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."

And here are the obligatory "persecutions of the light": "I have experienced more sorrow and need than you think; I have always tried on purpose to show absent-mindedness, wilfulness, etc., when I was at home, so that you would think that I did not wipe myself enough, that I was little pressed down by evil. But hardly anyone has endured so many ingratitudes, injustices, stupid ridiculous pretensions, cold contempt, and so on. I endured everything without reproach, without murmuring" (to his mother, 1828). Where does literature end and reality begin in these confessions? Life and fantasy are so intertwined in Gogol's soul that it is impossible to separate them. The young author, if he deceives others, then first of all deceives himself. He really feels like a romantic hero, although, of course, he did not experience any grief, any injustices and contempt. True, his comrades teased the reserved, arrogant and slovenly young man, but they loved him and good-naturedly endured his ridicule and molestation.

"His comrades loved him," writes Gogol's closest friend of the Lyceum, A. S. Danilevsky, "but called him 'the mysterious Karl'. He treated his comrades sarcastically, loved to laugh and gave nicknames. They laughed at him a lot, mocked him." Gogol had two or three friends who formed a circle of chosen ones; all the others were "existers," and he treated them with the poet's traditional romantic contempt for the mob. Back in Nizhyn, "Hans Küchelgarten" was recorded. The hero of this poem is almost a self-portrait.

The mob shouts madly:

He is firm in the midst of these living wreckage,

And he only hears the noise

Blessing of descendants.

Gogol wrote to his friend G. I. Vysotsky (1827): "You know all our existences, all those who inhabited Nizhyn. They crushed with the crust of their earthliness, insignificant self-will, the high purpose of man... And among these beings I must grovel!"