Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Progressives, like their leader Belinsky, saw Gogol’s ideological shift as either a bizarre psychological digression or the desire to suck up to Nicholas, whose financial aid to the writer was widely known (Gogol proudly told his friends about it). But in fact, Gogol’s transformation was organic, if ultimately tragic.

Gogol always felt what he called “a passion for painting.” He took drawing classes at the Academy of Arts and loved making “architectural landscapes”: churches, temples, ruins. He wrote two important pieces about contemporary Russian artists: the essay “The Last Day of Pompeii,” written in 1834 in response to the notorious painting by Briullov on exhibition in St. Petersburg, and “Historical Painter Ivanov,” written in 1846 about Gogol’s friend Alexander Ivanov and his enormous canvas Christ Appearing to the People, created in 1837–1858 and now regarded as one of the greatest nineteenth-century Russian paintings.

The Romantic Briullov attracted the twenty-five-year-old art lover Gogol as an exotic figure and as a master celebrated in Europe, whose style—striking composition, vivid contrasts, bold chiaroscuro, and hot colors—were close to Gogol’s early writings.

In his essay, Gogol compared The Last Day of Pompeii to opera. But even then Gogol was expressing some doubts on the value of “operatic effects” in art: “In the hands of a real talent they are true and can turn man into a giant; but used by a pretender, they are disgusting to connoisseurs.”

Reaching for a higher spiritual plane, while rejecting everything “false,” brought Gogol to a friendship in 1838 with Ivanov, thirty-two and living, like Gogol, in Rome.

Like his new friend, Ivanov was strange and rather mysterious (“helpless and weak, one of those who think with their heart,”⁶ as the poet Rainer-Maria Rilke later described him). He was the complete opposite of the flashy, confident epicurean Briullov.

In his St. Petersburg period, Gogol envied Briullov’s unprecedented access to the emperor and high society, so tempting—and unattainable—to the provincial Gogol. Briullov liked Gogol, but regarded him a bit down his nose. The innocent and naive Ivanov was another matter completely; when Gogol arrived in Rome, already a maître, he became the painter’s guru and patron.

In Rome both Gogol and Ivanov were toiling on their magnum opuses: the writer was wrestling with Dead Souls, the artist with Christ Appearing to the People. Both came to regard their work as a spiritual exploit, a religious service to the Russian national idea. Both unmarried (and not attracted by women), Gogol and Ivanov labored far from Russia, in the colorful world of Rome that had enchanted them and was such a contrast to their previous life in the severe Russian capital. In Rome, Gogol and Ivanov were the central figures in the small colony of Russian artists studying in Italy on stipends from the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Short Ivanov in those years was “rather portly, with a little beard, sad brown eyes and a typical Slavic face.”⁷ Gogol still enjoyed eating well and drinking in good company, preferring pasta with grated cheese and red wine. He liked crostata with cherries. He learned to add rum to warmed goat’s milk, calling the drink “gogol-mogol.” (He liked to joke, “Gogol loves gogol-mogol.”)

But gradually his mood and health deteriorated: he complained of migraines, pains in his stomach, nervous fits, and faints, growing gloomy and cranky. He became unbearable at his favorite taverna, sending a dish back two or three times in a row, until the waiters refused to serve him: “Signor Niccolò, there is no pleasing you, and the owner charges us for the dishes you send back.”

Strangely, Ivanov’s health declined in parallel with Gogol’s: he too lost weight, turned pale, and became paranoid. Turgenev suggested that in Rome Ivanov “went a bit crazy: the twenty-five years of solitude took their toll.” In a confidential letter to his friend Annenkov, the writer described how Ivanov began to assure him, “turning white and laughing nervously that he was being poisoned with a special potion, therefore he often did not eat.”⁸ Ivanov was afraid to drink water in taverns and preferred to fill bottles from fountains.

In his essay on Ivanov, Gogol praised him as the Russian Raphael. He described him as a man who “was dead to everything in the world except his work.” That was now the model of a truly artistic life for Gogol, not the glamorous existence of his former idol, Briullov.

In the end, Gogol did not finish writing Dead Souls and Ivanov did not complete Christ Appearing to the People. Even unfinished, these monumental works occupy a central place in the panorama of Russian nineteenth-century culture.