Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

(The prospect of literally being buried alive had always terrified Gogol. He began his famous “Testament” of 1845 with the following spooky directions: “I will that my body not be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear.” Like everything written by Gogol, this strange request can be interpreted not only literally but also symbolically. Gogol explained that he had “witnessed many sad occurrences resulting from our irrational haste in all matters” and expressed the hope that his posthumous voice would remind people of “circumspection,” the same word Pushkin used in chiding Belinsky in 1836.)

Russia’s Millennium, a monument designed by Mikhail Mikeshin and erected in 1862 in Novgorod, depicts the main figures of Russian history (a list approved by Emperor Alexander II), and the sculptor shows a sorrowful Gogol leaning on a radiant and angelic Pushkin.

Readers are generally aware that Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy did not get along. But a legend persists about the incredible closeness of Pushkin and Gogol: after all, Pushkin hailed the young genius from Ukraine, laughing till he dropped at his satirical works and sighing over the elegiac ones, and he gave him the plot ideas for the comedy The Inspector-General and the epic Dead Souls. But were relations between Pushkin and Gogol truly so idyllic?

Gogol was the sole manufacturer of the legend, and it remains one of his greatest creations. Making his acquaintance in St. Petersburg in May 1831, Gogol sat down to write an article about Pushkin, proclaiming him the chief national poet and adding that “Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and perhaps the unique manifestation of the Russian spirit: this is Russian man in his evolution, the way he might appear two hundred years hence.”

This was shameless flattery, of course, but so inspired that it became very popular in Russia and is quoted to this day, when it should be clear that Gogol’s prediction was unlikely to ever come true.

There is no doubt that the thirty-two-year-old Pushkin came to like Gogol, ten years younger, an oddly dressed, short provincial with lanky blond hair, pointy nose, and sly gaze. He liked his works, full of attractive Ukrainian exotica, and his raconteur’s gift of telling funny stories. (Gogol could tell scabrous jokes just as easily; a friend marveled, “it was Ukrainian salo [lard] sprinkled with Aristophanes salt.”)¹

Pushkin immediately hired Gogol to work at his magazine; Contemporary needed “golden pens.” But this brought about their first serious conflict: Pushkin commissioned a manifesto from Gogol for the first issue, but its cocky tone offended many readers. Consequently, Pushkin had to disassociate himself from the article, deeply wounding Gogol’s vanity.

Presumably, it had been Pushkin’s little revenge on Gogol for stealing a plot Pushkin had intended to use himself—about a petty crook who arrives in a provincial town where he is taken for an important official from the capital traveling incognito. Laughing, Pushkin told his wife, “You have to be careful around this Ukrainian: he steals from you, and you can’t even complain.”²

Gogol wrote the comedy on Pushkin’s theme, The Inspector-General, in record time, and immediately started reading it in influential salons in the capital, hoping to get it onstage faster this way. Gogol was a master manipulator, having learned early in his youth the secrets of “reading minds, influencing hearts, and flattering with tenderness” and developing a virtuoso ability “to subordinate other people’s wills,” according to a memoirist.

Through Zhukovsky’s good offices, Gogol managed to interest Nicholas I in The Inspector-General—the tsar liked it “very much.”³ That was the green light for the play: it sailed past all the dangerous censorship reeds and was quickly accepted by the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater. From its completion (on December 4, 1835) to its premiere on the country’s main stage (on April 19, 1836) took only four and a half months, and a month after that the play was presented in Moscow, too.

At the very same time that The Inspector-General was being rehearsed onstage at the Alexandrinsky Theater with Gogol present, the composer Glinka was in the building lobby, working with the soloists and chorus on his new opera A Life for the Tsar, while the opera theater was being renovated.