The Theme of Apocalypse in Three Works by Gogol' *
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Vladimir Glyantz the saCrament oF end The Theme of Apocalypse in Three Works by Gogol’ * Few works by other Russian writers have been as closely connected to their authors' religious views as those of Gogol’. Soviet scholars have often pointed out that The Government Inspector and Dead Souls are, in fact, no more than satires of the Russia of landlords and serfs as it was during the reign of Nikolaj. But academics and soviet theorists have perhaps focused less on the deepest symbolism of Gogol’'s works. One may object that in the first half of the nineteenth century, symbolism had not yet begun to make its mark on Russian literature, and this is certainly the case if we consider it in terms of a dominant literary trend. Historically speaking, however, symbolism dates back more than 100 years. The Christian Church service, for example, is deeply symbolical. The language of symbols was used by Masonic literary authors in their works. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the preacher and church activist Simeon Polockij had already “admitted the rhetorical postulate calling for four levels of meaning to be identified in every text: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical.”1 In this article, we will examine the “anagogical” aspects, or, in other words, the symbolic meaning of Gogol’'s texts. For reasons of space, Gogol’'s early works and his later apocalyptic reflections have been omitted. 1. Different Readings of the Various Versions of The Portrait The Portrait was first published in 1835 in the short-story collection “Arabesques.” The main character of the story, a painter, creates a surprising * Translated from russian by olga selivanova and revised by karen turnbull. 1 Aleksandr m. pančenko, O russkoj istorii i kul’ture (st petersburg: Azbuka, 2000), 195. shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and philosophy in slavic thought 90 Part Two: Literature and forceful portrait of a money-lender with “vivid eyes.” The money- lender has great personal interest in the portrait: if the painter’s art manages to capture at least a part of the money-lender’s life in the portrait, he will not have to be present at the forthcoming Judgement Day, which he is terrified of and wishes to postpone or avoid altogether. During the final sitting, the money-lender dies. But just as he had foreseen, a part of his life remains in the portrait, not merely in paint but captured in a supernatural way. At the heart of the story is the idea that a work of art can be, and often is, a testimony of sin. For Gogol’, it would seem, the devil willingly binds himself to talent. Terrible things start happening in the artist’s family. The late money-lender often appears to the artist, embarrassing him with sacrilegious offers. An attempt is made to burn the evil image, but to no avail: the burnt portrait reappears once again in its place. An attempt to talk to a priest is punished by the death of the wife and younger son. It is only when the artist begins painting images of saints and notices that their faces take on a diabolical expression that he is finally able to understand that the supernatural ability which he acquired when painting the money-lender’s portrait has now become an evil skill: his paintbrushes have been cursed. The artist goes to live in a monastery, where he spends years doing penance, and having at length become an enlightened monk, he reveals a secret to his eldest son, who has come to visit him. My son!—he said after a long pause, almost immobile and staring at the sky—The time is getting nearer when the one tempting the human race will be born into the world. It will be a terrible time: it will happen before the end of the world. He will gallop by on a giant horse, and those who remain faithful to Christ will undergo terrible suffering. Listen, my son: the antichrist has been wanting to be born for a long time... He is already in the process of being born, but only a part of him has forced its way into this world. He chooses a man to latch on to, and reveals himself through people whom the angel shunned at birth, and they are marked with a terrible hatred for all and for everything God has created. The terrific money-lender whom I, like a fool, dared to depict with my cursed paintbrush was exactly like that. It was him, my son, it was the antichrist himself… Marvel, my son, at the terrible power of the devil. He is trying to penetrate everything: our actions, our thoughts and even the artist’s inspiration. This devilish spirit, living invisibly without an image on Earth, will claim innumerable victims. It is the black spirit that Vladimir Glyantz 91 the sacrament of end. the theme of Apocalypse in three Works by gogol’ storms into our lives even in the moment of the purest and holiest thoughts .… My son, this is a disaster for poor mankind!”2 What is meant by the assertion that “the antichrist has been wanting to be born for a long time”? Does it mean that he has existed for a long time but cannot be incarnated before a certain date? There is a complicated question concerning the likeness between Antichrist and Christ:—In what way? How? To what extent will Christ’s antagonist resemble him?3—Gogol’ understands and resolves this question rather mechanically, and therefore incompletely. Only the idea of Antichrist has existed for a long time, but this idea has not yet acquired its desire for action. Gogol’ has not formulated a clear idea here about the antichristian power’s numerous attempts to conquer the world. The image of Antichrist as a character from the future is in many ways hypothetical. In trying to describe him negatively, Gogol’ builds on part of the Credo, which states that Christ “was born from the Father before the beginning of time,” or in other words, that he existed not only long before His embodiment, but even before “the clock started ticking.” St. Efrem Sirin, however, refers to the Antichrist in a different way: “Indeed, his power will be born from a desecrated maiden, but this doesn’t mean that he will be incarnated.”4 Saints have predicted that the Antichrist will not be incarnated in a form resembling the embodiment of God, and that the embodiment of God is absolutely exceptional and unique. The prophecy of the artist monk inThe Portrait attracted the attention of the great Russian emigrant thinker, Dmitrij Ivanovič Čiževskij. It seems to me—wrote the scholar in the article “Unknown Gogol”— that the only possible explanation of Gogol’'s strange words about 2 Nikolaj v. gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij i pisem v 17 tomach (moscow-kiev: izdatel’stvo moskovskoj patriarchii, 2009), vol. 7, 316-317. subsequent quotations (except where otherwise indicated) will be taken from this edition. 3 Traditional iconographic depictions of the antichrist—such as the frescoes created by luca signorelli between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the cathedral of the italian town orvieto—at most make his image similar to the image of Christ, giving him a proud, gloomy, unconfident expression (see Mythological dictionary [moscow: 1990], 52). Also see the modern interpretation of this subject by the russian painter il’ja glazunov. 4 Efrem sirin (saint), Tvorenija, vol. 2 (moscow: izdatel’skij otdel moskovskogo patriarchata, 1993), 255 (reprinted edition). shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and philosophy in slavic thought 92 Part Two: Literature the Antichrist in the first edition ofThe Portrait is that he was aware of the prophecy of Jung-Stilling and of his apocalyptic novel Victory Song.5 During the eighteenth century, the Swabian mystic Bengel had prophesied that the apocalypse would take place in 1836. In the nineteenth century, his ideas were repeated by another German mystic and specialist in spiritual issues: Heinrich Jung-Stilling. The latter was well known in Russia thanks to the translations of Aleksandr Fëdorovič Labzin, a Russian mason who promoted his works. Labzin had published a Russian version of Jung- Stilling’s apocalyptic novel Victory’s Narrative or The Triumph of Christian Faith, and Čiževskij deduced that Stilling’s novel had probably influenced Gogol’ to a certain degree. Unfortunately, there is no proof that Gogol’ knew of Jung-Stilling’s apocalyptic novel. But, according to the words of the scholar Il’ja Vinickij, “although there are no direct proofs that Gogol’ knew Stilling’s works, the indirect proofs are considerable enough to believe that it is quite possible.”6 One such indirect proof is the fact that Gogol’ wrote both The Portrait and The Nose during a specific period which he was distinctly aware of— but which he never discussed. Both stories, produced prior to 1836, were written as though in honour of some grand future event. In this regard, it is significant that the date of the first edition of The Government Inspector is 4 December 1835. During the period of Golicin’s “Ministry of Spiritual Affairs,” the libraries of educational institutions were obliged to stock books such as those by Jung-Stilling, and other mystic literature in general. However, whether or not Gogol’ read the works of the German mystic is not important. He was influenced by the powerful eschatological expectations which permeated the society he lived in, and if he genuinely believed in Jung-Stilling’s prophecy, then his soul must have been open to such a belief long beforehand. As a very young man, he wrote a letter home advising his mother on how she should raise her younger daughter, Ol’ga (October 1833): 5 Dmitrij i.