Most extraordinary...were the eyes;

“The Portrait” by Nikolai Gogol is a traditional ghost story. A young artist purchases a mysterious portrait from the owner of a Saint Petersburg art shop. After taking the portrait home it comes to life and the image in the portrait steps out of the frame. Gogol was an extremely reglious person who lived in the fear that his work might become possessed by the devil. Many literary critics suggest “The Portrait” depicts Gogol’s real life fear. Here is a passage from “The Portrait.”

“The Portrait”

“…the artist had already been standing motionless for some time before a portrait in a big, once magnificent frame, on which traces of gilding now barely gleamed. It was an old man with a face the color of bronze, gaunt, high-cheekbones; the features seemed to have been caught at a moment of convulsive movement and bespoke an un-northern force. Fiery noon was stamped on them. He was draped in a loose Asiatic costume. Damaged and dusty though the portrait was, when he managed to clean the dust off the face, he could see the marks of a lofty artist’s work. The portrait, it seemed, was unfinished; but the force of the brush was striking. Most extraordinary of all were the eyes; in them the artist seemed to have employed all the force of his brush and all his painstaking effort. They simply stared, stared even out of the portrait itself, as if destroying its harmony by their strange aliveness. When he brought the portrait to the door, the eyes stared still more strongly. They produced almost the same impression among the people. A woman who stopped behind him exclaimed, “It's staring, it's staring!” and backed away. He felt some unpleasant feeling, unacceptable to himself, and put the portrait down.”

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