Nicholaevan Russia was far different in tone from the heroic theatricality of the other two. The contrast is made even more striking by the divergent pattern of Gogol's subsequent personal career. For, whereas Briullov accepted imperial patronage and Glinka became Kappelmeister to Nicholas I, Gogol left Russia altogether in the wake of his great success. He was driven by a strange inner compulsion to pronounce through art what others were expressing through philosophy and history: a new word of redemptive hope for Russia and all humanity.
After visiting Paris, which he found even more vulgar and venal than St. Petersburg, Gogol settled in Rome and set forth on his effort to rise above the negativism of the Inspector General with a trilogy to serve as a Russian Divine Comedy. His sense of mission was intensified by the death of Pushkin in 1837, and his fame increased by the successful appearance in 1842 of The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, the first part of his great work. Yet in the remaining ten years of his life, Gogol was unable to make further progress on his project. Dead Souls remains, like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, the glorious first part of an uncompleted trilogy. Other Slavic exiles in Italy were also trying to write a new Divine Comedy. Juliusz Slowacki's Poem of Piast Dantyszek about Hell was a Polish Inferno; but whereas Slowacki went on to provide a Paradiso in a poetic 'rhapsody' King Spirit, and Krasinski finished his Undivine Comedy, Gogol's terrifying honesty never permitted him to go beyond the Inferno of Dead Souls. Unlike his Polish contemporaries-and indeed most popular patriotic literature of the day-Gogol was not seduced by idealistic and nationalistic appeals. He could only sweep the stage clean without providing any positive answers.
In Dead Souls (as in another of his unforgettable pictures of provincial pettiness, 'How the Two Ivans Quarreled') Gogol borrowed in part from an earlier picaresque writer from the same section of the Ukraine, Vasily Narezhny. The satirical style and vivid tableaux of Dead Souls are often reminiscent of Narezhny's Russian Gil Bias. But just as Gogol distorts the name of Narezhny's hero (Chistiakov) in the direction of caricature (Chichikov), so he transforms the image of a picaresque hero from a
boisterous adventurer to an enigmatic wanderer, moving through the distorted world of the living in search of his claims on the dead. Narezhny was able to move on to provide Russia with a valedictory message in his posthumously published Dark Year, or the Mountain Princes,101 which criticized Russian rule in Transcaucasia and anticipated in some ways both the novel of social reform and the separatist propaganda of the late imperial period. Gogol, on the other hand, could offer no simple message or hopeful conclusions; he could find no guiding road except one which led to destruction-first of his later works and then of the frail body that had linked him with the world.
The caricatured figures of Dead Souls, the surviving first part of his trilogy, reveal Gogol's fascination with human disfigurement together with an unvoiced, but passionate concern for wholeness and perfection. But there is no bearer of salvation, nothing as compelling as the images of evil and blight. He concluded that one had to be perfect in order to write about perfection. He failed to create positive heroes because
you cannot invent them out of your head. Until you become like them yourself, until you acquire a few good qualities by your perseverance and strength of character, everything you produce by your pen will be nothing but carrion, and you will be as far from the truth as earth is from heaven.102
Driven by this quest for moral perfection, Gogol felt impelled to burn most of the second part of Dead Souls, his Purgatorio, and turn away from art altogether at the end, dying at the age of forty-three. From the artistic perfection of the Inspector General (perhaps the greatest play in the Russian language)103 Gogol moved within a decade to a plea for a total subservience to the established Church in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. His voluntary renunciation of art was to have echoes in the careers of Leo Tolstoy and others. The call of morality was beginning to claim precedence over that of art, and Belinsky, who rejected Gogol's religious appeal, nonetheless contrasted Gogol's moral concern with the 'idea-lessness' of Griboedov's work. The prophet of the sixties, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, was to draw an even more extreme contrast between 'Pushkinian' disciples of pure art and 'Gogolian' concern for the injustice
of humanity.
It was not until the Orthodox revival of the early twentieth century that Gogol's final plea for a return to the Church would receive serious attention; but other enigmatic hints at a way out of the inferno acquired a haunting symbolism for subsequent nineteenth-century thinkers. The final image in Dead Souls, Chichikov's troika heading off across the steppe to an
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unknown destination, came to epitomize the enigma of Russia's future. The ending of The Greatcoat, his most famous short story, written between the Inspector General and Dead Souls, left an even more spectral message. In it Gogol transforms a drawing-room story that others had found humorous concerning a man's excessive grief over the loss of his rifle into a tale of great pathos and meaning. The hero is a poor and insignificant clerk in St. Petersburg, a passive figure whose pitiable life finds focus only in saving money for a new greatcoat. He finally gets it, but is robbed of it in a dark street and dies. Then, in a strange final sequence, he returns to reclaim his coat and cause his superiors to fear for their own. The clerk is not at all noble or heroic in Gogol's story. Thus, his final victory over Nicholaevan St. Petersburg seems all the more fantastic. By making it seem, however, both unavoidable and convincing, Gogol creates not only one of his greatest artistic effects but perhaps also the positive prophecy he was unable to offer in Dead Souls. For not only does the strange victory of the little man represent the best example of Gogol's 'thin, weak feet' crushing the 'real or imaginary monuments' of Nicholaevan Russia; it may also-as one close student of Soviet literature has contended-provide some hope to those who must live with the greater monumentalism of the Soviet era.104
Gogol's imagination was so vivid and pictorial that it sometimes requires the language of painting to discuss it. His writings lent themselves readily to pictorial representation, just as Pushkin's lent themselves to music in the same period. Gogol was, indeed, as interested in pictorial art as Pushkin was in music; the subject matter of Gogol's Portrait came as naturally to him as did that of Mozart and Salieri to Pushkin. Painting held for Gogol not only a special interest but a unique advantage over sculpture and all other forms of plastic art:
It deals not just with one man, its borders are wider: it includes in itself the whole world; all the beautiful phenomena surrounding man are within its power; all the secret harmony and the linking of man with nature are found in it alone.105
Thus, it is not surprising that, when Gogol's own faith in the possibility of pronouncing words of artistic deliverance to Russia weakened, he focused many of his last hopes on the work of a painter, for whose labors he arduously solicited support during the last years of his life. The painter was, of course, Alexander Ivanov, a friend of many years standing, who had often painted Gogol in Rome and who kept pasted within his album for new sketches a letter Gogol had sent him:
God grant you His aid in your labours, do not lose heart, be of good courage, God's blessing be on your brush and may your picture be glori-
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3. The 'Cursed Questions
ously completed. That at any rate is what I wish you from the bottom of my heart.106
