Gogol: an unsolvable mystery. Gogol's childhood friends? “Correspondence with Friends” by Nikolai Gogol as a literary sermon

Gogol's tailed friend

- That day we celebrated my birthday! - The cricket smiled. - Crickets have birthdays too! Oh, it was a great day! Why? You will understand now, my dears. Do you know Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol? Yes, yes, our Russian writer! Or rather, you cannot know him personally, unlike me. Because he lived in the 19th century. But... you know his works! You, of course, have read “The Night Before Christmas”, “Taras Bulba”, “The Inspector General”, “Marriage”. And if you haven’t read it yet, you’ve probably heard it. And you, my dears, have many wonderful moments ahead of you with these great books!

The cricket jumped from the mantelpiece and motioned to the table.

- Today I am treating you to watermelon!

He waved his paw and there really was a watermelon on the table! Large, bright green with black stripes on the sides. On impact it broke... What a scent that was!

- ABOUT! It was the same watermelon that was on the table on that significant day. It's my birthday!

The watermelon was huge. It lay on a table covered with a white embroidered tablecloth, already divided into even, neat pieces. The juicy, sugary pulp didn’t just beckon. It was as if she hypnotized and forced her to continuously look at the most fragrant and bright piece of food, from which black shiny seeds peeked appetizingly. Nikolenka waited... He waited patiently and courageously. The first plate, loaded with scarlet pulp, landed on a snow-white starched napkin in front of daddy. Then the same plate appeared in front of my mother. Finally, that very last piece with the blackest and most shiny seeds in the entire watermelon world smoothly landed on Nikolenka!

Nikolenka noisily inhaled the watermelon freshness. And he had just bent down to take a bite of the long-awaited delicacy when he heard a monotonous loud buzzing in his ear. Wasp! Nikolenka pulled back and watched in horror as a thick, striped wasp impudently tried to land... no, a watermelon is not land! At... watermelon! Yes, “pri-ar-bu-zi-sya!” Nikolenka adored new words. Only he could not understand where they came from in his head. He always wanted to catch at least one word by the tail! After all, every word has a tail. Some have more, some have less, and some have very tiny ones. The word “forelock”, for example... And there’s nothing to grab onto! But he will definitely grab it! Then everyone will even be surprised at how word-loving he is! And daddy will be the most surprised of all, because he says that Nikolenka won’t do any good, that he’s painfully shy, and he thinks about something out of duty. What is not good is...

Ay!!! Nasty wasp! Nose! Ay!!! Nikolenka didn’t even notice how, lost in thought, it really wasn’t good, he really gave in to that same impudent wasp who was enjoying the watermelon nectar on his, Nikolenka’s, piece...

Ay!!! Nikolenka screamed shrilly, tightly covering his face with his hands. No one, neither mummy, nor daddy, nor nanny could persuade him to remove his hands from his face. Everyone just oohed and aahed, offering lotions and poultices. They explained the necessity of these procedures for wasp stings. But it was all in vain. Nikolenka grabbed his nose with an iron grip. Only Doctor Ivan Fedorovich, quickly brought by the nimble servant Trishka on the fast horse Goloputsek, managed to persuade the boy and was the first to look at Nikolenka’s new nose. Yes... The Wasp was indeed a giantess. And time was lost. Through the efforts of the doctor, the tumor was eliminated, but the shape of the nose was hopelessly damaged. The nose grew incredibly long and remained so on the unforgettable face of our beloved writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol throughout his great life.

What a sad and significant day! But my dears, don’t be upset! This did not spoil the great life of our writer at all! Trust me. On the contrary, it was useful to some extent! But we continue...

Nikolenka learned to read early. He didn’t even know how to say it, but he already realized that the book was a great thing. Daddy never parted with the book. Even during dinner, I sometimes read, despite the dissatisfaction of my mother, who was firmly convinced that digestion required concentration, although she herself loved to read while drinking tea. In the cozy house of landowner Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol, huge cabinets filled with books occupied endless space. At least that’s what it seemed to little Nikolenka. Among the books were old, dusty, leather-bound ones, which daddy didn’t allow to look at even from a distance. There were also modern poems, stories, novels, and even various plays that could be “performed at the theater.” Nikolenka still had a vague idea of what theater was, but he knew that daddy also wrote comedies, that is, hilarious stories that were “played out” by roles. Nikolenka dreamed himself read, read freely and easily, expressively, with heartfelt inspiration, so that everyone can be heard. Read, like daddy...

The desire was so great that one day Nikolenka decided to commit a crime. Dad hid the key to the bookcase securely. No way to find it. But Nikolenka noticed long ago that the key to the buffet in the living room was exactly the treasured key to the kingdom of books. And... lo and behold!.. He, this cupboard key, came up! Nikolenka, not believing his luck, took books from the shelves one after another, examined them carefully and reverently put them in their place. Finally, he came across a familiar book about the “minor” Mitrofanushka, who could not learn anything, but only ate, slept and dreamed of getting married, so that he could eat, sleep and do nothing again. When guests came to daddy’s house, they often read this “Undergrowth” by role, and daddy often read it - and read it great! - for Mrs. Prostakova, mother of the ill-fated Mitrofan. The guests laughed heartily, not suspecting that they had a secret admirer, hiding behind the curtains and quietly giggling into their palms. Nikolenka had an excellent memory. So it didn’t cost him anything to memorize this great comedy by the great Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin. Therefore, when this book came into his hands, he easily figured out letters, sounds, syllables and sentences!

Nikolenka managed to keep the secret of the treasured key for a long time. Papa left at the same time, and Nikolenka had two or three hours of devoted reading at her disposal.

When Nikolenka was sent to the Poltava district school at the age of nine, parting with the bookcase was a real grief. With tears in his eyes, he walked over to the bookshelves and stroked them tenderly. It’s good that daddy didn’t see this, otherwise he would have been completely upset. He had long given up on his son, considering him “not of this world.” But... Nikolenka was incredibly lucky at school. There was a library there! And not only was it not forbidden to go there, but on the contrary, it was encouraged! Nikolenka was happy. If it were possible, he would drag his bed there and live among the books, constantly enjoying the special smell of books. I must say that these dreams were half fulfilled. Nikolenka, as the most fanatical book lover, was appointed keeper of the school library! Guardian... It was no longer the cat who sneezed!

Apchhi!!! Nikolenka did not stop sneezing when he had to climb on the bookshelves with a damp rag. He is a custodian, which means that everything should be in order in the bookkeeping entrusted to him! Each book, little book and little booklet should be in alphabetical order and by topic, strictly in its place and in decent form. Nikolenka spared no glue and effort in repairing particularly damaged specimens. Apchhi!!! He even made up the library rules and posted them in front of the entrance.

1. Do not tear or stain books.

2. Come to the library only with clean hands.

3. Return books on time.

4. Violators are excluded mercilessly.

Shy by nature, compliant Nikolenka was as solid as a rock when it came to questions about books. It was useless to ask him for forgiveness for torn or lost book. He will never forgive you! He’ll simply cross it off from the readers’ lists and tear up the form. And take books wherever you want...

Apchhi!!! Nikolenka froze with a rag in the middle of the library and listened... It wasn’t he who sneezed!.. Whoops!!! Someone's impudent loud sneeze was heard again!.. Nikolenka was seriously scared. At this late hour he closed himself alone in the library to put the books in their places and work. He had to finish an article about his favorite poet Alexander Pushkin and his new stunning novel in verse, “Eugene Onegin,” for the gymnasium magazine “Meteor of Literature.” And besides, I decided to write my own tragedy. The name has already been invented and even neatly written on the first piece of paper in the still blank notebook - “Robbers”. Sounds?!. Ah!.. Apchhi!!! Nikolenka carefully went to the sneeze, armed with a broom just in case...

Apchhi!!! It sounded somewhere very close. Nikolenka raised his head and saw... On the top shelf, carefully moving the books to the side, there was a huge black cat! He stretched out the entire length of the shelf and shook his bushy tail. Apchhi!!! Now Nikolenka himself will sneeze. “Be healthy!” the Cat purred and yawned protractedly. The impressionable Nikolenka leaned on the next shelf to avoid fainting, touched it with his elbow, and books fell on him with a roar. But he didn't even pay attention to it. “Where did you come from?!!!”, was all Nikolenka could squeeze out. “From Alex-andr Sergeeevich m-we-s... Push-shkin... Both day and nightco-scientist everything goes around and around... read? So this is m-we-s and e-is...” the Cat drawled, softly jumped onto the table and brazenly sat down on Nikolenka’s notebook right on the title of the planned tragedy. Despite the improbability of what happened, Nikolenka could not tolerate such disrespect for his own creation. “Get out of here!” he yelled. But the Cat didn’t even bat an eye. Having licked his left paw with special care, he reached out, swung and hit Nikolenka quite hard on the cheek. “I warn you first and last time, you can only talk to us without your last name, dear Nikolai Vasya -i-lyevich, w-we don’t like this...,” the cat reconciledly rubbed himself against the tip of Nikolenka’s famous nose. Apchhi!!! Nikolenka blew his nose noisily. The cat smiled. “Do we know anyone?” the Cat extended his paw and Nikolenka, surprising himself, also gave the Cat his hand and nodded dumbfounded. “Well, that’s sla-avnenko. I’ll still be useful to you, Nikolai Va-asilyevich, we’ll get some work done... You have a great future..." And silently jumping off the table, the Cat walked away pompously...

Friendship with the Cat continued even when Nikolenka became the famous writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who had already created his brilliant works: “The Inspector General,” “Marriage,” “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka,” “Petersburg Tales,” “Dead Souls.” The cat came in the evenings. Rarely, really. He said there was a lot to do. That this help then Togo support. He was completely running around... Stretching, he settled down on Nikolai Vasilyevich’s desk and slept peacefully to the creaking sounds of his pen. He also came to dinner parties, where the best representatives of the great era of the nineteenth century gathered. And what representatives! And Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, and Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, and Mikhail Semenovich Shchepkin, and Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, and Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov... Although these meetings could not be called dinners, there were very few treats for dinner parties, the Cat liked to rub against the trousers of the great guests, leave tufts of your priceless black wool on them and listen... And there was always something to listen to here... At these dinners, along with beautiful music and high poetry, there were stories and tales of the famous writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who knew how to turn his readings into real theatrical performance! The cat, without hesitation, fell on his back and laughed heartily along with all the representatives of genius. Yes... He was not mistaken in Nikolenka, he was not mistaken... True, the Cat did not always manage to stand on his own paws. He became old, weak... Nikolai Vasilyevich quickly and deftly picked up his tailed friend and helped him find balance. The cat gratefully rubbed himself against his long nose... Apchhi!!! God bless you, dear Nikolai Vasilyevich!..

“The storyteller and amusing man suddenly ran away from home and became a monk,” is how P. A. Vyazemsky characterized the attitude of his contemporaries towards Gogol after the release of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.” Subsequently, many critics, literary scholars, and philosophers wrote about this book. Most of her contemporaries, as well as her descendants, subjected her to devastating criticism - what is it worth? famous letter Belinsky, which became a manifesto of revolutionary reprisals against “obscurantists.” But almost all of them viewed this book as a journalistic or didactic work, without taking into account its literary merits. Meanwhile, understanding the formal structure of “Selected Places”, revealing their poetics in connection with the writer’s previous work, identifying the traditions on which Gogol relied - all this seems to be perhaps the most important for understanding the concept of the book.

V.V. Vinogradov speaks of a one-sided assessment of Gogol’s work, when “Gogol’s” is reduced to complex expressive forms of comic mockery and irony, to “the inexhaustible poetry of the comic style.” Indeed, with this approach, it remains to consider “Selected places...” as completely out of keeping with big picture a secondary phenomenon. It is not surprising that we still do not have a more or less complete description of poetics Gogol's work, which the author himself considered his “only practical book.”

Chaos or synthesis?

It is known how much importance Gogol attached to the composition of “Selected Places”: “In this book, everything was calculated by me and the letters were placed in strict sequence...”. Meanwhile, an opinion was established that the structure of the book was chaotic and ill-thought out. Here is what Professor I.M. Andreev writes, for example: “The main formal drawback of “Correspondence” (that is, “Selected Places” is V. T.) - this is its incompleteness, lack of integrity, mixing into one mechanical whole of heterogeneous letters written at different times, and placing deeply thought-out letters next to immature ones. “Correspondence” is a draft of topics collected in one pile that are clear and unclear to the author himself, complete treatises and scraps of incorrect thoughts, important life problems and small, insignificant fleeting impressions.” The subtle critic Andrei Sinyavsky says approximately the same thing: “The impression of blasphemy<…>stemmed, for the most part, from a mixture of genres that were legitimate in their separate form and merged here into something unnatural: the Bible and a cookbook, prayer and newspapers, earthly and heavenly concerns.”

There is undoubtedly some truth in these statements, but in general we cannot agree with them. It would be strange and deeply erroneous to believe that such a great master of words as Gogol suddenly abandoned his talent and began to write somehow, without any processing and without reflection. Yu. Barabash emphasizes that “Correspondence” is “ in a certain way organized ideological and aesthetic unity, complete work". And further, having analyzed in detail Gogol’s work on the book, the critic concludes that “the approach of the author of “Selected Places...” cannot be called anything other than a systematic approach.”

All of Gogol’s work convinces us that in his works, behind the visible external content, the internal, deep content is always hidden. Archpriest Vasily Zenkovsky writes about this, for example: “... all research gets stuck in the outer side of Gogol’s work, as if not noticing that behind the outer shell there are other “layers”<…>Gogol has for external plot other themes constantly emerge in which the artistic acuity and power of this work is hidden.” And “The Nose”, and “The Overcoat”, and “The Inspector General”, and, of course, “Dead Souls” are by no means just humorous or satirical sketches, but works of profound symbolic power that reveals itself to the thoughtful reader.

According to S.S. Averintsev, “the meaning of a symbol does not exist as some kind of rational formula that can be “embedded” in an image and then extracted from the image.” Speaking in the language of Vyach. Ivanov, the symbol is like a sunbeam penetrating different layers. Depending on which layer we study, the content of the image is revealed to us differently. So, for example, P. G. Palamarchuk saw the key to “The Inspector General” in the idea of the city, going back to St. Augustine and reinterpreted by Gogol. We find something similar in “Selected Places”.

Where's the key?

The famous researcher of Gogol’s work V.V. Voropaev expressed the idea that the composition of “Selected Places” corresponds to the structure of Lent. Upon careful study of the book, it turns out that this similarity is not at all superficial or accidental, but deep and fundamentally important for understanding the writer’s intention.

In the “Preface,” Gogol talks about his intention to “go to the Holy Land for the coming Lent” and asks everyone for forgiveness, just as on the last Sunday before this Lent all Christians ask each other for forgiveness. On Forgiveness Sunday, a passage from the Gospel is read in church, which says: If you forgive people their sins, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.(Matthew 6:14). In Gogol's notebook we find detailed story about how to forgive before Great Lent.

Thus, the journey that Gogol “would like to make as a good Christian” is the Lenten wandering. Of course, this does not erase the direct meaning of the “Preface,” that is, Gogol’s intention to go to Jerusalem. Indeed, Gogol had long dreamed of visiting the Holy Land, received a blessing for this trip from Bishop Innocent of Kharkov at the beginning of 1842, prepared a lot for it, and told his friends about it. However, he made his pilgrimage only in 1848.

In the book, “a trip to Jerusalem” has symbolic meaning. The fact is that the long Lenten wandering (Gogol could often encounter this image both in the writings of the Holy Fathers and in church hymns) serves as an image of Israel’s wanderings in the desert, described in the book of Exodus. This forty-year (Lent - forty-day) journey led the ancient Jews to Jerusalem. Now, when everyone within the church fence is God’s chosen people, they, like the ancient Israelites, make their way during Great Lent to the Heavenly Jerusalem, to the Bright Resurrection of Christ - Easter (the chapter “Bright Resurrection” ends Gogol’s book).

P. G. Palamarchuk in the book “The Key to Gogol” says that for the writer the trip to Jerusalem was “a journey to the prototype of the New City.” It is said about him in the Revelation of St. John the Theologian: And I, John, saw the holy city Jerusalem, new, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband(Rev 21:2). From “the city with all the whirlwind of gossip - a prototype of the idleness of life of all humanity en masse,” as Palamarchuk put it, - to the City of God: this is the path of Great Lent. Palamarchuk examines in detail the evolution of the “city” in Gogol and proves the importance of this image in his work. Thus, the “journey to Jerusalem” is the path Christian soul during Great Lent. It should be noted that on the last Friday before Lent, an excerpt from the Book of the Prophet Zechariah is read at the service. Here are a few selected passages from it that speak of Jerusalem as the goal and salvation:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: Behold, I will save my people from the land of the east and from the land of the setting of the sun; and I will bring them, and they will live in Jerusalem, and they will be My people, and I will be their God, in truth and righteousness<…>And many tribes and mighty nations will come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem and to pray to the face of the Lord(Zechariah 8:7–8,22).

The same passage contains the admonition: These are the things you must do: speak the truth to one another; Judge in truth and peaceably at your gates(Zechariah 8:16). There is no doubt that the words tell the truth to each other Gogol took it as a guide to action, as his duty, as the basis of his book. Mochulsky rightly notes that “his own path” for Gogol is teaching and moral influence. “God commanded,” Gogol claims, “that we teach each other every minute.”

Great Lent is a time of learning about oneself and one’s place in the world, and the goal is meeting Christ in His Resurrection. This is exactly what “Selected Places” is about. Many ideas from Gogol’s book can be found in his own handwritten extract “On Fasting” from “Christian Reading”. Great Lent, according to the Holy Fathers, is a way of our life. Likewise, Gogol’s book covers almost all areas of human activity: it was not without reason that it was compared to Domostroi.

So, already in the first lines of his work, Gogol, speaking about the “coming Great Lent,” gives the reader the key to understanding the second, hidden level of the work. This is like a signal, an indication - “look here.” Gogol says that “no matter how insignificant and insignificant my book is, I<…>I ask my compatriots to read it several times,” it is so difficult to get to the bottom of its inner meaning. “Preface” is like an epigraph to “Selected Passages”, designed to correctly orient the reader.

The Great Path to Resurrection

“Selected Places” consistently and harmoniously reflect every significant moment of the Lenten journey. This hidden and rather complex symbolic connection is not always easy to see, but its presence is undeniable. Let us dwell only on one, the last chapter of Gogol’s book. It is called “Bright Sunday” and was written, unlike most others, specifically for “Selected Places...”.

This is the crown of the book - and the crown of the Lenten path. The chapter itself is a complete lyrical work, a kind of expanded lyrical digression to the third, unwritten volume “ Dead souls" (It is known that this volume, according to the author’s plan, was supposed to show the spiritual resurrection of the main character. In relation to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, he was in Gogol’s poem “Paradise”.) And in this chapter the influence of the Easter service is clearly felt, festive mood: from exclamation Christ is Risen to the desire to “look at a person on this day as your best jewel, to hug and press him to yourself, like your dearest brother, to rejoice at him, as if you were your best friend...”. Let us compare these words with the Easter hymns: “Let us embrace one another with joy, saying: brethren, and we will forgive all those who hate us through the resurrection...”

Gogol continues: “and we became related to him according to our wonderful heavenly Father.” Let us remember the appeal “compatriots” at the beginning of “Selected Places...” and relate it to what is being heard these days in the church: “Shine, shine, new Jerusalem, for the glory of the Lord is upon you.” The fast is over, we have reached our goal and come to our common Fatherland - Heavenly Jerusalem. As Gogol writes, “on this day we are in our true family, in His own home,” because, as it is sung at the Easter service, “This day the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad on it!” “This day is that holy day on which all mankind celebrates their holy, heavenly brotherhood,” exclaims the author.

However, Gogol’s thoughts are imbued not so much with joy as with bitterness from the fact that people “drove Christ out into the street,” that they do not want to embrace a person as a brother. This seems to be a continuation of the theme that sounded back in “The Overcoat”, when in the words of Akaki Akakievich “Why are you offending me?” “Other words rang: “I am your brother.”

Speaking about the “people of the century,” Gogol implicitly draws a parallel with the Pharisees whom Christ denounced. “He is ready to hug all of humanity like a brother, but he will not hug his brother<…>Separate yourself from this humanity, one who suffers more clearly than others from the severe ulcers of his spiritual shortcomings, who more than anyone else requires compassion for himself - he will push him away and will not embrace him.” Compare with the Gospel story:

But He, knowing their thoughts, said to the man who had a withered hand: stand up and step into the middle. And he stood up and spoke. Then Jesus said to them: I will ask you: whato should do on Saturday? good or evil? save your soul or destroy it? They were silent. And looking at them all, he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so; and his hand became healthy, like the other(Luke 6:8–10)

The healings, because of which the Pharisees were most indignant at Christ, were performed by Him on Saturday, on day dedicated to the Lord. In New Testament times, Sunday became the Lord's day - when must do good, - and it is no coincidence that Gogol speaks about mercy precisely in the chapter “Bright Sunday”. His words that “they drove Christ out into the streets, into infirmaries and hospitals, instead of calling Him to their homes” are also related to the Gospel:

For I was hungry, and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and they did not accept Me; I was naked, and they did not clothe Me; sick and in prison, and they did not visit Me. Then they too will answer Him: Lord! when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not serve You? Then he will answer them, “Truly I say to you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.”(Matthew 25:42–45).

Gogol's denunciations are very close to what the Savior said to the scribes and Pharisees. The writer states: “Rejoiced that it has become in many ways better than its ancestors, humanity of the present century has fallen in love with cleanliness And beauty my. No one was ashamed to publicly show off their spiritual beauty your own and consider yourself better than others” (emphasis mine - V. T.). Compare this with the words of Christ:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you cleanse the outside of the cup and platter, while inside they are full of robbery and unrighteousness. Blind Pharisee! First cleanse the inside of the cup and the dish, so that the outside of them may also be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and all uncleanness; So you, on the outside, seem righteous to people, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness(Matthew 23:25–28).

Pride in his purity and beauty - this is the diagnosis Gogol makes for the “man of the century.” This name itself correlates with the Gospel sages of this age. “But everything is forgotten by the man of the nineteenth century, and he pushes his brother away from himself, like a rich man pushes away a beggar covered in pus from his magnificent porch. He does not care about his suffering; He just wouldn’t have to see the pus of his wounds. He doesn’t even want to hear his confession, fearing that his sense of smell might be struck by the foul breath of the unfortunate man’s lips, proud of the fragrance of his purity. Is it right for such a person to celebrate the holiday of heavenly Love?” It is not difficult to see in these Gogol words an allusion to the Gospel story about the rich man and Lazarus and their different fates after the resurrection.

Gogol calls “pride of mind” an even more terrible disease. “The man of the century will endure everything: he will endure the name of a rogue, a scoundrel; give him whatever name you want, he will tear it down - but he won’t tear down the name of a fool. He will allow you to laugh at everything - and he just won’t allow you to laugh at his own mind. His mind is a shrine for him<…>He doesn’t believe in anything or anything; He only believes in his own mind.”

These thoughts of Gogol directly correlate with his extract “On the Resurrection” from “Christian Reading” (Vol. 2, 1842), which was later included in the handwritten collection “Selected Passages from the Works of St. fathers and teachers of the Church" (! - V.T.). It says: “The future Resurrection of our bodies, dear brethren, is an object of faith, and not knowledge, is a mystery acceptable to the heart, and not comprehended by the mind.”<…> And is it possible to use a smaller mind to judge a larger one? And then a person is even mad if, being not great himself, he judges a great man who far exceeds him in intelligence. But, our God! Is it possible to count all the miracles of Your omnipotence, which at every step stop and amaze the attentive? And how, after this, do we dare, with a mind that disappears in Your mind, like the slightest drop in the abyss of the sea, how dare we hesitate to hesitate when You, the omnipotent Lord of creation, proclaim incorruptibility to this corruptible?” . The most remarkable thing is that the words highlighted here in italics are not in the source itself - “The Word on the Day of the Resurrection of Christ” unknown author from “Christian Reading”. According to the authors of the notes to the collected works of the writer, “they probably belong to Gogol himself.”

This proves, on the one hand, that the problem of pride of mind, raised in the chapter “Bright Sunday” (circa 1846), worried Gogol back in 1843–44. On the other hand, the organic inclusion of one’s own thoughts in the context of the sermon “The Word on the Day of the Resurrection of Christ” anticipated the features of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends”, oriented towards the patristic tradition. It is not for nothing that Gogol called his handwritten collection “Selected passages from the works of St. fathers and teachers of the Church."

According to Gogol, anger penetrates the world precisely along this road - “the road of the mind, and on the wings of magazine sheets, like an all-destroying locust, attacks the hearts of people everywhere.” This metaphor has its source in the Revelation of St. John the Theologian, which tells about the end of the world.

And out of the smoke came locusts onto the earth, and they were given the power that the scorpions of the earth have. And she was told not to harm the grass of the earth, or any greenery, or any tree, but only to people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. And she was given not to kill them, but only to torture them for five months; and her torment is like the torment of a scorpion when it stings a person<…>She had armor on her, like iron armor, and the noise from her wings was like the sound of chariots when many horses run to war.(Rev 9:3–5,9).

The Bible speaks of locust attacks several more times (Ex 10:4–6; Ps 104:34–35), but only in the Apocalypse does it become an image of heartache.

Continuing to reflect on what prevents us from “celebrating Bright Sunday,” Gogol talks about the “stupidest laws” of his time. “What does this fashion mean, insignificant, insignificant, which man allowed as a trifle, as an innocent matter, and which now, like a complete mistress, has already begun to rule our homes, driving out everything that is most important and best in man? No one is afraid to transgress the first and most sacred laws of Christ several times a day and yet is afraid not to fulfill her slightest command, trembling before her like a timid boy.”

This passage makes us recall the lyrical digression from the first volume of “Dead Souls,” which says: “And more than once not only a broad passion, but an insignificant passion for something small grew in one born to the best deeds, forced him to forget great and holy duties and to see the great and holy in insignificant trinkets.” Thus, we are once again convinced that both at the stylistic and ideological level, many (and, perhaps, the best) passages from “Selected Places” are consonant with the lyrical digressions from “Dead Souls”.

But Gogol paints death modern society in even darker colors: “And the earth was already on fire with an incomprehensible melancholy; life becomes stale and stale; everything becomes smaller and smaller, and only one gigantic image of boredom grows in the sight of everyone, reaching immeasurable growth every day. Everything is silent, the grave is everywhere. God! Your world is becoming empty and scary!”

But death, according to the writer, must certainly be followed by resurrection. Customs “die in the letter, but come to life in the spirit,” writes Gogol. “Not a grain of what is truly Russian in it and what is sanctified by Christ Himself will not die from our antiquity. It will spread ringing strings poets, will be announced by the fragrant lips of the saints, the darkened will flare up - and the holiday of Bright Sunday will be celebrated as it should be, before us, than among other peoples!”

It should be noted that in the symbolism of “Selected Places” Jerusalem is Russia - the image promised land, Heavenly Fatherland. It is on this note that Gogol ends his book and chapter “Bright Sunday”: “...finally, we have courage, akin to no one, and if some task appears to us all, absolutely impossible for any other people, even , for example, to suddenly and at once throw off all our shortcomings, everything that disgraces the high nature of man, then with the pain of our own body, without sparing ourselves, as in the twelfth year, without sparing our property, we burned our houses and earthly wealth, so it will rush from us to throw off everything that shames and stains us, not a single soul will lag behind the other, and at such moments all quarrels, hatreds, enmities - everything is forgotten, brother will hang on his brother’s chest, and all of Russia is one person. Based on this, we can say that the feast of the Resurrection of Christ will be celebrated earlier among us than among others.”

The beginning or the end?

Thus, Gogol in his book, speaking about life, about Russia, about Russian poetry, builds a story in the image of Great Lent. The chapters of “Selected Places” correspond to the main stages of the Lenten path to the Resurrection that the Church goes through. Thus, Gogol points out that only in the Church is fullness of life, fullness of creativity, true spiritual rebirth possible: then and only then “in our country, before in any other land, will the Bright Resurrection of Christ be celebrated!”

Now the rejection of “Selected Places...” by the writer’s contemporaries becomes largely understandable. It was caused by misunderstanding and rejection of the very tradition on which Gogol relied - church and patristic. On the other hand, Nikolai Vasilyevich, trying to carefully follow it, is far from always impeccable, which was noted by both secular and clergy (in particular, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov).

Finally, the very image of a preacher and teacher of life, borrowed from the mentioned tradition, did not at all correspond to the real status of Gogol - a writer and a secular person. Gogol, carried away by the rhetorical pathos of his work, did not foresee this “effect of disappointed expectations” among readers. What happened is what A. A. Volkov writes about in the book “Fundamentals of Russian Rhetoric”, in which, by the way, he consistently analyzes the rhetorical aspect of Russian fiction: “The image of a rhetorician is gradually emerging<…>the audience will evaluate new statements based on the image of the rhetorician that has developed in its mind. The entire rhetorical career is determined by the image of the rhetorician, and if this image is built incorrectly, it can be interrupted.” Apparently, something similar happened to Gogol.

Fortunately, the chapter “Bright Sunday,” written in a single inspired impulse, is free from a teacher’s tone and excessive moralizing. Apparently, it is best pages Gogol’s book allowed Pushkin’s friend, the famous writer P. A. Pletnev, to call “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” “the beginning of Russian literature proper.” Or maybe this is a continuation of ancient Russian literature?

Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron overcoat...

M. Bulgakov

1.Requiem aeternam

(Eternal peace...)

Very often I came to these rooms, stood for a long time between the bookshelves, imagining exactly where his bed was, and how he lay, turned to the wall, and in response to all questions and attempts to touch him, he either remained silent, or sadly begged to leave him. I also tried to imagine his exhausted face with black, dull hollows of the eye sockets and a sunken mouth, but every time I saw his face calm and serene, without pain and without suffering, focused on some kind of inner vision and internal conversation. And then it seemed to me that he begged not to disturb him, so that he would not be torn away from this internal dialogue with someone, and that he wanted to finish it before he left our world...

And again and again I imagined people gathered in the yard. There are so many of them that they all couldn’t fit in this tiny courtyard, and they stand in a crowd on Nikitsky Boulevard, constantly looking at the windows and doors, and greedily catching every word of the household and servants who sometimes come out of the doors. "What did they say?" - rushes through the crowd. “Which is very bad,” they answer without hesitation. - He's lying down. Lost in sleep” - “Maybe he’ll let you go again?” - "Not anymore. It is his last days" Someone took off their hat and crossed themselves, someone breathes on their frozen hands. Everyone is waiting. Nobody leaves...

Many times I thought about other, happy days, and then for some reason I wanted it to be summer and open windows onto the boulevard and into the small front garden; when Gogol, standing at the desk, hastily covered sheets of paper, then suddenly suddenly stopped and peered intently at what he had written - like an artist takes a step away from the painting in order to look at it better; and suddenly, with a deft stroke, he inserted a word or fragment of a phrase. Or he would suddenly write a whole paragraph on an awkwardly small piece of paper. Scraps of paper, as well as sheets of writing, partially or completely, are scattered everywhere: on the desk, on the parquet boards, on the carpet. Some are crossed out, some are drawn. But this is not chaos, this is the beginning of order, the construction, or rather, the creation of a new world.

Sometimes the door to the room opens, but Gogol does not turn around, he is too carried away; A boy, the servant Semyon, briskly looks into the room: “The coffee is ready and has been cooling for a long time. If you please..." - but Gogol's back is motionless, his head is lowered, and the boy - the servant, without finishing speaking, disappears.

And suddenly Gogol laughs: some character made a joke - he made a mistake, slipped absurdly on the straight road of the story he had begun, but immediately the road began to swerve. And the story began to grow and wobble, and headed wherever it wanted. And that’s all: Chichikov’s chaise jumped up at a turn and, Chichikov, who had dozed off in his dreams, opened one eye slightly and scolded Selifan. And again the road, the dust, the summer heat filled with flowers... The scene is over. Gogol puts the final point and, looking out the open window at the summer Nikitsky Boulevard, - sunlight scatters like a shining rain over the green leaves; asks how the person is very loving life: “Are you saying the coffee is getting cold?”

But then again the icy February morning rose before my eyes, a little over eight o’clock, when the doors of the house opened and a servant, who appeared on the threshold, said quietly but clearly: “That’s it... died... tormented... moved away...” No one asks again, not even those standing in the front garden , nor waiting on the boulevard. Everyone silently understood. Many in the crowd knelt.)

("Day of Wrath...")

And for a long time it has been determined for me by someone else’s power to go

hand in hand with mine strange heroes, look around

hugely rushing life, look at it through

visible to the world laughter and invisible, invisible tears to him.

N. Gogol “Dead Souls”.

Here he is, bent over, freezing, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, sitting in the very center of Moscow behind cast-iron gates, “in plain sight and reliably hidden from view.” Everyone knows Arbat Square in Moscow, but what about the small shady palisade?

The name Gogol is carved on a cubic pedestal made of black granite. This is rather not even a name, but rather the fate of a stone - to be surrounded on four sides by a round dance - a crowd - a series of faces and grimaces, faces and grins, faces and faces of wonderful, alarming and incredible creatures, released into this world with the press of a pen. This is the painful fate of granite to be crushed from above by the statue of a man who, just now, kneeling in front of the fire flaring in the stove, threw in the notebooks of “Dead Souls” one after another. Just as at the very beginning, in his early youth, having completely bought up all copies of the poem “Hans Küchelgarten,” Gogol destroyed it in a fire. Thus, his entire literary life is, as it were, placed in burning brackets from two poems by Hans Küchelgarten and the second volume of Dead Souls.

(The sculptor Andreev worked on the monument for four years. He went to the village of Shishaki and drew in detail the local residents for the images of the round dance on the pedestal. And now Ostap and Andriy are ready, respectfully walking a little further away from Taras’s father, and now Chub has appeared along with Vakula and Solokhoi. They say that at the Smolensk market Andreev found a thin, hook-nosed and long-haired model from whom he sculpted the figure of Gogol. That is, all the images of his monument were not a game of the mind. They were sculpted from living people of flesh and blood.

Andreev managed to do the same thing that, many years later, Shostakovich did in music. With the help of his soulful talent, the sculptor Andreev talentedly read Gogol so that his beautiful and tragic world opened up and let him in. After all, what is a talented reading if not the keys to the writer’s world? And so, when Gogol’s reality opened up to the sculptor Andreev and the composer Shostakovich and let them in, they, each in their own expressive means they conveyed and described it and returned back to our world. Andreev brought with him a monument to Gogol, and Shostakovich brought two operas “The Nose” and “The Players”).

("Trumpet call...")

There are two types of melancholy. Congenital melancholy and melancholy that arose during life, acquired. A person with innate melancholy is sad, plunged into grief without reason, in everything he looks for tragedy and anguish. These are its properties. With them he came into the world. This man is deeply unhappy from birth.

And how scary it is to imagine a cheerful and laughing person who came into our world to rejoice, and not to be upset, and if he sees sorrow, then immediately turn it into joy, or at least give hope for salvation, and who will ultimately end his life life as a suffering melancholic person approaching death.

What should have been done with Gogol?

What kind of hell did you have to show him?

How can one offend his soul so that the joy he carries within himself would turn over and turn into bitterness and sorrow? So that a life-loving person from birth, capable of having fun from the simple, original joys of life, he would spend his last days mutely turning to the wall and begging not to touch him and not to hurt him?

(The first time I saw Andreev’s monument was when I was twelve years old. It amazed me, and I firmly decided that I would often return here, fortunately we lived then on Vspolny Lane, on Patriarch's Ponds, and it was very close to go. I wanted to understand that when in different light V different time day will happen with this cast iron statue, with this wonderful bowed face. To look Gogol in the face, to meet his eyes, you had to throw your head up, and then an amazing picture would open up: overgrown tree branches were intertwined into a web or lattice, this became especially clear in late autumn, when the branches were bare, but between them there was a blue gap - a window the sky burst in, and from this gap looked out the tragic face of Gogol. What I especially remember about his face was the pupils of his eyes. They were two narrow hollow tunnels in stone eye sockets, absorbing light. And I immediately thought that if you walk through them, like through corridors, you can see how his thoughts were born.

When I came in winter to look at the “bent” Gogol, I remember how the snow creaked under my feet, and the residents of nearby houses were walking their dogs on short leashes. They were talking quietly, and the dogs were barking loudly, and it seemed to me that Gogol was heavier than usual: on the lapel of his cast-iron overcoat the snow lay like a heavy snowdrift, and tears flowed from his black eye sockets.

By evening, frost began, and tears became white narrow stripes of ice on a black face. And still talking quietly and smoking short cigarettes with red dancing flashes of fire at the end as they walked, the residents walked their dogs, and they barked loudly, loudly, rejoicing at the approaching twilight and the stinging, light frost, diving deeper into the bottom of my memory so that, breathing heavily , emerge on its surface on a February night, in a dream. In the dream, it seemed to me that these were not cigarette butts smoking, clutched in the fingers of people walking in the twilight, but tightly rolled sheets of the second volume of Dead Souls, lit at the end. They circled around the square, getting closer and closer to the cast-iron Gogol, quietly ordering their dogs to be silent. Finally, they stopped, huddled near his granite pedestal, and, throwing back their heads, began to peer into his black face with frozen stains of tears, trying to meet his eyes. They shook the flaring notebook sheets of “Dead Souls” and each of them asked: “Do you know what it’s like to burn alive in a fire?” Do you know how scary it is - out of life and straight into the flames?...Why did you let us into this world and immediately send us to torment? We wanted to come here so much, we came to you at night, showing ourselves, telling all our most secret things, just so you would let us in on paper, but if we only knew what you would do then... we would not have come. Why did you burn us, Nikolai Vasilyevich? How have we angered you? Why did he send us to death? Do you know how scary it is to burn? “And the sheets of “Dead Souls” in their hands kept flaring up, gloomily and lifelessly illuminating the ghostly faces of the characters. And now the landowner Tentetnikov was writhing in suffering and asking: “Why did I not please you, Nikolai Vasilyevich? Why did you treat me so terribly, so cruelly?” and held on a leash a quietly growling bow-legged bulldog, terribly gaping his teeth. “And I, I also wanted to move on with my life,” a short, stocky man in shiny patent leather boots jumped up after him. “I wasn’t going into the fire.” It’s scary in the fire: suffering is beyond my strength... Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, your dear child, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov!” And Selifan remained gloomily, frowningly silent, stretching out his hands to the fair-haired, purebred girls, wrapped in scarves over warm sheepskin coats. But as soon as Selifan managed to touch them, immediately the white, smooth hands of the girls with whom he twirled in a round dance, with their tight skin moist with tenderness, turned black and crumbled into ashes and dust. And then the dogs began to bark madly, frantically: the sheets of “Dead Souls” burned out, and their disembodied owners lost strength and could no longer hold them... From the barking of mad dogs, which I dreamed about in a dream, I woke up in reality. One morning in Gogol's small park I saw a whole flock of dead stray dogs in the snow. Crows screamed, circling over the dark snow. Then, in the early 90s, “knackers cleaned the center”: they shot stray dogs at night, closer to spring, and did not even always take away their exhausted corpses, exhausted and hoarse... They simply left them on the black, hoarse snow...

It felt good and almost carefree in May, when on gentle evenings Gogol’s face softened and warmed, and seemed inexpressibly beautiful among the blossoming greenery, the smells and buzz of summer. The library windows were open to the front garden, and stacks of heavy volumes lay on the window sills. Bookshelves with absolutely living bindings were looked through, and the quick hands of librarians moved them from place to place. But I don’t remember the faces: only flexible, hasty hands with intelligent fingers. It all looked like a strange theater of fingers and books.

Sometimes, cars driving along Nikitsky (then Suvorovsky Boulevard) accidentally, for a moment, illuminated Gogol with headlights. And then, in response, it flashed gold, and a long, black shadow monument lying on the asphalt. She seemed embossed, almost alive. It also seemed that everything around was falling into Gogol’s long shadow: nearby houses, streets and alleys, as well as boulevards - Tverskoy, Nikitsky and Prechistensky (Gogolevsky); and begins to live according to his fantastic laws. Him and his shadow.

I also noticed that after the rain, a long transparent drop hangs from Gogol’s long, sensitive nose. This seemed funny to me. A little later I read about this drop in “A Romance with Cocaine”).

Rex tremende majestatis.

(“The formidable and majestic king...”)

The nature of laughter is diverse. So Gogol’s laughter is a saving laughter, it is a shield between despair, infernal fear and the human soul. Fear leads a person to madness and death, but if you laugh at fear in time, it will seem small and insignificant and will lose its power. Gogol made fun of the devil all his life, “this eternal monkey of God,” according to Merezhkovsky, “begun and unfinished, but posing as something that has no beginning and end.”

“I planned to write something funnier than the devil,” Gogol will say about the “Inspector General” he planned. - In “The Inspector General” I decided to collect in one pile everything bad in Russia that I knew then, all the injustices that are done in those places and in those cases where justice is most required from a person; and laugh at everything at once.”

Gogol has that special, heightened vision that makes it possible to see that laughter is spread everywhere in the world, and that not only people and their actions and their conversations are funny, but also the words that make up their conversations and the sounds that make up the words. and the letters that express these sounds. Suffice it to recall the “fita with her hands on her hips,” which Nozdryov considered an extremely indecent letter.

In Gogol's world, laughter is a shield, it is a king, it is a Savior.

One of the lives of the saints speaks of two brothers who decided to take the path of repentance. They separated for a year, and one of them wept and bitterly repented, mourning his sins, and the other had fun and rejoiced, triumphant that he had renounced his sinful life once and for all. And when a year later both appeared to their confessor, he admitted that both paths were saving.

Gogol, unlike his follower Dostoevsky, who decomposed the algorithm of suffering and sorrow, knew how to escape through laughter.

5. Recordare, Jesu pie... “Remember, merciful Lord...”)

There are writers who read their works in a dull and colorless manner, but this in no way detracts from the quality of their literature or their artistic talent. This only means that, most likely, their writing is narrative, not reproducing.

Eikhenbaum quite rightly distinguished two styles of writing - narrative, that is, outlining events, and reproducing, that is, recreating reality. He wrote that our literature is not the literature of adventure novels, in which one exciting action is followed by the next, even more extraordinary, it is, first of all, a literature of language, a literature of inconspicuous details and trifles that it would be logical to list separated by a comma, or not to mention at all, but which are painted in such a way that they themselves come to life and fill and spiritualize with true life, that is significant for the sake of which the author began to write.

As a rule, these kinds of writers are so receptive to language that their linguistic sense resembles the absolute pitch of a musician. And the intonations of the voice are so rich and varied that they can be compared to the voices of singers with great range and flexibility. Such writers read their works perfectly, but I want to emphasize! not as an actor, but as a writer.

Gogol read inimitably. Without being an actor, he turned each of his readings to the public into theater. He skillfully and comically imitated speech, sounds, and words. He inserted exclamations and interjections, which so necessary complement any character... Sometimes Gogol suddenly fell silent, and at these moments the facial expressions of his face spoke for him... And then suddenly he threw aside the comic as unnecessary and switched to the highest pathos, worthy of the authors of antiquity. Eikhenbaum cites Annenkov’s testimony about how Gogol dictated to the copyist a description of Plyushkin’s garden, did not even dictate, but simply created it in words, where instead of colors there were metaphors, and flexible, soulful intonations with brush strokes...

You can try to complete the picture: here Gogol is sitting in a chair, here are his beautiful words flowing, here he fell silent for a moment to catch his breath... Exhale... And with him in the air, like the invisible Kitezh-grad, Plyushkin’s garden appears, twilight, half-deserted, smoking from wet flowering, with vague outlines of branches, the leaves of which turn into a ghostly greenish haze...

One famous trip from Kyiv to Moscow can be described as follows: there were three of them - the writer Danilevsky, young Gogol, dressed with a strange, wild panache, and Pashchenko, Gogol’s friend from the Nezhin Lyceum. They urgently needed to get to Moscow, and they were forced to rent a stroller. (Gogol, impeccably sensitive to language, will later describe Chichikov’s chaise, rapidly rushing along Russian roads. He will replace the neutral “carriage” with a “britzka”. After all, what is a britzka if not onomatopoeia? Its wheels hit roadside stones and boulders, bounce on ruts - kick! kick! - they buck like a restive horse.)

Gogol persuades Paschenko to go ahead and warn all the station employees that an inspector is coming to them, pursuing his hidden goal, wanting to remain incognito... Needless to say, Paschenko’s childhood comrade, without any hesitation, agrees...

And then a carriage with Danilevsky and Gogol enters the station. Gogol is immediately and unconditionally mistaken for an auditor. And here you can imagine his appearance: a face that laughs, not with a smile. But only with facial expressions, tension internal muscles, long sharp nose, as if sniffing out something, finding out, long hair, neatly laid out on both sides of the parting and dark, almost black under-eyes around the attentive eyes. He could have been wearing an impeccable frock coat and a poisonously bright vest, causing surprise not for its tastelessness, but rather for its unusual color... Of course, such a person is impossible not to notice, and, of course, he is no one else. Like an auditor traveling incognito.

(According to contemporaries, Gogol was a dandy, but his attitude towards his appearance looked strange. He could flawlessly, according to latest fashion, get dressed, but he could dress up awkwardly and even ridiculously, and at the same time remain very pleased with himself. Gogol's dapperness is rather literary. Clothes are a metaphor for him. He needed to convey his idea of himself, to express an invented image, and not to dress like a fashionista. And if some small parts were sticking out - so from under the wig, which he, having shaved his head, at one time wore, there were inner secret ribbons hanging down - then this did not interest him at all.)

At the stations, the newly-minted inspector Gogol behaved, of course, like a private person, but under the outer gentleness and goodwill, the vestment of power involuntarily slipped through. Feigning curiosity, the inspector Gogol suddenly unexpectedly asked: “Please show me the condition of your horses?”, and Danilevsky followed him, strictly and silently.

Of course, they were immediately given the best horses. And soon, extremely quickly, they reached Moscow.

6. Confutatis maledictis

(“Having overthrown those who slander ...”)

Belinsky's idea of a little man is as far from literature as the idea of humanism is from the Russian, Christian worldview. She is good for Smerdyakov and for his successor, the completely crazy Peredonov. Of course, Peredonov and Smerdyakov are literary characters, but their flesh and blood father, Smerdyakov and Ardalyon Borisovich Peredonov, was Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky.

It is he, little demon Belinsky wrote his vile letters to Gogol, in which he expressed deep doubt in Gogol’s understanding of the nature of Russian man and with scrofulous resentment stood up for a certain hypothetical peasant, whom Gogol in “Dead Souls” called “an unwashed snout” and, choking with rage and sarcasm, talks about social reasons for the unwashedness of this same man who never existed.

All this has nothing to do with literature, and carries nothing in itself except anger and personal injury.

It would be better not to talk about these nasty letters at all, but nothing stings more than the sting of anger and the sting of mediocrity, and the second is more painful.

Here is a sad excerpt from Gogol’s letter, striking in its sincerity, an answer to a low, unworthy man, whose entire work was not worth even one Gogol line: “...Write the most cruel criticisms, go through all the words you know in order to humiliate a person, contribute to ridicule of me in the eyes of your readers, without sparing the most sensitive strings, perhaps the most tender heart - my soul will endure all this, although not without pain, and not without sorrowful shocks. (...note that despite all the despair, Gogol still talks about criticism of his work. Apparently, he didn’t even perceive Belinsky’s scolding as criticism...) But it’s hard, very hard for me, I tell you this truly, when there is a personal feeling against me even bitterness evil person, and I considered you as kind person. Here is a sincere statement of my feelings!”

The surprising thing is that this insignificant image of the “little man,” this painful recovery of Belinsky’s mind “stamped” Gogol’s work for a long time and turned several generations of Russian children away from literature. Was it a tragic whim of history, or payment for genius, or the revenge of the most vulgar of the average, the ape God, whom Gogol ridiculed all his life?

And yet, in Russian schools, Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is still analyzed from a sensually naive and literary helpless point of view, and not from the position of Eikhenbaum, for example. “The spiritual world of Akaki Akakievich (if such an expression is permissible) is not insignificant (this was brought in by our naive and sensitive literary historians, hypnotized by Belinsky), but fantastically closed, his own: “There, in this rewriting, he saw his own diverse (!) and a pleasant world... Outside of this rewriting, it seemed that nothing existed for him” (Eikhenbaum “How Gogol’s “The Overcoat” was Made.”

What Bulgakov lived in the confined space of his room, Gogol tried to live in the open space of his life. And I again remembered the comical rehearsal trip for “The Inspector General,” and suddenly, one of its hidden meanings became clear... Gogol will tell a sparkling joke, and his friends will immediately laugh, and he, along with them, will curve his lips into a smile, feigning laughter. Gogol never laughed at his own jokes.

The wheels of the chaise creak, and quietly, just as secret pictures are revealed to invisible sight in the pauses between laughter and conversations, so to invisible hearing the tragic words become discernible in the creaking of the wheels: “Oro supplex el acclinis,

(“I pray, kneeling”),

cor contritum quasi cinis

("with a heart breaking into dust")

gere curam mei finis

(“give me salvation after my death”).” “Here are the ashes of my heart,” it seemed to me that Gogol was thinking. “Laugh so as not to be afraid...”

(I like reading room Gogol Library on the second floor. I usually sit facing the window so that I can see the square of the front garden and the monument with a long shadow standing in its center.

I'm usually alone here. Sometimes two or three literary scholars from nearby houses come, cover themselves with books and go deep into their own world. And I'm alone again. I'm reading Hoffmann and writing a novel.

But one morning we all raised our heads from our desks, because he came in, loud and heavy, a small, square man in a wide tracksuit. He looked as if he had just fallen out of the binding of a book that had fallen with a crash from the shelf, and did not know how to get back. He walked with a decisive step towards the library counter: “I am the head of the council,” he said and threw a red square ID onto the counter. “Is everyone clear?” - “Departments of what?” - I thought. "Do you want books?" - asked the librarian girl. “No, of course” - “What then?” “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just that your Gogol never lived here... Everyone is Gogol, Gogol... But he was never here...” “Let’s leave this to the historians,” the girl suggested peacefully. And one could agree and leave or stay and sit down at the far table with a stack of newspapers and other periodicals, but this nervous square man turned into a Gogol ghoul and hissed, barely restraining his rage: “Yes, we’ve been living here for three hundred years,” and immediately It became clear that there are some mysterious “we who have lived for three hundred years on the Arbat,” and in front of us is the head of their council. Ghoul councils. “You know, we’ve been here for a long time, but we haven’t seen any Gogol.” I'm telling you, he's not here and never was. And this statue should be moved, taken away from here... In general, they wanted to melt it down, but they just hid it, but it’s a pity...” Then a well-mannered girl, a librarian, should have said that he was interfering with her work, but she didn’t have time. A square man in a tracksuit started shouting: “Do you even know how Gogol died? He... he was buried alive, and he has no grave!” - and passionately began to throw books off the tables and counter.

At that moment, quickly rising from the first floor, a female security guard in a strict black uniform ran in and whistled shrilly into a plastic whistle on a chain...)

(“This is a tearful day...”)

...shame on anyone who attracts any attention to

rotting dust, which is no longer mine: he will bow to the worms, her

gnawing...

From Gogol's "Testament".

Rumors that Gogol was buried alive are shameful. They were disbanded by ghouls who have lived on the Arbat for three hundred years, great-nephews of the critic Belinsky.

There is a lot of evidence that Gogol’s agony, which lasted several days, was painful, and the treatment was like torture, and that the famous Moscow doctor Alexei Terentyevich Tarasenkov avoided meeting with Dr. Over, who prescribed Gogol leeches on the nose, ice water on the crown, wrapping wet sheets and other painful procedures, and called him “an executioner doctor, convinced that he was saving a person.”

And yet, the leading doctors of the time, who were able to distinguish death from lethargy, tried to save Gogol. The undeniable death of Gogol was also witnessed by the sculptor Ramazanov, who removed the death mask from the deceased...

When Gogol's ashes were transferred from the Danilovsky Monastery to the Novodevichy Cemetery, his coffin was blasphemously opened. One of those huddled over the coffin cut off the tail of the deceased’s frock coat and then bound an edition of “Dead Souls” into it, and sold it, they say, for a lot of money. And here the line of the psalm that sounds every Good Friday in every Orthodox church involuntarily comes to mind: “...divide my garments for yourselves, and draw lots for my clothes...”

They tormented and tortured him during his life, and after his death, having pulled away the boards of the coffin, they plunged their hands into a pile of swarming worms, decay and decay.

It was these people, hunters of other people's suffering, running with pleasure and animal fear to watch someone else's execution, it was they who spread the rumor that Gogol did not die, but fell into lethargy, and in this state was interred.

8.Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae

(Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory...)

(That summer we realized how wonderful and unbearably difficult it was to be covered with the hollow of his cast-iron overcoat...

The front garden around Gogol has grown and bloomed. In the flowerbed around the pedestal there were pale yellow marigolds planted by the library workers... We often climbed one of the trees, sat on the wide bend of its trunk just at the level of the pedestal and looked down. At that time, hippies gathered in the courtyard of house No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard, and this place was called “small gogol”...

So, we sat in a tree and, dangling our legs in delight, looked down at two hippies in torn pants, with carefully unwashed hair, standing in front of two open sketchbooks. We knew one of them. He lived in the janitor's room, in a small section of the estate with a separate door, locked with a heavy barn lock. When it was especially hot, the door to his janitor's room was open, and we saw rough-hewn shelves with rows of paintings or simply primed canvases. Below, on the floor, stood a bed with its legs removed, and in the corner there was a broom and two wide shovels for clearing snow, which had never been touched by the hands of the janitor's occupant. We were amused by his long Gogol-style nose and thin chicken neck. He and his friend were about nineteen years old, and we considered them very old men. A middle-aged lady was bustling between the sketchbooks of two hippies, dispensing some pretty good advice left and right. The lady was wearing an emerald green suit: a green skirt and a matching jacket over a shiny red shirt with numerous watch straps printed on its fabric. “Well, where, tell me, did you see such a shadow? - the lady asked heart-rendingly and, in confirmation of her words, shook the palm of one hand, and forefinger the second rested against the canvas on the sketchbook. She was a teacher at an art school, and these two guys were her students. And she didn’t care at all that they had ragged pants, long hair and beaded T-shirts. We were serenely swinging our legs, and a stout lady shouted to us that very soon we would fall, and then turned to her students, who were trying to portray the black Gogol of St. Andrew. “Don’t you see,” she said soulfully to our friend the janitor, “don’t you see his face? – I remembered her next words for the rest of my life: after all, he is two-faced, look closely. He has two profiles. One laughs, the other cries, and both of them are molded into a whole in his cast-iron face...” And then her student immediately stretched his long-haired head forward on a chicken neck, and the nostrils of his nose fluttered excitedly, as if he was trying to see through the smell... It seemed from the side that he and Gogol are touching each other’s noses.

Then I saw him, shaking his long, unwashed hair, desperately bargaining for a bunch of dark blue eggplants at the Palashevsky market, and when the merchant was ready to give in to him, he suddenly did not find his wallet and completely serenely walked away from the counter, whistling something... something pleasant and melodic...

Very often I come here, to this courtyard, once called “small Gogol”, and, remembering my childhood, I think that linear time exists only in our human consciousness. In reality there is only one liturgical time when all times through and through occur in one instant. And then it turns out that it was not the folds of the window curtain that formed in such a way that the outline of a person appeared, but that perhaps it was Gogol himself, who had just finished writing the episode and approached the window, and that right here and now there are crowds of people waiting for the terrible and mysterious news of his death, and that right now the ghouls and ghouls from literature have crowded over his open coffin, and are stretching their hands to his decay, realizing that they will never reach his shining soul, and that right now the granite pedestal of his monument is rushing upward, and he himself motionlessly looks down, like a knight in the Carpathians in the finale of “Terrible Vengeance,” and that right now we are sitting on a tree, and we are twelve years old, and we are dangling our legs...

Towards the end of that summer, I went to the “small Gogol’s” to see if they, the hippie artists, were still painting there? When I was already running along the fence of the square, for some reason I remembered the testimony of one of Gogol’s friends that when he went to say goodbye to the dying man, he was overtaken by two men carrying the coffin lid, and he realized that he was late... When I entered the gate, I saw that there was no coffin, but that it was just him, the long-nosed hippie artist, being carried in the arms of several of his friends. His head was thrown back helplessly, his embroidered T-shirt riding up to reveal a sunken belly so gaunt you could feel his vertebrae. It was the same with Gogol. While they were carrying him, he screamed in pain and fear, and his pulse in the solar plexus was frantically beating. The door to the janitor's room was opened wide, and he was laid on a bed without legs. All of his paintings turned out to be turned towards the wall, except for one, a sketch of Andreevsky Gogol. The floor was littered with syringes. So he lay under the unfinished sketch, and I never saw him again).

" Victim…"

...the solemnity of death is in its immobility. Life does not end, but, as it were, freezes on the threshold of eternity.

Gogol, festively decorated for burial, according to our Russian custom, lay on the table. One of his eyes was slightly open, as if he still wanted to see his loved ones and loved ones, to know what was happening to them, and to take a farewell look at this world that he was about to leave. One of those who came to say goodbye put a laurel wreath on him.

And even when the death mask was removed from his face, even then his eye did not close. He was still looking at our world, still saying goodbye...

I often imagined how next to his body, invisible to human eyes, his soul stood, as if on bright popular prints, which in my childhood were secretly kept in our home and worried my mind...

(Once at school I didn’t know what to write in an essay on a free topic. “My friend Gogol,” I painstakingly wrote in my student notebook and put bold point, because I couldn’t add another word. The lesson had just started, but I handed over my notebook and went out into the corridor. My friend came out next. Maybe she wrote something? Shaking with laughter, we hid in the locker room and, throwing other people's softer coats onto the floor, lay down on them and began to read aloud to each other “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.” We were still twelve years old. We didn't think about what would happen next. They didn’t want to... My friend was very worried about Ivan Nikiforovich’s pleated trousers, which, if inflated, could fit the entire yard with barns, a house and other buildings in them. And I was very interested in Agafia Fedoseevna, who bit off the ear of the assessor, and, after some time, grew in Russian literature to the size of Stavrogin. I carefully looked for traces of her further presence in the story...

We were absolutely happy).

("Holy God...)

...the coffin with Gogol’s body was solemnly transferred to the university church on Bolshaya Nikitskaya. All the way from Tolstoy’s house to the church itself, students and university professors carried his coffin in their arms, passing it to each other.

In the church the coffin was placed on a hearse.

It seemed that the whole city had come to say goodbye to the writer. Gogol was lying in laurel wreath, reminiscent of Dante's embossed images.

For two days in a row, due to the crowd of people, travel along Bolshaya Nikitskaya was impossible.

On Sunday the funeral service took place, and the deceased was carried in their arms all the way to the Danilov Monastery. It turned out that he, passing from hand to hand, was floating over the streets of Moscow...

(When I was studying at Literary Institute, then once at a seminar they mercilessly destroyed my friend’s play, which seemed to me successful. He was a coldish, imperturbable person, and he always accepted all the abuse directed at him with indifference or laughed... When I went out into the corridor, he stood turning to the window, his shoulders trembled, and it was not clear whether he was laughing, or crying. I never expected tears from this man. But when I approached, his face was shining, and a transparent drop was hanging from the tip of his nose. And instead of saying: “You have good play“, I accidentally said: “You have a drop on your nose” - “Like Gogol in your park?” - he immediately responded. “Well, yes...” - and I thought he would laugh, but he slowly, forcefully smiled, and suddenly calmed down completely).

("Blessed...")

Rozanov wrote about the impossibility of explaining the riddle of Gogol, about the impossibility of using ordinary logic to interpret his life and understand even the simplest actions. Despite numerous evidence and the known facts of his biography, Gogol is impenetrable. And all the unambiguous interpretations and indisputable evidence about him look rather helpless and funny.

No matter how many assumptions are made, we will never know for certain the reason why Gogol sent his “Dead Souls” to the fire.

There is a well-known story from Semyon, a serf boy who served Gogol, about how Gogol woke him up at three o’clock in the morning and ordered him to light the stove. Semyon replied that first he needed to open the pipe on the second floor, where everyone was sleeping, and that he was afraid of waking everyone up. Gogol convinced him to rise silently and move the shutter. And Semyon succeeded. Nobody woke up.

When the fire flared up, Gogol threw a tied stack of notebooks there, but it did not burn, but only slightly smoldered around the edges. Then Gogol took it out with a poker, untied it, and began throwing one notebook at a time into the fire, which instantly filled in and burned out quite quickly. And soon the entire stack, the entire second volume of Dead Souls, was burned.

The next morning, Gogol cried while talking to Count Tolstoy. He said that the evil one, out of revenge, prompted him to destroy the manuscript, which was the crown of his creations, and that after reading it, all his work, his purpose in literature became clear... And that now death was close, that it was breathing in his face, and There’s no time left, and he won’t have time to explain anything about himself...

Count Tolstoy was a generous man, and he had deep compassion for Gogol. Trying to feign indifference, he said: “After all, you have done this with your manuscripts before. They burned them. After all, this is a working moment for you. And then they rewrote it, and it turned out much better... And rewrite this. This means that there can be no talk of any death. That means she’s still far away!” At these words, Gogol perked up. “After all, you can remember what was written?” continued the count. “Of course I can,” and then Gogol calmed down. He stopped crying, and even remained cheerful until the end of the day...

Nothing hurts more than vulgarity.

The poet Berg told how, immediately after Gogol’s death, a cheap lithograph was published: Gogol in a robe in front of a blazing fireplace. Nearby, Semyon throws notebooks into the fire. Behind them lurked a carnival figure of Death with a scythe and other weapons.

Berg said that looking at this lithograph was pitiful and shameful, like making fun of someone else’s suffering.

(“Lamb of God...”)

Last words, written by Gogol’s hand, were as follows: “Unless you are small, like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

And the last thing he said, calmly, in full consciousness, after all the grief and sobbing: “How sweet it is to die!”

And here, at the very end, I would like to quote an excerpt from his “Reflections on the Divine Liturgy”: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God - as in a pure mirror of calm waters, not disturbed by either sand or mud, the pure vault of heaven is reflected, so in the mirror of a pure heart, not disturbed by passions, there is no longer anything human, and the image of God is reflected in it alone.” And now, another thing... For a long time I tried to understand what is so incredible the appeal of Andreevsky Gogol? Why, after all the monuments and portraits, do we return to him, here, to a small, semi-dark square with a cast-iron fence, where there is always shade and coolness and peace, as in a half-forgotten hidden corner of Plyushkin’s garden, where a double door leading into the house is hidden under semicircular arches? the former last refuge of Gogol, where the branches of overgrown trees intertwined into a vault, and in the wide opening of the vault, as if visible through a window transparent rectangle sky, and right from the sky, from this blue rectangle, a black cast-iron face looks down, and twilight and bad weather have settled, then you need to peer for a long time to discern its marvelous features? And finally, I saw... Here is the despair of his exhausted body, here is the helplessly lowered head, here are the dancing shadows and dazzling flashes of light around, here is the roar and smoke of passing cars, here are the cries of the night's staggering speech, here is the magnetic burning of fireworks in the pre-holiday sky, here is the ugly dwarf fear of the past, here is the demon of fear of the present... But his face... If you just look closely, and you still couldn’t look closely, you kept getting distracted by little things, responding with petty abuse to outbursts of abuse and malice...

His face did not ask riddles and clever questions that exhausted the mind and burned out the soul, but simply floated, framed by a blue rectangle of the sky... Black on blue...

His face itself was the answer to all questions about grief and sorrow from the very beginning, but for some reason we didn’t see...

His face, forever frozen in stone, always expressed peace and tranquility... Teacher, cover us all with your cast-iron overcoat, let us calm down in the blissful and majestic bliss of the Russian word...

B. Eikhenbaum “How Gogol’s “Overcoat” was Made”

V. Nabokov “Nikolai Gogol”

D. Merezhkovsky “Gogol and the Devil”

I. Pilishek “Monument to Gogol”

Compiled by P. Fokin “Gogol without gloss”

Ekaterina SADUR.

MY FRIEND GOGOL.

Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron overcoat.
M. Bulgakov.

1.Requiem aeternam
(Eternal peace...)

In the courtyard of house No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard there still stands, and I hope that it will forever remain, a beautiful monument to Gogol by the sculptor Andreev. Both this house and this monument are extremely important for Russian literature. It was here, in this estate, on the first floor, in bright, well-heated rooms, on March 4 (February 21, Old Style) in 1852. Gogol died, and it was this small courtyard during the last days of his life that was filled with people of all classes and ages who came to say goodbye, bow and kiss his cold hand and already cooled forehead for the last time.
(Very often I came to these rooms, stood for a long time between the bookshelves, imagining exactly where his bed was, and how he lay, turned to the wall, and in response to all questions and attempts to touch him, he either remained silent, or sadly begged to leave him. I also tried to imagine his exhausted face with black, dull hollows of the eye sockets and a sunken mouth, but every time I saw his face as calm and serene, without pain and without suffering, focused on some kind of inner vision and internal conversation. then it seemed to me that he was begging not to disturb him, so that he would not be torn away from this internal dialogue with someone, and that he wanted to finish it before he left our world...
And again and again I imagined people gathered in the yard. There are so many of them that they all couldn’t fit in this tiny courtyard, and they stand in a crowd on Nikitsky Boulevard, constantly looking at the windows and doors, and greedily catching every word of the household and servants who sometimes come out of the doors. "What did they say?" - rushes through the crowd. “Which is very bad,” they answer without hesitation. - He's lying down. Lost in sleep” - “Maybe he’ll let you go again?” - "Not anymore. These are his last days." Someone took off their hat and crossed themselves, someone breathes on their frozen hands. Everyone is waiting. Nobody leaves...
Many times I thought about other, happy days, and then for some reason I wanted it to be summer and open windows onto the boulevard and into the small front garden; when Gogol, standing at the desk, hastily covered sheets of paper, then suddenly suddenly stopped and peered intently at what he had written - like an artist takes a step away from the painting in order to look at it better; and suddenly, with a deft stroke, he inserted a word or fragment of a phrase. Or he would suddenly write a whole paragraph on an awkwardly small piece of paper. Scraps of paper, as well as sheets of writing, partially or completely, are scattered everywhere: on the desk, on the parquet boards, on the carpet. Some are crossed out, some are drawn. But this is not chaos, this is the beginning of order, the construction, or rather, the creation of a new world.
Sometimes the door to the room opens, but Gogol does not turn around, he is too carried away; A boy, the servant Semyon, briskly looks into the room: “The coffee is ready and has been cooling for a long time. If you please..." - but Gogol's back is motionless, his head is lowered, and the boy - the servant, without finishing speaking, disappears.
And suddenly Gogol laughs: some character made a joke - he made a mistake, slipped absurdly on the straight road of the story he had begun, but immediately the road began to swerve. And the story began to grow and wobble, and headed wherever it wanted. And that’s all: Chichikov’s chaise jumped up at a turn and, Chichikov, who had dozed off in his dreams, opened one eye slightly and scolded Selifan. And again the road, the dust, the summer heat filled with flowers... The scene is over. Gogol puts the last point and, looking out the open window, at the summer Nikitsky Boulevard, the sunlight scatters like a shining rain on the green leaves; asks, like a person who loves life very much: “Is the coffee getting cold, you say?”
But then again the icy February morning rose before my eyes, a little over eight o’clock, when the doors of the house opened and a servant, who appeared on the threshold, said quietly but clearly: “That’s it... died... tormented... moved away...” No one asks again, not even those standing in the front garden , nor waiting on the boulevard. Everyone silently understood. Many in the crowd knelt.)

2.Dies irae
("Day of Wrath...")
And for a long time it has been determined for me by someone else’s power to go
hand in hand with my strange heroes, look around
hugely rushing life, look at it through
laughter visible to the world and invisible tears invisible to him.
N. Gogol “Dead Souls”.
Here he is, bent over, freezing, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, sitting in the very center of Moscow behind cast-iron gates, “in plain sight and reliably hidden from view.”
Everyone knows Arbat Square in Moscow, but what about the small shady palisade?
The name Gogol is carved on a cubic pedestal made of black granite. This is rather not even a name, but the fate of a stone - to be surrounded on four sides by a round dance - a crowd - a series of faces and grimaces, faces and grins, faces and faces of wonderful, disturbing and incredible creatures released into this world with the pressure of a pen. This is the painful fate of granite to be crushed from above by the statue of a man who, just now, kneeling in front of the fire flaring in the stove, threw in the notebooks of “Dead Souls” one after another. Just as at the very beginning, in his early youth, having completely bought up all copies of the poem “Hans Küchelgarten,” Gogol destroyed it in a fire. Thus, his entire literary life is, as it were, placed in burning brackets from two poems by Hans Küchelgarten and the second volume of Dead Souls.
(The sculptor Andreev worked on the monument for four years. He went to the village of Shishaki and drew in detail the local residents for the images of the round dance on the pedestal. And now Ostap and Andriy are ready, respectfully walking a little further away from Taras’s father, and now Chub has appeared along with Vakula and Solokhoi. They say that at the Smolensk market Andreev found a thin, hook-nosed and long-haired model from whom he sculpted the figure of Gogol. That is, all the images of his monument were not a game of the mind. They were sculpted from living people of flesh and blood.
Andreev managed to do the same thing that, many years later, Shostakovich did in music. With the help of his soulful talent, the sculptor Andreev talentedly read Gogol so that his beautiful and tragic world opened up and let him in. After all, what is a talented reading if not the keys to the writer’s world? And so, when Gogol’s reality opened up to the sculptor Andreev and composer Shostakovich and let them in, they, each with their own expressive means, conveyed and described it and returned back to our world. Andreev brought with him a monument to Gogol, and Shostakovich brought two operas “The Nose” and “The Players”).

3. Tuba mirum
("Trumpet call...")
There are two types of melancholy. Congenital melancholy and melancholy that arose during life, acquired. A person with innate melancholy is sad, plunged into grief without reason, in everything he looks for tragedy and anguish. These are its properties. With them he came into the world. This man is deeply unhappy from birth.
And how scary it is to imagine a cheerful and laughing person who came into our world to rejoice, and not to be upset, and if he sees sorrow, then immediately turn it into joy, or at least give hope for salvation, and who will ultimately end his life life as a suffering melancholic person approaching death.
What should have been done with Gogol?
What kind of hell did you have to show him?
How can one offend his soul so that the joy he carries within himself would turn over and turn into bitterness and sorrow? So that a life-loving person from birth, capable of having fun from the simple, original joys of life, he would spend his last days mutely turning to the wall and begging not to touch him and not to hurt him?
(The first time I saw Andreev’s monument was when I was twelve. It amazed me, and I firmly decided that I would return here often, fortunately we lived then on Vspolny Lane, on the Patriarch’s Ponds, and it was very close to walk. I wanted to understand what in different light at different times of the day will happen to this cast iron statue, with this wonderful bowed face.To look into Gogol’s face, to meet his eyes, you had to throw your head up, and then an amazing picture would open: overgrown tree branches intertwined into a web or lattice, this became especially clear in late autumn, when the branches were bare, but between them there was a blue gap - a window - the sky burst in, and from this gap the tragic face of Gogol looked out. I especially remember the pupils of his eyes in his face. They were two narrow hollow tunnels in stone sockets , absorbing light. And I immediately thought that if you walk along them, like along corridors, you can see how his thoughts were born.
When I came in winter to look at the “bent” Gogol, I remember how the snow creaked under my feet, and the residents of nearby houses were walking their dogs on short leashes. They were talking quietly, and the dogs were barking loudly, and it seemed to me that Gogol was heavier than usual: on the lapel of his cast-iron overcoat the snow lay like a heavy snowdrift, and tears flowed from his black eye sockets.
By evening, frost began, and tears became white narrow stripes of ice on a black face. And still talking quietly and smoking short cigarettes with red dancing flashes of fire at the end as they walked, the residents walked their dogs, and they barked loudly, loudly, rejoicing at the approaching twilight and the stinging, light frost, diving deeper into the bottom of my memory so that, breathing heavily , emerge on its surface on a February night, in a dream. In the dream, it seemed to me that these were not cigarette butts smoking, clutched in the fingers of people walking in the twilight, but tightly rolled sheets of the second volume of Dead Souls, lit at the end. They circled the square, getting closer and closer to the cast-iron Gogol, quietly ordering their dogs to be silent. Finally, they stopped, huddled near his granite pedestal, and, throwing back their heads, began to peer into his black face with frozen stains of tears, trying to meet his eyes. They shook the flaring notebook sheets of “Dead Souls” and each of them asked: “Do you know what it’s like to burn alive in a fire?” Do you know how scary it is - out of life and straight into the flames?...Why did you let us into this world and immediately send us to torment? We wanted to come here so much, we came to you at night, showing ourselves, telling all our most secret things, just so you would let us in on paper, but if we only knew what you would do then... we would not have come. Why did you burn us, Nikolai Vasilyevich? How have we angered you? Why did he send us to death? Do you know how scary it is to burn? “And the sheets of “Dead Souls” in their hands kept flaring up, gloomily and lifelessly illuminating the ghostly faces of the characters. And now the landowner Tentetnikov was writhing in suffering and asking: “Why did I not please you, Nikolai Vasilyevich? Why did you treat me so terribly, so cruelly?” and held on a leash a quietly growling bow-legged bulldog, terribly gaping his teeth. “And I, I also wanted to live on,” a short, stocky man in shiny patent leather boots jumped up after him. “I wasn’t going into the fire.” It’s scary in the fire: suffering is beyond my strength... Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, your dear child, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov!” And Selifan remained gloomily, frowningly silent, stretching out his hands to the fair-haired, purebred girls, wrapped in scarves over warm sheepskin coats. But as soon as Selifan managed to touch them, immediately the white, smooth hands of the girls with whom he twirled in a round dance, with their tight skin moist with tenderness, turned black and crumbled into ashes and dust. And then the dogs began to bark madly, frantically: the sheets of “Dead Souls” burned out, and their disembodied owners lost strength and could no longer hold them... From the barking of mad dogs, which I dreamed about in a dream, I woke up in reality. One morning in Gogol's small park I saw a whole flock of dead stray dogs in the snow. Crows screamed, circling over the dark snow. Then, in the early 90s, “knackers cleaned the center”: they shot stray dogs at night, closer to spring, and did not even always take away their exhausted corpses, exhausted and hoarse... They simply left them on the black, hoarse snow...
It felt good and almost carefree in May, when on gentle evenings Gogol’s face softened and warmed, and seemed inexpressibly beautiful among the blossoming greenery, the smells and buzz of summer. The library windows were open to the front garden, and stacks of heavy volumes lay on the window sills. Bookshelves with absolutely living bindings were looked through, and the quick hands of librarians moved them from place to place. But I don’t remember the faces: only flexible, hasty hands with intelligent fingers. It all looked like a strange theater of fingers and books.
Sometimes, cars driving along Nikitsky (then Suvorovsky Boulevard) accidentally, for a moment, illuminated Gogol with headlights. And then, in response, it flashed gold, and the long, black shadow of the monument lying on the asphalt became visible. She seemed embossed, almost alive. It also seemed that everything around fell into Gogol’s long shadow: nearby houses, streets and alleys, as well as boulevards - Tverskoy, Nikitsky and Prechistensky (Gogolevsky); and begins to live according to his fantastic laws. Him and his shadow.
I also noticed that after the rain, a long transparent drop hangs from Gogol’s long, sensitive nose. This seemed funny to me. A little later I read about this drop in “A Romance with Cocaine”).

Rex tremende majestatis.
(“The formidable and majestic king...”)
The nature of laughter is diverse. So Gogol’s laughter is a saving laughter, it is a shield between despair, infernal fear and the human soul. Fear leads a person to madness and death, but if you laugh at fear in time, it will seem small and insignificant and will lose its power. Gogol made fun of the devil all his life, “this eternal monkey of God,” according to Merezhkovsky, “begun and unfinished, but posing as something that has no beginning and end.”
“I planned to write something funnier than the devil,” Gogol will say about the “Inspector General” he planned. - In “The Inspector General” I decided to collect in one pile everything bad in Russia that I knew then, all the injustices that are done in those places and in those cases where justice is most required from a person; and laugh at everything at once.”
Gogol has that special, heightened vision that makes it possible to see that laughter is spread everywhere in the world, and that not only people and their actions and their conversations are funny, but also the words that make up their conversations and the sounds that make up the words. and the letters that express these sounds. Suffice it to recall the “fita with her hands on her hips,” which Nozdryov considered an extremely indecent letter.
In Gogol's world, laughter is a shield, it is a king, it is a Savior.
One of the lives of the saints speaks of two brothers who decided to take the path of repentance. They separated for a year, and one of them wept and bitterly repented, mourning his sins, and the other had fun and rejoiced, triumphant that he had renounced his sinful life once and for all. And when a year later both appeared to their confessor, he admitted that both paths were saving.
Gogol, unlike his follower Dostoevsky, who decomposed the algorithm of suffering and sorrow, knew how to escape through laughter.

5. Recordare, Jesu pie…
"Remember, merciful Lord...")
There are writers who read their works in a dull and colorless manner, but this in no way detracts from the quality of their literature or their artistic talent. This only means that, most likely, their writing is narrative, not reproducing.
Eikhenbaum quite rightly distinguished two styles of writing - narrative, that is, outlining events, and reproducing, that is, recreating reality. He wrote that our literature is not the literature of adventure novels, in which one exciting action is followed by the next, even more extraordinary, it is, first of all, a literature of language, a literature of inconspicuous details and trifles that it would be logical to list separated by a comma, or not to mention at all, but which are painted in such a way that they themselves come to life and fill and spiritualize with true life, that is significant for the sake of which the author began to write.
As a rule, these kinds of writers are so receptive to language that their linguistic sense resembles the absolute pitch of a musician. And the intonations of the voice are so rich and varied that they can be compared to the voices of singers with great range and flexibility. Such writers read their works perfectly, but I want to emphasize! not as an actor, but as a writer.
Gogol read inimitably. Without being an actor, he turned each of his readings to the public into theater. He skillfully and comically imitated speech, sounds, and words. He inserted exclamations and interjections, which so necessary complement any character... Sometimes Gogol suddenly fell silent, and at these moments the facial expressions of his face spoke for him... And then suddenly he threw aside the comic as unnecessary and switched to the highest pathos, worthy of the authors of antiquity. Eikhenbaum cites Annenkov’s testimony about how Gogol dictated to the copyist a description of Plyushkin’s garden, did not even dictate, but simply created it in words, where instead of colors there were metaphors, and flexible, soulful intonations with brush strokes...
You can try to complete the picture: here Gogol is sitting in a chair, here are his beautiful words flowing, here he fell silent for a moment to catch his breath... Exhale... And with him in the air, like the invisible Kitezh-grad, Plyushkin’s garden appears, twilight, half-deserted, smoking from wet flowering, with vague outlines of branches, the leaves of which turn into a ghostly greenish haze...
One famous trip from Kyiv to Moscow can be described as follows: there were three of them - the writer Danilevsky, young Gogol, dressed with a strange, wild panache, and Pashchenko, Gogol’s friend from the Nezhin Lyceum. They urgently needed to get to Moscow, and they were forced to rent a stroller. (Gogol, impeccably sensitive to language, will later describe Chichikov’s chaise, rapidly rushing along Russian roads. He will replace the neutral “carriage” with a “britzka”. After all, what is a britzka if not onomatopoeia? Its wheels hit roadside stones and boulders, bounce on ruts - kick! kick! - they buck like a restive horse.)
Gogol persuades Paschenko to go ahead and warn all the station employees that an inspector is coming to them, pursuing his hidden goal, wanting to remain incognito... Needless to say, Paschenko’s childhood comrade, without any hesitation, agrees...
And then a carriage with Danilevsky and Gogol enters the station. Gogol is immediately and unconditionally mistaken for an auditor. And here you can imagine his appearance: a face that laughs, not with a smile. But only facial expressions, tension of internal muscles, a long sharp nose, as if sniffing out something, recognizing something, long hair neatly laid out on both sides of the parting and dark, almost black under-eyes around attentive eyes. He could have been wearing an impeccable frock coat and a poisonously bright vest, causing surprise not for its tastelessness, but rather for its unusual color...
Of course, such a person is impossible not to notice, and, of course, he is no one else. Like an auditor traveling incognito.
(According to the testimony of his contemporaries, Gogol was a dandy, but his attitude towards his appearance looked strange. He could dress impeccably, in the latest fashion, or he could dress up awkwardly and even ridiculously, and at the same time remain very pleased with himself. Gogol’s dapperness is rather a writer’s one. Clothes for him are a metaphor. He needed to convey his idea of himself, to express an invented image, and not like a fashionista to dress like a brand new. And if some small details stood out, it was from under the wig, which he, having shaved his head, at one time he wore it, the inner secret ribbons were hanging down, but this did not interest him at all.)
At the stations, the newly-minted inspector Gogol behaved, of course, like a private person, but under the outer gentleness and goodwill, the vestment of power involuntarily slipped through. Feigning curiosity, the inspector Gogol suddenly unexpectedly asked: “Please show me the condition of your horses?”, and Danilevsky followed him, strictly and silently.
Of course, they were immediately given the best horses. And soon, extremely quickly, they reached Moscow.

6. Confutatis maledictis
(“Having overthrown those who slander ...”)

The first of the petty demons of literature, a vulgar man who covers up his averageness with helpless ideas of humanism, Vissarion Belinsky, uttered his inarticulate words about the little man. A little demon suddenly noticed a little man on the pages of our literature and began to lay claim to the great, the only reading. This idea was sweetly picked up by our critics, people who for the most part do not understand or love art.
Belinsky's idea of a little man is as far from literature as the idea of humanism is from the Russian, Christian worldview. She is good for Smerdyakov and for his successor, the completely crazy Peredonov. Of course, Peredonov and Smerdyakov are literary characters, but their flesh and blood father, Smerdyakov and Ardalyon Borisovich Peredonov, was Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky.
It was he, the petty demon Belinsky, who wrote his vile letters to Gogol, in which he expressed deep doubt in Gogol’s understanding of the nature of Russian man and with scrofulous resentment stood up for a certain hypothetical peasant, whom Gogol in “Dead Souls” called “an unwashed snout” and, choking with rage and sarcasm, talks about the social reasons for the unwashedness of this very man who never existed.
All this has nothing to do with literature, and carries nothing in itself except anger and personal injury.
It would be better not to talk about these nasty letters at all, but nothing stings more than the sting of anger and the sting of mediocrity, and the second is more painful.
Here is a sad excerpt from Gogol’s letter, striking in its sincerity, an answer to a low, unworthy man, whose entire work was not worth even one Gogol line: “...Write the most cruel criticisms, go through all the words you know in order to humiliate a person, contribute to ridicule of me in the eyes of your readers, without sparing the most sensitive strings, perhaps the most tender heart - my soul will endure all this, although not without pain, and not without sorrowful shocks. (...note that despite all the despair, Gogol still talks about criticism of his work. Apparently, he didn’t even perceive Belinsky’s scolding as criticism...) But it’s hard, very hard for me, I tell you this truly, when there is a personal feeling against me bitterness, even an evil person, but I considered you to be a good person. Here is a sincere statement of my feelings!”
The surprising thing is that this insignificant image of the “little man,” this painful recovery of Belinsky’s mind “stamped” Gogol’s work for a long time and turned several generations of Russian children away from literature. Was it a tragic whim of history, or payment for genius, or the revenge of the most vulgar of the average, the ape God, whom Gogol ridiculed all his life?
And yet, in Russian schools, Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is still analyzed from a sensually naive and literary helpless point of view, and not from the position of Eikhenbaum, for example. “The spiritual world of Akaki Akakievich (if such an expression is permissible) is not insignificant (this was brought in by our naive and sensitive literary historians, hypnotized by Belinsky), but fantastically closed, his own: “There, in this rewriting, he saw his own diverse (!) and a pleasant world... Outside of this rewriting, it seemed that nothing existed for him” (Eikhenbaum “How Gogol’s “The Overcoat” was Made.”

The life of Akaki Akakievich in the world of letters, putting them on blank paper, and the way then, perfect in form, they freely scattered across the snow-white sheet and already existed according to their own laws - all this for some reason reminded me of Bulgakov, before whom The action of “Days of the Turbins” unfolded on a blank sheet of paper, and he simply wrote down what was happening before his eyes: the movement of the characters across the vast field of the sheet, their actions and conversations. Only two people saw them - Bulgakov and his cat, who was jumping onto the desk and intently trying to swipe away the small, dark figures with his paw.
What Bulgakov lived in the confined space of his room, Gogol tried to live in the open space of his life. And I again remembered the comical rehearsal trip for “The Inspector General,” and suddenly, one of its hidden meanings became clear... Gogol will tell a sparkling joke, and his friends will immediately laugh, and he, along with them, will curve his lips into a smile, feigning laughter. Gogol never laughed at his own jokes.
The wheels of the chaise creak, and quietly, just as secret pictures are revealed to invisible sight in the pauses between laughter and conversations, so to invisible hearing the tragic words become discernible in the creaking of the wheels: “Oro supplex el acclinis,
(“I pray, kneeling”),
cor contritum quasi cinis
("with a heart breaking into dust")
gere curam mei finis
(“give me salvation after my death”).”

“Here are the ashes of my heart,” it seemed to me that Gogol was thinking. “Laugh so as not to be afraid...”
(I like the reading room of the Gogol Library on the second floor. I usually sit facing the window so that I can see the square of the front garden and the monument with a long shadow standing in its center.
I'm usually alone here. Sometimes two or three literary scholars from nearby houses come, cover themselves with books and go deep into their own world. And I'm alone again. I'm reading Hoffmann and writing a novel.
But one morning we all raised our heads from our desks, because he came in, loud and heavy, a small, square man in a wide tracksuit. He looked as if he had just fallen out of the binding of a book that had fallen with a crash from the shelf, and did not know how to get back. He walked with a decisive step towards the library counter: “I am the head of the council,” he said and threw a red square ID onto the counter. “Is everyone clear?” - “Departments of what?” - I thought. "Do you want books?" - asked the librarian girl. “No, of course” - “What then?” “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just that your Gogol never lived here... Everyone is Gogol, Gogol... But he was never here...” “Let’s leave this to the historians,” the girl suggested peacefully. And one could have agreed and left, or stayed and sat down at the far table with a stack of newspapers and other periodicals, but this nervous square man turned into a Gogol ghoul and hissed, barely restraining his rage: “Yes, we’ve been living here for three hundred years,” and immediately It became clear that there are some mysterious “we who have lived for three hundred years on the Arbat,” and in front of us is the head of their council. Ghoul councils. - You know, we’ve been here for a long time, but we haven’t seen any Gogol. I'm telling you, he's not here and never was. And this statue should be moved, taken away from here... In general, they wanted to melt it down, but they just hid it, but it’s a pity...” Then a well-mannered girl, a librarian, should have said that he was interfering with her work, but she didn’t have time. A square man in a tracksuit started shouting: “Do you even know how Gogol died? He... he was buried alive, and he has no grave!” - and passionately began to throw books off the tables and counter.
At that moment, quickly rising from the first floor, a female security guard in a strict black uniform ran in and whistled shrilly into a plastic whistle on a chain...)

7. Lacrimosa.
(“This is a tearful day...”)
...shame on anyone who attracts any attention to
rotting dust, which is no longer mine: he will bow to the worms, her
gnawing...
From Gogol's "Testament".
Rumors that Gogol was buried alive are shameful. They were disbanded by ghouls who have lived on the Arbat for three hundred years, great-nephews of the critic Belinsky.
There is a lot of evidence that Gogol’s agony, which lasted several days, was painful, and the treatment was like torture, and that the famous Moscow doctor Alexei Terentyevich Tarasenkov avoided meeting with Dr. Over, who prescribed Gogol leeches on the nose, ice water on the crown, wrapping wet sheets and other painful procedures, and called him “an executioner doctor, convinced that he was saving a person.”
And yet, the leading doctors of the time, who were able to distinguish death from lethargy, tried to save Gogol. The undeniable death of Gogol was also witnessed by the sculptor Ramazanov, who removed the death mask from the deceased...
When Gogol's ashes were transferred from the Danilovsky Monastery to the Novodevichy Cemetery, his coffin was blasphemously opened. One of those huddled over the coffin cut off the tail of the deceased’s frock coat and then bound an edition of “Dead Souls” into it, and sold it, they say, for a lot of money. And here the line of the psalm that sounds every Good Friday in every Orthodox church involuntarily comes to mind: “...divide my garments for yourselves, and draw lots for my clothes...”
They tormented and tortured him during his life, and after his death, having pulled away the boards of the coffin, they plunged their hands into a pile of swarming worms, decay and decay.
It was these people, hunters of other people's suffering, running with pleasure and animal fear to watch someone else's execution, it was they who spread the rumor that Gogol did not die, but fell into lethargy, and in this state was interred.

8.Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae
(Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory...)

(That summer we realized how wonderful and unbearably difficult it was to be covered with the hollow of his cast-iron overcoat...
The front garden around Gogol has grown and bloomed. In the flowerbed around the pedestal there were pale yellow marigolds planted by the library workers... We often climbed one of the trees, sat on the wide bend of its trunk just at the level of the pedestal and looked down. At that time, hippies gathered in the courtyard of house No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard, and this place was called “small gogol”...
So, we sat in a tree and, dangling our legs in delight, looked down at two hippies in torn pants, with carefully unwashed hair, standing in front of two open sketchbooks. We knew one of them. He lived in the janitor's room, in a small section of the estate with a separate door, locked with a heavy barn lock. When it was especially hot, the door to his janitor's room was open, and we saw rough-hewn shelves with rows of paintings or simply primed canvases. Below, on the floor, stood a bed with its legs removed, and in the corner there was a broom and two wide shovels for clearing snow, which had never been touched by the hands of the janitor's occupant. We were amused by his long Gogol-style nose and thin chicken neck. He and his friend were about nineteen years old, and we considered them very old men. A middle-aged lady was bustling between the sketchbooks of two hippies, dispensing some pretty good advice left and right. The lady was wearing an emerald green suit: a green skirt and a matching jacket over a shiny red shirt with numerous watch straps printed on its fabric. “Well, where, tell me, did you see such a shadow? – the lady asked heart-rendingly and, in confirmation of her words, shook the palm of one hand, and the index finger of the other rested on the canvas on the sketchbook. She was a teacher at an art school, and these two guys were her students. And she didn’t care at all that they had ragged pants, long hair and beaded T-shirts. We were serenely swinging our legs, and a stout lady shouted to us that very soon we would fall, and then turned to her students, who were trying to portray the black Gogol of St. Andrew. “Don’t you see,” she said soulfully to our friend the janitor, “can’t you see his face? – I remembered her next words for the rest of my life: after all, he is two-faced, look closely. He has two profiles. One laughs, the other cries, and both of them are molded into a whole in his cast-iron face...” And then her student immediately stretched his long-haired head forward on a chicken neck, and the nostrils of his nose fluttered excitedly, as if he was trying to see through the smell... It seemed from the side that he and Gogol are touching each other’s noses.
Then I saw him, shaking his long, unwashed hair, desperately bargaining for a bunch of dark blue eggplants at the Palashevsky market, and when the merchant was ready to give in to him, he suddenly did not find his wallet and completely serenely walked away from the counter, whistling something... something pleasant and melodic...
Very often I come here, to this courtyard, once called “small Gogol”, and, remembering my childhood, I think that linear time exists only in our human consciousness. In reality there is only one liturgical time when all times through and through occur in one instant. And then it turns out that it was not the folds of the window curtain that formed in such a way that the outline of a person appeared, but that perhaps it was Gogol himself, who had just finished writing the episode and approached the window, and that right here and now there are crowds of people waiting for the terrible and mysterious news of his death, and that right now the ghouls and ghouls from literature have crowded over his open coffin, and are stretching their hands to his decay, realizing that they will never reach his shining soul, and that right now the granite pedestal of his monument is rushing upward, and he himself motionlessly looks down, like a knight in the Carpathians in the finale of “Terrible Vengeance,” and that right now we are sitting on a tree, and we are twelve years old, and we are dangling our legs...
Towards the end of that summer, I went to the “small Gogol’s” to see if they, the hippie artists, were still painting there? When I was already running along the fence of the square, for some reason I remembered the testimony of one of Gogol’s friends that when he went to say goodbye to the dying man, he was overtaken by two men carrying the coffin lid, and he realized that he was late... When I entered the gate, I saw that there was no coffin, but that it was just him, the long-nosed hippie artist, being carried in the arms of several of his friends. His head was thrown back helplessly, his embroidered T-shirt riding up to reveal a sunken belly so gaunt you could feel his vertebrae. It was the same with Gogol. While they were carrying him, he screamed in pain and fear, and his pulse in the solar plexus was frantically beating. The door to the janitor's room was opened wide, and he was laid on a bed without legs. All of his paintings turned out to be turned towards the wall, except for one, a sketch of Andreevsky Gogol. The floor was littered with syringes. So he lay under the unfinished sketch, and I never saw him again).

9.Hostias
" Victim…"
...the solemnity of death is in its immobility. Life does not end, but, as it were, freezes on the threshold of eternity.
Gogol, festively decorated for burial, according to our Russian custom, lay on the table. One of his eyes was slightly open, as if he still wanted to see his loved ones and loved ones, to know what was happening to them, and to take a farewell look at this world that he was about to leave. One of those who came to say goodbye put a laurel wreath on him.
And even when the death mask was removed from his face, even then his eye did not close. He was still looking at our world, still saying goodbye...
I often imagined how next to his body, invisible to human eyes, stood his soul, as in the bright popular prints that in my childhood were secretly kept in our home and excited my mind...
(Once at school I didn’t know what to write in an essay on a free topic. “My friend Gogol,” I painstakingly wrote in my student notebook and put a bold dot because I couldn’t add a single word. The lesson had just begun, but I handed over the notebook and went out into the corridor. My friend came out next. Maybe she wrote something? Shaking with laughter, we hid in the locker room and, throwing someone else's softer coats on the floor, lay down on them and began to read aloud to each other “The Story about how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich." We were still twelve years old. We didn’t think about what would happen next. We didn’t want to... My friend was very worried about Ivan Nikiforovich’s pleated trousers, which, if inflated, , then it was possible to fit the entire yard with barns, a house and other buildings in them. And I was very interested in Agafia Fedoseevna, who bit off the ear of the assessor, and, after some time, grew in Russian literature to the size of Stavrogin. I carefully looked for traces of her further presence in the story...
We were absolutely happy).

10. Sanctus…
("Holy God...)
...the coffin with Gogol’s body was solemnly transferred to the university church on Bolshaya Nikitskaya. All the way from Tolstoy’s house to the church itself, students and university professors carried his coffin in their arms, passing it to each other.
In the church the coffin was placed on a hearse.
It seemed that the whole city had come to say goodbye to the writer. Gogol lay in a laurel wreath, reminiscent of Dante's chased images.
For two days in a row, due to the crowd of people, travel along Bolshaya Nikitskaya was impossible.
On Sunday the funeral service took place, and the deceased was carried in their arms all the way to the Danilov Monastery. It turned out that he, passing from hand to hand, was floating over the streets of Moscow...
(When I was studying at the Literary Institute, once at a seminar they mercilessly destroyed a play of my friend, which seemed successful to me. He was a coldish, imperturbable person, and always accepted all the abuse directed at him with indifference or laughed... When I left into the corridor, he stood, turned to the window, his shoulders were shaking, and it was unclear whether he was laughing or crying. I never expected tears from this man. But when I approached, his face was shining, and from the tip of his nose a transparent drop was hanging down. And instead of saying: “Your play is good,” I accidentally said: “You have a drop on your nose.” “Like Gogol in your park?” he immediately responded. “Well, yes... "- and I thought that he would laugh, but he slowly, forcefully smiled, and suddenly calmed down completely).

11.Benedictus
("Blessed...")
Rozanov wrote about the impossibility of explaining the riddle of Gogol, about the impossibility of using ordinary logic to interpret his life and understand even the simplest actions. Despite numerous evidence and the known facts of his biography, Gogol is impenetrable. And all the unambiguous interpretations and indisputable evidence about him look rather helpless and funny.
No matter how many assumptions are made, we will never know for certain the reason why Gogol sent his “Dead Souls” to the fire.
There is a well-known story from Semyon, a serf boy who served Gogol, about how Gogol woke him up at three o’clock in the morning and ordered him to light the stove. Semyon replied that first he needed to open the pipe on the second floor, where everyone was sleeping, and that he was afraid of waking everyone up. Gogol convinced him to rise silently and move the shutter. And Semyon succeeded. Nobody woke up.
When the fire flared up, Gogol threw a tied stack of notebooks there, but it did not burn, but only slightly smoldered around the edges. Then Gogol took it out with a poker, untied it, and began throwing one notebook at a time into the fire, which instantly filled in and burned out quite quickly. And soon the entire stack, the entire second volume of Dead Souls, was burned.
The next morning, Gogol cried while talking to Count Tolstoy. He said that the evil one, out of revenge, prompted him to destroy the manuscript, which was the crown of his creations, and that after reading it, all his work, his purpose in literature became clear... And that now death was close, that it was breathing in his face, and There’s no time left, and he won’t have time to explain anything about himself...
Count Tolstoy was a generous man, and he had deep compassion for Gogol. Trying to feign indifference, he said: “After all, you have done this with your manuscripts before. They burned them. After all, this is a working moment for you. And then they rewrote it, and it turned out much better... And rewrite this. This means that there can be no talk of any death. That means she’s still far away!” At these words, Gogol perked up. “After all, you can remember what was written?” continued the count. “Of course I can,” and then Gogol calmed down. He stopped crying, and even remained cheerful until the end of the day...

***
Nothing hurts more than vulgarity.
The poet Berg told how, immediately after Gogol’s death, a cheap lithograph was published: Gogol in a robe in front of a blazing fireplace. Nearby, Semyon throws notebooks into the fire. Behind them lurked a carnival figure of Death with a scythe and other weapons.
Berg said that looking at this lithograph was pitiful and shameful, like making fun of someone else’s suffering.

12. Agnus Dei
(“Lamb of God...”)
The last words, written by Gogol’s hand, were: “Unless you are small, like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
And the last thing he said, calmly, in full consciousness, after all the grief and sobbing: “How sweet it is to die!”
And here, at the very end, I would like to quote an excerpt from his “Reflections on the Divine Liturgy”: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God - as in a pure mirror of calm waters, not disturbed by either sand or mud, the pure vault of heaven is reflected, so in the mirror of a pure heart, not disturbed by passions, there is no longer anything human, and the image of God is reflected in it alone.”
And now, another thing... For a long time I tried to understand what is so incredible the appeal of Andreevsky Gogol? Why, after all the monuments and portraits, do we return to him, here, to a small, semi-dark square with a cast-iron fence, where there is always shade and coolness and peace, as in a half-forgotten hidden corner of Plyushkin’s garden, where a double door leading into the house is hidden under semicircular arches? the former last refuge of Gogol, where the branches of overgrown trees intertwined into a vault, and through the wide opening of the vault, as if through a window, a transparent rectangle of the sky is visible, and right from the sky, from this blue rectangle, a black cast-iron face looks down, and twilight and bad weather have settled, then you need look for a long time to discern his marvelous features?
And finally I saw...
Here is the despair of his exhausted body, here is the helplessly lowered head, here are the dancing shadows and dazzling flashes of light around, here is the roar and smoke of passing cars, here are the cries of the night's staggering speech, here is the magnetic burning of fireworks in the pre-holiday sky, here is the ugly dwarf of the fear of the past, here is the demon of fear real...
But his face...
If you just looked closely, but you still couldn’t look closely, you kept getting distracted by little things, responding with petty abuse to outbursts of abuse and malice...
His face did not ask riddles and clever questions that exhausted the mind and burned out the soul, but simply floated, framed by a blue rectangle of the sky... Black on blue...
His face itself was the answer to all questions about grief and sorrow from the very beginning, but for some reason we didn’t see...
His face, forever frozen in stone, always expressed peace and tranquility...
Teacher, cover us all with your cast-iron overcoat, let us calm down in the blissful and majestic bliss of the Russian word...

I am glad that your health is better; my health... but aside from our health; we must forget about them, as well as about ourselves. So, you return again to your provincial city. You must love him with new strength - he is yours, he is entrusted to you, he must be your family. It is in vain that you begin to think again that your presence in relation to social activities in it is completely useless, that society is fundamentally corrupted. You're just tired, that's all. The governor's wife will have to work everywhere, at every turn. She even makes an impact when she does nothing. You yourself already know that it’s not a matter of fuss and recklessly throwing yourself into everything. Here are two living examples that you yourself named. Your predecessor, F***, started a bunch of charitable institutions, and with them - heaps of paper correspondence and fuss, housekeepers, secretaries, theft, stupidity, became famous for charity in St. Petersburg and created a mess in K***; Princess O***, who was before her the governor of your same city K***, did not open any establishments or shelters, did not make any noise anywhere beyond her city, did not even have any influence on her husband and was not involved in anything , actually government and official, and yet to this day no one in the city can remember her without tears, and everyone, from the merchant to the last nobleman, still repeats: “No, there will never be another Princess O***! » And who repeats this? The same city for which you believe nothing can be done is the same society that you believe is forever corrupted. So, as if nothing can be done? You're tired - that's all! You were tired because you started too rashly, you relied too much on your own strength, you were carried away by the feminine agility... I repeat to you again the same thing as before: your influence is strong. You are the first person in the city, they will take everything from you to the last trinket, thanks to the ape of fashion and our Russian ape in general. You will be a legislator in everything. If you just begin to manage your own affairs well, then you will already have an influence, because you will force others to take better care of their own affairs. Drive away luxury (there are no other things to do for now), this is already a noble cause, and it does not require any fuss or costs. Don’t miss a single meeting or ball, come just to show up in the same dress; wear the same dress three, four, five, six times. Praise at everyone only what is cheap and simple. In a word, drive away this disgusting, nasty luxury, this ulcer of Russia, the source of bribes, injustices and abominations that we have. If you manage to do just this one thing, then you will bring more significant benefit than Princess O*** herself. And this, as you can see for yourself, does not even require any donations, and does not even take time. My friend, you are tired. From your previous letters, I see that to begin with, you have already managed to do a lot of good (if you weren’t in too much of a hurry, even more would have happened), rumors have already spread about you outside of K***; some of them reached me too. But you are still very hasty, you are still too carried away, you are still too agitated and overwhelmed by all sorts of unpleasantness and nastiness. My friend, remember again my words, the truth of which, you say that you yourself are convinced: look at the whole city, like a doctor looks at the infirmary. Look like this, but add something else to this, namely: assure yourself that all the sick people in the infirmary are your relatives and people close to your heart, then everything will change for you: you will be reconciled with people and will antagonize only their diseases. Who told you that these diseases are incurable? You told yourself this because you didn’t find the means in your hands. Well, are you an all-knowing doctor? Why didn’t you ask others for help? Did I ask you for nothing to tell me everything that is in your city, to introduce me to the knowledge of your city, so that I have a complete understanding of your city? Why didn’t you do this, especially since you yourself are sure that I can have more influence on many things than you; especially since you yourself attribute to me some general knowledge of people that is not common to everyone; especially, finally, since you yourself say that I helped you in your spiritual matter more than anyone else? Do you really think that I could not help your incurable patients in the same way? After all, you forgot that I can pray, my prayer can reach God, God can send admonition to my mind, and a mind admonished by God can do something better than that a mind that is not enlightened by Him.

Until now, in your letters you have given me only general concepts about your city, in general terms that can belong to any provincial city; but also are common yours are not complete. You relied on the fact that I know Russia like the back of my hand; and I don’t know anything about it. If I knew one thing, it had already changed since I left. Significant changes took place in the composition of the provincial administration: many places and officials moved away from the dependence of the governor and entered the department and administration of other ministries; new officials and places have appeared, in a word - the province and the provincial city appear in relatively many ways in a different form, and I asked you to introduce me absolutely in your position, not any perfect, But essential, so that I can see everything that surrounds you, from small to large.

You yourself say that during your short stay in K*** you got to know Russia more than in your entire previous life. Why didn't you share your knowledge with me? Say that you don’t even know where to start, that a lot of information you have typed into your head is still in disarray (NB the reason for failure). I will help you put them in order, but just fulfill the following request in good faith, as best you can - not the way your brother is used to fulfilling - passionate woman, who will skip eight out of ten words and answer only two, because they somehow came to her heart, but in the same way as our brother - a cold, impassive man, or, better, like a businesslike, smart official who, nothing Taking it especially to heart, he answers exactly all points.

For my sake, you must begin to review your provincial city again. Firstly, you must tell me all the main people in the city by first name, patronymic and last name, every single official. I need it. I must be a friend to them just as you yourself must be a friend to all of them without exception. Secondly, you must write to me exactly what each person’s position is. You must learn all this personally from them, and not from anyone else. After talking with everyone, you should ask him what his position is, so that he tells you all of it items and designated it limits. This will be the first question. Then ask him to explain to you exactly how and how much good can be done in this position, under the current circumstances. This will be the second question. Then, what exactly and how much evil can be done in this same position. This will be the third question. Having found out, go to your room and immediately write it all down on paper for me. You will already do two things at once: in addition to giving me a means of being useful to you later, you will learn for yourself from the official’s own answers how he understands his position, what he lacks, in a word - with his answer he will describe himself. He may even lead you to do something right now... But that’s not the point: it’s better not to rush into time; do not do anything even if it seems to you that you can do something and that you are able to help something. It’s better to take a closer look for now; for now be content with passing it on to me. Then on the same page, opposite the same place or on another piece of paper - your own comments what you noticed about each gentleman in particular, what others say about him, in a word - everything that can be added about him from the outside.

Then provide me with the same information about the entire female half of your city. You were so smart that you paid them all visits and recognized almost all of them. However, they found out imperfectly - I’m sure of that. Regarding women, you are guided by first impressions: the one you don’t like, you leave that one. You are looking for all the favorites and the best. My friend! I will reproach you for this. You must love everyone, especially those who have more rubbish in them - at least get to know them more, because a lot depends on this and they can have a great influence on their husbands. Take your time, don’t rush to instruct them, but just ask them; You have the gift of asking questions. Find out not only the affairs and activities of each, but even the way of thinking, tastes, what each person likes, what each of them likes, what each person’s hobby is. I need it all. In my opinion, in order to help someone, you need to know him through and through, and without that I don’t even understand how you can give anyone any advice. Any advice you give him will be addressed to him by its difficult side, it will not be easy, it will be difficult to implement. In a word, women - all of them! so that I have a perfect understanding of your city.

In addition to the characters and persons of both sexes, write down every incident that in any way characterizes the people or the spirit of the province in general, write down ingenuously, in the form as it happened, or as in which faithful people conveyed it to you. Also write down two or three pieces of gossip, the first ones you come across, so that I know what kind of gossip you have going on. Make this writing a permanent activity of yours, so that there is a designated hour in the day for this. Imagine in your mind, systematically and in its entirety, the entire volume of the city, so that you can suddenly see if you have missed anything for me to write down, so that I finally get a complete understanding of your city.

And if you introduce me in this way to all the persons, to their positions, and how they understand them, and, finally, even to the nature of the events themselves that happen to you, then I will tell you something, and you will see that much is impossible The incorrigible is possible and can be corrected. Until then, I won’t say anything precisely because I could be wrong, and I wouldn’t want that. I would like to speak words that would go straight to where they should be, neither above nor below the object at which they are directed - to give such advice that you would immediately say: “It is easy, it can be carried out.”

Here, however, is something ahead, and not for you, but for your spouse: ask him, first of all, to pay attention to ensuring that the advisers to the provincial government are honest people. This is the main thing. As soon as the advisers are honest, immediately the police captains and assessors will be honest, in a word - everything will become honest. You need to know (if you don’t already know this) that the safest bribe, which eludes all persecution, is the one that an official takes from an official on command from top to bottom; it sometimes goes like an endless staircase. The police captain and assessors often have to bend their hearts and take what is taken from them and because they need money to pay for their place. This buying and selling can take place before your eyes and at the same time not be noticed by anyone. God bless you even to pursue. Just try to keep everything honest from above; from below everything will be honest by itself. Until the time when evil has matured, do not pursue anyone; Better act morally in the meantime. Your idea that the governor always has the opportunity to do a lot of evil and little good and that in the field of good he is limited in actions is not entirely fair. The governor can always have influence moral, even very big, just like you can have a big one moral influence, although you do not have the power established by law. Believe me, if he didn’t pay a visit to some gentleman, the whole city would talk about it, they would ask why and why - and this same gentleman, because of this single fear, would be afraid to commit meanness, which he would not be afraid to commit in the face of power and the law. Your action, that is, yours and your spouse’s, with the district judge of the M*** district, whom you deliberately summoned to the city in order to reconcile him with the prosecutor, to honor him with a warm meal and a friendly reception for his directness, nobility and honesty - believe me , has already done its job. What I like about this case is that the judge (who, as it turned out, was a most enlightened man) was dressed in such a way that, as you say, he would not have been accepted into the hallway of St. Petersburg drawing rooms. At this moment I would like to kiss the hem of his shabby tailcoat. Believe that best image actions at the present time - do not arm yourself violently and ardently against bribe-takers and bad people and not to persecute them, but instead try to show every kind of honest trait, in a friendly manner, in front of everyone, to shake the hand of a straightforward, honest person. Believe me, as soon as it becomes known throughout the entire province that the governor is really doing this, all the nobility will already be on his side. There is an amazing feature in our nobility that has always amazed me, this is a sense of nobility, not the nobility that infects the nobility of other lands, that is, not the nobility of birth or origin and not the European point d’honneur, but real, moral nobility. Even in such provinces and places where, if you take apart another nobleman, it will turn out to be simply rubbish, but if you challenge him only to some truly noble feat, everything will suddenly rise as if by some kind of electricity, and people who do dirty tricks will suddenly do the noblest case. And therefore, every noble act of the governor will first of all find a response in the nobility. And is it important. The governor must certainly have a moral influence on the nobles; only by this alone can he encourage them to rise to invisible positions and unattractive places. And this is necessary, because if a nobleman from the same province takes some place in order to show how to serve, then no matter what he himself is, although he is lazy and not good to many, he will fulfill his task in the same way as the official sent will never fulfill it, even if he wears out his life in the offices. In a word, in no case should one lose sight of the fact that these are the same nobles who in the twelfth year sacrificed everything - everything that anyone had in their souls.

When it happens, because of the nasty things committed, that another official is brought to trial, then in this case it is necessary that he be brought to justice withdrawal from business. It is very important. For if he is put on trial without retiring from business, then all the employees will remain on his side for a long time, he will continue to fuss for a long time and will find ways to confuse everything so much that he will never get to the truth. But as soon as he is brought to trial with retirement from business he will suddenly hang his nose, become no one’s threat, evidence will come towards him from all sides, everything will come out clean water and suddenly the whole matter becomes known. But, friend, for the sake of Christ, do not leave the official who has been pushed out of his place, no matter how bad he is: he is unhappy. It must pass from your husband's hands to yours; he's yours. Do not explain yourself to him and do not accept him, but follow him from afar. You did well to expel the matron at the insane asylum because she decided to sell the rolls assigned to these unfortunate people - a doubly disgusting crime, taking into account the fact that the insane cannot even complain, and therefore were expelled; it had to be done publicly and transparently. But do not abandon any person, do not cut off anyone’s return, follow the renounced; sometimes, out of grief, out of despair, out of shame, he falls into even greater crimes. Act either through your confessor, or even through some smart priest, who would visit him and give you reports on him constantly, and most importantly, try to ensure that he does not remain without some kind of work and work. Don't be like this in this case dead the law, but alive God, who strikes a person with all the scourges of misfortune, but does not leave him until the very end of his life. Whatever the criminal, if the earth still bears him and the thunder of God has not struck him, this means that he remains in the world so that someone, touched by his fate, will help him and save him. If, however, during the descriptions that you will begin to make for me, or during your own research into all sorts of ailments, you will be too amazed by our sad sides and your heart will be indignant, then I advise you to talk about this more often with the bishop; he, as can be seen from your words, is an intelligent man and a good shepherd. Show him your entire infirmary and reveal to him all the diseases of your sick. Even if he was not a great expert in the science of healing, even then you must introduce him to all attacks, signs and phenomena of diseases. Try to outline everything to him so vividly that it floats before his eyes, so that your city, as if alive, would constantly remain in his thoughts, as it should constantly remain in your thoughts, so that through this very thing his thoughts themselves strive yourself to unceasing prayer for him. Believe me, that because of this, his very sermon will be directed more and more to the hearts of his listeners every Sunday, and he will then be able to expose a lot of things and, without pointing out anyone personally, will be able to bring everyone face to face with their own abomination, so that he the owner will spit on his own property. Pay also attention to the city priests, be sure to recognize them all; everything depends on them, and the matter of our improvement is in their hands, and not in the hands of anyone else. Do not neglect any of them, despite the simplicity and ignorance of many. They can be returned to their duty sooner than any of us. We, secular ones, have pride, ambition, self-love, self-confidence in our perfection, as a result of which no one among us will listen to the words and admonitions of his brother, no matter how fair they may be, and finally, the most entertainment... Spiritual, no matter what he is , he still more or less feels that he should be more humble than everyone and lower than everyone; moreover, already in the very daily service he performs, he hears a reminder to himself, in a word, he is closer than all of us to returning to his path, and by returning to it himself, he can return all of us. And therefore, even if you meet one of them who is completely incapable, do not neglect him, but talk to him thoroughly. Ask everyone what his parish is, so that he can give you a complete understanding of what the people in his parish are like and how he himself understands and knows them. Don’t forget that I still don’t know what the philistinism and merchant class are like in your city; that they also begin to become fashionable and smoke cigars, this is the case everywhere; I need to take them from among them live someone so that I can see him from head to toe in every detail. So, find out about them all in detail. You will learn one side of this matter from the priests, the other from the police chief, if you take the trouble to have a good conversation with him about this subject, the third side you will learn from them themselves, if you do not disdain to talk with one of them, even when leaving church on Sunday. All the information collected will serve to outline in front of you approximate image a tradesman and merchant, what he should really be; in the freak you will feel the ideal of what the freak has become a caricature of. If you feel this, then call the priests and talk to them: you will tell them exactly what they need: the very essence of every title, that is, what it should be with us, and a caricature of this title, that is, what it has become as a result of our abuses. Don't add anything else. He himself will be brought to his senses if he only begins to correct his own life. Our priests especially need a conversation with such ready people who would be able to outline for them in a few, but bright and clear lines, the limits and responsibilities of every rank and position. Often, solely because of this, some of them do not know how to deal with parishioners and listeners, and speak in generalities that do not directly address the subject. Also consider his own situation, help his wife and children if his parish is poor. Whoever is ruder and more arrogant, threaten him bishop; but in general try to act better morally. Remind them that their duty is too terrible, that they will give a better answer than any of the people of any other rank, that now both the synod and the sovereign himself are paying special attention to the life of the priest, that a bulkhead is being prepared for everyone, because not only the highest government, but even every single private person in the state is beginning to notice that the reason for all the evil is that the priests have begun to perform their duties carelessly... Announce to them more often those terrible truths that will involuntarily make their soul shudder. In a word, do not neglect the city priests in any way. With their help, the governor can produce a lot of moral influence on the merchants, philistines and every simple class living in the city, so much influence that even you can’t imagine now. I will tell you just a little of what she can do, and point out the means by which she can do it: firstly... but I remembered that I have absolutely no idea what kind of philistinism and merchants are in your city : my words may not come at the right time, it’s better not to utter them at all; I will only tell you that you will be amazed later when you see how many such feats await you in this field, from which there is several times more benefit than from shelters and all sorts of charitable institutions, which not only do not involve any donations or labor, but they will turn into pleasure, into relaxation and entertainment of the spirit.

Try to encourage all the chosen and best in the city to take up social activities: each of them can do a lot almost like you. They can be moved. If you give me only a complete understanding of their characters, lifestyle and activities, I will tell you with what and how they can be incited; There are hidden strings in a Russian man, which he himself does not know, which can be struck so hard that he will perk up all over. You have already named some in your city as smart and noble people; I am sure that even more will be found. Don’t look at the repulsive appearance, don’t look at the unpleasant manners, rudeness, callousness, awkwardness of treatment, or even the fanfare, the cliché of actions and all sorts of overly clever swagger. We're all in Lately we have acquired something arrogantly unpleasant to handle, but despite all this, in the depths of our souls there are more good feelings than ever, despite the fact that we have cluttered them with all sorts of rubbish and even simply spat on them ourselves. Especially don't neglect women. I swear, women are much better than us men. They have more generosity, more courage for everything noble; don’t look at the fact that they are spinning in a whirlwind of fashion and emptiness. If only you can speak to them in the language of the soul itself, if only you can somehow outline before a woman her high field, which the world now expects from her - her heavenly field to be the leader of us in all that is direct, noble and honest, to cry out to man for the noble desire, then the same woman whom you thought was empty will suddenly flare up nobly, look at herself, at her abandoned duties, motivate herself to do everything pure, encourage her husband to fulfill an honest duty and, throwing her rags far to the side , everyone will be turned to business. I swear, our women will wake up before men, nobly reproach us, nobly whip us and drive us with the scourge of shame and conscience, like a stupid herd of sheep, before each of us has time to wake up and feel that he should have run away himself long ago, without waiting for the scourge. They will love you, and they will love you deeply, but they cannot help but love you if they recognize your soul; but until that time you love them all, every single one, no matter if someone doesn’t love you...

But my letter is getting long. I feel that I am beginning to say things that may not be entirely appropriate either for your city or for you at the present moment; but you yourself are to blame for this by not providing me with detailed information about anything. Until now, I'm just like in the forest. I only hear about some incurable diseases and I don’t know what hurts anyone. But it is my custom not to believe in rumors of any incurables, and I will never call any disease incurable until I feel it with my own hand. So, look again, for my sake, at the whole city. Describe everything and everyone, without saving anyone from the three inevitable questions: what is his position, how much good can be done in it and how much evil. Act like a diligent student: make a notebook for this and do not forget to be as thorough as possible in your explanations with me, do not forget that I am stupid, absolutely stupid, until they introduce me to the most detailed knowledge. Better imagine what is in front of you there is a child or such an ignoramus who needs to interpret everything down to the last trinket; then only your letter will be as it should be. I don’t know why you consider me some kind of know-it-all. That I happened to predict something for you and that what was predicted came true - this happened solely because you brought me into the situation of your soul at that time. It's very important to guess! One has only to take a closer look at the present, and the future suddenly appears by itself. A fool is one who thinks about the future without the present. He will either lie or tell a riddle. By the way, I will also scold you for your following lines, which I will put before your eyes here: “It’s sad and even woeful to see the state of Russia up close, but, however, we shouldn’t talk about it. We must look with hope and bright eyes to the future, which is in the hands of a merciful God. Everything is in the hands of a merciful God: the present, the past, and the future. That’s why all our trouble is that we don’t look at the present, but look at the future. That’s why the whole trouble is that as soon as we look at the present, we notice that some things in it are sad and sad, others are simply disgusting or are not being done the way we would like, we give up on everything and let’s stare into the future. That is why God does not give us intelligence; that is why the future hangs in the air for all of us: some people hear that it is good, thanks to some advanced people who also heard it by instinct and have not yet verified it with a legitimate arithmetic conclusion; but no one knows how to reach this future. It's like sour grapes. Forgot the trifle! Everyone forgot that there are ways and roads to this light the future is hidden precisely in this dark And confusing the present, which no one wants to recognize: everyone considers it low and unworthy of their attention and even gets angry if they expose it to everyone. At least introduce me to the knowledge of the present. Do not be embarrassed by abominations and give me every abomination! For me, disgusting things are not a novelty: I am quite disgusting myself. While I was still a little involved in abominations, all sorts of abominations embarrassed me, I became despondent from many things, and I became afraid for Russia; from the moment I began to look more closely at the abominations, I became enlightened in spirit; Outcomes, means and paths began to appear before me, and I revered Providence even more. And now most of all I thank God for the fact that He has vouchsafed me, at least in part, to recognize the abominations of both my own and my poor brothers. And if there is any drop of intelligence in me, which is not characteristic of all people, it is because I looked more closely at these abominations. And if I was able to provide spiritual help to some close to my heart, including you, it was because I looked more closely at these abominations. And if I finally acquired a love for people, not dreamy, but substantial, it was finally from the same thing that I looked more closely at all sorts of abominations. Do not be afraid of abominations, and especially do not turn away from those people who for some reason seem vile to you. I assure you that the time will come when many of us in Rus' from clean ones They will cry bitterly, covering their faces with their hands, precisely because they considered themselves too pure, because they boasted of their purity and all sorts of lofty aspirations somewhere, considering themselves through this to be better than others. Remember all this and, pray, get back to your business more vigorously and freshly than ever before. Read my letter five or six times, precisely because everything in it is scattered and there is no strict logical order, which, however, is your own fault. It is necessary that the essence of the letter remains entirely within you, my questions become your questions and my desire becomes your desire, so that every word and letter pursues you and torments you until you fulfill my request in exactly the way I want.

1846

Addressed to A. O. Smirnova (see comments about her to the letter VI. About helping the poor), whose husband, N. M. Smirnov, in 1845-1851. was the governor of Kaluga. The article is based on Gogol’s long letter to A. O. Smirnova dated July 6 and. Art. 1846 The chapter was banned by censorship. First published in the newspaper “Modernity and Economic List” (1860. No. 1), reprinted under the title “Letter of N.V. Gogol” in the magazine “Home Conversation” (1866. Issue 6).
This refers to Elizaveta Nikolaevna Zhukovskaya (1803-1856), wife of the Kaluga governor N.V. Zhukovsky. On January 14, 1846, A. O. Smirnova wrote to Gogol about her from Kaluga: “Zhukovskaya, the governor’s wife, came here and started all these philanthropic houses, committees, correspondence in order, relations with philanthropic societies, received certificates of merit for virtue, etc. Thus, I found a work already prepared for me, but in such a form that my soul does not belong to all this” (Correspondence of N.V. Gogol. T. 2. P. 172).
This refers to Agrafena Yuryevna Obolenskaya (born Neledinskaya-Meletskaya; 1789-1828), wife of Prince A. GG. Obolensky, who was in 1825-1831. Kaluga governor. Gogol also takes information about A. Yu. Obolenskaya from the indicated letter to him from Smirnova dated January 14, 1846, which, in particular, says: “In the old days, Princess Obolenskaya, the daughter of Neledinsky, was here, who died here. All classes, from the poor to the richest, merchants and nobles, all unanimously cried for her. She died about 15 years ago, but her memory is so alive in all hearts that I constantly hear something new about her. Her husband was a governor and of a very mediocre mind; she did not enter into anything, but meanwhile had the most beneficial influence on everyone. She did not start a single school, not a single shelter and did not collect taxes for the poor, and everyone repeats in hospitals, almshouses, prison castles and in the clergy: “No, there will no longer be a second Princess Obolenskaya!” (Correspondence of N.V. Gogol. T. 2. P. 171 - 172).
About A. Yu. Obolenskaya and her moral influence on the residents of Kaluga, see: Chronicle of Recent Antiquity. From the archive of Prince Obolensky-Neledinsky-Meletsky. St. Petersburg, 1876. pp. 290-291.
On December 16, 1845, A. O. Smirnova wrote to Gogol from Kaluga: “This month I learned more about Russia and humanity in general than during my entire stay in the palace” (Correspondence of N. V. Gogol. Vol. 2. P. 167).
This refers to the Meshchovo district judge Klementyev, about whom Smirnova spoke in a letter to Gogol dated February 21, 1846 (see: Correspondence of N.V. Gogol. T. 2. P. 182-183). Later, on January 18, 1851, A. O. Smirnova wrote to Gogol: “We had elections in Kaluga, I saw the Meshchov judge Klementyev; He seemed so bitter to the whole district that he was almost voted out, however, he retained his place. He loves his position, values it and says that he cannot live without it.<…> Klementyev was sick with a nervous disorder, but he is better, he is very pious and writes strange things in a religious sense, no less remarkable. He told me his thoughts about relics, which he calls power - strength, temple, bedchamber of the Spirit of God given to us. This is a whole theory, and there is a connection in everything he says and writes. Remarkable is this lonely, silent spiritual development, completely original, which did not develop from alien influence, but resulted from suffering and unceasing prayer. I don’t know what will happen to him next; but he is, of course, very remarkable” (Russian Antiquity. 1890. No. 12. P. 662).
a matter of honor (French).
This refers to the Right Reverend Nicholas (Sokolov), in 1834-1851. Bishop of Kaluga. Smirnova wrote to Gogol about him on January 14, 1846 (see: Correspondence of N.V. Gogol. T. 2. P. 174).
Gogol quotes lines from a letter to him from A. O. Smirnova dated May 14, 1846 (see: Correspondence of N. V. Gogol. T. 2. P. 186).