The main point about Gogol's advent into Russia is that Russia was, or at least appeared to be, a "monumental," "majestic," "great power," yet Gogol walked over these real or imaginary "monuments" with his thin weak feet and crushed them all, so that not a trace of them remained.100
Gogol was the first of those original Russian prose writers whose work requires analysis from a religious and psychological as well as a literary point of view. He shared the sense of loneliness and introspection that had been characteristic of many fellow Ukrainians from Skovoroda to Shev-chenko. Yet both the form and content of his work is deeply Russian. His early career is at least superficially typical of the romanticism of the twenties and thirties: beginning with weak, sentimental poetry on German pastoral themes, followed by an abortive attempt to flee to America, vivid stories about his native Ukraine (Mirgorod), Hoffmannesque sketches about St. Petersburg and the meaning of art (Arabesques), and a brief career as teacher and writer of history. His early career culminated in 1836 in the satirical play the Inspector General; and his last great work, Dea4„$puls,
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appeared six years later in the familiar romantic form of observations during a voyage through the countryside.
The triumphal appearance of the Inspector General in the same year as that of Glinka's Life for the Tsar and Briullov's "Last Days of Pompeii" marks a kind of watershed in the history of Russian art. The three works were hailed as harbingers of a new national art capable of engaging dramatically a broader audience than that of any previous Russian art. Yet Gogol's work with its "laughter through invisible tears" at the bureaucratic pretense of Nicholaevan Russia was far different in tone from the heroic theatricality of the other two. The contrast is made even more striking by the divergent pattern of Gogol's subsequent personal career. For, whereas Briullov accepted imperial patronage and Glinka became Kappelmeister to Nicholas I, Gogol left Russia altogether in the wake of his great success. He was driven by a strange inner compulsion to pronounce through art what others were expressing through philosophy and history: a new word of redemptive hope for Russia and all humanity.
After visiting Paris, which he found even more vulgar and venal than St. Petersburg, Gogol settled in Rome and set forth on his effort to rise above the negativism of the Inspector General with a trilogy to serve as a Russian Divine Comedy. His sense of mission was intensified by the death of Pushkin in 1837, and his fame increased by the successful appearance in 1842 of The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, the first part of his great work. Yet in the remaining ten years of his life, Gogol was unable to make further progress on his project. Dead Souls remains, like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, the glorious first part of an uncompleted trilogy. Other Slavic exiles in Italy were also trying to write a new Divine Comedy. Juliusz Slowacki's Poem of Piast Dantyszek about Hell was a Polish Inferno; but whereas Slowacki went on to provide a Paradiso in a poetic "rhapsody" King Spirit, and Krasinski finished his Undivine Comedy, Gogol's terrifying honesty never permitted him to go beyond the Inferno of Dead Souls. Unlike his Polish contemporaries-and indeed most popular patriotic literature of the day-Gogol was not seduced by idealistic and nationalistic appeals. He could only sweep the stage clean without providing any positive answers.
In Dead Souls (as in another of his unforgettable pictures of provincial pettiness, "How the Two Ivans Quarreled") Gogol borrowed in part from an earlier picaresque writer from the same section of the Ukraine, Vasily Narezhny. The satirical style and vivid tableaux of Dead Souls are often reminiscent of Narezhny's Russian Gil Bias. But just as Gogol distorts the name of Narezhny's hero (Chistiakov) in the direction of caricature (Chichikov), so he transforms the image of a picaresque hero from a
boisterous adventurer to an enigmatic wanderer, moving through the distorted world of the living in search of his claims on the dead. Narezhny was able to move on to provide Russia with a valedictory message in his posthumously published Dark Year, or the Mountain Princes,101 which criticized Russian rule in Transcaucasia and anticipated in some ways both the novel of social reform and the separatist propaganda of the late imperial period. Gogol, on the other hand, could offer no simple message or hopeful conclusions; he could find no guiding road except one which led to destruction-first of his later works and then of the frail body that had linked him with the world.
The caricatured figures of Dead Souls, the surviving first part of his trilogy, reveal Gogol's fascination with human disfigurement together with an unvoiced, but passionate concern for wholeness and perfection. But there is no bearer of salvation, nothing as compelling as the images of evil and blight. He concluded that one had to be perfect in order to write about perfection. He failed to create positive heroes because
you cannot invent them out of your head. Until you become like them yourself, until you acquire a few good qualities by your perseverance and strength of character, everything you produce by your pen will be nothing but carrion, and you will be as far from the truth as earth is from heaven.102
Driven by this quest for moral perfection, Gogol felt impelled to burn most of the second part of Dead Souls, his Purgatorio, and turn away from art altogether at the end, dying at the age of forty-three. From the artistic perfection of the Inspector General (perhaps the greatest play in the Russian language)103 Gogol moved within a decade to a plea for a total subservience to the established Church in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. His voluntary renunciation of art was to have echoes in the careers of Leo Tolstoy and others. The call of morality was beginning to claim precedence over that of art, and Belinsky, who rejected Gogol's religious appeal, nonetheless contrasted Gogol's moral concern with the "idea-lessness" of Griboedov's work. The prophet of the sixties, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, was to draw an even more extreme contrast between "Pushkinian" disciples of pure art and "Gogolian" concern for the injustice
of humanity.
It was not until the Orthodox revival of the early twentieth century that Gogol's final plea for a return to the Church would receive serious attention; but other enigmatic hints at a way out of the inferno acquired a haunting symbolism for subsequent nineteenth-century thinkers. The final image in Dead Souls, Chichikov's troika heading off across the steppe to an
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unknown destination, came to epitomize the enigma of Russia's future. The ending of The Greatcoat, his most famous short story, written between the Inspector General and Dead Souls, left an even more spectral message. In it Gogol transforms a drawing-room story that others had found humorous concerning a man's excessive grief over the loss of his rifle into a tale of great pathos and meaning. The hero is a poor and insignificant clerk in St. Petersburg, a passive figure whose pitiable life finds focus only in saving money for a new greatcoat. He finally gets it, but is robbed of it in a dark street and dies. Then, in a strange final sequence, he returns to reclaim his coat and cause his superiors to fear for their own. The clerk is not at all noble or heroic in Gogol's story. Thus, his final victory over Nicholaevan St. Petersburg seems all the more fantastic. By making it seem, however, both unavoidable and convincing, Gogol creates not only one of his greatest artistic effects but perhaps also the positive prophecy he was unable to offer in Dead Souls. For not only does the strange victory of the little man represent the best example of Gogol's "thin, weak feet" crushing the "real or imaginary monuments" of Nicholaevan Russia; it may also-as one close student of Soviet literature has contended-provide some hope to those who must live with the greater monumentalism of the Soviet era.104
Gogol's imagination was so vivid and pictorial that it sometimes requires the language of painting to discuss it. His writings lent themselves readily to pictorial representation, just as Pushkin's lent themselves to music in the same period. Gogol was, indeed, as interested in pictorial art as Pushkin was in music; the subject matter of Gogol's Portrait came as naturally to him as did that of Mozart and Salieri to
Pushkin. Painting held for Gogol not only a special interest but a unique advantage over sculpture and all other forms of plastic art:
It deals not just with one man, its borders are wider: it includes in itself the whole world; all the beautiful phenomena surrounding man are within its power; all the secret harmony and the linking of man with nature are found in it alone.105
Thus, it is not surprising that, when Gogol's own faith in the possibility of pronouncing words of artistic deliverance to Russia weakened, he focused many of his last hopes on the work of a painter, for whose labors he arduously solicited support during the last years of his life. The painter was, of course, Alexander Ivanov, a friend of many years standing, who had often painted Gogol in Rome and who kept pasted within his album for new sketches a letter Gogol had sent him:
God grant you His aid in your labours, do not lose heart, be of good courage, God's blessing be on your brush and may your picture be glori-
jt-I
3. The "Cursed Questions
ously completed. That at any rate is what I wish you from the bottom of my heart.106
The painting of which Gogol spoke was Ivanov's "Appearance of Christ to the People," on which he worked for twenty-five years, drawing up more than six hundred sketches amidst one of the most extraordinary and anguished artistic searches of modern times. Ivanov's work illustrates far better than that of the more successful and uniquely gifted Gogol the profoundly disquieting effects of this search for a new prophetic message on accepted forms of art and thought.
Ivanov was born into the artistic world with every possible advantage as the gifted aristocratic son of the leading academic painter in St. Petersburg. Despite his privileged position, excellent training and prize-winning early compositions in the prevailing classical style, the young Ivanov became infected with the restlessness of the times. In 1830 he left St. Petersburg proclaiming: "A Russian artist cannot remain in a city like Petersburg which has no character. The academy of fine arts is a survival of a past century."107 In Rome he embarked on a vigorous search for a new, more meaningful style. He began a lifelong, first-hand study of classical and Renaissance art. In his own work he moved from mythological subjects in oil to somber sketches and chiaroscuro water colors of Roman street scenes and the semi-impressionistic color studies of the Italian countryside. His quest for authenticity in rendering the human form took him away from Rome to Perugia and other cities where the nude body could be studied at length in the public baths.
Throughout this early period of experimentation, Ivanov was driven by the conviction that he was living on the threshold of a new era. The solemn coronation of Nicholas I had made a profound religious and aesthetic impression on him as a youth of twenty, and he felt that a new "golden age of Russian art" was dawning.108 The responsibility of the artist was in a sense even greater than that of the political leader; for "all the aesthetic life of humanity, and, as a result, the very happiness of its future" depends on "the development of the artist's capabilities."109
After this initial period of intensive technical preparation, Ivanov turned his attention to the creation of a canvas which would serve as a kind of monumental icon for the new age: a transposition into painting of the heroic sculptural and architectural style of the early nineteenth century. The subject matter that he chose for his first efforts in this direction was invariably Biblical: Samson and Delilah, David before Saul, Joseph's brothers, and-much the best-"Christ with Mary Magdalen." Finally, in the late thirties he began to turn all his attention to the preparation of his "Appear-
IV. THE CENTURY OF ARISTOCRATIC CULTURE
3. The "Cursed Questions'
343
ance of Christ to the People." In contrast to Briullov's canvas of 1836, which conveyed the negative message of the fall of Rome in an artistically sloppy and sentimental manner, Ivanov's painting was to carry a positive message in a technically perfect manner. The subject was to be the decisive moment in history when the agitated and uncertain followers of John the Baptist first caught sight of Christ. The style was to be that of Raphael, with the composition based partly on Leonardo's "Last Supper" and Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
Throughout his long labors on this painting, he was driven by a concern for authenticity that astonished all who came in contact with him. He spent long hours in synagogues studying Jewish faces, made trips to the courtrooms of Rome to study the expressions of despair on the face of condemned criminals, and invited peasants into his otherwise impenetrable study to tell them jokes and then sketch their spontaneous expressions of happiness and enjoyment. He was particularly haunted by the problem of depicting Christ in art. He sought, up until the very eve of his death, to find the oldest and most authentic representation of Christ's earthly form- studying in museums, Byzantine frescoes, and finally embarking on a trip to Jerusalem and the Near East. At the same time, his sketches for the Christ of his painting reveal a desire to incorporate the beauty of classical statuary into the representation of Christ's visage.
Slowly but inexorably, driven by some dark inner force which bears the mark either of sainthood or demonic pride, Ivanov became obsessed with the idea that he must in fact be Christ in order to be worthy of depicting him. The "golden age of all-humanity" which his canvas was to announce now required "perfection in morality as well as art." He immersed himself in reading the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. When Turgenev tried to show him some humorous drawings in the early forties, Ivanov suppressed his mirth and stared at them for a long time before suddenly lowering his head and repeating softly, "Christ never smiled."110
The course of Ivanov's subsequent religious quest brought a frenzied climax to the century-long search for direct new links with God. At the same time it gives a hint of the new paths into which prophetic impulses and messianic longings were shortly to be channeled. For, although he spoke longingly in 1845 of a need for links with a Christian Church linked to the apostolic age "when religion was not a corpse,"111 he turned neither to the Orthodox Church that had attracted Gogol nor to the Roman Catholic Church that had won the allegiance of other Russians in Rome. Nor did he seek solace in some new form of inner devotion following the sectarian or pietistic tradition, as one might think from the title of his 1846 manuscript, Thoughts upon Reading the Bible. He turned instead to messianic patriotism,
a position that had been implied in the general assumption that Russia was to provide spiritual salvation for all mankind. Ivanov was profoundly moved by a visit to the artist's studio in December, 1845, which was made by Nicholas I during his trip to Rome. Ivanov became lost in a kind of fantastic eschatological chauvinism. Russia became "the last of the peoples of the planet… . The Messiah whom the Jews await and in whose second coming symbolic Christians believe is the Russian Tsar, the Tsar of the last people."112
He borrows the language of occult masonry in speaking of "symbolic Christians," the "elect (elu) of providence" and "all-wise rule" {premudroe tsarstvovanie). Humanity is about to enjoy "the eternal peace, which will be given to it by the great and final people." Truth is to be "the basis of everything"; the artist, who is "the priest (zhrets) of the future of humanity," will soon be superfluous, because there will be no conflict-or even any difference between the sexes. The Tsar will become "entirely equal to Christ in his high authority and belief in God" and will establish his authority "over the Slavic races" and
. . . then shall the prophecy be fulfilled that there shall be one kingdom and one pastor, for all surviving kings will ask his counsel in order to bring order to their governments in a manner befitting each separate nationality.
The Russian artist of today must speak
… in the Asian spirit, in the spirit of prophecy . . . like musicians going before a regiment all aflame, lifting men up and away from worry and grief to the finest moments of life through marvelous sounds.113
Thus, the theme of consecrated combat, so central to later militant Pan-Slavism, was given an early and exalted formulatio
n. Like his friend, the poet Tiutchev, who had also seen messianic portents in Nicholas' visit to Rome, Ivanov saw apocalyptical implications in the revolution of 1848 and hailed Nicholas' stern repressive moves.
Deeply impressed that "the parabola of the bombs has missed my studio," Ivanov set forth on a frenzied secret project to found a new academy for a consecrated army of "public artists." Their shrine was to be a temple to "the golden age of all humanity," which was to be built in Moscow "on that very spot where the fate of Russia was resolved by the speech of Abraham Palitsyn."114 The temple, in turn, was to be dominated by a vast fresco, one half of which was to show the Holy Lands as they appeared in Christ's lifetime, the other to show the Holy Lands as they now
appeared, with Nicholas I in the center as the form taken by the Messiah in His second coming.115 Apparently believing that his project would gain the approval of the Tsar, he made some 250 sketches for murals and icons, including events from secular history and mythology along with sacred subjects.
If the idea of the temple represents a final flight of fantasy, the murals themselves show a deep relation to the problem that had haunted him since beginning his "Appearance of Christ to the People": how can one depict the perfection of Christ in the world of imperfect men? All the murals were to be built around a monumental series portraying the earthly life of Christ. Under the influence of David Strauss' Life of Christ, which he first read in French translation in 1851, he began to conceive of Christ primarily as a human being, whose story of heroism and suffering had been needlessly complicated and etherealized by the historic churches. Abjuring all traditional models for representing the life of Christ, Ivanov's starkly original sketches show a lonely figure passing through real suffering, cruelty, and indifference. There is no trace of sentimentality or artificial adornment. Christ emerges as an almost totally passive figure surrounded by mobs of people and phalanxes of pharisees, with the scourging and crucifixion treated in particular detail. In only two of the 120 scenes in the published version of the series is there any real animation on the face of Christ. In the wilderness, when he is being tempted by the devil, Christ is seated facing straight ahead in the manner of Christ enthroned on the icons, but he is looking nervously at Satan out of the corner of his eye. In the last picture, which shows Christ on the cross, he is looking straight ahead at the viewer with a weird and piercing look that bespeaks less physical suffering than some terrible unspoken doubt about himself.116
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