In his influential
Deprived of his metaphorical overcoat, Gogol’s hapless hero is left naked to face his main enemy—the city, where, according to Gogol, there is eternal winter, where even “the wind, in accordance with Petersburg custom, blew at him from all four quarters” (again impossible in reality) and where the white snow whipped up by the cutting wind is identified with the useless deadly paper snow that falls on the helpless individual from anonymous ministries and offices—a Kafkaesque image forty-one years before Kafka’s birth. Of course, the poor clerk dies and indifferent Petersburg, according to Gogol, goes on without him as if he had never existed.
In a similar situation Pushkin would probably hesitate to bring a final judgment. But Gogol has no doubts: the culprit is Petersburg, ruthlessly destroying the personality, a soulless heap “of houses tumbled one upon the other, roaring streets, seething mercantilism, that ugly pile of fashions, parades, clerks, wild northern nights, specious glitter, and base colorlessness.”
Gogol’s image of a demonic Petersburg became mystical. The city of his imagination is not really a city at all anymore but a land of the living dead: a black hole that sucks people into it, the Great Nothing. “The idea of the city,” Gogol wrote, is “emptiness taken to the highest degree.” The deep-seated rejection of Petersburg so typical of the common people rose to the surface in his writing, slowly but inexorably becoming part of the social and philosophical discourse of the educated classes.
Gogol was the first (1837) to publish an extended literary comparison of the old and new capitals—Moscow and Petersburg—starting a long line of such essays, right up to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
Peter the Great subordinated the church to the state. Petersburg, despite certain external religious attributes fixed to official legends, was planned and built as a secular city. Moscow’s silhouette was determined by the “forty times forty” churches and their belfries. Petersburg’s silhouette is made of dominating spires.
The people perceived the godless, foreign-looking Petersburg as alien, a gigantic squid sucking the lifeblood out of Russia. Gogol legitimized that view by formulating the people’s vague doubts into the famous line, “Russia needs Moscow; Petersburg needs Russia.”
Gogol’s verdict became a catchphrase for the Slavophiles, the influential nationalistic literary, philosophical, and—as much as the post-Decembrist climate allowed—political movement of the times, which called for a special path of development for Russia, eschewing Western models. They considered the entire “Petersburg” period of Russian history to be a tragic mistake and saw salvation in a return to pre-Petrine, patriarchal norms and forms of social life. “Long live Moscow and down with Petersburg!” was their battle cry.
Almost every utterance by Gogol—who considered himself to be a divinely endowed person, prophet, and spiritual adviser—was law to the Slavophiles. But even the so-called Westernizers, who dreamed of a Russian constitution and European-style parliament, recognized Gogol’s importance, especially after his early death in 1852. Gogol’s mystical picture and negative assessment of Petersburg’s significance reigned in the minds of his contemporaries, easily outweighing the pre-ponderant hundred years of praise for the capital.
This was an extremely rare instance when the writing of a single man, albeit a recognized literary genius, could change so drastically the established perception among the educated classes of a great city. But this is the way literature works in Russia. Hence the Petersburg mythos changed from Peter’s version to Gogol’s.
Gogol had a powerful ally in this unprecedented achievement—Nicholas I. For the Russian intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century, haughty, autocratic Petersburg grew completely confused with the monumental, neoclassical Nicholas. Finally, the two blended into one. Neither had lived up to the expectations of the intelligentsia.
