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THE LOST PAST of NIKOLAI GOGOL in 1847 the Last Book Appeared Which Gogol Published During His Life, Selected Passages from Corr

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THE LOST PAST of NIKOLAI GOGOL in 1847 the Last Book Appeared Which Gogol Published During His Life, Selected Passages from Corr CHAPTER SEVEN THE LOST PAST OF NIKOLAI GOGOL In 1847 the last book appeared which Gogol published during his life, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Fnends.1 The book contains thirty-two essays, varying in length from two or three pages to fifteen or twenty pages. The essay "On the Essence of Russian Poetry and On Its Originality" numbers about fifty pages and is thus exceptionally long. The reader is informed about a wide variety of subjects: "The Meaning of Sickness", via a discussion of the theatre, to an exposition on the question "What a Wife Can Do for Her Husband in Simple Domestic Matters, as Things Now Are in Russia". Gogol's answer to this question is that she can be frugal, pray often, see to it that her husband continues to serve his country, and remind him continually that he is the master of the house. All this is meant as serious and virtuous instruction. Gogol himself called his Selected Passages "my first book that serves a purpose".2 What purpose it served is made clear e contrano by the furious letter which Vissarion Belinsky, already critically ill, wrote to Gogol on 15 June 1847 and which since then, more than any other document, has gained the status of a kind of Holy Writ of Russia's Western intelligentsia with its Mannheimian Utopian views. Belinsky's letter is uncommonly spirited and moving and shows profound social sympathy. It is the letter of a man who feels deeply betrayed. Belinsky accuses Gogol of invok­ ing the church and the whip to proclaim the mendacity and complete lack of ethical awareness in Russian society to be in fact truth and virtue. What follows is a collage of fragments from this letter:3 1 N.V. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii ν semi tomakh, pod obshchei redaktsei S.I. Mashinskogo, N.L. Stepanova, M.B. Khrapchenko, Moscow 1966-1967, vol. 6. ^ R.-D. Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol, mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbekl985, p. 110-111. s Quoted from Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, London 1978, p. 172-173; complete translation by Valentine Snow in: M. Raeff (ed.), Russian Intellectual History: an Anthology, 1978, p. 253-261. 252 THE LOST PAST OF NIKOLAI GOGOL Yes, I loved you, with all the passion with which a man, tied by ties of blood to his country loves its hope, its glory, its pride, one of its great leaders along the path of consciousness, development and progress ... Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, or aesthe- ticism, or piety, but in the achievements of education, civilisation, and humane culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, lost for so many ages in mud and filth. It needs laws and rights in accordance not with the teachings of the church, but with those of common sense and justice ... Instead of which she offers the terrible spectacle of a land where men buy and sell other men without even the cant of the Americans, who say that negroes are not men ... a country where there are no guarantees of personal liberty or honour or property; not even a police state, only huge corporations of official thieves and robbers ... The government ... knows well what the landlords do to their peasants, and how many landlords are massacred by their serfs every year ... Preacher of the whip, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscuran­ tism and black reaction, defender of a Tartar way of life—what are you doing? Look at the ground beneath your feet. You are standing on the edge of an abyss. You found your teachings upon the Orthodox Church, and that I understand, for the Church has always favoured whips and prisons, and it has always grovelled to despotism. But what has this to do with Christ? ... Of course a Voltaire whose ridicule put out the flames of fanaticism and illiteracy in Europe is far more a son of Christ, flesh of His flesh, than all your parsons, bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans ... Our country priests are the heroes of rude, popular tales ... the priest is always the glutton, the miser, the sycophant, the man lost to all sense of shame ... Most of our clergy are ... either pedantic school­ men, or else appallingly ignorant and blind. Only our literature, in spite of a barbarous censorship, shows signs of life and forward movement. That is why the calling of a writer is so honoured among us, why even a small literary gift makes for success; that is why the profession of letters has thrown into the shade the glitter of epaulettes and gaudy uniforms; that is why a liberal writer, even one whose capacity is poor, excites general attention, while great poets who ... sell their gifts to serve the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationalism, quickly lose their popularity ... The Russian people is right. It sees in writers of Russia its only leaders, defenders, and saviours from the darkness of Russian autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism. It can forgive a bad book but not a harmful one. The charge in this quotation that Gogol had sold his talents to the trinity of "autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism" is a refe­ rence to information leaked shortly before by Uvarov, generally regarded as the apostle of this trinity. The journalist Ivan Panaev .
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