Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Literary biography Life and literary activity

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809 – 1852) is one of the greatest writers of Russian literature. He was born on March 19, 1809 in the town of Sorochintsy (on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts) and came from an old Little Russian family. Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich, left the spiritual field and entered the hetman's office; It was he who added another name to his Yanovsky surname - Gogol, which was supposed to demonstrate the origin of the family from the 17th century, known in Ukrainian history. Colonel Evstafy (Ostap) Gogol (this fact, however, does not find sufficient confirmation). My grandfather wrote in an official document that “his ancestors, with the last name Gogol, were of the Polish nation,” although he himself was a real Little Russian and some considered him the prototype of the hero of “Old World Landowners.” The writer's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, served at the Little Russian Post Office. Mother, Marya Ivanovna, who married Vasily Afanasyevich at the age of fourteen, came from the landowner Kosyarovsky family and was known as the first beauty in the Poltava region. In addition to Nikolai, the family had five more children. The future writer spent his childhood years in his native estate Vasilievka (another name is Yanovshchina), visiting with his parents the surrounding places - Dikanka, which belonged to the Minister of Internal Affairs V.P. Kochubey, Obukhovka, where the writer V.V. Kapnist lived, but especially often in Kibintsy, the estate of a former minister, a distant relative of Gogol on his mother’s side - D. P. Troshchinsky. The early artistic impressions of the future writer are connected with Kibintsy, where there was an extensive library and a home theater. Another source of the boy’s strong experiences were historical legends and biblical stories, in particular, the prophecy told by his mother about the Last Judgment with a reminder of the inevitable punishment of sinners. Since then, Gogol, in the words of researcher K.V. Mochulsky, has constantly lived “under the terror of retribution from beyond the grave.” Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, was a man of cheerful character and a wonderful storyteller; his stage activities influenced the tastes of the future writer, who early showed a penchant for the theater. V. A. Gogol died when his son was 15 years old. Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the complete atmosphere of Little Russian life, lordly and peasant. It was these impressions that served as the basis for Gogol’s later Little Russian stories and his historical and ethnographic interests. Subsequently, while living in St. Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his Little Russian stories. The inclinations of religiosity, which subsequently took possession of the writer’s entire being, are attributed to the mother’s influence. His mother adored Gogol and spoiled him greatly, which became one of the sources of his conceit; the writer early realized the genius power hidden within him.

In 1818 – 1819 Gogol studied at the Poltava district school, then took private lessons from the Poltava teacher Gabriel Sorochinsky. From May 1821 to June 1828, the writer studied at the gymnasium of higher sciences in Nizhyn. He was not a diligent student, but had an excellent memory and prepared for exams in just a few days. Gogol was very weak in languages and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature. The Gymnasium of Higher Sciences, where Gogol studied, was poorly organized at that time. The literature teacher was a fan of Kheraskov and Derzhavin and an enemy of modern poetry, especially Pushkin. Gogol made up for the shortcomings of school by self-education in a friendly circle. Gogol together with Vysotsky, who at that time had considerable influence on the writer; with A. S. Danilevsky and N. Prokopovich, who remained his friends for life; together with Nestor Kukolnik we subscribed to magazines. They even started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in poetry. Nikolai Vasilyevich was very witty and even then he was distinguished by his unusual comedy. Along with literary interests, a love for theater also developed. He was its most zealous participant. In his youth, he admired Pushkin, but his writing experiments took shape in the style of romantic rhetoric, in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

The death of his father was a heavy blow for the whole family. Having shared his mother’s concerns about family affairs, Gogol also thinks about the future arrangement of his own affairs. Towards the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of broad social activity, which, however, he sees not at all in the literary field; he is thinking of getting ahead and benefiting society in the service, in the field of justice, for which in fact he was completely incapable.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Gogol in December 1828, together with one of his closest friends A. S. Danilevsky, went to St. Petersburg, where he was severely disappointed: his modest means ended up in big city very scarce; brilliant hopes were not realized as quickly as he expected. He tried to enter the stage, become an official, devote himself to literature, but he was not accepted as an actor; he was burdened by service. He became more attracted to the literary field. In St. Petersburg, he took part in the Little Russian circle, which consisted partly of former comrades. He found that Little Russia aroused interest in society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native Little Russia, and from here “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” arose. But first, under the pseudonym V. Alova, he published that romantic idyll “Hanz Küchelgarten” (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it with the year 1827) and the hero of which was given the ideal dreams and aspirations with which he himself was fulfilled in last years of Nizhyn life. But his work meets with murderous responses from reviewers (Gogol immediately buys up almost the entire circulation of the book and sets it on fire); to this, perhaps, were added the love experiences that he spoke about in a letter to his mother (dated July 24, 1829). A restless search for life's work and personal troubles force Gogol to suddenly leave St. Petersburg for Germany. Gogol went by sea to Lubeck, but a month later he returned again to St. Petersburg (in September 1829). “He was drawn to some fantastic land of happiness and reasonable productive work,” says his biographer; America seemed like such a country to him. In fact, instead of America, he ended up serving in the Department of Appanages (April, 1830) and remained there until 1832. His future fate and his literary activity were influenced by his rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin.

Disappointment and failure. - Impromptu to Lubeck. - Entry into service and resignation. - First successes in the literary field. - “Evenings on the farm.” - Acquaintance with Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Karamzin. - In the circle of Nezhin comrades. - " Old world landowners", "Taras Bulba", "Marriage", "The Inspector General". - Gogol in the role of an unsuccessful adjunct in the history department. - Attraction to literature. - Belinsky predicts a glorious future for Gogol. - “The Inspector General” is staged at the personal request of Emperor Nicholas I

He rushed through the bookstores, took away all the copies of his idyll from the booksellers and secretly burned them.

Another attempt to achieve fame, made by Gogol at the same time, led to the same sad results. Remembering his successes on the stage of the Nizhyn Theater, he decided to become an actor. The then director of the theater, Prince Gagarin, instructed his official Khrapovnitsky to test it. Khrapovnitsky, a fan of pompous declamation, found that his reading was too simple, unexpressive, and could only be accepted for “exit roles.”

This new failure completely upset Gogol. Climate change and material deprivation, which he had to experience after a good life in Little Russia, affected his naturally weak health, while all the troubles and disappointments were felt even more strongly; in addition, in one letter to his mother, he mentions that he had hopelessly and passionately fallen in love with some beauty, unattainable for him due to her social status. As a result of all these reasons, Petersburg disgusted him, he wanted to hide, to run away, but where? To return home to Little Russia without achieving anything, without doing anything - it was unthinkable for the proud young man. Even in Nizhyn, he dreamed of a trip abroad, and so, taking advantage of the fact that a small amount of his mother’s money fell into his hands, he, without thinking twice, boarded a ship and went to Lubeck.

Judging by his letters from this time, he did not associate any plans with this trip, did not have any specific goal, except to heal a little with sea bathing; he was simply running away from the troubles of St. Petersburg life in youthful impatience. Soon, however, letters from his mother and his own prudence made him come to his senses, and after a two-month absence he returned to St. Petersburg, ashamed of his boyish antics and at the same time deciding to courageously continue the struggle for existence.

At the beginning of the next 1830, happiness finally smiled on him. In Svinin’s “Domestic Notes” his story “Basavryuk, or the Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” appeared, and soon after that he received a modest position as assistant chief in the department of appanages. His long-standing desire to benefit society through public service was fulfilled, but what a difference between dream and reality! Instead of benefiting the whole state, spreading truth and goodness everywhere, eradicating lies and abuses, the humble assistant to the chief had to rewrite and file boring papers about various small matters that did not interest him at all. It is clear that he very soon became tired of the service, he began to treat it carelessly, and often did not show up for duty. Less than a year had passed before he was asked to resign, to which he gladly agreed: at that time literary works absorbed all his thoughts. During 1830 and 31, several of his articles appeared in the then timely publications, almost all without the author’s signature: “Teacher”, “Success of the Embassy”, an excerpt from the novel “Hetman”, “A few thoughts on teaching geography”, “Woman”. Amid the cold and discomfort of life in St. Petersburg, his thoughts involuntarily rushed to his native Little Russia; a circle of fellow Nezhin residents, with whom he had maintained friendly ties since his arrival, shared and supported his sympathies. Every week they got together, talked about their dear Ukraine, sang Little Russian songs, treated each other to Little Russian dishes, remembered their school pranks and their cheerful trips home for the holidays.

Singing doors, clay floors, low rooms illuminated by a cinder in an ancient candlestick, roofs covered with green mold, cloudy oaks, virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry trees, yakhont seas of plums, intoxicatingly luxurious summer days, dreamy evenings, clear winter nights - all these from childhood familiar native images again resurrected in Gogol’s imagination and asked to pour out into poetic works. By May 1931, he had ready the stories that made up the first volume of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.”

At the beginning of 1931, Gogol met Zhukovsky, who treated the aspiring writer with his usual kindness and warmly recommended him to Pletnev. Pletnev looked at his literary works with great sympathy, advised him to publish the first collection of his stories under a pseudonym, and himself invented a title for it, designed to arouse interest in the public. To provide for Gogol financially, Pletnev, who was at that time an inspector at the Patriotic Institute, gave him the position of senior history teacher at this institute and provided him with lessons in several aristocratic families. For the first time, Gogol was introduced to the circle of writers in 1832 at a celebration given by the famous bookseller Smirdin on the occasion of moving his store to new apartment. The guests presented the host with various articles that made up the almanac “Housewarming,” which also included Gogolev’s “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarreled.”

Gogol met Pushkin in the summer of 1831. Thanks to him and Zhukovsky, he was introduced to the Karamzins’ living room, which formed a kind of link between the literary and court-aristocratic circles, and met Prince Vyazemsky, the family of Count Vielgorsky, and the ladies-in-waiting, whose beauty was considered Alexandra Osipovna Rosseti, later Smirnova. All these acquaintances could not but have an influence on Gogol, and a very strong influence. The young man, who had meager worldly experience and even more meager theoretical knowledge, had to submit to the charm of more developed and educated people. Zhukovsky, Pushkin - these were names that he had been accustomed to pronounce with reverence since childhood; when he saw that under these names hidden not only great writers, but truly kind people who received him with the most sincere friendliness, he became attached to them with all his heart, he willingly accepted their ideas, and these ideas formed the basis of his own worldview. In relation to politics, the beliefs of the literary-aristocratic circle in which Gogol had to move can be characterized by the word: liberal-conservative. He unconditionally rejected any radical reforms of Russian life and the monarchical system of Russia, as absurd and harmful, and yet the restrictions imposed by this system on individuals, outraged him; he wanted more space for the development of individual abilities and activities, more freedom for individual classes and institutions; all kinds of abuses of bureaucratic arbitrariness met with his condemnation, but he rejected both energetic protest against these abuses and any search for their root cause. However, it must be said that political and social issues never came forward in that brilliant society that gathered in the Karamzins’ living room and grouped around the two great poets. Zhukovsky, both as a poet and as a person, shunned questions that worried life and led to doubt or denial. Pushkin spoke with disdain about the “pathetic skeptical speculations of the last century” and the “harmful dreams” existing in Russian society, and he himself rarely indulged in such dreams.

“Not for everyday worries,

Not for gain, not for battles”...

the chosen ones of fate were born, gifted with the genius of creativity. Priests pure art, they must stand above the petty passions of the mob. From this point of view of service to art, the circle also considered all the works that came out from the pens of the writers of that time. The fresh poetry and cheerful humor of Gogol’s first works attracted the attention of the luminaries of the literature of that time, who did not suspect what social significance the further works of the witty “Khokhol” would have, or what interpretation the new, already emerging literary generation would give them.

Acquaintances in the aristocratic world did not force Gogol to sever ties with his classmates at the Nezhin Lyceum. A rather diverse society gathered in his small apartment: former lyceum students, among whom Kukolnik was already well known, aspiring writers, young artists, the famous actor Shchepkin, some unknown modest official. Here all sorts of anecdotes from the life of the literary and bureaucratic world were told, humorous couplets were composed, and newly published poems were read. Gogol read unusually well and expressively. He was in awe of Pushkin’s creations and shared with his friends every new product that came from his pen. Yazykov's poems acquired special prominence and passion in his reading. A lively, witty conversationalist, he was the soul of his circle. Every vulgarity, complacency, laziness, every untruth, both in life and especially in works of art, met in him an apt accuser. And how much subtle observation he showed, noting the slightest features of slyness, petty seeking and selfish pomposity! In the midst of the most heated debates and animated conversations, the ability to keep an eye on everyone around him, to notice the hidden spiritual movements and secret motives of everyone, did not leave him. Often a randomly heard anecdote, apparently not at all an interesting story, from a visitor sown images into his soul, which grew into entire poetic works. Thus, an anecdote about some clerk, a passionate hunter, who with great difficulty saved money to buy a gun and lost this gun, gave rise to the idea of "The Overcoat" in him; the story of some old man about the habits of madmen gave birth to “Notes of a Madman.” “Dead Souls” themselves owe their origin to an accidental story. Once, during a conversation, Pushkin conveyed to Gogol the news that some adventurer in the Pskov province was purchasing dead souls from landowners and was arrested for his tricks. “You know,” added Pushkin, “this is excellent material for a novel, I’ll get around to it somehow.” When, some time later, Gogol showed him the first chapters of his “ Dead souls“, at first he became a little annoyed and said to his family: “You have to be careful with this Little Russian: he robs me so much that you can’t even shout.” But then, carried away by the charm of the story, he completely reconciled with the thief of his idea and encouraged Gogol to continue the poem.

Biographical Library of Florenty Pavlenkov

Biographical sketch of A. N. Annenskaya.

GOGOL.

HIS LIFE AND LITERARY ACTIVITY

Original here: SSGA. CONTENT: 1. Family and school 3. First trips abroad 5. Unexpected crash 6. Sad ending

1. Family and school

Parental home.- A gifted father and a homely mother.- Passion for theater in Gogol’s family.- Prince Bezborodko’s Lyceum.- Gogol’s lack of friends at school.- “The Mysterious Carlo.”- Early glimpses of observation.- Poor teaching at the Lyceum.- Ignorant teachers.- Gogol's laziness.- Home performances.- The little librarian.- Gogol's first poetic experiments at school.- He becomes the editor of the school magazine.- Dreams of serving in St. Petersburg.- Friendship with Vysotsky

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol-Yanovsky was born on March 19, 1809 in the town of Sorochintsy, on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts. His father was a poor Poltava landowner, and Nikolai Vasilyevich spent his early childhood with his family, on his father’s family estate, the village of Vasilyevka. Pictures of nature and life in Little Russia, which later filled Gogol’s works with living images, surrounded him in the first years of his life and awakened the first impressions of his soul. A low, dilapidated house with intricate battlements along the roof, with side turrets and pointed windows in the corners, around it an old shady garden, behind the garden on a hill there is a white one-domed church, at its foot a village with small houses and groups of tall trees - this is the situation, among in which a naturally dreamy child grew and developed. His father, Vasily Afanasyevich, was a very intelligent man, unusually witty, who had seen and experienced a lot in his time, an inexhaustible joker and storyteller. Close and distant neighbors constantly gathered in Vasilyevka; the hospitable host cordially treated them to works of Little Russian cuisine and amused them with stories, seasoned with the salt of purely Little Russian humor. It was here, among these neighbors, that Nikolai Vasilyevich found the prototypes of his Afanasiev Ivanovichs, Ivanov Nikiforovichs, Shponek, Golopuzey, etc., etc. Not far from Vasilyevka, in the village of Kibintsy, the famous D.N. Troshchinsky lived at that time. A retired minister, a wealthy nobleman, he settled down in his rural retreat on a grand scale. He was surrounded by a whole staff of all kinds of servants, jesters, hangers-on, and poor relatives. A large crowd gathered in his house, feasts and celebrations were constantly held, and, among other things, a home theater was set up. Vasily Afanasyevich, a distant relative of Troshchinsky, was his own man in his house. Former statesman managed to appreciate the original mind and rare gift of speech of my neighbor. In addition, Vasily Afanasyevich, a passionate theatergoer, took an active part in staging performances at his theater. At that time, “Natalka Poltavka” and “Moskal Charivnyk” by Kotlyarevsky had just appeared; These plays delighted the Little Russians and aroused in them a desire to replace translations of French and German comedies with scenes taken from their native reality. Vasily Afanasyevich wrote several comedies from Little Russian life for the Troshchinsky Theater, he himself conducted their production and played various roles in them. We don’t know whether little Nikola, as Nikolai Vasilyevich was called in the family, was present at the performance of these plays in the house of a wealthy relative, but, in any case, he heard rumors and conversations about them, witnessed all the cheerful bustle that usually accompanies the organization of households. performances, and this engendered in his soul a taste for theater and dramatic performances. From his father, Nikolai Vasilyevich inherited humor, the gift of a fascinating storyteller, a love of art in general and theater in particular; his mother conveyed to him an ardent religious feeling and a desire to benefit others, if not by deed, then at least with advice, at least with a word of consolation and approval. Marya Ivanovna Gogol was, according to all the people who knew her, an extremely likable person. After her early marriage, she lived almost constantly in the village, concentrating all her interests on the close circle of her family and household. Vasily Afanasyevich died when the eldest of the children, Nikolai Vasilyevich, was still studying at the lyceum, and besides him there were five girls at home; raising children and all household chores on the estate lay exclusively with Marya Ivanovna. “I rarely go on business, and the droshky is never put aside, but only changes horses,” she described her pastime to one relative, “I also need to keep order in the house, look after the little children and think about the big ones.” These worries did not prevent her from strictly performing all religious rituals and conducting active correspondence with relatives and friends, and especially with her son. Nikolai Vasilyevich was already in St. Petersburg and was trying to get into the civil service, but she still considered it necessary to write him “a few lines of morality,” since he “had not yet settled down.” In all of Marya Ivanovna’s correspondence, her humble submission to the will of Providence, her sincere love for those around her, her practical, common sense, strangely combined with the most naive ignorance of people and social relations, are constantly revealed. Until the end of his life, Gogol treated his mother with the most tender love; she adored him and was proud of him. His first student works were kept like a treasure in Vasilievka, the slightest adversity painfully worried his mother, she boasted of his literary successes and among her friends directly called him a genius. Gogol from St. Petersburg approached her, as having a “subtle, observant mind,” with a request to tell him the names of different parts of Little Russian costumes, various folk legends and beliefs, and various Little Russian rites and customs. Nikolai Vasilyevich's book education began quite early. For eight years he had already been learning to read and write from a seminarian teacher, and the next year his father took him and his younger brother Ivan to Poltava and placed them with a teacher who was supposed to prepare them for entering the gymnasium. The children of this teacher did not live long. The following year, when they were taken home for the holidays, little Ivan fell ill and died, and his parents felt sorry for sending Nikola, who missed his brother greatly, to strangers, and they left him at home for several months. At this time, the “Gymnasium of Higher Sciences”, or the Lyceum of Prince Bezborodko, opened in Nezhin, and at the beginning of 1821 Vasily Afanasyevich placed his son there. The gymnasium was still poorly organized, there were only about 50 students, divided into three sections; the training staff was not at full strength. But its premises were spacious, there was a lot of light and air in the large classrooms and bedrooms, and around there was a dense, shady garden, almost a forest, and a quiet river flowed, half overgrown with reeds. The children spent all their time free from class lessons in this garden. Supervision over them was very weak, and they were left to independently develop their moral and mental strength, without the guidance of elders, exclusively in the circle of comrades. Many spent all their time in idleness and pranks, but more gifted individuals were not satisfied with childish games. In the vast garden they had a place to retire from their noisy companions; in a secluded shady corner they delved into the book that first awakened in them the love of thought and knowledge; perched on the branch of some old tree, they pondered and even sketched out on paper their first attempts at literary works. When Gogol was brought to the lyceum, he was a thin, sickly 12-year-old boy; his face was strikingly pale, and as a result of scrofula he had frequent leakage from his ears. He shunned his new comrades and avoided their noisy games. Schoolchildren usually do not like this kind of newcomer, and Gogol was for a long time the victim of their ridicule and various tricks. So that Nikola would not be so creepy among strangers, his parents sent with him their serf footman, Simon, who was supposed to play the role of a servant in the boarding school at the gymnasium, and most importantly, look after the “little baron.” At first, Gogol greatly missed his family and home; This melancholy was especially intensified in the evening when he went to bed. Often Simon sat over him whole nights, comforting him, persuading him not to cry. Little by little, the boy got used to school life, stopped being alienated from his friends, became close to one of them, and responded to the ridicule of others with such well-aimed and caustic sarcasms that the jokers had to bite their tongues. Gogol was never a high-spirited naughty boy. Weak and quiet by nature, he did not take part not only in the wild pranks of the boys, but even in games that required exertion of physical strength; fooling a teacher, throwing a hussar in the nose of a sleepy comrade, giving someone an apt nickname - that was his thing. He nicknamed one lyceum student, who often attacked him, for his short-cropped hair: “Unshorn Spiridon,” and in the evening, on his name day, he placed in the gymnasium a banner of his own creation with the image of a devil cutting a dervish, and with the following acrostic: Se way of life of the wicked, the Scarecrow of the dervishes of all, the shrew, the stripper who committed sin, and for this crime he received this title, O reader! have patience, seal the initial words in your mouth. Once, in order to avoid punishment, Gogol so cleverly pretended to be crazy that he deceived and frightened all the gymnasium authorities. Neither teachers nor comrades considered Gogol a talented, promising boy. His keen powers of observation, which were evident from an early age, did not attract their attention; His ability not only to notice all the characteristic features of the appearance and address of those around him, but also to convey them amazingly correctly amused the boys, but to adults it seemed like just buffoonery, stupid imitation. Gogol never had real friends. Since childhood, no simple-minded frankness or communication was noticed in him; he was always somehow strangely secretive, there were always corners in his soul where no one’s eyes dared to look. Often he spoke even about the most ordinary things for a reason, investing them with some kind of mystery or hiding his real thought under the guise of a joke or buffoonery. With the insight characteristic of children, lyceum students soon noticed this trait in Gogol’s character, and for a long time he bore the nickname “mysterious Carlo” among them. From the total mass of schoolchildren, he singled out three or four (G. Vysotsky, A. Danilevsky, N. Prokopovich), with whom he was more friendly than with the rest, to whom he sometimes confided his childhood ideas, his youthful dreams and thoughts. Having become accustomed to lyceum life, having entered into its interests, Gogol never ceased to yearn with his soul to go home, to the circle of his family, to his native Vasilyevka. Trips to the village during the holidays were a true holiday for him throughout his school life. Usually a spacious carriage was sent for him and his two comrades, neighbors on the estate; the boys were supplied with various household provisions, and they set off on long journeys, with a serf coachman and footman. The journey lasted for three days, during which they could do as much mischief as they wanted, and Gogol, in addition, sharpened his powers of observation on all the objects he encountered. Every building, every passer-by - everything aroused his childhood curiosity and made his imagination work. “The district official pass by,” he recalls in “Dead Souls” (vol. I, chapter II) - I was already wondering where he was going, whether for the evening to some of his brothers, or straight to his home, so that, after sitting on the porch for half an hour, while it was not yet completely dusk, he could sit down to an early dinner with his mother, his wife, his wife’s sister and the whole family; and what will they be talking about at the time when a courtyard girl in monnits or a boy in a thick jacket brings a tallow candle in a durable household candlestick after soup. Approaching the village of some landowner, I looked curiously at the tall, narrow wooden bell tower or the wide, dark wooden old church. From afar, through the greenery of the trees, the red roof and white chimneys of the manor's house flashed temptingly to me, and I waited impatiently until the gardens encroaching on both sides opened up, and he would appear all his own then, alas! not at all vulgar in appearance, and from him I tried to guess who the landowner himself was, whether he was fat, and whether he had sons or as many as six daughters, with ringing girlish laughter, games and the eternal beauty of his little sister, and whether they were dark-eyed, and a merry fellow whether he himself or gloomy like September in last days , looks at the calendar and talks about rye and wheat, boring for youth." Scientific teaching at the lyceum was very weak. In terms of the number of subjects taught, the program was broad and versatile. It included, in addition to the law of God, the Russian language, mathematics, physics, history and geography, also: moral philosophy and logic, Roman law, Russian civil and criminal law, state economy, the beginnings of chemistry, natural history, technology, military sciences, languages: Latin, Greek, French and German, drawing, music, singing, dancing, fencing. From this single list of subjects that students had to master within seven years, it is clear that a thorough completion of the course was out of the question. To this it must be added that most of the teachers did not satisfy the most modest pedagogical requirements. Class magazine, in which the misdeeds of the students were recorded, it is striking in its illiteracy; the teacher of Russian literature Nikolsky did not recognize poets after Derzhavin and Kheraskov: he deeply despised Pushkin, although he had never read. One of the students presented him with an excerpt from “Eugene Onegin” under the guise of his own composition, and he did not suspect deception. School discipline, even just order, was very poorly maintained in the institution. The director of the lyceum, I. S. Orlai, was generally a gentle man, inclined to turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of his students, and was especially condescending towards Gogol, whose parents he was a neighbor on the estate and met in Troshchinsky’s house. So, Gogol often left the classroom during class and calmly walked along the corridors. Seeing from a distance the director, who really did not like such offenses, he did not hide, like other students, but used a different kind of trick. He directly approaches I.S. Orlai and tells him: “Your Excellency! I just received a letter from my mother. She instructed me to pay your most zealous bow to your Excellency and report that everything is going very well on your estate.” “Thank you sincerely,” The director usually answered, “If you write to mother, don’t forget to bow to her for me and thank her.” Gogol could be lazy without hindrance and was indeed lazy, not paying attention to such minor troubles as a bad mark in the journal, punishment without lunch or without tea, standing in the corner for a poorly answered lesson. His abilities were good; having quickly skimmed the previous lecture, he was almost always able to convey it quite satisfactorily, and having sat down with books in last month before the exam, he managed to prepare so much that he could easily move on to the next class. Of all the subjects he taught, Gogol worked diligently on drawing. He willingly listened to theoretical discussions about the art of his teacher Pavlov, a man devoted to his work, and he himself drew a lot, both with pencil and paints. In general, studying science or what was read in class under the name of science attracted very few lyceum students. Some of them spent their time in pranks, even carousing, causing scandals in the city; others came up with a more noble entertainment - organizing home performances. The initiator of these performances was, in all likelihood, Gogol, who, returning to school after the holidays, enthusiastically talked about Troshchinsky’s home theater and brought plays in the Little Russian language. Few pupils took part in the first performances; they played in a classroom without any proper staging or decorations, without a curtain, instead of which they simply placed blackboards. But little by little the passion for theater spread among the lyceum students. They formed up, arranged their costumes and backstage. In January 1824, Gogol wrote to his father: “...I humbly ask you to send me comedies, such as: “Poverty and Nobility of the Soul,” “Hatred of People and Repentance,” “Bogatonov, or a Provincial in the Capital,” and if any send others, for which I will be very grateful to you and will return you intact. Also, if you can, send me canvases and other aids for the theater. The first play we will perform is “Oedipus in Athens,” Ozerov’s tragedy. I think, dearest daddy , you will not refuse me this pleasure and send me the necessary aids, so if you can send and make several costumes, as many as possible, even just one, better if more, also at least a little money. Just do me a favor, do not refuse me this request. When I play my role, I will notify you about it." The administration of the gymnasium patronized this idea of the students, finding that it distracted them from harmful pranks and served to develop their aesthetic taste. I. S. Orlai decided to use it to encourage lyceum students to study foreign languages more diligently, and demanded that they stage French plays in their theater from time to time. They agreed, but preferred presentations in Russian. Little by little, the theater at the Lyceum improved so much that the city public began to be invited to it. In February 1827, Gogol wrote to his mother: “We spent Maslenitsa the whole week in such a way that I wish everyone to spend it like we did: we had fun all week tirelessly. We had a theater for four days in a row, and to our credit it was unanimously recognized that from the provincial theaters "None of them are any match against ours. True, they all played beautifully. The scenery was excellent, the lighting was magnificent, there were a lot of visitors, and all of them were foreigners, and all of them had excellent taste." The best actors in this lyceum theater were considered Gogol and the Puppeteer, the future author of the play “The Hand of the Almighty Saved the Fatherland.” Gogol aroused general delight in comic roles, the Puppeteer in tragic ones. Female roles were also performed by lyceum students. The role of Prostakova from "The Minor" was one of the best in Gogol's repertoire; his friend Danilevsky, a handsome, graceful boy, portrayed Moina, Antigone and all sorts of gentle beauties in general. In addition to the theater, Gogol early became interested in reading. He got books from his father, from teachers, from Troshchinsky’s library, spent a significant part of his pocket money on them and, together with several comrades, subscribed to the works of Zhukovsky and Pushkin, “Northern Flowers” by Delvig and other magazines and almanacs. "Eugene Onegin", which was then released in parts and was considered to some extent forbidden fruit, delighted young lyceum students. Gogol was chosen as the custodian of books subscribed to by pool. He handed them out for reading, strictly observing the queue; the one who received the book had to sit down with it decorously in a certain place and not get up from it until he returned it. Moreover, since readers’ hands were rarely clean, the librarian, before handing out a book, wrapped each person’s thumbs and forefingers in paper. Being keen on reading, the lyceum students tried to write themselves. First literary experiments Gogol were written in poetic form. In one of the junior classes of the gymnasium, he read to his friend Prokopovich the ballad “Two Fishes,” in which he portrayed himself and his early deceased brother. Later he wrote an entire tragedy in iambic pentameter: “The Robbers.” But the main content of his poems was satirical: in them he ridiculed not only his comrades and teachers, but also other inhabitants of the city. One of Gogol's school friends had in his hands a rather voluminous satire of him on the inhabitants of Nezhin: “Something about Nezhin, or the law is not written for fools.” It depicted typical faces of different classes on ceremonial occasions, and it was divided into the following chapters: 1) Consecration of the church in the Greek cemetery. 2) Election to the city magistrate. 3) All-Eating Fair. 4) Lunch with the Leader of the Nobility. 5) Dissolution and congress of students. Gogol did not attach any importance to all these comic poems; he considered them simple fun; he and all his comrades believed that real works should concern serious subjects and be written in a solemn, high style. The example of Karamzin's "Bulletin of Europe", whose books Gogol received from his father, seduced the lyceum students, and they decided to publish their own magazine. Gogol was chosen as the editor of this magazine, which bore the title "Star". The boys wanted to give their publications the appearance of printed books, and Gogol spent whole nights painting the title pages. The staff kept their articles in greatest secret from other comrades, and they met them only on the 1st, when the whole book was ready, “came out into the world.” Gogol, who was already distinguished by his ability to read very well, often read his own and other people’s works loudly to the whole class. He published several of his poems and a long story in "Zvezda": "The Tverdislavich Brothers", an imitation of Marlinsky's stories. Unfortunately, not a single one of these semi-children’s works by Gogol survived, and former lyceum students have a very vague memory of “Star” itself, which was published only for a short time. They only remember one thing: all the articles in their magazine were written in the most pompous style and full of rhetoric; They considered only this kind of writing to be a serious matter, real literature. A similar view is clearly visible in Gogol’s correspondence during his apprenticeship. In letters to his comrades, even sometimes to his uncle, he jokes, jokes, inserts strong words and common expressions. We see nothing of the kind in his letters to his mother, which he obviously viewed as a serious matter. All of them are “composed” in a noble and sublime tone, all are filled with pompous phrases. Even with the news of his father’s death, which greatly affected him, he cannot express his feelings simply, without rhetorical embellishment and exaggeration! “Don’t worry, dearest mother,” writes a 16-year-old boy, “I bore this blow with firmness.” true Christian. True, at first I was terribly shocked by this news, but I did not let anyone notice that I was saddened; Left alone, I surrendered to the full force of insane despair; I even wanted to encroach on my life. But God kept me from this, and by evening I noticed only sadness in myself, but no longer impulsive, which finally turned into a light, barely noticeable melancholy, mixed with a feeling of reverence for the Almighty. I bless you, sacred faith! in you only I find a source of consolation and quenching of my sorrow. So, dearest mother, I am now at peace, although I cannot be happy, having lost best father , most faithful friend, everything precious to my heart. But is there nothing left that would tie me to life? Don’t I still have a most sensitive, tender, virtuous mother who can replace my father, my friend, and everything? What is cuter? What is more precious?" The thought of what to do, how to organize his life after leaving the lyceum, began to occupy Gogol early. He did not attach any importance to his literary attempts and never dreamed of being a writer. It seemed to him that only being in the public service ", a person can benefit his neighbors and the fatherland. Here is what he wrote in October 1827 to his maternal uncle, P. P. Kosyarovsky: “From the very times of the past, from the very years of almost misunderstanding, I have been burning with unquenchable zeal to make my life necessary for the good state, I was seething with the desire to bring even the slightest benefit. Anxious thoughts that I would not be able to, that my path would be blocked, that I would not be given the opportunity to bring him the slightest benefit, threw me into deep despondency. Cold sweat broke out on my face at the thought that perhaps I would perish in the dust, not having signified my name with any wonderful deed - to be in the world and not signify its existence - this was terrible for me. I went over in my mind all the states, all the positions in the state and settled on one - justice. I saw that there would be more work here than anything else, that here only I could be a blessing, here only I would be truly useful to humanity. Injustice, the greatest misfortune in the world, tore my heart more than anything else. I vowed not to lose a single minute of my short life without doing good.” And in this letter, as in all of Gogol’s “serious” letters of that time, there are many exaggerations and at the same time a lot of childish ignorance of life, but it clearly shows what dreams, what aspirations filled the soul of the young man. The confidant of these aspirations was Gogol’s lyceum friend, senior class student G. Vysotsky. Of all the lyceum students, Gogol was, it seems, the friendliest of all with him. “We are united by human stupidity,” says Gogol in one from his letters. Indeed, Vysotsky was distinguished, like his younger comrade, by his ability to notice funny or vulgar sides in the characters of the people around him and to laugh evilly at them. In the infirmary, where he often sat due to an eye disease, a whole club gathered around his bed, in which various amusing anecdotes were composed, lyceum and city incidents were conveyed from a comic point of view.Probably partly under his influence, Gogol began to have a completely negative attitude not only towards the entire gymnasium authorities, starting with the director, whom he had previously praised very much, but also towards other persons who inspired him to believe childhood, reverent respect, as, for example, for Troshchinsky. Together with Vysotsky, they dreamed of immediately going to St. Petersburg upon completion of the course, entering the civil service, becoming useful members of society, and gaining fame and general respect for themselves. Vysotsky completed the course two years before Gogol and actually left for St. Petersburg in 1826. After his departure, Gogol began to strive even more than before to leave Nizhyn, which was boring to him, with all the “beings” inhabiting it, who “crushed the high purpose of man under the crust of their earthliness and insignificant complacency.” Petersburg seemed to him like some kind of magical land, on the one hand, opening up a field for wide-ranging all-round activity, on the other, presenting the opportunity to enjoy all the gifts of art, all the benefits of mental life. “You are already in place,” he writes to a comrade at the beginning of 1827, “you already have the sweet confidence that your existence is not insignificant, that you will be noticed and appreciated, and I?.., why do we so want to see our happiness soon? Why is it given to us impatience? the thought of him both day and night torments, disturbs my heart; my soul wants to escape from its cramped abode, and I am all impatience. You already live in St. Petersburg, you are already having fun with life, you are greedily in a hurry to drink pleasures, but I am not yet closer a year and a half to see you, and these one and a half years last for me an endless century "... Convinced from experience that the reality of St. Petersburg did not correspond much to their youthful dreams, Vysotsky tried to disappoint his comrade and imagine to him the difficulties and troubles that would meet him in the capital, but These warnings made little impression on Gogol. “You terrified me with the monsters of various obstacles,” he writes in 1827, “but they are powerless, or - a strange property of a person! The more difficulties, the more obstacles, the more he flies there. Instead of stopping me, they are even more ignited my desire." Obviously, the inexperienced young man had a very vague idea of the “monster” of minor troubles, squabbles, pricks of pride, and failures that accompany the first steps in practical life. Asking his mother to send him money to buy the books necessary for his studies, he self-confidently declares that all expenses for his education will be returned to her “triple with large interest,” that he will have to ask her for some help only in the first two or three years of his life in St. Petersburg, and there he himself will settle down firmly and will have the opportunity to transport her to him so that she can be his “guardian angel.” Counting on success in St. Petersburg, he begs both his mother and uncle to arrange so that his part of the estate goes to his mother and she is independently provided for financially. Gogol had to break away from these dreams of a happy life in St. Petersburg and sit down to his textbooks. The final exam was approaching, it was necessary to give an account of the knowledge that had been acquired during a 6-year stay at the lyceum, and the young man saw with horror how insignificant this knowledge was: in mathematics he was very weak; from foreign languages could barely understand only easy French books; in Latin, at the age of three, he learned to translate only the first paragraph of Koshansky’s anthology; from German he tried to read Schiller with the help of a dictionary, but this work was beyond his strength; Even in Russian he wrote far from correctly, both spelling and stylistically. “I am now a complete recluse in my studies,” he tells his mother at the end of 1827. “The whole day from morning to evening, not a single idle minute.” does not interrupt my deep studies. There is nothing to regret about lost time; I must try to repay it; and in these short six months I want to produce and will produce twice as much as during the entire time of my stay here. "... It is difficult to imagine that in any For six months, Gogol managed to largely fill in the gaps in his education. In any case, in June 1828 he stood final exam and could fulfill his dream - to go to St. Petersburg. Some family matters kept him in the village until the end of the year, and only in December he, together with his friend and neighbor on the estate A. Danilevsky, got into a wagon and set off on a long journey.

2. Gogol’s arrival in St. Petersburg and the beginning of his literary fame

Disappointment and failures, - Impromptu to Lubeck. - Enlistment and resignation. - First successes in the literary field. - "Evenings on the farm." - Acquaintance with Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Karamzin. - In the circle of Nezhin comrades. - "Old World Landowners" , “Taras Bulba”, “Marriage”, “The Inspector General”.- Gogol in the role of an unsuccessful adjunct in the history department.- Attraction to literature.- Belinsky predicts a glorious future for Gogol.- “The Inspector General” is put on stage at the personal request of Emperor Nicholas I

The young people were very worried as they approached the capital. They, like children, constantly leaned out of the carriage to see if the lights of St. Petersburg were visible. When these lights finally flashed in the distance, their curiosity and impatience reached their highest pitch. Gogol even froze his nose and caught a runny nose, constantly jumping out of the carriage in order to better enjoy the coveted spectacle. They stayed together in furnished rooms, and immediately had to get acquainted with various practical troubles and minor troubles that greet inexperienced provincials when they first appear in the capital. These squabbles and trifles of everyday life had a depressing effect on Gogol. In his dreams, St. Petersburg was a magical land, where people enjoy all material and spiritual blessings, where they do great things, wage a great fight against evil - and suddenly, instead of all this, a dirty, uncomfortable furnished room, worries about how to have a cheaper lunch, alarm at the sight of how quickly the wallet, which seemed inexhaustible in Nizhyn, is being emptied! Things got even worse when he began to work hard to realize his cherished dream - to enter the civil service. He brought with him several letters of recommendation to various influential persons and, of course, was sure that they would immediately open up for him the path to useful and glorious activity; but, alas, bitter disappointment awaited him here again. The “patrons” either coldly accepted the young, awkward provincial and limited themselves to mere promises, or offered him the most modest places at the lowest levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy - places that did not in the least correspond to his proud plans. He tried to enter the literary field, wrote the poem “Italy” and sent it under a false name to the editorial office of “Son of the Fatherland.” This poem, very mediocre both in content and in thought, written in a romantically pompous tone, was, however, published. This success encouraged the young author, and he decided to publish his poem “Hans Küchelgarten” (imitation of Voss’s “Louise”), conceived and, in all likelihood, even written by him while still in high school. Secretly from his closest friends, hiding under the pseudonym V. Alova, he published his first great literary work (71 pages in 12 lobes), distributed copies to booksellers on commission and waited with bated breath for the public's verdict on him. Alas! Acquaintances either did not say anything at all about “Hans”, or spoke about him indifferently, and in the “Moscow Telegraph” a short but caustic note by Polevoy appeared that the idyll of Mr. It would be best for Alov to remain hidden forever. This first unfavorable review from critics worried Gogol to the depths of his soul. He rushed through the bookstores, took away all the copies of his idyll from the booksellers and secretly burned them. Another attempt to achieve fame, made by Gogol at the same time, led to the same sad results. Remembering his successes on the stage of the Nizhyn Theater, he decided to become an actor. The then director of the theater, Prince Gagarin, instructed his official Khrapovnitsky to test it. Khrapovnitsky, a fan of pompous declamation, found that his reading was too simple, unexpressive, and could only be accepted for “exit roles.” This new failure completely upset Gogol. Climate change and material deprivation, which he had to experience after a good life in Little Russia, affected his naturally weak health, while all the troubles and disappointments were felt even more strongly; in addition, in one letter to his mother, he mentions that he had hopelessly and passionately fallen in love with some beauty, unattainable for him due to her social status. As a result of all these reasons, Petersburg disgusted him, he wanted to hide, to run away, but where? To return home to Little Russia without achieving anything, without doing anything - it was unthinkable for the proud young man. Even in Nizhyn, he dreamed of a trip abroad, and so, taking advantage of the fact that a small amount of his mother’s money fell into his hands, he, without thinking twice, boarded a ship and went to Lubeck. Judging by his letters from this time, he did not associate any plans with this trip, did not have any specific goal, except to heal a little with sea bathing; he was simply running away from the troubles of St. Petersburg life in youthful impatience. Soon, however, letters from his mother and his own prudence made him come to his senses, and after a two-month absence he returned to St. Petersburg, ashamed of his boyish antics and at the same time deciding to courageously continue the struggle for existence. At the beginning of the next 1830, happiness finally smiled on him. In Svinin’s “Domestic Notes” his story “Basavryuk, or the Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” appeared, and soon after that he received a modest position as assistant chief in the department of appanages. His long-standing desire to benefit society through public service was fulfilled, but what a difference between dream and reality! Instead of benefiting the whole state, spreading truth and goodness everywhere, eradicating lies and abuses, the humble assistant to the chief had to rewrite and file boring papers about various small matters that did not interest him at all. It is clear that he very soon became tired of the service, he began to treat it carelessly, and often did not show up for duty. Less than a year had passed before he was asked to resign, to which he gladly agreed: at that time literary works absorbed all his thoughts. During 1830 and 31, several of his articles appeared in the then timely publications, almost all without the author’s signature: “Teacher”, “Success of the Embassy”, an excerpt from the novel “Hetman”, “Some thoughts on teaching geography”, “Woman”. Amid the cold and discomfort of life in St. Petersburg, his thoughts involuntarily rushed to his native Little Russia; a circle of fellow Nezhin residents, with whom he had maintained friendly ties since his arrival, shared and supported his sympathies. Every week they got together, talked about their dear Ukraine, sang Little Russian songs, treated each other to Little Russian dishes, remembered their school pranks and their cheerful trips home for the holidays. Singing doors, clay floors, low rooms lit by a cinder in an old candlestick, roofs covered with green mold, cloudy oaks, virgin thickets of bird cherry and cherry trees, yakhont seas of plums, intoxicatingly luxurious summer days, dreamy yesterdays, clear winter nights - all these from childhood familiar native images again resurrected in Gogol’s imagination and asked to be expressed in poetic works. By May 1931, he had ready the stories that made up the first volume of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.” At the beginning of 1931, Gogol met Zhukovsky, who treated the aspiring writer with his usual kindness and warmly recommended him to Pletnev. Pletnev looked at his literary works with great sympathy, advised him to publish the first collection of his stories under a pseudonym, and himself invented a title for it, designed to arouse interest in the public. To provide for Gogol financially, Pletnev, who was at that time an inspector of the Patriotic Institute, gave him the position of senior history teacher at this institute and provided him with lessons in several aristocratic families. For the first time, Gogol was introduced to the circle of writers in 1832 at a holiday which was given by the famous bookseller Smirdin on the occasion of moving his store to a new apartment. The guests presented the host with various articles that made up the almanac “Housewarming”, which also included Gogolev’s “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarreled.” Gogol met Pushkin in the summer of 1831. Thanks to him and Zhukovsky, he was introduced to the Karamzins’ living room, which formed a kind of link between the literary and court-aristocratic circles, and met Prince Vyazemsky, the family of Count Vielgorsky, and the ladies-in-waiting, whose beauty was considered Alexandra Osipovna Rosseti, later Smirnova. All these acquaintances could not but have an influence on Gogol, and a very strong influence. The young man, who had meager worldly experience and even more meager theoretical knowledge, had to submit to the charm of more developed and educated people. Zhukovsky, Pushkin - these were names that he had been accustomed to pronounce with reverence since childhood; when he saw that under these names hidden not only great writers, but truly kind people who received him with the most sincere friendliness, he became attached to them with all his heart, he willingly accepted their ideas, and these ideas formed the basis of his own worldview. In relation to politics, the beliefs of the literary-aristocratic circle in which Gogol had to move can be characterized by the word: liberal-conservative. He unconditionally rejected any radical reforms of Russian life and the monarchical system of Russia, as absurd and harmful, and yet the restrictions imposed by this system on individuals outraged him; he wanted more space for the development of individual abilities and activities, more freedom for individual classes and institutions; all kinds of abuses of bureaucratic arbitrariness met with his condemnation, but he rejected both energetic protest against these abuses and any search for their root cause. However, it must be said that political and social issues never came forward in that brilliant society that gathered in the Karamzins’ living room and grouped around the two great poets. Zhukovsky, both as a poet and as a person, shunned questions that worried life and led to doubt or denial. Pushkin spoke with disdain about the “pathetic skeptical speculations of the last century” and the “harmful dreams” existing in Russian society, and he himself rarely indulged in such dreams. “Not for everyday worries, not for self-interest, not for battles”... the chosen ones of fate, gifted with the genius of creativity, were born. Priests of pure art, they must stand above the petty passions of the mob. From this point of view of service to art, the circle also considered all the works that came out from the pens of the writers of that time. The fresh poetry and cheerful humor of Gogol’s first works attracted the attention of the luminaries of the literature of that time, who did not suspect what social significance the further works of the witty “Khokhol” would have, or what interpretation the new, already emerging literary generation would give them. Acquaintances in the aristocratic world did not force Gogol to sever ties with his classmates at the Nezhin Lyceum. A rather diverse society gathered in his small apartment: former lyceum students, among whom Kukolnik was already well known, aspiring writers, young artists, the famous actor Shchepkin, some unknown modest official. Here all sorts of anecdotes from the life of the literary and bureaucratic world were told, humorous couplets were composed, and newly published poems were read. Gogol read unusually well and expressively. He was in awe of Pushkin’s creations and shared with his friends every new product that came from his pen. Yazykov's poems acquired special prominence and passion in his reading. A lively, witty conversationalist, he was the soul of his circle. Every vulgarity, complacency, laziness, every untruth, both in life and especially in works of art, met in him an apt accuser. And how much subtle observation he showed, noting the slightest features of slyness, petty seeking and selfish pomposity! In the midst of the most heated debates and animated conversations, the ability to keep an eye on everyone around him, to notice the hidden spiritual movements and secret motives of everyone, did not leave him. Often a randomly heard anecdote, an apparently not at all interesting story from a visitor, sown into the soul his images, which grew into entire poetic works. Thus, an anecdote about some clerk, a passionate hunter, who with great difficulty saved money to buy a gun and lost this gun, gave rise to the idea of "The Overcoat" in him; An old man's story about the habits of madmen gave birth to "Notes of a Madman." "Dead Souls" themselves owe their origin to an accidental story. Once, during a conversation, Pushkin conveyed to Gogol the news that some adventurer in the Pskov province was purchasing dead souls from landowners and was arrested for his tricks. “You know,” Pushkin added, “this is excellent material for a novel, I’ll get around to it somehow.” When, some time later, Gogol showed him the first chapters of his “Dead Souls,” he was at first a little annoyed and told his family: “You have to be careful with this Little Russian: he robs me so much that you can’t even shout.” But then, carried away by the charm of the story, he completely reconciled with the thief of his idea and encouraged Gogol to continue the poem. From 1831 to 1836, Gogol lived almost entirely in St. Petersburg. Only twice did he manage to spend several weeks in Little Russia and visit Moscow and Kiev. This time was the period of his most intense literary activity. Not counting various magazine articles and unfinished stories, during these years he released 2 parts of “Evenings on a Farm” and gave us such works as “Old World Landowners”, “Taras Bulba”, “Viy”, “Portrait”, “Marriage”, "The Inspector General", the first chapters of "Dead Souls". Gogol himself was very modest about his first literary works. General praise flattered his pride and was pleasant to him, but he considered them exaggerated and, apparently, was not aware of the moral significance of the laughter aroused by his stories. He still dreamed of a great deed, of a feat for the benefit of many, but he was still looking for this deed outside of literature. In 1834, at the opening of Kyiv University, he was very concerned about the department of history at it; when these efforts failed, he, with the assistance of his patrons, received the position of adjunct in the department of general history at St. Petersburg University. One cannot help but be surprised that a person with such weak theoretical training, with such a meager supply of scientific knowledge, decided to take up lecturing. But perhaps precisely because he had never been involved in science, it seemed to him an easy task. “For the sake of our Ukraine, for the sake of our father’s graves, don’t sit over books!” - he wrote in 1834 to M. Maksimovich, who received the department of Russian literature in Kiev. - “Be as you are, say your own. It is best for you to make aesthetic analyzes with them (with students). This is most useful for them; it will most likely develop their intelligence and you will be pleased." However, Gogol himself, apparently, had a serious intention, or at least dreamed, of devoting himself to science. In his letters from that time, he more than once says that he is working on the history of Little Russia and, in addition, is going to compile a “History of the Middle Ages in volumes 8 or 9, if not more.” The brilliant result of his studies in Ukrainian antiquities was "Taras Bulba", but his dreams about the history of the Middle Ages remained dreams. The teaching staff of St. Petersburg University was very reserved towards their new colleague: many, not without reason, were outraged by the appointment to the department of a man known only for a few works of fiction and completely alien to the world of science. But the students were waiting with impatient curiosity for the new lecturer. His first lecture [it was published in Arabesques under the title “On the Character of the History of the Middle Ages”] delighted me. He illuminated the darkness for them with living pictures medieval life . With bated breath, they watched the brilliant flight of his thoughts. At the end of the lecture, which lasted three quarters of an hour, he told them: “For the first time, gentlemen, I tried to show you only the main character of the history of the Middle Ages; next time we will get down to the facts themselves and for this we will have to arm ourselves with an anatomical knife.” But these facts were not at the young scientist’s disposal, and the painstaking collection and “anatomization” of them was beyond the power of his mind, which was too prone to synthesis and quick generalization. He began the second lecture with a loud phrase: “Asia has always been some kind of people-believing volcano.” Then he spoke listlessly and lifelessly about the migration of peoples, indicated several history courses, and after 20 minutes left the pulpit. Subsequent lectures were of the same nature. The students were bored, yawned and doubted whether this mediocre Mr. Gogol-Yanovsky was the same Rudy Panko who made them laugh with such a healthy laugh. Only once more did he manage to revive them. Zhukovsky and Pushkin came to one of his lectures. Gogol probably knew about this visit in advance and prepared for it. He gave a lecture similar to his introductory one, just as fascinating, lively, picturesque: “A look at the history of the Arabians.” Apart from these two lectures, all the rest were extremely weak. The boredom and dissatisfaction clearly expressed on the faces of the young listeners could not help but have a depressing effect on the lecturer. He realized that he had taken on the wrong business, and began to feel burdened by it. When, at the end of 1835, he was asked to pass the test for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy if he wished to accept a professorship, he without regret refused a chair that he could not fill with honor. Gogol tried in vain to convince himself and others that he could devote himself to scientific research. The artist's instinct pushed him to embody the phenomena of the surrounding life in living images and prevented him from indulging in serious study of dry materials. Having decided to compose a large essay on geography: “Earth and People,” he soon wrote to Pogodin: “I don’t know why melancholy attacked me... the proof sheet fell out of my hands and I stopped typing. Somehow it’s not working like that now, no "With that inspired, complete pleasure, the pen scratches the paper. As soon as I start and accomplish something from history, I already see my own shortcomings. Now I regret that I didn’t take it wider, larger in volume, then suddenly a new system is built and the old one collapses." Then he says that he is obsessed with comedy, that it can’t get out of his head, and that the plot and title are already ready. “I’ll get down to history - the stage moves in front of me, applause is noisy; faces stick out from boxes, from the barn, from armchairs and bare their teeth, and to hell with history!” Instead of preparing for lectures, he published his “Mirgorod”, created “The Inspector General”, nurtured the first volume of “Dead Souls” in his head, and took an active part in the literary affairs of that time. The most pressing issue in the literary world at that time was the abnormal state of journalism. It was finally taken over by the famous triumvirate: Grech, Senkovsky and Bulgarin. Thanks to the large funds of the publisher-bookseller Smirdin, “Library for Reading” became the thickest and most widespread of the monthly magazines. Senkovsky reigned supreme in her. Under various pseudonyms he filled it with his own writings; in the department of criticism, at his own discretion, he promoted some writers into geniuses, and trampled others into the dirt; the works published in his magazine were most unceremoniously shortened, lengthened, and altered in his own way. The official editor of the "Library for Reading" was Grech, and since he, in addition, together with Bulgarin, published "Northern Bee" and "Son of the Fatherland", then, of course, everything that was said in one magazine was supported in the other two. Moreover, it should be noted that to combat opponents, the triumvirate did not disdain any means, even denunciation, so that purely literary polemics often ended with the assistance of the administration. Several periodicals in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Rumor, Telegraph, Telescope, Literary Additions to the Invalid) tried to counteract the pernicious influence of the Reading Library. But partly a lack of funds, partly a lack of energy and skill in running a magazine business, and mainly difficult censorship conditions hindered the success of the struggle. Since 1835, a new magazine, “Moscow Observer,” appeared in Moscow with the same goal of counteracting the St. Petersburg triumvirate. Gogol warmly welcomed the arrival of a new member of the magazine family. He knew personally and corresponded with his publisher Shevyrev and Pogodin; In addition, Pushkin also reacted favorably to the Moscow edition. "Telegraph" and "Telescope" outraged him with the harshness of their tone and unfair, in his opinion, attacks on some literary names(Delvig, Vyazemsky, Katenin). The "Moscow Observer" promised more respect for authorities, more solidity in the discussion of various issues, less youthful enthusiasm, which had an unpleasant effect on the aristocrats of the literary world. Gogol most energetically promoted it among his St. Petersburg acquaintances. Each member of his circle certainly had to subscribe to the new magazine, “have his own “Observer”; he begged all his acquaintances of writers to send articles there. Soon, however, he had to be very disappointed in the Moscow organ. His books emanated boredom, they were pale , lifeless, devoid of a guiding idea. Such an opponent could not be terrible for the St. Petersburg tycoons of the magazine business. Meanwhile, Gogol had to experience the unpleasant sides of their rule. When his “Arabesques” and “Mirgorod” came out, the entire Bulgarin clique attacked with bitterness on him, and the "Moscow Observer" very restrainedly and evasively expressed his approval of him. True, a voice was heard from Moscow in his defense, but he had not yet anticipated the full power of this voice. An article by Belinsky appeared in the "Telescope": "About the Russian story and Gogol's stories", which stated that "a feeling of deep sadness, a feeling of deep sympathy for Russian life and its order can be heard in all Gogol's stories", and directly stated that in Gogol Russian society has a future "great writer". Gogol was both touched and delighted by this article; but the favorable review of a critic who was not yet authoritative, placed in an organ that his St. Petersburg friends did not sympathize with, did not reward him for the troubles that he had to endure from other quarters. In addition to the caustic criticism of literary enemies, he was subjected to even more severe attacks on his personality. His entry into the university thanks to patronage, and not academic merit, was met with disapproval in the circle of his close acquaintances, and this disapproval increased as his complete inability to become a professor became clear. He resigned from the department at the end of 1835, but in his soul there remained a residue of bitterness from the condemnation, the justice of which he could not help but recognize. In the same year, 1835, Gogol began to bother about staging his “The Inspector General” on the stage of the St. Petersburg theater. This was his first work, which he greatly valued, to which he attached great importance . “This face,” he says about Khlestakov, “must be a type of many things that are scattered in different Russian characters, but which here were united by chance in one person, as very often comes across in nature. Everyone, at least for a minute, if not for a few minutes, was done or is being done by Khlestakov, but naturally he just doesn’t want to admit it.” “In The Inspector General, I decided to collect in a heap all the bad things in Russia that I knew then, all the injustices that are done in those places and in those cases where justice is most required from a person, and laugh at everyone at once.” In a word, he wanted to create a serious comedy of manners and was most afraid that, due to misunderstanding or ineptitude of the actors, it might seem like a farce or a caricature. To avoid this, he diligently monitored the production of the play, read their roles to the actors, attended rehearsals, and fussed about costumes and props. On the evening of the first performance, the theater was full of select audiences. Gogol sat pale, excited, sad. After the first act, bewilderment was written on all faces; From time to time, laughter was heard, but the further, the less often this laughter was heard, there was almost no applause at all, but the general tense attention was noticeable, which in the end turned into indignation of the majority: “This is an impossibility, this is slander, this is a farce!” was heard from all sides. In the highest bureaucratic circles they called the play liberal, revolutionary, they found that putting such things on stage meant directly corrupting society, and “The Inspector General” got rid of the ban only thanks to the personal desire of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. St. Petersburg journalism fell upon him with all its thunder. Bulgarin in “The Northern Bee” and Senkovsky in “Library for Reading” accused the play of absurdity and implausibility of content, caricature of characters, cynicism and dirty ambiguity of tone. Gogol was greatly upset and disappointed: his favorite work, from which he expected glory for himself, was humiliated and thrown into the dirt! “I’m tired, both soul and body,” he wrote to Pushkin after the first performance of “The Inspector General.” “I swear, no one knows or hears my suffering... God be with them all! I’m disgusted with my play!” In a letter to Pogodin, he describes his feelings in detail: “I’m not angry at the gossip, as you write; I’m not angry that those who find their own features in my originals and scold me are angry and turn away; I’m not angry that literary enemies scold me , sales talents. But what makes me sad is the general ignorance that drives the capital; It’s sad when you see that the stupidest opinion of a writer who has been spat upon and disgraced by them affects them themselves and leads them by the nose. It’s sad when you see what a pitiful state our writer is in. Everyone is against him, and there is no equivalent side for him. "He's a firebrand! He's a rebel!" And who is saying this? This is said by people of state, people who have earned service, experienced people, people who should have enough intelligence to understand the matter in its present form, people who are considered educated and whom the world - at least the Russian world - calls educated. The rogues were brought onto the stage - and everyone was furious: “Why bring the rogues onto the stage?” Let the rogues be angry, but those who I did not know to be rogues are angry. This ignorant irritability is deplorable to me, a sign of the deep, stubborn ignorance spilled over our classes. The capital is ticklishly offended by the fact that the morals of six provincial officials have been inferred; What would the capital say if its own morals were removed, even slightly? I am not upset by the current bitterness against my play, I am concerned about my sad future. The province is already faintly depicted in my memory, its features are already pale. But life in St. Petersburg is clear before my eyes, its colors are vivid and sharp in my memory. The slightest feature of it - and then how will my compatriots speak? And what would be accepted by enlightened people with loud laughter and sympathy is what the bile of ignorance outrages; and this is general ignorance. To say about a rogue that he is a rogue is considered to be undermining the state machine; to say just one living and true line means, in translation, to disgrace the entire class and to arm others or its subordinates against it. Consider the position of the poor author, who meanwhile loves his fatherland and his own compatriots very much, and tell him that there is a small circle that understands him, looking at him with different eyes - will this console him? "The understanding of a small circle of progressive people could not console Gogol, because he himself was not clearly aware of the meaning and moral force of his work. For him, as well as for his friends, to whom he read The Inspector General in Zhukovsky’s apartment, it was a living, true picture of provincial society, biting satire over the universally recognized plague of the bureaucratic world - over bribery. When he wrote it, when he worked so hard to put it on stage, it never occurred to him that it could have a deep social meaning, that, by vividly depicting the vulgarity and untruths among which society lived, it would make this society think, look for the reasons for all this vulgarity and untruth. And suddenly: “Liberal, rebel, slanderer of Russia!” He was stunned, confused. The St. Petersburg climate had a murderous effect on his health, his nerves were shaken; sick, tired mentally after the intense work of recent years, disappointed in his attempts to find a truly useful field of activity, he decided to take a break from everything that worried him Lately, away from the fogs and bad weather of the northern capital, under a clearer sky, among complete strangers who will treat him without hostility and without annoying affection. “I would like to run away now. God knows where,” he wrote to Pushkin in May 1836, “and the journey ahead of me - a steamship, the sea and other distant skies - can only refresh me. I crave them like God knows what!”

3. First trips abroad

In Germany and Switzerland.- In Geneva and Paris.- News of the death of Pushkin.- In Rome.- Impressions and meetings.- Death of Vielgorsky - Arrival for a short time in Moscow and St. Petersburg.- Second visit to Rome.- Life and literary studies Gogol in Rome

In June 1836, Gogol boarded a ship bound for Lübeck. His friend A. Danilevsky was traveling with him. None of them had a specific goal: they just wanted to relax, refresh themselves, and admire everything that is wonderful about Europe. After traveling around Germany together, the friends parted: Danilevsky was drawn to Paris, to the entertainment there, Gogol made a trip along the Rhine and from there headed to Switzerland. The beauty of nature made a strong impression on him. He was especially struck by the snowy peaks of the Alps with their majestic splendor. Under the influence of the trip, the gloomy mood in which he left St. Petersburg dissipated, he became stronger and encouraged in spirit: “I swear that I will do something that an ordinary person will not do,” he wrote to Zhukovsky. “I feel the lion’s strength in my soul and noticeably hear one’s transition from childhood, spent in school, to adolescence.” In the fall, while living in Geneva and Vienna, he diligently set to work on the continuation of Dead Souls, the first chapters of which had already been written in St. Petersburg. “If I complete this creation the way it needs to be accomplished, then... what a huge, what an original plot! What a varied heap! All of Rus' will appear in it, this will be my first decent thing that will bear my name!” - he said in a letter to Zhukovsky. Gogol spent the winter again with Danilevsky in Paris; Together they examined all its sights: the Louvre art gallery, the Jardin des Plantes [Botanical Garden (French)], Versailles and so on, visited cafes, theaters, but in general Gogol found little attractive in this city. What could be new and interesting for Russians in the capital constitutional monarchy- the struggle of political parties, debates in the House, freedom of speech and press - interested him little. During all his travels, nature and works of art were in the foreground for him; he observed and studied people as individuals, and not as members of a known society; all political passions and interests were alien to his predominantly contemplative nature. Abroad, he made little contact with foreigners: everywhere he entered the circle of his own, Russians, new or old St. Petersburg acquaintances. In Paris, he spent most of the evenings in the cozy living room of Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova. Smirnova, née Rosseti, a former maid of honor to Empresses Maria Feodorovna and Alexandra Feodorovna, shone in social circles with her beauty and intelligence. Through Pletnev, who was her teacher at the Catherine Institute, and Zhukovsky, she met everyone outstanding writers of that time, and “we were all more or less its prisoners of war,” says Prince Vyazemsky. Pushkin and Lermontov dedicated poems to her, Khomyakov, Samarin, Ivan Aksakov were fond of her, Zhukovsky called her “heavenly little devil.” Gogol met her back in 1829, giving lessons to an aristocratic family. She paid attention to the modest, shy teacher because of his Khokhlatsky origin. She herself was born in Little Russia, spent her first childhood there and loved everything Little Russian. There is some reason to believe that Gogol did not remain indifferent to the charms of the witty and flirtatious social beauty; but he carefully hid this love from everyone around him, and in all his numerous letters to Alexandra Osipovna, only sincere friendship is visible, which found an answer in her. In Paris they met like good old acquaintances, and all their conversations revolved mainly around memories of Little Russia. She sang to him: “Oh, don’t go to Grytsyu at the evening,” and together they remembered Little Russian nature and Little Russian dumplings. He conveyed his Parisian observations to her in the form comic scenes , breathing with subtle observation and genuine humor. In Paris, Gogol found the news of Pushkin's death. How this news struck him like a thunderbolt! “You know how much I love my mother,” he said to Danilevsky, “but if I had lost even her, I could not be as upset as I am now. Pushkin no longer exists in this world!” “Every month, every week, there was a new loss,” he later wrote to Pletnev from Rome, “but no worse news could have been received from Russia... All the pleasure of my life, all my highest pleasure disappeared with it. I did nothing without his advice. Not a single line was written without me imagining him in front of me. What he would say, what he would notice, what he would laugh at, what he would express his indestructible and eternal approval - that’s what only occupied me and animated my strength. Secret the thrill of pleasure anticipated on earth embraced my soul... God! My current work, inspired by him, his creation... I am unable to continue it. Several times I took up the pen - and the pen fell from my hands. Inexpressible melancholy! " It may very well be that it was precisely this melancholy that accelerated Gogol’s departure from Paris. In March 1837 he was already in Rome. The Eternal City made a charming impression on him. The nature of Italy delighted and enchanted him. Living in St. Petersburg, he constantly sighed about spring, envied those who could enjoy it in Little Russia, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed by all the charm of the Italian spring. "What spring! God, what spring!" - he exclaims in delight in one of his letters. “But you know what a young, fresh spring is like among decrepit ruins, blooming with ivy and wild flowers. How beautiful now are the blue patches of sky between the trees, barely covered with fresh, almost yellow greenery, and even the dark cypresses, like a crow’s wing, and even further blue, matte, like turquoise, the mountains of Frascati, and Albania, and Tivoli. What an air! Amazing spring! I look and can’t get enough of it. Roses now strewn the whole of Rome; but my sense of smell is even sweeter from the flowers that have now bloomed and whose name is I, really, I forgot at that moment. We don’t have them. Do you believe that often comes a frantic desire to turn into one nose, so that there is nothing more - no eyes, no arms, no legs, except just one huge nose, which would have nostrils? were in good buckets so that you could draw in as much incense and spring as possible.” Probably; at other moments of his life, Gogol just as passionately wanted to turn himself into eyes, so as not to lose anything from those wonderful pictures that unfolded before him at every step, constantly revealing new and new delights. “Oh, if you only looked at this blinding sky, everything drowning in radiance,” he wrote to Pletnev. “Everything is beautiful under this sky; every ruin is a picture, there is some kind of sparkling color on a person; a structure, a tree, a work of nature, a work of art - everything seems to breathe and speak under this sky. When everything changes for you, when you no longer have anything left that would tie you to any corner of the world, come to Italy. There is no better fate "how to die in Rome; here a person is a mile closer to God." Gogol liked everything in Rome, everything captivated him. From enjoying nature he moved on to works of art, and there was no end to his delight. Monuments of ancient life and creations newest artists, Colosseum and St. Peter equally fascinated him. He studied everything art galleries cities; he stood for hours in churches in front of paintings and statues of great masters; he visited the workshops of all the artists and sculptors who then lived in Rome. Showing Rome to his acquaintances who came from Russia was his greatest pleasure. He was simply proud of Rome as something of his own, wanted everyone to admire it, and was offended by those who treated him coldly. He also liked the Roman people very much for their gaiety, their humor and their wit. Having learned to understand well Italian language , he often sat for a long time at the open window of his room, listening with pleasure to the squabble of some artisans or the gossip of Roman gossips. He observed individual types and admired them; but even here, as in Paris, he had no desire to get closer to society or the people, to find out how they live, what they hope for, what these people expect. He made acquaintance with several Italian artists, but spent most of his time either alone at work and in solitary walks, or in the company of Russians. Of the Russian artists who lived in Rome at that time, he became close friends only with A.I. Ivanov, and perhaps with the engraver Jordan, and in general he sympathized with only a few: he did not like most of them for their arrogance, lack of education and talent, combined with enormous conceit. Gogol often had to receive Russian guests in Rome and “treat” them to Rome. Apart from Danilevsky, who traveled around Europe at the same time as him, in the first years of his life the following people visited Rome: Zhukovsky, Pogodin (husband and wife), Panaev, Annenkov, Shevyrev and many others. In Rome, he had to care for one patient, who died in his arms. This was Joseph Vielgorsky, the son of the chamberlain Count Mikhail Yuryevich Vielgorsky, a young man who, according to everyone who knew him, was richly gifted by nature. Gogol knew him and his family in St. Petersburg. He developed consumption, doctors sent him to Italy, and his mother asked Gogol to take part in it, to take care of him in a foreign land. Gogol fulfilled her request more than conscientiously: he surrounded the patient with the most tender care, almost never parted with him for whole days, and spent sleepless nights at his bedside. The death of the young man greatly upset him. “The other day I buried my friend, whom fate gave me at that time, in that era of life, when friends are no longer given,” he wrote to Danilevsky. “We have long been attached to each other, respected each other for a long time, but we became close friends, inseparably and decisively brotherly only - alas! - during his illness. You cannot imagine to what extent this lofty, childishly clear soul was noble! This would have been a husband who would have adorned the future reign of Alexander Nikolaevich. And the beautiful should was to perish, as everything beautiful perishes in our Russia!..” Under the life-giving rays of the Italian sun, Gogol’s health strengthened, although he never considered himself completely healthy. His acquaintances made fun of his suspiciousness, but back in St. Petersburg he said quite seriously that doctors did not understand his illness, that his stomach was structured completely differently from that of other people, and this caused him suffering that others did not understand. Living abroad, he spent almost every summer on some kind of water, but rarely withstood the full course of treatment; It seemed to him that he himself knew better than all the doctors how and with what to be treated. In his opinion, travel and life in Rome had the most beneficial effect on him. Travel refreshed him and drove away all sorts of gloomy or disturbing thoughts. Rome strengthened and invigorated him. There he began to continue “Dead Souls”; in addition, he wrote “The Overcoat” and “Anunziata”, a story that he later reworked and compiled the article “Rome”; He also worked a lot on a great tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, but he was dissatisfied with it and after several alterations he destroyed it. In the fall of 1839, Gogol went with Pogodin to Russia, straight to Moscow, where the Aksakov circle received him with open arms. He had known the Aksakov family before, and they were all among his enthusiastic admirers. This is how S.T. describes it. Aksakov, the impression made on them by Gogol’s arrival: “I lived this summer with my family at the dacha in Aksinin, 10 versts from Moscow. On September 26, I suddenly received the following note from Shchepkin: “I hasten to notify you that M.P. Pogodin arrived, and not alone; our expectations were fulfilled, N.V. came with him. Gogol. The latter asked not to tell anyone that he was here; he has become very handsome, although doubts about his health are constantly visible; I was so delighted at his arrival that I was completely distraught, even to the point that I almost received him dryly; Yesterday I sat with them the whole evening and, it seems, did not say a worthwhile word; His arrival created such excitement in me that I hardly slept that night. I could not resist informing you about such a surprise for us." We were all extremely happy. My son (Konstantin), having read the note first, raised such a cry of joy that he frightened everyone, immediately galloped to Moscow and saw Gogol, who stopped at Pogodin's." It is clear what a warming impression such a cordial reception must have made on Gogol’s soul. He visited the Aksakovs almost every day and appeared to them as all his close acquaintances saw him: a cheerful, witty and sincere interlocutor, alien to any arrogance, any ceremony. The Aksakovs found a big change in his appearance compared to how they saw him in 1834. “There were no traces of the former smooth-shaven and cropped man, except for one crested, dandy man in a fashionable tailcoat. Beautiful, blond, thick hair lay over his shoulders; a beautiful mustache and goatee completed the change; all facial features took on a completely different meaning; especially in the eyes, when he spoke, kindness, cheerfulness and love for everyone were expressed; when he was silent or thoughtful, now they depicted a serious aspiration for something not external. A frock coat like a coat replaced a tailcoat, which Gogol wore only in extreme extremes; the very figure of Gogol in a frock coat became more handsome." Gogol was going to St. Petersburg, where he was supposed to take his two sisters from the Patriotic Institute. Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov had to go there with his son and daughter. They all went together in one carriage, and Gogol all the way was inexhaustibly cheerful. In St. Petersburg, he stayed with V.A. Zhukovsky, who, as a mentor to the then heir, Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich, had a large apartment in the Winter Palace - and immediately unpleasant troubles began for him. Literary work did not provide him with material respect. The money he received from the Directorate of Imperial Theaters for The Inspector General (2500 rubles allocated) gave him the means to leave Russia in 1836, but, of course, could not ensure his existence abroad. In 1837, Zhukovsky procured for he received an allowance from the sovereign in the amount of 5 thousand rubles. Assignment, and he lived on this money before arriving in Russia. But now he faced emergency expenses: it was necessary, having taken his sisters from the institute, to make them full equipment, take them to Moscow and also pay for some private lessons that they took at the institute. His mother could not give anything to her daughters from her own funds. Although the estate left after Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol was not particularly small (200 peasant souls, about 1000 acres of land), it was mortgaged, and Marya Ivanovna could barely subsist on the income from it. Coming from Little Russia to Moscow to pick up her daughters already seemed quite ruinous to her. Gogol did not dare to ask for a financial benefit from his old friends, Zhukovsky and Pletnev, since they had already lent him money many times, and he considered himself their unpaid debtor; Of his other acquaintances, some, despite all their desire, were not able to help him; with others he was not close enough to appear as a supplicant. Gogol was worried, mopey, accusing St. Petersburg of coldness and indifference. S. T. Aksakov with the sensitivity characteristic of his true good heart , guessed what was happening in the poet’s soul, and he himself, without any request on his part, offered him 2 thousand rubles. Gogol knew very well that the Aksakovs were not rich at all, that they themselves often needed money, and he was even more touched by this unexpected help. Having calmed down about material matters, Gogol did not completely abandon his literary pursuits in St. Petersburg and spent certain hours every day at his desk, locking himself in his room from all visitors. At that time, he had most of the first volume of Dead Souls ready, and the first chapters were even finished. He read them in a circle of his friends who had gathered for this purpose in Prokopovich’s apartment. Everyone listened with intense attention to the masterful reading, only sometimes bursts of uncontrollable laughter interrupted the general silence. Gogol, while conveying the funniest scenes, remained completely serious, but the sincere gaiety and genuine delight aroused in the listeners, apparently, were very pleasant to him. This time he did not stay in St. Petersburg for long and, taking his sisters from the institute, returned with the Aksakovs to Moscow. In Moscow, mental life at that time was much more lively than in St. Petersburg. A sharp break between the Slavophiles and Westerners had not yet occurred; the advanced intelligentsia was dominated by a passion for Hegel and German philosophy. At the Aksakovs, at Stankevich, at Elagina - wherever young professors or writers gathered, there were heated, lively debates about various abstract issues and philosophical systems. Gogol, neither by his development nor by his mentality, could take part in such verbal debates. His Moscow friends did not expect this from him at all. They liked him as a keenly observant and tenderly responsive person, they worshiped his talent, they loved him as an artist who, with a bold and at the same time subtle brush, touched the ulcers of modern society. They sought and found the causes of these ulcers and the means to heal them based on their own convictions. Precisely because Gogol did not express his theoretical views, each party considered itself entitled to call him one of its own and draw conclusions about his worldview on the basis of the conclusions that it itself drew from his works. “The more I look at him, the more I am surprised and feel all the greatness of this man and all the pettiness of the people who do not understand him!” exclaimed the always enthusiastic Konstantin Aksakov. “What an artist! How useful it is to spend time with him!” Stankevich admired every line that came from his pen; at the first words of his reading, he burst into uncontrollable laughter from the mere premonition of the humor with which his works were imbued. “Bow down from me to Gogol,” Belinsky, at that time still a Muscovite in spirit, wrote from the Caucasus, “and tell him that I love him so much both as a poet and as a person; that those few minutes in which I met him in St. Petersburg, were joy and relaxation for me. In fact, I didn’t even want to talk to him, but his presence gave fullness to my soul.” Having sent one of his sisters to the village with her mother, who came to Moscow to take her and see her son, placing the other with a familiar lady who undertook to complete her education, Gogol began to get ready to return to Rome. Friends tried to restrain him, expressing fear that among the luxurious nature and free life of Italy he would forget Russia; but he assured them that it was quite the opposite: in order to truly love Russia, he needed to move away from it; in any case, he promised to return to Moscow in a year and bring the first volume of Dead Souls completely finished. The Aksakovs, Pogodin and Shchepkin accompanied him to the first station of the Warsaw road and there they said goodbye in the most friendly way. Having undergone a course of treatment with water in Vienna, Gogol then returned to his beloved Rome, about which he said: “it seemed to me that I saw my homeland, which I had not been to for several years, and in which only my thoughts lived. But no, this everything is not the same: not my homeland, but the homeland of my soul, where my soul lived before me, before I was born.” Now this Rome ceased to serve for him as a subject of constant enthusiastic observation and study: he unconsciously, as if something familiar, enjoyed both its nature and its artistic beauties, and completely devoted himself to his literary works. “I rejoiced at my awakened strength, refreshed after the waters and the journey,” he writes, “and began to work with all my might, sensing the awakening inspiration that had long been dormant in me.” He was finishing last chapters the first volume of “Dead Souls”, in addition, he redid some scenes in “The Inspector General”, reworked “The Overcoat” completely, and was translating the Italian comedy “Ajo nell Imbarazzo” (“A Man in a Difficult Situation”), the production of which on the stage of the Moscow theater gave similar instructions to Shchepkin. But - alas - the poet’s weak body could not bear the nervous tension that accompanies intense creative activity. He contracted severe swamp fever (malaria). An acute, painful illness almost brought him to the grave and left marks for a long time on both his physical and mental state. Her seizures were accompanied by nervous suffering, weakness, and loss of spirit. N.P. Botkin, who was in Rome at that time and looked after Gogol with brotherly love, says that he told him about some visions that visited him during his illness. The “fear of death” that tormented Gogol’s father in the last days of his life was partially passed on to his son. From an early age, Gogol was distinguished by suspiciousness and always attached great importance to any of his ill health; the painful illness, which did not immediately respond to medical help, seemed to him the threshold of death or, at least, the end of an active, full life. Serious, solemn thoughts, which the proximity of the grave suggests to us, gripped him and did not leave him until the end of his life. Having recovered from physical suffering, he again set to work, but now it acquired a different, more important meaning for him. Partly under the influence of reflections inspired by illness, partly thanks to Belinsky’s articles and the reasoning of his Moscow admirers, he developed a more serious view of his duties as a writer and of his works. He, almost from childhood, was looking for a field in which he could become famous and benefit others, trying to become an official, an actor, a teacher, and a professor, finally realized that his real vocation was literature, that the laughter excited by his creations has there is a deep educational meaning behind it. “The further continuation of Dead Souls,” he says in a letter to Aksakov, “is clearer, more majestic in my head, and now I see that I will do, perhaps over time, something colossal, if only my weak strength allows “At least, it’s true, few people know what strong thoughts and deep phenomena can be evoked by an insignificant plot, the first innocent and modest chapters of which you already know.” At the same time, religiosity, which had distinguished him since childhood, but had hitherto rarely manifested itself, began to be expressed more often in his letters, in his conversations, in his entire worldview. Under her influence, he began to give his literary work a kind of mystical character, began to look at his talent, at his creative ability as a gift sent to him by God for a good purpose, at his writing activity as a calling predetermined from above, as a duty, entrusted to him by Providence. “A wonderful creation is happening and taking place in my soul,” he wrote at the beginning of 1841, “and now my eyes are filled with grateful tears more than once. Here the holy will of God is clearly visible to me: such a suggestion does not come from a person; he would never invent such a plot ". Gogol has so far expressed this mystical, solemn view of his work to very few of his acquaintances. For the others, he was his former pleasant, although somewhat silent interlocutor, a subtle observer, and a humorous storyteller. Russia and all Russians still aroused the most ardent interest in him. He asked the Russians who visited him in Rome about everything that was happening in Russia, and tirelessly listened to their stories about all sorts of news, literary and non-literary, about all the interesting articles that appeared in magazines, about all the new writers. At the same time, he knew how to find out not only everything he wanted, but also the views, opinions, and character of the narrator, while he himself kept his innermost thoughts and beliefs to himself. “He takes with his full hand everything he needs, without giving anything,” a Roman friend, the engraver Jordan, said about him. Apart from Russia and Rome, nothing seemed to interest Gogol. During periods of intense creative work, he usually read almost nothing. “In certain eras, one good book is enough to fill a person’s entire life,” he said and limited himself to rereading Dante, the Iliad in Gnedich’s translation and Pushkin’s poems. The political life of Europe attracted his attention less than ever; He spoke almost with hatred of France as the ancestor of all innovations, as the destroyer of what he called “the poetry of the past.” The Rome of that time, the Rome of papal rule and Austrian influence, was to his heart. Gregory XVI, so good-natured in appearance, smiling so affectionately at all ceremonial exits, knew how to suppress all the aspirations of his subjects to join the common life European peoples, to the general progress European civilization . A restless stream invisibly seeped under the soil of the then edifice of Italian life, the prisons were filled not with criminals, but with restless heads who did not get along with the monastic police regime, but on the surface everything was smooth, peaceful, even fun. Magnificent orchestras thundered in the city squares, solemn religious processions constantly moved through the streets, accompanied by crowds of worshipers, libraries, museums, and art galleries hospitably opened their doors to everyone. Artists, actors, scientists found here all the means to practice their specialty and a quiet, secluded corner, protected from those storms, the echoes and harbingers of which disturbed the peace of the rest of Europe. Having settled in the relatively sparsely populated Via Felice street, in a very modestly furnished, but spacious and bright room, Gogol led a regular, monotonous life. He usually got up early and immediately set to work, drinking a carafe or two of cold water in between. He found that water had an unusually beneficial effect on him, and that only with its help he maintained his strength. He would have breakfast in some cafe with a cup of coffee with cream, then work again until late lunch, if there were no Russians, with whom he would take walks around Rome and the surrounding area, and spend most of his evenings with his artist friends. By the summer of 1841, the first volume of Dead Souls was finally finished and prepared for printing. Gogol wanted to direct its publication himself and come to Russia for this purpose. As the processing of his work progressed and his entire plan became clear to him, he became more and more imbued with the thought of its great significance. “It is now painful and almost impossible for me to deal with the trifles and troubles of the road,” he wrote to S.T. Aksakov, “I need peace of mind and the happiest, most cheerful disposition of my soul as possible; I now need to be protected and cherished. I came up with this : let Mikhail Semenovich (Shchepkin) and Konstantin Sergeevich (Aksakov) come for me. They need it: Mikhail Semenovich - for health, Konstantin Sergeevich - for the harvest, which it’s time for him to take up, and dearer to my soul are these two, who could come for me, there could be no one for me! I would then travel with the same youthful feeling as a schoolboy on vacation goes home from a boring school, under his native roof and free air. Now I need to be cherished - not for me, no They will do something useful: They will bring with them a clay vase. Of course, this vase is now all cracked, quite old and barely standing, but this vase now contains a treasure. Therefore, it must be protected."

4. Precursors of mental disorder

Changes in Gogol's mental mood upon returning from abroad. - Difficulties with the first volume of "Dead Souls". - Gogol's physical and moral suffering. - Troubles of Moscow life. - Packing for Jerusalem. - Gogol comes to the Aksakovs' house with the image of the Savior in his hands .- Departure abroad.- “Guardians of the fires of truth.”- Love and mysticism.- Solitary readings of the church fathers with A.O. Smirnova.- Passion for preaching in conversations and letters.- Financial difficulties.- Three-year subsidy from Emperor Nicholas I .- Difficult childbirth of the 2nd volume of “Dead Souls”.- Prayer for asking inspiration from God

Personal matters prevented both Shchepkin and K. Aksakov from fulfilling Gogol’s request and meeting him on the road to Russia. He came alone, first for a short time to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, where old acquaintances greeted him with the same cordiality. S.T. Aksakov found a big change in him over the past year and a half. He lost weight, became pale, and quiet submission to the will of God was heard in his every word. His gaiety and mischief had largely disappeared; In his conversations, the old humor sometimes broke through, but the laughter of those around him seemed to weigh on him and quickly forced him to change the tone of the conversation. The publication of the first volume of Dead Souls caused Gogol a lot of anxiety and internal suffering. The Moscow Censorship Committee did not allow the publication of the poem; he was confused by the very title of it, “Dead Souls,” when it is known that the soul is immortal. Gogol went to the St. Petersburg censorship committee and for a long time did not know what fate would befall her, whether she would be allowed in or not. On this occasion, he had to address petitionary letters to various influential persons: Pletnev, Vielgorsky, Uvarov, Prince. Dondukov-Kor-sakov, even through Smirnova, send a petition to the Highest Name. Finally, in February, he received news that the manuscript had been approved for publication. New trouble! Despite his letters and requests, the manuscript was not sent to Moscow, and no one could tell him where it was. Knowing the importance he attached to his work, one can imagine how worried Gogol was. He constantly made inquiries at the post office, addressed questions to everyone who could tell him where his treasure had gone, and considered him dead. Finally, in early April 1842, the manuscript was received. The St. Petersburg censorship did not find anything suspicious in what confused the Moscow censorship, only “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” turned out to be completely crossed out in red ink. Gogol immediately began to remake it and at the same time began printing the poem in 2,500 copies. All these anxieties and troubles had a painful effect on Gogol’s health. His nerves were shaken, the cold of the Russian winter depressed him. “My head,” he wrote to Pletnev, “suffers in every possible way: if the room is cold, my brain nerves ache and freeze, and you cannot imagine what kind of torment I feel every time I try to overcome myself at that time, to take power over myself and force my head to work. If the room is heated, then this artificial heat completely suffocates me, the slightest tension produces such a strange condensation of everything in my head, as if it wants to crack." In another letter, he describes his painful attacks in the following way: “My illness is expressed by such terrible attacks as have never happened to me before, but it seemed most terrible to me when I felt that excitement rising to my heart, which turned every image flying in my thoughts into a giant, every insignificant pleasant feeling turned into such a terrible joy that human nature cannot bear, and every gloomy feeling turned into a heavy, painful sadness, and then fainting followed, and finally a completely somnambulistic state.” S. T. Aksakov says that during one of these fainting spells, Gogol had to lie for a very long time without any help, alone in his room, on the mezzanine of Pogodin’s apartment. In letters to his acquaintances, Gogol complained exclusively about physical suffering, but besides them, many moral troubles poisoned his life in Moscow. He had a personal relationship of friendship and gratitude with Pogodin and especially with the Aksakov family, but he could not fully share their theoretical views. The influence of the St. Petersburg literary circles in which he spent his youth, his continued connections with Pletnev and Zhukovsky, and finally, his long life abroad, all interfered with this. The Slavophiles considered him completely one of their own, and he really agreed with them in many ways, but their exclusivity was alien to him. While they considered Belinsky their worst enemy - and even the good-natured Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov lost his temper when talking about him, Gogol saw him in a familiar house and entrusted him with the delivery of “Dead Souls” to St. Petersburg. Gogol could not explain to his friends directly and openly his attitude towards their party, to show them how far he was going with them, both due to the natural evasiveness of his character, and because those philosophical theories with which they were worried, those conclusions that what they made of these theories was far from clear to his mind, and he did not even try to understand them. The mystical mood that gripped him during his illness in Rome developed more and more; his thoughts were directed toward heaven, towards the means to achieve heavenly bliss, and earthly disputes about various philosophical and social issues seemed to him insignificant, not worth much attention. His friends did not suspect the process that was taking place in his soul, but they often noticed his secrecy and insincerity; this upset and outraged them. Gogol’s relationship with Pogodin, in whose house he lived, became especially strained. Pogodin provided many services to Gogol, lent him money, took care of his affairs, offered generous hospitality to him and his entire family in his house, and because of this he considered himself entitled to make certain demands on him. His magazine, "Moskvityanin", was doing poorly: its sluggish articles made readers despondent, there were few subscribers - he wanted at all costs to attract Gogol to cooperate and improve his literary affairs with the name of the talented popular writer. In vain Gogol insisted that he had nothing ready, that he was not able to write at the given time - he did not allow such periods in the author’s life when he “wasn’t doing well,” and constantly tormented Gogol, demanding articles from him for his magazine, and rudely reproached him for ingratitude. It’s easy to understand how painfully such demands and reproaches affected Gogol’s nervous, impressionable nature! He did not want to openly quarrel with Pogodin after leaving his house, or even tell others about his indelicate actions. He was silent, but secretly he was tormented and irritated. Acquaintances who did not understand the real reason for this irritability, who heard Pogodin’s constant complaints about Gogol’s bad character, accused him of being quarrelsome and grumpy. The troubles of Moscow life forced Gogol to abandon his initial assumption of “living longer in Russia, getting to know those sides of it that were not so briefly familiar to him,” and he began to get ready for the journey again. Friends and acquaintances begged him to stay, bombarded him with questions about where exactly he was going, for how long, and whether he would return soon, but these requests and questions were apparently unpleasant for him; he answered them evasively, vaguely. Once he greatly surprised the Aksakovs by appearing to them with the image of the Savior in his hands and with an unusually joyful, radiant face. “I kept waiting,” he said, “for someone to bless me with an image; but no one did this. Finally, Innocent blessed me, and now I can announce where I am going: I am going to the Holy Sepulcher.” Gogol saw off the Most Reverend Innocent, who was leaving Moscow, and he blessed him with an image at parting, and he saw in this an indication from above, divine approval for the enterprise, which he dreamed of in the depths of his soul, without saying a word to anyone. Gogol's unexpected intention aroused great bewilderment and curiosity, causing a lot of talk and gossip in Moscow circles: he was considered something strange, absurd, almost insane. Gogol did not explain to anyone the moral motives by virtue of which this intention appeared to him, and generally avoided any conversation about the proposed journey, especially with people who did not share his religious mood. As the printing of Dead Souls safely drew to a close, and the weather became warmer, Gogol's health improved... and his mood cleared. On May 9, he celebrated his name day with a large dinner in Pogodin’s garden, and at this dinner his friends again saw him cheerful, talkative, and animated. Nevertheless, as soon as the first volume of Dead Souls came out of print at the end of May, Gogol left Moscow. In June he was in St. Petersburg, but was in a hurry to leave from there. At first, he intended, simultaneously with the first volume of Dead Souls, to publish a complete collection of his works and to oversee their printing himself. Now it seemed to him that this would keep him in Russia too long; he entrusted the publication to his friend Prokopovich and went abroad in June, without even waiting for press reviews of his new work. Meanwhile, these reviews were of such a kind that they could make him forget many of the troubles of the last year. All three literary camps, which were beginning to share dominance over public opinion, greeted his book with enthusiastic sympathy. Pletnev published a very detailed and laudatory article about her in his Sovremennik; Konstantin Aksakov in his brochure compared Gogol with Homer; for Belinsky and his circle, “Dead Souls” was a significant phenomenon that established a new era in literature. Unfortunately, Gogol did not understand at all the importance that Russian literature, Russian journalism, as a leader of public opinion and public consciousness . Alien to those deep questions of principle that caused a split in the progressive minds of his time, he mistook the passionate polemical fervour of representatives of different literary parties for personal irritation and was indignant at it. This is what he wrote to Shevyrev soon after leaving abroad: “... in your state of mind, among other things, you can hear sadness, the sadness of a person who has looked at the state of magazine literature. To this I will tell you this: this feeling is unpleasant, and it is quite familiar to me. But it appears when you look more closely at this circle. This evil then seems enormous and, as it were, embracing the entire field of literature, but as soon as you get out of this circle even for a moment and enter for a moment into yourself - you will see that this is such an insignificant corner that you shouldn’t even think about it. Up close, when you stay with them, you never know what you won’t imagine? It will even seem that this influence is terrible for the future, for youth, for education; but how do you look from higher places - you will see that all this is for a moment, everything is under the influence of fashion. You look around, already in place of one - another: today Hegelists, tomorrow Schellingists, then again some kind ofists. What to do? Such is already the desire of society to be some kind of ists. Humanity is running headlong, no one stands still; let him run, that's what he needs to do. But woe to those who are appointed to stand motionless by the fires of truth if they are carried away by the general movement, even if only to bring to reason those who are rushing. This round dance spins and spins and, finally, can suddenly turn to the place where the fires of truth are. What if he does not find guardians in their places and if they see that the holy fires burn with incomplete light? Not the refutation of the momentary, but the affirmation of the eternal, should be done by the few to whom God has not given gifts common to all. A person born with great powers should, before fighting the world, deeply educate himself. If he eagerly accepts everything that is modern, he will come out of a state of peace of mind, without which our upbringing is impossible." - "So, it seems to me that modern magazine literature should produce in intelligent people indifference to it rather than any heartbreak. It’s just a bowl that not only sometimes doesn’t burn well, but even stinks.” Gogol obviously considered himself one of the guardians of the sacred fire of truth. He went into solitude to continue there in silence the work that he considered his calling. Having barely reached Gastein, where he spent the end of the summer with the sick Yazykov, he already wrote to Aksakov, asking him to send him some statistical works about Russia and a register of all Senate affairs for the past year. He obviously needed them to truthfully depict various details in the lives of his characters. Over the subsequent time, Gogol more than once turned to many people with requests of the same kind: he wanted to know what income different estates brought in, how landowners could be useful to others, how much a district judge in his position could bring benefit or harm, etc. Although he says: “In my very nature I have noticed the ability to imagine the world vividly only when I move away from it. That is why I can write about Russia only in Rome. Only there does it appear to me in its entirety, in all its enormity,” but Obviously, the inability to observe the phenomena that formed the basis of his work made itself felt. The ending of “Dead Souls” was associated in his soul with the proposed journey to Jerusalem. He found that he could take this path only after the complete completion of his work, that this completion was as necessary for him before the journey, “like spiritual confession before holy communion.” He dreamed of significantly expanding the scope of his work, writing a third in addition to the second volume, creating something important and great, which the first volume did not even give an idea of. “This is nothing more than a porch to my palace, which is being built within me,” he wrote to Pletnev. “Dead Souls” was supposed to present not only negative, but also positive types; the vivid depiction of human vulgarity and baseness seemed insufficiently instructive to the author; He also wanted to provide examples that would show people how they could and should achieve moral perfection. Having set himself such didactic goals, Gogol could no longer write under the influence of a direct creative impulse. First of all, he needed to resolve the question of what constitutes the moral perfection to which he intends to lead his readers, and he, as a religious man, sought the answer to this question in the Gospel and in the writings of St. church fathers. Then he naturally had doubts about whether a vicious, sinful person could lead others along the path of virtue, and a strong desire to cleanse himself from sin, to raise himself morally. Gogol wrote to Shchepkin about staging his plays at the theater, reworked some scenes from The Inspector General, put the final finishing touches on Marriage and Players, joked in letters to friends, and conducted business correspondence with Pletnev and Prokopovich regarding the publication of Dead Souls and the complete collection their writings; none of the correspondents suspected the process that was taking place in his soul; He hinted about him only to a few close ones: his mother, sisters, S. T. Aksakov, poet Yazykov and some others; he spoke quite frankly almost exclusively in letters and conversations with A.O. Smirnova. There were various rumors in Moscow about Gogol’s love for Alexandra Osipovna, and Moscow acquaintances were afraid that this love would destroy the poet. Perhaps love really existed, but Gogol tried to give it a purely spiritual character, to turn it into “the love of souls.” It was at this time that Smirnova was experiencing a painful mental crisis. From an early age she shone in social drawing rooms, saw crowds of admirers at her feet, captivated and was carried away herself. But little by little, like an intelligent woman, she realized the emptiness of the life around her; salon conversations and easy victories over men ceased to occupy her. She had no serious interest in anything, family life did not satisfy her; her husband, N.M. Smirnov, was a kind, honest man, but did not have a brilliant mind or outstanding talents; he did not understand his wife’s restless impulses; she could not share his too “material” tastes and suffered, not finding support for herself in life. In this spiritual mood, she tried to turn to religion and seek consolation in it. She spent the winter of 1843 in Rome, where Gogol also lived. He revealed to her all the wonders of art eternal city, he forced her to admire the ancient ruins and new works of painting and sculpture, with her he again visited all his favorite churches and every walk around Rome certainly ended with St. Peter's Cathedral, which, in his opinion, could not be enough to look at. Given the emotional mood in which Alexandra Osipovna was, she could not always share his passion for the world of art; her thoughts were occupied with something else. In Rome, she joined the circle of Z. Volkonskaya, Prince Gagarin and other Russian aristocrats, zealous Catholics. The external side of Catholicism had much that was attractive to Alexandra Osipovna’s artistic nature; but Gogol, who had a deeper understanding of religion, kept her from this hobby and tried to direct her attention mainly to the general foundations of Christian teaching. These conversations, Smirnova’s complaints about dissatisfaction with life, the religious consolations that Gogol offered her, on the one hand, strengthened their friendship more and more, on the other, they forced Gogol to more and more often withdraw his thoughts from everything earthly into the area of spiritual and moral issues. He did not stop working on Dead Souls, but now personal improvement was in the foreground for him, and he became stricter and stricter about both himself and his work. “The more we rush ourselves, the less progress we make,” he wrote. “And it’s difficult to do this when your tireless judge is inside you, strictly demanding an account of everything and turning back every time while rashly striving forward.” I know that later I will create more fully and even faster: but I will not soon achieve this. My works, so to speak, are closely connected with the spiritual education of myself, and until that time I need such an internal strong spiritual education, deep education, that it is impossible to hope for the speedy appearance of my works." The religious mood of both Gogol and Smirnova especially developed after the winter of 1843-44, which they spent in Nice. There was a whole colony of Russian aristocrats there at that time. Alexandra Osipovna did not neglect her social duties, attended society, and was one of the decorations of the living room Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna; Gogol wrote while walking on the seashore, read Taras Bulba to a small circle of acquaintances, and often enlivened the company with cheerful, witty conversations; but all this was only the external side of their life, the main essence of it was something else. Left alone, they read the works of St. church fathers, had endless conversations about various spiritual and moral issues, mutually supported each other's religious mood. Smirnova often experienced moments of unaccountable melancholy and painful dissatisfaction with life. To calm her down, Gogol advised her to memorize psalms and carefully monitored the implementation of this advice. Every day after lunch she had to answer him a passage from one of the psalms assigned by him, and if she stumbled on any word, he said: “not firmly,” and postponed the lesson until the next day. Witnesses and to some extent participants in this intimate life Gogol and Smirnova were the Vielgorskys, who also spent that winter in Nice. After the death of Joseph Vielgorsky, his entire family treated Gogol in the most friendly manner. His father, Chamberlain Count Mikhail Yuryevich, took an active part in Gogol’s fate and more than once rendered him services with his influence at court; his mother and sisters looked at him as if they were their own. The Vielgorsky family has always been distinguished by its piety and desire for mysticism. Mikhail Yuryevich was one of the famous Freemasons in the last years of the reign of Emperor Alexander Pavlovich, and his wife was a zealous Catholic. Louise Karlovna and her two daughters, the eldest of whom was married to the famous writer Gr. Sologub, surrounded Gogol with an atmosphere of sincere friendship and trust. Thanks to his ability to observe the secret movements of the soul, to “guess” people, he soon became the confidant of both mother and daughters. They talked to him about all the troubles, consulted about all household matters. One of the daughters confided to him the hardships of her married life, the other he guided in the choice of books to read and in the distribution of activities. Among all these women, Gogol played the role of friend, adviser, preacher. “God bless you,” Smirnova wrote to him a little later, “you, dear friend, sought out my soul, you showed it the way, you decorated this path so much that others don’t want to go. Beautiful fragrant roses grow on it, sweetly soothing the soul. If we all fully understood that the soul is a treasure, we would take care of it more eyes , more than life, but not everyone is given the opportunity to feel this for themselves and not everyone attacks a friend as happily as I do.” The desire to be useful, which had lived in Gogol since childhood, thus found, obviously, tactile satisfaction: he saw that his advice, his teachings and instructions encourage, strengthen, force people to take their responsibilities more seriously, to organize their lives more wisely. He began to extend his teaching activities to a wider circle of people: his mother, sisters, and after that many acquaintances (Aksakov, Yazykov, Annenkov, Perovsky, Danilevsky, Pogodin, even Zhukovsky) received letters from him that surprised them with their preaching tone, with their claim to look into the soul, to guide other people's thoughts and feelings. In the mental mood in which Gogol was at that time, all sorts of purely material his worries were especially difficult for him. He led the most moderate, simple lifestyle, rented inexpensive apartments, did not allow himself any excesses either in food or clothing; There was only one thing he had to spend a lot on - travel. After 1842, he constantly changed his place of residence: he lived for several months in Rome, Nice, Frankfurt, Paris, Dusseldorf, was treated with waters in various German resorts, and took advantage of sea bathing in Ostend. These moves from place to place were caused mainly by the weakness of his health. The painful attacks of which he had complained so bitterly in Moscow were repeated several times; he had to either seek calm for his nerves in the silence of the Roman Via Felice, or run away from the suffocating Italian heat, or, on the advice of doctors, strengthen himself with bathing. Travel, in his own conviction, had the most beneficial effect on his body, and he resorted to it whenever he felt very ill. Meanwhile, at a time when railways did not exist in Europe, these trips were very expensive. Gogol's financial affairs were in the most deplorable state. Part of the proceeds for the first volume of Dead Souls went to pay off previously incurred debts; the publication of the complete collection of his works encountered various delays. Prokopovich, partly due to inexperience, partly confused by the contradictory instructions that Gogol gave him on this matter in his letters, handled the matter impractically. Various delays, obstacles, and unpleasant explanations appeared. Printing was terribly expensive, and besides, the printing house printed more than the specified number of copies and sold counterfeits [Counterfeiting (French. Contrefaction) - a violation of copyright, consisting of the reproduction and distribution of someone else's work by a person who is not authorized to do so, for his own benefit with a significant concession]. All this greatly worried Gogol: he would like to renounce all worldly worries, not to break away from the thought of saving his soul and of accomplishing the feat assigned to him by God himself, of creating a great literary work, and meanwhile, monetary calculations and related squabbles are constantly turned him aside. Not knowing how to help himself, he turned to his Moscow friends - Shevyrev, Pogodin and Aksakov - with a rather strange request: to take control of all his publishing affairs, receive all the money due to him for him, and in return, within three years to send 6 thousand rubles in banknotes per year. This amount was, according to his calculations, completely enough to ensure him a calm, comfortable existence, which would give him the opportunity to both improve his health and finish “Dead Souls.” None of his correspondents agreed to take on this kind of obligation, and Gogol had to again resort to loans in order to somehow make ends meet. Despite all his financial difficulties, or, perhaps, precisely because they tormented him too much, too often prevented him from pursuing his “soul and spiritual affairs,” he decided to share part of the money received from the sale of his works - these “suffering” as he called them, money - to use to help others. At the end of 1844, he wrote to Pletnev in St. Petersburg and Aksakov in Moscow, asking them to no longer send him the money they received from booksellers for the complete collection of his works, but to keep them and from them issue benefits to the most talented students of the university, carefully concealing their this is who exactly the benefit comes from. This request greatly surprised Gogol’s acquaintances. They found such a philanthropic undertaking ridiculous on the part of a man who himself was constantly in need. Smirnova, who was in St. Petersburg at that time, wrote him a sharp letter about this, reminding him that he had a low-income mother and sisters on his hands, that he himself had no right to starve himself or live in debt, giving his money to strangers. Gogol was offended by the lack of sympathy that his desire met with among his acquaintances, but soon the facts clearly convinced him of the impracticality and even unfeasibility of this desire. The publication of his works sold out very slowly, printing was expensive, the money he received was barely enough for him to live on, and meanwhile the affairs of his mother’s estate often became confused, despite all her troublesome activities, and in order to save Vasilyevka from being sold for failure to pay interest to the board of guardians , it was necessary to send her small amounts from time to time. “You should take care of him from the Tsar and Queen,” Zhukovsky wrote to Smirnova, “he needs to have something true per year. They don’t give him enough essays, and he is incessantly dependent on tomorrow. Think about it: you, better than others, can characterize Gogol from the real, best side." Smirnova willingly took up intercession for her friend, and indeed, Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich assigned Gogol a thousand silver rubles a year for three years. The period after which Gogol promised return to Moscow with the finished second volume of “Dead Souls”, passed, and no one knew what situation his work was in. To the curious questions of his friends, he either remained silent or answered with displeasure that “Dead Souls” is not a pancake that can be bake whenever you want." Obviously, work was moving forward slowly, and this irritated him. Perhaps as a result of a painful condition, perhaps as a result of the nervous tension with which he maintained and developed a religious mood in himself, but his direct creativity, which in previous years created vivid images on the outline of some incident heard by chance, now rarely visited him. Meanwhile, he could not leave work, which he considered his sacred duty, his feat for the good of humanity, and he wrote, dissatisfied with himself, constantly destroying and redoing what he had written. To understand with what difficulty and in what way it was now given to him what had previously come quite easily by itself, it is worth reading the letter in which he advises Yazykov to ask God for inspiration through prayer: “It is necessary that this prayer be from all the strength of our souls.” ". If you maintain such constant tension, even for two minutes a day, for one or two weeks, then you will certainly see its effect. By the end of this time, there will be additions in prayer. These are the miracles that will happen. On the first day, there is not yet a nucleus of thought in your head ; you simply ask for inspiration. On the next or third day you will say simply: “Let me produce in such and such a spirit.” Then on the fourth or fifth: with such and such force. Then questions will appear in your soul: “What impression can produce the intended creations and what can they serve for?" And the questions will be immediately followed by answers that will be directly from God. The beauty of these answers will be such that the whole composition will automatically turn into delight, and by the end of some week you will see , that everything has already worked out, what is needed: the object, and its meaning, and the power, and the deep inner meaning, in a word - everything; you just have to pick up a pen and write."

5. Unexpected crash

Gogol writes “Reflections on the Divine Liturgy.” He burns the manuscript of the 2nd volume of “Dead Souls.” "Selected passages from correspondence with friends." - The storm caused by this book. - Belinsky's letter to Gogol regarding his correspondence with friends. - The effect produced on Gogol by this whole pogrom. - Journey to holy places

1845 was a very difficult year for Gogol. At the end of 1844, while living in Frankfurt, he felt attacks of illness and, as was his custom, he went to Paris for treatment by traveling. At first he seemed to feel better there. He lived in a close circle of his friends Vielgorsky and Count A.P. Tolstoy, every day he went to mass in the Russian church, studied the rite of the liturgy with the help of one expert in the Greek language, a retired teacher Belyaev, and wrote: “Reflections on the Divine Liturgy.” But from February his painful attacks intensified, and he again left for Frankfurt. Physical suffering was accompanied by melancholy and hypochondria. “My soul is languishing all over from the terrible melancholy that illness brings,” he complains in a letter to Smirnova, “and not a soul was near me during the most difficult moments, while every human soul would be a gift.” - “Painful states to such the degrees were unbearable,” he says in another letter, “that hanging or drowning seemed like some kind of medicine and relief.” The fear of death took possession of him again. He felt, painfully felt, that life was leaving him, that he was dying, dying without having done anything great or useful! In recent years, as his religious feelings developed, he became increasingly negative about his literary works. In letters to Smirnova, he expressed a desire for all copies of his works to be burned; he said that he had done a lot of stupid things in them, that he did not love them, especially the first volume of Dead Souls. All of them were written under the inspiration of direct creativity, without a seriously conceived goal of teaching. In front of him lay the almost finished, although still in manuscript, second volume of “Dead Souls”, every line, every character of which had been strictly thought out, begged from God, but it did not satisfy the author, who was preparing to appear before the judgment of God and give an account of the use of his talent received from God. With melancholy, with pain in his heart, he burned the manuscript, sacrificed it to God, and suddenly, as soon as the manuscript burned, its new content appeared to his mind “in a purified, bright form, like a phoenix from a fire.” It seemed to him that now, finally, he knew how to write in order to “direct the whole society towards the beautiful.” Meanwhile, the painful attacks continued, weakness, chilliness in all limbs, painful melancholy did not allow him to get to work... During one of these painful attacks it occurred to him that, in addition to printed works, the benefits of which seemed more than doubtful to him , he also wrote letters, and some of them undoubtedly had a beneficial effect on those to whom they were addressed. What if we collected them and published them for everyone’s edification? Their beneficial influence will spread to hundreds, to thousands, to the entire mass of reading people... Given the mystical mood in which Gogol was at that time, he took this thought as an inspiration from above. As soon as his strength allowed him, he immediately set about carrying it out: he demanded from his acquaintances those letters that he considered most suitable to his goal; He reworked some of them, processed some previously written articles. The importance he attached to his work can be seen from his correspondence with Pletnev regarding its publication. “Finally, my request!” he writes, sending him the first notebook. “You must fulfill it, as best friend fulfills his friend's request. Put all your business aside and get busy printing this book entitled: “Selected passages from correspondence with friends.” Everyone needs it, too much; That's what I can say for now, everything else will be explained to you by the book itself." In another letter he says: "For God's sake, use all your strength and measures to print the book as soon as possible, this is necessary, necessary both for me and for others - in a word, it is necessary for the common good." Setting the price of the book, he finds that it can be made more expensive, "considering that rich and wealthy people will buy it more, and the poor will receive it for free from their generous distributions." Gogol gives detailed instructions: on what paper the book should be printed, in what font, in what format, so that its appearance is simple and as convenient as possible for reading; he lists in detail to whom gift copies of it should be sent, starting with all the persons of the reigning house; he is very afraid that the censorship will spoil his works; wants Smirnova, if necessary, to submit the book to the discretion of the sovereign, who will undoubtedly find that this is a completely useful matter, requiring support and encouragement. He was convinced that his book would meet with general sympathy, that it would dispel bewilderment and various unflattering rumors , which circulated about him in literary circles due to the strange mystical-teacher tone of some of his letters, that it would create real, lasting fame for him, that it would be that universally beneficial thing that he constantly dreamed of. While Gogol, far from Russia, put his own moral improvement in the foreground and, intending to act as a moralist-preacher, had a negative attitude towards all his previous works, these works acquired more and more supporters, creating for the author their primacy position in literature. He became the founder of the so-called natural school: all of Russia, which read and thought, eagerly awaited the continuation of his “Dead Souls,” the first volume of which won an ever-increasing circle of readers and admirers. Some hints in Gogol's letters were understood by his acquaintances in the sense that the second volume of Dead Souls was already ready for publication. Imagine Pletnev’s surprise when instead they brought him a thin notebook of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” and a letter from Gogol, in which he asks to print this work in secret, in a little-known printing house, and not to tell anyone he knows about it. Despite Pletnev’s efforts to fulfill his friend’s strange request, the secret was revealed, and before the book was published, it was already being talked about in literary circles, causing bewilderment, amazement, and indignation. The three small works Gogol, on which he worked at the same time and which he sent to Russia a few days after “Selected Places”, namely: “Preface to the 2nd edition of “Dead Souls”, where he admits that much is written in his book is incorrect, and asks readers to send him their critical comments and, at the same time, stories about various incidents and personalities known to them; “The Inspector's Denouement,” which gives the whole play the character of some strange allegory, and “Pre-Notice,” in which it is announced that 4 and The 5th editions of "The Inspector General" are sold for the benefit of the poor and persons are appointed who will manage the distribution of benefits to the poor in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The indignation was, one might say, general; all the main literary parties again converged on it. Both Slavophiles and Westerners found in the “Correspondence” thoughts and expressions that offended their most sacred beliefs; people who were indignant at many ugly phenomena of modern life were indignant at the calm, conciliatory, even sympathetic attitude of the author towards them; the humility with which he spoke about his own insignificance and the weakness of all his previous works seemed to be a mask covering the highest conceit; The preaching, sharply accusatory tone of some pages was striking in its arrogance, the very religious mood of the author aroused doubt, an accusation of insincerity, of some kind of practical calculations. From St. Petersburg and Moscow a whole hail of letters rained down on Gogol with questions, with expressions of surprise, with reproaches, with cries of indignation. Even people who agreed with most of the main provisions of his book (Zhukovsky, Pletnev, Prince Vyazemsky, Vigel, etc.) rebelled against its harshness, angularity, against its arrogant tone. S. T. Aksakov convinced Pletnev and Shevyrev not to publish Gogol’s last works, since “all this is a lie, game and absurdity, and if it is made public, it will make Gogol the laughing stock of all of Russia.” He wrote to Gogol himself: “If you wanted to make a noise, you wanted both your praisers and your detractors, who have now partly changed places, to speak out, then you have completely achieved your goal. If this was a joke on your part, then success has exceeded your wildest expectations : everything is fooled! Opponents and defenders present an infinitely varied range of comic phenomena... But, alas! I cannot deceive myself: you sincerely thought that your calling was to proclaim to people high moral truths in the form of reasoning and teachings, of which an example is contained in your book. .. You were deeply and pathetically mistaken. You are completely confused, confused, constantly contradicting yourself and, thinking of serving heaven and humanity, you insult both God and man. If this book had been written by an ordinary writer, God would be with him! But the book was written by you; your former, mighty talent shines in places in it, and therefore your book is harmful: it spreads the lies of your speculations and delusions. Oh, it was a bad day and hour when you decided to go to foreign lands, to this Rome, the destroyer of Russian minds and talents! These friends of yours, the blind fanatics and the famous Manilovs, who not only allowed, but themselves helped you to become entangled in the network of your own mind, of devilish pride, which you mistake for Christian humility, will give God an answer. I am bitterly convinced that no one escapes from the fatherland with impunity: for a prolonged absence is already flight - a betrayal of it." Articles appeared in the press strictly condemning "Selected Places." In Sovremennik, Belinsky vigorously protested against the ideas expressed by the author, against his renunciation of his previous works, against the dogmatic tone with which his book is permeated. Gogol was not closely acquainted with Belinsky, but knew and appreciated his opinions about his first works, and could not be indifferent to his attacks. “I read your article with regret about me in No. 2 of “Contemporary,” he wrote to him, “not because I was saddened by the humiliation in which you wanted to put me in front of everyone, but because in it you can hear the voice of a man angry with me. But I would not want to anger a person who did not even love me, much less you, whom I think of as a person who loves me. I did not mean to upset you at any point in my book; how did it happen that every single one of them in Russia was angry with me, I still can’t understand this; Eastern, Western and neutral - all were upset. It's true: I meant a little push to each of them, considering it necessary, having experienced the need for it on our own skin (we all need more humility). But I didn’t think that my click would come out so rude, awkward and so offensive. I thought that I would be generously forgiven, and that in my book there was the germ of universal reconciliation, and not discord." Belinsky was lying sick in Salzbrunn when he received this letter from Gogol. It further strengthened his indignation against the author of "Correspondence." Humble and arrogant tone letters, reducing the whole matter as if to a personal basis, ignoring those important social issues, the misunderstanding of which he hinted at in his article - all this outraged him to the depths of his soul. Weak, half-dying, he took up his pen with feverish excitement and wrote a long reply letter, in which, with captivating eloquence, he pointed out to Gogol the harmful significance of the ideas he promoted in his “Correspondence.” “You are only partly right,” he wrote casually, “in seeing an angry person in my article; this epithet is too weak and gentle to express the state into which reading your book led me. But you are completely wrong, attributing this to your really not very flattering comments about the admirers of your talent. There was a more important reason here. An insulted sense of pride can still be endured, and I would have the sense to remain silent about this subject if that was the whole point, but an insulted sense of truth, human dignity cannot be endured. You cannot remain silent when lies and immorality are preached as truth and virtue. Yes, I loved you with all the passion, as a person connected by blood with his country can love its hope, honor and glory, one of its great leaders on the path of consciousness and development ", progress. And you had a good reason, even for a minute, to leave the calm state of your spirit, having lost the right to such love." “I think that you deeply know Russia only as an artist, and not as a thinking person, whose role you so unsuccessfully assumed in your fantasy book; but it's not because you weren't thinking person , but because you have been looking at Russia for so many years from your beautiful distance." - "That’s why you didn’t notice that Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in pietism, [Pietism (pietism) - lat. (- piety) false feigned piety] but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, humanity, in the awakening in the people of a sense of human dignity, lost for so many centuries in dirt and dung. She needs rights and laws consistent with common sense and justice, and their strictest possible implementation." "The most pressing modern national issues in Russia now are: the abolition of serfdom and the abolition of corporal punishment, the introduction of the strictest possible implementation of those laws that already exist. These are the questions with which Russia is anxiously occupied in its apathetic half-sleep. And at this time, the great writer, who long ago, with his artistic and thoughtful creations, so powerfully contributed to the self-awareness of Russia, giving her the opportunity to look at herself, as if in a mirror, appeared with a book with which he teaches the barbarian landowner to make more money from the peasants, scolding them " with unwashed snouts." - Yes, if you had discovered the attempt on my life, then I would have hated you no more than for these shameful lines. No, if you had really been imbued with the spirit of Christ’s teaching, you would have written differently to your adept from the landowners; you would write to him that “since the peasants are his brothers in Christ, and since his brother cannot be the slave of his brother, he must give them freedom or, at least, use their labors as preferentially as possible for them, recognizing himself in the depths of his conscience in a false position towards them":-- "And such and such a book can be the result of a difficult internal process, high spiritual enlightenment? It cannot be!.. Preacher of the whip, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and obscurantism, panegyrist of Tatar rights "What are you doing? Look at your feet, because you are standing over an abyss!" - “Here is my last final word: if you had the misfortune with proud humility to renounce your truly great works, then now you must with sincere humility renounce your last book and atone for the grave sin of its publication with new creations that would resemble your previous ones.” The unexpected impression made by “Selected Places” amazed and stunned Gogol. To be so suddenly overthrown from the pedestal on which he placed himself and his work - it was terrible! He tried to console himself with the thought that censorship was mainly to blame for this, that by not passing through some of his articles and cutting others, she deprived the book of its integrity and made its purpose and intentions not quite clear. He worked hard to restore the missing places, hoping for the intervention of the supreme power and that the book in its entirety would dispel all misunderstandings. At the first attacks, he stood strong and responded quite complacently, assuring that he was glad for them, that he loved to hear judgment, even the harshest, that it showed him on the one hand himself, and on the other - the readers. But time passed: many read passages in the manuscript that were not passed by the censor, and this did not in the least force them to soften their sentences, and these sentences were cruel. “Every word was examined with suspicion and distrust, and everyone vied with each other in a hurry to declare the source from which it came. Over the living body of a still living person, that terrible anatomy was carried out, from which even one who is gifted with a strong build is thrown into a cold sweat,” he complains he is in his "Author's Confession". Belinsky's letter made a strong impression on Gogol. He wrote two answers to it, of which only one reached its intended destination, and this one indicates a strong decline in spirit: “I could not answer your letter,” he says. “My soul is exhausted, everything in me is shocked, I can say, that there were no sensitive strings left that had not been defeated even before I received your letter. I read your letter almost insensitively, but nevertheless I was unable to answer it. And what should I answer? God knows, maybe There may be some truth in your words." He is perplexed why smart and noble people express conflicting opinions about his book, and is convinced of only one thing: that he does not know Russia, that much has changed in it, and that he cannot write anything more “until he arrives in Russia.” , I won’t see much with my own eyes and won’t touch it with my own hands.” Another answer of Gogol to Belinsky was written by him only in draft and was found torn in his papers. It is much longer and has a completely different character: “Where should I begin my response to your letter,” Gogol begins, “if not with your own words: come to your senses, you are standing on the edge of an abyss! How far have you strayed from the straight path! things appeared inverted before you! in what a rude, ignorant sense you took my book! " He further accuses Belinsky of deviating from his direct purpose - “to show readers the beauty in the works of our writers, to elevate their souls and strengths to the understanding of everything beautiful, to enjoy the thrill of the sympathy awakened in them and thus act on their souls”; regrets that he plunged “into the whirlpool of political life, into these murky events of our time, among which the firm prudence of a multilateral mind is lost”; finds that, reproaching him for ignorance of Russia and Russian society, Belinsky himself did not prove this knowledge in any way, and could not acquire it, “living almost without touching people and the world, leading peaceful life magazine employee." Gogol was especially outraged by the hint expressed in Belinsky's letter about the practical benefits that confession of the ideas expressed in the "Correspondence" could bring. "I fell into excess," he admits, "but I didn't even notice it. I didn’t have selfish goals before, when I was still somewhat occupied by the temptations of the world, especially now when it’s time for me to think about death. It's not in my nature. You should at least remember that I don’t even have a corner, and that I’m trying to figure out how to make my small traveling suitcase even lighter, so that it’s easier to part with the world. Therefore, you should have refrained from branding me with those offensive suspicions with which, I admit, I would not have the courage to sully the last scoundrel." Gogol asked and demanded frankness, strict comments, and condemnations from all his acquaintances after the publication of the first volume of Dead Souls. But now, when these remarks turned into caustic attacks, into harsh reproaches, he was suppressed by them: “For the sake of Christ himself,” he wrote to Aksakov in July 1847, “I ask you now not out of friendship, but out of mercy, which should be characteristic of every kind and compassionate soul, out of mercy I ask you to rise to my position, because my soul is languishing, no matter how hard I try and try to be calm. My relationship became too difficult with all those friends who rushed to make friends with me without recognizing me. How am I not yet completely dizzy, how am I not yet going crazy from all this stupidity! I myself cannot understand this. I only know that my heart is broken, and my activity has been taken away. You can still fight with the most fierce enemies, but God forbid everyone from this terrible battle with friends. Here everything is exhausted, no matter what is in you." It was difficult for Gogol to endure the storm caused by his book, but it served him well. It forced him to look more strictly at himself, to leave the preaching pulpit to which he had elevated himself with the help of his enthusiastic admirers and admirers, forced him not with feigned, but with real humility to admit that he was too arrogant in trying to teach others when, by his own admission, he himself had not yet had time to “build up.” In the letters he wrote after 1847, it is noticeably much more less didactic-mentoring tone, much more cordiality and sincerity than in the previous three or four years. “I have swung such Khlestakov in my book that I don’t have the courage to look into it,” he confessed to Zhukovsky. In addition, from the comments and objections he received, he saw that he was wrong in insisting exclusively on the moral improvement of individuals and completely ignoring public issues, that in society there is an interest in these, as he called, state issues and that a work of art that does not address them , cannot exercise influence. Religious feeling helped Gogol to endure the blows that unexpectedly fell upon him, but, meanwhile, his situation was terrible: in addition to condemnations directed against his personality, he heard rumors that his talent was lost, that he was giving up writing, and for minutes it seemed to him that this may be fair... The second volume of Dead Souls was burned; a general plan for its reconstruction flashed in his mind, but creativity had not visited him for a long time, and he did not have the materials for construction. Everything that his acquaintances who visited him abroad told him about Russia concerned either the literary world, or the capital’s aristocratic and government circles, and not those provincial backwaters where his heroes lived and acted. He turned many times to his friends and acquaintances in different cities, asking them to describe to him all sorts of incidents that happened there and give detailed characteristics of both the external and moral characteristics of all the persons with whom they entered into relations; but all these requests remained unfulfilled: describing unimportant incidents seemed boring and pointless to his correspondents, and composing vivid descriptions was far from an easy task. Gogol saw that first of all he needed to get to know Russia, and he could only get to know it by traveling around it himself and living in it. In order to be able to live in his homeland, he was ready to take some position in the civil service, even the most modest one, but which would give him the opportunity to observe, collect material and write slowly, when creative power will appear again. The severe crisis that he had to endure at this time forced him to return again to the long-cherished plan of traveling to Jerusalem. Previously he had thought of undertaking this journey after finishing his great work; now he felt that he could not take on any task until he had completed it. There, at the Holy Sepulcher, grace was supposed to descend on him, which would purify his soul, resolve all his doubts and hesitations, show him his path... The importance he attached to this journey can be concluded from all his letters of that time . He begged all his acquaintances, whom he knew to be pious people, to pray that God would grant him the dignity to accomplish this feat; He asked his mother not to leave Vasilyevka and to pray for him there; he even composed a special kind of prayer that those praying for him were supposed to say. He himself tried with all his might to stay at the height of his religious mood in order to worthily bow to the tomb of Christ the Savior and “from the day of this worship carry the image of Christ everywhere in his heart” in order to “rise from the holy tomb with renewed strength, with a vigorous and refreshed spirit to return to your deed and labor for the good of your land." At the end of 1847, Gogol moved to Naples, and from there in January 1848 he boarded a ship that was supposed to bring him through Malta to Jaffa. Fear and anxiety filled his heart; none of his acquaintances traveled with him, he was alone among strangers, and given his weak health and his suspiciousness, this increased his excitement. He took this excitement as proof of the weakness of his faith and suffered doubly from it. Seasickness tormented him terribly, and he landed ashore barely alive. He had to make the overland journey accompanied by his former comrade from Nezhin, who occupied the place of the Russian consul in Syria, but this did not eliminate the inconveniences of the journey: he had to endure fatigue, the heat of the desert, and thirst. The difficulties of the journey were naturally reflected in Gogol’s disposition of spirit. That poetic aura with which he overshadowed the holy places of worship faded before the prosaic situation that actually surrounded them, before the mass of small troubles and squabbles that had to be overcome before reaching them. For so long, in such vivid colors, he had imagined the moment when he would kneel at the holy tomb and the grace of God would overshadow and cleanse him, that reality could not help but turn out to be lower than his expectations. “I have never been so little pleased with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. “It was as if I was at the Holy Sepulcher so that there, on the spot, I could feel how much coldness of heart I had, how much selfishness and vanity.” In response to Zhukovsky’s request to tell him all the details of the trip to Palestine, he wrote to him: “ Every simple Russian person, even a Russian peasant, if only he with the trembling of a believing heart bowed, shedding tears, to every corner of St. earth, can tell you more than everything you need. My journey to Palestine was definitely made by me in order to find out personally and, as it were, to see with my own eyes, how great the callousness of my heart is... I was honored to spend the night at the tomb of the Savior, I was honored to receive communion from St. secrets that stood on the coffin itself instead of the altar, and for all that I did not become the best. What can my sleepy impressions bring you? Somewhere in Samaria I picked a wildflower, somewhere in Galilee I picked another, in Nazareth, caught in the rain, I sat for two days, forgetting that I was sitting in Nazareth, just as it would have happened in Russia at the station." The reality did not correspond to the dream poet. The miracle that he so passionately begged from God did not happen, but in vain he accused himself of callousness. “Some ray of salvation shines in the distance,” he says in another letter, “the holy word is love. It seems to me like as if the images of people are now becoming dearer to me than ever before, as if I am much more capable of loving now than ever before.”

6. Sad ending

Summer in the village.- Gogol starts over again on the 2nd volume of “Dead Souls” and finishes it in rough form.- Moving to Moscow.- Reading the first chapters in the Aksakov family and general delight.- Constant revisions of the manuscript.- Gogol is overcome by the “fear of death” .- Secondary burning of the manuscript.- Death of Gogol

From Jerusalem, Gogol traveled through Constantinople and Odessa to Little Russia and spent the end of spring and the whole summer in Vasilyevka with his mother and sisters. It was an alarming summer: revolutionary movements in different parts of Europe were reflected in Russia, on the one hand, by a vague fermentation of minds; on the other hand, strict government measures to maintain order. Added to this was cholera, which raged in the capitals and many localities of the state and brought panic to the population. Gogol learned about political events only from fragmentary news from newspapers that accidentally ended up in Vasilyevka, and from the cautious letters of his capital acquaintances; He saw cholera around him in Poltava and in the vicinity of Vasilyevka. In general, the pictures that he encountered in his homeland were of a sad nature: the house in which his mother and sisters lived was falling into ruin; farming on the estate was carried out with an inept hand, a bad harvest threatened famine, poverty and disease were everywhere. It is not surprising that his relatives often saw him sad, thoughtful, and absent-minded. He was placed in a small outbuilding overlooking the garden, and retired there for the whole morning, trying to do literary work: “To bring something into the light and save it from general destruction is already a feat of every honest person,” he says in one letter. The second volume of Dead Souls was that “civic duty”, that “service to the state”, which he took up again, having refreshed his strength with travel. His work moved slowly forward, the intense heat exhausted him, everything he had to see and hear had a painful effect on his nerves. He spent most of the day not at his desk, but in the field, in the garden, delving into all the details of the farm, asking everyone, being interested in everything. “He’s going to give in to everything,” one old shepherd later told about him. He drew a plan for the new manor house in Vasilyevka, planted trees in the garden, made patterns for his mother for carpets that were woven by her serf craftswomen, and listened with pleasure to his sisters singing Little Russian songs. In September, Gogol left Vasilyevka and moved to Moscow. The Aksakov family and their entire circle received him with the same friendliness. The misunderstandings caused by “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” were forgotten, and Gogol again became his own man with the Aksakovs. He spent almost all his evenings with them and very often read something aloud to them: either Russian songs, or “The Odyssey” in Zhukovsky’s translation. “Before I get down to writing seriously, I want to become familiar with Russian sounds and speech,” he said. At the same time, he did not abandon Dead Souls. Judging by some hints in his letters, his work was progressing well; Probably, by the end of winter the entire second volume was ready in rough form, and after that he began to work on finishing and reworking each chapter. He visited little society. In large meetings he was silent, absent-minded, and gloomy. The philosophical and social issues that worried the minds of that time were not to his liking. He sighed for the literary circles of Pushkin's time and his youth - for those circles in which literary works were analyzed mainly from an aesthetic point of view, where general issues There was almost no talk, where instead of vague reasoning, witty anecdotes were told, where the ugly phenomena of the surrounding reality evoked a caustic epigram or harmless laughter. “It’s a crazy time,” he wrote to Zhukovsky. “The smartest people are lying and saying a lot of nonsense.” The coldness with which the public reacted to Zhukovsky’s “Odyssey” outraged him, seemed to him a sign of lack of taste, mental impotence of society, and he found that he had no reason to rush to finish “Dead Souls”, since the people of his time were not suitable readers, incapable of anything artistic or calm. “No amount of reviews can entice the current generation, fainted by political unrest, to read light and soothe the soul.” Gogol spent the summer of 1849 with Smirnova, first in the village, then in Kaluga, where N. M. Smirnov was governor. There he read for the first time several chapters from the second volume of Dead Souls. The first two chapters were completely finished and appeared completely different from the form in which we read them now. Alexandra Osipovna remembered that the first chapter began with a solemn lyrical introduction, like the page with which the first volume ends; then she was struck by the unusually vivid description of Tentetnikov’s feelings after the general’s consent to his marriage with Ulenka, and in the next seven chapters, which, according to Gogol, still required significant revision, she liked the novel of a secular beauty who spent her youth at court, is bored in the provinces and falls in love in Platonov, also bored from doing nothing. In Kaluga, Gogol did not abandon his literary work and spent the entire morning with a pen in his hand, locked in his outbuilding. Obviously, the creative ability, which had temporarily failed him, partly as a result of physical suffering, partly as a result of the painful direction that his religious feeling took, returned to him again after his trip to Jerusalem. The liveliness and spontaneity of his work at that time can be judged by the short story of Prince D. Obolensky, who traveled with him from Kaluga to Moscow. Gogol was very concerned about the briefcase, which contained the notebooks of the second volume of Dead Souls, and did not calm down until he put them in the safest place of the dormeuse [Dormez (French dormeuse) - an old road carriage adapted for sleeping]. “Towards the morning we stopped at the station to drink tea,” says Obolensky. “Coming out of the carriage, Gogol pulled out his briefcase and carried it with him; he did this every time we stopped. Gogol's cheerful mood did not leave him. At the station I found a fine book and read in it a rather funny complaint from some gentleman. After listening to her, Gogol asked me: “Who do you think this gentleman is? What properties and character is this person?... But I’ll tell you...” - and then he began to first describe to me the appearance of this man in the most funny and original way. gentleman, then told his entire career, even presenting in person some episodes of his life. I remember that I laughed like crazy, and he did it all completely seriously." In the fall of the same year, Gogol was visiting the Aksakovs in the Moscow region and there he read the first chapter of the second volume of Dead Souls. Here is how Sergei Timofeevich tells about this reading: " On the evening of the 18th, Gogol, sitting in his usual place, suddenly said: “Shouldn’t we read the chapter of “Dead Souls”?” My son, Konstantin, even got up to bring them from above, from his library, but Gogol held him by the sleeve and said: “No, I’ll read you from the second one." And with these words he pulled out a large notebook from his huge pocket. I can’t express what happened to all of us. I was completely destroyed. Not joy, but fear that I would hear something unworthy of the former Gogol, confused me so much that I was completely at a loss. Gogol himself was confused. At that very moment we all moved closer to the table, and Gogol read the 1st chapter of the second volume of Dead Souls. From the first pages I saw, that Gogol's talent was not lost, and he was completely delighted. The reading lasted an hour and a quarter. Gogol was somewhat tired and, showered with our sincere and joyful greetings, soon went upstairs to his room, because the hour at which he usually went to bed had passed, i.e. 11 o'clock." In response to the Aksakovs' requests to read the next chapters, Gogol responded that they were not yet ready, that much needed to be changed in them. He set about this change upon returning to Moscow. At the beginning of the next year, he read the first chapter to the Aksakovs again, and they were amazed: the chapter seemed even better to them and as if it had been written again. Gogol was very pleased with this impression and said: “This is what it means when a painter gives the last ink to his picture. The amendments, apparently, are the most insignificant: one word is subtracted here, added here, and rearranged here - and everything turns out different. Then we need to print it when all the chapters are finished like this." It turned out that he took advantage of all the comments that Sergei Timofeevich made to him after the first reading. The second chapter brought Aksakov into positive delight. He found that it was even higher and deeper than the first, that Gogol could fulfill his task, which he arrogantly spoke about in the first volume. During the winter, Gogol read chapters 3 and 4 also by Aksakov alone. Obviously, he had the entire volume ready in rough form, but he found it insufficiently processed and finished it carefully in chapters and parts. At the same time, he continued to read a lot, being interested mainly in those works that described Russia and some aspects of life in Russia. The winter of 1849-1850 did not go as well for the poet’s health as the previous one. He suffered greatly from the cold, again he felt a loss of strength, chilliness, nervousness, and again he was drawn to bask in the southern sun. But now he had firmly decided not to leave Russia and intended to spend the next winter in Odessa. In the spring, he went with his acquaintance, professor at Kyiv University Maksimovich, to Little Russia for a long stay. Riding by mail seemed too expensive to Gogol, and, besides, traveling long distances was for him like the beginning of the implementation of his long-standing plan: he wanted to travel all over Russia along country roads from monastery to monastery, stopping to rest with landowners. They traveled from Moscow to Glukhov for 12 days; On the way, we visited friends and monasteries, where Gogol prayed with great tenderness; in the villages they listened to village songs; in the forest they got out of the carriage and collected herbs and flowers for one of Gogol’s sisters, who was engaged in botany. Gogol spent the summer in Vasilievka, again with his family, caring for the garden and the new house; in the fall he lived in Moscow, and in the winter he moved to Odessa. His health was quite bad all the time: the summer heat weakened him, winter, even in Odessa, seemed to him not warm enough, he complained about the sea wind, about the inability to warm up. However, his work was progressing, and he had already begun to hint in letters about its imminent completion. From Odessa, he wrote to Shevyrev that a 2nd edition of his works should be undertaken, since after the release of the 2nd volume of “Dead Souls” there would be a demand for them, and congratulating Zhukovsky on the New Year of 1851, he told him: “ Work in progress with the same constancy and although it is not yet finished, it is already close to completion." - "While a writer is young, he writes a lot and quickly. His imagination pushes him constantly; he creates, builds charming castles in the air, and it’s no wonder that writing, like castles, has no end. But when you're already alone pure truth has become his subject, and the point is to transparently reflect life in its highest dignity, in what it should and can be on earth and in what it is so far in the chosen and best few, here the imagination will move the writer a little, you need to get it from battle every feature." After spending the spring in Vasilievka, Gogol, despite the intense heat, returned to Moscow in the middle of the summer in order to quickly begin printing his work. But the more he re-read and corrected it, the more dissatisfied he remained with various details, the more considered the alterations necessary. In October 1851, he even told the wife of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov that there was no point in printing the second volume, that everything in it was still unsuitable and that everything needed to be redone. However, such thoughts apparently appeared to him rarely, in moments despair and special dissatisfaction with himself.In general, he carefully spent several hours every day at his desk, preparing for publication both the complete collection of his works and the second volume of Dead Souls. It still remains unclear what the endless amendments to which he subjected his “Dead Souls” were leading to. Did his more mature artistic instinct tell him that his virtuous heroes, his Kostanzhoglo, Murazov, the Governor-General are not “constructed from the same body as we are,” that these are fictitious persons, that “all that should be is dead and cold alive, like life itself, beautiful and true, like truth"; or, perhaps, in fits of religious self-flagellation, he rejected the great significance of his artistic talent and tried to compose examples of virtue that were supposed to serve as an edifying example for his contemporaries and for posterity. In any case, he worked hard and seriously: a difficult struggle often took place in his soul between the artist and the pietist, and this struggle in the end broke his naturally weak organism. The religious mood, under the influence of which he undertook the journey to Jerusalem, did not leave him. He did not talk about it with people indifferent to religious issues, but it was clearly reflected in all his letters to his mother, to his sisters and to those persons whom he considered to be of the same convictions as himself. He diligently read the Chetiy-Minea and various books of spiritual content, loved to visit monasteries, prayed with tears in churches... In the winter of 1851-52, he did not feel entirely healthy, often complained of weakness, nerve disorders, and attacks of melancholy, but None of his acquaintances attached any importance to this, everyone knew that he was suspicious, and had long been accustomed to his complaints about various illnesses. In the circle of close friends, in those houses where he could come “without a tailcoat,” he was sometimes still cheerful and playful, willingly read his own and other people’s works, sang Little Russian songs in his “goat” - as he himself called it - voice and I listened with pleasure when they sang well. By spring, he planned to go to his native Vasilyevka for several months in order to strengthen his strength there, and promised his friend Danilevsky to bring him the completely finished second volume of Dead Souls. At the end of January 1852, Khomyakov’s wife, nee Yazykova, the sister of the poet, with whom Gogol was very friendly, died. Gogol always loved and highly valued her, calling her one of the most worthy women. Her almost sudden death (she had been ill for a very short time) greatly shocked him. Mixed with his natural grief over the loss of a loved one was the horror of an open grave. He was gripped by that painful “fear of death” that he had experienced more than once before. He confessed it to his confessor, and he tried to calm him down, but in vain. On Shrovetide Gogol began to fast and stopped all his literary pursuits; He visited his friends and seemed calm, only everyone noticed that he had become very thin and pale. All these days he ate nothing but prosphora, and on Thursday he confessed to his confessor in a remote part of the city and took communion. Before receiving the holy gifts, Gogol prayed, shedding tears. The priest noticed that he was very weak and could barely stand on his feet. Despite this, he came to him again in the evening and asked him to serve a thanksgiving prayer service. During the entire fast he spent his nights awake in prayer, and on the night from Friday to Saturday he suddenly heard voices saying that he would soon die. He immediately woke up the servant and sent him for the priest to receive unction, but when the priest arrived, he calmed down somewhat and postponed the sacrament until another day. The thought of imminent death did not leave him. The second volume of Dead Souls, his cherished work, was already ready for printing, and he wanted to leave it as a souvenir for his friends. He called Count A.P. Tolstoy, in whose house he lived, and asked him to take the manuscript to him and, after his death, take it to a certain clergyman, who was supposed to decide what could be printed from it. Count Tolstoy did not agree to take the papers, so as not to show the patient that his friends considered his situation dangerous. At night, left alone, Gogol again experienced the sensations that he described in his “Correspondence with Friends.” His soul “froze in horror at the mere representation of the afterlife greatness and those spiritual highest creations of God, before which all the greatness of His creations, here visible to us and amazing us, is dust; the entire dying composition of it groaned, sensing the gigantic growths and fruits whose seeds we sowed in life, without seeing or hearing what horrors will arise from them.” His work seemed to him, as it had often seemed before, as the fulfillment of a duty entrusted to him by the Creator; he was gripped by fear that this duty was not fulfilled in the way the Creator, who endowed him with talent, had intended, that his writing, instead of being useful, instead of preparing people for eternal life, would have a bad, corrupting influence on them. He prayed for a long time with tears; then at three o'clock in the morning he woke up his servant, ordered him to open the chimney in the fireplace, took papers from his briefcase, tied them into a tube and put them in the fireplace. The servant threw himself on his knees in front of him and begged him not to burn the papers. The corners of the notebooks were burned, and the fire began to go out. Gogol ordered the ribbon to be untied and he himself turned over the papers, crossing himself and praying until they turned to ashes. The servant cried and said: “What have you done!” "Are you sorry for me?" - said Gogol, hugged him, kissed him and began to cry. He returned to the bedroom, lay down on the bed and continued to cry bitterly. The next morning, when the light of day had faded gloomy pictures, pictured in his imagination at night, the terrible auto-da-fé to which he subjected his best, beloved creation, presented itself to him in a different form. He repentantly told Count Tolstoy about it, believed that it was made under the influence of an evil spirit, and regretted that the count had not taken the manuscript from him earlier. From that time on, he fell into a gloomy despondency, did not allow friends to visit him, or, when they came, asked them to leave under the pretext that he wanted to sleep; he said almost nothing, but often wrote with a trembling hand texts from the Gospel and short sayings religious content. He stubbornly refused any treatment, assuring that no medicine would help him. This is how the first week of Lent passed. On Monday, the second, the confessor invited him to receive communion and receive unction. He happily agreed to this, prayed with tears during the ceremony, and held a candle with his weak hand behind the Gospel. On Tuesday he seemed to feel better, but on Wednesday he had a terrible attack of nervous fever, and on Thursday, February 21, he died. The news of Gogol's death struck all his friends, until last days who did not believe his gloomy forebodings. His body, as an honorary member of Moscow University, was transferred to the university church, where it remained until the funeral. Present at the funeral were: Moscow Governor-General Zakrevsky, trustee of the Moscow educational district Nazimov, professors, university students and the mass of the public. The professors carried the coffin out of the church, and the students carried it in their arms all the way to the Danilov Monastery, where it was lowered into the ground next to the grave of the poet Yazykov. On tombstone Gogol carved out the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “I will laugh at my bitter words.” The great writer died, and with him the work that he created for so long, with such love, died. Whether this work was the fruit of fully developed artistic creativity or only the embodiment in images of those ideas that are expressed in “Selected Passages of Correspondence with Friends” is a secret that the poet took with him to the grave. The passages found in his papers and published after his death belong to earlier editions of the poem and do not give an idea of what form it took after the author’s final processing. As a thinker, as a moralist, Gogol stood below the progressive people of his time, but from an early age he was animated by a noble desire to benefit society, living sympathy for human suffering and found poetic language, brilliant humor, and living images to express them. In those works in which he surrendered to the direct attraction of creativity, his powers of observation and his powerful talent penetrated deeply into the phenomena of life and, with their vividly truthful pictures of human vulgarity and baseness, contributed to the awakening of social self-awareness.

Born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in the village of Sorochintsy, Poltava province, in the family of a landowner. Gogol was the third child, and in total there were 12 children in the family.

Training in the biography of Gogol took place at the Poltava School. Then in 1821 he entered the class of the Nizhyn gymnasium, where he studied justice. IN school years the writer did not have any special academic abilities. He was only good at drawing lessons and studying Russian literature. He was only able to write mediocre works.

The beginning of a literary journey

In 1828, Gogol’s life took place when he moved to St. Petersburg. There he served as an official, tried to get a job as an actor in the theater and studied literature. Actor career things didn’t go well, and the service did not bring Gogol any pleasure, and at times even became a burden. And the writer decided to prove himself in the literary field.

In 1831, Gogol met representatives of the literary circles of Zhukovsky and Pushkin; undoubtedly, these acquaintances greatly influenced his future fate and literary activity.

Gogol and theater

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol showed interest in theater in his youth, after the death of his father, a wonderful playwright and storyteller.

Realizing the power of the theater, Gogol took up drama. Gogol's work "The Inspector General" was written in 1835, and first staged in 1836. Due to the negative reaction of the public to the production of “The Inspector General,” the writer leaves the country.

last years of life

In 1836, the biography of Nikolai Gogol included trips to Switzerland, Germany, Italy, as well as a short stay in Paris. Then, from March 1837, work continued on the first volume in Rome greatest work Gogol's "Dead Souls", which was conceived by the author back in St. Petersburg. After returning home from Rome, the writer publishes the first volume of the poem. While working on the second volume, Gogol experienced a spiritual crisis. Even a trip to Jerusalem did not help improve the situation.

At the beginning of 1843 it was first printed famous story Gogol's "The Overcoat".

These biographical sketches were published about a hundred years ago in the series “The Life of Remarkable People”, carried out by F.F. Pavlenkov (1839-1900). Written in the genre of poetic chronicle and historical and cultural research, new for that time, these texts retain their value to this day. Written “for ordinary people”, for Russian province, today they can be recommended not only to bibliophiles, but to the widest readership: both those who are not at all experienced in the history and psychology of great people, and those for whom these subjects are a profession.

A series: Life of wonderful people

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by liters company.

Chapter II. Gogol's arrival in St. Petersburg and the beginning of his literary fame

Disappointment and failure - Impromptu in Lubeck. – Entry into service and resignation. – First successes in the literary field. - “Evenings on the farm.” – Acquaintance with Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Karamzin. – In the circle of Nezhin comrades. - “Old World Landowners”, “Taras Bulba”, “Marriage”, “The Inspector General”. – Gogol in the role of an unsuccessful adjunct in the history department. – Attraction to literature. - Belinsky predicts a glorious future for Gogol. – “The Inspector General” is staged at the personal request of Emperor Nicholas 1

Alas! Acquaintances either said nothing at all about “Hans”, or spoke about him indifferently, and in the “Moscow Telegraph” a short but caustic note by Polevoy appeared that the idyll of Mr. Alov would be best left forever under a bushel. This first unfavorable review from critics worried Gogol to the depths of his soul.

He rushed through the bookstores, took away all the copies of his idyll from the booksellers and secretly burned them.

Singing doors, clay floors, low rooms illuminated by a cinder in an ancient candlestick, roofs covered with green mold, cloudy oaks, virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry trees, yakhont seas of plums, intoxicatingly luxurious summer days, dreamy yesterdays, clear winter nights - all these from childhood familiar native images again resurrected in Gogol’s imagination and asked to be expressed in poetic works. By May 1931, he had ready the stories that made up the first volume of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.”

At the beginning of 1931, Gogol met Zhukovsky, who treated the aspiring writer with his usual kindness and warmly recommended him to Pletnev. Pletnev looked at his literary works with great sympathy, advised him to publish the first collection of his stories under a pseudonym, and himself invented a title for it, designed to arouse interest in the public. To provide for Gogol financially, Pletnev, who was at that time an inspector of the Patriotic Institute, gave him the position of senior history teacher at this institute and provided him with lessons in several aristocratic families. For the first time, Gogol was introduced to the circle of writers in 1832 at a holiday which was given by the famous bookseller Smirdin on the occasion of moving his store to a new apartment. The guests presented the host with various articles that made up the almanac “Housewarming,” which also included Gogolev’s “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarreled.”

Gogol met Pushkin in the summer of 1831. Thanks to him and Zhukovsky, he was introduced to the Karamzins’ living room, which formed a kind of link between the literary and court-aristocratic circles, and met Prince Vyazemsky, the family of Count Vielgorsky, and the ladies-in-waiting, whose beauty was considered Alexandra Osipovna Rosseti, later Smirnova. All these acquaintances could not but have an influence on Gogol, and a very strong influence. The young man, who had meager worldly experience and even more meager theoretical knowledge, had to submit to the charm of more developed and educated people. Zhukovsky, Pushkin - these were names that he had been accustomed to pronounce with reverence since childhood; when he saw that under these names hidden not only great writers, but truly kind people who received him with the most sincere friendliness, he became attached to them with all his heart, he willingly accepted their ideas, and these ideas formed the basis of his own worldview. In relation to politics, the beliefs of the literary-aristocratic circle in which Gogol had to move can be characterized by the word: liberal-conservative. He unconditionally rejected any radical reforms of Russian life and the monarchical system of Russia, as absurd and harmful, and yet the restrictions imposed by this system on individuals outraged him; he wanted more space for the development of individual abilities and activities, more freedom for individual classes and institutions; all kinds of abuses of bureaucratic arbitrariness met with his condemnation, but he rejected both energetic protest against these abuses and any search for their root cause. However, it must be said that political and social issues never came forward in that brilliant society that gathered in the Karamzins’ living room and grouped around the two great poets. Zhukovsky, both as a poet and as a person, shunned questions that worried life and led to doubt or denial. Pushkin spoke with disdain about the “pathetic skeptical speculations of the last century” and the “harmful dreams” existing in Russian society, and he himself rarely indulged in such dreams.

End of introductory fragment.

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The given introductory fragment of the book Gogol. His life and literary activity (A. N. Annenskaya) provided by our book partner -