Old letters about fundamentals

A genius is always an eternal enigma if only for the simple reason that he sees what others do not, and in a way that is unfathomable both to ordinary mortals and learned people. This unique capacity for clear vision can be coupled in a genius’s heart with striking naivete in social, political, and everyday matters. But can this naivete also be the hallmark of some kind of supreme wisdom? For a genius is a creator and not of this world.

The enigma of Gogol is out of the ordinary. Even among other comparable great artists (although who comes close to this immortal son of the Ukrainian soil?), Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol) truly stands out. This genius strikingly managed to unite in his heart the seemingly discrete “facets of the magical crystal”: a tendency toward mysticism, the unknown, dark and mysterious with a wonderful perception of the minutest details of ordinary life; a profound understanding of many complex processes in the spiritual life of society with an ingenuous and utopian homily on social reconciliation between landlord and peasant on the basis of “Christian brotherly love,” or, in other words, the reconciliation of the irreconcilable in the specific conditions of Nicholas I’s Russia (Gogol’s major tragedy to which I will return further on).

Add to this the great writer’s lasting and unbreakable “Ukrainianness,” which always stood out in his work, no matter what he was writing about, and his deliberate choice as an artist and preacher. He was the precursor and ideologue of a special, “Orthodox,” and singular path for Russia (yes, Russia!), the only path that could save the people from aping the false Western European social model. (Gogol spent several months in Rome, the center and stronghold of Catholicism, which he scathingly criticized, yet many times confessed to a passionate love for this city).

In this article on Gogol, I will try to give the author of Myrhorod and Dead Souls an opportunity to express himself as fully as possible. For can anybody but Gogol himself — despite his reticence, fickleness, and rare ability to suddenly and craftily “split apart” and “double” in the eyes of the reader — tell us, his distant heirs, fairly, sincerely and correctly about the secret of his soul, his spiritual drama, and the factors that brought this man of genius to a tragic end?

Gogol’s correspondence — his private and “open” correspondence has been collected in a marvelous book entitled Selected Fragments from My Correspondence with Friends — is a striking human document, a genuine window into his soul, and its mirror. Let us try to peek into this window, all the while remembering the words of our prominent compatriot Panteleimon Kulish, the author of one of the first and finest biographies of Gogol: “Gogol is his own best biographer, and if all his letters were published, there would be no need to add any explanations to understand the history of his inner life.” I will focus on just a few of the most illustrative pieces of the genius’s epistolary legacy, for it is impossible to fathom the unfathomable.

THE ARTIST

“My task is to depict the life of people, to portray real-life people the way they are.” Gogol’s well-known words were often used in Soviet times to illustrate the powerfully critical, realistic, and condemnatory principles that allegedly predominated in his works (at least until the 1840s) and were most precious in Gogol’s heritage. But the genius that created Dead Souls was endlessly complex.

In the chapter “Four Letters to Various People about Dead Souls” from the above-mentioned book we read: “I take my characters close to heart because they are from inside my heart; all my latest works are the history of my own soul. For there were many attempts to interpret some of my traits but the main essence of my self was never identified. Pushkin was the only one who heard it. He used to tell me that no other writer had ever had the gift of displaying so brilliantly the meanness of life and was able to outline so powerfully the meanness of a mean person, so that usually intangible trivia can dazzle everyone’s eyes.” (In a letter from 1846 Gogol discusses the concept of the unrivaled Dead Souls: “I wanted to try and see what a Russian man will say if he is shown his own meanness.”)

The Selected Fragments also contains the following striking words: “I have never liked my bad qualities; and if God’s heavenly love had not decreed that they open up to me gradually and little by little, instead of immediately catching my eyes, at a time when I was not yet aware of His immeasurable and amazing grace, I would have hanged myself. A miraculous supreme will would reinforce my desire to get rid of them. Since then I have been endowing my characters not only with their inherent vices but also my own rubbish. This is the way I do it: I take a bad quality of mine and imagine it in a person of a different rank and occupation; I try to portray him as a mortal enemy, who has hurled a most sensitive insult at me, I pursue him with malice, ridicule, and the like. If anyone had seen the monsters that crawled from underneath my pen originally for me to see, he would have shuddered. Then I suddenly saw the true meaning of something taken from the bottom of one’s heart, the truth of one’s soul in general, and in what horrible shape one can see darkness and the frightening absence of light. I saw that many vices were not worth being scourged with anger: it is better to reveal their eternal and mundane nothingness.” Perhaps these lines will allow us to peer into the sanctuaries of Gogol’s creative laboratory.

Petr Annenkov, one of Gogol’s close acquaintances in the mid-1840s, had every reason to declare, “The second volume of Dead Souls is a hermit’s cell in which he (Gogol — Ed.) agonized and suffered until he was taken out of it breathless.” This is no exaggeration. What is striking is the genius’s dramatic inner struggle and his astonishing and fantastic exactness towards himself. Recall how once in 1845 and the second time on Feb. 12, 1852, nine days before his death, the writer burned the final draft of the second volume, the fruit of painful efforts and hundreds of sleepless nights, his lifetime achievement, as Gogol’s contemporaries were well aware.

But why did the writer repudiate the first volume of Dead Souls, this brilliant and frightening work? He may have done this because of the horror that he saw in the world and the Russia that he had created through his incomparable creative imagination (and the horror of the reality that was miraculously transformed in Gogol’s soul and nourished the great poem).

After the first volume of Dead Souls was published in 1842, a number of critics, including Pogodin, claimed that only a person who looks at our fatherland with alien eyes and for whom Russia is not native (!) could create the image of Russia that permeates the poem (drabness, dirt, rundown roads, overall sadness, all-out bribery, etc.).

In Gogol’s preparatory notes to Dead Souls we read: “The idea of a city. The highest degree of emptiness. Gibberish. Gossips that exceed all bounds. All this emerged from nothingness and assumed the expression of something extremely funny. The emptiness and utter idleness of life give way to a murky and inexplicable death. This terrible event occurs mindlessly. Nothing touches anything. Death affects a stagnant world. The reader must feel still more strongly the dead senselessness of life.”

This “dead senselessness of life” scared Gogol most of all. He thought about it every moment when he was working on his great novel, working hard and strenuously, overcoming his physical ailment, desperation, lack of self-confidence, and jibes from critics and censors. In a letter to Zhukovsky, dated Dec. 2, 1843, Gogol writes: “I continue to work, i.e., sketch on paper the chaos from which Dead Souls is to emerge. Work and patience, even overexertion, are rewarding me greatly. I am also revealing the secrets of which my soul has not hitherto heard. And many things in the world are becoming clear after this work.”

Every month of painful work on the poem’s second volume was arousing in Gogol an endless and unquenchable spiritual thirst to show all of Russia not the terrible world of “poverty,” a world dominated by “the meanness of cold and splintered characters,” not a world of “phantasmal reality” but a world warmed by the light of Christ, the light of a “heavenly homeland” for all people. The motif of a heavenly homeland may have been first discovered in world literature by Gogol and actively developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Shevchenko was one of the first in our country — reread his brilliant poem of genius, The Dream, about the phantasmal reality of St. Petersburg and the nightmare of imperial absurdity.

A PROPHET IGNORED

Here one can see the reason why Gogol’s letters (of a personal nature as well as those hand-picked for publishing, such as Selected Fragments ) from the mid-1840s are increasingly filled with “prophetic” and “soul-searching” motifs: the writer had set himself an exceptional task, too onerous and perhaps unrealizable for one individual, even if he is a genius: to blaze a trail for riding out the gravest ethical and social crisis that the artist thought had affected both Russia and all of humanity. Gogol saw a way out by opposing the “obvious depravity and turmoil of our times” (letter to Nikolai Yazykov, dated Dec. 14, 1844) to a social system based on the “eternal truth of Christ.” He believed that only the Orthodox Church “can compel any estate, rank, and office to act within their legitimate boundaries and limits” and thus harmonize society and defuse the most dangerous social tensions that Gogol saw only too well.

Did he always believe in this? Was he without doubts? There must have been doubts and — who knows? — even desperation, but we will never know how deep they were — this is also one of Gogol’s great mysteries. On the surface, his correspondence increasingly assumes the tone of an inspired biblical preacher: “Now you must hark to my words, for my word has double sway over you, and woe betide anyone who does not heed my word” (letter to Oleksandr Danilevsky, a friend from his Nizhyn days, dated July 26, 1841).

Over and over again, in correspondence with Zhukovsky, Yazykov, Pogodin, Pletnev, Belinsky, and Mykola Prokopovych, another friend from his early Ukrainian years, Gogol explains with incredible fervor his scheme of an “ideal heavenly state led by an earthly tsar, a loyal servant of the King of Heaven (he specifically meant the “unforgettable” Nicholas I. Another aspect of Gogol’s tragedy was that he contemplated his “heavenly state” in rather earthly forms, in the already existing bosom of Nicholas’s bureaucracy).

Despite this, the writer’s many ideas are still important and in the context of our contemporary realities are acquiring new and unexpected significance. Take, for example, the attitude of the governor in the second volume of Dead Souls (to a significant extent this character expresses the views of the author). In the governor’s opinion, the dismissal and punishment of irresponsible bureaucrats will not improve society per se “because others will take the place of the dismissed ones, and those who were honest until now will turn dishonest, while the trusted ones will be cheating and betraying.” Therefore, the ideal Gogolian governor (too ideal, unfortunately) appeals to his subordinate officials and beseeches them “to remember your duties...I am saying this to you as a man related to you by the same blood,” he adds.

Another of Gogol’s prophetic visions is about the enormous harm of fanaticism, extremism, and “malicious blindness.” “One-sided people and fanatics,” our genius warned, “are an ulcer on society. Woe betide the land and the state where these kinds of people acquire some power.” Expressed in 1846, this statement seems to be a cry from the abyss of the 20th century’s terrible and tragic experience.

The common perception is that Gogol was naive and utopian in his analysis of contradictory social problems. This is partly true, but does the following idea from Selected Fragments not create the impression that he had a perfect knowledge of life? “You should know (if you do not know it yet) that the most innocuous bribe, which eludes any prosecution, is the one that a bureaucrat takes from another bureaucrat on the orders of his superiors: this sometimes resembles an endless ladder.” Then Gogol expresses his view of combating corruption: “Believe me, the best way to do things today is not to take up arms, bitterly and fervently, against bribers and bad people and not to victimize them but to try instead to place the accent on any positive trait and shake hands, publicly and friendly, with a straightforward and honest individual.”

The famous debate between Gogol and Belinsky in 1847 still has the power to fascinate us today. It helps us gain a better understanding of which of our genius’s views are already part of the past because they bear the mark of utopianism and hare-brained schemes — it was impossible to reconcile the irreconcilable, unite the boundlessly egoistical nobles who, as a rule, held onto their privileges (Shevchenko saw dozens of these people and wrote about them with hatred) — and their wretched serfs, even by appealing to “Christ’s law of brotherly love” and which ones still astonish us with their prophetic depth.

While the Russian critic’s arguments are quite well known (among them, the need for radical social transformations in the empire, rather than an overhaul of society via the moral perfection of individuals, on which Gogol insisted; vehement rejection of the beneficial spiritual role of religion and of the deep religious feelings of the masses; clear-cut radicalism of assessments and conclusions; an inclination to the “European” vector of progress), and until recently Belinsky’s letter to Gogol of July 3, 1847, was required reading in schools, Gogol’s reply was not as fortunate.

At first Gogol planned to give his opponent a detailed and comprehensive answer, for which purpose he wrote a long epistolary message. But for some reason that is not quite clear, he did not send it to the addressee, confining himself to a short letter of an entirely different, more “pacified,” content. But the rough copy of the first letter has survived (it was none other than Panteleimon Kulish who restored it by literally gluing its fragments backtogether). Readers should familiarize themselves with this fascinating document.

Rejecting Belinsky’s unfair accusations — Gogol was especially nettled by the critic’s hint at his desire to “please the government” as the motive force behind Selected Fragments) — the writer explains his position. “I did not intend to flatter or praise anyone with it (his new book — Author). I only wanted to cool some hot heads that are ready to spin and lose themselves in the whirlpool and mess in which all things in the world have suddenly plunged. I have never been interested in personal gain even earlier, when I could not resist earthly temptations, and even less so now, when it is time to think of death.”

Then he gets down to the heart of the matter. “You allege, incidentally, that I sang the praises of our government (in Selected Fragments from My Correspondence with Friends). I never sang them. I only said that the government consists of us (!). We serve and comprise the government. But if the government is a colossal bunch of thieves, do you think no Russians know this? Let us think carefully why this happens. Does this complex and monstrous accumulation of rights not result from the fact that some of us are going to the forest and others for logs? Some are looking at England, others at Prussia, and still others at France. Some adhere to certain principles, others to different ones. One tries to foist a certain project on the sovereign (the “sovereign” can also be called a “president” or “prime minister,” which does not change the essence — Author), another pushes a different project. Each man and each city offers different projects and expresses different ideas. Is it really surprising that all kinds of frauds, crooks, and injustices have emerged from this mess, when everybody sees obstacles everywhere, when everybody only thinks about himself and about setting up a warm little apartment?”

This is followed by an opinion that is perhaps not so “popular” by today’s standards (i.e., it is a subject for debate): “You say that Russia can only be saved in European civilization (or perhaps it should be said that when Gogol, a Ukrainian in soul and body, said “Russia,” he meant, consciously or unconsciously, his native land — Author). But what a boundless and limitless word that is! If only you defined what European civilization is that everybody repeats mindlessly. We see here phalanstery (utopian and Christian socialists of the 1840s — Author), the reds (Gogol crossed out the word “communist” and wrote this one instead — Author), and all and sundry, and they all ready to eat each other, they all stick to such destructive and such ruinous principles that every thinking head in Europe is already trembling and involuntarily asking: where is our civilization? So European civilization has turned into a ghost that nobody has seen yet, and if somebody tried to grasp it with his hands, it would fall to pieces. There was progress, too, as long as nobody was thinking about it, but when some people began to catch it, it disintegrated.”

Gogol also resolutely rebuffed Belinsky’s anti-Orthodox and anti- religious gibes. “You are separating church from Christ and Christianity, the church, the pastors who, through their martyrdom, sealed the truth of Christ’s every word, who were killed by the thousands with the knives and swords of murderers, who nevertheless prayed for them and finally tired their butchers, so that the winners knelt to the losers, and the entire world accepted this word. And you want to separate these pastors, these martyrs — the bishops who carried the holy church on their shoulders — from Christ, calling them false interpreters of Christ. Then who do you think can interpret Christ better now? The current communists and socialists, who maintain that Christ sanctioned stealing property and robbing those who have made a fortune?” Gogol asks with indignant irony.

In the last few years a most interesting and truly phantasmagorical sight has emerged before our very eyes: a new communism with Orthodox banners mixed with red flags (?!). The words that Gogol wrote in late July 1847 are suddenly becoming very significant today.

It would be wrong to consider the great writer’s credo in the primitive categories of current politics. In the last years of Gogol’s life his views were more often than not condemned as too retrograde and arch-conservative, an apotheosis of the notorious imperial trinity of “monarchism, Orthodoxy, and people’s spirit.” “In the last while I have met many splendid people, who have completely lost their bearings. They think that all kinds of transformations and reforms can improve the world. But public well-being will not clear the mess or cool hot heads. No constitutions will suppress what is fomenting inside of you. A society is forming itself, for it consists of units. Every unit should perform its function. A human should remember that he is not a material beast but an exalted citizen of a supreme heavenly entity. Unless he lives, if only partly, the life of a heavenly citizen, earthly citizenship will not be brought to order.”

This philippic could have been written and championed by the early Christians, those who before the days when “heretics” and pagans were persecuted were burned at the stake or killed in lion pits. But Gogol lived in the 19th century. His sermon triggered stiff opposition: it was interpreted as merely an apology of the government (the inhumane government of Nicholas I).

Meanwhile, Gogol sincerely strove to distance himself from all extremes, for example, from the extremes of the fervent “Westernizers” and unfettered “Eurasians.” “As for all those Slavophiles, Europhiles, old believers, new believers, easterners and westerners, I cannot say what they really are because so far they seem to me just caricatures of what they wish to be: they all keep talking about the two different sides of the same object, without even guessing that they are not at all arguing or contradicting each other. One came too close to a building and sees just one part of it, the other went away from it a bit too far and can see the whole facade but misses the details. I could advise both of them: let one come closer at least for some time, and let the other step back a little. But they won’t do this because both are engulfed by the spirit of false pride. Each of them is certain that he is completely and positively right and that the other one is completely and positively wrong. The Slavophiles are bragging more: each of them pretends to have discovered America and tries to make a turnip out of the seed he has found. Naturally, by bragging so stubbornly, they are setting against themselves the Europeanizers, who have long been prepared to concede very much because they can now hear many things that they could not hear before, but they persist, not wishing to give in to a somewhat boastful individual” (Selected Fragments from My Correspondence with Friends, Letter 11: “Disputes”).

I will reiterate that Gogol failed to reconcile the irreconcilable, and this may be the source of his horrible tragedy, when he died at age 43. A large number of biographers agree that the writer, tormented with desperation and loneliness and aware that his “pacifying” sermon was being rejected by all warring camps, chose not to resist death and destroyed the completed second volume of Dead Souls. But one more question should be asked: who (or what) hindered the reconciliation that Gogol dreamed of? Perhaps it was the “new people” who had appeared both in Russia and in Ukraine (the crook Chichikov being the most illustrative example) and who feel, as our genius sarcastically noted, “tender affection towards meanness whenever they see a millionaire.”

A SCATHING CRITIC

Surprisingly, regardless of Gogol’s intentions and no matter how his views and the overall structure of his soul were changing, objectively (this word was endlessly and cynically abused during the Soviet era, but it is indispensable in this case) his works of genius, particularly Dead Souls, pronounced a damning, scathing, and immovable verdict against Nicholas I’s state. The prominent Russian philologist, Prof. Pipin, was correct in saying that “after reading Dead Souls, Russia could no longer remain the way it used to be: it changed forever, irreversibly and unrecognizably.” Immediately after reading this work, Aleksandr Herzen wrote that he was stunned by the terrible world described by the artist of genius.

These are well-known facts. Moreover, the Ukrainian Gogol, on whom God bestowed an exceptional talent (yes, he created his masterpieces in the Russian language, but it cannot be denied that his works, as well as the legacy of Shevchenko, is our nation’s greatest contribution to the global treasury of spirit), firmly supported and reinforced the future idea of a free and independent Ukraine. The same Gogol, who underlined in many official letters the holiness of “the name and title of the all-Russian sovereign,” showed in his artistic masterpieces that the emperor is in fact naked and that the majestic imperialist idea is in reality a phantasmagoria, a ghost.

Naturally, Gogol himself would have never agreed to this interpretation of what he had written. But it is very characteristic that for decades his books (especially Taras Bulba, the subject of a special debate) inspired fighters for Ukraine’s national, social, and spiritual liberation, such as Mykhailo Drahomanov, Mykola Kostomarov, the Ukrainian insurgent Taras “Bulba” Borovets of World War Two fame, Oleksandr Dovzhenko — the list can be continued indefinitely. So we will not be sinning against the truth if we say that Gogol was one of those who were wrecking the “kingdom of lies” on which the Romanov Empire rested. This is why his achievements before modern independent Ukraine are invaluable.

The problem that can be briefly defined as “What does Gogol mean for Ukraine?” is endless and inexhaustible. But the heart of the matter can perhaps be summarized as follows: both Shevchenko and Gogol opened up Ukraine (the majestic image that they created) to mankind; at the same time, they discovered the worldwide achievements of the human spirit for Ukraine. Is this not the highest possible achievement?

Even today Gogol’s heritage is not just a “dead letter” of an outdated museum classic. Now and for decades to come, every sound-minded Ukrainian who is concerned for his motherland will be touched by Gogol’s words. “All you have to do is find a key to your own soul; when you find one, you will unlock the souls of everyone with this same key.” As for our VIP class, the following Gogolian prophecy is addressed to them: “As for political events, society would calm down by itself if there were reconciliation in the spirit of those who have an impact on society.”