Natasha's Dance полностью

Dead Souls was conceived as a work of religious instruction. Its written style is imbued with the spirit of Isaiah, who prophesied the fall of Babylon (an image Gogol often used for Russia in his letters while working on the second volume of Dead Souls).³⁹As he struggled with the novel Gogol was swept up by the religious fervour of his own prophecy. He plunged into the writings of the seventh-century hermit John of Sinai, who had talked about the need to purify one's soul and climb a ladder of spiritual perfection (an image Gogol used in his letters to his friends where he said that he was only on the bottom rungs).⁴⁰ Constant prayer was Gogol's only comfort and, as he believed, the spiritual source from which he would get the strength to complete his divine mission in Dead Souls. 'Pray for me, for the sake of Christ Himself, he wrote to Father Filaret at Optina Pustyn in 1850.

Ask your worthy superior, ask all of the brotherhood, ask all of those who pray most fervently and who love to pray, ask them all to pray for me. My path is a difficult one, and my task is such that without God's help at every minute and hour of the day, my pen will not move… He, the Merciful, has the power to do anything, even to turn me, a writer black like coal, into something white and pure enough to speak about the holy and the beautiful.⁴¹

The trouble was that Gogol could not picture this holy Russia, the realm of Christian brotherhood which he believed it was his divine task to reveal. This, the most pictorial of all the Russian writers, could not conjure up an image of this place - or at least not one that satisfied his critical judgement as a writer. However hard he tried to paint an

ideal picture of his Russian characters - an icon, if you like, of the Russian soul - Gogol's observations of reality were such that he could not help but burden them with grotesque features derived from their natural habitat. As he himself despaired of his own religious vision, 'this is all a dream and it vanishes as soon as one shifts to what it really is in Russia'.⁴²

Sensing he had failed in his fictional endeavour, Gogol sought instead to drive his message home in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1846), a pedantic moral sermon on the divine principle contained in Russia which was meant to serve as a sort of ideological preface to the unfinished volumes of Dead Souls. Gogol preached that Russia's salvation lay in the spiritual reform of every individual citizen. He left untouched the social institutions. He neglected the questions of serfdom and the autocratic state, ludicrously claiming that both were perfectly acceptable so long as they were combined with Christian principles. Progressive opinion was outraged - it seemed a defection from their sacred ideals of progress and political commitment to the people's cause. In an open letter of 1847 Belinsky launched a devastating attack on the writer whom he had championed (mistakenly, perhaps) as a social realist and advocate of political reform:

Yes, I did love you, with all the passion a man tied by blood ties to his country can feel for a man who was its hope, its glory and its pride, one of its great leaders on the path of consciousness, progress and development… Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, asceticism or piety, as you suggest, but in education, civilization and culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people of human dignity, a sense lost for centuries in the mud and filth.⁴³

The Slavophiles, who were no less committed to reform, threw their hands up in despair. 'My friend', Sergei Aksakov wrote to Gogol, 'if your aim was to cause a scandal, to make your friends and foes stand Up and unite against you, then you have simply achieved this. If this publication was one of your jokes, it has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams: everyone is mystified.'⁴⁴ Even Father Makary, Gogol's