Gogol mystic project what to do. Mystical motifs in the works of H

MBOU secondary school No. 9

Research

work on literature:

"Mysticism in life and creativity

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol.

Performed: 10th grade student

Madyka Yulia

Supervisor: teacher of Russian language and literature

Odnorog Tatyana Nikolaevna

S.P. Mulino, 2012

I. Introduction.

Gogol as the most mysterious figure of Russian literature.

II. Main part.

1.Childhood. Formation of religiosity.

2.Gogol’s arrival in St. Petersburg. First publication.

3. The difficult path to literature.

4. Folk fiction in “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

The image of the devil in "The Night Before Christmas".

The mystical image of a cat in “May Night or the Drowned Woman” and in “Old World Landowners.”

Fantastic plot in "Terrible Revenge".

God's Retribution in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”

5. “Viy” is Gogol’s most mystical and terrible story.

6. Fiction "Petersburg Tales". Hoaxes in the stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat”.

7. Gogol’s passion for practical jokes and hoaxes.

8.The mystery of the writer's death.

III.Conclusion.

IV . Bibliography

Much time will still pass before the full deep and strict significance of Gogol, this monk-artist, Christian satirist, ascetic and humorist, this martyr of sublime thought and insoluble task, is fully understood.

I. S. Aksakov

Nikolai Gogol is one of the most original Russian writers; his fame has gone far beyond the Russian cultural space. His books are interesting throughout his life, each time he manages to find new facets in them, almost new content.

There is no more mysterious figure in Russian literature than Gogol. There are more myths about his life and death than about any other writer.

Why was Gogol never married? Why did he never have his own home? Why did he burn the second volume of Dead Souls? And, of course, the biggest mystery is the mystery of his illness and death.

Here is how the Russian religious philosopher and literary critic Konstantin Mochulsky wrote: “Gogol’s life is a complete torture, the most terrible part of which, which took place in the mystical plane, is beyond our sight. A man who was born with a feeling of cosmic horror, who saw quite realistically the interference of demonic forces in human life, who fought with the devil until his last breath - this same man “burned” with a passionate thirst for perfection and an indefatigable longing for God.”

The relevance of research. Mystical motives are widespread

spread in Russian classical, as well as modern

literature.

Being much older than the written word, these motives go their own way

roots in folklore and mythological systems of Slavic and

other peoples.

It is in the works of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol that we meet

frequent appeals to mystical motives, and an example of this

his collection “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka” can serve as a reference. Like

every writer who rethinks in the course of creative work

the original material taken as a basis, Gogol is not just

transfers folk tales to paper (although the writer himself

claimed that he did not change the Little Russian legend), but creates on their

basis - and on the basis of the reality he saw - new, truly

piece of art.

To understand the essence of mystical motifs in the works of N.V. Gogol, it is necessary to trace their connections with folk art itself, with the objective reality that surrounded the writer, to identify the place of each of the two worlds in the holistic system of each of the works under consideration.

To consider this topic, I chose the works of N.V. Gogol “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and “Petersburg Tales”.

In this work, mystical motifs in the works of N.V. Gogol is studied from three points of view:

From a folklore point of view, that is, the mythological and folklore sources used by N.V. are explored. Gogol for creating works;

From a literary point of view, i.e., the specificity of mystical characters in Gogol’s works, their difference from the original folklore prototypes is examined;

From the point of view of their place in everyday reality, which also finds a place in Gogol’s stories.

Goal of the work:

The purpose of the study is to consider the specifics of mystical motifs in the works of N.V. Gogol.

In this regard, I set myself the following research objectives:

Comparison of literary mystical images created by N.V. Gogol, with their folklore prototypes, identifying similarities;

Consideration of the specifics of Gogol’s mystical characters;

A study of the reasons for the introduction of a mystical line in the works being studied, their value for the plot and ideological content.

In my work, I used research on this topic by scientists such as V.B. Sokolov, E. Dobin, A.N. Kozhin.

According to the Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev: “Gogol is the only Russian writer who had a sense of magic, he artistically conveys the action of dark, evil magical forces...”.

Gogol's fiction is often compared with the fiction of a number of foreign writers - mainly Hoffmann. Indeed, similar features can be found in the works of Gogol and Hoffmann. Nevertheless, the very nature of fantasy and its place in Gogol are distinguished by their characteristics, first of all, by their realistic basis. In Gogol's works, everyday attributes always retain their essence and contribute to the understanding of the motives and meaning of a number of fantastic persons and events. According to V. Belinsky: “The perfect truth of life in Gogol’s stories is closely connected with the simplicity of fiction.”

V.Ya. Bryusov emphasized: “The desire for extremes, for exaggeration, for hyperbole was reflected not only in Gogol’s work, not only in his works: the same desire permeated his whole life. He perceived everything that happened around him in an exaggerated form, easily mistook the ghosts of his fiery imagination for reality, and lived his entire life in a world of changing illusions.”

Chapter I. Childhood. Formation of religiosity.

First of all, the writer’s life path, starting from his first steps, is marked by mystery.

N.V. Gogol was born in the town of Velikiye Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district, Poltava province, into the family of a middle-income landowner, who had 400 serfs and 1000 acres of land. For a long time they did not know the exact date of his birth - it was called

March 19, 1809, then March 20, 1810 Only almost forty years after the writer’s death, it was established from the publication of metrics that he was published on March 20, 1809.

This gave Vladimir Nabokov the basis to end his book about Gogol with a spectacular phrase: “It is true that Gogol was born on April 1.” The phrase hints at the fact that Gogol’s entire subsequent life passed as if under the sign of an April Fool’s hoax.

Well, if not all of life, then many of its events...

The writer's childhood was spent on his parents' estate Vasilyevka (Yanovshchina) in Ukraine, in a land covered in legends, beliefs and traditions. Nearby was a famous

now the whole world is Dikanka, where in those days they showed the shirt of an executed man

Kochubey, as well as the oak tree where Maria and Mazepa met.

Gogol came from ancient

Little Russian family; in troubled times

times of Little Russia some of

his ancestors were also pestered by the Polish

nobility. Gogol's grandfather Afanasy

Demyanovich Yanovsky (1738-early 19

Descended from priests

graduated from Kyiv Theological

Academy,

rose to the rank of second major and,

having received hereditarily

nobility, came up with a mystical

pedigree going back to

mythical Cossack colonel

Andre Gogol, who supposedly lived in

mid-eighteenth century. He

wrote in an official document that “his ancestors, with the last name Gogol,

Polish nation,” although he himself was a real Little Russian, and others

They considered him the prototype of the hero of “Old World Landowners.”

Great-grandfather, Yan Gogol, a graduate of the Kyiv Academy, “having graduated

Russian side", settled in the Poltava region, and from him

the nickname "Gogol-Yanovsky" came into being. Gogol himself, according to

apparently did not know the origin of this increase and

subsequently discarded it, saying that the Poles had made it up.

Father N.V. Gogol, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol - Yanovsky, was an employee of the Little Russian Post Office, and also wrote Ukrainian comedies, which were successfully staged at the D.P. Theater. Troshchinsky, a famous nobleman and patron of the arts; his estate was located nearby and was the cultural center of the region. The poetic element of folk life, the literary and theatrical environment very early developed in the boy a passion for writing. The writer's mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a deeply religious, nervous and impressionable woman. Having lost two children who died in infancy, she waited with fear for the third. The couple often went to the neighboring Dikan Church, where the miraculous icon of St. Nicholas of Myra. The boy was named Nicholas in honor of the saint.

Very early, his mother began to bring Nikolai to church. At first he felt only boredom, and with disgust the smell of incense. But one day, looking closely at the painting depicting heaven and hell, he asked his mother to tell him about the Last Judgment. She told the boy about the death of the world and the Last Judgment, about the hellish torment of sinners.

Mother instructed that it is necessary to maintain moral purity in the name of salvation. The stories about the ladder that angels lower from heaven, giving their hand to the soul of the deceased, were especially memorable and impressed the child. There are seven measures on this ladder; the last seventh raises the immortal soul of man to the seventh heaven, to the heavenly abodes. The souls of the righteous go there - people who spent their earthly life “in all piety and purity.” The image of the staircase will then pass through all of Gogol’s thoughts about the fate and calling of man to spiritual ascent and moral growth, to self-improvement.

Since then, Gogol has constantly lived “under the terror of retribution from beyond the grave.”

From his mother, Gogol inherited a subtle mental organization, a penchant for mystical contemplation and God-fearing religiosity. In the deep silence, he imagined that he heard voices from beyond the grave, calling out to him, chilling his soul. “You, no doubt, have ever heard a voice calling you by name,” Gogol described these childhood sensations in “Old World Landowners,” “which common people explain this way: that the soul yearns for a person and calls him; after which death inevitably follows. I confess that I am always afraid of this mysterious call. I remember that in childhood I often heard it: sometimes suddenly behind me someone clearly pronounced my name... I usually then ran with the greatest fear and caught my breath from the garden, and then I only calmed down when some person came towards me, the sight of which drove away this terrible desert of the heart.”

The inclinations of religiosity, which later took possession of Gogol’s entire being, are attributed to the influence of his mother, as well as the shortcomings of his upbringing: his mother surrounded him with real adoration, and this could be one of the sources of his conceit, which, on the other hand, was early generated by the instinctive consciousness of the genius power hidden within him.

The boy's imagination was influenced in childhood by popular beliefs in brownies, witches, merman and mermaids. The mysterious world of folk demonology was absorbed by Gogol’s impressionable soul from childhood.

N. Gogol was thin and short from his youth, which in no way corresponded to his idea of ​​​​the heroic Cossack nature. But in his soul he felt growing strength. And he was, as his schoolmates said, inexhaustible in mischievous jokes and pranks; he had a predilection for playing pranks on his friends, noticing their funny features; he knew how to “guess a person” (Pushkin’s expression), but he himself did not trust his plans, his innermost dreams to anyone. His passion for reincarnation, unexpected changes of masks, and practical jokes often perplexed his friends.

Those who saw Gogol on the gymnasium stage and - later - heard him read, retained the conviction that he could become a great comic actor. It is curious that he was most successful in female roles; for example, he inimitably played Mrs. Prostakova in Fonvizin’s comedy “The Minor.”

Gogol's inner spiritual world was very complex and contradictory.

He knew that some of his comrades considered him a freak, small, frail, ugly, unkempt and unkempt. He could not help but be vulnerable from the tricks of his comrades. Harmless ridicule tormented him all night long. The awareness of his inferiority humiliated him, but at the same time stimulated him to rise to success and dignity.

He never opened up to anyone about his aspirations and plans - everyday and especially creative. He liked to mystify his friends and mislead him about his own, even the most innocent, intentions. Any successful hoax gave him the greatest joy.

These inclinations of Gogol were fully determined already in the Nizhyn gymnasium. Since childhood, no simple-minded frankness or sociability was noticed in him; he was always somehow strangely secretive, there were always corners in his soul where no one’s eyes dared to look. Often he spoke even about the most ordinary things for a reason, investing them with some kind of mystery or hiding his real thought under the guise of a joke or buffoonery.

He saw God's will in all the smallest events of life. A rude shout in class, a bad grade, or a runny nose was considered by him as supernatural attention. He was tormented by inexplicable premonitions that forced him to obey the Divine will.

In the gymnasium of higher sciences in the city of Nezhin, where the future writer studied and lived from 1821 to 1828, he was called Mysterious Carlo - after one of the characters in Walter Scott’s novel “Black Dwarf”. A few months before graduating from high school, he wrote to his mother: “True, I am considered a mystery to everyone, no one has completely solved me.”

While studying at the Nizhyn gymnasium, still in the lower grades, N. Gogol somehow did something wrong, so that he ended up in the “criminal category”. “It’s bad, brother,” one of the comrades said: “they’ll flog you!” - "Tomorrow!" - answered Gogol. But the verdict was confirmed and the perpetrators came for it. Gogol suddenly screams so shrilly that everyone was scared - and “goes crazy.” There is a commotion and Gogol is taken to the hospital. The director visits him twice a day. His schoolmates go to see him secretly and return sadly. I'm crazy, really crazy! Gogol pretended so skillfully that everyone was convinced of his insanity. After two weeks of successful treatment, he was released from the hospital, but everyone still looked at him with doubt and apprehension for a long time.

Towards the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of broad social activity, which, however, he sees not at all in the literary field; no doubt, under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to advance and benefit society in a service for which in fact he was completely incapable. Thus, plans for the future were unclear; but it is curious that Gogol was possessed by a deep confidence that he had a wide career ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what simple “existents” are content with, as he put it, which were the majority of his Nezhin comrades.

He dreamed of government activity that would allow him to accomplish something great “for the common good, for Russia.”

Chapter II. Petersburg. First publications

At the end of December 1828 Gogol ended up in St. Petersburg. Ideas about St. Petersburg life changed the appearance of Nikolai Gogol to such an extent that from an unkempt schoolboy he turned into a real dandy. Without well-tailored clothes, he could not achieve, as it seemed to him, social prosperity.

But his first impressions stunned him.

In his dreams, St. Petersburg was a magical land, where people enjoy all material and spiritual blessings, where they do great things, wage a great fight against evil - and suddenly, instead of all this, a dirty, uncomfortable furnished room, worries about how to have a cheap lunch, anxiety at the sight of the wallet being emptied, which seemed inexhaustible in Nizhyn!

Things got even worse when he began to work hard to realize his cherished dream - to enter the civil service. He brought with him several letters of recommendation to various influential persons and, of course, was sure that they would immediately open up for him the path to useful and glorious activity; but, alas, here again bitter disappointment awaited him.

Gogol tried to find his calling in acting and teaching, and meanwhile the idea of ​​writing grew stronger in his mind. In 1829 He published, under the pseudonym V. Alov, the poem “Hans Küchelgarten,” which he began in high school.

Constantly communicating with friends, he did not open up to them about his intentions and did not want to take their advice. None of them knew about his plans to publish Gantz. All this was explained not by his timidity, but by his desire to assume some kind of mystery. He fantasized that Pushkin himself would read this poem and, enchanted by the music of the poems, demand to introduce him to the mysterious author. This kind of fantasies so fired up his crazy imagination that he sometimes pulled himself together so as not to really believe that he was already a close friend of the poet.

Critics noticed the author's abilities, but considered this work immature; it did not attract readers. Gogol was so shocked by the failure that he bought all the unsold copies of the book in stores and burned them. This was the beginning of acts of self-immolation, which Gogol repeated more than once and ended with the destruction of the second volume of Dead Souls.

The failure of the poem was also associated with another feature of behavior, which later also turned out to be constant for Gogol: having experienced a shock, he rushed out of Russia. Later, such departures at times of crisis, at the height of controversy surrounding published works, became more frequent and longer lasting.

Suddenly Gogol took off and went abroad by ship, to the seaside city of Germany - Lubeck.

To prevent his mother from reproaching him for wasting money, he invents a mysterious friend who supposedly wanted to pay for the trip, but suddenly died.

In his letters to his mother, he writes about the reasons for his flight, each time coming up with new mystical justifications. First, he justified his departure by the need to treat a severe scrofulous rash that appeared on his face and hands (but never took advantage of the water treatment in Travemund), then by “the order of the Almighty” (as if God had shown him the way to a foreign land), then by meeting a woman with "a face of astonishing brilliance." As a result, Maria Gogol brought together two stories - about illness and about love passion - and concluded that her son had become infected with a venereal disease. This conclusion plunged Gogol into deep horror. His lies turned against him. Just as the hero of his poem Gogol fled from the world to find himself face to face with himself, he fled from himself, from the discord between his lofty dreams and practical life. Life in a foreign land turned out to be even worse than in Russia. Gogol did not stay here long. Soon, however, letters from his mother and his own prudence made him come to his senses, and after a two-month absence he returned to St. Petersburg.

The explanation for this strange act suggests itself: Gogol fails to get a job; the poem “Hanz Küchelgarten” he published did not bring the expected fame, but aroused sharp criticism.

However, Gogol himself spoke about a completely different reason: that “he met a woman of extraordinary beauty and, in order not to die, not to burn in the fire of passion, he had to run away...”.

Back in 1829, Gogol described a meeting with a woman on Nevsky: “but I saw her... no, I won’t name her... she is too tall for anyone, not just me. I would call her an angel, but this expression is low and inappropriate for her. An angel is a creature with neither virtues nor vices, without character, because it is not a person, and living with thoughts in the same sky. This is a deity dressed slightly in human passions. A face whose astonishing brilliance is imprinted on the heart in an instant; eyes that quickly pierce the soul. But their radiance, burning, passing through everything, cannot be endured by any person... Oh, if you had looked at me then... it’s true, I knew how to hide myself from everyone, but did I hide from myself?

Hellish melancholy with possible torment boiled in my chest...

no, it wasn’t love, at least I haven’t heard anything like it

love. In a fit of rage and terrible mental anguish

I was thirsty, seething to drink in just one look, just one

I was hungry for a glance. Look at her again - that's what happened

the only desire growing stronger and stronger with

the inexpressible causticity of melancholy...

I saw that I needed to run away from myself if I wanted to save my life, to bring at least a shadow of peace into my tormented soul...

No, this creature that he sent to deprive me of peace, to upset my precariously created world, was not a woman. If she had been a woman, she would not have been able to produce such terrible impressions with all the power of her charms. It was a deity created by him, a part of himself! But, for God's sake, don't ask her name. She's tall, too tall."

His friend from school, A.S. Danilevsky, was perplexed: they say, he lived with Nikolai in the same city and in the same apartment and did not notice anything... And yet Gogol’s extraordinary secrecy in front of his comrades is known. In addition, the experiences of the loving heroes of his stories (for example, Vakula from “The Night Before Christmas”) are so reminiscent of the confusion when meeting a beauty that the thought suggests itself: all this was familiar to the writer firsthand. Also indicative is Gogol’s later mute admission that, thanks to his willpower, he was twice kept on the edge of the “abyss.”

Did he mean the episode with the beautiful stranger?

It must be said that the secret remained a secret. What actually happened is unknown. And this is not the last mysterious event in Gogol’s biography.

Gogol was seized by a new dream - theater. He remembered his successes on stage at the Nezhin gymnasium and decided to become an actor. Gogol came to the director of the imperial theaters, Prince Gagarin, and offered his services. He was given a monologue from the tragedy “Dmitry Donskoy” to read. In the minds of old-school theatergoers, the dramatic actor had to play his role with affectation. The words did not have to be spoken, but recited with pathos. Gogol read simply, without howls and “dramatic hiccups.” His manner of performance clearly contradicted the tastes of the examiners. In a word, Gogol did not pass the test.

He almost fell into despair. After the death of the father, life for the family became difficult. Debts appeared. Help from the mother became less and less regular. The small estate had to be mortgaged several times. So several painful months passed until, finally, happiness smiled. Gogol received service in one of the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was an unenviable place: the work of a petty clerical worker, boring and tiring. It turned out that here one must spend one’s life “rewriting the old nonsense and nonsense of the gentlemen-heads” (from a letter to his mother).

At the same time, Gogol carefully looked at the life and everyday life of his fellow officials. These observations later formed the basis of his famous stories “The Nose”, “Notes of a Madman”, “The Overcoat”. After serving for a year, Gogol decided to put an end to the idea of ​​a bureaucratic career forever. In February 1831 he resigned.

Chapter III. A difficult path to literature.

Gradually, however, the conviction begins to mature in him that literary creativity is his main calling. The bitterness of failure with “Hans Kuchelgarten” was forgotten, and Gogol began to write again, devoting all his leisure time to this work. By the way, until the end of his life Gogol never admitted to anyone that V. Alov was his pseudonym.

Gradually Gogol finds his way and achieves success. The doors to a select literary society opened for Gogol: he met V. A. Zhukovsky, P. A. Pletnev, and in May 1831. at the latter's party he was introduced to Pushkin. Another two or three months passed, and Gogol became a literary celebrity. In an atmosphere of communication with them - in Tsarskoe Selo - Gogol completes the work that made him famous in Russia: “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

In letters to his mother, Gogol often hints at the “extensive work” on which he works hard and hard. After his arrival in St. Petersburg, he begins to pester his relatives with requests: to regularly send him information and materials about the customs and morals of “our Little Russians”, samples of Ukrainian folk art - songs, fairy tales, as well as all kinds of antiques - hats, dresses, costumes. “A few more words,” he writes to his mother, “about carols, about Ivan Kupala, about mermaids. If there are, in addition, any spirits or brownies, then more about them with their names and actions; a lot of people are running around

between the common people of beliefs, terrible legends,

various jokes, and so on, and so on, and so on. All this will happen

Extremely entertaining for me."

These materials are in addition to our own

life impressions were used by Gogol in

a large series of stories published under the general title

"Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka". According to Pletnev’s advice

Gogol published both parts of this collection under the intriguing

pseudonym of a naive and crafty beekeeper storyteller

Rudogo Panka.

Chapter IV. Folk fiction in

“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

The first part of “Evenings” was published in September 1831.

It included four stories: “Sorochinskaya Fair”,

“The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night” and

"The Missing Letter." Six months later, at the beginning of March

In 1832, the second part appeared (“The Night Before Christmas”, “Terrible Revenge”,

“Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt”, “Enchanted Place”).

The world that opened up in “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” had little in common with the reality in which Gogol lived. It was cheerful, joyful,

the happy world of a poetic fairy tale, in which the light major principle predominates. In “Evenings,” elements of Ukrainian folk fiction and legends are abundantly introduced. Witches, mermaids, sorceresses, and devils act alongside people. Real life and the legend were perceived by the readers of “Evenings” as a single whole.

The stories seem to be woven from Ukrainian fairy tales, songs, and stories. Here, as Belinsky said, a special world of “poetic reality arises, in which you never know what is in it and what is a fairy tale, but you inevitably take everything for true.”

The story “The Night Before Christmas” begins with the witch flying out of the chimney on a broom and hiding the stars in her sleeve, and the devil steals the Moon and, getting burned, hides it in his pocket. But the witch, it turns out, is the mother of the blacksmith Vakula, a clever coquette who knows how to “bewitch sedate Cossacks to herself.” A person not only is not afraid of “evil spirits,” he forces them to serve him. The devil, although he came straight from Hell, is not so scary: riding on the devil, Vakula flies to St. Petersburg to bring the wayward beauty Oksana the same slippers as the queen herself. The whole story goes in this spirit, the interweaving of fairy tales and tales. The fantastic and the real are mixed in Gogol in some kind of bizarre grotesque. Not only the reader, but also the characters themselves are surprised by the fantastic twists and turns. So, Vakula looks in bewilderment at the art of Patsyuk, swallowing dumplings, which are first coated in sour cream.

In the early cycles (“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Mirgorod”) the devil has real typological features. He has a “narrow muzzle, constantly spinning and sniffing everything that comes along, ending, like our pigs, with a round snout”, “a sharp and long tail.” This is a small demon, conceptualized in folklore traditions.

In general, “Evenings” “follow two heterogeneous traditions: German romantic demonology (witches, devils, spells, witchcraft) and the Ukrainian fairy tale with its primordial dualism, the struggle between God and the devil.” A demon is a creature in which the denial of God and eternal vulgarity are concentrated.

Gogol “in the light of laughter explores the nature of this mystical essence”, which forces people “to do something similar to human, like the mechanic of his lifeless machine gun” or pushes the bride into the arms of “a terrible black cat with iron claws,” that is, into the arms of a witch.

Gogol’s devil is “an underdeveloped hypostasis of the unclean; a shaking, frail imp; the devil is one of the breed of small devils that seem to haunt our drunkards.” The invasion of demonic forces into human life becomes the cause of the emptiness in the world where God has been forgotten, which gives birth to death. In this unreal world, even beauty becomes something terribly piercing, accompanied not only by a demonically sweet feeling, but also by panic horror.

Thus, one of the hypostases of Gogol’s demon lies in the phenomenon of “immortal human vulgarity,” which must be “hit in the face without being embarrassed.” This vulgarity is “the begun and unfinished, which presents itself as beginningless and infinite,” it denies God and is identified with universal evil.

The evil devilish evil spirits, who personified the dark forces in “Evenings,” are in most cases put to shame, and all her attempts to fool and mock a person turn against her.

But great troubles and misfortunes were brought by the forces of hell when, through deceit and demonic promises, they managed to blind people and make them, at least for a moment, doubt that they were right.

As in Gogol’s previous works, a large place in the story “Terrible Revenge” is occupied by a fantastic plot. But behind the fantastic features and events in the story, the real historical and moral theme of crime and betrayal, and the inevitability of the most severe punishment for this, is revealed.

The bloody atrocities of the evil sorcerer-traitor from this story are terrible, but inevitable retribution will overtake him in due course.

The story of Vasily Gogol’s marriage to Maria Ivanovna Kosyarovskaya was also shrouded in mysticism. As a boy, Vasily Gogol went with his mother on a pilgrimage to the Kharkov province, where there was a wonderful image of the Mother of God. Staying overnight, he saw in a dream this temple and the heavenly queen, who predicted his fate: “You will be overcome by many illnesses (and for sure, he suffered from many illnesses), but everything will pass, you will recover, you will get married, and here is your wife.” Having uttered these words, she raised her hand, and he saw at her feet a small child sitting on the floor, whose features were engraved in his memory.

At home Vasily forgot his dream. His parents, not having a church at that time, went to the town of Yareski. There he saw a seven-month-old child in the nurse’s arms; he looked at him and stopped in surprise: he remembered the very features of the child that he had seen in his dream.

Without telling anyone about this, he began to watch the girl and amused her with toys. Thirteen years later, he saw the same dream, and in the same temple the gates opened, and a maiden of extraordinary beauty came out and, pointing to the left, said: “Here is your bride!” He saw a girl in a white dress with the same facial features. After a short time, Vasily Gogol wooed thirteen-year-old Maria Kosyarovskaya.

The plot of the story “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” is based on the Slavic pagan holiday of Ivan Kupala, dedicated by the Russian Orthodox Church to the Nativity of Ivan the Baptist (June 24, old style).

In Little Russia there is a belief that the fern blooms only once a year, precisely at midnight before Midsummer, with a fiery color. The one who manages to pick it, despite all the ghosts that prevent him from doing so, finds the treasure. The treasure in the story becomes a devilish temptation that Petrus, who killed an innocent child and extracted the gold at this terrible price, cannot withstand.

Therefore, severe punishment is inevitable for a bloody crime that did not bring happiness to the young. After all, wealth acquired through dishonest means is so illusory and short-lived.

A.K. Vronsky writes in his book “Gogol”: “The fantastic in Gogol is by no means an external device, not accidental and not superficial. Remove the devil, the sorcerer, the witches, the disgusting pig snouts, the stories will fall apart not only in plot, but also in their meaning, in their idea.

An evil, extraneous force, unknown, coming from somewhere, destroys the quiet, serene, ancient way of life with the help of chervonets and all sorts of things - that’s the meaning. There is something demonic in wealth, in money, in treasures: they beckon, entice, tempt, push people into terrible crimes, turn people into fat cattle, into carnivorous gluttons, and deprive them of the image and likeness of humanity.

Things and money sometimes seem alive, moving, and people become like dead things; like Chub, godfather, clerk, thanks to the devil’s intrigues, they turn into coolies.”

Chapter V “Viy” is Gogol’s most mystical and terrible story.

In the collection of stories "Mirgorod" one of

the most mystical and terrible is

story "Viy".

The story was begun by Gogol in 1833.

Viy, the name of a fantastic underground spirit,

was invented by Gogol as a result

connecting the name of the ruler of the underworld in

Ukrainian mythology of “Iron Niy” and

Ukrainian words “viya” - eyelash and “poviko”

Eyelid. Hence the long eyelids of Gogol’s character.

In the note to Viy, Gogol points out,

that “this whole story is folk

tradition" and that he conveyed it exactly as he heard it,

changing almost nothing. However, not a single piece of folklore has yet been discovered with a plot that exactly resembles the story. Only certain motifs of “Viy” are comparable to some folk tales and legends.

Khoma Brut dies from fear, but at the cost of his life he destroys the evil spirit that rushed at the philosopher and did not hear the rooster’s cry in time - after his third cry, the spirits who did not have time to return to the underground kingdom of the dead die.

Gogol brilliantly displays a whole range of mythical moods in the scene of Khoma’s magical jump and flight over the water with a witch on his shoulders. Khoma Brut saw a mermaid swim up from behind the sedge, her back and leg flashed - convex, elastic, all created from brilliance and trembling... “Her cloudy breasts, matte, like porcelain, not covered with glaze, shone through before the sun the edges of its white elastic circle...Water in the form of small bubbles, like beads, showered them. She is shaking and laughing in the water. Does he see it or not? Is this real or is it a dream? "What is this?" - thought the philosopher, looking down, rushing at full speed. Sweat rolled off him like a hail, he felt a devilishly sweet feeling, he felt some kind of piercing, some kind of painfully terrible pleasure. It often seemed to him that he no longer had a heart at all, and he clutched at it with fear.” Critics greeted Viy rather coldly at first, not appreciating the author's true virtuosity and the depth of his philosophy. In Viya, fantasy is intricately intertwined in the story with real-life details and descriptions.

We can say that “Viy” is the first real thriller

in Russian literature. Gogol skillfully builds tension

living with every night that Khoma Brut must spend

at the tomb of Pannochka the Witch. At the same time truly folk

humor only sets off the horror of what is happening.

For example, in the following characterization of Khoma: “After

At lunchtime the philosopher was completely in good spirits. He managed to go around

all the villages, get to know almost everyone; from two huts

he was even kicked out; one cute girl grabbed him

quite a shovel on the back, when he decided to feel

I wonder what material her shirt and scarf were made of.”

And Khoma wouldn’t mind sleeping with the old witch,

if she were a little younger.

Next to this, these are truly soul-chilling

serious lines that do not cause even a shadow of a smile,

despite the fantastic nature of what is happening: “The corpse

was already standing in front of him on the very line and staring at him dead,

green eyes. Bursak shuddered, and a cold sensation ran through his entire body.<…>She began to grumble dully and began to utter terrible words with dead lips; They sobbed hoarsely, like the bubbling of boiling tar. What they meant, he could not say, but there was something terrible in them. The philosopher, in fear, realized that she was casting a spell.”

Osip Senkovsky said: “In Viy there is no end, no beginning, no idea - there is nothing except a few terrible, incredible scenes. Anyone who copies a folk legend for a story must also give it meaning - only then will it become an elegant work. It is likely that the Little Russians Viy have some kind of myth, but the meaning of this myth has not been solved.”

Who is Viy? There are two versions, and neither of them can be strictly preferred. Many researchers believe that the name Viy, a fantastic underground spirit, was invented by Gogol as a result of the contamination of the names of the ruler of the underworld in Ukrainian mythology, “Iron Niy,” who is capable of killing people with his gaze and burning cities (probably this property of his was identified with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes), and the Ukrainian words “viya”, “viyka” - eyelash. In the “Little Russian Lexicon” compiled by Gogol, for example, we read: “Virlooky - goggle-eyed.” Hence the long eyelids of Gogol’s character. If we accept this version, it turns out that Viy in the form in which we recognize him today is entirely the fruit of Gogol’s fantasy - an iron creature with long eyelids reaching to the ground. Indeed, in famous fairy tales, as well as in other folklore works of Ukrainians and other Slavic peoples, there is no character named Viy. With one remarkable exception. True, the famous collector and researcher of folklore A.N. Afanasyev in his book “Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature” argued that in Slavic mythology not only there is a similar image, but also the very name of the fantastic creature - Viy - was considered as quite traditional.

Gogol's Viy is the ruler of the underground kingdom, the master of the earth's bowels. No wonder he has an iron face and iron fingers. In the popular consciousness, the bowels of the earth were associated, first of all, with iron ore - it was this mineral that people began to mine first. For Gogol, Viy's power is hidden behind extra-long eyelids, and he cannot use it without outside help. The writer combined the Belarusian Koshchei with the Ukrainian iron Niy. One of the other evil spirits must lift Viyu’s eyelids. Allegorically, this can be interpreted in the sense that the person himself must help the evil spirits - with his fear. It is Khoma's fear that ultimately destroys him. Viy takes his soul to himself, to the kingdom of the dead.

Khoma's story also allows for a realistic explanation. Viy's vision can be imagined as the fruit of the delirium tremens of a great lover of vodka, from which he dies.

Gogol thoroughly prepared to write his mystical stories. The author carefully collected all folklore information regarding evil spirits. The writer wanted complete similarity with popular ideas about evil spirits. And for this he wrote to his mother: “...A few more words about carols, about Ivan Kupala, about mermaids. If there are, in addition, any spirits or brownies, then about them in more detail with their names and deeds; There are a lot of superstitions, terrible tales, legends, various anecdotes, and so on floating around among the common people. and so on. and so on. All this will be extremely interesting for me.”

Gogol: “Viy is a colossal creation of simply the people’s imagination - this is the name given to the Little Russians for the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids go all the way to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I didn’t want to change it in any way and I tell it almost in the same simplicity as I heard it.” Indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the legend about Viya that Gogol heard was not recorded by any other folklorist, and only Gogol’s story has preserved it to this day.

“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” opened, not counting Gogol’s first works, the romantic period of his work. At the same time, it is obvious that the stories alternate in tone. After the cheerful “Sorochinskaya Fair”, in its fantastic part going back to the motifs of folk demonology, where evil spirits are ultimately put to shame, there followed the story with a tragic end “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, in which evil (devilishness) was presented as irreversible, fitting more into the traditions of German romantic fiction.

However, if you take a closer look, it becomes obvious that despite the certain dominant tonality that prevails in all the stories of the cycle, sometimes joyful and cheerful, sometimes tragic and terrible, Gogol already within each text constantly balances on the concepts of scary and funny.

As mentioned earlier, Gogol tries to fully comply with folklore regarding evil spirits. One of these characters is the mermaid in the story “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”: “She was all pale, like a sheet; but how wonderful, how beautiful!<…>Levko looked at the shore: in the thin silver fog, light, like shadows, girls in shirts white, like a meadow covered with lilies of the valley, flashed; golden necklaces, monists, ducats shone on their necks; but they were pale; their body seemed to be sculpted from transparent clouds and seemed to shine through and through during the silver moon.” This is exactly what mermaids look like in folk tales. They are often confused with sea maidens, who have tails instead of legs. But mermaids have legs, and they love to dance in circles along the river bank, which is shown in the story. Gogol also says that this mermaid is a girl who threw herself into the water. And here the author did not sin against folklore truth. The following become mermaids: a) drowned women who voluntarily went to the bottom of the river; b) girls who bathed without a cross or entered the water without crossing themselves; c) girls who died unbaptized or were stillborn; d) those girls whom the mermaids lured into their round dance.

Chapter VI.

Fiction "Petersburg Tales".

Hoaxes in the stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat”.

“In Viya,” noted A.K. Vronsky, “sweetheart

sensuality, the earthly, the essential fight against

mortal charms, with dark souls

pleasures, with a pernicious world, but melting

inexplicable pleasures."

From the end of 1833 he became interested in the idea of

unrealistic, as were his previous plans for the service:

it seemed to him that he could enter the scientific field. At that

the opening of the Kyiv University was being prepared, and he

dreamed of occupying the history department there, which he taught to girls

at the Patriotic Institute.

Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; Gogol thought to found

together with him in Kyiv, he wanted to invite Pogodin there; in Kyiv to him

Finally, he imagined Russian Athens, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in universal history, and at the same time studying Little Russian antiquity.

To his chagrin, it turned out that the department of history had been given to another person; but soon he was offered the same chair at St. Petersburg University, thanks to the influence of his high literary friends.

He actually took this chair: once or twice he managed to give a spectacular lecture, but then the task turned out to be beyond his strength, and he himself refused the professorship in 1835.

At the same time, Gogol presented the manuscript of the two-volume “History of Little Russia” to St. Petersburg University. But then I took it back for revision. . Whether Gogol burned this manuscript, as he often did with works that did not satisfy him, or whether it was preserved is unknown.

"Nose"

Vladimir Nabokov tied

the main character of the story with features

appearance of Gogol himself: “His big and

the sharp nose was so long and mobile that

in his youth he knew how to pester

its tip is the lower lip; the nose was the most

a sensitive and noticeable feature of his appearance.

The nose runs like a leitmotif through it

essays: it is difficult to find another writer,

who would describe smells with such gusto,

sneezing and snoring. Increased sensation in the nose

eventually resulted in the story “The Nose” -

truly a hymn to this organ. Whether his imagination created his nose or whether his nose awakened his fantasy does not matter.”

The hero of the story “The Nose” could not always control himself, which

a person into someone unlike those around him and due to his dissimilarity

no longer able to live the same life. In order for something like this

the transformation has taken place, it takes very little: to take one

one of its most insignificant parts is the nose. A victim like this

the hoax was the collegiate assessor Kovalev, who did nothing

he was different from other “collegiate assessors”, he only liked for everyone to call him major. “It is for this very reason that we will henceforth call this collegiate assessor major.”

So, one morning, Major Kovalev “woke up quite early” and, “to his greatest amazement, he saw that instead of a nose he had a completely smooth place!” “I woke up quite early” and the barber Ivan Yakovlevich found in the bun he was cutting the nose of Major Kovalev. How Ivan Yakovlevich was able to cut off his nose, and even more so how this nose ended up in a bun, remains unclear, but it is known for sure that from the hands of the barber the nose went to the Neva from the St. Isaac's Bridge. It is from this moment that the major’s torment begins, during which he realizes that “a man without a nose is the devil knows what!” If Kovalev’s actions after this unfortunate incident can be explained, then the actions of the nose cannot be explained in any way. Instead of floating in the Neva, the bow, in the most incredible way, ended up in a carriage in the center of St. Petersburg. “He was in a uniform embroidered with gold, with a large stand-up collar; he was wearing suede trousers; there's a sword at my side." Kovalev “almost went crazy from such a spectacle.” His own nose travels around St. Petersburg with the rank of state councilor (which is much higher than the rank of Kovalev himself), he prays in the Kazan Cathedral, goes on visits, and even responds to Kovalev’s statements that he (the nose) “decidedly does not understand anything.”

Due to a seemingly insignificant change in the major's appearance, the whole world was turned upside down. Not only did the nose acquire all human properties and characteristics, it became more powerful than its owner, thereby demonstrating the insignificant role of man in this city, in this world. After losing his nose, Kovalev is not free in his actions, the range of his possibilities has decreased almost to a point, and all his efforts are aimed at one thing - to return such a “noticeable part of the body” to its original place.

Things play a very important role in Gogol's works; people dissolve in this world of things. Therefore, it is not surprising that the world of objects - the city - suppresses a person, makes

its existence is mechanistic and inertial.

"Overcoat"

The thought of a man whose soul was breathed in by God, and whose fate

often determines the devil, apparently, did not leave Gogol. Hero

the story “The Overcoat” Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin in everything

offended by fate, even given a name at birth

cacophonous. But Bashmachkin does not complain: he is already over

rank higher than titular councilor; he has no family, friends,

he doesn’t go to the theater, or to visit, or just for a walk: all of him

spiritual needs are satisfied by copying

Gogol describes in great detail how

The old overcoat, repaired many times, has finally worn out

Akakiy Akakievich, how he childishly tried to convince

tailor Petrovich, that the cloth is still new, I should supply

patches; how Bashmachkin is trying to get the missing forty rubles, how to save money. Finally, the coveted overcoat is acquired, but soon it is stolen. Akakiy Akakievich uselessly walks around the officials, trying to find the missing overcoat and... dies, unable to withstand the indifference on the part of the “significant person.”

Death, it would seem, put an end to the history of Akaki Akakievich. But Gogol presents the reader with another surprise. He talks about a dead man who was looking for his overcoat at night, so he tore off everyone’s overcoat, without regard to rank or title. The dead man did not calm down until he reached the “significant person” and tore the greatcoat off his shoulders.

This fantastic turn of events is reminiscent of the dark wonders of Viy. But in “The Overcoat,” the description of the dead man’s actions is seasoned with humor and presented in such a way that it is impossible to say for sure what really happened and what was born in the fevered imagination of ordinary people. Gogol, however, reports in the very last lines that when the watchman tried to detain the ghost, it stopped and asked: “What do you want?” - and showed such a fist that you won’t find among the living. In addition, the ghost was much taller than Akaki Akakievich and wore an “enormous mustache.” However, at the moment of meeting with the dead robber, the general recognized Akaki Akakievich and even heard his voice: “... it’s your overcoat that I need! you didn’t bother about mine, and even scolded me - now give me yours!” However, in a state of horror, it is no wonder to hear the words that the voice of conscience has been repeating for a long time. And without that, almost every day the general was presented with “pale Akakiy Akakievich, who could not stand the official scolding.”

Gogol leaves the reader in the dark: whether it was a ghost or something else. In any case, if there were rumors in St. Petersburg about an avenger official rebelling after death, this showed the anger that Bashmachkin felt while still alive. In a feverish delirium, he “blasphemed” and, following the words “Your Excellency,” uttered some other, “terrible words.”

After the publication of new collections “Mirgorod” and “Arabesques”, Gogol’s fame increased even more. V.G. Belinsky in the article “On the Russian story and the stories of Gogol” proclaimed him “the head of literature, the head of poets” - and this was during Pushkin’s lifetime!

In 1836, the premiere of The Inspector General took place at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. But soon Gogol leaves abroad again. He leaves unexpectedly for his acquaintances and friends, deeply traumatized by critical reviews: “I’m going abroad, there I unlock the melancholy that my compatriots inflict on me every day.” Many biographers have come to the conclusion that the reason for the sudden departure was the public reaction to the comedy...

But, as it turned out, Gogol made the decision to leave even before the premiere of The Government Inspector, and it is not so easy to explain this action.

Gogol had been abroad since June 1836. to April 1848, but visited his homeland twice during this time: in 1839-1840 and in 1841-1842.

He traveled almost all of Western Europe, living the longest in his beloved Italy - a total of about four and a half years.

Gogol also sailed in the Mediterranean Sea, and before his final return to Russia, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. According to Gogol’s sister Anna Vasilievna: “When Gogol was getting ready to travel abroad, he certainly wanted to receive an image from someone in the form of a blessing.

He waited for a long time in vain, but suddenly he received the image of the Savior from the preacher Innocent. This fulfillment of his desire seemed miraculous to him and was interpreted by him as a command from above to go to Jerusalem and, having cleansed himself with prayer at the Holy Sepulcher, ask for God’s blessing for his planned literary work.”

His stay abroad in the “beautiful distance” for the first time strengthened and calmed him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, “Dead Souls,” but it also became the embryo of deeply fatal phenomena. Disunion with life, an increased withdrawal into oneself, the exaltation of religious feeling led to a “pietistic” exaggeration, which ended with his last book, which amounted to a kind of negation of his own artistic work...

In March 1837, Gogol was in Rome. The Eternal City made a charming impression on him. The nature of Italy delighted and enchanted him. Under the life-giving rays of the Italian sun, Gogol's health strengthened, although he never considered himself completely healthy.

His acquaintances made fun of his suspiciousness, but back in St. Petersburg he said quite seriously that doctors did not understand his illness, that his stomach was structured completely differently from that of other people, and this caused him suffering that others did not understand.

Living abroad, he spent almost every summer on some kind of water, but rarely withstood the full course of treatment; It seemed to him that he himself knew better than all the doctors how and with what to be treated. In his opinion, travel and life in Rome had the most beneficial effect on him. This is what Gogol said about his beloved Rome: “It seemed to me that I saw my homeland, which I had not been to for several years, and in which only my thoughts lived. But no, this is not all that: not my homeland, but the homeland of my soul, where my soul lived before me, before I was born.”

In May 1840, Gogol left for Italy and promised his friends to bring the first volume of Dead Souls, ready for printing.

S. T. Aksakov, Pogodin and Shchepkin saw him off and stood on the street in Perkhushkovo until the crew disappeared from sight. Suddenly, out of nowhere, terrible, black clouds stretched out and very quickly covered half of the sky, it became dark, and some kind of ominous feeling took possession of Gogol’s friends.

They talked sadly, referring to the dark clouds that had eclipsed the sun for Gogol’s future fate, but half an hour later the horizon suddenly changed: a strong wind tore into shreds and dispersed the terrible clouds, the sky soon cleared, the sun appeared in its brilliance and a joyful feeling filled the hearts of those seeing them off.

Thus, in a mystical way, nature accompanied Gogol abroad.

Chapter VII. Gogol's passion for practical jokes and hoaxes.

But it was in Rome that the poet’s weak body could not withstand the nervous tension that accompanies intense creative activity. He caught a severe swamp fever. An acute, painful illness almost brought him to the grave and left marks for a long time, both on his physical and mental state. Her seizures were accompanied by nervous suffering, weakness, and loss of spirit. N.P. Botkin, who was in Rome at that time and looked after Gogol with brotherly love, says that he told him about some visions that visited him during his illness. The “fear of death” that tormented Gogol’s father in the last days of his life was passed on to his son.

From an early age, Gogol was distinguished by suspiciousness and always attached great importance to his ill health; the painful illness, which did not immediately respond to medical help, seemed to him the threshold of death, or at least the end of an activity full of life.

Before this, the religious feelings that had been dormant in him begin to acquire ever greater proportions. He also begins to regard inspiration, which periodically leaves and returns to the writer, as divine overshadowing.

Serious, solemn thoughts, which the proximity of the grave suggests to us, gripped him and did not leave him until the end of his life. Having recovered from physical suffering, he again set to work, but now it acquired a different, very important meaning for him. Partly under the influence of reflections inspired by illness, partly thanks to Belinsky's articles, he developed a more serious view of his duties as a writer and of his works.

He, who almost from childhood was looking for a field in which he could become famous and benefit others, tried to become an official, an actor, a teacher, and a professor, finally realized that his real calling was literature, that the laughter excited by his creations , has a deep educational meaning. “The further continuation of “Dead Souls,” he says in a letter to Aksakov, “is clearer and more majestic in my head, and now I see that I will do, perhaps over time, something colossal, if only my weak strength allows.” "

At the same time, religiosity, which had distinguished him since childhood, but had hitherto rarely manifested itself, began to be expressed more often in his letters, in his conversations, and in his entire worldview. Under her influence, he began to give his literary work a kind of mystical character, began to look at his talent, at his creative ability as a gift sent to him by God for a good purpose, at his writing activity as a calling predetermined from above, as a duty, entrusted to him by providence.

A high idea of ​​his talent and the responsibility that lies within it led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and take a broad look at life, one must strive for internal improvement, which is given only by thinking of God.

Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood;

in his circle he found favorable soil for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently gave instructions to his friends and, in the end, came to the conviction that what he had done so far was unworthy of the high goal to which he now considered himself called.

If before he said that the first volume of his poem was nothing more than a porch to the palace that was being built in it, now he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission. One day, in a moment of heavy thought about fulfilling his duty, he burned the second volume of “Dead Souls”, sacrificed it to God, and the new content of the book, enlightened and purified, was presented to his mind; It seemed to him that he now understood how to write in order to “direct the whole society towards the beautiful.”

“A wonderful creation is happening and taking place in my soul,” he wrote in 1841, “and now my eyes are more than once filled with grateful tears. Here the holy will of God is clearly visible to me: such a suggestion does not come from a person; he would never invent such a plot.”

Gogol has so far expressed this mystical, solemn view of his work to very few of his acquaintances. For others, he was his former pleasant, although somewhat silent interlocutor, a subtle observer, and a humorous storyteller.

Chapter VIII. The mystery of the writer's death.

Gogol's tragic end was accelerated by conversations with the fanatical priest Matvey Konstantinovsky, Gogol's confessor, in the last months of the writer's life.

Instead of reassuring and reassuring the suffering person, he pushed him, seeking spiritual support, further towards mysticism. This fateful meeting ended the crisis. This limited man adamantly reproached Gogol for his imaginary sinfulness, demonstrated the horrors of the Last Judgment, and portrayed the writer’s previous activities as a satanic temptation. Konstantinovsky’s conversations shocked Gogol so much that he, unable to control himself, once interrupted his speech with words that he could not listen any longer, that it was too scary.

During the winter of 1851-52, he did not feel entirely healthy, constantly complaining of weakness, nerve disorders, and fits of melancholy, but none of his acquaintances attached any importance to this, everyone knew that he was suspicious, and had long been accustomed to his complaints about various illnesses . In the circle of close friends, he was still cheerful and playful, willingly read his own and other people’s works, sang Little Russian songs in his “goat” voice, as he himself called it, and listened with pleasure when they were sung well. By spring, he planned to go to his native Vasilievka for several months in order to strengthen his strength there, and promised his friend Danilevsky to bring a completely finished volume of Dead Souls.

In 1850, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Sheremeteva died, she was a close friend of Gogol, they agreed on the basis of piety and became very close. This death strengthened Gogol's desire to reunite with her soul in heaven and brought his martyrdom closer.

In 1852, the sudden death of Khomyakov’s wife, née Yazykova, greatly shocked Gogol. Mixed with his natural grief over the loss of a loved one was the horror of an open grave. He was gripped by that painful “fear of death” that he had experienced more than once before. He admitted this to his confessor, and he tried to calm him down, but in vain. On Shrovetide Gogol began to fast and stopped all his literary pursuits; He visited his friends and seemed calm, only everyone noticed that he had become very thin and pale.

His tragic death - a kind of suicide, when the writer deliberately starved himself to death, was caused by the realization of the impossibility of reconciling aesthetics and morality.

The thought of imminent death did not leave him. The second volume of Dead Souls, his cherished work, was already ready for printing, and he wanted to leave it as a souvenir for his friends.

D. A. Obolensky said about the circumstances of the burning of the second volume of Dead Souls: “Gogol finished Dead Souls abroad and burned them. Then I wrote again and was pleased with my work.

But a religious frenzy began to visit him in Moscow, and then the idea of ​​burning this manuscript also fermented within him. Gogol called Count A.P. Tolstoy and told him: “Please take these notebooks and hide them. Hours come upon me when I want to burn it all. But I myself would be sorry. There seems to be some good stuff here.” Count Tolstoy, out of false delicacy, did not agree, so as not to show the patient, so as not to confirm his hypochondriacal fears.

Three days later, the count came to Gogol again and found him sad.

“But,” Gogol told him, “the evil one has misled me: I burned “Dead Souls.” He said more than once that he had some kind of vision. Three days before his death, he was sure of his imminent death.”

M. P. Pogodin recalls the circumstances of the burning of the second volume of “Dead Souls” somewhat differently: “On the Sunday before Lent, he called A. P. Tolstoy to him and, as if preparing for death, instructed him to give some of his works to the disposal of a spiritual person (Metropolitan Philaret), and print others. He tried to cheer up his fallen spirit and ward off any thought of death from him.

He prayed for a long time with tears; then at three o'clock in the morning he woke up the servant, ordered him to open the chimney in the fireplace, took papers from the briefcase, tied them into a tube and put them in the fireplace. The boy threw himself on his knees in front of him and begged him not to burn the papers. The corners of the notebooks were burned, and the fire began to go out. Gogol ordered the ribbon to be untied and he himself turned over the papers, crossing himself and praying until they turned to ashes. The servant cried and said: “What have you done!”

"Don't you feel sorry for me?" - said Gogol, hugged him, kissed him and began to cry. “Some things should have been burned,” he said, after thinking, “but for others they would have prayed to God for me; but, God willing, I will recover and everything will be fine.” In the morning he said to Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy: “Imagine how strong the evil spirit is. I wanted to burn papers that had long been determined for this purpose, but I burned the chapters of Dead Souls, which I wanted to leave to my friends as a souvenir after my death.” This is what is known so far about the destruction of our unappreciated treasure.”

That night, left alone, Gogol again experienced the sensations that he described in his “Correspondence with Friends.”

His soul “froze in horror at the mere representation of the greatness beyond the grave and those spiritual highest creations of God, before which dust all the greatness of his creations, here visible to us and amazing us; its entire dying composition groaned, sensing the gigantic growths and fruits whose seeds we sowed in life, without seeing or hearing what monsters would rise from them.”

His work seemed to him, as it had often seemed before, as the fulfillment of a duty entrusted to him by the Creator; he was gripped by fear that his duty was not fulfilled as the Creator, who had endowed him with talent, had intended, that his writing, instead of being useful, instead of preparing people for eternal life, would have a bad, corrupting influence on them.

According to A. O. Smirnova, “Gogol looked at “Dead Souls” as something that lay outside of him, where he had to reveal the secrets commanded to him. “When I write, my eyes open with unnatural clarity. And if I read what I have written, not yet finished, to anyone, the clarity leaves my eyes. I've experienced this many times. I am sure that when I have served my duty and finished what I am called to do, I will die. And if I release into the world what is immature or share the little that I have accomplished, then I will die before I fulfill what I am called into the light.”

This is probably the key to Gogol's death. “Having shared a little of the unripe,” reading the chapters of the second volume to M. A. Konstantinovsky and receiving sharply critical feedback from him, the writer became convinced that he had violated the covenant given from above and now must die.

WITH At this time he fell into a gloomy despondency, did not allow friends to visit him, or, when they came, asked them to leave under the pretext that he wanted to sleep; he said almost nothing, but often wrote texts from the Gospel and short sayings of religious content with a trembling hand. He stubbornly refused any treatment, assuring that no medicine would help him. This is how the first week of Lent passed. On Monday, the second, the confessor invited him to receive communion and receive unction.

He happily agreed to this, during

ritual, prayed with tears, held the Gospel

a candle with a weak hand. On Tuesday he felt like

it seemed easier, but on Wednesday he had it

a terrible attack of nervous fever, and on Thursday,

The news of Gogol's death shocked everyone

friends, until the last days, who did not believe

terrible premonitions. His body is like

honorary member of Moscow University,

was moved to the university church, where it remained until the funeral.

Present at the funeral were: Moscow Governor-General Zakrevsky, trustee of the Moscow educational district Nazimov, professors, university students and the mass of the public. The professors carried the coffin out of the church, and the students carried it in their arms all the way to the Danilov Monastery, where it was lowered into the ground next to the grave of their friend, the poet Yazykov.

From the memoirs of the Russian artist F.I. Jordan: “The flow of people over the course of two days was incredible. Richter, who lives near the university, wrote to me that there was no traffic on Nikitskaya Street for two days. Gogol lay in a frock coat, probably of his own free will, with a laurel wreath on his head, which was removed when the coffin was closed and brought in a lot of money from the sale of the leaves of this wreath. Everyone wanted to enrich themselves with this monument.”

Conclusion.

A peasant woman who met near the estate of G.P. Danilevsky two months after Gogol’s death stated: “It is not true that they interpret that he died. It was not he who was buried, but the poor old man; He himself, it is heard, went to pray for us in Holy Jerusalem. He left and will soon return here again.” On February 21, 1852 (old style), the greatest Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who had fallen into a lethargic state, was counted among the dead. “I bequeath my body not to be buried,” he wrote in his Will, “until obvious signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating...” Not heeding these words, they still buried him, so to speak, alive. It is difficult not to agree that Gogol was a great mystic. What happened in his works not only reflected on the author’s life circumstances, but also spread to his posthumous fate.

Thus, one famous writer, who was present at the reburial, took for himself a piece of well-preserved fabric from Gogol’s frock coat and boots. He bound the volume of “Dead Souls” with a piece of his frock coat, and put his boots on a shelf in his office. A mysterious story happened to them. At night, Gogol appeared to the writer and demanded that his boots be returned to him. The same thing happened on the second and third nights...

Worried, without further explanation, he gave the boots to his fellow writer. But Nikolai Vasilyevich did not leave the other owner of the ill-fated shoes alone. The story continued until one of the next owners of the boots thought of taking them to the cemetery. Isn’t it true that this non-fictional story is reminiscent of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”?

The very circumstances of Gogol's death reek of the mystical horror of the last page of Viy. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic Russian writers, a deeply religious, Orthodox man, he was no stranger to mysticism and believed that the devil led people after him, forcing them to commit evil deeds. Well, his compatriots, Ukrainians, have lived for centuries according to the principle: “Love God, but don’t anger the devil.”

The words of the prophet Jeremiah are carved on Gogol’s tombstone: “I will laugh at my bitter word.”

Conclusion.

In 1839, Gogol’s remains were transferred to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, which gave rise to many mystical assumptions that Gogol did not die, but was buried in a lethargic sleep. The spirit of Gogol will continue to disturb our earthly borders for a long time, and, apparently, these assumptions are not accidental.

The great writer died, and with him the work that he created for so long, with such love, died. Whether this work was the fruit of fully developed artistic creativity or the embodiment in images of those ideas that are expressed in “Selected Passages of Correspondence with Friends” is a secret that he took with him to the grave.

V. A. Rozanov in his work “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor F. M. Dostoevsky” stated: “He called his main work “Dead Souls” and, beyond any prediction, expressed in this title the great secret of his creativity and, of course, himself .

He could not find or express the ideal; he, a great artist of forms, burned with an impotent desire to put some living soul into at least one of them. And he burned with a helpless thirst to touch the human soul, something unclear speaks of his last days, about some kind of madness, about the terrible pangs of repentance, about fasting and starvation.”

“He died a victim of the lack of his nature - and the image of an ascetic burning his writings is the last that he left from his entire strange, so extraordinary life. “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay,” these words seem to be heard from behind the crackling of a fireplace, into which a brilliant madman throws his brilliant and criminal slander against human nature.”

The passages found in his papers and published after his death belong to earlier editions of the poem and do not give an idea of ​​what form it took after the author’s final processing.

As a thinker, as a moralist, Gogol stood below the progressive people of his time, but from an early age he was animated by a noble desire to benefit society, living sympathy for human suffering, and found poetic language, brilliant humor, and living images to express them. In those works in which he surrendered to the direct attraction of creativity, his powers of observation and his powerful talent penetrated deeply into the phenomena of life and, with their vividly truthful pictures of human vulgarity and baseness, contributed to the awakening of social self-awareness.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who could not bear it and looked openly at the outrages that were happening around him, was buried according to all church canons in the courtyard of the St. Daniel's Monastery. There he woke up and turned over, shuddering with horror, in the darkness of the cramped coffin. And how can you not turn over in your grave at what is happening in Rus'?

Bibliography.

Sokolov B.V. Gogol deciphered. Viy. Taras Bulba. Inspector. Dead Souls. – M.: Yauza, Eksmo, 2007. – 352 p.

N.V. Gogol and Russian literature of the 19th century: Interuniversity. Sat. scientific tr. - L.: Leningrad State Historical Institute, 1989. – 131 p.

The art of detail: observation and analysis: about the work of Gogol./ E. Dobin. L.: “Owl. writer". Leningr. department, 1975.

About the language of art. prose of N.V. Gogol: the art of narratives. / Responsible editor A.N. Kozhin; Academy of Sciences of the USSR. – M.: Nauka, 1987.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Biography of the writer. A.N. Stepanov, M., Education, 1998

"Nikolay Gogol". Henri Troyat, M., "Eksmo", 2004

The life and work of N.V. Gogol: Materials for an exhibition at school. and children's bib-ke. – M.: Det.lit., 1980.

About the nationality of N.V. Gogol. – Kyiv, ed. Kyiv. Univ., 1973.

Fantastic in “Petersburg Tales” by N.V. Gogol. – Vladivostok: Far Eastern University Publishing House, 1986.

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. N.V. Gogol. Lectures - L.: 1962.

The story “Viy” by N.V. Gogol. Lecture from a special course by N.V. Gogol. – L.: 1963.

History of Russian lit. XIX century At 3 o'clock 2h. (1840-1860): textbook for university students studying in the specialty “Russian language”. and literature." / E.E. Dmitrieva and others; edited by V.I. Korovin. – M.: Humanitarian Publishing Center VLADOS, 2005. – 524 p.

“The Artistic World of Gogol” S. Mashinsky, M., Enlightenment, 1971

Sokolov B.V. Gogol. Encyclopedia. (Series: Russian writers). M.: Algorithm, 2003. –

“I am considered a mystery to everyone, no one can solve me completely” - N.V. Gogol

The mystery of Gogol's life and death causes numerous disputes among literary critics, historians, psychologists, doctors and scientists. Over time, like many of his characters, he himself became a semi-fantastic figure.

Gogol's staircase

As a child, little Gogol listened to his grandmother's stories about the staircase along which people's souls ascend to heaven. This image was deeply imprinted in the boy’s memory; Gogol carried it throughout his entire life. Staircases of various kinds come across us every now and then on the pages of Gogol’s works. And the last words of the writer, according to eyewitnesses, were the cry “Ladder, quickly give me the ladder!”

Sweet tooth

G Ogol had a sweet tooth. For example, he could, without outside help, eat a jar of jam, a mountain of gingerbread cookies and drink a whole samovar of tea in one sitting... “He always had a supply of sweets and gingerbread cookies in his trouser pockets, he chewed without ceasing, even in classes during classes. “somewhere in a corner, away from everyone, and there he already ate his delicacy,” his gymnasium friend describes Gogol. This passion for sweets remained until the end of his days. In Gogol’s pockets one could always find a lot of all kinds of sweets: caramels, pretzels, crackers, half-eaten pies, lumps of sugar...

Another interesting feature was a passion for rolling bread balls. The poet and translator Nikolai Berg recalled: “Gogol either walked around the room, from corner to corner, or sat and wrote, rolling balls of white bread, which he told his friends about that they helped solve the most complex and difficult problems. When he was bored at dinner, he would again roll the balls and quietly throw them into the kvass or soup of those sitting next to him... One friend collected whole heaps of these balls and kept them reverently..."

What else did Gogol burn?

The first work to turn into ashes was a poem in the spirit of the German romantic school "Hans Küchelgarten". The pseudonym V. Alov saved Gogol’s name from the criticism that fell, but the author himself took the failure very hard: he bought all the unsold copies of the book in stores and burned them. Until the end of his life, the writer never admitted to anyone that Alov was his pseudonym.

On the night of February 12, 1852, an event occurred, the circumstances of which still remain a mystery to biographers. Nikolai Gogol prayed until three o'clock, after which he took his briefcase, took out several papers from it, and ordered the rest to be thrown into the fire. Having crossed himself, he returned to bed and cried uncontrollably. It is believed that that night he burned the second volume of Dead Souls. However, later the manuscript of the second volume was found among his books. And what was burned in the fireplace is still unclear.

Is Gogol a homosexual?

The ascetic lifestyle that Gogol led and the writer’s excessive religiosity gave rise to many fables. The writer's contemporaries were surprised and frightened by such behavior. Of his things, he only had a couple of changes of underwear with him and kept it all in one suitcase... Quite unsociable, he rarely allowed himself the company of unfamiliar women, and lived his whole life as a virgin. Such isolation gave rise to the common myth about the writer’s homosexual inclinations. A similar assumption was put forward by the American Slavist, historian of Russian literature, Professor Semyon Karlinsky, who stated in his work “The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol” about the “oppressed homosexuality” of the writer, which involves “suppression of emotional attraction to members of the same sex” and “aversion to physical or emotional contact with women "

According to literary critic I.P. Zolotussky, Gogol was not indifferent to women, including A.M. Vilyegorskaya, to whom he proposed in 1840, but was refused. Vladimir Nabokov also objected to representatives of the psychoanalytic method. In his essay “Nikolai Gogol” he wrote: “The heightened sense of the nose eventually resulted in the story “The Nose” - truly a hymn to this organ. A Freudian could argue that in Gogol’s world turned inside out, human beings are placed upside down and therefore the role of the nose is obviously played by another organ, and vice versa,” but “it is better to completely forget about all Freudian nonsense” and much more. etc.

Was Gogol buried alive?

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol died on February 21, 1852. And on February 24, 1852, he was interred in the cemetery at the Danilov Monastery. According to the will, no monument was erected to him - Golgotha ​​rose above the grave. But 79 years later, the writer’s ashes were removed from the grave: by the Soviet government, the Danilov Monastery was transformed into a colony for juvenile delinquents, and the necropolis was subject to liquidation. It was decided to move only a few burials to the old cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. Among these “lucky ones”, along with Yazykov, Aksakovs and Khomyakovs, was Gogol... The entire color of the Soviet intelligentsia was present at the reburial. Among them was the writer V. Lidin. It is to him that Gogol owes the emergence of numerous legends about himself.

One of the myths concerned the lethargic sleep of the writer. According to Lidin, when the coffin was pulled out of the ground and opened, those present were filled with bewilderment. In the coffin lay a skeleton with its skull turned to one side. No one found an explanation for this. I remembered the stories that Gogol was afraid of being buried alive in a state of lethargic sleep and seven years before his death he bequeathed: “My body should not be buried until obvious signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating.” What they saw shocked those present. Did Gogol really have to endure the horror of such a death?

It is worth noting that this story was later subject to criticism. The sculptor N. Ramazanov, who removed Gogol’s death mask, recalled: “I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the prepared coffin... finally, the constantly arriving crowd of people who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased forced me and my old man, who pointed out the traces of destruction, to hurry...” explanation for the rotation of the skull: the side boards of the coffin were the first to rot, the lid lowers under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man’s head, and it turns to one side on the so-called “Atlas” vertebra.

Was there a skull?

However, Lidin’s wild imagination was not limited to this episode. A more terrible story followed - it turns out that when the coffin was opened, the skeleton did not have a skull at all. Where could he have gone? This new invention of Lidin gave rise to new hypotheses. They remembered that in 1908, when a heavy stone was installed on the grave, it was necessary to build a brick crypt over the coffin to strengthen the base. It was suggested that it was then that the writer’s skull could have been stolen. It was suggested that he was stolen at the request of a fanatic of the Russian theater, merchant Alexei Alexandrovich Bakhrushin. It was rumored that he already had the skull of the great Russian actor Shchepkin...

Gogol's head and ghost train

They say that Gogol's head was decorated with Bakhrushin's silver laurel crown and placed in a glazed rosewood case, lined with black morocco on the inside. According to the same legend, the great-nephew of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Yanovsky, a lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Navy, upon learning about this, threatened Bakhrushin and took his head. Allegedly, the young officer wanted to take the skull to Italy (to the country that Gogol considered his second homeland), but he could not complete this mission himself and entrusted it to an Italian captain. So the writer’s head ended up in Italy. But this is not the end of this incredible story. The captain's younger brother, a student at the University of Rome, went with a group of friends on a pleasure railway trip; deciding to play a prank on his friends by opening a box containing a skull in the Channel Tunnel. They say that the moment the lid was opened, the train disappeared... Legend has it that the ghost train did not disappear forever. Allegedly, he is sometimes seen somewhere in Italy...or in Zaporozhye...

Nikolai's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol, was 14 years older than his mother, and the story of their acquaintance is truly amazing. As a teenager, Vasily saw his future wife Maria in a dream in the form of a baby. A loud voice announced: “Vasily! Your future wife has been born! Love the baby! A few days later, a daughter was born to the Kosyarsky neighbors, and he began to nurse her, recognizing her as the baby from the dream...
They got married when Maria was 15 years old. For many years they had no children, and only after passionate prayers to Nicholas the Pleasant, to whom the church in Dikanka was dedicated, was their first child born, named Nicholas in honor of the saint.
Vasily Gogol died in 1825 from a very strange and rare disease - “fear of death”. In those days, it was believed that a person who suffered from it was guilty before God, and the disease itself was inherited.
All of Nicholas's first works are closely related to ancient folk beliefs and customs. In “May Night” we are talking about the holiday of Rusalia. There is everything here: demonic games, evil spirits, witches, “the dancing and splashing of mermaids with pipes,” werewolves. Gogol speaks through the mouth of his hero: “Who in his life has not known evil spirits?”
There are many ways to communicate with evil spirits, and all of them are described in the works of the great esotericist Gogol, whom all acquaintances and even Pushkin himself considered a fair “contactor” with the dark devilish world. You can use evil spirits for your own purposes, Gogol assures, just like in the Sorochinskaya Fair the gypsies are selling fear. You can, obeying her, follow her instructions in everything, like Petro from “The Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala.” But you can also outwit and leave the evil spirits in the cold, as the Cossack messenger does in “The Lost Letter.”
When Gogol began his literary career, few educated Russians took seriously what we call today paranormal or psi phenomena. Some contemporaries believed that Nikolai Vasilyevich was endowed with the rare ability to summon the souls of people, like the sorcerer from “Terrible Vengeance,” to influence them, subjugating them to his power.
Gogol felt free and at ease only in the circle of his closest people. He told scary stories and fairy tales, made witty jokes and even... sang romances in a marvelous tenor! In unfamiliar company, the writer became gloomy, withdrawn, hid in the corners of rooms, or climbed onto a sofa or couch, covered his head with something and fell asleep soundly. He didn't care about the noise of the guests. It took a lot of work to persuade Gogol to meet new people. If he succeeded, his mood quickly deteriorated, and he tried to leave, citing ill health. It is worth reminding you, readers, that it is the sorcerers who try to communicate only with “their own”, perceiving the invasion of “strangers” as a threat.
Many contemporaries pointed out special abilities, as well as characteristic details of Gogol’s behavior. For example, the writer Aksakov testified that he found Gogol at work “in the following fantastic attire: instead of boots - long striped woolen stockings above the knees, instead of a frock coat - a purple velvet cloak, his neck was wrapped in a long satin burgundy-black scarf; on the head is a crimson astronomer’s cap embroidered with gold.” Gogol looked for a long time at his friends Aksakov and Zhukovsky, who had disturbed him - clearly not recognizing them. He was in a state of trance. This and other similar evidence (including Pushkin’s) emphasize Gogol’s ecstatic state, morbidity, incredible nervousness, the ability to fall into a trance, the rare gift of instantly abstracting himself from others - these are all well-known properties of shamans and sorcerers.
Every sorcerer and shaman suffers the so-called “shamanic disease,” a state in which he is between life and death. It is known that Gogol, while traveling in Italy, suffered from an illness - he was visited by terrible visions in reality. After this he became extremely pious and spoke to his friends in no other way than in the tone of a prophet.

Gogol created all of his early works in seven years while he lived in St. Petersburg. Then he moved from place to place and composed “Dead Souls.” It took about 15 years. He worked a lot, but published almost nothing. Then he suddenly began to burn what he had written: he burned the second volume of “Dead Souls,” wrote it again, and burned it again... From the point of view of a priest of an ancient pagan religion or a sorcerer, these actions, incomprehensible to others, have a deep meaning. You need to give the gods the best you have. And what burns in fire immediately goes to the divine throne.
The writer's death was strange, just like his life. Gogol fell ill for no apparent reason and began to refuse food. During his illness, being in a semi-conscious state, he continuously repeated the words of his mad hero from “Notes of a Madman.”
Incredible events accompanied the reburial of the writer's body in 1931. Then it was decided to transfer Gogol’s ashes from the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery to Novodevichye. Almost 30 famous writers took part in the ceremony. These were the years of militant atheism, and no one thought about the sacrilege of such an action. Imagine the shock of those gathered when a skeleton without a skull was discovered in the opened coffin, and someone’s head was buried separately nearby.
The rituals of dismembering bodies during burial are known to archaeologists who excavated mounds in Ukraine and southern Russia. But the age of these burials is 3-4 thousand years. What happened to Gogol after his death? Most likely, no one will ever be able to answer this question.
It is reliably known that after the burial, a certain writer A. Ivanov went to Leningrad, blasphemously taking a rib of Gogol’s skeleton as a “souvenir”. There he came to his friends, hung his coat in the hallway (he checked that there was a rib wrapped in an old newspaper in the inner pocket). In a conversation, he hinted to his friends that he had a unique item. They asked to see it. Ivanov went out into the hallway, reached into his coat pocket... and the rib was not there! Apart from three friends who did not leave the hall, and himself, there was no one in the house; the doors were bolted. A week later, grave robber Ivanov suddenly died from an unknown attack of wild fever and loss of pulse.
Another lover of “memory souvenirs,” the writer I. Malyshkin, who stole foil from the decorations of the coffin, did not live even a month after that - in a state of depression, he hanged himself in the attic of the building of the USSR Writers' Union. The director of the cemetery, S. Arakcheev, who removed the yellow leather boots from the bones of Gogol's skeleton, was moved by his mind: every night he dreamed of these boots and Gogol, shaking his finger at him from the darkness; the boots came to life and strangled the thief. The frightened party member found the grandmother-witch and fell at the old woman’s feet, saying, what should he do with such a misfortune? “And bury these boots next to the coffin of the dead man you robbed!” - the sorceress advised. Arakcheev did just that, he stopped having nightmares, and his overstrained psyche was no longer able to recover...
It should be noted that not everyone believes in the terrible stories associated with the manifestations of clairvoyance and telepathy of N.V. Gogol during his life, his communication with the forces of the other world, falling into a trance, etc., and especially - in the details of his reburial and subsequent behind this are events associated with the sudden death of people who were engaged in looting the grave of the great writer. Some today attribute all these super-oddities to the wild imagination of first Gogol’s contemporaries, and then those who desecrated his ashes by excavating and opening (and looting!) the coffin with the remains of the author of Dead Souls. We just have to remember the words from Nikolai Vasilyevich’s will:
“It will be a shame and hardship for those who are attracted to the disappearing flesh, which is no longer mine, and may they be punished for this...”

Alexander Evteev,
esotericist, Kyiv

MAOU "Labazinskaya Secondary School"

Research

literature project:

"Mysticism in life and creativity

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol.

Performed: 9th grade student

Rozhnova Marina

Supervisor: teacher of Russian language and literature

Zakharova Lyudmila Semyonovna

2017

1. Introduction.

1. Main part.
   1. Childhood. Formation of religiosity.
   2. Gogol's arrival in St. Petersburg. First publication.
   3. A difficult path to literature.
   4. Folk fiction in “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”
      • The image of the devil in "The Night Before Christmas".
      • The mystical image of a cat in “May Night or the Drowned Woman” and in “Old World Landowners.”
      • Fantastic plot in "Terrible Revenge".
      • God's Retribution in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”
   5. “Viy” is Gogol’s most mystical and terrible story.
   6. Gogol's passion for practical jokes and hoaxes.
   7. The mystery of the writer's death.
2. Conclusion.

IV . Bibliography

Much time will still pass before the full deep and strict significance of Gogol, this monk-artist, Christian satirist, ascetic and humorist, this martyr of sublime thought and insoluble task, is fully understood.

I. S. Aksakov

Nikolai Gogol is one of the most original Russian writers; his fame has gone far beyond the Russian cultural space. His books are interesting throughout his life, each time he manages to find new facets in them, almost new content.

There is no more mysterious figure in Russian literature than Gogol. There are more myths about his life and death than about any other writer.

Why was Gogol never married? Why did he never have his own home? Why did he burn the second volume of Dead Souls? And, of course, the biggest mystery is the mystery of his illness and death.

Here is how the Russian religious philosopher and literary critic Konstantin Mochulsky wrote: “Gogol’s life is a complete torture, the most terrible part of which, which took place in the mystical plane, is beyond our sight. A man who was born with a feeling of cosmic horror, who saw quite realistically the interference of demonic forces in human life, who fought with the devil until his last breath - this same man “burned” with a passionate thirst for perfection and an indefatigable longing for God.”

The relevance of research.

Mystical motives are widespread

spread in Russian classical, as well as modern

literature.

Being much older than the written word, these motives go their own way

roots in folklore and mythological systems of Slavic and

other peoples.

It is in the works of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol that we meet

frequent appeals to mystical motives, and an example of this

his collection “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka” can serve as a reference. Like

every writer who rethinks in the course of creative work

the original material taken as a basis, Gogol is not just

transfers folk tales to paper (although the writer himself

claimed that he did not change the Little Russian legend), but creates on their

basis - and on the basis of the reality he saw - new, truly

piece of art.

To understand the essence of mystical motifs in the works of N.V. Gogol, it is necessary to trace their connections with folk art itself, with the objective reality that surrounded the writer, to identify the place of each of the two worlds in the holistic system of each of the works under consideration.

To consider this topic, I chose the works of N.V. Gogol “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and “Petersburg Tales”.

In this work, mystical motifs in the works of N.V. Gogol is studied from three points of view:

Goal of the work:

The purpose of the study is to consider the specifics of mystical motifs in the works of N.V. Gogol.

In this regard, I set myself the following research objectives:

Comparison of literary mystical images created by N.V. Gogol, with their folklore prototypes, identifying similarities;

Consideration of the specifics of Gogol’s mystical characters;

A study of the reasons for the introduction of a mystical line in the works being studied, their value for the plot and ideological content.

In my work, I used research on this topic by scientists such as V.B. Sokolov, E. Dobin, A.N. Kozhin.

According to the Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev: “Gogol is the only Russian writer who had a sense of magic, he artistically conveys the action of dark, evil magical forces...”.

Gogol's fiction is often compared with the fiction of a number of foreign writers - mainly Hoffmann. Indeed, similar features can be found in the works of Gogol and Hoffmann. Nevertheless, the very nature of fantasy and its place in Gogol are distinguished by their characteristics, first of all, by their realistic basis. In Gogol's works, everyday attributes always retain their essence and contribute to the understanding of the motives and meaning of a number of fantastic persons and events. According to V. Belinsky: “The perfect truth of life in Gogol’s stories is closely connected with the simplicity of fiction.”

V.Ya. Bryusov emphasized: “The desire for extremes, for exaggeration, for hyperbole was reflected not only in Gogol’s work, not only in his works: the same desire permeated his whole life. He perceived everything that happened around him in an exaggerated form, easily mistook the ghosts of his fiery imagination for reality, and lived his entire life in a world of changing illusions.”

G lava I. Childhood. Formation of religiosity.

First of all, the writer’s life path, starting from his first steps, is marked by mystery.

N.V. Gogol was born in the town of Velikiye Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district

Poltava province in the family of a landowner of average income, who had 400 serfs and 1000 acres of land. For a long time they did not know the exact date of his birth - it was called

March 19, 1809, then March 20, 1810 Only almost forty years after the writer’s death, it was established from the publication of metrics that he was published on March 20, 1809.

This gave Vladimir Nabokov the basis to end his book about Gogol with a spectacular phrase: “It is true that Gogol was born on April 1.” The phrase hints at the fact that Gogol’s entire subsequent life passed as if under the sign of an April Fool’s hoax.

Well, if not all of life, then many of its events...

The writer's childhood was spent on his parents' estate Vasilyevka (Yanovshchina) in Ukraine, in a land covered in legends, beliefs and traditions. Nearby was a famous

now the whole world is Dikanka, where in those days they showed the shirt of an executed man

Kochubey, as well as the oak tree where Maria and Mazepa met.

Gogol came from an ancient

Little Russian family; in troubled times

times of Little Russia some of

his ancestors were also pestered by the Polish

nobility. Gogol's grandfather Afanasy

Demyanovich Yanovsky (1738-early 19

Descended from priests

graduated from Kyiv Theological

Academy,

rose to the rank of second major and,

having received hereditarily

nobility, came up with a mystical

pedigree going back to

mythical Cossack colonel

Andre Gogol, who supposedly lived in

mid-eighteenth century. He

wrote in an official document that “his ancestors, with the last name Gogol,

Polish nation,” although he himself was a real Little Russian, and others

They considered him the prototype of the hero of “Old World Landowners.”

Great-grandfather, Yan Gogol, a graduate of the Kyiv Academy, “having graduated

Russian side", settled in the Poltava region, and from him

the nickname "Gogol-Yanovsky" came into being. Gogol himself, according to

apparently did not know the origin of this increase and

subsequently discarded it, saying that the Poles had made it up.

Father N.V. Gogol, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol - Yanovsky, was an employee of the Little Russian Post Office, and also wrote Ukrainian comedies, which were successfully staged at the D.P. Theater. Troshchinsky, a famous nobleman and patron of the arts; his estate was located nearby and was the cultural center of the region. The poetic element of folk life, the literary and theatrical environment very early developed in the boy a passion for writing. The writer's mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a deeply religious, nervous and impressionable woman. Having lost two children who died in infancy, she waited with fear for the third.

The couple often went to the neighboring Dikan Church, where the miraculous icon of St. Nicholas of Myra. The boy was named Nicholas in honor of the saint.

Very early, his mother began to bring Nikolai to church. At first he felt only boredom, and with disgust the smell of incense. But one day, looking closely at the painting depicting heaven and hell, he asked his mother to tell him about the Last Judgment. She told the boy about the death of the world and the Last Judgment, about the hellish torment of sinners.

Mother instructed that it is necessary to maintain moral purity in the name of salvation. The stories about the ladder that angels lower from heaven, giving their hand to the soul of the deceased, were especially memorable and impressed the child. There are seven measures on this ladder; the last seventh raises the immortal soul of man to the seventh heaven, to the heavenly abodes. The souls of the righteous go there - people who spent their earthly life “in all piety and purity.” The image of the staircase will then pass through all of Gogol’s thoughts about the fate and calling of man to spiritual ascent and moral growth, to self-improvement.

Since then, Gogol has constantly lived “under the terror of retribution from beyond the grave.”

From his mother, Gogol inherited a subtle mental organization, a penchant for mystical contemplation and God-fearing religiosity. In the deep silence, he imagined that he heard voices from beyond the grave, calling out to him, chilling his soul. “You, no doubt, have ever heard a voice calling you by name,” Gogol described these childhood sensations in “Old World Landowners,” “which common people explain this way: that the soul yearns for a person and calls him; after which death inevitably follows. I confess that I am always afraid of this mysterious call. I remember that in childhood I often heard it: sometimes suddenly behind me someone clearly pronounced my name... I usually then ran with the greatest fear and caught my breath from the garden, and then I only calmed down when some person came towards me, the sight of which drove away this terrible desert of the heart.”

The inclinations of religiosity, which later took possession of Gogol’s entire being, are attributed to the influence of his mother, as well as the shortcomings of his upbringing: his mother surrounded him with real adoration, and this could be one of the sources of his conceit, which, on the other hand, was early generated by the instinctive consciousness of the genius power hidden within him.

The boy's imagination was influenced in childhood by popular beliefs in brownies, witches, merman and mermaids. The mysterious world of folk demonology was absorbed by Gogol’s impressionable soul from childhood.

N. Gogol was thin and short from his youth, which in no way corresponded to his idea of ​​​​the heroic Cossack nature. But in his soul he felt growing strength. And he was, as his schoolmates said, inexhaustible in mischievous jokes and pranks; he had a predilection for playing pranks on his friends, noticing their funny features; he knew how to “guess a person” (Pushkin’s expression), but he himself did not trust his plans, his innermost dreams to anyone. His passion for reincarnation, unexpected changes of masks, and practical jokes often perplexed his friends.

Those who saw Gogol on the gymnasium stage and - later - heard him read, retained the conviction that he could become a great comic actor. It is curious that he was most successful in female roles; for example, he inimitably played Mrs. Prostakova in Fonvizin’s comedy “The Minor.”

Gogol's inner spiritual world was very complex and contradictory.

He knew that some of his comrades considered him a freak, small, frail, ugly, unkempt and unkempt. He could not help but be vulnerable from the tricks of his comrades. Harmless ridicule tormented him all night long. The awareness of his inferiority humiliated him, but at the same time stimulated him to rise to success and dignity.

He never opened up to anyone about his aspirations and plans - everyday and especially creative. He liked to mystify his friends and mislead him about his own, even the most innocent, intentions. Any successful hoax gave him the greatest joy.

These inclinations of Gogol were fully determined already in the Nizhyn gymnasium. Since childhood, no simple-minded frankness or sociability was noticed in him; he was always somehow strangely secretive, there were always corners in his soul where no one’s eyes dared to look. Often he spoke even about the most ordinary things for a reason, investing them with some kind of mystery or hiding his real thought under the guise of a joke or buffoonery.

He saw God's will in all the smallest events of life. A rude shout in class, a bad grade, or a runny nose was considered by him as supernatural attention. He was tormented by inexplicable premonitions that forced him to obey the Divine will.

In the gymnasium of higher sciences in the city of Nezhin, where the future writer studied and lived from 1821 to 1828, he was called Mysterious Carlo - after one of the characters in Walter Scott’s novel “Black Dwarf”. A few months before graduating from high school, he wrote to his mother: “True, I am considered a mystery to everyone, no one has completely solved me.”

While studying at the Nizhyn gymnasium, still in the lower grades, N. Gogol somehow did something wrong, so that he ended up in the “criminal category”. “It’s bad, brother,” one of the comrades said: “they’ll flog you!” - "Tomorrow!" - answered Gogol. But the verdict was confirmed and the perpetrators came for it. Gogol suddenly screams so shrilly that everyone was scared - and “goes crazy.” There is a commotion and Gogol is taken to the hospital. The director visits him twice a day. His schoolmates go to see him secretly and return sadly. I'm crazy, really crazy! Gogol pretended so skillfully that everyone was convinced of his insanity. After two weeks of successful treatment, he was released from the hospital, but everyone still looked at him with doubt and apprehension for a long time.

Towards the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of broad social activity, which, however, he sees not at all in the literary field; no doubt, under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to advance and benefit society in a service for which in fact he was completely incapable. Thus, plans for the future were unclear; but it is curious that Gogol was possessed by a deep confidence that he had a wide career ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what simple “existents” are content with, as he put it, which were the majority of his Nezhin comrades.

He dreamed of government activity that would allow him to accomplish something great “for the common good, for Russia.”

Chapter II. Petersburg. First publications

At the end of December 1828 Gogol ended up in St. Petersburg. Ideas about St. Petersburg life changed the appearance of Nikolai Gogol to such an extent that from an unkempt schoolboy he turned into a real dandy. Without well-tailored clothes, he could not achieve, as it seemed to him, social prosperity.

But his first impressions stunned him.

In his dreams, St. Petersburg was a magical land, where people enjoy all material and spiritual blessings, where they do great things, wage a great fight against evil - and suddenly, instead of all this, a dirty, uncomfortable furnished room, worries about how to have a cheap lunch, anxiety at the sight of the wallet being emptied, which seemed inexhaustible in Nizhyn!

Things got even worse when he began to work hard to realize his cherished dream - to enter the civil service.

ABOUT he brought with him several letters of recommendation to various influential persons and, of course, was sure that they would immediately open up the path to useful and glorious activities for him; but, alas, here again bitter disappointment awaited him.

Gogol tried to find his calling in acting and teaching, and meanwhile the idea of ​​writing grew stronger in his mind. In 1829 He published, under the pseudonym V. Alov, the poem “Hans Küchelgarten,” which he began in high school.

Constantly communicating with friends, he did not open up to them about his intentions and did not want to take their advice. None of them knew about his plans to publish Gantz. All this was explained not by his timidity, but by his desire to assume some kind of mystery. He fantasized that Pushkin himself would read this poem and, enchanted by the music of the poems, demand to introduce him to the mysterious author. This kind of fantasies so fired up his crazy imagination that he sometimes pulled himself together so as not to really believe that he was already a close friend of the poet.

Critics noticed the author's abilities, but considered this work immature; it did not attract readers. Gogol was so shocked by the failure that he bought all the unsold copies of the book in stores and burned them. This was the beginning of acts of self-immolation, which Gogol repeated more than once and ended with the destruction of the second volume of Dead Souls.

The failure of the poem was also associated with another feature of behavior, which later also turned out to be constant for Gogol: having experienced a shock, he rushed out of Russia. Later, such departures at times of crisis, at the height of controversy surrounding published works, became more frequent and longer lasting.

Suddenly Gogol took off and went abroad by ship, to the seaside city of Germany - Lubeck.

To prevent his mother from reproaching him for wasting money, he invents a mysterious friend who supposedly wanted to pay for the trip, but suddenly died.

In his letters to his mother, he writes about the reasons for his flight, each time coming up with new mystical justifications. First, he justified his departure by the need to treat a severe scrofulous rash that appeared on his face and hands (but never took advantage of the water treatment in Travemund), then by “the order of the Almighty” (as if God had shown him the way to a foreign land), then by meeting a woman with "a face of astonishing brilliance." As a result, Maria Gogol brought together two stories - about illness and about love passion - and concluded that her son had become infected with a venereal disease. This conclusion plunged Gogol into deep horror. His lies turned against him. Just as the hero of his poem Gogol fled from the world to find himself face to face with himself, he fled from himself, from the discord between his lofty dreams and practical life. Life in a foreign land turned out to be even worse than in Russia. Gogol did not stay here long. Soon, however, letters from his mother and his own prudence made him come to his senses, and after a two-month absence he returned to St. Petersburg.

The explanation for this strange act suggests itself: Gogol fails to get a job; the poem “Hanz Küchelgarten” he published did not bring the expected fame, but aroused sharp criticism.

However, Gogol himself spoke about a completely different reason: that “he met a woman of extraordinary beauty and, in order not to die, not to burn in the fire of passion, he had to run away...”.

Back in 1829, Gogol described a meeting with a woman on Nevsky: “but I saw her... no, I won’t name her... she is too tall for anyone, not just me. I would call her an angel, but this expression is low and inappropriate for her. An angel is a creature with neither virtues nor vices, without character, because it is not a person, and living with thoughts in the same sky. This is a deity dressed slightly in human passions. A face whose astonishing brilliance is imprinted on the heart in an instant; eyes that quickly pierce the soul. But their radiance, burning, passing through everything, cannot be endured by any person... Oh, if you had looked at me then... it’s true, I knew how to hide myself from everyone, but did I hide from myself?

Hellish melancholy with possible torment boiled in my chest...

no, it wasn’t love, at least I haven’t heard anything like it

love. In a fit of rage and terrible mental anguish

I was thirsty, seething to drink in just one look, just one

I was hungry for a glance. Look at her again - that's what happened

the only desire growing stronger and stronger with

the inexpressible causticity of melancholy...

I saw that I needed to run away from myself if I wanted to save my life, to bring at least a shadow of peace into my tormented soul...

No, this creature that he sent to deprive me of peace, to upset my precariously created world, was not a woman. If she had been a woman, she would not have been able to produce such terrible impressions with all the power of her charms. It was a deity created by him, a part of himself! But, for God's sake, don't ask her name. She's tall, too tall."

His friend from school, A.S. Danilevsky, was perplexed: they say, he lived with Nikolai in the same city and in the same apartment and did not notice anything... And yet Gogol’s extraordinary secrecy in front of his comrades is known. In addition, the experiences of the loving heroes of his stories (for example, Vakula from “The Night Before Christmas”) are so reminiscent of the confusion when meeting a beauty that the thought suggests itself: all this was familiar to the writer firsthand. Also indicative is Gogol’s later mute admission that, thanks to his willpower, he was twice kept on the edge of the “abyss.”

Did he mean the episode with the beautiful stranger?

It must be said that the secret remained a secret. What actually happened is unknown. And this is not the last mysterious event in Gogol’s biography.

Gogol was seized by a new dream - theater. He remembered his successes on stage at the Nezhin gymnasium and decided to become an actor. Gogol came to the director of the imperial theaters, Prince Gagarin, and offered his services. He was given a monologue from the tragedy “Dmitry Donskoy” to read. In the minds of old-school theatergoers, the dramatic actor had to play his role with affectation. The words did not have to be spoken, but recited with pathos. Gogol read simply, without howls and “dramatic hiccups.” His manner of performance clearly contradicted the tastes of the examiners. In a word, Gogol did not pass the test.

He almost fell into despair. After the death of the father, life for the family became difficult. Debts appeared. Help from the mother became less and less regular. The small estate had to be mortgaged several times. So several painful months passed until, finally, happiness smiled. Gogol received service in one of the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was an unenviable place: the work of a petty clerical worker, boring and tiring. It turned out that here one must spend one’s life “rewriting the old nonsense and nonsense of the gentlemen-heads” (from a letter to his mother).

At the same time, Gogol carefully looked at the life and everyday life of his fellow officials. These observations later formed the basis of his famous stories “The Nose”, “Notes of a Madman”, “The Overcoat”. After serving for a year, Gogol decided to put an end to the idea of ​​a bureaucratic career forever. In February 1831 he resigned.

Chapter III. A difficult path to literature.

Gradually, however, the conviction begins to mature in him that literary creativity is his main calling. The bitterness of failure with “Hans Kuchelgarten” was forgotten, and Gogol began to write again, devoting all his leisure time to this work. By the way, until the end of his life Gogol never admitted to anyone that V. Alov was his pseudonym.

Gradually Gogol finds his way and achieves success. The doors to a select literary society opened for Gogol: he met V. A. Zhukovsky, P. A. Pletnev, and in May 1831. at the latter's party he was introduced to Pushkin. Another two or three months passed, and Gogol became a literary celebrity. In an atmosphere of communication with them - in Tsarskoe Selo - Gogol completes the work that made him famous in Russia: “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

In letters to his mother, Gogol often hints at the “extensive work” on which he works hard and hard. After his arrival in St. Petersburg, he begins to pester his relatives with requests: to regularly send him information and materials about the customs and morals of “our Little Russians”, samples of Ukrainian folk art - songs, fairy tales, as well as all kinds of antiques - hats, dresses, costumes. “A few more words,” he writes to his mother, “about carols, about Ivan Kupala, about mermaids. If there are, in addition, any spirits or brownies, then more about them with their names and actions; a lot of people are running around

between the common people of beliefs, terrible legends,

various jokes, and so on, and so on, and so on. All this will happen

It’s extremely interesting for me.”

These materials are in addition to our own

life impressions were used by Gogol in

a large series of stories published under the general title

"Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka". According to Pletnev’s advice

Gogol published both parts of this collection under the intriguing

pseudonym of a naive and crafty beekeeper storyteller

Rudogo Panka.

Chapter IV. Folk fiction in “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

The first part of “Evenings” was published in September 1831.

It included four stories: “Sorochinskaya Fair”,

“The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night” and

"The Missing Letter." Six months later, at the beginning of March

In 1832, the second part appeared (“The Night Before Christmas”, “Terrible Revenge”,

“Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt”, “Enchanted Place”).

The world that opened up in “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” had little in common with the reality in which Gogol lived. It was cheerful, joyful,

the happy world of a poetic fairy tale, in which the light major principle predominates. In “Evenings,” elements of Ukrainian folk fiction and legends are abundantly introduced. Witches, mermaids, sorceresses, and devils act alongside people. Real life and the legend were perceived by the readers of “Evenings” as a single whole.

The stories seem to be woven from Ukrainian fairy tales, songs, and stories. Here, as Belinsky said, a special world of “poetic reality arises, in which you never know what is in it and what is a fairy tale, but you inevitably take everything for true.” 1

The story “The Night Before Christmas” begins with the witch flying out of the chimney on a broom and hiding the stars in her sleeve, and the devil steals the Moon and, getting burned, hides it in his pocket. But the witch, it turns out, is the mother of the blacksmith Vakula, a clever coquette who knows how to “bewitch sedate Cossacks to herself.” A person not only is not afraid of “evil spirits,” he forces them to serve him. The devil, although he came straight from Hell, is not so scary: riding on the devil, Vakula flies to St. Petersburg to bring the wayward beauty Oksana the same slippers as the queen herself. The whole story goes in this spirit, the interweaving of fairy tales and tales. The fantastic and the real are mixed in Gogol in some kind of bizarre grotesque. Not only the reader, but also the characters themselves are surprised by the fantastic twists and turns. So, Vakula looks in bewilderment at the art of Patsyuk, swallowing dumplings, which are first coated in sour cream.

In the early cycles (“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Mirgorod”) the devil has real typological features. He has a “narrow muzzle, constantly spinning and sniffing everything that comes along, ending, like our pigs, with a round snout”, “a sharp and long tail.” This is a small demon, conceptualized in folklore traditions.

In general, “Evenings” “follow two heterogeneous traditions: German romantic demonology (witches, devils, spells, witchcraft) and the Ukrainian fairy tale with its primordial dualism, the struggle between God and the devil.” A demon is a creature in which the denial of God and eternal vulgarity are concentrated.

Gogol “in the light of laughter explores the nature of this mystical essence”, which forces people “to do something similar to human, like the mechanic of his lifeless machine gun” or pushes the bride into the arms of “a terrible black cat with iron claws,” that is, into the arms of a witch.

Gogol’s devil is “an underdeveloped hypostasis of the unclean; a shaking, frail imp; the devil is one of the breed of small devils that seem to haunt our drunkards.” The invasion of demonic forces into human life becomes the cause of the emptiness in the world where God has been forgotten, which gives birth to death. In this unreal world, even beauty becomes something terribly piercing, accompanied not only by a demonically sweet feeling, but also by panic horror.

Thus, one of the hypostases of Gogol’s demon lies in the phenomenon of “immortal human vulgarity,” which must be “hit in the face without being embarrassed.” This vulgarity is “the begun and unfinished, which presents itself as beginningless and infinite,” it denies God and is identified with universal evil.

The evil devilish evil spirits, who personified the dark forces in “Evenings,” are in most cases put to shame, and all her attempts to fool and mock a person turn against her.

But great troubles and misfortunes were brought by the forces of hell when, through deceit and demonic promises, they managed to blind people and make them, at least for a moment, doubt that they were right.

As in Gogol’s previous works, a large place in the story “Terrible Revenge” is occupied by a fantastic plot. But behind the fantastic features and events in the story, the real historical and moral theme of crime and betrayal, and the inevitability of the most severe punishment for this, is revealed.

The bloody atrocities of the evil sorcerer-traitor from this story are terrible, but inevitable retribution will overtake him in due course.

The story of Vasily Gogol’s marriage to Maria Ivanovna Kosyarovskaya was also shrouded in mysticism. As a boy, Vasily Gogol went with his mother on a pilgrimage to the Kharkov province, where there was a wonderful image of the Mother of God. Staying overnight, he saw in a dream this temple and the heavenly queen, who predicted his fate: “You will be overcome by many illnesses (and for sure, he suffered from many illnesses), but everything will pass, you will recover, you will get married, and here is your wife.” Having uttered these words, she raised her hand, and he saw at her feet a small child sitting on the floor, whose features were engraved in his memory.

At home Vasily forgot his dream. His parents, not having a church at that time, went to the town of Yareski. There he saw a seven-month-old child in the nurse’s arms; he looked at him and stopped in surprise: he remembered the very features of the child that he had seen in his dream.

Without telling anyone about this, he began to watch the girl and amused her with toys. Thirteen years later, he saw the same dream, and in the same temple the gates opened, and a maiden of extraordinary beauty came out and, pointing to the left, said: “Here is your bride!” He saw a girl in a white dress with the same facial features. After a short time, Vasily Gogol wooed thirteen-year-old Maria Kosyarovskaya.

The plot of the story “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” is based on the Slavic pagan holiday of Ivan Kupala, dedicated by the Russian Orthodox Church to the Nativity of Ivan the Baptist (June 24, old style).

In Little Russia there is a belief that the fern blooms only once a year, precisely at midnight before Midsummer, with a fiery color. The one who manages to pick it, despite all the ghosts that prevent him from doing so, finds the treasure. The treasure in the story becomes a devilish temptation that Petrus, who killed an innocent child and extracted the gold at this terrible price, cannot withstand.

Therefore, severe punishment is inevitable for a bloody crime that did not bring happiness to the young. After all, wealth acquired through dishonest means is so illusory and short-lived.

A.K. Vronsky writes in his book “Gogol”: “The fantastic in Gogol is by no means an external device, not accidental and not superficial. Remove the devil, the sorcerer, the witches, the disgusting pig snouts, the stories will fall apart not only in plot, but also in their meaning, in their idea.

An evil, extraneous force, unknown, coming from somewhere, destroys the quiet, serene, ancient way of life with the help of chervonets and all sorts of things - that’s the meaning. There is something demonic in wealth, in money, in treasures: they beckon, entice, tempt, push people into terrible crimes, turn people into fat cattle, into carnivorous gluttons, and deprive them of the image and likeness of humanity.

Things and money sometimes seem alive, moving, and people become like dead things; like Chub, godfather, clerk, thanks to the devil’s intrigues, they turn into coolies.”

Chapter V. “Viy” is Gogol’s most mystical and terrible story.

In the collection of stories "Mirgorod" one of

the most mystical and terrible is

story "Viy".

The story was begun by Gogol in 1833.

Viy, the name of a fantastic underground spirit,

was invented by Gogol as a result

connecting the name of the ruler of the underworld in

Ukrainian mythology of “Iron Niy” and

Ukrainian words “viya” - eyelash and “poviko”

Eyelid. Hence the long eyelids of Gogol’s character.

In the note to Viy, Gogol points out,

that “this whole story is folk

tradition" and that he conveyed it exactly as he heard it,

changing almost nothing. However, not a single piece of folklore has yet been discovered with a plot that exactly resembles the story. Only certain motifs of “Viy” are comparable to some folk tales and legends.

Khoma Brut dies from fear, but at the cost of his life he destroys the evil spirit that rushed at the philosopher and did not hear the rooster’s cry in time - after his third cry, the spirits who did not have time to return to the underground kingdom of the dead die.

Gogol brilliantly displays a whole range of mythical moods in the scene of Khoma’s magical jump and flight over the water with a witch on his shoulders. Khoma Brut saw a mermaid swim up from behind the sedge, her back and leg flashed - convex, elastic, all created from brilliance and trembling... “Her cloudy breasts, matte, like porcelain, not covered with glaze, shone through before the sun the edges of its white elastic circle...Water in the form of small bubbles, like beads, showered them. She is shaking and laughing in the water. Does he see it or not? Is this real or is it a dream? "What is this?" - thought the philosopher, looking down, rushing at full speed. Sweat rolled off him like a hail, he felt a devilishly sweet feeling, he felt some kind of piercing, some kind of painfully terrible pleasure. It often seemed to him that he no longer had a heart at all, and he clutched at it with fear.” Critics greeted Viy rather coldly at first, not appreciating the author's true virtuosity and the depth of his philosophy. In Viya, fantasy is intricately intertwined in the story with real-life details and descriptions.

We can say that “Viy” is the first real thriller

in Russian literature. Gogol skillfully builds tension

living with every night that Khoma Brut must spend

at the tomb of Pannochka the Witch. At the same time truly folk

humor only sets off the horror of what is happening.

For example, in the following characterization of Khoma: “After

At lunchtime the philosopher was completely in good spirits. He managed to go around

all the villages, get to know almost everyone; from two huts

he was even kicked out; one cute girl grabbed him

quite a shovel on the back, when he decided to feel

I wonder what material her shirt and scarf were made of.”

And Khoma wouldn’t mind sleeping with the old witch,

if she were a little younger.

Next to this, these are truly soul-chilling

serious lines that do not cause even a shadow of a smile,

despite the fantastic nature of what is happening: “The corpse

was already standing in front of him on the very line and staring at him dead,

green eyes. Bursak shuddered, and a cold sensation ran through his entire body. She began to grumble dully and began to utter terrible words with dead lips; They sobbed hoarsely, like the bubbling of boiling tar. What they meant, he could not say, but there was something terrible in them. The philosopher, in fear, realized that she was casting a spell.”

Osip Senkovsky said: “In Viy there is no end, no beginning, no idea - there is nothing except a few terrible, incredible scenes. Anyone who copies a folk legend for a story must also give it meaning - only then will it become an elegant work. It is likely that the Little Russians Viy have some kind of myth, but the meaning of this myth has not been solved.”

Who is Viy? There are two versions, and neither of them can be strictly preferred. Many researchers believe that the name Viy, a fantastic underground spirit, was invented by Gogol as a result of the contamination of the names of the ruler of the underworld in Ukrainian mythology, “Iron Niy,” who is capable of killing people with his gaze and burning cities (probably this property of his was identified with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes), and the Ukrainian words “viya”, “viyka” - eyelash. In the “Little Russian Lexicon” compiled by Gogol, for example, we read: “Virlooky - goggle-eyed.” Hence the long eyelids of Gogol’s character. If we accept this version, it turns out that Viy in the form in which we recognize him today is entirely the fruit of Gogol’s fantasy - an iron creature with long eyelids reaching to the ground. Indeed, in famous fairy tales, as well as in other folklore works of Ukrainians and other Slavic peoples, there is no character named Viy. With one remarkable exception. True, the famous collector and researcher of folklore A.N. Afanasyev in his book “Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature” argued that in Slavic mythology not only there is a similar image, but also the very name of the fantastic creature - Viy - was considered as quite traditional.

Gogol's Viy is the ruler of the underground kingdom, the master of the earth's bowels. No wonder he has an iron face and iron fingers. In the popular consciousness, the bowels of the earth were associated, first of all, with iron ore - it was this mineral that people began to mine first. For Gogol, Viy's power is hidden behind extra-long eyelids, and he cannot use it without outside help. The writer combined the Belarusian Koshchei with the Ukrainian iron Niy. One of the other evil spirits must lift Viyu’s eyelids. Allegorically, this can be interpreted in the sense that the person himself must help the evil spirits - with his fear. It is Khoma's fear that ultimately destroys him. Viy takes his soul to himself, to the kingdom of the dead.

Khoma's story also allows for a realistic explanation. Viy's vision can be imagined as the fruit of the delirium tremens of a great lover of vodka, from which he dies.

Gogol thoroughly prepared to write his mystical stories. The author carefully collected all folklore information regarding evil spirits. The writer wanted complete similarity with popular ideas about evil spirits. And for this he wrote to his mother: “...A few more words about carols, about Ivan Kupala, about mermaids. If there are, in addition, any spirits or brownies, then about them in more detail with their names and deeds; There are a lot of superstitions, terrible tales, legends, various anecdotes, and so on floating around among the common people. and so on. and so on. All this will be extremely interesting for me.”

Gogol: “Viy is a colossal creation of simply the people’s imagination - this is the name given to the Little Russians for the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids go all the way to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I didn’t want to change it in any way and I tell it almost in the same simplicity as I heard it.” Indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the legend about Viya that Gogol heard was not recorded by any other folklorist, and only Gogol’s story has preserved it to this day.

“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” opened, not counting Gogol’s first works, the romantic period of his work. At the same time, it is obvious that the stories alternate in tone. After the cheerful “Sorochinskaya Fair”, in its fantastic part going back to the motifs of folk demonology, where evil spirits are ultimately put to shame, there followed the story with a tragic end “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, in which evil (devilishness) was presented as irreversible, fitting more into the traditions of German romantic fiction.

However, if you take a closer look, it becomes obvious that despite the certain dominant tonality that prevails in all the stories of the cycle, sometimes joyful and cheerful, sometimes tragic and terrible, Gogol already within each text constantly balances on the concepts of scary and funny.

As mentioned earlier, Gogol tries to fully comply with folklore regarding evil spirits. One of these characters is the mermaid in the story “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”: “She was all pale, like a sheet; but how wonderful, how beautiful! Levko looked at the shore: in the thin silver fog, light, like shadows, girls in shirts white, like a meadow covered with lilies of the valley, flashed; golden necklaces, monists, ducats shone on their necks; but they were pale; their body seemed to be sculpted from transparent clouds and seemed to shine through and through during the silver moon.” This is exactly what mermaids look like in folk tales. They are often confused with sea maidens, who have tails instead of legs. But mermaids have legs, and they love to dance in circles along the river bank, which is shown in the story. Gogol also says that this mermaid is a girl who threw herself into the water. And here the author did not sin against folklore truth. The following become mermaids: a) drowned women who voluntarily went to the bottom of the river; b) girls who bathed without a cross or entered the water without crossing themselves; c) girls who died unbaptized or were stillborn; d) those girls whom the mermaids lured into their round dance.

Chapter VI.

Fiction "Petersburg Tales". Hoaxes in the stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat”.

“In Viya,” noted A.K. Vronsky, “sweetheart

sensuality, the earthly, the essential fight against

mortal charms, with dark souls

pleasures, with a pernicious world, but melting

inexplicable pleasures."

From the end of 1833 he became interested in the idea of

unrealistic, as were his previous plans for the service:

it seemed to him that he could enter the scientific field. At that

the opening of the Kyiv University was being prepared, and he

dreamed of occupying the history department there, which he taught to girls

at the Patriotic Institute.

Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; Gogol thought to found

together with him in Kyiv, he wanted to invite Pogodin there; in Kyiv to him

Finally, he imagined Russian Athens, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in universal history, and at the same time studying Little Russian antiquity.

To his chagrin, it turned out that the department of history had been given to another person; but soon he was offered the same chair at St. Petersburg University, thanks to the influence of his high literary friends.

He actually took this chair: once or twice he managed to give a spectacular lecture, but then the task turned out to be beyond his strength, and he himself refused the professorship in 1835.

At the same time, Gogol presented the manuscript of the two-volume “History of Little Russia” to St. Petersburg University. But then I took it back for revision. . Whether Gogol burned this manuscript, as he often did with works that did not satisfy him, or whether it was preserved is unknown.

"Nose"

Vladimir Nabokov tied

the main character of the story with features

appearance of Gogol himself: “His big and

the sharp nose was so long and mobile that

in his youth he knew how to pester

its tip is the lower lip; the nose was the most

a sensitive and noticeable feature of his appearance.

The nose runs like a leitmotif through it

essays: it is difficult to find another writer,

who would describe smells with such gusto,

sneezing and snoring. Increased sensation in the nose

eventually resulted in the story “The Nose” -

truly a hymn to this organ. Whether his imagination created his nose or whether his nose awakened his fantasy does not matter.”

The hero of the story “The Nose” could not always control himself, which

a person into someone unlike those around him and due to his dissimilarity

no longer able to live the same life. In order for something like this

the transformation has taken place, it takes very little: to take one

one of its most insignificant parts is the nose. A victim like this

the hoax was the collegiate assessor Kovalev, who did nothing

he was different from other “collegiate assessors”, he only liked for everyone to call him major. “It is for this very reason that we will henceforth call this collegiate assessor major.”

So, one morning, Major Kovalev “woke up quite early” and, “to his greatest amazement, he saw that instead of a nose he had a completely smooth place!” “I woke up quite early” and the barber Ivan Yakovlevich found in the bun he was cutting the nose of Major Kovalev. How Ivan Yakovlevich was able to cut off his nose, and even more so how this nose ended up in a bun, remains unclear, but it is known for sure that from the hands of the barber the nose went to the Neva from the St. Isaac's Bridge. It is from this moment that the major’s torment begins, during which he realizes that “a man without a nose is the devil knows what!” If Kovalev’s actions after this unfortunate incident can be explained, then the actions of the nose cannot be explained in any way. Instead of floating in the Neva, the bow, in the most incredible way, ended up in a carriage in the center of St. Petersburg. “He was in a uniform embroidered with gold, with a large stand-up collar; he was wearing suede trousers; there's a sword at my side." Kovalev “almost went crazy from such a spectacle.” His own nose travels around St. Petersburg with the rank of state councilor (which is much higher than the rank of Kovalev himself), he prays in the Kazan Cathedral, goes on visits, and even responds to Kovalev’s statements that he (the nose) “decidedly does not understand anything.”

Due to a seemingly insignificant change in the major's appearance, the whole world was turned upside down. Not only did the nose acquire all human properties and characteristics, it became more powerful than its owner, thereby demonstrating the insignificant role of man in this city, in this world.

After losing his nose, Kovalev is not free in his actions, the range of his possibilities has decreased almost to a point, and all his efforts are aimed at one thing - to return such a “noticeable part of the body” to its original place.

Things play a very important role in Gogol's works; people dissolve in this world of things. Therefore, it is not surprising that the world of objects - the city - suppresses a person, makes

its existence is mechanistic and inertial.

"Overcoat"

The thought of a man whose soul was breathed in by God, and whose fate

often determines the devil, apparently, did not leave Gogol. Hero

the story “The Overcoat” Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin in everything

offended by fate, even given a name at birth

cacophonous. But Bashmachkin does not complain: he is already over

rank higher than titular councilor; he has no family, friends,

he doesn’t go to the theater, or to visit, or just for a walk: all of him

spiritual needs are satisfied by copying

Gogol describes in great detail how

The old overcoat, repaired many times, has finally worn out

Akakiy Akakievich, how he childishly tried to convince

tailor Petrovich, that the cloth is still new, I should supply

patches; how Bashmachkin is trying to get the missing forty rubles, how to save money. Finally, the coveted overcoat is acquired, but soon it is stolen. Akakiy Akakievich uselessly walks around the officials, trying to find the missing overcoat and... dies, unable to withstand the indifference on the part of the “significant person.”

Death, it would seem, put an end to the history of Akaki Akakievich. But Gogol presents the reader with another surprise. He talks about a dead man who was looking for his overcoat at night, so he tore off everyone’s overcoat, without regard to rank or title. The dead man did not calm down until he reached the “significant person” and tore the greatcoat off his shoulders.

This fantastic turn of events is reminiscent of the dark wonders of Viy. But in “The Overcoat,” the description of the dead man’s actions is seasoned with humor and presented in such a way that it is impossible to say for sure what really happened and what was born in the fevered imagination of ordinary people. Gogol, however, reports in the very last lines that when the watchman tried to detain the ghost, it stopped and asked: “What do you want?” - and showed such a fist that you won’t find among the living. In addition, the ghost was much taller than Akaki Akakievich and wore an “enormous mustache.” However, at the moment of meeting with the dead robber, the general recognized Akaki Akakievich and even heard his voice: “... it’s your overcoat that I need! you didn’t bother about mine, and even scolded me - now give me yours!” However, in a state of horror, it is no wonder to hear the words that the voice of conscience has been repeating for a long time. And without that, almost every day the general was presented with “pale Akakiy Akakievich, who could not stand the official scolding.”

Gogol leaves the reader in the dark: whether it was a ghost or something else. In any case, if there were rumors in St. Petersburg about an avenger official rebelling after death, this showed the anger that Bashmachkin felt while still alive. In a feverish delirium, he “blasphemed” and, following the words “Your Excellency,” uttered some other, “terrible words.”

After the publication of new collections “Mirgorod” and “Arabesques”, Gogol’s fame increased even more. V.G. Belinsky in the article “On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol” proclaimed him “the head of literature, the head of poets” - and this was during Pushkin’s lifetime!

In 1836, the premiere of The Inspector General took place at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. But soon Gogol leaves abroad again. He leaves unexpectedly for his acquaintances and friends, deeply traumatized by critical reviews: “I’m going abroad, there I unlock the melancholy that my compatriots inflict on me every day.” Many biographers have come to the conclusion that the reason for the sudden departure was the public reaction to the comedy...

But, as it turned out, Gogol made the decision to leave even before the premiere of The Government Inspector, and it is not so easy to explain this action.

Gogol had been abroad since June 1836. to April 1848, but visited his homeland twice during this time: in 1839-1840 and in 1841-1842.

He traveled almost all of Western Europe, living the longest in his beloved Italy - a total of about four and a half years.

Gogol also sailed in the Mediterranean Sea, and before his final return to Russia, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. According to Gogol’s sister Anna Vasilievna: “When Gogol was getting ready to travel abroad, he certainly wanted to receive an image from someone in the form of a blessing.

He waited for a long time in vain, but suddenly he received the image of the Savior from the preacher Innocent. This fulfillment of his desire seemed miraculous to him and was interpreted by him as a command from above to go to Jerusalem and, having cleansed himself with prayer at the Holy Sepulcher, ask for God’s blessing for his planned literary work.”

His stay abroad in the “beautiful distance” for the first time strengthened and calmed him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, “Dead Souls,” but it also became the embryo of deeply fatal phenomena. Disunion with life, an increased withdrawal into oneself, the exaltation of religious feeling led to a “pietistic” exaggeration, which ended with his last book, which amounted to a kind of negation of his own artistic work...

In March 1837, Gogol was in Rome. The Eternal City made a charming impression on him. The nature of Italy delighted and enchanted him. Under the life-giving rays of the Italian sun, Gogol's health strengthened, although he never considered himself completely healthy.

His acquaintances made fun of his suspiciousness, but back in St. Petersburg he said quite seriously that doctors did not understand his illness, that his stomach was structured completely differently from that of other people, and this caused him suffering that others did not understand.

Living abroad, he spent almost every summer on some kind of water, but rarely withstood the full course of treatment; It seemed to him that he himself knew better than all the doctors how and with what to be treated. In his opinion, travel and life in Rome had the most beneficial effect on him. This is what Gogol said about his beloved Rome: “It seemed to me that I saw my homeland, which I had not been to for several years, and in which only my thoughts lived. But no, this is not all that: not my homeland, but the homeland of my soul, where my soul lived before me, before I was born.”

In May 1840, Gogol left for Italy and promised his friends to bring the first volume of Dead Souls, ready for printing.

S. T. Aksakov, Pogodin and Shchepkin saw him off and stood on the street in Perkhushkovo until the crew disappeared from sight. Suddenly, out of nowhere, terrible, black clouds stretched out and very quickly covered half of the sky, it became dark, and some kind of ominous feeling took possession of Gogol’s friends.

They talked sadly, referring to the dark clouds that had eclipsed the sun for Gogol’s future fate, but half an hour later the horizon suddenly changed: a strong wind tore into shreds and dispersed the terrible clouds, the sky soon cleared, the sun appeared in its brilliance and a joyful feeling filled the hearts of those seeing them off.

Thus, in a mystical way, nature accompanied Gogol abroad.

Chapter VII. Gogol's passion for practical jokes and hoaxes.

But it was in Rome that the poet’s weak body could not withstand the nervous tension that accompanies intense creative activity. He caught a severe swamp fever. An acute, painful illness almost brought him to the grave and left marks for a long time, both on his physical and mental state. Her seizures were accompanied by nervous suffering, weakness, and loss of spirit. N.P. Botkin, who was in Rome at that time and looked after Gogol with brotherly love, says that he told him about some visions that visited him during his illness. The “fear of death” that tormented Gogol’s father in the last days of his life was passed on to his son.

From an early age, Gogol was distinguished by suspiciousness and always attached great importance to his ill health; the painful illness, which did not immediately respond to medical help, seemed to him the threshold of death, or at least the end of an activity full of life.

Before this, the religious feelings that had been dormant in him begin to acquire ever greater proportions. He also begins to regard inspiration, which periodically leaves and returns to the writer, as divine overshadowing.

Serious, solemn thoughts, which the proximity of the grave suggests to us, gripped him and did not leave him until the end of his life. Having recovered from physical suffering, he again set to work, but now it acquired a different, very important meaning for him. Partly under the influence of reflections inspired by illness, partly thanks to Belinsky's articles, he developed a more serious view of his duties as a writer and of his works.

He, who almost from childhood was looking for a field in which he could become famous and benefit others, tried to become an official, an actor, a teacher, and a professor, finally realized that his real calling was literature, that the laughter excited by his creations , has a deep educational meaning. “The further continuation of “Dead Souls,” he says in a letter to Aksakov, “is clearer and more majestic in my head, and now I see that I will do, perhaps over time, something colossal, if only my weak strength allows.” "

At the same time, religiosity, which had distinguished him since childhood, but had hitherto rarely manifested itself, began to be expressed more often in his letters, in his conversations, and in his entire worldview. Under her influence, he began to give his literary work a kind of mystical character, began to look at his talent, at his creative ability as a gift sent to him by God for a good purpose, at his writing activity as a calling predetermined from above, as a duty, entrusted to him by providence.

A high idea of ​​his talent and the responsibility that lies within it led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and take a broad look at life, one must strive for internal improvement, which is given only by thinking of God.

Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood;

in his circle he found favorable soil for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently gave instructions to his friends and, in the end, came to the conviction that what he had done so far was unworthy of the high goal to which he now considered himself called.

If before he said that the first volume of his poem was nothing more than a porch to the palace that was being built in it, now he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission. One day, in a moment of heavy thought about fulfilling his duty, he burned the second volume of “Dead Souls”, sacrificed it to God, and the new content of the book, enlightened and purified, was presented to his mind; It seemed to him that he now understood how to write in order to “direct the whole society towards the beautiful.”

“A wonderful creation is happening and taking place in my soul,” he wrote in 1841, “and now my eyes are more than once filled with grateful tears. Here the holy will of God is clearly visible to me: such a suggestion does not come from a person; he would never invent such a plot.”

Gogol has so far expressed this mystical, solemn view of his work to very few of his acquaintances. For others, he was his former pleasant, although somewhat silent interlocutor, a subtle observer, and a humorous storyteller.

Chapter VIII. The mystery of the writer's death.

Gogol's tragic end was accelerated by conversations with the fanatical priest Matvey Konstantinovsky, Gogol's confessor, in the last months of the writer's life.

Instead of reassuring and reassuring the suffering person, he pushed him, seeking spiritual support, further towards mysticism. This fateful meeting ended the crisis. This limited man adamantly reproached Gogol for his imaginary sinfulness, demonstrated the horrors of the Last Judgment, and portrayed the writer’s previous activities as a satanic temptation. Konstantinovsky’s conversations shocked Gogol so much that he, unable to control himself, once interrupted his speech with words that he could not listen any longer, that it was too scary.

During the winter of 1851-52, he did not feel entirely healthy, constantly complaining of weakness, nerve disorders, and fits of melancholy, but none of his acquaintances attached any importance to this, everyone knew that he was suspicious, and had long been accustomed to his complaints about various illnesses . In the circle of close friends, he was still cheerful and playful, willingly read his own and other people’s works, sang Little Russian songs in his “goat” voice, as he himself called it, and listened with pleasure when they were sung well. By spring, he planned to go to his native Vasilievka for several months in order to strengthen his strength there, and promised his friend Danilevsky to bring a completely finished volume of Dead Souls.

In 1850, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Sheremeteva died, she was a close friend of Gogol, they agreed on the basis of piety and became very close. This death strengthened Gogol's desire to reunite with her soul in heaven and brought his martyrdom closer.

In 1852, the sudden death of Khomyakov’s wife, née Yazykova, greatly shocked Gogol. Mixed with his natural grief over the loss of a loved one was the horror of an open grave. He was gripped by that painful “fear of death” that he had experienced more than once before. He admitted this to his confessor, and he tried to calm him down, but in vain. On Shrovetide Gogol began to fast and stopped all his literary pursuits; He visited his friends and seemed calm, only everyone noticed that he had become very thin and pale.

His tragic death - a kind of suicide, when the writer deliberately starved himself to death, was caused by the realization of the impossibility of reconciling aesthetics and morality.

The thought of imminent death did not leave him. The second volume of Dead Souls, his cherished work, was already ready for printing, and he wanted to leave it as a souvenir for his friends.

D. A. Obolensky said about the circumstances of the burning of the second volume of Dead Souls: “Gogol finished Dead Souls abroad and burned them. Then I wrote again and was pleased with my work.

But a religious frenzy began to visit him in Moscow, and then the idea of ​​burning this manuscript also fermented within him. Gogol called Count A.P. Tolstoy and told him: “Please take these notebooks and hide them. Hours come upon me when I want to burn it all. But I myself would be sorry. There seems to be some good stuff here.” Count Tolstoy, out of false delicacy, did not agree, so as not to show the patient, so as not to confirm his hypochondriacal fears.

Three days later, the count came to Gogol again and found him sad.

“But,” Gogol told him, “the evil one has misled me: I burned “Dead Souls.” He said more than once that he had some kind of vision. Three days before his death, he was sure of his imminent death.”

M. P. Pogodin recalls the circumstances of the burning of the second volume of “Dead Souls” somewhat differently: “On the Sunday before Lent, he called A. P. Tolstoy to him and, as if preparing for death, instructed him to give some of his works to the disposal of a spiritual person (Metropolitan Philaret), and print others. He tried to cheer up his fallen spirit and ward off any thought of death from him.

He prayed for a long time with tears; then at three o'clock in the morning he woke up the servant, ordered him to open the chimney in the fireplace, took papers from the briefcase, tied them into a tube and put them in the fireplace. The boy threw himself on his knees in front of him and begged him not to burn the papers. The corners of the notebooks were burned, and the fire began to go out. Gogol ordered the ribbon to be untied and he himself turned over the papers, crossing himself and praying until they turned to ashes. The servant cried and said: “What have you done!”

"Don't you feel sorry for me?" - said Gogol, hugged him, kissed him and began to cry. “Some things should have been burned,” he said, after thinking, “but for others they would have prayed to God for me; but, God willing, I will recover and everything will be fine.” In the morning he said to Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy: “Imagine how strong the evil spirit is. I wanted to burn papers that had long been determined for this purpose, but I burned the chapters of Dead Souls, which I wanted to leave to my friends as a souvenir after my death.” This is what is known so far about the destruction of our unappreciated treasure.”

That night, left alone, Gogol again experienced the sensations that he described in his “Correspondence with Friends.”

His soul “froze in horror at the mere representation of the greatness beyond the grave and those spiritual highest creations of God, before which dust all the greatness of his creations, here visible to us and amazing us; its entire dying composition groaned, sensing the gigantic growths and fruits whose seeds we sowed in life, without seeing or hearing what monsters would rise from them.”

His work seemed to him, as it had often seemed before, as the fulfillment of a duty entrusted to him by the Creator; he was gripped by fear that his duty was not fulfilled as the Creator, who had endowed him with talent, had intended, that his writing, instead of being useful, instead of preparing people for eternal life, would have a bad, corrupting influence on them.

According to A. O. Smirnova, “Gogol looked at “Dead Souls” as something that lay outside of him, where he had to reveal the secrets commanded to him. “When I write, my eyes open with unnatural clarity. And if I read what I have written, not yet finished, to anyone, the clarity leaves my eyes. I've experienced this many times. I am sure that when I have served my duty and finished what I am called to do, I will die. And if I release into the world what is immature or share the little that I have accomplished, then I will die before I fulfill what I am called into the light.”

This is probably the key to Gogol's death. “Having shared a little of the unripe,” reading the chapters of the second volume to M. A. Konstantinovsky and receiving sharply critical feedback from him, the writer became convinced that he had violated the covenant given from above and now must die.

From that time on, he fell into a gloomy despondency, did not allow friends to visit him, or, when they came, asked them to leave under the pretext that he wanted to sleep; he said almost nothing, but often wrote texts from the Gospel and short sayings of religious content with a trembling hand. He stubbornly refused any treatment, assuring that no medicine would help him. This is how the first week of Lent passed. On Monday, the second, the confessor invited him to receive communion and receive unction.

He happily agreed to this, during

ritual, prayed with tears, held the Gospel

a candle with a weak hand. On Tuesday he felt like

it seemed easier, but on Wednesday he had it

a terrible attack of nervous fever, and on Thursday,

The news of Gogol's death shocked everyone

friends, until the last days, who did not believe

terrible premonitions. His body is like

honorary member of Moscow University,

was moved to the university church, where it remained until the funeral.

Present at the funeral were: Moscow Governor-General Zakrevsky, trustee of the Moscow educational district Nazimov, professors, university students and the mass of the public. The professors carried the coffin out of the church, and the students carried it in their arms all the way to the Danilov Monastery, where it was lowered into the ground next to the grave of their friend, the poet Yazykov.

From the memoirs of the Russian artist F.I. Jordan: “The flow of people over the course of two days was incredible. Richter, who lives near the university, wrote to me that there was no traffic on Nikitskaya Street for two days. Gogol lay in a frock coat, probably of his own free will, with a laurel wreath on his head, which was removed when the coffin was closed and brought in a lot of money from the sale of the leaves of this wreath. Everyone wanted to enrich themselves with this monument.”

Conclusion.

A peasant woman who met near the estate of G.P. Danilevsky two months after Gogol’s death stated: “It is not true that they interpret that he died. It was not he who was buried, but the poor old man; He himself, it is heard, went to pray for us in Holy Jerusalem. He left and will soon return here again.” On February 21, 1852 (old style), the greatest Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who had fallen into a lethargic state, was counted among the dead. “I bequeath my body not to be buried,” he wrote in his Will, “until obvious signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating...” Not heeding these words, they still buried him, so to speak, alive. It is difficult not to agree that Gogol was a great mystic. What happened in his works not only reflected on the author’s life circumstances, but also spread to his posthumous fate.

Thus, one famous writer, who was present at the reburial, took for himself a piece of well-preserved fabric from Gogol’s frock coat and boots. He bound the volume of “Dead Souls” with a piece of his frock coat, and put his boots on a shelf in his office. A mysterious story happened to them. At night, Gogol appeared to the writer and demanded that his boots be returned to him. The same thing happened on the second and third nights...

Worried, without further explanation, he gave the boots to his fellow writer. But Nikolai Vasilyevich did not leave the other owner of the ill-fated shoes alone. The story continued until one of the next owners of the boots thought of taking them to the cemetery. Isn’t it true that this non-fictional story is reminiscent of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”?

The very circumstances of Gogol's death reek of the mystical horror of the last page of Viy. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic Russian writers, a deeply religious, Orthodox man, he was no stranger to mysticism and believed that the devil led people after him, forcing them to commit evil deeds. Well, his compatriots, Ukrainians, have lived for centuries according to the principle: “Love God, but don’t anger the devil.”

The words of the prophet Jeremiah are carved on Gogol’s tombstone: “I will laugh at my bitter word.”

Conclusion.

In 1839, Gogol’s remains were transferred to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, which gave rise to many mystical assumptions that Gogol did not die, but was buried in a lethargic sleep. The spirit of Gogol will continue to disturb our earthly borders for a long time, and, apparently, these assumptions are not accidental.

The great writer died, and with him the work that he created for so long, with such love, died. Whether this work was the fruit of fully developed artistic creativity or the embodiment in images of those ideas that are expressed in “Selected Passages of Correspondence with Friends” is a secret that he took with him to the grave.

V. A. Rozanov in his work “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor F. M. Dostoevsky” stated: “He called his main work “Dead Souls” and, beyond any prediction, expressed in this title the great secret of his creativity and, of course, himself .

He could not find or express the ideal; he, a great artist of forms, burned with an impotent desire to put some living soul into at least one of them. And he burned with a helpless thirst to touch the human soul, something unclear speaks of his last days, about some kind of madness, about the terrible pangs of repentance, about fasting and starvation.”

“He died a victim of the lack of his nature - and the image of an ascetic burning his writings is the last that he left from his entire strange, so extraordinary life. “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay,” these words seem to be heard from behind the crackling of a fireplace, into which a brilliant madman throws his brilliant and criminal slander against human nature.”

The passages found in his papers and published after his death belong to earlier editions of the poem and do not give an idea of ​​what form it took after the author’s final processing.

As a thinker, as a moralist, Gogol stood below the progressive people of his time, but from an early age he was animated by a noble desire to benefit society, living sympathy for human suffering, and found poetic language, brilliant humor, and living images to express them. In those works in which he surrendered to the direct attraction of creativity, his powers of observation and his powerful talent penetrated deeply into the phenomena of life and, with their vividly truthful pictures of human vulgarity and baseness, contributed to the awakening of social self-awareness.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who could not bear it and looked openly at the outrages that were happening around him, was buried according to all church canons in the courtyard of the St. Daniel's Monastery. There he woke up and turned over, shuddering with horror, in the darkness of the cramped coffin. And how can you not turn over in your grave at what is happening in Rus'?

Bibliography.

Sokolov B.V. Gogol deciphered. Viy. Taras Bulba. Inspector. Dead Souls. – M.: Yauza, Eksmo, 2007. – 352 p.

N.V. Gogol and Russian literature of the 19th century: Interuniversity. Sat. scientific tr. - L.: Leningrad State Historical Institute, 1989. – 131 p.

The art of detail: observation and analysis: about the work of Gogol./ E. Dobin. L.: “Owl. writer". Leningr. department, 1975.

About the language of art. prose of N.V. Gogol: the art of narratives. / Responsible editor A.N. Kozhin; Academy of Sciences of the USSR. – M.: Nauka, 1987.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Biography of the writer. A.N. Stepanov, M., Education, 1998

"Nikolay Gogol". Henri Troyat, M., "Eksmo", 2004

The life and work of N.V. Gogol: Materials for an exhibition at school. and children's bib-ke. – M.: Det.lit., 1980.

About the nationality of N.V. Gogol. – Kyiv, ed. Kyiv. Univ., 1973.

Fantastic in “Petersburg Tales” by N.V. Gogol. – Vladivostok: Far Eastern University Publishing House, 1986.

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. N.V. Gogol. Lectures - L.: 1962.

The story “Viy” by N.V. Gogol. Lecture from a special course by N.V. Gogol. – L.: 1963.

History of Russian lit. XIX century At 3 o'clock 2h. (1840-1860): textbook for university students studying in the specialty “Russian language”. and literature." / E.E. Dmitrieva and others; edited by V.I. Korovin. – M.: Humanitarian Publishing Center VLADOS, 2005. – 524 p.

“The Artistic World of Gogol” S. Mashinsky, M., Enlightenment, 1971

Sokolov B.V. Gogol. Encyclopedia. (Series: Russian writers). M.: Algorithm, 2003. –

1. Folklore as a source of mystical images in Gogol’s works.
2. Evil spirits in collections of stories.
3. Mysticism in the story “Portrait”.

In dictionaries you can find several definitions of the concept “mysticism,” but they all agree that this word means beliefs in another reality inhabited by supernatural beings, as well as in the possibility of people communicating with them. The folklore tradition of different peoples has preserved stories about various creatures of another world, both kind and bright, benevolently disposed towards people, and evil, hostile to God and people.

In the works of N.V. Gogol, it is mainly malicious entities that penetrate into the world of people, and their accomplices also act - evil sorcerers and witches. Only occasionally do people encounter benevolent creatures from another world. And yet, in the works of writers there are much more evil people from another world than good ones. Perhaps this “distribution of forces” reflected people’s wary attitude towards the mysterious world, contact with which can lead to unpredictable consequences.

In the collection “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka,” mystical motifs are heard in almost all the stories, with the exception of one, “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his Aunt.” In other stories, the degree of contact between people and the other world is different. In the story “Sorochinskaya Fair” the story about the mysterious red scroll can still be considered a joke, successfully picked up by a young man in love. But the superstitious Cossack Solopiy Cherevik has no doubt that the ill-fated red sleeve that he keeps coming across is nothing more than a sleeve from the devil’s chopped up scroll! However, in this story it is not the evil spirits themselves that act, but the human belief in their existence, and this “shadow” of the evil spirits brings much more benefit than harm. Solopiy suffered and was shaken up, but everything turned out well, his daughter and the Cossack Gritsko received Cherevik’s consent to the marriage, and he himself successfully sold the goods brought to the fair.

A meeting with a mermaid - a lady who drowned herself due to the oppression of her stepmother-witch - unexpectedly changes the life of the boy Levko and his beloved Ganna. The mermaid generously rewards the young man for helping her find her stepmother. Thanks to the power of the drowned woman, Levko and Ganna finally become husband and wife despite the objections of the young man’s father.

In the stories “The Missing Letter”, “The Night Before Christmas”, “The Enchanted Place” the evil spirits are very active and unfriendly towards people. However, she is not so powerful that she cannot be defeated. We can say that the heroes of the stories “The Missing Letter” and “The Enchanted Place” got off easy. The evil spirits played a joke on them, but also let them go in peace, each one left to his own. And in the story “The Night Before Christmas,” the meeting with the devil turned out to be even useful for the blacksmith Vakula - having scared the devil, the blacksmith used him as a vehicle and fulfilled the order of his capricious lover, bringing her the Tsarina’s slippers.

But in the stories “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” and “Terrible Revenge”, as well as in the story “Viy”, included in another collection, “Mirgorod”, the evil spirits and their assistants - evil sorcerers - are truly terrible. No, it’s not even the evil spirits that are the most terrible, with the possible exception of the creepy Viy. Much more terrible people: the sorcerer Basavryuk and the sorcerer from the story “Terrible Revenge”, who killed all his loved ones. And the sinister Viy appears for a reason.

He comes to the witch's body to destroy the man who killed her.

“The devil is not as terrible as he is painted,” says a common expression. Indeed, we can agree that in Gogol’s works, evil spirits often do not turn out to be so terrible if the person himself is not afraid of them. Sometimes she even looks quite comical (remember the devil put in a bag by the witch Solokha and beaten by her son Vakula). Much more terrible and dangerous is the person who contributes to the penetration of evil into our world...

Mystical motives are also heard in the story “Portrait”, included in the collection of “Petersburg Tales”. However, in it they acquire an even deeper philosophical meaning. A talented artist unwittingly becomes the culprit of the fact that evil penetrates the souls of people. The eyes of the moneylender, whose portrait he painted, have an ominous effect on people. However, the artist did not have bad intentions, like those sorcerers who, of their own free will, helped the evil spirits rampage. Having realized what he had done, this man experiences deep remorse. And the work itself was not a joy to him - he felt something mysterious and terrible in a man who at all costs wanted to be captured on the canvas: “He threw himself at his feet and begged him to finish the portrait, saying that from this his fate and existence in the world depend on the fact that he has already touched its living features with his brush, that if he conveys them correctly, his life will be held in the portrait by supernatural power, that through this he will not die completely, that he needs to be present in the world. My father felt horror from such words...”

How can one not remember Viy’s creepy, deathly gaze! Who exactly was this moneylender? Gogol does not give a direct answer to this question. The artist, who painted the portrait and became a monk in repentance, speaks about it to his son: “To this day I cannot understand what that strange image was from which I painted the image. It was definitely some kind of devilish phenomenon... I wrote it with disgust...” Yes, the eyes of the moneylender depicted in the portrait became a kind of doors through which evil entered the world of people: and the artist, who carelessly allowed these doors to remain open, asks his son, if the opportunity arises, to destroy the ominous image, to block the path to the evil obsession that cripples human souls and fate. However, evil, having penetrated the human world, does not want to leave it: a strange portrait suddenly disappears from the hall where the auction is being held, and the son is deprived of the opportunity to fulfill the will of his father. What other troubles will an ominous look cause?..

So, we can summarize all of the above. Gogol's interest in mysticism is undeniable: the writer repeatedly developed plots in which a significant place was devoted to evil spirits and their assistants. Gogol also showed various results from a person’s collision with supernatural forces - from a completely harmless joke to a terrible tragedy, while emphasizing the role of the human factor in the activities of people from another world.