Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

A painterly approach colors Dead Souls, and Ivanov’s canvas is dominated by a religious idea. Rilke, with his subtle feeling for Russian culture, described this idea as “profound Russian piety that demanded its embodiment in painting.”

Both Gogol and Ivanov became outsiders for the Russian establishment, and yet Tsar Nicholas I supported both. In 1845, in Rome on state business, the tsar visited Ivanov’s studio; he had been warned that the painter was a “crazy mystic,” but he found his magnum opus “wonderful” (the heir, Alexander, liked it very much too).⁹ Aid from the imperial treasury eased Ivanov’s lot in Rome.

Now the final act of Gogol’s tragedy was starting. Gogol had worked on Dead Souls since 1835. The writer always said that the plot (like that of The Inspector-General) had been “a gift” from Pushkin. By making Pushkin the godfather of Dead Souls, Gogol positioned his novel as the poet’s “sacred will” and thus raised its status.

The plot is extremely simple: the crook Chichikov travels around the Russian provinces, visiting local landowners to buy up their serfs—not living serfs, but dead ones. These serfs, referred to in legal documents as “souls,” had not yet been removed from the tax rolls and therefore could be used fraudulently as collateral for loans from the state treasury, which Chichikov planned to do.

Nothing much happens in the book: Chichikov travels from one place to another, encountering various bizarre landowners. But Gogol turns those owners of “dead souls” into unforgettable characters whose names have become symbols in Russia. (As, of course, did the book’s title.)

Gogol’s concept of the book kept changing, and eventually he came to see it as something like Dante’s Divine Comedy or even Homer’s Odyssey. (He was often compared with Homer later by his fervent admirers in Russia.) Gogol decided that his work was not a mere novel, but a “poem.” This again connected him with Pushkin: “This work of mine is his creation. He made me swear to write it.”

In 1842, with the help of court circles, Gogol managed to get around the censors and published the first volume of Dead Souls in Russia. “Writers, journalists, book sellers, lay people—all say that there hasn’t been so much hullabaloo in the literary world in a long time, with some reviling your work and others praising it,”¹⁰ a friend wrote to Gogol from Moscow.

Dostoevsky later confirmed this: “This was the way young people were then; two or three would get together: ‘Why don’t we read Gogol, gentlemen!’ and they would sit and read aloud to one another, perhaps the whole night through.” But such literary acclaim was no longer enough for Gogol. He perceived himself as a prophet exiled from his homeland, whose writing could miraculously transform all of life in Russia: “Like a silent monk, he lives in the world without belonging to it, his pure, unsullied soul conversing only with God.”

When this ideal author (in fact, Gogol’s self-portrait) appeals to Russia, “The sermon will pierce the soul and will not fall on barren soil. Like an angel’s grief, our poetry will flare up and strike all the strings that there may be in the Russian person, bringing holiness into the most coarsened (read: ‘dead’) souls.”

In the summer of 1851, Gogol informed friends that he had finished the second volume of Dead Souls and began reading chapters to them. He planned a trilogy, something like the “Inferno,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradise” of The Divine Comedy. The friends were impressed, but Gogol, hurt by the failure of Correspondence with Friends, was dubious.

He had always suffered bouts of profound melancholy. The condition was exacerbated by his return to Russia in 1848, where everything—climate, landscape, food, authorities—depressed him: “You feel that Russia is not a brotherly warm place, but a cold blizzardy post station, where the station master, totally indifferent to everything, has only one curt reply, ‘No horses!’ ”

Gogol stayed at the house of his Moscow friend Count Alexander Tolstoy. He stopped writing, read only religious books, went to church assiduously, spent his nights in prayer, and imposed a debilitating fast upon himself: he ate once a day, and then just a few spoons of oatmeal soup made with water or cabbage broth. He refused any other food, explaining that it made his “intestines twist.”

On Sunday, February 10, 1852, Gogol asked Count Tolstoy to keep the manuscript of the second volume, explaining, “I have moments when I want to burn all of it. But I would regret it. I think there is something good in there.”¹¹ The count refused: he did not want to feed Gogol’s depression.