Nikolai Gogol

(1809-1852)

"A liberated Russian people would not go to Parliament, but they would hurry to the pub to have a drink, to smash windows and hang the gentry" - Vissarion Belinsky

The Philosophy of Nikolai Gogol

Gogol belongs not only to the history of literature but also to the history of the Russian religious and social quest. . . . Gogol is one of the most enigmatic of Russian writers. He went through a very painful experience in the sphere of religion, and in the end he burned the second part of Dead Souls in circumstances which have remained a mystery. . . .

Like many other Russians he sought the Kingdom of God on earth; but in him this search takes a repellent form. Gogol is one of the greatest and most finished of Russian artists; he is not a realist, nor is he a satirist, as used to be thought. He is a writer of fantasies that depicted not real people but elemental evil spirits, and above all the spirit of falsehood in whose power Russia lay. He even had but a feeble sense of reality, and he was incapable of distinguishing truth from invention.

The tragedy of Gogol lay in the fact that he could never see and depict the human, the image of God in man, and this fact was a torment to him. He had a strong feeling for demonic and magical forces. Gogol was the most romantic of Russian writers, and has close affinities with Hoffman. He has no psychology at all, nor are living people to be found in his writings. It was said of Gogol that he sees the world sub specie mortis. He recognized that he had no love for men and women.

He was a Christian and he experienced his Christianity passionately and tragically, but the religion he professed was one of fear and retribution. There was something which is not Russian in his spiritual type. It is astonishing that the Christian writer Gogol was the least humane of Russian writers, the least humane in the most humane of all literatures. . . He was overwhelmed by the sense of sin; he was almost a man of the Middle Ages; above all he was seeking salvation. As a romantic Gogol at first believed that the transfiguration of life might be attained through art. He lost this belief and gave expression to his disillusionment by means of Revizor.

Ascetic thought grew stronger in him and he is permeated by ascetic doubts about the justifiability of creative work. There was a strong sense of evil in Gogol and this feeling of his was certainly not exclusively due to the evil of public life, of the Russian political regime; it was something deeper. He was inclined to public repentance. At times there breaks out in him the acknowledgment that he has no faith; he wants to give effective expression to religious and moral service and to subordinate his artistic creative activity to it.

He printed Select passages from correspondence with my Friends, a book which called forth a storm of indignation among people of the left; they regarded him as a traitor to the liberation movement. (Berdyaev 98-100)

The fact that Gogol preached the pursuit of personal moral perfection and without that saw no possibility of the attainment of the highest level of public and social life may lead to a false interpretation of him. That idea of his, which is in itself true, could not arouse indignation against him. But in actual fact he, like many Russians, preached social Christianity, and this social Christianity of his was horrible.

In his zealous sense of duty as a religious and moral teacher Gogol propounded his theocratic utopia, a patriarchal idyll. He desired to transform Russia by means of virtuous governor-generals, and their wives bearing the same title. From top to bottom the authoritarian regime is to be attained; even serfdom is to be preserved, but those who stand highest in the hierarchical scale are virtuous men; those who stand lowest are submissive and obedient.

Gogol’s utopia is abject and slavish; there is no spirit of freedom, no ardent call to rise; it is all permeated by an intolerable bourgeois moralizing. . . . Gogol is one of the most tragic figures in the history of Russian literature and thought. . . . Yet all the same, in spite of the repellent character of Gogol’s book he shared in the idea that Russia is called to express the brotherhood of man. The quest for the Kingdom of God upon earth was itself a Russian quest.

From Gogol the religious and moral character of Russian literature, its messianism, takes its beginning; and the great importance of Gogol lies in the fact apart from his importance as an artist. From his time onwards there will be found among Russian artists a longing to go beyond the production of artistic work to the creation of the perfect life. The subject of religion and metaphysics and of religion and social life is a torment to all Russian writers of importance. (Berdyaev 100-1)