29 pages • 58 minutes read
The Carriage
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Symbols & Motifs
The Carriage
As the object that lends the story its title, the carriage is a central symbol. The invitation that Chertokutsky extends to the visiting officers flows from his boasts about his carriage, which he claims is worth 4,000 rubles and could hold a bull in its side pockets. Carried away by his own exaggerations, he asks the men to dinner for the purpose of viewing the carriage; when they arrive and find Chertokutsky absent, they insist on seeing the carriage regardless, discovering both its mediocrity and Chertokutsky’s.
Like modern cars, 19th-century carriages existed at the border of public and private life. They conveyed their passengers through streets and to social events, and their exteriors could be lavishly decorated to communicate the owner’s status. At the same time, they were enclosed spaces that sheltered occupants from public view. The story’s carriage therefore develops themes of both The Performance of Class and, more broadly, Depth and Shallowness. In its disappointing looks, it represents Chertokutsky’s social climbing and self-aggrandizement. By its very nature, however, it holds out the promise of some hidden depth beneath its ordinary exterior. This promise proves equally illusory, resulting in a double disappointment for the officers.
By titling the story after the carriage, Gogol aims to raise and frustrate similar expectations in his readers. It is not merely that the carriage does not live up to the characters’ hopes but rather that the general’s discovery of Chertokutsky proves so anticlimactic: His emotional response is difficult to gauge, and he simply walks away. The story itself therefore functions like the carriage, building to an apparent confrontation or reckoning that—to the extent that it occurs—is emptied of content.
The Bay Mare
Although the horse appears briefly in the story, she occupies an important symbolic position: She represents the ephemeral nature of wealth and ownership. At the end of the general’s dinner party, he orders his bay mare to be brought before the guests. As they watch from the porch, two soldiers present the “quivering, frightened” horse, who is “[as] strong and wild as a beautiful woman of the south” (186). Seemingly both brave and terrified, she lifts one of the hapless soldiers nearly off the ground before crashing her hooves into the porch. The general announces that the horse’s name is Agrafena Ivanovna, and his guests praise her beauty with great enthusiasm.
Despite his professed satisfaction with Agrafena—she is “quite decent,” he says—the general complains about her multiple times. Because the village of B— lacks a good stable, Agrafena is “not in perfect shape” (186), and some medicine she has been taking for an unnamed ailment has caused her to sneeze for two days. The general’s frustration with these apparently minor issues suggests that he, like the other aristocrats in the story, expects perfection from everything he owns. This unrealistic desire is reflected in Chertokutsky’s own compulsion to lie about the quality of his carriage, which is of a much lower quality than he would like it to be, but is still, like Agrafena, “quite decent.”
Mustaches
Mustaches “as bristly as boot brushes” are extremely common among the soldiers in the cavalry regiment (183), symbolizing the kind of military pomp important to these men in both identifying one another and in setting themselves apart from the villagers. In fact, the mustaches sometimes stand in for the men themselves: When local townswomen go to the market with their baskets, for example, “mustaches would inevitably peep out from behind their shoulders” (183). This descriptive method is called synecdoche, or a figure of speech in which a part of something represents the whole. In this case, the mustache is such an essential part of the soldier that it takes the place of the person wearing it. This transformation of mustaches emphasizes their importance as symbols of ornate methods of class presentation.
Ownership
The narrator frequently provides detailed descriptions of how both inanimate objects and people change hands over time, moving from one owner or overseer to a new one. This not only emphasizes the story’s considerations of The Hazards of Consumption and materiality, but it draws attention to the ephemerality of ownership. For example, the carriage owned by the cavalry regiment is shared among all the men, belonging to no single person: “[Today] a major would be riding in it, tomorrow it would appear in a lieutenant’s stable, and in a week, just look, it’s being greased with lard by a major’s batman” (182). Similarly, Chertokutsky tells the general that he acquired his carriage “by accident” from a childhood friend and makes it a point to highlight the extent to which they shared it, saying, “With us it was—what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine” (188). The story also includes multiple references to the ownership of peasants by members of the aristocracy, which adds a tinge of irony to passages that describe collective ownership or other forms of shared experiences. Ownership is malleable on an individual level—for example, Chertokutsky’s wife’s peasants are transferred to him upon their marriage—but as a manifestation of structural inequality between economic classes, it seems utterly unchangeable.
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By Nikolai Gogol
