Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Gogol hailed the patriotic peasant Ivan Susanin, the hero of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar: “No royal house began as unusually as the house of Romanov. Its beginning was already an exploit of love. The last and lowliest subject in the state laid his life down in order to give us the Tsar, and with this pure sacrifice he tied inseparably the Tsar with his subjects. Love entered our blood, and it bound all of us to the Tsar.”

The trickiest part for Gogol was to preach about nationality and the Russian national idea, precisely because he was living in the West. Gogol found wiggle room in an explanation (with Solzhenitsyn-like overtones): “I knew that I was not traveling in order to enjoy foreign places but rather to suffer—as if I had a premonition that I would learn Russia’s value only outside Russia and would add to my love for her from afar.”

For Russian liberals and Westernizers, all this sounded like hypocritical drivel. They reacted with fury to Gogol’s book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in early 1847 in St. Petersburg, and the source of almost all the citations above. The harshest criticism came from the influential progressive critic Belinsky.

Dying of consumption, the thirty-six-year-old Belinsky was being treated in Europe. He wrote Gogol a long scathing letter, which turned into his profession de foi. The dissident Herzen printed the text for the first time in 1855 in his antigovernment almanac, Polar Star, which he published in London. In Russia, the letter was considered revolutionary propaganda and banned.

Pavel Annenkov, who was a friend of both Gogol and Belinsky, recalled how the critic, emaciated and resembling an old man with his deathly pale face, said in his muffled voice as he sat down to write his letter (which, in Annenkov’s words, “sounded throughout intellectual Russia like a trumpet call”), “What can I do? We must use every method to save people from a madman, even if it’s Homer himself who went mad.”⁵

Imagine Gogol’s reaction to his former apologist addressing him this way: “Preacher of the knout, apostle of ignorance, proponent of obscurantism, panegyrist of Tatar mores—what are you doing! Look down at your feet—you are standing at the abyss … That you align yourself with the Orthodox Church, I can understand: it always supported the knout and despotism; but why did you drag in Christ here?”

In publishing his Correspondence with Friends, Gogol wanted to “endow dissolute Russian life at last with a code of great rules and unshakable axioms that would help organize its inner world as a model for all other nations,” said Annenkov. The book consisted of his real letters (naturally, expanded and edited) and essays especially written for the book.

Gogol turned out to be a powerful preacher. The letters have the best qualities of Gogol’s prose, making it so difficult to translate: they are vivid, musical, with their own rhythm and imbued with passion for Russia, whose salvation Gogol saw in Christian self-betterment.

Belinsky, for whom purely literary qualities were always less important than ideology, disagreed with Gogol. “Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, humanism. It does not need preaching (it has heard plenty), or prayers (it has repeated enough of them), but the awakening in the people of human dignity, lost for so many centuries in mud and manure.”

The dying but still fiery Belinsky tore apart the ideological triad of Nicholas-Uvarov-Gogol, in passim taking a swipe angrily (and unfairly) at Pushkin; he declared to Gogol that in Russia “the popularity drops quickly of great talents that give themselves sincerely or insincerely to the service of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.’ A striking example is Pushkin, who needed only to write two or three sucking-up poems and don the court uniform to lose the people’s love!”

Of course, Pushkin had never lost the people’s love, whatever that may be; his reputation suffered only in a small albeit influential circle of progressive intelligentsia, whose spokesman was Belinsky.

For that radical group, Gogol’s evolution, which began with the colorful, quasifolkloric “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,” then moved through his mystical and tragic “St. Petersburg Stories” (“Nevsky Prospect,” “Notes of a Madman,” “The Nose,” “The Overcoat”) to the powerful, bitter satire of The Inspector-General and volume 1 of Dead Souls, came crashing down in the Christian sermonizing of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.