Was I mad too? That I do not know, but I do know that this was what I saw, not clearly, but with my own eyes. And I wonder why it was that when I was writing this just now I didn’t mention that when Nikolai Vassilevitch came back into the room he was muttering between his clenched teeth: ‘Him too! Him too!’

And that is the sum of my knowledge of Nikolai Vassilevitch’s wife. In the next chapter I shall tell what happened to him afterwards, and that will be the last chapter of his life. But to give an interpretation of his feelings for his wife, or indeed for anything, is quite another and more difficult matter, though I have attempted it elsewhere in this volume, and refer the reader to that modest effort. I hope I have thrown sufficient light on a most controversial question and that I have unveiled the mystery, if not of Gogol, then at least of his wife. In the course of this I have implicitly given the lie to the insensate accusation that he ill-treated or even beat his wife, as well as other like absurdities. And what else can be the goal of a humble biographer such as the present writer but to serve the memory of that lofty genius who is the object of his study?

‘La moglie di Gogol’

First published in the magazine Città (14 December 1944), later included in Ombre (Vallecchi, 1954) and then in Racconti (Vallecchi, 1961).

Natalia Ginzburg

1916–91

Ginzburg was a young bride and recent mother when she left Turin, where she was raised, to follow her husband, an anti-fascist dissident, who had been interned in a small village in Abruzzo. It was there, in a place she both loved and detested, that she wrote several short stories which she published under a false name, Alessandra Tornimparte, necessary protection for a Jewish writer at the time. After the fall of Mussolini and the liberation of Italy, Einaudi published a volume called La strada che va in città (The Road to the City) under her real name. This story comes from that book. Ginzburg wrote it at night, as her children slept. In 1943, her daughter Alessandra was born, named after the pseudonym that had protected and in some sense ‘given birth’ to Ginzburg the writer. Her most famous work, Lessico famigliare (the most recent English version is called Family Lexicon), which received the Strega Prize in 1963, is an amalgam of truth and invention that both anticipates the literary memoir and surpasses it. Reading Ginzburg, one understands that all memory is constructed. In 1937, she was approached by Einaudi, where Leone was among the first and most prominent editors, to join the group of writers entrusted to translate the complete works of Marcel Proust (she translated the first volume, Swann’s Way). Ginzburg also worked for years as an editor at Einaudi (where she famously rejected Levi’s manuscript of Se questo è un uomo). This tale, characteristic of Ginzburg’s delicate, unblinking style, and her love of first-person narration, is composed with a placidity that contains violent emotional currents. It was Natalia’s daughter Alessandra who suggested I include this particular story in this volume.