A Herzen Reader

As Gogol left Little Russia and approached central Russia, the naive and gracious images disappeared. There is no further half-wild hero of the type in Taras Bulba, no debonair and patriarchal old man like the one he por­trayed in Old-World Landowners. Under the Moscow sky, everything in him turned gloomy, somber, and hostile. He still laughed, he laughed more than he had done before, but it was a different laughter, and only people who were very hard-hearted or very simple could allow themselves to be taken in by this laughter. Passing from Little Russians and Cossacks to Russians, he left the side of his people and gave himself over to his two most implacable enemies: the official and the nobleman. Before him no one had ever given such a complete course of lectures on the anatomy and pathology of the Russian bureaucrat. With laughter on his lips, he pen­etrated indiscreetly into the deepest recesses of this impure and malicious soul. Gogol's comedy The Inspector General and his novel Dead Souls are a terrible confession of contemporary Russia, on the scale of Koshikhin's revelations in the 17th century.²¹

The emperor Nicholas split his sides with laughter when he attended a production of The Inspector General!!!

The poet, in despair from having produced only this majestic hilarity and the conceited laughter of bureaucrats who exactly resembled those he had depicted, though they were better protected by the censorship, felt obliged to explain in an introduction that his comedy was not only very funny, but also very sad, and that "there are warm tears under its smile."

After The Inspector General, Gogol turned to the provincial gentry and brought into the light this unknown population which had remained be­hind the scenes, far from roads and large cities, buried deep in the country­side, this Russia of petty squires, who in quietly taking care of their lands bred a corruption deeper than that of the West. Thanks to Gogol, we finally saw them leave their manor houses, their lordly homes, and parade before us without mask or makeup, forever drunk and greedy, slaves of power with no dignity, and tyrants without compassion toward their serfs, draining the life and blood of the people with the lack of constraint and the naivete of a child who nurses at his mother's breast.

Dead Souls roused all Russia.

Such an accusation was necessary for contemporary Russia. It is the story of an illness, written by the hand of a master. Gogol's poetry is a cry of terror and shame, uttered by a man degraded by the vulgarity of life, who suddenly sees in the mirror his own brutalized features. But for such a cry to break loose from a chest there must be healthy parts and the strength for recovery. A person who frankly confesses his weaknesses and faults senses that they do not form the main part of his being, that they do not absorb him entirely, and that there is in him something that escapes and resists the fall; that he can redeem the past, not simply to raise his head again, but to be transformed, as in Byron's tragedy, from Sardanapal the womanish to Sardanapal the hero.

Here we come face to face once more with this great question: where is the evidence that the Russian people can rise up again, and what is the evidence to the contrary? This question, as we have seen, had preoccupied all thinking men without any of them finding an answer.

Polevoy, who encouraged others, believed in nothing; would he have oth­erwise allowed himself to become discouraged so quickly, and gone over to the enemy at the first setback? The Library for Reading leaped right over this problem, circumventing the question without having made an effort to answer it. The solution offered by Chaadaev was no solution at all.

Poetry, prose, art, and history demonstrate for us the formation and de­velopment of this absurd milieu, these harmful ways, this monstrous power, but no one points to a way out. Must one become acclimated, as Gogol did later on, or rush toward one's doom like Lermontov? It is impossible to become acclimated; and yet we are loath to perish; something tells us from the bottom of our heart that it is too early to die, it seems there are still some living souls behind the dead souls.

The questions have reappeared with greater intensity, and all that is still hopeful demands a solution at any cost.

After 1840, two opinions absorbed the public's attention. From a scholas­tic controversy they soon passed into literature, and from there into society.

We are speaking of Muscovite pan-Slavism and Russian Europeanism.

The battle between these two opinions was ended by the revolution of 1848.

This was the last spirited polemic that occupied the public, and for that very reason it had real importance. We therefore dedicate the following chapter to it. [. . .]

Epilogue