Telegraph. Dismayed, Gogol burned all the copies he could find and left for L?beck, Germany, only to return several weeks later. In 1831 he met the poet Alexander Pushkin. His first collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831-1832), folk and ghost tales set in Ukraine and narrated by beekeeper Rudy Panko, reaped praise for its relative freshness and hilarity, and Gogol became a household name in Petersburg literary circles.
Gogol followed the Dikanka stories with two 1835 collections, Arabesques and Mirgorod. From Mirgorod, the “Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich” (nicknamed “The Two Ivans”), blends comedy with tragedy, prose with poetry, satire with gratuitous play. Describing the two Ivans through bizarre juxtapositions, the narrator explains how the fatal utterance of the
GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
word gander (gusak) severed their friendship for good.
Gogol’s Petersburg tales, some included in Arabesques, some published separately, contain some of Gogol’s best-known work, including “The Nose” (1835), about a nose on the run in full uniform; “Diary of a Madman” (1835), about a civil servant who discovers that he is the king of Spain; and “The Overcoat” (1842), about a copyist who becomes obsessed with the purchase of a new overcoat. In all these stories, as in the “Two Ivans,” plot is secondary to narration, and the tension between meaning and meaninglessness remains unresolved.
In 1836 a poor staging and mixed reception of Gogol’s play The Inspector General precipitated his second trip to Europe, where he stayed five years except for brief visits to Russia. While in Rome he wrote the novel Dead Souls (1842), whose main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, travels from estate to estate with the goal of purchasing deceased serfs (souls) to use as collateral for a state loan. Chichikov’s travels can be considered a tour of Gogol’s narrative prowess. With each visit, Chichi-kov encounters new eccentricities of setting, behavior, and speech.
In 1841 Gogol returned to Russia. There he began a sequel to Dead Souls chronicling Chichikov’s fall and redemption. This marked the beginning of Gogol’s decline: his struggle to establish a spiritual message in his work. His puzzling and dogmatic Selections from Correspondence with Friends (1847), in which he offers advice on spiritual and practical matters, dismayed his friends and supporters. Various travels, including a pilgrimage in 1848 to the Holy Land, failed to bring him the strength and inspiration he sought. Following the advice of his spiritual adviser and confessor, the fanatical Father Matthew, who told him to renounce literature, he burned Dead Souls shortly before dying of self-starvation in 1852. See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Karlinsky, Simon. (1976). The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maguire, Robert. (1994). Exploring Gogol. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. (1961). Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions. Senechal, Diana. (1999). “Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, New Haven, CT.
The Golden Age of Russian Literature is notably not a term often employed in literary criticism. It does not refer to any particular school or movement (e.g., Classicism, Romanticism, Realism); rather, it encompasses several of them. As such, it immediately falls prey to all the shortcomings of such literary categorizations, not the least of which is imprecision. The term furthermore demands, eo ipso, a pair of ungilded ages at either end, and might lead one to an easy and unstudied dismissal of works outside its tenure. Finally, those who wrote during its span were not particularly aware of living in an aureate age, and they certainly never consciously identified themselves as belonging to a unified or coherent faction-any similarity is adduced from the outside and puts in jeopardy the authors’ particular geniuses. That said, the phrase “golden age of Russian literature” has gained currency and therefore, if for no other reason, deserves to be defined as carefully and intelligently as possible.
When they indulge in a yen for periodization, literary specialists tend to distinguish two contiguous (or perhaps slightly overlapping) golden ages: the first, a golden age of Russian poetry, which lasted (roughly) from the publication of Gavrila Derzhavin’s Ossianic-inspired “The Waterfall” in 1794, until Aleksandr Pushkin’s “turn to prose” around 1831 (or as late as Mikhail Ler-montov’s death in 1841); and the second, a Golden Age of Russian prose, which began with the nearly simultaneous publication of Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka and Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin (1831), and which petered out sometime during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
It is historians, with their professional inclination to divide time into discrete and digestible pieces, who most often make use of the term under discussion. Nicholas Riasanovsky, in A History of Russia, offers the following span: The golden age of Russian literature has been dated roughly from 1820 to 1880, from Pushkin’s first major poems [his stylized, Voltairean folk-epic Ruslan and Liud-mila] to Dostoevsky’s last major novel [Brothers
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Karamazov]. Riasanovsky’s dates are notably narrower than those mentioned above. His span omits the first two decades of the century, and with them the late pseudo-classicism of Derzhavin, as well as the Sentimentalism and Ossianic Romanticism of Nikolai Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky-schools that constituted Pushkin’s and Gogol’s frame of reference and laid the verbal foundation for the later glorious literary output of Russia. On the far end, it disbars the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky notwithstanding. Ending the golden age in 1880 furthermore neatly excludes the second half of Tolstoy’s remarkable sixty-year career.
If one is to follow the historians in disregarding the first decades of the nineteenth century-to discount, so to say, the first blush and to wait until the flower has fully bloomed-then arguably a better date to initiate the golden age of literature would be 1831, which witnessed the debut of two un-contested masterpieces of Russian literature. In January, for the first time in its final form, Woe from Wit, Alexander Griboyedov’s droll drama in verse (free iambs), was performed. A few months later, Pushkin put the final touches on Eugene Onegin, his unequaled novel in verse, which he had begun in 1823. The works are both widely recognized by Russians as the hallmarks of Russian literature, but they receive short shrift outside of their native land, a fate perhaps ineluctable for works of subtle and inventive poetry.
The year 1831 also witnessed Gogol’s successful entry into literary fame with his folksy Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka. Gogol and Pushkin had struck up an acquaintance in that year, and Gogol claimed that Pushkin had given him the kernel of the ideas for his two greatest works: Dead Souls (1842), perhaps the comic novel par excellence; and the uproarious Inspector General (1836), generally recognized as the greatest Russian play and one that certainly ranks as one of the world’s most stage-able.
Pushkin also served as the springboard for another literato of the golden age, Lermontov, who responded to Pushkin’s death (in a duel) in 1837 with his impassioned “Death of a Poet,” a poem which launched Lermontov’s brief literary career (he was killed four years later in a duel). Although his corpus is smallish-he had written little serious verse before 1837-and much of it was left unpublished until after his death (mostly for censorial reasons), Lermontov is generally considered Russia’s second-greatest poet. He also penned a prose masterpiece, A Hero of Our Time, a cycle of short stories united by its jaded and cruel protagonist, Pechorin, who became a stock type in Russian literature.
In 1847 Gogol published his Selected Passages from My Correspondence with Friends, a pastiche of religious, conservative, and monarchical sermonettes- he endorses serfdom-that was met by an overwhelmingly negative reaction by critics who had long assumed that Gogol shared their progressive mindset. Vissarion Belinsky, perhaps the most influential critic ever in Russia, wrote a lashing rebuke that was banned by the censor, in part because it claimed that the Russian people were naturally atheists. The uproar surrounding Selected Passages effectively ended Gogol’s career five years before the author’s death in 1852.
REALISM
In 1849, the young writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky- who had created a sensation in 1845 with his par-odic sentimentalist epistolary novel Poor Folk, but whose subsequent works had been coolly received- injudiciously read the abovementioned rebuke of Gogol and allowed his copy to be reproduced, for which he spent ten years in Siberia. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he published Notes from the House of the Dead, an engrossing fictionalized
