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."

Of course, in this story the emphasis falls not on the description of rewards for virtue, but on the depiction of the torments of sinners. The terrible picture painted by the morbid imagination of the mystically gifted mother "shocked" Gogol. He would never forget this shock; his religious consciousness will grow out of the harsh image of Retribution.

Marya Ivanovna's story met the prepared ground: Gogol grew up as a weak, impressionable and unbalanced child. The picture of the Last Judgment allowed the vague fears that had tormented him since childhood to take shape. And before he had experienced fits of elemental terror, tides of incomprehensible anguish. Now he knew what he was afraid of: death and punishment beyond the grave.

In "The Old World Landowners" Gogol describes his mystical experience of childhood with extraordinary power.

"You have no doubt ever heard a voice calling you by name, which the commoners explain by saying that the soul is longing for a man and calling for him, and after which death follows immediately. I confess that I have always been afraid of this mysterious call. I remember hearing it a lot as a child: sometimes someone behind me would say my name clearly. The day at this time was usually the clearest and sunniest: not a single leaf in the garden on the tree moved; the silence was dead; even the grasshoppers stopped screaming at this time; not a soul in the garden. But I confess that if the most frantic and stormy night, with all the hell of the elements, had overtaken me alone in the middle of an impenetrable forest, I would not have been so frightened by it as by this terrible silence in the middle of a cloudless day. I used to flee from the garden with the greatest fear and breathing, and only then calmed down when I met a person whose sight drove away this terrible desert of the heart."

In Gogol's soul, the experience of cosmic horror and the elemental fear of death are primary; And on this pagan basis, Christianity is perceived by him as a religion of sin and retribution.

3. Lyceum

In 1821, Gogol entered the Nizhyn gymnasium of higher sciences and spent seven years there. His adolescence was a time of complex and deep inner work. Unfortunately, we have to judge this period only from his letters to his relatives, and this is an insufficient and unreliable source; insufficient because Gogol is a closed and secretive nature, and he either hints at the most significant things or is completely silent; he is not frank with his mother; unreliable because Gogol's letters never accurately reflect his state of mind. His image, refracted in correspondence, undergoes a double distortion: of literary manner and psychological pose. In the twenties, Gogol reads romantic magazines, assimilates fashionable phraseology and sees himself in the image of René and Childe Harold: he is a mysterious, lonely and light-driven dreamer. "I am considered an enigma to everyone; no one has figured me out completely...," Gogol wrote to his mother in 1828. "Here they call me a humble man, the ideal of meekness and patience. In one place I am the quietest, modest, courteous, in another I am gloomy, thoughtful, uncouth, etc., in a third I am talkative and annoying to the point of excess, in others I am clever, in others I am stupid."