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.

Gogol's father, the author of folk farces in the Little Russian language, director and main actor of the amateur theater in the estate of the Catherine nobleman D. P. Troshchinsky, passed on his humor and literary talent to his son. But he died when Gogol was only 16 years old. From the age of nine, the boy does not live at home, he studies first in Poltava, then in Nizhyn. He knows little about his father and does not depend on him for his spiritual development. When his father died in 1825, he wrote a letter of condolence to his mother in a spectacular rhetorical style; It is a sentimental-romantic declaration on the theme of filial love and sorrow. But it is unlikely that Gogol loved his father.

Gogol's mother, Marya Ivanovna, is a pious, superstitious woman with oddities. S. T. Aksakov speaks of her as "a kind, gentle, loving creature, full of aesthetic feeling, with a slight touch of gentle humor." This is the bright side of her image. But there is also a dark one. Marya Ivanovna was sick with fear. Her sincere and genuine religiosity is colored by the fear of impending disasters and death. She believed in Providence and trembled before evil spirits. Her happy family life began with a mystical vision. "At the age of fourteen," Gogol's mother recalls, "I was married to my good husband, who lived seven versts away from my parents. The Queen of Heaven showed me to him, appearing to him in a dream." All her life Marya Ivanovna lived in inexplicable, painful anxieties. Her suspiciousness, suspicion, and distrust were inherited by Gogol. "My life was the calmest," she says, "my husband and I had a cheerful character. We were surrounded by good neighbors. But sometimes gloomy thoughts came upon me. I had a premonition of misfortune, I believed in dreams." This passage from Marya Ivanovna's "Notes" is confirmed by the following testimony of a contemporary: "Sometimes Marya Ivanovna, without moving from her place for whole hours, thought about who knows what. At such moments the very expression of her face changed: from kind and affable it became somehow lifeless: it was evident that her thoughts wandered far away. She was very similar to her husband in suspiciousness; on the slightest occasion she often imagined great fears and anxieties. For the same reason, she was extremely suspicious..."

Gogol resembles his mother: now cheerful and cheerful, now "lifeless", as if he had been intimidated and frightened for life since childhood.

The life of the landlords in Vasilyevka, reminiscent of the world of Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna, was distinguished by ritual, patriarchal religiosity. Gogol's child was taken to church, taken on pilgrimage to Dikanka, Bulishchi, Lubny, forced to fast and listen to the reading of the Chetya-Minei. Subsequently, he sharply condemned the religious education he received in childhood:

"Unfortunately, parents are rarely good educators of their children... I looked at everything with impassive eyes; I went to church because I was ordered or carried; but, standing in it, I saw nothing but the robes, the priest, and the nasty roar of the sacristans. I was baptized because I saw that everyone was baptized."

Gogol did not belong to those chosen ones who are born with love for God; The patriarchal religiosity that surrounded his childhood remained alien and even hostile to him. Faith had to come to him in a different way – not from love, but from fear. This is how his religious feeling was born in his soul.

"Once," Gogol wrote to his mother, "I remember this incident vividly, as I do now, I asked you to tell me about the Last Judgment, and you told me, a child, so well, so clearly, so touchingly about the blessings that await people for a virtuous life, and so strikingly, so terribly described the eternal torments of sinners, that it shocked and awakened all my sensitivity. this sowed and subsequently produced in me the highest thoughts."