In the film Evening On a Farm Near Dikanka, A Night Before Christmas is brought to life and is a very accurate re-creation of Nikolai Gogol’s short fairy tale. The film’s images transmit the intimacy of Little Russia, while above tends in the opposite direction the crescent of Gogol’s lunar reversal. Alexander Solomonovich, Production Designer for the adaptation released in 1961, was an artist who implemented Gogol’s intentionality as an intricate style of brush stroke and composition, behind the story’s warm Façade of a snowy village. V. Ye. Dikhtar, Teacher at the Department of Directing, [Russian] State institute of Cinematography, in an interview concerning the production of this film recites, in Solomonovich’s own words, a description of the farm, not far from Dikanka:

“ ‘The city of Kirovsk, former Kamenogork, is very peculiar. Five story houses were built right on the slopes of high, snow-covered mountains. Below there is a ravine. Along the ravine’s banks a railroad stretches up to the Apatite Works. The Apatite is a colossal smokestack ejecting soot and ashes many kilometers away. The soot lands on the houses, covers streets, roofs, the buildings’ windows, the people’s faces. It’s everywhere. There’s no white snow in the city. The houses are adorned with huge black icicles. They say in April there will be no snow. It’s melting even today. The location chosen to build the set, is on the territory of the city’s dump, two kilometers from town.’ ”

V. Ye., looking up from the paper, in her own words adds with bold continuity, “That was the reality… A real fairy tale! The fairy tale described by Gogol!”

The Façade is naiveté, and as consequence or perhaps as cause, Gogol and Solomonovich place the night’s characters and action, as if by nature, in a place of remote neutrality, calm and comfortable, where the Devil’s aversions appear only as light-hearted mockery towards the individual. The Devil is deduced a joker as only wit would allow, for the ultimate devil of Gogol’s tale is found in the interpretive imperative of Solomonovich’s imagery: Kirovsk; soot laden ranges and hills.

Vakula, the blacksmith and protagonist, is the commodity of truth, and in the film appears as a double image to Oksana upon the face of Christ. Gogol’s work has been termed hagiographic by some, and Vakula’s tale is here interpreted as such the narrative of a saint. Vakula delineates good and evil and is engaged throughout the story with characters of different sort and nature. Vakula is also naively immersed in the place he is found, though unequivocally held at odds amongst spirits than the buffoons held in stride as were the Headsman, the Deacon, the Choub, the town.

Having obtained slippers of material import and having survived the turbidity of Deviled Air, Vakula thanks the Devil for his help with three lashes, to moments later accept three at the hands of soiled Choub. Vakula experiences the elastic realities of his fairy tale (where it is he who doles the lashes), yet surpasses them without need of royal booties, and accepts the conditions of reality beyond them, the reason and enjoyment Choub finds in his persecution.

In that most corporeal realm, Vakula accepts the pain of his lashings as that which by their own measures are simply justified, and negates anything otherwise said, against Choub, or in his own defense. Vakula discards of himself, submits as does the innocent perceptibility of the child, who “holding back its tears, would look askance at the picture and press against its mother’s breast” (63). This is the hagiography of Christ, who accepts persecution for worldly sin, and similar to the story of Plato’s last days.

Vakula is a wit – conversely and co-currently. Aside from his ‘simple-hearted’, humble, honest face, Vakula’s exchanges with the Devil are of great concern. Of Vakula, the Devil portents a mirrored image, such that he would seem a devil and not a saint, like Oksana’s fleeting glimpses of repulsion before herself.

Vakula is a devil in the very possibility that he could be a saint. The beauty of his life as an artist is devised as such! He is mathematical and descriptive while too the vague and inconceivable left to the credit of other individuals. Vakula the devil is the wit that watched over the shoulder as Choub struck Vakula, and when, moments before, to Choub the whip and shoulder were presented, recalled with a smirk the subject the blacksmith had painted on the walls of the church. In reversing the pursuit of Vakula as a saint, and insisting him a devil, the snow covered village turns as black as the sky above the town when the Devil stole the moon; when the streets were vacant of song.

“In Dikanka nobody realized that the devil had stolen the moon. True, the local scrivener, leaving the tavern on all fours, saw the moon dancing about in the sky for no reason and swore to it by God before the whole village; but people shook their heads and even made fun of him” (21).

The fairy tale described by Gogol…

“I mention it not so as to insult you in any way–that you have some kinship with the devil” (42) says Patsiuk, an omniscient wizard, to Vakula. “My sinful self is bound to perish! nothing in the world helps! Come what may, I must ask for help from the devil himself” (42) replies Vakula. It seems absurd. When Vakula, like Patsiuk had said, dropped from his shoulder a sack to the ground, he found to his surprise that he’d been carrying Devil, adorned and angry with his bitter hate of the blacksmith.

“I’ll bet many would be surprised to see the devil getting up to it as well. What’s most vexing is that he must fancy he’s a handsome fellow, whereas–it’s shameful to look him in the face. A mug, as Foma Grigorievich says, that’s the vilest of the vile, and yet he, too, goes philandering” (23)!

In terms of their relationship… Well, they may have gotten along just fine had V––––a not stabbed his vanity and painted those “offensive caricatures” (31).

To investigate this absurdity. The application of evil is encouraged by Gogol; he implies subtle multiplicities of the devil and witchery everywhere. Gogol conditions his story, and affects the windy roads of the country side with the weight of these folkloric entities, offering a moralistic imperative beyond naiveté. “No witch in the world could elude the Sorochintsy assessor” (20). The Sorochintsy assessor is introduced by Gogol and left unutilized as a character of action, but described as a ‘German,’ or foreigner.

The witch, Solokha, returns from the sky, down the chimney with the Devil, that of her home and her son Vakula. Vakula remains indifferent of her relations with the men of town, absorbed in his pursuit of Oksana. Evening On a Farm Near Dikanka shows Solokha depositing, at the base of the chimney, a sack of stars into a bowl. From the sky she’d plucked them merrily, as if grapes off the vine, and “wherever the spot [she] appeared, the stars disappeared from the sky one after another… Another little spot appeared, grew bigger, began to spread, and was no longer a little spot” (20). Solokha is light hearted and playful; she steals only stars. When the devil neglects for a second his sack, Solokha lifts it from the corner of the house, and out the chimney to the sky it returns.

As easily as Solokha – the Witch – becomes Vakula’s mother, and engages in an a series of fleeting welcomes with men ashamed of town, the Devil, with the powers of the Sorochintsy assessor [“What business did he have with other people, since he had his own territory” (20) ?], becomes this man:

“A nearsighted man, even if he put the wheels of the commissar’s britzka on his nose for spectacles, still wouldn’t have been able to make out what it was. From the front, a perfect German: the narrow little muzzle, constantly twitching and sniffing at whatever came along, ended in a round snout, as with out pigs; the legs were so thin that if the headman of Yareskov had had such legs, he’d have broken them in the first Cossack dance. To make up for that, from behind he was a real provincial attorney in uniform… he was not a German or a provincial attorney, but simply a devil who had one last night to wander about the wide world and teach good people to sin” (20).

Any Cossack would be ashamed of this man. As Khoma Brut from Gogol’s Viy, perturbed and driven to the bottle after his second night alone in the chapel, reading scriptures over a coffin and a witch, breaks spontaneously into dance before the eyes of his compatriots, so too, historically, was dancing common celebration throughout Cossack culture.

For as of the drunkards, exclaiming debauchery of dancing stolen moons the people would laugh, Vakula’s fairy tale exchanges with the devil, are defused and left as slight possibilities beside the corporeal metaphorical counterpoints of corruption and sin. It is the captivating magic that sends dumplings hurling through the air and betwixt bowls to the jowls of Patsiuk. Even the playful devilments of the witch Solokha elude all except the assessor, and therefore exist as only their action allow – as the sleds and merriment on the night before Christmas. Devilry, or the recognition of all that is not right in the world, remains a formula beyond the capacity of naiveté, and not in the least the breast of the child’s mother.

Gogol wrote far from the degree of naiveté that was to be the setting of his tale. Solomonovich’s imagery of Kirovsk and sharp black icicles – Gogol’s ultimate devil – superimposed against the dawn of a white Christmas, suggests our hero’s prerogative. For Vakula, the blacksmith, its as simple as could be.