Natasha's Dance

were the true embodiment of Orthodoxy’s ancient spiritual traditions, the one place where the ‘Russian soul’ was most alive, and by the time Gogol returned to Moscow from abroad, its salons were all filled with Optina devotees.

Dead Souls was conceived as a work of religious instruction. Its written style is imbued with the spirit of Isaiah, who prophesied the fall of Babylon (an image Gogol often used for Russia in his letters while working on the second volume of Dead Souls).39As he struggled with the novel Gogol was swept up by the religious fervour of his own prophecy. He plunged into the writings of the seventh-century hermit John of Sinai, who had talked about the need to purify one’s soul and climb a ladder of spiritual perfection (an image Gogol used in his letters to his friends where he said that he was only on the bottom rungs).40 Constant prayer was Gogol’s only comfort and, as he believed, the spiritual source from which he would get the strength to complete his divine mission in Dead Souls. ‘Pray for me, for the sake of Christ Himself, he wrote to Father Filaret at Optina Pustyn in 1850.

    Ask your worthy superior, ask all of the brotherhood, ask all of those who pray most fervently and who love to pray, ask them all to pray for me. My path is a difficult one, and my task is such that without God’s help at every minute and hour of the day, my pen will not move… He, the Merciful, has the power to do anything, even to turn me, a writer black like coal, into something white and pure enough to speak about the holy and the beautiful.41

    The trouble was that Gogol could not picture this holy Russia, the realm of Christian brotherhood which he believed it was his divine task to reveal. This, the most pictorial of all the Russian writers, could not conjure up an image of this place - or at least not one that satisfied his critical judgement as a writer. However hard he tried to paint an

    ideal picture of his Russian characters - an icon, if you like, of the Russian soul - Gogol’s observations of reality were such that he could not help but burden them with grotesque features derived from their natural habitat. As he himself despaired of his own religious vision, ‘this is all a dream and it vanishes as soon as one shifts to what it really is in Russia’.42

    Sensing he had failed in his fictional endeavour, Gogol sought instead to drive his message home in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1846), a pedantic moral sermon on the divine principle contained in Russia which was meant to serve as a sort of ideological preface to the unfinished volumes of Dead Souls. Gogol preached that Russia’s salvation lay in the spiritual reform of every individual citizen. He left untouched the social institutions. He neglected the questions of serfdom and the autocratic state, ludicrously claiming that both were perfectly acceptable so long as they were combined with Christian principles. Progressive opinion was outraged - it seemed a defection from their sacred ideals of progress and political commitment to the people’s cause. In an open letter of 1847 Belinsky launched a devastating attack on the writer whom he had championed (mistakenly, perhaps) as a social realist and advocate of political reform:

    Yes, I did love you, with all the passion a man tied by blood ties to his country can feel for a man who was its hope, its glory and its pride, one of its great leaders on the path of consciousness, progress and development… Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, asceticism or piety, as you suggest, but in education, civilization and culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people of human dignity, a sense lost for centuries in the mud and filth.43

    The Slavophiles, who were no less committed to reform, threw their hands up in despair. ‘My friend’, Sergei Aksakov wrote to Gogol, ‘if your aim was to cause a scandal, to make your friends and foes stand Up and unite against you, then you have simply achieved this. If this publication was one of your jokes, it has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams: everyone is mystified.’44 Even Father Makary, Gogol’s

    mentor at Optina, could not endorse Selected Passages. The elder thought that Gogol had not understood the need for humility. He had set himself up as a prophet and had prayed with all the fervour of a fanatic, but, without the truth or inspiration of the Holy Ghost, that was ‘not enough for religion’. ‘If a lamp is to shine’, he wrote to Gogol in September 1851, ‘it is not enough that its glass merely be washed clean: its candle must be lit within.’45 Nor could Makary agree with the writer’s social quietism. For the calling of his monastery was to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Makary’s criticisms were a crushing blow for Gogol, all the more so since he must have realized that they were fair: he did not feel that divine inspiration in his soul. As soon as he received Makary’s letter Gogol broke off all relations with Optina. He saw that he had failed in his divine calling as a writer-prophet. He felt himself unworthy before God and began to starve himself to death. Instructing his servant to burn the manuscript of his unfinished novel, he took to his deathbed. The last words he uttered as he died, aged forty-three, on 24 February 1852, were, ‘Bring me a ladder. Quickly, a ladder!’46

3

    In his letter to Gogol, Belinsky had acknowledged that the Russian peasant was full of pious reverence and fear of God. ‘But he utters the name of God while scratching his backside. And he says about the icon: “It’s good for praying - and you can cover the pots with it as well.” Look carefully’, the literary critic concluded, ‘and you will see that the Russians are by nature an atheistic people with many superstitions but not the slightest trace of religiosity.’47

    Doubts about the Christian nature of the peasant soul were by no means confined to the socialist intelligentsia for whom Belinsky spoke. The Church itself was increasingly concerned by the image of a heathen peasantry. Parish priests drew a dismal picture of religious ignorance in the countryside. ‘Out of one hundred male peasants’, wrote I. S. Belliutsin in the 1850s,

    a maximum often can read the Creed and two or three short prayers (naturally, without the slightest idea or comprehension of what they have read). Out of

    one thousand men, at most two or three know the Ten Commandments; so far as the women are concerned, nothing even needs to be said here. And this is Orthodox Rus’! What a shame and disgrace! And our pharisees dare to shout for everyone to hear that only in Russia has the faith been preserved undefiled, in Rus’, where two-thirds of the people have not the slightest conception of the faith!48

    For the parish priest it was an uphill task to lead his peasant flock towards a conscious knowledge of the faith - even more to defend it from the secular ideas that came in from the towns. It was partly that the priest himself was barely literate. Most priests were the sons of other parish priests. They were brought up in the countryside, and few had received more than a little education in a local seminary. The peasants did not hold their priests in high esteem. They saw them as servants of the gentry and the state, and their humble, even squalid, way of life did not earn the peasantry’s respect. The clergy were unable to support themselves on the meagre salaries they received from the state, or from the farming of their own small chapel plots. They relied heavily on collecting fees for their services - a rouble or so for a wedding, a bottle of vodka for a funeral - and, as a consequence, the peasants came to see them less as spiritual guides than as a class of tradesmen in the sacraments. The peasant’s poverty and the priest’s proverbial greed often made for lengthy haggling over fees, with peas-ant brides left standing for hours in the church, or the dead left unburied for several days, until a compromise was found.

    In this precarious situation the priest was obliged to live on the constantly shifting border between the Church’s idea of faith and the semi-pagan version of the peasantry. He would use the icons, the candles and the cross to ward away the demons and the evil spirits who, the peasants were convinced, were able to cast spells on their cattle and crops, make women infertile, bring misfortune or disease, or come back as apparitions of the dead to haunt their houses. For all the claims of the Slavophiles and the intense devotion of the Old

    Believers, the Russian peasant had never been more than semi-attached in the Orthodox religion. Only a thin coat of Christianity had been painted over his ancient pagan folk culture. To be sure, the Russian peasant displayed a great deal of external devotion. He crossed himself

    constantly, pronounced the Lord’s name in every other sentence, always observed the Lenten fast, went to church on religious holidays, and was even known to go on pilgrimages from time to time to the holy shrines. He thought of himself, first of all, as ‘Orthodox’, and only later (if at all) as ‘Russian’. Indeed, if one could travel back in time and ask the inhabitants of a nineteenth-century Russian village who they thought they were, the most likely answer would be: ‘We are Orthodox, and we are from here.’ The religion of the peasants was a long way from the bookish Christianity of the clergy. Being illiterate, the average nineteenth-century Russian peasant knew very little of the Gospels, for there was no real tradition of preaching in the countryside. Even peasant readers had little means of access to the Russian Bible (which did not exist in a complete published version until the middle of the 1870s). The Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments were unknown to the average peasant. He vaguely understood the concepts of heaven and hell, and he no doubt hoped that his lifelong observance of the Church’s rituals would save his soul. But other abstract notions were a foreign land to him. He thought of God as a human