severing all their ties with the existing state and society, seeing them as the realm of the Antichrist, and wandered as free spirits across the Russian land; the ‘Milk-drinkers’ (
Russia was a breeding ground for Christian anarchists and Utopians. The mystical foundation of the Russian faith and the messianic basis of its national consciousness combined to produce in the common people a spiritual striving for the perfect Kingdom of God in the ‘Holy Russian land’. Dostoevsky once maintained that ‘this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth’, was the basis of ‘our Russian socialism’.17 And there was a sense in which this spiritual quest lay at the heart of the popular conception of an ideal Russian state where truth and justice
The oldest of these folk myths was the legend of Kitezh - a sacred city that was hidden underneath the lake of Svetloyar (in Nizhegorod province) and was only visible to the true believers of the Russian faith. Holy monks and hermits were said to be able to hear its ancient churches’ distant bells. The earliest oral versions of the legend went back to the days of Mongol rule. Kitezh was attacked by the infidels and at the crucial moment of the siege it magically disappeared into the lake, causing the Tatars to be drowned.
Over the centuries the legend became mixed with other stories about towns and monasteries concealed underground, magic realms and buried treasure under the sea, and legends of the folk hero Ilia Muro-
mets. But in the early eighteenth century the Old Believers wrote the legend down, and it was in this form that it was disseminated in the nineteenth century. In the Old Believers’ version, for instance, the Kitezh tale became a parable of the truly Christian Russia that was concealed from the Russia of the Antichrist. However, among the peasantry it became a vehicle for dissident beliefs that looked towards a spiritual community beyond the walls of the established Church. Throughout the nineteenth century pilgrims came to Svetloyar in their thousands to set up shrines and pray in hopeful expectation of a resurrection from the lake. The height of the season was the summer solstice, the old pagan festival of Kupala, when thousands of pilgrims would populate the forests all around the lake. The writer Zinaida Gippius, who visited the scene in 1903, described it as a kind of ‘natural church’ with little groups of worshippers, their icons posted to the trees, singing ancient chants by candlelight.20
Another of these Utopian beliefs, no less tenacious in the popular religious consciousness, was the legend of Belovode, a community of Christian brotherhood, equality and freedom, said to be located in an archipelago between Russia and Japan. The story had its roots in a real community that had been established by a group of serfs who had fled to the mountainous Altai region of Siberia in the eighteenth century. When they did not return, the rumour spread that they had found the Promised Land. It was taken up, in particular, by the Wanderers, who believed in the existence of a divine realm somewhere at the edge of the existing world, and parties of the sect would journey to Siberia in search of it.21 The legend grew in status after 1807, when a guidebook to Belovode was published by a monk who claimed to have been there and, although his directions on how to get there were extremely vague, hundreds of peasants set off each year by horse and cart or riverboat to find the legendary realm. The last recorded journeys, in the 1900s, seem to have been prompted by a rumour that Tolstoy had been to Belovode (a group of Cossacks visited the writer to see if this was true).22 But long after this, Belovode remained in the people’s dreams. The painter Roerich, who took an interest in the legend and visited the Altai in the 1920s, claimed to have met peasants there who still believed in the magic land.
2
’I stopped at the Hermitage at Optina’, Gogol wrote to Count A. P. Tolstoy, ‘and took away with me a memory that will never fade. Clearly, grace dwells in that place. You can feel it even in the outward signs of worship. Nowhere have I seen monks like those. Through every one of them I seemed to converse with heaven.’ During his last years Gogol came to Optina on several occasions. He found comfort and spiritual guidance for his troubled soul in the tranquillity of the monastery. He thought he had found there the divine Russian realm for which he had searched all his life. Miles away from the monastery, he wrote to Tolstoy, ‘one can smell the perfume of its virtues in the air: everything becomes hospitable, people bow more deeply, and brotherly love increases’.23
Nikolai Gogol came from a devout family in the Ukraine. Both his parents were active in the Church, and at home they kept to all the fasts and religious rituals. There was a tinge of mysticism in the Gogol household which helps to account for the writer’s life and art. Gogol’s parents met when his father had a vision in the local church: the Mother of God had appeared before him and, pointing to the young girl standing next to him, had said that she would become his wife, which indeed she did.24 Like his parents, Gogol was not satisfied by the observance of the Church’s rituals. From an early age he felt a need to experience the divine presence as a drama in his soul. In 1833 he wrote to his mother:
[in my childhood] I looked at everything with an impartial eye; I went to church because I was ordered to, or was taken; but once I was there I saw nothing but the chasuble, the priest and the awful howling of the deacons. I crossed myself because I saw everyone else crossing themselves. But one time - I can vividly remember it even now - I asked you to tell me about the Day of Judgement, and you told me so well, so thoroughly and so touchingly about the good things which await people who have led a worthy life, and you described the eternal torments awaiting sinners so expressively and so fear-somely that it stunned me and awoke in me all my sensitivity. Later on it engendered the most lofty thoughts in me.23
Gogol never had religious doubts, as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did. The torments of his final years arose only from doubts about his own merits before God. But the intense nature of the writer’s faith could not be contained within any Church. In some ways, as he himself acknowledged, his faith had much in common with the Protestant religion, in the sense that he believed in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.26 Yet in the six years which Gogol spent in Rome, from 1836 to 1842, he also became close to the Catholic tradition, and if he chose not to convert to Rome, it was only, in his words, because he saw no difference between the two creeds: ‘Our religion is just the same thing as Catholicism - and there is no need to change from the one to the other.’27 In the final version of
Gogol’s fiction was the arena of this spiritual search. Contrary to the view of many scholars, there was no real divide between the ‘literary works’ of Gogol’s early period and the ‘religious works’ of his final years, although he did reveal a more explicit interest in religious issues later on. All Gogol’s writings have a theological significance - they were indeed the first in a national tradition that granted fiction the status of religious prophecy. Many of his stories are best read as religious allegories. Their grotesque and fantastic figures are not intended to be realistic - any more than icons aim to show the natural world. They are designed to let us contemplate another world where good and evil battle for man’s soul. In Gogol’s early stories this religious symbolism is embedded in biblical motifs and sometimes quite obscure religious metaphors. ‘The Overcoat’, for example, has echoes of the life of St Acacius - a hermit (and tailor) who died after years of torment by his elder, who later repented of his cruelty. This explains the hero’s name, Akaky Akakievich - a humble civil servant of St Petersburg who dies unloved, robbed of his precious overcoat, but who then returns to haunt the city as a ghost.28 After the ‘failure’ of
parable but which the public look as a hilarious satire - Gogol sought
to drive his religious message home. The work to which he then devoted all his energies was envisaged as a three-part novel called
