NATASHA

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 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.