Gogol. Solovyov. Dostoevsky

Gogol's spiritual path

1. Foreword

"Try to see me as a Christian and a man of letters rather than as a man of letters," Gogol wrote to his mother in 1844.

Did Gogol's biographers fulfill this wish? Was his religious feat, that "lasting life's work", which the writer considered more important than his literary work, justly appreciated? One can approach the life task set by Gogol from different points of view; One can sympathize with her or challenge her, but she cannot be ignored.

Gogol was not only a great artist: he was also a teacher of morality, a Christian ascetic, and a mystic.

We are trying to tell the story of this Gogol, using Gogol's correspondence, religious and moral writings and the testimonies of contemporaries as materials; the aesthetic evaluation of the artistic works of the author of "Dead Souls" is not part of our task: we involve them in consideration only as psychological and ideological documents.

To this day, in the literature about Gogol, the opinion is repeated or tacitly admitted that his vocation was exclusively literary, that by "falling into mysticism" he ruined his talent and "did not mind his own business", that the entire spiritual path of the writer was one deplorable misunderstanding. But why did Gogol's religious and moral ideas form the basis of the "teaching" of all great Russian literature, and why is the significance of his Christian path revealed to us more and more clearly every year?

After our experience of war and revolution, we look with different eyes at Gogol – "the martyr of Christianity", as S. T. Aksakov called him; and the words of his Testament sound new to us:

"Be not dead, but living souls. There is no other door than the one indicated by Jesus Christ."

Paris, October 29, 1933

2. Childhood

Gogol came from an old Little Russian family, which temporarily deviated into Catholicism. His great-grandfather, already Orthodox, was a priest. His grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich, was a bursak who kidnapped the daughter of the landowner Lizogub, Tatyana Semyonovna, and received a nobilitation in 1788. In the Lizogub family there is a tense religiosity, hereditary mysticism.