The Icon and the Axe

you cannot invent them out of your head. Until you become like them yourself, until you acquire a few good qualities by your perseverance and strength of character, everything you produce by your pen will be nothing but carrion, and you will be as far from the truth as earth is from heaven.102

Driven by this quest for moral perfection, Gogol felt impelled to burn most of the second part of Dead Souls, his Purgatorio, and turn away from art altogether at the end, dying at the age of forty-three. From the artistic perfection of the Inspector General (perhaps the greatest play in the Russian language)103 Gogol moved within a decade to a plea for a total subservience to the established Church in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. His voluntary renunciation of art was to have echoes in the careers of Leo Tolstoy and others. The call of morality was beginning to claim precedence over that of art, and Belinsky, who rejected Gogol's religious appeal, nonetheless contrasted Gogol's moral concern with the "idea-lessness" of Griboedov's work. The prophet of the sixties, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, was to draw an even more extreme contrast between "Pushkinian" disciples of pure art and "Gogolian" concern for the injustice

of humanity.

It was not until the Orthodox revival of the early twentieth century that Gogol's final plea for a return to the Church would receive serious attention; but other enigmatic hints at a way out of the inferno acquired a haunting symbolism for subsequent nineteenth-century thinkers. The final image in Dead Souls, Chichikov's troika heading off across the steppe to an

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unknown destination, came to epitomize the enigma of Russia's future. The ending of The Greatcoat, his most famous short story, written between the Inspector General and Dead Souls, left an even more spectral message. In it Gogol transforms a drawing-room story that others had found humorous concerning a man's excessive grief over the loss of his rifle into a tale of great pathos and meaning. The hero is a poor and insignificant clerk in St. Petersburg, a passive figure whose pitiable life finds focus only in saving money for a new greatcoat. He finally gets it, but is robbed of it in a dark street and dies. Then, in a strange final sequence, he returns to reclaim his coat and cause his superiors to fear for their own. The clerk is not at all noble or heroic in Gogol's story. Thus, his final victory over Nicholaevan St. Petersburg seems all the more fantastic. By making it seem, however, both unavoidable and convincing, Gogol creates not only one of his greatest artistic effects but perhaps also the positive prophecy he was unable to offer in Dead Souls. For not only does the strange victory of the little man represent the best example of Gogol's "thin, weak feet" crushing the "real or imaginary monuments" of Nicholaevan Russia; it may also-as one close student of Soviet literature has contended-provide some hope to those who must live with the greater monumentalism of the Soviet era.104

Gogol's imagination was so vivid and pictorial that it sometimes requires the language of painting to discuss it. His writings lent themselves readily to pictorial representation, just as Pushkin's lent themselves to music in the same period. Gogol was, indeed, as interested in pictorial art as Pushkin was in music; the subject matter of Gogol's Portrait came as naturally to him as did that of Mozart and Salieri to Pushkin. Painting held for Gogol not only a special interest but a unique advantage over sculpture and all other forms of plastic art:

It deals not just with one man, its borders are wider: it includes in itself the whole world; all the beautiful phenomena surrounding man are within its power; all the secret harmony and the linking of man with nature are found in it alone.105

Thus, it is not surprising that, when Gogol's own faith in the possibility of pronouncing words of artistic deliverance to Russia weakened, he focused many of his last hopes on the work of a painter, for whose labors he arduously solicited support during the last years of his life. The painter was, of course, Alexander Ivanov, a friend of many years standing, who had often painted Gogol in Rome and who kept pasted within his album for new sketches a letter Gogol had sent him:

God grant you His aid in your labours, do not lose heart, be of good courage, God's blessing be on your brush and may your picture be glori-

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3. The "Cursed Questions

ously completed. That at any rate is what I wish you from the bottom of my heart.106