from the satiric extremes of his play and embraced the Nicholas I–Uvarov ideological triad, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” In fact, he was the first great Russian writer to accept this doctrine fully and unconditionally. (The second was Dostoevsky.)
Gogol’s evolution was apparently sincere. While the path had been cleared somewhat for him by the late Pushkin, Gogol went much further.
This is Gogol on Orthodoxy: “Reason does not give man full ability to strive forward. There is a higher ability; its name is wisdom, and only Christ can give it to us.” Gogol explains that the poet “better than others hears God’s hand in everything that happens in Russia, and feels the proximity of another Kingdom. That is why our poets’ sound turns biblical.”
On autocracy, Gogol cites what he allegedly heard from Pushkin: “The state without a plenipotentiary monarch is an automaton: at best it could achieve what the United States has achieved. And what is the United States? Carrion; a man there is so worn down that he’s not worth a shelled egg. A state without a plenipotentiary monarch is like an orchestra without a Kapellmeister.”
Gogol hailed the patriotic peasant Ivan Susanin, the hero of Glinka’s opera
The trickiest part for Gogol was to preach about nationality and the Russian national idea, precisely because he was living in the West. Gogol found wiggle room in an explanation (with Solzhenitsyn-like overtones): “I knew that I was not traveling in order to enjoy foreign places but rather to suffer—as if I had a premonition that I would learn Russia’s value only outside Russia and would add to my love for her from afar.”
For Russian liberals and Westernizers, all this sounded like hypocritical drivel. They reacted with fury to Gogol’s book
Dying of consumption, the thirty-six-year-old Belinsky was being treated in Europe. He wrote Gogol a long scathing letter, which turned into his
Pavel Annenkov, who was a friend of both Gogol and Belinsky, recalled how the critic, emaciated and resembling an old man with his deathly pale face, said in his muffled voice as he sat down to write his letter (which, in Annenkov’s words, “sounded throughout intellectual Russia like a trumpet call”), “What can I do? We must use every method to save people from a madman, even if it’s Homer himself who went mad.”5
Imagine Gogol’s reaction to his former apologist addressing him this way: “Preacher of the knout, apostle of ignorance, proponent of obscurantism, panegyrist of Tatar mores—what are you doing! Look down at your feet—you are standing at the abyss … That you align yourself with the Orthodox Church, I can understand: it always supported the knout and despotism; but why did you drag in Christ here?”
In publishing his
Gogol turned out to be a powerful preacher. The letters have the best qualities of Gogol’s prose, making it so difficult to translate: they are vivid, musical, with their own rhythm and imbued with passion for Russia, whose salvation Gogol saw in Christian self-betterment.
Belinsky, for whom purely literary qualities were always less important than ideology, disagreed with Gogol. “Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, humanism. It does not need preaching (it has heard plenty), or prayers (it has repeated enough of them), but the awakening in the people of human dignity, lost for so many centuries in mud and manure.”
The dying but still fiery Belinsky tore apart the ideological triad of Nicholas-Uvarov-Gogol, in passim taking a swipe angrily (and unfairly) at Pushkin; he declared to Gogol that in Russia “the popularity drops quickly of great talents that give themselves sincerely or insincerely to the service of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.’ A striking example is Pushkin, who needed only to write two or three sucking-up poems and don the court uniform to lose the people’s love!”
Of course, Pushkin had never lost the people’s love, whatever that may be; his reputation suffered only in a small albeit influential circle of progressive intelligentsia, whose spokesman was Belinsky.
For that radical group, Gogol’s evolution, which began with the colorful, quasifolkloric “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,” then moved through his mystical and tragic “St. Petersburg Stories” (“Nevsky Prospect,” “Notes of a Madman,” “The Nose,” “The Overcoat”) to the powerful, bitter satire of
Progressives, like their leader Belinsky, saw Gogol’s ideological shift as either a bizarre psychological digression or the desire to suck up to Nicholas, whose financial aid to the writer was widely known (Gogol proudly told his friends about it). But in fact, Gogol’s transformation was organic, if ultimately tragic.
Gogol always felt what he called “a passion for painting.” He took drawing classes at the Academy of Arts and loved making “architectural landscapes”: churches, temples, ruins. He wrote two important pieces about contemporary Russian artists: the essay “The Last Day of Pompeii,” written in 1834 in response to the notorious painting by Briullov on exhibition in St. Petersburg, and “Historical Painter Ivanov,” written in 1846 about Gogol’s friend Alexander Ivanov and his enormous canvas
The Romantic Briullov attracted the twenty-five-year-old art lover Gogol as an exotic figure and as a master celebrated in Europe, whose style—striking composition, vivid contrasts, bold chiaroscuro, and hot colors—were close to Gogol’s early writings.
In his essay, Gogol compared
Reaching for a higher spiritual plane, while rejecting everything “false,” brought Gogol to a friendship in 1838 with Ivanov, thirty-two and living, like Gogol, in Rome.
Like his new friend, Ivanov was strange and rather mysterious (“helpless and weak, one of those who think with their heart,”6 as the poet Rainer-Maria Rilke later described him). He was the complete opposite of the flashy, confident epicurean
