Gogol's divine vision was inspired by his champions, the Slavophiles, whose fantasy of Russia as a holy union of Christian souls was naturally attractive to a writer so disturbed by the soulless individualism of modern society. The Slavophile idea was rooted in the notion of the Russian Church as a free community of Christian brotherhood - a sobornost' (from the Russian word 'sobor' which was used for both 'cathedral' and 'assembly') - as outlined by the theologian Aleksei Khomiakov in the 1830s and 1840s. Khomiakov came to his conception from a mystical theology. Faith could not be proved by reasoning, he said. It had to be arrived at by experience, by feeling from within the Truth of Christ, not by laws and dogmas. The True Church could not persuade or force men to believe, for it had no authority except the love of Christ. As a freely chosen community, it existed in the spirit of Christian love that bound the faithful to the Church - and this spirit was its only guarantee.
The Slavophiles believed that the True Church was the Russian one. Unlike the Western churches, which enforced their authority through laws and statist hierarchies like the Papacy, Russian Orthodoxy, as they saw it, was a truly spiritual community, whose only head was Christ. To be sure, the Slavophiles were critical of the established Church, which in their view had been spiritually weakened by its close
alliance with the Tsarist state. They espoused a social Church, some would say a socialistic one, and many of their writings on religion were banned as a result (Khomiakov's theological writings were not published until 1879).30 The Slavophiles were firm believers in the liberation of the serfs: for only the communion of fully free and conscious individuals could create the sobornost' of the True Church. They placed their faith in the Christian spirit of the Russian people, and this was the spirit which defined their Church. The Slavophiles believed that the Russian people were the only truly Christian people in the world. They pointed to the peasantry's communal way of life ('a Christian union of love and brotherhood'), to their peaceful, gentle nature and humility, to their immense patience and suffering, and to their willingness to sacrifice their individual egos for a higher moral good - be that for the commune, the nation or the Tsar. With all these Christian qualities, the Russians were far more than a nationality -they bore a divine mission in the world. In the words of Aksakov, 'the Russian people is not just a people, it is a humanity'.31
Here was the vision of the 'Russian soul' - of a universal spirit that would save the Christian world - which Gogol tried to picture in the second and third volumes of Dead Souls. The concept of a national soul or essence was commonplace in the Romantic age, though Gogol was the first to give the 'Russian soul' this messianic turn. The lead came from Germany, where Romantics like Friedrich Schelling developed the idea of a national spirit as a means to distinguish their own national culture from that of the West. In the 1820s Schelling had a godlike status in Russia, and his concept of the soul was seized upon by intellectuals who sought to contrast Russia with Europe. Prince Odoevsky, the archpriest of the Schelling cult in Russia, argued that the West had sold its soul to the Devil in the pursuit of material progress. 'Your soul has turned into a steam engine', he wrote in his novel Russian Nights (1844); 'I see screws and wheels in you but I don't see life.' Only Russia, with her youthful spirit, could save Europe now.12 It stands to reason that young nations like Germany and Russia that lagged behind the industrializing West would have recourse to the idea of a national soul. What such nations lacked in economic progress they could more than make up for in the spiritual virtues of the unspoilt countryside. Nationalists attributed a creative spontaneity
and fraternity to the simple peasantry that had long been lost in the bourgeois culture of the West. This was the vague Romantic sense in which the idea of the Russian soul began to develop from the final decades of the eighteenth century. In his essay 'On the Innate Qualities of the Russian Soul' (1792), Pyotr Plavilshikov maintained, for example, that in its peasantry Russia had a natural creativity that had more potential than the science of the West. Carried away by national pride, the playwright even claimed some unlikely firsts:
One of our peasants has made a tincture which all the learning of Hippocrates and Galen failed to find. The bone setter of the village Alekseevo is famous among pioneers of surgery. Kulibin and the mechanic Sobakin from Tver are marvels in mechanics… What the Russian cannot grasp will for ever be unknown to men.33*
