an epic ‘poem’ in the style of Dante’s Divine Comedy -in which the providential plan for Russia was at last to be revealed. The grotesque imperfections of provincial Russia exposed in the first, and only finished (1842) volume of the novel - where the adventurer Chichikov travels through the countryside swindling a series of moribund squires out of the legal title to their deceased serfs (or ‘souls’) -were to be negated by Gogol’s lofty portrait of the ‘living Russian soul’ which he was intending for the second and third parts. Even the roguish Chichikov would eventually be saved, ending up as a paternal landowner, as Gogol moved towards the Slavic idyll of Christian love and brotherhood. The whole conception of the ‘poem’ was Russia’s resurrection and its spiritual ascent on an ‘infinite ladder of human perfection’ - a metaphor he took from the parable of Jacob’s ladder in the Book of Genesis.29
Gogol’s divine vision was inspired by his champions, the Slavophiles, whose fantasy of Russia as a holy union of Christian souls was naturally attractive to a writer so disturbed by the soulless individualism of modern society. The Slavophile idea was rooted in the notion of the Russian Church as a free community of Christian brotherhood - a sobornost’ (from the Russian word ‘sobor’ which was used for both ‘cathedral’ and ‘assembly’) - as outlined by the theologian Aleksei Khomiakov in the 1830s and 1840s. Khomiakov came to his conception from a mystical theology. Faith could not be proved by reasoning, he said. It had to be arrived at by experience, by feeling from within the Truth of Christ, not by laws and dogmas. The True Church could not persuade or force men to believe, for it had no authority except the love of Christ. As a freely chosen community, it existed in the spirit of Christian love that bound the faithful to the Church - and this spirit was its only guarantee.
The Slavophiles believed that the True Church was the Russian one. Unlike the Western churches, which enforced their authority through laws and statist hierarchies like the Papacy, Russian Orthodoxy, as they saw it, was a truly spiritual community, whose only head was Christ. To be sure, the Slavophiles were critical of the established Church, which in their view had been spiritually weakened by its close
alliance with the Tsarist state. They espoused a social Church, some would say a socialistic one, and many of their writings on religion were banned as a result (Khomiakov’s theological writings were not published until 1879).30 The Slavophiles were firm believers in the liberation of the serfs: for only the communion of fully free and conscious individuals could create the sobornost’ of the True Church. They placed their faith in the Christian spirit of the Russian people, and this was the spirit which defined their Church. The Slavophiles believed that the Russian people were the only truly Christian people in the world. They pointed to the peasantry’s communal way of life (‘a Christian union of love and brotherhood’), to their peaceful, gentle nature and humility, to their immense patience and suffering, and to their willingness to sacrifice their individual egos for a higher moral good - be that for the commune, the nation or the Tsar. With all these Christian qualities, the Russians were far more than a nationality -they bore a divine mission in the world. In the words of Aksakov, ‘the Russian people is not just a people, it is a humanity’.31
Here was the vision of the ‘Russian soul’ - of a universal spirit that would save the Christian world - which Gogol tried to picture in the second and third volumes of Dead Souls. The concept of a national soul or essence was commonplace in the Romantic age, though Gogol was the first to give the ‘Russian soul’ this messianic turn. The lead came from Germany, where Romantics like Friedrich Schelling developed the idea of a national spirit as a means to distinguish their own national culture from that of the West. In the 1820s Schelling had a godlike status in Russia, and his concept of the soul was seized upon by intellectuals who sought to contrast Russia with Europe. Prince Odoevsky, the archpriest of the Schelling cult in Russia, argued that the West had sold its soul to the Devil in the pursuit of material progress. ‘Your soul has turned into a steam engine’, he wrote in his novel Russian Nights (1844); ‘I see screws and wheels in you but I don’t see life.’ Only Russia, with her youthful spirit, could save Europe now.12 It stands to reason that young nations like Germany and Russia that lagged behind the industrializing West would have recourse to the idea of a national soul. What such nations lacked in economic progress they could more than make up for in the spiritual virtues of the unspoilt countryside. Nationalists attributed a creative spontaneity
and fraternity to the simple peasantry that had long been lost in the bourgeois culture of the West. This was the vague Romantic sense in which the idea of the Russian soul began to develop from the final decades of the eighteenth century. In his essay ‘On the Innate Qualities of the Russian Soul’ (1792), Pyotr Plavilshikov maintained, for example, that in its peasantry Russia had a natural creativity that had more potential than the science of the West. Carried away by national pride, the playwright even claimed some unlikely firsts:
One of our peasants has made a tincture which all the learning of Hippocrates and Galen failed to find. The bone setter of the village Alekseevo is famous among pioneers of surgery. Kulibin and the mechanic Sobakin from Tver are marvels in mechanics… What the Russian cannot grasp will for ever be unknown to men.33*
After the triumph of 1812 the idea of the peasant’s soul, of his selfless virtue and self-sacrifice, began to be linked to the notion of Russia as the saviour of the West. This was the mission that Gogol first developed in Dead Souls. In his earlier story ‘Taras Bulba’ (1835) Gogol had attributed to the Russian soul a special kind of love that only Russians felt. ‘There are no bonds more sacred than those of comradeship!’ Taras Bulba tells his fellow Cossacks:
The father loves his child, the mother loves her child, a child loves its mother and father. But this is not the same, my brothers; a beast also loves its young. But the kinship of the spirit, rather than the blood, is something only known to man. Men have been comrades in other lands too, but there have never been comrades such as those in the Russian land… No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves - that does not mean to love with the head or with
some other part of you, it means to love with everything that God has given you.34
* Such claims were often made by Russian nationalists. In the 1900s, when a practical joker let loose a report that an old Russian peasant had flown several kilometres on a homemade aeroplane, this was taken as a proof that the patriarchal system of Russia was not only better than the West’s -it was cleverer as well (B. Pares, Russia (Harmonds-worth, 1942), p. 75).
The closer Gogol came to the Slavophiles, the more convinced he was that this Christian brotherhood was Russia’s unique message to the world. Here was the providential plan for the ‘Russian soul’ which Gogol hinted at in the unforgettable troika passage at the end of the first volume of Dead Souls:
Is it not like that that you, too, Russia, are speeding along like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake? The road is like a cloud of smoke under you, the bridges thunder, and everything falls back and is left far behind. The spectator stops dead, struck dumb by the divine miracle: it is not a flash of lightning thrown down by heaven. What is the meaning of this terrifying motion? And what mysterious force is hidden in these horses the like of which the world has never seen? Oh horses, horses - what horses! Are whirl winds hidden in your manes? Is there some sensitive ear, alert to every sound, concealed in your veins? They have caught the sound of the familiar song from above, and at once they strain their chests of brass and barely touching the ground with their hoofs are transformed almost into straight lines, flying through the air, and the troika rushes on full of divine inspiration. Russia, where are you flying to? Answer! She gives no answer. The bells fill the air with their wonderful tinkling; the air is torn asunder, it thunders and is transformed into wind; everything on earth is flying past, and, looking askance, other nations and states draw aside and make way for her.35
The ‘Russian principle’ of Christian love, to be revealed by Gogol in the second and third volumes, would save humanity from the selfish individualism of the West. As Herzen put it after reading Gogol’s novel, ‘in potentia there is a great deal in the Russian soul’.36
The longer Gogol worked on his novel, the greater was his sense of a divine mission to reveal the sacred truth of the ‘Russian soul’. ‘God only grant me the strength to finish and publish the second volume’, he wrote to the poet Nikolai Yazykov in 1846. ‘Then they will discover that we Russians have much that they never even guessed about, and that we ourselves do not want to recognize.’37 Gogol looked for inspiration to the monasteries - the place where he believed this hidden Russian spirit was to be revealed. What he most admired in the hermits of Optina was their apparent ability to master their own passions and cleanse their souls of sin. It was in such discipline that he saw the
solution to Russia’s spiritual malaise. Once again it was the Slavophiles who pointed Gogol towards Optina. Kireevsky had been there many times to see Father Makary in the 1840s, when the two men had brought out a life of Father Paissy and translated the works of the Church Fathers from the Greek.38 Like all the Slavophiles who followed him, Kireevsky believed that the hermits of Optina
