This is a continuation of the essay by Professor Ivan Andreev on the life and religious development of one of Russia’s greatest authors, Nikolai Gogol. You can read part one here and part two here.
In 1844, the battle with himself entered a new phase and was exhibited in new forms. More and more clearly Gogol began to realize the extent of evil in the world and his own helplessness in the face of that evil, but simultaneously he began to feel the power of God’s Grace. The joyful moments of interaction with this grace were, however, followed by long periods of death-like sorrow and depression. In such a state, with torturous effort that left the author deeply unsatisfied, work continued on the second volume of Dead Souls. This sorrowful time was for Gogol a training in prayer. In one of his letters to Yazykov (1844), one can find a moving passage where Gogol described a special method of praying that he had learned in his most sorrowful moments:
There is a tool for those difficult moments when the suffering of soul or body become unbearably painful; I found it through terrible spiritual shock, but I will tell you about it. If such a state comes upon you, throw yourself into tears and weeping. Pray through weeping and crying. Pray not like the man who sits in his room, but like the man who is drowning in the waves, holding on to the last piece of driftwood.
During such a prayer, self-satisfaction, pride, coldness, stony insensibility, doubt, despair, lack of faith are all impossible, for the whole soul of the man who prays thus turns into a wail to God for salvation!
In 1845, Gogol suffered through an especially painful attack of depression, accompanied simultaneously by insistent thoughts of suicide and a fear of death. He weakened physically, fell ill, and completely lost his ability to work. No doctor was able to determine the cause of his illness. Gogol himself called it a “demonic hindrance.” His letters are full of trepidation and despair: “My sickness is very serious. Only a miracle of God can save me. All my strength is spent,” he wrote to Yazikov. “My powers are fading: I don’t expect any help from the doctors or their art, for it is physically impossible,” he wrote during the same period to Sheremetieva.
“Come to give me Communion. I am dying,” he wrote to Archpriest I. I. Bazarov. During the summer of the same year, Gogol burned the recent chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls. We know of this only from the words of Gogol himself.
When the torturous and lengthy period of sorrow and depression began to lessen, as it often happened with Gogol, he once again began to write, uplifted in spirit, full of energy and creative inspiration. This positive period was preceded or, perhaps, even determined by humbly coming to terms with his own disease of soul and body. In a letter to Smirnova, Gogol wrote: “Crossing our arms over our chests and lifting up our eyes to heaven, let us every moment say, ‘May Thy will be done!’ and thus we will accept all, blessing even sorrow and loneliness and serious illnesses.”
The heavy experience of sorrow, sickness, and most importantly a heightened fear of death became the inspiration and the source for a new creative work. Gogol became inspired by the idea of publishing Selections from Correspondence with Friends. This book grew out of the experience of overcoming his suffering and the tortured remembrances of his own sufferings.
In a latter to Yazikov (1846), he wrote: “When I looked through all that I wrote to different people in recent times, especially those people who needed and required spiritual help from me, I saw that from this I could make a book that would be very useful to people who are suffering in various ways. The sufferings that I overcame were ultimately beneficial, and through their help I was able to help others.”
In a letter to Countess A. M. V’el’gorskaya (1846), he made a passionate request: “Pray to God that He will send me those bright moments that are necessary for me to relate all the reasons why I was sent the most heavy moments, and the sickness itself, for which I must ceaselessly thank God.”
In his Author’s Confession, Gogol informs his readers that he published this book “under the influence of fear for his own death,” which hounded him “for the duration of his sickness,” even when he “was already out of danger.”
The publication of the Selections was dictated by Gogol’s constant spiritual need (from missionary motives) to share his experience of suffering and thereby enlighten others, so that he might “direct all of society to the Beautiful” and show society those paths of life that he considered to be correct. And this time he was completely convinced of the great benefit of his “only useful book.”
The epistolary form was the most comfortable literary form for Gogol to present his still nascent thoughts, which were, however, unified by a consistent inner religious, moral, and political worldview. Among the Selections, he also included (in the form of letters) several specially written essays.
In the preface to his book, written with unique sincerity and spiritual collectedness, Gogol wrote: “My heart tells me that my book is needed and that it can be beneficial. I believe this not because I have a high opinion of myself or because I’m convinced in my ability to be beneficial, but because until this moment I have never had such a strong desire to be useful.” Informing his countrymen of his intention to travel to the Holy Land, Gogol touchingly asked forgiveness of his readers.
The content and meaning of the Selections is so significant and complicated that a good commentary or a critical appraisal would require an entire book, which unfortunately has yet to be written. This is undoubtedly the most sincere book ever written in Russian literature.
The main theme of the book was “God and the Church.” When Gogol was admonished for this, he answered simply and with conviction: “How can one be silent when the very stones are ready to sing about God?” Like Khomiakov and I. Kireevsky, Gogol called everyone to “a life in the Church.” The pages dedicated to the Orthodox Church are the best pages of the book. No Russian writer had ever expressed such a genuine filial love for Mother Church, such piety and submissiveness, such a deep and complete understanding of Orthodoxy in general as well as the small details of church ritual.
“We own a treasure which has no price,” he thus characterized the Church. “This Church, which like a chaste virgin alone kept its original purity from the times of the Apostles, this Church, which was seemingly brought down straight from heaven for the Russian people with Her profound dogmas and the smallest of her rituals, She alone has the strength to untie all bonds of doubt and all our questions. And this Church, created for life, has not yet been brought into our lives. ”
Other than the main theme (“On God and the Church”), Gogol touched on a remarkably wide swath of other topics in the Selections. In various “letters” he wrestled with questions of morality, art, literature, politics, and much more.
In the third letter on the subject of Dead Souls, we find a sincere and genuine confession:
I had inside me the entire swarm of all possible sins, a little bit of every single one, and in a multitude that I have never met in any other person. God gave me a multifaceted nature. He also put into my soul, even from birth, a few good qualities; but the best of these, for which I don’t know how to thank him, was a desire to be the best. I never loved my many evil qualities, and if the heavenly love of God had not arranged it in such a way that I discovered them slowly and a little at a time, instead of opening them up to me immediately and suddenly when I still didn’t have any idea of His immeasurable, endless mercy, I would have hanged myself. . . .
From that point on, I began to give my heroes bits of my own evils, in addition to their own sins. . . .
The main formal limitation of the Selections is its unfinished quality, its lack of wholeness, its mixing of letters from different times, written in different voices and styles, its juxtaposition of deeply thought out letters with underdeveloped ones. The Selections is a kind of rough draft—in the same pile one finds ideas that are clearly expressed and those that are confused; finished treatises and fragments of unfinished thoughts; matters of life and death and slight, useless, fleeting impressions. Gogol himself agreed, in his Author’s Confession, that he made a mistake when he put together letters written during different phases of his spiritual development. The Selections are like mineral ore, where a good deal of impure metal was mixed together with purest gold. They were published in 1847, printed (according to Gogol’s wish) by Pletnev.
The religious and political significance of the Selections was huge. This book appeared during an epoch when in the unseen depths of historical life the fate of Russia and of Russian Orthodox culture was being decided. Would Russia stand tall in its Orthodoxy, or would it be tempted by atheism and materialism? Would Russian Orthodox monarchy survive, or would socialism and communism prevail? These questions were connected with others even more deeply relevant to the fate of the entire world. What was to come? A flowering and progression of areligious humanistic culture, or the beginning of the pre-Apocalyptic era of world history?
Gogol maintained loudly and with conviction that the Truth is in Orthodoxy and in Orthodox Russian monarchy, and that the “to be or not to be” of Orthodox Russian culture was being decided now, and that the fate of the entire world depended on the preservation of that culture. The world was near its death pangs and had entered into the pre-Apocalyptic phase of history.
The Selections, taken as a whole, were not understood by Gogol’s contemporaries and were subjected to criticism from his friends as well as his enemies (of course, both sides’ criticisms came from entirely different points of reference).
Especially hateful and irritating to Gogol’s enemies was his genuine and assured support of traditional foundations of social-political order that so-called enlightened people considered baseless and even dangerous. The most virulent and angry protest against the Selections was Belinsky’s famous “Letter to Gogol.” Disturbed by the fact that Gogol dared to see the salvation of Russia in a religious and mystical “inner work,” in ascetic labors and prayers, in missionary work, Belinsky wrote: “Russia requires salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the success of civilization, enlightenment, and humaneness. She needs not sermons (She has heard enough), not prayers (She has prayed enough), but the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity.”
His friends criticized the Selections for other reasons. S. T. Aksakov saw a “demonic pride” in the book, Sverbeev saw a “self-immolation worse than pride” and a “prideful humility,” and the wife of Sverbeev felt a “strange pride and a deceitful sheen of Christian humility.” Many spiritual figures also found fault with the book, including Archbishop Innocent, Father Brianchaninov, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, and others.
The most serious and in many respects the fairest criticism came from Father Konstantinosky, whom Gogol asked for an honest appraisal of his book, although the two were not yet personally acquainted. Father Matthew judged many parts of the book very negatively, especially the chapter on the theater, and wrote to Gogol that he “will answer for that before God.” Gogol protested that his intentions were good. But Father Matthew counseled that Gogol shouldn’t justify himself to the critics, but instead he should “listen to the spirit residing in us, not to our earthly flesh . . . and to return into the inner life.”
The failure of the book affected Gogol very seriously. After some halfhearted rebuttals and attempts to resolve the “storm of misunderstandings,” still not recanting his main ideas, Gogol humbled himself and confessed that he had been wrong to dare to be a prophet and preacher of the Truth, not being personally worthy to serve that Truth. Even Belinsky’s strident and cruel letter was answered meekly and humbly: “God knows, maybe there is truth in your words. ”
Always inclining towards extremes, after a while Gogol judged himself perhaps too severely for writing his book. In a letter to Zhukovsky dated March 6, 1847, he wrote: “I became in my book such a Khlestakov, that I don’t have the heart to even peek into it. My job is to speak in vivid images, not to philosophize.” But while he blamed himself, he continued to justify his work: “It is true that my work is more useful and complete than many think.”
The criticisms of the Selections, while they hurt Gogol deeply, ultimately brought him great benefit. In his letters dated after 1847, we no longer find even a hint of that pedantic and cold doctrinal tone that he sometimes used in his letter-sermons to Aksakov, Pogodin, his sisters, and mother. Gogol was beginning to learn that most difficult of virtues: humility.
To be continued in Part Four…