Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich

GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILYEVICH. - Russian writer, b. at Sorochyntsi on 20 March 1809, d. at Moscow on 21 Feb. 1852. His drama rested on a contrast between an ethical nature and a poetic nature, between the ambition to invest art with a content and a temperament of a stylist unsuited to sustain it. From his youth he nourished the conviction that he was predestined to bring "a good" to humanity, and he believed he identified it in "justice." He first dreamed of becoming a great legislator, but a brief experience of the bureaucratic world was enough to disillusion him.

While waiting to discover his "true mission," he began to write and publish stories: the Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka (1831-32) mark his first success, confirmed in 1835 by Mirgorod and Arabesques. Literary fortune made him convinced that he had finally found his path, and he began to look upon art as the natural means of realizing his own ideal. In that same year 1835 he in fact set to work on a play, The Inspector General, in which he wished to strike at "all the injustices" committed where "justice is needed more than anything else." But the performance of the comedy (1836) turned into a catastrophe. G. was accused of being a writer incapable of human feeling. He was exasperated by this; he fled from Russia so that nothing would remind him of the comedy: he wished to submit to a spiritual education that would preserve him from further errors, and to purify himself in solitude in order to attain a maturity that would condition for him a work he had conceived as the "poem" of his redemption: Dead Souls, in which he would depict ideal characters. In Rome (1837-39) he found peace again, but in 1842, when, the first part of the novel having been printed, he felt the same accusations renewed, the crisis became tragic. His "education" now took a mystical direction; but he was by then almost entirely incapable of continuing the work. In 1846 he realized that he had already set forth in theoretical form, in certain letters to friends, that ideal content which he was incapable of translating poetically into the novel. He disowned himself as a writer, abjured his entire artistic output and printed the "first useful book": Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). This time he was accused of bigotry, obscurantism, proud humility. And, in the front line, Belinsky began the battle against him in the name of rationalism. And it was the death blow. He sought in vain salvation and peace in pilgrimages (Palestine 1848), fasts, prayers. The last years were a slow dragging on from sorrow to sorrow, physical and moral. In the first days of Feb. 1852, in a fit of despondency, he burned the manuscript of Dead Souls and on the 21st, exhausted by too harsh and prolonged fasting, he died. G.'s art starts from style; style from a shrewd and complex play of contrasts. The deformation of reality through stylistic texture, the grotesque, hyperbole, gives it a highly relative "realistic" character. Rich in imagination but poor in inventiveness, G. sustains the narrative beyond the limits of the plot: in the portrait, which becomes a mirror of profound, warm humanity in The Overcoat. With the figure of Akaky in The Overcoat, G. revolutionizes the traditional, classical and Shakespearean concept of the hero, assuming to the function of the latter, and raising to equal greatness, the petty and laughable "brother." Dostoevsky, in his early works, connects directly to this particular aspect of G.'s art.

Leone Pacini