Gogol's Mystical Nationalism

...The publication here, for the first time in English, of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends will not disturb Gogol's dust...

...The general reader knows Gogol as the author of Dead Souls and The Inspector-General, the only two of his fictional works to survive the translation barrier more or less intact...

...The epistolatory form as exemplified in the collection was little more than a convenient vehicle for Gogol's views on literature, Christianity and the Russian soul...

...Like them, he exalted the virtues of traditional Russian institutions—Church, Tsar, nobility, peasantry—and deprecated the unthinking introduction of "Western" ideas...

...at the same time I ask those among them who have the means to buy several copies of it and distribute them among those who cannot buy it...

...it is still possible for us to reject . . . what is improper to us and to take into ourselves things impossible to other peoples, who have received their form and hardened in it...

...he comes right out with it...

...WRITERS (^WRITING Gogol's Mystical Nationalism By Kingsley Shorter My first act on setting out to review N. V. Gogol's Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Vanderbilt University Press, 271 pp., $5.95), the most ill-starred of the author's works and the last published in his lifetime, was to visit the New York Public Library to check out the Gogol literature and refresh my memory of the period...

...Gogol was a visionary who at times expressed himself in embarrassingly naive terms, but he was no fool...

...Jesse Zeldin, who prepared this translation of Selected Passages, rightly suggests in the Introduction that Vis-sarion Belinsky, the most forceful and articulate of the Westernizers, completely mistook Gogol's intentions?if, in fact, he ever read the book to its end—when he castigated him as a "proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism, panegyrist of Tatar ways...

...His instinct was sound: Russia did astound the world, even if not quite in the way he anticipated...

...Are we better than other peoples...

...there is among us, finally, a courage not innate to anyone else...

...Slowly the pullulation subsides, leaving a residue of metaliterature in the archives, there to gather dust until the Second Coming—or the Bomb —makes it as irrelevant to us as fossil records of Paleozoic age...

...Again the Preface: "My heart tells me that my book is necessary and that it can be useful...

...But the resemblance is superficial...

...In no way are we better, and our life is more unsettled and disordered than theirs...

...Yet Gogol was saying something important about what it meant to be a Russian in the middle of the 19th century...

...Grundlagen einer Charak-terologie Gogols...

...Finding his creative impulse stymied by an excess of piety, Gogol apparently concluded that his duties as the doyen of Russian letters—a position he inherited after the death of Pushkin—could best be discharged by instructing his fellow countrymen in the rigors of the Christian life...

...Gogol issues blow-by-blow instructions on everything from how to run a province ("To One Who Occupies an Important Position"), to the most pedestrian details of household management ("What a Wife Can Do for Her Husband in Simple Domestic Matters as Things Now Are in Russia...

...In "Four Letters to Divers Friends Apropos Dead Souls.'' for instance, he defends himself against the charges of "Pride until now unheard of in any writer" leveled at him by critics who regarded his public assumption of this responsibility as an act of gross self-advertisement...

...The cards—usually references to long-defunct Saint Petersburg literary journals—are Kingsley Shorter, a previous contributor, is an Eng-ish critic and translator now based in New York City...

...He understood that in a sense his nation did not exist, was struggling to come into being...

...greeted the work with the following body blow: "You have seriously thought that your calling is the announcement of high moral truths in the form of discourses and sermons, a specimen of which is contained in your book...

...For us, there is something almost indecent in Gogol's paternalist vision of a Christian brotherhood embracing the Tsar (God's representative on earth, all-wise, all-loving, vicariously suffering for his grateful subjects), the nobility ("the flower of our nation"), a docile and joyously illiterate peasantry ("Our people is sensible: without racking its brains it will comprehend what the intellectuals do not understand"), and the Church ("whose profound dogmas and least external ceremonies are as though sent directly from Heaven for the Russian people...

...I gazed at a hundred or so cards, the painstaking inventory of as many acts of scholarship committed upon the literary person of the hapless Nikolai Vasil'evich, sinner and comic genius...

...Nobody was more keenly aware than Gogol of the cruel disparity between what is and what might be, or of the fact that every individual is both responsible for trying to change things and largely powerless to do so...

...Gogol's views on Church and State were apparently close to those of the Slavophiles, the conservatives of the mid-19th-century Russian intelligentsia...

...I would sooner have been forgiven if I had presented pictures ot monsters: but banality I was not forgiven...

...Most of the Russian items date back to the turn of the century or earlier...

...Die aestetische Utopie Gogols...

...Lest anyone suppose that it offers an insight into his personal affairs or adds significantly to our knowledge of his contemporaries, it must be said immediately that the term "correspondence" is a misnomer...

...Nevertheless, a careful reading raises some fascinating issues...

...With Selected Passages, Gogol temporarily abandoned the debilitating struggle to write fiction and addressed his public directly...

...The problem\) And exercises in pure erudition, on such gripping topics as Ukrainian Speech Patterns in Gogol's Early Work...

...He would no doubt have liked to tell the Tsar how to run the Empire, had not the infallibility of the autokrator been the virtual cornerstone of his theocratic philosophy...

...He had excoriated it in his fiction, heaping ridicule upon what he saw to be the sins besetting Russia—banality, corruption, hypocrisy, every kind of grossness...

...Now he put forth his program: nothing less than the practical application of Christianity to every area of human relations...

...In your hymn," he enjoins the poet Nikolai Yazykov, "celebrate the giant who could only issue from the Russian land, who, suddenly awakened from his shameful sleep, becomes something other than what he was: in the sight of all spitting on his abominations...

...Of the Tsar: "The monarch . . . must at the end inevitably be made all love, and in this way it will become evident to everyone that the sovereign is the image of God...

...It is difficult to discuss notions like these in 1969...

...In our century, we have seen what havoc can be wrought by too exalted a sense of national destiny...

...This was revolutionary indeed, and it is not surprising that it should have called down upon him the wrath not only of the Westernizers—that was to be expected—but also of many Slavophiles...

...You are grossly and pitifully mistaken...

...If it seemed to Gogol "as though everything in [Russia], from inanimate things to animate, fixes its eyes on him and expects something from him," these words were neither pride nor boasting: "They are simply an awkward expression of a real feeling...

...To our 20th-century ears, this sort of thing has the shocking impact of four-letter words at a Victorian garden party: We cringe back in disbelief, our sensibilities outraged...

...there is nothing truly personal in these pages, the portentously confessional tone notwithstanding...

...He believed that the genius of the Russian people, still inchoate, still wrestling with "a concurrence of alien forces within us," would one day come into its own and astound the world with the perfection of its indigenous social forms...

...As it was, he had to content himself with laying down the law to everybody else...

...he asks in "Easter Sunday," the concluding piece of Selected Passages...

...I flipped the cards with sinking heart: Gogol and Poe, Gogol and Aristophanes, Gogol and Moliere...

...There it was, the whole creaking apparatus of scholarship, essential yet absurd...

...Witness the bizarre letters he wrote in his capacity as self-appointed spiritual adviser to various friends in high places, which Zeldin likens to the conduct-book style of Machiavelli's The Prince...

...Students of the period, however, are further aware that along with many another devout Christian, Gogol was beset by grave doubts as to the usefulness and even the propriety of his imaginative writing, doubts which caused him to burn the second volume of Dead Souls after seven years of agonizing labor and eventually drove him into the black melancholia that killed him at the pitifully early age of 42...

...Lugubrious Soviet pieces with titles like The Problem of Gogol's Humor...

...Gogol, on the other hand, was a mystical revolutionary who abominated the status quo...

...Thus his lifelong friend, Slavophile Ivan Aksa-kov...

...His purpose, he explains, is "to atone for the uselessness of everything published by me up to now, since in my letters, in the opinion of those to whom they were written, there are more things needful to man than in my fictional works...

...and that Russia had only to enter into the abode already prepared for it for the Kingdom of Heaven to be at hand...

...Gogol's sense of the ridiculous, so keenly developed in his fiction, completely deserted him when he tried to present an abstract account of his philosophy...

...The temptation to make fun of Gogol is almost overwhelming: As a religious philosopher he took himself so desperately seriously that one looks in vain for any trace of the agile ironic intelligence that produced comic masterpieces...

...as unimportant and insignificant as my book may be, still I allow myself to have it published and I ask my compatriots to read it through several times...

...I feel the same now...

...In the Preface, he takes the reader by the lapels and gazes earnestly into his eyes...

...His critique of Russian poetry from this singular standpoint make a great deal of sense...

...There is much in our native nature, forgotten by us, which is close to the law of Christ...

...The Second Coming is taking its own sweet time...

...And the tone throughout is one of deadly, unrelieved earnestness...

...If only people would practice what they preach, he says, the Millennium would arrive at once...

...he will become the foremost champion of the good...

...Just one big happy family, unlike those bickering Europeans with their shallow intellectual fashions, their discredited Church and their hamstrung monarchies...

...even the otherwise excellent essays on literary topics are marred by extreme religiosity...

...You are a landowner," he says of the nobility, "because you were born a landowner, because God will make you answer if you should change this rank for another, because everyone must serve God in his place and not in another's, just as they who were born under a power must submit to that power . . . because there is no power which is not from God...

...Gogol's analysis of the "Russian soul," for example, foreshadows Dostoevski...

...The "things needful to man" are contained in pieces with such titles as "The Meaning of Sickness," "Help the Poor," "A Few Words on Our Church and Our Clergy," and "The Christian Goes Forward"—a far cry indeed from Chichikov's exploits...

...Things must be seen as they arc...

...Who is to say that such a vision was totally absurd...

...He knew perfectly well—who better than the author of Dead Soulsl—that the state of things in Russia was profoundly unsatisfactory, but he did not believe the remedy could be found outside Russia...

...And Gogol is absolutely unashamed...

...And when Gogol tries to apply his vision of Christian service to practical matters, he sounds just plain silly...

...If for no other reason, Selected Passages is valuable as a literary source book...

...The book consists of 32 pieces compiled by Gogol himself from the voluminous correspondence he carried on in the last decade of his brief life...

...that a farsighted Providence had provided the nation in advance with institutions and customs tailor-made for the Russian soul...

...The conventional wisdom in our secular democracies dismisses such ideas out the hand...

...Loving every person in Mis empire, each man of every class and rank, and making them all, so to speak, a part of his own body...

...handwritten in spidery old-lady Cyrillic, the ink faded now and the corners beginning to crumble...

...Still, one cannot help being stirred by his visionary eloquence...

...There follows an elegy on the melancholy of unrc-generate Russia, poignant despite the stiltedness of the translation: "Whoever at the sight of these uninhabited empty spaces unrelieved by village or home does not feel depressed, whoever in the doleful sounds of our songs does not hear painful rebukes to himself . . . either has fulfilled his duty as he should, or is not a Russian in his soul...

...A Russian is capable of every extreme," he says while discussing people's reactions to the "holy and profound purport of misfortune...

...Like the intestinal bacteria that hasten the processes of digestion, critics and epigones swarm upon the artist's leavings, analyzing, aping, detracting, defending, until at last the body of his work has been absorbed into the cultural mainstream...

...The combination of ignorance and arrogance in these pages makes for some entertaining reading...

...The proceeds of this public-spiritedness, he hastens to assure his readers, will be used to finance his forthcoming pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he promises to pray for all his compatriots...

...In our country, earlier than in any other, will the advent of the Kingdom of Christ be celebrated...

...Among us there is no irreconcilable hatred between estates and we do not have those bitter parties such as abound in Europe and constitute an insuperable obstacle to the unity of peoples and brotherly love among them...

...The inevitable Teutonic big guns: Zur Interpretation von Gogols "Nase...

...In the Preface, he asks to be pardoned for his offenses "With that magnanimity with which only a Russian soul is capable of pardoning...

...So Gogol...

...Is our life closer to Christ than theirs...

...It would be only too easy to write a dismissive review of Selected Passages...

...He concludes that it was not his presumption that enraged the critics: it was his unique talent for portraying banality...

...The events that have befallen Russia in the 120 years since Gogol's death are as apocalyptic as anything he ever dreamed could happen...

...they were united by their hostility to innovation rather than by commitment to any positive approach...

...Gogol's position was that everything needed for the good life was already present...

...We are still a molten metal, not cast in the mold of our national form...

...He further believed that it was the function of literature to act as midwife at this birth of national awareness...

...The traditionalism of the Slavophiles was largely passive...

...Talk about the Russian soul seems faintly absurd, if not potentially mischievous...

...Fumbling through the light trance that descends on one in the mute presence of all that print, I found my way to the Slavonic catalogue and pulled out the appropriate tray: "Gogol, Nikolai Vasil'evich, 1809-1852: Works About...

...The sorrowful self-importance with which Gogol pressed Selected Passages on the public did not commend itself to his readers, even the most kindly disposed...

...At first sight, many of the "letters" impress one as exercises in undiluted sententiousness...

...praying day and night for his suffering people, a sovereign acquires that omnipotent voice of love which alone can be intelligible to a sick humanity . . . which alone can reconcile all classes and turn the nation into a harmonious orchestra...