The Icon and the Axe

Gogol was the first of those original Russian prose writers whose work requires analysis from a religious and psychological as well as a literary point of view. He shared the sense of loneliness and introspection that had been characteristic of many fellow Ukrainians from Skovoroda to Shev-chenko. Yet both the form and content of his work is deeply Russian. His early career is at least superficially typical of the romanticism of the twenties and thirties: beginning with weak, sentimental poetry on German pastoral themes, followed by an abortive attempt to flee to America, vivid stories about his native Ukraine (Mirgorod), Hoffmannesque sketches about St. Petersburg and the meaning of art (Arabesques), and a brief career as teacher and writer of history. His early career culminated in 1836 in the satirical play the Inspector General; and his last great work, Dea4„$puls,

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appeared six years later in the familiar romantic form of observations during a voyage through the countryside.

The triumphal appearance of the Inspector General in the same year as that of Glinka's Life for the Tsar and Briullov's "Last Days of Pompeii" marks a kind of watershed in the history of Russian art. The three works were hailed as harbingers of a new national art capable of engaging dramatically a broader audience than that of any previous Russian art. Yet Gogol's work with its "laughter through invisible tears" at the bureaucratic pretense of Nicholaevan Russia was far different in tone from the heroic theatricality of the other two. The contrast is made even more striking by the divergent pattern of Gogol's subsequent personal career. For, whereas Briullov accepted imperial patronage and Glinka became Kappelmeister to Nicholas I, Gogol left Russia altogether in the wake of his great success. He was driven by a strange inner compulsion to pronounce through art what others were expressing through philosophy and history: a new word of redemptive hope for Russia and all humanity.

After visiting Paris, which he found even more vulgar and venal than St. Petersburg, Gogol settled in Rome and set forth on his effort to rise above the negativism of the Inspector General with a trilogy to serve as a Russian Divine Comedy. His sense of mission was intensified by the death of Pushkin in 1837, and his fame increased by the successful appearance in 1842 of The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, the first part of his great work. Yet in the remaining ten years of his life, Gogol was unable to make further progress on his project. Dead Souls remains, like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, the glorious first part of an uncompleted trilogy. Other Slavic exiles in Italy were also trying to write a new Divine Comedy. Juliusz Slowacki's Poem of Piast Dantyszek about Hell was a Polish Inferno; but whereas Slowacki went on to provide a Paradiso in a poetic "rhapsody" King Spirit, and Krasinski finished his Undivine Comedy, Gogol's terrifying honesty never permitted him to go beyond the Inferno of Dead Souls. Unlike his Polish contemporaries-and indeed most popular patriotic literature of the day-Gogol was not seduced by idealistic and nationalistic appeals. He could only sweep the stage clean without providing any positive answers.

In Dead Souls (as in another of his unforgettable pictures of provincial pettiness, "How the Two Ivans Quarreled") Gogol borrowed in part from an earlier picaresque writer from the same section of the Ukraine, Vasily Narezhny. The satirical style and vivid tableaux of Dead Souls are often reminiscent of Narezhny's Russian Gil Bias. But just as Gogol distorts the name of Narezhny's hero (Chistiakov) in the direction of caricature (Chichikov), so he transforms the image of a picaresque hero from a

boisterous adventurer to an enigmatic wanderer, moving through the distorted world of the living in search of his claims on the dead. Narezhny was able to move on to provide Russia with a valedictory message in his posthumously published Dark Year, or the Mountain Princes,101 which criticized Russian rule in Transcaucasia and anticipated in some ways both the novel of social reform and the separatist propaganda of the late imperial period. Gogol, on the other hand, could offer no simple message or hopeful conclusions; he could find no guiding road except one which led to destruction-first of his later works and then of the frail body that had linked him with the world.

The caricatured figures of Dead Souls, the surviving first part of his trilogy, reveal Gogol's fascination with human disfigurement together with an unvoiced, but passionate concern for wholeness and perfection. But there is no bearer of salvation, nothing as compelling as the images of evil and blight. He concluded that one had to be perfect in order to write about perfection. He failed to create positive heroes because