmans, neither Folantin nor Bougran are literary authors; any writing they
produce is bureaucratic writing. That is, the caricatured versions of Huysmans’ own life
demonstrate the subsuming of all writing into the form language and empty copying of the
bureau. All writing becomes writing for writing’s sake. It is in the bureau, the space of lifeless
writing, and in the manner of bureaucratic writing, a copying of details, that Folantin produces
his only piece of writing shown verbatim to the reader. Upon finally finding a new promising
restaurant, he produces a grocery list that is carefully copied into the text: “Confitures; fromage;
biscuits; sel; poivre; moutarde; vinaigre; huile.”
455
Like his bureaucratic writing, this grocery list
is a part of mundane, everyday life and does not require much skill beyond the ability to copy
words onto a sheet of paper. The information offered in this list seems extraneous and useless to
À vau-l’eau’s reader. Like Gogol’, Folantin and Huysmans can also multiply words and in this
way emphasize the mundane qualities of Folantin’s life-and-death quest for food. Furthermore,
Folantin writes this list “quand il arrivé à son bureau” [“when he had arrived in his office”] and
this is the only scene wherein the reader sees Folantin at his office, doing bureaucratic-style
writing in real time.
456
Immediately after he finishes his grocery list, his superior saddles him
with new material to copy for the bureau so that the same act of writing bridges his personal and
professional lives, both of which are ultimately contained within the scope of the bureaucratic
world. In this proliferation of detail, at the site of the bureau, Huysmans draws together

454. Baldick, 339.

455. Huysmans, “A vau-l’eau,” 524. “Jam; Cheese; Biscuits; Salt; Pepper; Mustard; Vinegar; Oil.”
Huysmans, With the Flow, 45.

456. Huysmans, “A vau-l’eau,” 524. Huysmans, With the Flow, 45.
231

bureaucracy, the inevitability of ennui, extraneous writing, and the tension between Folantin’s
desire and disgust. As the reader might expect, Folantin is disappointed on all counts.
After writing out his list, his future hope, the hours at work drag on unbearably and are
capped by the boss’ request for handwritten copies of letters in “quatre pages serrées” [“four
dense pages”], a task that Folantin considers “absurde.”
457
After hearing his complaints, his
colleague reminds him that “l’administration ne peut pourtant pas s’occuper de ces détails”
leaving the reader to wonder with which details exactly the administration was able to concern
itself if not the details of its own functioning.
458
This aside also leaves the reader to wonder what
will become of Folantin’s little details and the affect with which he has imbued them. If the
bureau cannot be bothered to attend to the labor that keeps it running, then what happens to the
marginal scribbling of the bureaucrat in the literary text? Unsurprisingly, Folantin’s hopes do not
go to plan and his infatuation with the restaurant does not last long. Folantin again sinks into
ennui and laments that “rien ne me divertit, rien ne m’intéresse; et puis mon estomac se
détraque”
459
before the novel ends with an unpleasant sexual encounter between Folantin and a
woman who “avait une figure de petit singe,” the suggestion of bestiality adding to the
grotesqueness of the scene.
460
It seems that, despite his attempts to hunt out and experience the
new, Folantin cannot fully break the cycle of his ennui because these things and experiences
merely replicate the forms of mundanity that make up the bureau and modernity more generally,
do not permanently disrupt the administrative rhythms of his daily life, and do not give him

457. Huysmans, “A vau-l’eau,” 525. Huysmans, With the Flow, 46.

458. Huysmans, “A vau-l’eau,” 525. “The administration can’t think of everything.” Huysmans, With the
Flow, 46.

459. Huysmans, “A vau-l’eau,” 528. “Nothing is any fun, nothing interests me; and then my digestion is up
the spout!” Huysmans, With the Flow, 51.

460. Huysmans, “A vau-l’eau,” 531. “She had the face of a little monkey.” Huysmans, With the Flow, 54.
232

something meaningful for which to strive. Like Huysmans, who cannot find comfort even in his
fiction writing, Folantin cannot rise above the pointless copying he performs in his office and the
affective and physical pitfalls that accompany it.
The conflation between writing and copying in À vau-l’eau narrows into a direct
complaint over the form language of the bureaucracy in Bougran. This form language, with
which Huysmans learns to blend his own writing in the context of the bureaucratic document,
defines the literary language of Bougran and carries with it the indifference of Huysmans’ actual
bureaucratic paperwork. True to Huysmans’ own experience, these “chinoiseries juridiques”
[“baroque complexities of the law”] serve as a staple of Bougran’s bureaucratic vocabulary as he
attempts to piece back together his bureaucratic office in his own home after his early
retirement.
461
In this racialized and Orientalized stock image of bureaucratic language and red
tape, Huysmans suggests that the form language of the bureau that keeps the office and its
paperwork going and flowing is incomprehensible or nonsensical for the average French citizen,
that it is, in fact, an entirely different language or cultural experience. Huysmans, so used himself
to working through, with, and around such constructed language in his bureaucratic work
laments:
Ces ‘exciper de,’ ces ‘en réponse à la lettre que vous avez bien voulu m’adresser,’
‘j’ai l’honneur de vous faire connaître que,’ ces ‘conformément à l’avis exprimé dans
votre dépêche relative à.’ Ces phraséologies coutumières: ‘l’esprit sinon le texte de la
loi,’ ‘sans méconnaître l’importance des considérations que vous invoquez à l’appui
de cette thèse.’ Enfin, ces formules destinées au Ministère de la Justice où l’on parlait
de l’avis ‘émané de sa Chancellerie,’ toutes ces phrases évasives et atténuées, les
‘j’inclinerais à croire,’ les ‘il ne vous échappera pas,’ les ‘j’attacherais du prix à,’ tout
ce vocabulaire de tournures remontant au temps de Colbert donnait un terrible
tintouin à M. Bougran.
462

461. Huysmans, “Bougran,” 75. Huysmans, With the Flow, 75. This English translation obscures the
specificity of the phrase that Huysmans uses. “Chinoiserie” is used to denote something related to China or Chinese
culture.

233

It is, however, these well-worn linguistic pieces that fit together to keep the bureaucratic and
juridical machine moving so that surveillance and imprisonment and execution may still happen.
But this form language is also intended to distance and to hide; these phrases are “évasives et
atténuées” [“evasive and inconclusive”]. As de la Motte argues, these linguistic patterns are
further replicated in the very style and structure of Huysmans’ fictional work. The linguistic
formulas of the bureaucracy cannot be grasped; meaning slides right off them. Yet in Bougran
and À vau-l’eau, Huysmans makes it clear that, despite the seeming incomprehensibility of
bureaucratic form language for non-bureaucrats, it is the stuff that makes up the patterns of
modern life.
Moreover, the form language of the bureau that Bougran has learned so well that he
invents unnecessary documents during his retirement also begins to pick his body apart. Working
on invented appeals for hours produces in Bougran a “malaise d’âme” [“sense of malaise”] and
leaves him feeling “harassé, mécontent de lui-même, distrait de pensées, incapable de s’abstraire,
de ne plus songer qu’à ses dossiers.”
463
And this sickening writing which, as Ziegler puts it, is
“indigestible” for Bougran, is specifically doing what it is meant to do by taking Bougran apart
bit by bit.
464
As he himself observes at the Luxembourg gardens, the circular form language of

462. Huysmans, “Bougran,” 80. “All those turns of phrase: ‘our client pleads;’ ‘in reply to your kind letter,
I have the honour to inform you that;’ ‘as per the opinion expressed in your dispatch relative to…’ Those customary
idioms: ‘the spirit, if not the letter of the law,’ ‘giving all due weight to the importance of the considerations to
which you refer in support of this argument…’ And finally, those formulae destined for the Ministry of Justice, in
which reference was made to ‘the opinion emanating from His Chancellery,’ all those evasive and inconclusive
phrases: ‘I am inclined to believe,’ or, ‘it will not have escaped your notice,’ or, ‘I would be most grateful if’—that
whole vocabulary and phraseology going back to the age of Colbert, gave M. Bougran a terrible headache.”
Huysmans, With the Flow, 80-81.

463. Huysmans, “Bougran,” 76. “exhausted, discontented, distracted, incapable of seeing things in
perspective, his head filled by his dossiers.” Huysmans, With the Flow, 75.

464. Ziegler, The Mirror of Divinity, 209.
234

the bureau, to which Alice de Georges-Métral attributes a poetic rhythm,
465
is like the “façon
d’assassiner les arbres, sous le prétexte de leur extirper de meilleurs fruits” that he notices as he
walks around. Like this aggressive “chirurgie,” the language of the bureau tries to “démantibuler
des choses simples.”
466
While de Georges-Métral asserts that Bougran’s adoption of bureaucratic
language is an act of creation that gives him control over his death,
467
it also necessitates his
death as the only escape from a bureaucratically ordered world. It is these well-worn linguistic
templates that fit together to keep the bureaucratic machine moving, but, in doing so, they create
a meaningless cyclical copying that creates “un terrible tintouin” [“a terrible headache”] not just
for individual bureaucrats like Bougran, but for the larger practice of writing in the nineteenth
century. Here Huysmans positions bureaucratic writing as something that the bureaucrat cannot
live without and as a deadening force. It is as though the act of physical copying becomes at once
a necessary and inherent quality of the bureaucrat himself and the means by which he falls apart.
Although Huysmans does not address policing directly in these texts, besides the reference to the
language of the law in Bougran, the traces of its violence are found in these “évasives et
atténuées” phrases that create “un terrible tintouin” for Bougran. This violence becomes so
monotonized, so linked to the mundane, that it seems normal within the world of the text and
normal within the world of French modernity. Like the rest of French governance, policing is
enacted by the same copying that Folantin and Bougran can barely stand and that constantly runs
in the background through the medium of paperwork. In this sense, the act of policing is not just
bound up with the ennui and disgust attached to bureaucratic labor and the modern period more

465. de Georges-Métral, “Pour une poésie administrative,” 199.

466. Huysmans, “Bougran,” 71-72. “this way of murdering trees on the pretext of extorting better fruit
from them” that he notices as he walks around. Like this aggressive “surgery,” the language of the bureau tries to
“take simple things to bits and pieces.” Huysmans, With the Flow, 70.

467. de Georges-Métral, “Pour une poésie administrative,” 202.
235

generally at the end of the century, it is part of what causes this affective crisis and lends it
bodily consequences.
After his move to the Sûreté Générale, the main “stuff” of Husymans’ copying was
directly related to policing, but this subject does not directly come into play in his semi-auto-
biographical work at all. Instead, what comes through are the affective and physical traces of
bureaucratic biopolitics and the policing that it enables. The links between everyday activities,
like eating and writing, and bureaucracy come out in Huysmans’ work, as discussed above,
through excessively mundane imagery and references to ennui. Folantin’s disgust over his
inability to actualize his gustatory desires and Bougran’s inability to create a daily routine that
does not depend on and revolve around the bureaucracy demonstrate the ways in which
biopolitical bureaucratic control expands out to include the entirety of daily living for Huysmans
and his contemporaries. In Bougran’s faux office in particular, one can read the disciplining of
bodies to bend to bureaucratic authority and a kind of self-imprisonment within the bureau, both
physically and metaphorically, that ultimately seals Bougran’s fate. Between the cultural
caricature of the rond-de-cuir and the grotesque bureaucratic lives of Folantin and Bougran, one
can locate a hybridity in bureaucracy, between text and body, that characterizes how it functions.
This relationship between textual existence and bodily existence, bridged by affect, seeps out to
define all of modernity; as a bureaucrat, Huysmans is particularly positioned within the crux of
this hybridity. However, specific references to the work carried out by the specific department
for which Huysmans worked are absent and his personal writing reveals little of this matter
either. Policing becomes a looming shadow over the normalized biopolitics of the bureaucratic
state, an ever-present potential threat to anyone whose body is counted in the body politic, but
Huysmans either can’t or won’t speak about it, that is, write it.
236

Although the Arsenal’s Lambert collection does not house many bureaucratic documents
written by Huysmans,
468
especially given the length of his bureaucratic career, some of his
relevant drafts and letters are available there in his own hand. Many of the available documents,
from the mid-1870s to the end of his career, are from the period when Huysmans worked for the
Sûreté Générale, the section of the French bureaucracy that handled the administrative
paperwork of the police. The Sûreté Générale continued a tradition of political policing,
“practised systematically in the seventeenth century by Louis XIV,” and still makes up a part of
France’s centralized policing system.
469
While Louis XIV relied on political policing for the sake
of keeping tabs on his aristocrats, nineteenth-century French administrations relied on the Sûreté
Générale and its corresponding institutions, to varying levels of success, to help root out possible
internal enemies of the current state. The Sûreté Générale was “established in 1854 after the
abolition of an ephemeral ministry of police” and went through a series of organizational shifts
throughout the 1870s.
470
As the French administration debated over the possible place of political
policing in French government, the Sûreté Générale “was separated from the Prefecture of Police
by the government of National Defence in 1870, then reattached to the Prefecture of Police in
1874 and finally in 1876 became a directorate within the ministry of the Interior.”
471
It was
around this time of uncertainty, in 1876, that Huysmans took up his position in the directorate

468. The relative lack of bureaucratic documents may be due to an unintentional incompletion of the
records or, very likely, to Huysmans’ relatively low position in the bureaucracy. Since he began as a rédacteur and
completed his career as a sous-chef, his paperwork would not be as important to preserve, in the eyes of the archive,
as those of his higher-ranked superiors. It is possible that there are more documents written by Huysmans held in the
AN that have not been identified and transferred into or cross-referenced with the Lambert collection, but given the
way the AN is organized, finding any such documents would be quite the feat if not functionally impossible. Here I
have to offer my deepest gratitude to Professor Nathan Perl-Rosenthal for talking me through the details of the AN
website and fonds and for helping me find some promising boxes to explore.

469. Anderson, In Thrall to Political Change, 267.

470. Anderson, 67.

471. Anderson, 68.
237

under the Ministry of the Interior.
472
While he did not serve as part of the gendarmerie, the actual
police forces on the ground, Huysmans’ bureaucratic career from this point onward very much
cemented his work in political policing. The Sûreté Générale acted as a tool and medium of state
discipline and this discipline focused on subjectively politicized forms of criminality that could
theoretically change from administration to administration. By working within this institution,
regardless of intent, Huysmans acted in accordance with these forms of state policing.
Huysmans, however low his position, worked at the center of French state power, at least
as it appeared on paper. Responding to a letter from Gustave Geffroy, Huysmans claims that he
himself is “trop maigre seigneur, pour vous obtenir ces permis” to visit Clairvaux, but he does
direct Geffroy to the proper figures within the administration to whom he should appeal.
473
So
while Huysmans himself may have lacked the power to make life-changing legal decisions as
part of the Sûreté générale, he was still a cog in the machine of state power and control and
personally involved in policing French bodies. Even if he were not the final word in the policing
process, he did produce some of the steps along the way to a decision and to the final enactment
of a given order or legal punishment. Although the masses of fragile, yellowed papers in the AN
seem individually inconsequential and resist individuality due to their sheer numbers, these same
kinds of papers, which would have come through the offices of Huysmans’ bureau, were tied to
actual arrests, the personnel of the police force, and the kinds of legal paperwork that allowed the
French government to surveil French citizens. These papers may have made up the boring stuff
of Huysmans’ day job, but they were also linked, in life-changing or even -ending ways, to
actual bodies.

472. Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 55.

473. “too low-ranking, to obtain these permits for you” to visit Clairvaux. Joris-Karl Huysmans à Gustave
Geffroy, 11 April 1896, Ms Lambert 21: 26, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.
238

Of course, real people and physical bodies exist materially in the world regardless of
government or juridical structures. They may not necessarily exist as “people” inasmuch as this
status is legally constructed and externally determined, but they exist as living beings of a kind.
It is only in paperwork, however, that the modern citizen is brought into existence and only in
further paperwork that this citizen is transformed into a criminal. The scholar, for example, can
trace the existence, the juridical being, of Huysmans’ father as citizen through the copies of the
description of his naturalization dossier (held at the AN), some of his naturalization paperwork,
and his “Extrait du Registre des Actes de Mariage” [“Extract from the Register of Marriage
Certificates”] available in the Lambert collection (See Images I-K below). Similarly, the subjects
of Huysmans’ bureaucratic memos exist as criminals and as criminalized citizens in the
paperwork that Huysmans drafted in relation to their cases. Just as Huysmans creates characters
like Folantin or Des Esseintes in the space of the bureau and in the realm of written text, he also
creates these criminals whose definition as criminal is grounded in the paperwork that records
and archives national French law and to whom it applies. In these acts of creation, Huysmans has
a hand in creating the objects and subjects that he also has a hand in policing. While the fictional
texts he writes face censorship at the hands of the government,
474
the criminals Huysmans
creates face real bodily consequences for their textual existence. Huysmans’ position in the
bureaucracy, then, establishes a kind of closed circuit in which he creates and so polices and
creates and is so policed in perpetuity. Nothing would exist to police if he, and others, did not
create it, but his careers as bureaucrat and novelist require such creation. Herein lies the
biopolitical paradox of bureaucratic policing and government more generally. In order to have a
national body and individual juridical bodies to police, the bureaucracy must create them and, as

474. See for example Baldick’s description of French custom officers seizing copies of Marthe at the
border. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 59.
239

such, these bodies are created in order to be policed. The creation of policed bodies at the hands
of bureaucratic departments like the Sûreté générale is essentially an extension of what Ian
Hacking calls “making up people.” That is, with the introduction of statistics, both as a concept
and as a governmental function, “categories had to be invented into which people could
conveniently fall in order to be counted,” which means that “many of the facts presented by the
bureaucracies did not even exist ahead of time.”
475
Not only did these new categories influence
how people might describe or interact with their fellow citizens, they also created new types of
people who, effectively, did not exist before, or at least not in the same way. And all of these
people and categories existed first and foremost on paper. What this suggests is that some form

Image I Image J

475. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 3.
240

Image K
of paperwork-based administration is necessary for the modern state not only to function, but to
exist in its current form. Further, it suggests that the bodily is inherently contained within and
defined by bureaucratic documentation, which establishes a form of bureaucratic administration
that is, by necessity, a mix of body and text alike. This paper-based existence, of novels, of
criminals or citizens, effectively pulls actual material like books and bodies into a larger
bureaucratic archive. That is, everything within the purview of the French state is contained
within its archives where paper and flesh alike become preserved bureaucratic material. If, in the
bureaucratic modern state, everything comes back to writing and paperwork, the production of
ennui, at least in the Schopenhauerian sense, seems inevitable. A striving for life becomes,
merely, a striving for paper and, ultimately, a striving for something beyond paper that is not
attainable.
241

Much of the paperwork that Huysmans drafted for the Sûreté Générale, and the archive it
fills, deal directly with potential criminals, often of a political nature. However, what otherwise
might serve as a drama unfolding in real time for the masses becomes buried under the template
language of the bureau. In the first of the “Deux pièces rédigées par Huysmans en 1878-79 au N
é

Carrias, condamné insurrectionnel” [“Two pieces composed by Huysmans in 1878-79 on the
named Carrias, convicted insurrectional”], Huysmans is literally filling in the blanks on a pre-
written form. The stock language of the bureau is already written: “Monsieur le Préfet, j’ai
l’honneur de vous communiquer ci-joint une pétition par laquelle…”
476
Huysmans simply needs
to supply the basic information of the prisoner, that is, his name and where he will reside after
release and why. The visual contrast (see Image L below) between these form words and the
filled-in information is not particularly stark, but Huysmans’ cursive does look mildly informal
beside the tightly spaced and regimented cursive of the form. His writing does not belong, upon
inspection, but at first glance it blends into the typical filler language of the bureau. There is a
chance for recognition or empathy to emerge from his additions, both because the reader
discovers the personal information of Carrias and because the reader can directly attach this
handwriting to a specific, notable bureaucrat, but everything ultimately becomes subsumed by
the orderliness and impersonality of the form. In the second piece of the “Deux pièces” (see
Image M below), Huysmans writes a short memo entitled “Police” where he responds to a memo
about Carrias’ liberation with an affirmation to keep him in Paris where he can be surveilled and
“provisoirement tolérée” [“provisionally tolerated”].
477
Even when Carrias is technically released

476. “Monsieur Prefect, I have the honor of communicating to you an attached petition by which…” Joris-
Karl Huysmans, Deux pièces rédigées par Huysmans en 1878-79 au N
é
Carrias, condamné insurrectionnel, 10
August 1898, Ms Lambert 29: 162, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

477. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Deux pièces rédigées par Huysmans en 1878-79 au N
é
Carrias, condamné
insurrectionnel, 10 August 1898, Ms Lambert 29: 163, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.
242

from the hands of the police, his body and its movements are under the careful control of the
Sûreté Générale and determined by short memos between a bureaucrat and his superior.

Image L Image M
The form language of Huysmans’ bureaucratic paperwork provides the material plane on
which he experiences the lives of the policed. That is, he only interacts with most of those
affected directly by the bureaucratic decisions made by the Sûreté Générale with his participation
through their textual existence on the page. He does not have the fleshly experiences with them
that he has with spoiled food or spiritual conversion, especially given his constant dyspepsia,
black masses, and Catholic asceticism. Rather, they are words plugged into templates that simply
represent a repetitive, ritualistic movement on his part, the conducting of work necessary for his
own life, for his financial maintenance. With the screen of these “I have the honors” and “I
would be inclined to believes,” the bigger questions of life and death that stand out so constantly
243

in the realm of religion and bodily pain become buried under the mundane to the point that they
must be dug out and recontextualized to regain their weight.
One of the documents Huysmans drafted deals with the case of a young woman, called
here only by her family name of Pisani, caught in a romantic relationship with another woman.
The language in this letter does actually take a bit of a turn from the usual formulas to
acknowledge a little bit of intrigue. Huysmans here speaks of “les soupçons” [“the suspicions”]
that “était devenus des réalités” [“have become reality”] and “la profondeur et la violence des
sentiments contre nature” that Pisani surely felt.
478
For her supposed sins, Pisani must now face
exile from France, yet beyond the possible feelings of her parents the main concern of the
document is language. The case has emerged out of rumor and the family largely fears that other
people will find out. The final full paragraph of the document, before the last little plug of form
language, hopes that the recommendations are going to “faire disparaître une cause d’affreux
scandale” and expects the resolution of the matter to “calmer la surexcitation de la
population.”
479
The fate of Pisani does not appear to hold much significance here for the
bureaucratic machine or its cogs. Rather the bureaucracy’s concern seems to be focused on how
they will control and maintain particular patterns of speaking and forms of behavior, particularly
public behavior. Language becomes a means of bodily discipline both in terms of what it enacts
and in terms of what it hides while still maintaining a distance between its seemingly mundane
implementation and its formidable effects. Language and paperwork also become the media

478. “the depth and the violence of the unnatural sentiments.” Document de police de la main de J.-K.
Huysmans, -- au Ministère de l’Intérieur, sur une affaire de mœurs lesbiennes dans le dept. du Var – 1882, 26
January 1882, Ms Lambert 29: 157, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

479. “remove a cause of terrible scandal” and expects the resolution of the matter to “calm the
overexcitement of the population.” Document de police de la main de J.-K. Huysmans…, Ms Lambert 29: 157.
244

through which the individual body and its larger connections to the body politic are accounted
for and policed.
To that end, the language of this document goes further than ignoring Pisani’s affects and
instead attempts to construct or rewrite them. Like her contemporaries, she would experience the
minor affects of bureaucratic modernity, like ennui, but in her criminalization she is further
subjected to a more acute affective experience triggered by bureaucratic paperwork. While we
don’t have access to her own account, and therefore to her experience of the revelation of her
relationship, one might expect some mixture of anger, fear, grief. And yet, even without clear
evidence, Huysmans not only addresses the possible “surexcitation” [“overexcitement”] of the
populace, but also projects a particular affective experience onto Pisani and her body. That is, he
suggests that she must have felt profound and violently strong feelings for the woman she loves
because, he seems to imply, why else would a rational person act against her best interests,
against legal and cultural mores, in this way? Here, Huysmans makes up her affects in the same
way that bureaucratic documents make up people. She is created through the eyes of the bureau
and through the lens of the affective atmosphere generated in the bureau. Because Pisani and her
affective state are recorded in the bureaucratic archive in this way, as far as the French
government is concerned, she becomes fact in this way; she exists in this way, any bodily
existence she once had defined only through a textual representation of her assumed affective
state. No consideration is given to her affective state after she receives her punishment at which
point, she likely becomes irrelevant to the bureaucratic archive and disappears from its pages.
Her affective being is at once of a piece with and elided by the affective atmosphere of
modernity, defined by the bureaucratic forces that rendered her criminal. Her bodily and textual
245

existence are both contained within this document and conflated—how she exists on paper is
how she exists in body, by bureaucratic necessity.
In the bureaucratic state, the body is both subject and object of the state and its existence
is delimited by paperwork. A striving for the bodily then becomes a mere striving for paperwork,
and Huysmans had plenty of that in the bureau already. For the bureaucrat, policing ends at this
level of paperwork and properly formulated documents, whereas Pisani, for example, is facing
exile: a bodily removal from her physical space of domicile. The Sûreté Générale document, in
this sense, is a kind of hybrid. It is at once textual and bodily, physical and ephemeral, formulaic
and specific. It straddles two worlds and pulls them together into one deceptively banal sheet of
material. The form of the bureaucratic document is inherently its most important feature and the
content of the document, due to the importance of the document’s form, is placed on a lower
level of significance as its form and so it cannot ultimately win out. When accurate copying and
recopying, at least in Huysmans’ depiction of the bureau, remains the highest good, the
bureaucratic document obscures the bodies it controls even while creating the physical and
affective consequences felt by bureaucrats and citizens alike in the time of modernity. Like
Pisani whose affair might stir up an unsavory rumor mill, and with it disorder, and Carrias whose
documentation cannot quite render the implications of his condemnation and surveilled freedom,
there is always a threat that the form cannot quite bear the burden of the lives affected. However,
the collapse of life into bureaucracy in the time of modernity suggests that nothing will totally
slip out of bureaucratic control. Bureaucracy keeps these kinds of affects and lives solely in the
realm of paperwork. The tension between the form of paperwork and its content marks, in turn,
the affective disconnect between indirectly policing bureaucrat and directly policed citizen.
480

480. In drawing this distinction, I do not mean to suggest that bureaucrats (and even police) are not
themselves policed. By virtue of being inhabitants of France, they are inherently policed bodies. However, I do want
246

The bureaucrat, by creating the necessary documentation, remains largely in an emotional realm
characterized by minor affects, disgust and ennui. Condemned, imprisoned, or exiled citizens
would experience much stronger affective responses to the effects of Huysmans’ mundane
documents: anger, terror, despair. These affects overlay the ennui of modernity, heightening the
disconnect between bureaucracy’s form and its content. It is these affects and their verbal and
physical accompaniments that are foreclosed by the neat encapsulation of form(s). There is a
point of separation between the affective worlds of the bureaucrat and the policed and it is
located within the bureaucratic document itself. In Huysmans’ version of the Sûreté Générale,
bureaucratic authority comes from and exists primarily on and through paper even as it produces
a bodily subject. It is this disconnect and hybridization with physical life, which extends to the
bureaucratic system writ large, that aids in producing the affective atmosphere of modernity, of
the mal du siècle.
Despite Huysmans’ complicity in the act of policing and in the act of biopolitical creation
that makes policing possible, he also existed as one of these created, sometimes criminal, bodies.
On more than one occasion he supposedly came to loggerheads with the ministry when it came
time to publish both his books and his journalistic work. Many of Huysmans’ novels, especially
his early works, dealt with the unsavory or intimate elements of human bodies and the occult,
while his later works tended to deal heavily with religion in a relatively secularized country.
According to his own accounts, these potentially salacious topics often went against the grain of

to demonstrate both Huysmans’ complicity in this system of policing, without passing rigid moral judgement on his
career, and the vast differences between his experience of policing and that of a condemned, imprisoned, or exiled
person. It’s worth noting that there are examples of bureaucratic authors who are both complicit with policing and
affected bodily by it across the literary traditions that I consider. Saltykov-Shchedrin, for example, wrote reports
about provincial riots to send back to the central administration but was also exiled to Viatka in 1848 for the stories
marking his “literary debut,” “one of which was deemed ‘subversive’” (Foote 4). Here is a case of bodily policing
based on textual crimes. See I. P. Foote, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyovs: A Critical Companion (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1997).
247

his superiors’ expectations for the public image of their employés. When Huysmans was writing
for the journal Le Gaulois, some articles that the journal published on the Jesuits apparently
upset his higher-ups as the “superiors in the Civil Service…brought his association with Le
Gaulois to an end” by “‘[giving] me [Huysmans] clearly to understand that I should have to
choose between remaining at the Ministry and working for that wretched paper.’”
481
Ironically
enough, it was not the ministry Huysmans initially feared in this capacity but rather the editor of
the paper, Arthur Meyer. Huysmans had gone so far as to write to a friend: “‘Quelle chance que
je sois dans un bureau!...Ce qu’[Meyer] va un de ces jours me balancer, bien sûr!’”
482

Huysmans’ misgivings were apparently misplaced in this instance. Later in his career, Huysmans
seemed to have learned his lesson as he played down the rumors around his visit to La Trappe in
1892 and later complained to his friend Gustave Boucher
483
in 1897 that “his anticlerical
superiors at the Ministry, hearing that La Cathédrale was to appear early in the New Year, had
advised him to retire from the Civil Service.”
484
Baldick rightfully calls into question Huysmans’
narration of this event given that “he had planned to retire in 1898 for at least five years” but it is
certainly possible that Huysmans’ plans could have overlapped with backlash from his
superiors.
485
Ultimately, it is unclear how much of a role Huysmans’ own bureau had in
censoring his work, although the French government more broadly certainly censored his writing

481. Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 85.

482. “‘What luck that I would be in a bureau!...One of these days Meyer is going to throw me away, for
sure!’” Gustave Coquiot, Le vrai J. K. Huysmans (avec un portrait nouveau) (Paris: C. Bosse, 1912), 123-124.

483. As Baldick describes him, “a bookseller on the Quai Voltaire whom Henri Girard had introduced to
Huysmans.” The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 232. Boucher and Huysmans were correspondents and friends before a
falling out around 1902 (425).

484. Baldick, 355.

485. Baldick, 531n.38.

248

on at least one occasion. Based on Huysmans’ journal entries and personal correspondence, he
did at least consider the bureau enough of a threat to his literary production or himself as
unwitting victim of the unscrupulous French bureaucracy that he cast his superiors as censors on
more than one occasion.
However, despite the disciplinary measures he faced for his fictional texts, Huysmans
certainly took advantage of his position when it suited him. When researching the occult earlier
in his career, Huysmans not only read published works on the topic, but delved into “abstracted
records of contemporary magicians from the files of the Ministry of the Interior.”
486
Huysmans
not only benefitted from the archive he helped create despite his loathing for the work, but he
also took advantage of the surveillance to which he contributed and about which he would not or
could not directly write. The same kind of police and bureaucratic surveillance that at times
caused Huysmans to fear for his position because of his occultism or Catholicism, or even
because of the material in his novels, served as a resource for fostering his ideas and for their
material representation in writing. When he received a letter attempting to blackmail him over
his novel Là-bas, the blackmailer and his accomplice were reminded of Huysmans’ position in
the Sûreté Générale when they “learned that a detective was making inquiries about them on
Huysmans’ behalf” and so “relapsed into a discreet silence.”
487
Despite his superiors’ past
censorship of his work, Huysmans is able to leverage the power of his department against would-
be blackmailers threatening his career over the same kind of works to which the bureaucracy
objected. It is in this split, the duality of Huysmans’ position, that he becomes a grotesque figure,
a hybrid bureaucrat-author who sharply feels the ennui of an inability to escape the bureau’s

486. Baldick, 228.

487. Baldick, 234.
249

reach. Every level of Huysmans’ life as author, as bureaucrat, even as individual, becomes
implicated within the biopolitics of the state as, of course, do the lives of the citizens he helps
police with and through paper. The bureaucrat-author not only creates a kind of closed circuit
whereby he generates the very material and bodies that he ultimately polices, this closed circuit
builds into the bureaucracy its own necessity and means of reproduction.
It is in this space of bureaucratic inclusion that Schopenhauerian ennui and a general
crisis of modernity emerge. Within the bureaucratic space and its affective atmosphere, every
citizen is a potential or hypothetical criminal (or even a new, not-yet-invented category) at any
given time and every bureaucrat is partially complicit in their own policing. This potentiality and
complicity and their affects define the modern French state, bureaucratic labor, and modernity as
an experienced time and space. The imposed necessity of bureaucratic structures and their self-
reproductive qualities create a sense of perpetuity but also a lack of perceived outside. There is
nothing to strive for beyond the bureaucracy and so the ennui of striving for something to strive
for, something beyond, becomes a permanent fixture of the bureaucratic state. By the time that
Huysmans worked in the Sûreté Générale, the structures that housed his bureau and the tasks he
performed were normalized elements of everyday life and governance in France. But despite
their normalization, and despite the mundanity of the work, his own life mirrored, at least in
affect if not always literally, the grotesque worlds of Folantin and Bougran. In the context of the
affective crisis of the nineteenth century, expressed in the minor persistent affects of bureaucratic
labor that nevertheless enact existential dread, modernity becomes defined by bureaucratic
structures. In short, bureaucracy is a material hybrid of text and body that redefines life and
living within modernity.

250

Conclusion
Ultimately, the case studies contained herein help to spotlight just how integral state
bureaucracy was to nineteenth-century literature in Russia and France but also to recode the
stereotypical view of bureaucracy in this period and how it functioned. The work of the authors
examined here, Balzac, Gogol’, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Huysmans, reveals the failures of
modernity as it is constructed and coded through state bureaucratic structures. However, in their
fiction they also locate affective attachments to ideas of rationality and progress—even if those
affective attachments are negative—that allow bureaucratic structures and a particular conceptual
narrative of modernity to persist throughout the nineteenth century and, at some level, even into
our current moment. Modernity, and the bureaucracy that helped to structure it, persisted in a
mode of failure even as they were being constructed and solidified as part of the everyday act of
living. In this sense, what these authors are highlighting is what it looks like to live within a
failed system,
488
or rather, a system that is founded in and defined by its own failure. To this end,
the first chapter of this dissertation begins by demonstrating the failure of bureaucratic systems
and the version of modernity that they bolster while the second chapter dives into the direct
material and affective consequences of such a failure as the concept of a professionalized
bureaucracy becomes increasingly concretized in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. From
there, chapters three and four examine the fully professionalized and culturally embedded state
bureaucracy in the late nineteenth century and how its failure persists both by advancing broad
cultural narratives and generating communal affective atmospheres that ensure its means for
enduring into the future. Through this assemblage of chapter arguments, then, I hope to both add
new layers of consideration to the conversation around nineteenth-century bureaucracy and its

488. My thanks to Antónia Szabari for this turn of phrase.
251

literary representations and to highlight the affective and material elements of failed rational
bureaucracy and modernity that persist into our present day.
We are living, after all, at a time when office work and government bureaucracy, the kind
of work that made up the days of the authors addressed in this dissertation, are integral in some
way to our daily lives. Whether that be interacting with or working for state bureaucracies that
manage institutions like immigration control, health care, or the military, or holding a position in
a university or private company with a professionalized bureaucratic structure. In particular, the
affective modes and material realities of these kinds of positions have continued to be a major
concern of pop culture which, whether through TV shows like The Office or Parks and Rec,
social media posts discussing the merits of returning to the office post-pandemic, or subreddits
like r/antiwork that interrogate the purpose of and need for work and its capitalist trappings more
generally, often focus on the individual and their experience in the office. With this context in
mind, even while contributing to discussions around the nineteenth century, I hope this project
can speak to timely concerns around the systems that continue to structure our daily lives.
Moving forward from the core takeaways of this dissertation and our contemporary
conversations around bureaucracy and the office, I am left with some final questions that might,
perhaps, resonate across disciplines: Is there room to acknowledge the affective and material
within the rational and abstract? Is there a version of bureaucracy that is not bound up with
capitalist goals or social hierarchy that could, instead, become a useful model for actual social,
economic, and political equity? This project is not meant to answer these questions, and writers
like David Graeber, Béatrice Hibou, and Catherine Liu
489
have given far more direct attention to
the question of what rethinking bureaucracy would actually entail in our present moment than I

489. See Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
252

have had room for in this dissertation. I hope, though, that this project creates intellectual space
for considering these questions through a long historical view that takes into account the
aesthetic and lived aspects of the nineteenth-century state bureaucracy—a series of bureaucratic
systems that were becoming increasingly concretized into the professionalized form that is most
familiar today—that have carried over into the current moment. If we acknowledge the ways in
which bureaucracy can fail and has failed, as well as the ways in which it replicates through its
failure, can we adopt certain bureaucratic principles in a new way? If we look to bureaucratic
labor as an affective endeavor, can we better harness and direct that affect?
Regardless of any answers we may or may not have to these questions, it is clear both
that state bureaucracy has had a larger influence on nineteenth-century literature and perceptions
of modernity than the current body of work on this topic reflects and that this influence has
persisted, even if in transformed versions, into the twenty-first century by relying on many of the
same strategies that made the matter and affects of bureaucracy so fascinating to nineteenth-
century Russian and French authors. If nothing else, then, this dissertation is an invitation for us
all to develop a nose for the bureaucratic.

253

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Appendix: The Table of Civil Ranks
Except for the character ranks, this partial recreation of the Table of Ranks is taken from
the Appendix of Irina Reyfman’s How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial
Table of Ranks. I have only included the civil ranks as the characters in the texts I look at all hold
civil ranks rather than military or court ranks. The Important Personage’s and Akakii’s ranks are
noted by Harold McFarlin on pg. 242 of “‘The Overcoat’ As a Civil Service Episode.”

Class Civil Ranks Character Ranks

I Chancellor
Actual Privy Councilor, First Class
(beginning in the late eighteenth century)

II

III Privy Councilor

IV Actual State Councilor Important Personage

V State Councilor Kovalev’s Nose

VI Collegiate Councilor

VII Court Councilor (from 1745)

VIII Collegiate Assessor Kovalev

IX Titular Councilor Akakii

X Collegiate Secretary

XI Ship Secretary (1764-1834)

XII Gubernial Secretary

XIII Provincial Secretary (1722-75)
Senate Registrar (from 1764)
Synod Registrar (from 1764)

XIV Collegiate Registrar

Abstract (if available)

Abstract "The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: Bureaucratic Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Russian and French Literature" examines how government bureaucracy influences the social and cultural frameworks established by Russian and French literary writers and public intellectuals to define European modernity. This project demonstrates how nineteenth-century authors put pressure on bureaucratic ideas of rationality and order, challenging the cultural narrative of modernity as a clean break from the past that would usher in a progressive march toward civilizational perfection. In particular, I focus on the ways in which bureaucracy takes on both a destructive and creative force in nineteenth-century fiction. I argue that state bureaucracy is not just a key element of nineteenth-century literary constructions of modernity, but also that in the literary unraveling of bureaucratic tropes and absurdity, the authors I examine locate ways in which bureaucracy becomes affective or animating despite typical stereotypes of bureaucracy as deadening. Through case studies of canonical Russian and French texts published between the 1830s and 1880s from Honoré de Balzac, Nikolai Gogol’, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, in this project I use an eclectic methodological approach to trace the shared bureaucratic tropes and representations across these two national contexts without constructing the kind of enclosed conceptual systematization that my chosen authors point to as a failure of bureaucratic structures. While engaging with these texts promises to offer a more complicated picture of nineteenth-century life and bureaucracy, this project is also especially relevant to concerns that persist across disciplines about the role that bureaucratic structures have had and still have in shaping state and corporate power.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Telfer, Michaela (author)

Core Title The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Literature)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/25/2024

Defense Date 06/13/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Administration,affect theory,Bureaucracy,France,Government,Literature,modernity,nineteenth century,OAI-PMH Harvest,Russia,state

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meeker, Natania (committee chair), Pratt, Sally (committee chair), Khanna, Neetu (committee member), Szabari, Antonia (committee member)

Creator Email mtelfer@g.ucla.edu,mtelfer@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375418

Unique identifier UC111375418

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Type texts

Source 20220728-usctheses-batch-962 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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