N. G. Chernyshevsky
Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature
(Works of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Four volumes. Second edition. Moscow. 1855;
The writings of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, found after his death.
Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls. Volume two (five chapters). Moscow, 1855)
Only four articles are given in this edition (1, 7, 8, 9).-- (Ed.).
Library of Russian classics
N. G. Chernyshevsky. Collected works in five volumes.
Volume 3 Literary criticism
Library "Spark".
M., "Pravda", 1974
OCR Bychkov M.N.
ARTICLE ONE
In antiquity, about which only obscure, implausible, but marvelous in their improbability memories are preserved, as about a mythical time, as about "Astrea", in Gogol's expression, - in this deep antiquity it was customary to begin critical articles with reflections on how Russian literature is developing rapidly. Think (we were told) - even Zhukovsky was in full color strength, as Pushkin already appeared; as soon as Pushkin completed half of his poetic career, so cut short by death, as Gogol appeared - and each of these people, so quickly following one after another, introduced Russian literature into new period development, incomparably higher than all that was given in previous periods. only twenty five years separate "Rural Cemetery" from "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", "Svetlana" from "Inspector General" - and in this short period of time Russian literature had three eras, Russian society took three great steps forward along the path of mental and moral perfection. This is how it started critical articles in ancient times.
This deep antiquity, hardly remembered by the current generation, was not too long ago, as can be assumed from the fact that the names of Pushkin and Gogol are found in its legends. But—although we have been separated from it by very few years—it has decidedly become outdated for us. We are assured of this by the positive testimonies of almost all the people who write now about Russian literature - as an obvious truth, they repeat, that we have already gone far ahead of the critical, aesthetic, etc. principles and opinions of that era; that its principles proved to be one-sided and unfounded, its opinions exaggerated and unjust; that the wisdom of that era has now turned out to be vainglory, and that the true principles of criticism, the truly wise views on Russian literature - which people of that era had no idea - were found by Russian criticism only from the time when critical articles began to remain uncut in Russian journals.
One can still doubt the validity of these assurances, especially since they speak decisively without any evidence; but what remains undoubted is that in fact our time differs significantly from the immemorial antiquity of which we spoke. Try, for example, to begin a critical article now, as you began it then, with considerations about the rapid development of our literature - and from the very first word you yourself will feel that things are not going well. The thought will present itself to you: it is true that Pushkin came after Zhukovsky, Gogol after Pushkin, and that each of these people introduced a new element into Russian literature, expanded its content, changed its direction; but what is new in literature after Gogol? And the answer will be: the Gogol trend is still the only strong and fruitful one in our literature. If one can recall a few tolerable, even two or three beautiful works that were not imbued with an idea akin to the idea of Gogol's creations, then, despite their artistic merits, they remained without influence on the public, almost without significance in the history of literature. Yes, in our literature the Gogol period is still going on - and after all, twenty years passed since the advent of the "Inspector", twenty-five years since the appearance of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" - before, two or three directions changed in such an interval. Today the same thing prevails, and we do not know whether we will soon be able to say: "a new period has begun for Russian literature."
From this we clearly see that at the present time it is impossible to begin critical articles in the way that they began in deep antiquity - by thinking that we hardly have time to get used to the name of a writer who makes his writings a new era in the development of our literature, as is already the case. the other, with works whose content is even deeper, whose form is even more independent and perfect - in this respect one cannot but agree that the present is not like the past.
To what should such a difference be attributed? Why does the Gogol period continue for such a number years, which in the past was enough to change two or three periods? Maybe a sphere Gogol's ideas so deep and vast that it takes too much time for their complete development by literature, for their assimilation by society - the conditions on which, of course, the further literary development depends, because only after absorbing and digesting the food offered, one can hunger for a new one, only Having completely secured the use of what has already been acquired, we must look for new acquisitions—perhaps our self-consciousness is still fully occupied with the development of Gogol’s content, does not foresee anything else, does not strive for anything more complete and profound? Or would it be time for a new trend to appear in our literature, but it does not appear due to some extraneous circumstances? In proposing the last question, we thereby give reason to think that we consider it fair to answer it in the affirmative; but when we say: “yes, it would be time for a new period in Russian literature to begin,” we thereby pose two new questions to ourselves: what should be the distinctive properties of the new trend that will arise and partly, although still weakly, hesitantly, already arise from Gogol’s directions? and what circumstances hinder the rapid development of this new direction? Last question, if you like, you can decide briefly - at least, for example, and regret that the new brilliant writer is not. But again, one may ask: why does he not appear for so long? After all, Pushkin, Griboedov, Koltsov, Lermontov, Gogol ... five people, almost at the same time, appeared before, and how quickly one after another - so they do not belong to the number of phenomena, so rare in the history of peoples, like Newton or Shakespeare, for which mankind has been waiting for several centuries. Let now a man appear equal to at least one of these five, he would begin with his creations a new era in the development of our self-consciousness. Why are there no such people now? Or are they there, but we don't notice them? As you wish, and this should not be left without consideration. The case is very tricky.
And another reader, after reading the last lines, will say, shaking his head: "not too wise questions; and somewhere I read completely similar ones, and even with answers - where, let me recall; well, yes, I read them by Gogol, and precisely in the following passage from the daily Notes of a Madman:
December 5. I've been reading newspapers all morning today. Strange things are being done in Spain. I couldn't even make out them well. They write that the throne has been abolished and that the ranks are in a difficult position regarding the election of an heir. I find this extremely strange. How can the throne be abolished? There must be a king on the throne. "Yes", they say, "there is no king" - it cannot be that there is no king. There can be no state without a king. There is a king, but he is hiding somewhere in the unknown. It may be that he is in the same place, but some family reasons, or fears on the part of neighboring powers, such as France and other lands, force him to hide, or there are some other reasons.
The reader will be absolutely right. We really came to the same position in which Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin was. The point is only to explain this situation on the basis of the facts presented by Gogol and our latest writers, and to shift the conclusions from the dialect spoken in Spain to ordinary Russian.
Criticism generally develops on the basis of the facts presented by literature, whose works serve as the necessary data for the conclusions of criticism. Thus, after Pushkin with his poems in the Byronian spirit and "Eugene Onegin" came the criticism of the "Telegraph", when Gogol gained dominance over the development of our self-consciousness, there was the so-called criticism of the 1840s ... Thus, the development of new critical convictions each times was a consequence of changes in the dominant character of literature. It is clear that our critical views cannot claim either special novelty or satisfactory completeness. They are derived from works that represent only certain foreshadowings, the beginnings of a new trend in Russian literature, but do not yet show it in full development, and cannot contain more than what is given by literature. It has not yet gone far from The Inspector General and Dead Souls, and our articles cannot differ much in their essential content from the critical articles that appeared on the basis of The Inspector General and Dead Souls. In terms of essential content, we say, the merits of development depend solely on the moral forces of the writer and on the circumstances; and if it is to be admitted at all that our literature in Lately ground, then it is natural to assume that our articles cannot but be of the same nature, in comparison with what we read in the old days. But be that as it may, these last years were not entirely fruitless - our literature has acquired several new talents, if they have not yet created anything. so great, like "Eugene Onegin" or "Woe from Wit", "A Hero of Our Time" or "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls", yet they have already managed to give us several beautiful works, remarkable for their independent artistic merits and lively content, - works in which it is impossible not to see the pledges of future development. And if our articles reflect in any way the beginning of the movement expressed in these works, they will not be completely devoid of a premonition of a fuller and deeper development of Russian literature. Whether we succeed is up to the readers to decide. But we ourselves will boldly and positively confer on our articles another merit, a very important one: they are generated by deep respect and sympathy for what was noble, just and useful in Russian literature and criticism of that deep antiquity, which we spoke about at the beginning, antiquity, which, however, it is only because antiquity is forgotten by lack of convictions or arrogance, and especially pettiness of feelings and concepts, that it seems to us that it is necessary to turn to the study of high aspirations that animated the criticism of the former time; unless we remember them, imbue them, our criticism cannot be expected to have any influence on the mental movement of society, no benefit to the public and literature; and not only will it not bring any benefit, but it will not arouse any sympathy, even any interest, just as it does not excite him now. And criticism should play important role in literature, it is time for her to remember this.
Readers may notice in our words an echo of the impotent indecision that has taken possession of Russian literature in recent years. They can say: “You want to move forward, and where do you propose to draw strength for this movement? Not in the present, not in the living, but in the past, in the dead. not in the future. Only the power of negation from everything past is the power that creates something new and better. Readers will be partly right. But we are not completely wrong either. For a fallen one, any support is good, if only to rise to his feet; and what is to be done if our time does not show itself capable of standing on its own feet? And what to do if this falling can only lean on the coffins? And we must also ask ourselves, are the dead really lying in these coffins? Aren't living people buried in them? At least, isn't there much more life in these dead than in many people who are called alive? After all, if the writer's word is animated by the idea of truth, the desire for a beneficial effect on the intellectual life of society, this word contains the seeds of life, it will never be dead. And is it a lot years Has it been since these words were spoken? No; and there is still so much freshness in them, they still fit the needs of the present so well that they seem to have been said only yesterday. The source does not dry out because that, having lost the people who kept it clean, we negligently, out of frivolity, allowed it to be filled with rubbish of idle talk. Let us discard this rubbish, and we will see that a stream of truth is still beating in the source with a living spring, capable, although in part, of quenching our thirst. Or do we not feel thirsty? We want to say "we feel" but we are afraid that we will have to add "we feel, but not too much."
Readers could already see from what we have said, and will see even more clearly from the continuation of our articles, that we do not consider Gogol's writings unconditionally satisfying all the modern needs of the Russian public, that even in Dead Souls (*) we find weak sides or, at least insufficiently developed, that, finally, in some works of subsequent writers we see the guarantees of a more complete and satisfactory development of ideas that Gogol embraced only from one side, not fully aware of their linkage, their causes and effects. And yet, we dare to say that the most unconditional admirers of everything that is written by Gogol, extolling up to heaven each of his works, each of his lines, do not sympathize with his works as vividly as we sympathize, they do not ascribe to his activity such enormous significance in Russian literature as we ascribe. We call Gogol without any comparison the greatest of Russian writers in terms of significance. In our opinion, he had every right to say the words, the immense pride of which embarrassed his most ardent admirers at one time, and whose awkwardness is understandable to us:
"Rus! What do you want from me? What incomprehensible bond lurks between us? What do you look like, and why whatever There is in you, turned eyes full of expectation on me?"
(* We are talking here only about the first volume of "Dead Souls", as elsewhere, where it is not indicated that we are talking about the second. By the way, at least a few words should be said about the second volume, until it is our turn to analyze it in detail, when reviewing Gogol's works The now published five chapters of the second volume of "Dead Souls" survived only in a draft manuscript, and, no doubt, in the final edition they did not have the form in which we now read them - it is known that Gogol worked hard, slowly, and only after many corrections and alterations he managed to give the true form to his works.This circumstance, which greatly complicates the decision of the question: "below or higher than the first volume of" Dead Souls "in artistic terms, would be their continuation, finally processed by the author", cannot yet force us to completely refuse from judging whether Gogol lost or retained all the enormity of his talent in the era of a new mood, expressed in “Correspondence with friends.” But a general judgment about the entire draft sketch that has survived from the second volume is made impossible because this passage itself, in turn , there is a collection of many passages, written at different times, under the influence of various moods of thought, and, it seems, written according to various general plans of the work, hastily crossed out without replenishing the crossed out passages - passages separated by spaces, often more significant than the passages themselves, finally, because many of the surviving pages were, apparently, discarded by Gogol himself as unsuccessful, and replaced by others written completely anew, of which some - perhaps also discarded in turn - have come down to us, others - - and probably more - died. All this forces us to consider each passage separately and to judge not about the "five chapters" of "Dead Souls", as a whole, albeit a rough sketch, but only about the varying degrees of merits of various pages, not connected either by a unity of plan, or a unity of mood, or the sameness of satisfaction with them in the author, not even the unity of the era of their composition. Many of these passages are decidedly just as weak both in execution and especially in thought as the weakest parts of Correspondence with Friends; such are especially the passages in which the ideals of the author himself are depicted, for example, the wonderful teacher Tentetnikov, many pages of the passage about Kostanzhoglo, many pages of the passage about Murazov; but that doesn't prove anything yet. The depiction of ideals was always the weakest side in Gogol's writings, and probably not so much because of the one-sidedness of talent, to which many ascribe this failure, but precisely because of the strength of his talent, which was in an unusually close relationship with reality: when reality presented ideal faces, they excellently came out in Gogol, as, for example, in "Taras Bulba" or even in "Nevsky Prospekt" (the face of the artist Piskarev). But if reality did not present ideal persons, or presented them in positions inaccessible to art, what was left for Gogol to do? Invent them? Others, accustomed to lying, do it quite skillfully; but Gogol never knew how to invent, he himself says this in his Confession, and his inventions always turned out unsuccessful. Among the passages in the second volume of "Dead Souls" there are many fictitious ones, and it is impossible not to see that they originated from Gogol's conscious desire to introduce into his work a gratifying element, about the lack of which in his previous writings so many and so much and loudly shouted and buzzed to him in ears. But we do not know whether these passages would have been destined to survive in the final edition of "Dead Souls" - the artistic tact, of which Gogol had so much, would correctly tell him when viewing the work that these passages are weak; and we have no right to assert that the desire to spread a pleasant coloring over the composition would then overpower the artistic criticism in the author, who was both implacable to himself and a penetrating critic. In many cases this false idealization seems to proceed purely from the arbitrariness of the author; but other passages owe their origin to sincere, involuntary, though unjust conviction. Among these places are mainly the monologues of Costanjoglo, which are a mixture of truth and falsehood, correct remarks and narrow, fantastic fictions; this mixture will surprise with its strange variegation everyone who is not briefly familiar with the opinions that often met in some of our journals and belong to people with whom Gogol had a short relationship. In order to characterize these opinions by some name, we, keeping to the rule: nomina sunt odiosa (Names are hateful - that is, we will not name names (lat.).), let's name only the late Zagoskin - many pages of the second volume of "Dead Souls" seem to be imbued with his spirit. We do not think that it was Zagoskin who had even the slightest influence on Gogol, and we do not even know what kind of relationship they had with each other. But opinions penetrating through latest novels Zagoskin and having the best of their many sources an ingenuous and short-sighted love for patriarchy, dominated among many people closest to Gogol, some of whom are distinguished by great intelligence, and others by erudition or even scholarship, which could seduce Gogol, who rightly complains that he did not receive an education, according to his talent, and, one might add, to the great strength of his moral character. Gogol, of course, obeyed their opinions, portraying his Kostanzhoglo or drawing the consequences that arose from Tentetnikov's weakness (pp. 24--26). Such passages, encountered in "Correspondence with Friends", contributed most of all to the condemnation to which Gogol was subjected for her. Later we will try to consider to what extent he should be condemned for having succumbed to this influence, from which, on the one hand, his penetrating mind was supposed to protect, but against which, on the other hand, he did not have a strong enough support, nor in a solid modern education, or in warnings from people who look straight at things - because, unfortunately, fate or pride kept Gogol always far from such people. Having made these reservations, inspired not only by deep respect for the great writer, but even more by a sense of just condescension towards a person surrounded by relations unfavorable for his development, we cannot, however, not say directly that the concepts that inspired Gogol many pages of the second volume " Dead Souls" are worthy of neither his mind, nor his talent, nor especially his character, in which, despite all the contradictions that still remain mysterious, one must recognize a noble and beautiful basis. We must say that on many pages of the second volume, in contradiction to other and better pages, Gogol is an advocate of rigidity; however, we are sure that he took this rigidity for something good, deceived by some aspects of it, from a one-sided point of view, which can be presented in a poetic or meek form and close the deep ulcers that Gogol so well saw and conscientiously exposed in other areas, more known to him, and which he did not distinguish in the sphere of action of Costanjoglo, he did not so well known. In fact, the second volume of "Dead Souls" depicts life, which Gogol almost never touched on in his previous writings. Previously, he always had cities and their inhabitants in the foreground, mainly officials and their relations; even in the first volume of Dead Souls, where there are so many landlords, they are not portrayed in their village relations, but only as people who are part of the so-called educated society, or purely from a psychological side. It was only in the second volume of Dead Souls that Gogol took it into his head to touch on rural relations, not casually, and his news in this field can to some extent explain his delusions. Perhaps, upon closer study of the subject, many of the pictures he sketched would completely change their color in the final edition. Whether it be so or not, in any case we have good grounds for asserting that, whatever some of the episodes in the second volume of Dead Souls, the predominant character in this book, when it was completed, would still remain the same, how different is its first volume and all the previous creations of the great writer. The very first lines of the chapters now published vouch for this:
“Why, then, portray poverty, yes poverty, and the imperfection of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote nooks and crannies of the state? - What to do if these are already the properties of the writer, and, having fallen ill with his own imperfection, he can no longer portray anything else, as soon as poverty, yes poverty, yes the imperfections of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote nooks and crannies of the state? .. "
It is obvious that this passage, which serves as the program for the second volume, was already written when Gogol was heavily occupied with talk about the alleged one-sidedness of his works; when, considering these rumors to be just, he already explained his imaginary one-sidedness by his own moral weaknesses—in a word, it belongs to the era of "Correspondence with Friends"; and yet the program of the artist remains, as we see, the former program of The Government Inspector and the first volume of Dead Souls. Yes, Gogol the artist always remained true to his vocation, no matter how we should judge the changes that happened to him in other respects. And indeed, whatever his mistakes may be, when he speaks of subjects new to him, one cannot but admit, rereading the surviving chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls, that as soon as he passes into the spheres of relations closely familiar to him, which he depicted in the first volume of Dead Souls, as his talent appears in its former nobility, in its former strength and freshness. In the surviving passages there are very many such pages, which should be ranked among the best that Gogol ever gave us, which delight with their artistic merit, and, more importantly, with their truthfulness and the power of noble indignation. We do not list these passages because there are too many of them; we will point out only a few: Chichikov’s conversation with Betrishchev that everyone demands encouragement, even thieves, and an anecdote explaining the expression: “love us black, and everyone will love us white”, a description of Kashkarev’s wise institutions, legal proceedings against Chichikov and brilliant deeds of an experienced legal adviser; finally, the marvelous ending of the passage is the speech of the governor-general, nothing like which we have yet read in Russian, even in Gogol. These passages of a person most prejudiced against the author of "Correspondence with Friends" will convince that the writer who created "The Government Inspector" and the first volume of "Dead Souls" remained true to himself as an artist until the end of his life, despite the fact that as a thinker he could be mistaken; they will convince him that the lofty nobility of the heart, the passionate love for truth and the good, always burned in his soul, that he boiled with passionate hatred for everything low and evil until the end of his life. As for the purely humorous side of his talent, each page, even the least successful one, provides evidence that in this respect Gogol always remained the same, the great Gogol. From large passages imbued with humor, all readers of the second volume of "Dead Souls" noticed the amazing conversations of Chichikov with Tentetnikov, with General Betrishchev, the excellently delineated characters of Betrishchev, Pyotr Petrovich Petukh and his children, many pages from Chichikov's conversations with the Platonovs, Kostanzhoglo, Kashkarev and Khlobuev, the excellent characters of Kashkarev and Khlobuev, the wonderful episode of Chichikov's trip to Lenitsyn, and, finally, the many episodes from the last chapter where Chichikov comes to trial. In a word, in this series of rough passages that we have left from the second volume of Dead Souls, there are weak ones that, no doubt, would have been altered or destroyed by the author when finishing the novel, but in most of the passages, despite their unfinished work, Gogol's great talent appears with its former strength, freshness, with the nobility of direction, innate in his lofty nature.)
He had every right to say this, because no matter how highly we appreciate the importance of literature, we still do not appreciate it enough: it is immeasurably more important than almost everything that is placed above it. Byron in the history of mankind is a person almost more important than Napoleon, and Byron's influence on the development of mankind is still far from being as important as the influence of many other writers, and for a long time there has not been a writer in the world who would be so important for his people, like Gogol for Russia.
First of all, let us say that Gogol should be considered the father of Russian prose literature, just as Pushkin is the father of Russian poetry. We hasten to add that this opinion was not invented by us, but only extracted from the article "On the Russian Story and the Stories of Mr. Gogol", printed exactly twenty years ago ("Telescope", 1835, part XXXVI) and owned by the author of the "Articles on Pushkin". He proves that our story, which began very recently, in the twenties of this century, had Gogol as its first true representative. Now, after the "Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" appeared, it must be added that in the same way Gogol was the father of our novel (in prose) and prose works in dramatic form, that is, Russian prose in general (it must not be forgotten that we are talking exclusively about fine literature). Indeed, the true beginning of each aspect of people's life must be considered the time when this aspect reveals itself in a noticeable way, with some energy, and firmly establishes a place for itself in life - all previous fragmentary, disappearing without a trace, episodic manifestations must be are considered only impulses towards self-fulfillment, but not yet actual existence. Thus, the excellent comedies of Fonvizin, which had no influence on the development of our literature, constitute only a brilliant episode, foreshadowing the appearance of Russian prose and Russian comedy. Karamzin's stories are significant only for the history of the language, but not for the history of original Russian literature, because there is nothing Russian in them but the language. Moreover, they were soon overwhelmed by the influx of poetry. When Pushkin appeared, Russian literature consisted of nothing but verse, did not know prose, and continued to be ignorant of it until the early thirties. Here - two or three years before "Evenings on a Farm", "Yuri Miloslavsky" made a fuss - but you only need to read the analysis of this novel, placed in the "Literary Gazette", and we will be palpably convinced that if "Yuri Miloslavsky" liked readers who are not too demanding about artistic merit, even then he could not be considered an important phenomenon for the development of literature - and indeed, Zagoskin had only one imitator - himself. Lazhechnikov's novels had more merit, but not so much as to assert the right of literary citizenship to prose. Then there are Narezhny's novels, in which several episodes of undeniable merit serve only to bring out more clearly the clumsiness of the story and the incongruity of the plots with Russian life. They, like Yagub Skupalov, are more like popular prints than like works of literature belonging to an educated society. The Russian story in prose had more gifted figures, among others Marlinsky, Polevoy, Pavlov. But their characterization is presented by the article about which we spoke above, and it will suffice for us to say that Polevoy's stories were recognized as the best of all that existed before Gogol - whoever has forgotten them and wants to form an idea of their distinctive qualities, I advise him to read an excellent parody, placed once in "Notes of the Fatherland" (if we are not mistaken, 1843) - "An Unusual duel", and for those who do not happen to have it at hand, we place in the callout a description of the best of Polevoy's fictional works - " Abbadonna". If this was the best of prose works, then one can imagine what was the dignity of the entire prose branch of literature of that time (*). In any case, the stories were incomparably better than the novels, and if the author of the article to which we have mentioned, having examined in detail all the stories that existed before Gogol, comes to the conclusion that, in fact, "we had not yet had a story" before the appearance of "Evenings on farm" and "Mirgorod", it is even more certain that we did not have a novel. There were only attempts to prove that Russian literature was preparing to have a novel and a story, which revealed in it a desire to produce a novel and a story. Nor can one say the same about dramatic works: the prose plays given at the theater were alien to all literary qualities, like vaudevilles, which are now being remade from French.
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Slides captions:
Gogol period of Russian literature (30s - early 50s of the XI X century)
Feeling of tragedy, catastrophic life. K. Bryullov "The Last Day of Pompeii", 1834
"Natural School" PUSHKIN'S PERIOD GOGOL'S PERIOD Integrity of outlook on life Hopes General human types and problems Ruthless analysis of reality Bitterness of disappointment Socially specific types and situations ( national traits, the life of the social "lower classes")
The concept of "natural" was introduced by F. Bulgarin, criticizing the works of a new kind. "They argue that you need to depict nature without a cover ... Nature is then good when it is washed and combed."
Critical attitude to reality Rejection social system humiliating and disfiguring a person Comprehension of the main question of the time: Who is to blame? The essence of the conflict between the individual and the environment: "The environment is stuck!" The originality of the position of the supporters of the "natural school"
A. Herzen "Who is to blame?" F. Dostoevsky "Poor people" A. Goncharov " ordinary story» I. Turgenev "Notes of a hunter" According to Belinsky, the best examples of the "natural school"
Reflections on the paths of development of Russia Westernizers Slavophiles European path Democratic reforms Constitution Emancipation of the peasants Path of national identity Reforms from above Enlightenment Monarchy Revolutionary direction Take the best from Europe and, having made a breakthrough, overtake it Conservative direction Idealization of Russian antiquity
The search for the ideal A. Ivanov "The appearance of Christ to the people", 1838-1858
On the topic: methodological developments, presentations and notes
"Whose business is war?" (A reflection lesson based on a review of literary works about the war from different periods in the history of Russian literature. Within the framework of a regional seminar on the exchange of experience in classes with an in-depth study of individual subjects).
Confiding and strict, calm and agitated - this conversation with a teenager about the war, which was once responsible for the same as he, was different in its emotional intensity ...
Strengthening of the satirical trend in different periods of development of Russian literature
... In satire, reality as a kind of imperfection is opposed to the ideal as the highest reality. F. Schiller...
Literature lesson in grade 8 on the topic "The image of a teacher in Russian literature" involves an analysis three works: V. Astafieva "A photograph in which I am not", V. Rasputin "French Lessons", ...
Synopsis of a literature lesson in grade 9. It can be used when studying the work of A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" in the first lessons ....
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ESSAYS OF THE GOGOL PERIOD OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
(Works of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Four volumes.
Second edition. Moscow. 1855.
The writings of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, found after his death.
Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls. Volume two (five chapters). Moscow. 1855)ARTICLE ONE
In antiquity, about which only obscure, implausible, but marvelous in their improbability memories are preserved, as about a mythical time, as about "Astrea", in Gogol's words, - in this deep antiquity it was customary to begin critical articles with reflections on how quickly development of Russian literature. Think (we were told) - even Zhukovsky was in the full bloom of his powers, as Pushkin already appeared; scarcely had Pushkin completed half of his poetic career, cut off so early by death, when Gogol appeared - and each of these people, who followed so quickly one after another, introduced Russian literature into a new period of development, incomparably higher than anything that had been given by previous periods. Only twenty-five years separate "Rural Cemetery" from "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", "Svetlana" from "Inspector General" - and in this short period of time Russian literature had three eras, Russian society took three great steps forward along the path of intellectual and moral
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improvement. This is how critical articles began in antiquity.
This deep antiquity, hardly remembered by the current generation, was not too long ago, as can be assumed from the fact that the names of Pushkin and Gogol are found in its legends. But - although we have been separated from it by very few years - it is decidedly outdated for us. We are assured of this by the positive testimonies of almost all the people who write today about Russian literature - they repeat as an obvious truth that we have already gone far ahead of the critical, aesthetic, etc. principles and opinions of that era; that its principles turned out to be one-sided and unfounded, its opinions - exaggerated, unjust; that the wisdom of that era has now turned out to be vainglory, and that the true principles of criticism, the truly wise views on Russian literature - of which the people of that era had no idea - were found by Russian criticism only from the time when critical articles began to remain uncut in Russian journals.
One can still doubt the validity of these assurances, especially since they speak decisively without any evidence; but what remains undoubted is that in fact our time differs significantly from the immemorial antiquity of which we spoke. Try, for example, to begin a critical article today, as they began it then, with considerations about the rapid development of our literature - and from the very first word you yourself will feel that things are not going well. The thought will present itself to you: it is true that Pushkin came after Zhukovsky, Gogol after Pushkin, and that each of these people introduced a new element into Russian literature, expanded its content, changed its direction; but what is new in literature after Gogol? And the answer will be: the Gogol trend is still the only strong and fruitful one in our literature. If one can recall a few tolerable, even two or three beautiful works that were not imbued with an idea akin to the idea of Gogol's creations, then, despite their artistic merits, they remained without influence on the public, almost without significance in the history of literature. Yes, in our literature still continues
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the Gogol period - and after all, twenty years have passed since the appearance of The Government Inspector, twenty-five years since the appearance of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka - before, two or three directions were replaced in such an interval. Today the same thing prevails, and we do not know whether we will soon be able to say: "a new period has begun for Russian literature."
From this we clearly see that at the present time it is impossible to begin critical articles in the way they began in ancient times, with reflections on the fact that as soon as we have time to get used to the name of a writer who makes a new era in the development of our literature with his writings, another one already appears. , with works whose content is even deeper, whose form is even more independent and perfect - in this respect one cannot but agree that the present is not like the past.
To what should such a difference be attributed? Why does the Gogol period continue for such a number of years, which, in the past, was enough to change two or three periods? Perhaps the sphere of Gogol's ideas is so deep and vast that too much time is needed for their complete development by literature, for their assimilation by society - conditions on which, of course, further literary development depends, because only having absorbed and digested the food offered, one can crave a new one only when one has completely secured for oneself the use of what has already been acquired, one must look for new acquisitions - perhaps our self-consciousness is still completely occupied with the development of Gogol's content, does not foresee anything else, does not strive for anything more complete and profound? Or would it be time for a new trend to appear in our literature, but it does not appear due to some extraneous circumstances? In proposing the last question, we thereby give reason to think that we consider it fair to answer it in the affirmative; but by saying: “yes, it would be time to start a new period in Russian literature”, we thereby pose two new questions to ourselves: what should be the distinctive properties of the new trend, which will arise and partly, although still weakly, hesitantly, already arises from gogol direction? and what
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circumstances hinder the rapid development of this new direction? The last question, if you like, can be answered briefly - at least, for example, and regret that the new brilliant writer is not. But again, one may ask: why does he not appear for so long? After all, Pushkin, Griboyedov, Koltsov, Lermontov, Gogol ... appeared before, and how quickly one after another ... five people, almost at the same time - which means they do not belong to the number of phenomena so rare in history peoples like Newton or Shakespeare, which humanity has been waiting for for several centuries. Let now a man appear equal to at least one of these five, he would begin with his creations a new era in the development of our self-consciousness. Why are there no such people now? Or are they there, but we don't notice them? As you wish, and this should not be left without consideration. The case is very tricky.
And another reader, after reading the last lines, will say, shaking his head: “Not very wise questions; and somewhere I read completely similar ones, and even with answers - where, let me remember; well, yes, I read them by Gogol, and in the following passage from the daily Notes of a Madman:
December 5. I've been reading newspapers all morning today. Strange things are being done in Spain. I couldn't even make out them well. They write that the throne has been abolished and that the ranks are in a difficult position regarding the election of an heir. I find this extremely strange. How can the throne be abolished? There must be a king on the throne. “Yes”, they say, “there is no king” - it cannot happen that there is no king. There can be no state without a king. There is a king, but he is hiding somewhere in the unknown. It may be that he is in the same place, but some family reasons, or fears on the part of neighboring powers, such as France and other lands, force him to hide, or there are some other reasons.
The reader will be absolutely right. We really came to the same position in which Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin was. The point is only to explain this situation on the basis of the facts presented by Gogol and our latest writers, and
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shift the conclusions from the dialect spoken in Spain to ordinary Russian.
Criticism generally develops on the basis of the facts presented by literature, whose works serve as the necessary data for the conclusions of criticism. So, after Pushkin with his Byronian poems and "Eugene Onegin" came criticism of the "Telegraph"; when Gogol gained dominance over the development of our self-consciousness, the so-called criticism of the 1840s appeared ... Thus, the development of new critical convictions each time was the result of changes in the dominant character of literature. It is clear that our critical views cannot claim either special novelty or satisfactory completeness. They are derived from works that represent only certain foreshadowings, the beginnings of a new trend in Russian literature, but do not yet show it in full development, and cannot contain more than what is given by literature. It has not yet gone far from The Inspector General and Dead Souls, and our articles cannot differ much in their essential content from the critical articles that appeared on the basis of The Inspector General and Dead Souls. In terms of essential content, we say, the merits of development depend solely on the moral forces of the writer and on the circumstances; and if it is to be admitted at all that our literature has recently become smaller, then it is natural to assume that our articles cannot but bear the same character as compared with what we read in the old days. But be that as it may, these last years were not completely fruitless - our literature has acquired several new talents, if not yet created anything as great as "Eugene Onegin" or "Woe from Wit", "A Hero of Our Time" or "The Government Inspector" and "Dead Souls", which nevertheless managed to give us several excellent works, remarkable for their independent artistic merits and lively content - works in which it is impossible not to see the guarantees of future development. And if our articles reflect in any way the beginning of the movement expressed in these works, they will not be completely devoid of a premonition of a fuller and deeper
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development of Russian literature. Whether we succeed is up to the readers to decide. But we ourselves will boldly and positively confer on our articles another merit, a very important one: they are generated by deep respect and sympathy for what was noble, just and useful in Russian literature and criticism of that deep antiquity, which we spoke about at the beginning, antiquity, which, however, only because antiquity has been forgotten by lack of convictions or arrogance, and especially pettiness of feelings and concepts, does it seem to us that it is necessary to turn to the study of high aspirations that animated the criticism of the former time; unless we remember them, imbue them, our criticism cannot be expected to have any influence on the intellectual movement of society, no benefit to the public and literature; and not only will it not bring any benefit, but it will not arouse any sympathy, even any interest, just as it does not excite him now. And criticism should play an important role in literature, it's time for her to remember this.
Readers may notice in our words an echo of the impotent indecision that has taken possession of Russian literature in recent years. They may say: “You want to move forward, and where do you propose to draw strength for this movement? Not in the present, not in the living, but in the past, in the dead. Those appeals to new activity that set ideals for themselves in the past, and not in the future, are discouraged. Only the power of negation from everything past is the power that creates something new and better. Readers will be partly right. But we are not completely wrong either. For a fallen one, any support is good, if only to rise to his feet; and what is to be done if our time does not show itself capable of standing on its own feet? And what to do if this falling can only lean on the coffins? And we must also ask ourselves, are the dead really lying in these coffins? Aren't living people buried in them? At least, isn't there much more life in these dead than in many people who are called alive? After all, if the writer’s word is animated by the idea of truth, by the desire for a beneficial effect on the mental life of society, this word contains
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seeds of life, it will never be dead. And how many years have passed since those words were spoken? No; and there is still so much freshness in them, they still fit the needs of the present so well that they seem to have been said only yesterday. The source does not dry up because, having lost the people who kept it clean, we carelessly, out of frivolity, allowed it to be filled with rubbish of idle talk. Let us discard this rubbish, and we will see that a stream of truth is still beating in the source with a living spring, capable of at least partially quenching our thirst. Or do we not feel thirsty? We want to say "we feel" - but we are afraid that we will have to add: "we feel, but not too much."
Readers could already see from what we have said, and will see even more clearly from the continuation of our articles, that we do not consider Gogol's writings unconditionally satisfying all the modern needs of the Russian public, that even in Dead Souls we find
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sides are weak or at least not sufficiently developed, that, finally, in some works of subsequent writers we see the guarantees of a more complete and satisfactory development of ideas that Gogol embraced only from one side, not fully aware of their linkage, their causes and consequences. And yet we dare to say that the most unconditional admirers of everything that is written by Gogol, who exalt to the skies each of his works, each of his lines, do not sympathize with his works as vividly as we sympathize, do not ascribe to his activity such enormous significance in Russian literature as we attribute. We call Gogol without any comparison the greatest of the Russians.
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writers by value. In our opinion, he had every right to say the words, the immense pride of which at one time embarrassed his most ardent admirers and whose awkwardness is understandable to us:
"Rus! What do you want from me? What incomprehensible bond lurks between us? What do you look like, and why everything that is in you turned eyes full of expectation on me?»
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He had every right to say this, because no matter how highly we appreciate the importance of literature, we still do not appreciate it enough: it is immeasurably more important than almost everything that is placed above it. Byron in the history of mankind is a person almost more important than Napoleon, and Byron's influence on the development of mankind is still far from being as important as the influence of many other writers, and for a long time there has not been a writer in the world who would be so important for his people, like Gogol for Russia.
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not invented by us, but only drawn from the article “On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol”, published exactly twenty years ago (“Telescope”, 1835, part XXVI) and belonging to the author of the “Articles about Pushkin”. He proves that our story, which began very recently, in the twenties of this century, had Gogol as its first true representative. Now, after the "Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" appeared, it must be added that in the same way Gogol was the father of our novel (in prose) and prose works
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in dramatic form, that is, Russian prose in general (it must not be forgotten that we are talking exclusively about fine literature). Indeed, the true beginning of each side of people's life must be considered the time when this side reveals itself in a noticeable way, with some energy, and firmly asserts its place in life - all previous fragmentary, episodic manifestations disappearing without a trace should be considered only impulses towards self-fulfillment, but not yet actual existence. Thus, the excellent comedies of Fonvizin, which had no influence on the development of our literature, constitute only a brilliant episode, foreshadowing the appearance of Russian prose and Russian comedy. Karamzin's stories are significant only for the history of the language, but not for the history of original Russian literature, because there is nothing Russian in them but the language. Moreover, they were soon overwhelmed by the influx of verses. When Pushkin appeared, Russian literature consisted of nothing but verse, did not know prose, and continued to be ignorant of it until the early thirties. Here - two or three years before "Evenings on a Farm" - "Yuri Miloslavsky" made a noise - but you just need to read the analysis of this novel, placed in the "Literary Gazette", and we will be palpably convinced that if "Yuri Miloslavsky" was liked by readers, not too demanding regarding artistic merit, then for the development of literature
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even then he could not be considered an important phenomenon - and indeed, Zagoskin had only one imitator - himself. Lazhechnikov's novels had more dignity, but not so much as to assert the right of literary citizenship for prose. Then there are Narezhny's novels, in which several episodes of undeniable merit serve only to bring out more clearly the clumsiness of the story and the incongruity of the plots with Russian life. They, like Yagub Skupalov, are more like popular prints than like works of literature belonging to an educated society. The Russian story in prose had more gifted figures - among other things, Marlinsky, Polevoy, Pavlov. But their characterization is presented by the article about which we spoke above, and it will suffice for us to say that Polevoy's stories were recognized as the best of all that existed before Gogol - whoever has forgotten them and wants to get an idea of \u200b\u200btheir distinctive qualities, I advise him to read the excellent a parody once placed in the “Notes of the Fatherland” (if we are not mistaken, 1843) - “An Unusual Duel”; and for those who do not happen to have it at hand, we place in the callout a description of the best of Polevoy's fictional works - Abbaddonna. If this was the best of prose works, then one can imagine what the dignity of the entire prose branch of literature of that time was. In any case, the stories were
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incomparably better than novels, and if the author of the article we mentioned, after reviewing in detail all the stories that existed before Gogol, comes to the conclusion that, in fact, “we still had no story” before the appearance of “Evenings on a Farm” and “Mirgorod” , then it is even more certain that we did not have a novel. There were only attempts to prove that Russian literature is preparing to have
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novel and story, which revealed in her the desire to produce a novel and a story. Nor can one say the same about dramatic works: the prose plays given at the theater were alien to all literary qualities, like vaudevilles, which are now being remade from French.
Thus, prose in Russian literature occupied very little space, had very little value. She longed to exist, but did not yet exist.
In the strict sense of the word, literary activity limited to poetry only. Gogol was the father of Russian prose, and not only was it its father, but quickly gave it a decisive preponderance over poetry, a preponderance that it has retained to this day. He had neither predecessors nor assistants in this matter. To him alone prose owes its existence and all its successes.
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"How! had no predecessors or assistants? Is it possible to forget about the prose works of Pushkin?
It is impossible, but, firstly, they are far from having the same significance in the history of literature as his works, written in verse: “The Captain's Daughter” and “Dubrovsky” are excellent stories in the full sense of the word; but what was their influence? where is the school of writers who could be called followers of Pushkin as a prose writer? And literary works sometimes owe value not only to their artistic merit, but also (or even more so) to their influence on the development of society, or at least literature. But the main thing is that Gogol appeared before Pushkin as a prose writer. The first of Pushkin's prose works (with the exception of minor passages) were published "Belkin's Tales" - in 1831; but everyone will agree that these stories were not of great artistic merit. Then, until 1836, only The Queen of Spades was printed (in 1834) - no one doubts that this little play is beautifully written, but no one will ascribe special importance to it either. Meanwhile, Gogol published "Evenings on a Farm" (1831-1832), "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" (1833), "Mirgorod" (1835) - that is, everything that subsequently made up the first two parts his "Works"; in addition, in "Arabesques" (1835) - "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt", "Notes of a Madman". In 1836, Pushkin published The Captain's Daughter, but in the same year the Inspector General appeared, and, in addition, The Carriage, The Morning of a Businessman and The Nose. Thus, most of Gogol's works, including The Inspector General, were already known to the public when they only knew The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter (Peter the Great's Moor, Chronicle of the Village of Gorokhin, Scenes from Knightly Times) were published already in 1837, after the death of Pushkin, and "Dubrovsky" only in 1841), the public had enough time to be imbued with Gogol's works before they met Pushkin as a prose writer.
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In a general theoretical sense, we do not think of giving preference to the prose form over the poetic, or vice versa - each of them has its undoubted advantages; but as regards Russian literature proper, looking at it from a historical point of view, one cannot but admit that all previous periods, when the poetic form prevailed, are far inferior in significance both for art and for life to the last, Gogol period, the period of the dominance of the poem. What the future will bring to literature we do not know; we have no reason to deny our poetry a great future; but we must say that up to the present time the prose form has been and continues to be much more fruitful for us than the poetic one, that Gogol gave existence to this branch of literature, which is most important for us, and he alone gave it the decisive preponderance that it retains to this day and, in all likelihood, , will keep for a long time.
On the contrary, it cannot be said that Gogol did not have predecessors in that direction of content that is called satirical. It has always been the most living, or rather, the only living aspect of our literature. We will not expand on this universally recognized truth, we will not talk about Kantemir, Sumarokov, Fonvizin and Krylov, but we must mention Griboyedov. Woe from Wit is artistically flawed, but remains one of the most beloved books to this day, because it presents a number of excellent satires, presented either in the form of monologues, or in the form of conversations. Pushkin's influence was almost as important as satirical writer, as he appeared mainly in Onegin. And yet, despite the high merits and enormous success of Griboedov's comedy and Pushkin's novel, Gogol must be credited exclusively with the merit of firmly introducing satirical - or, as it would be more fair to call it, critical - direction into Russian fine literature. Despite
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the enthusiasm aroused by his comedy, Griboyedov had no followers, and “Woe from Wit” remained in our literature a lonely, fragmentary phenomenon, as before the comedies of Fonvizin and Kantemir’s satire, remained without a noticeable influence on literature, like Krylov’s fables. What was the reason? Of course, the dominance of Pushkin and the galaxy of poets that surrounded him. "Woe from Wit" was a work so brilliant and lively that it could not but arouse general attention; but Griboyedov's genius was not so great as to gain dominance over literature from the very first time with one work. As for the satirical direction in the works of Pushkin himself, it contained too little depth and constancy to produce a noticeable effect on the public and literature. It almost completely disappeared in the general impression of pure artistry, alien to a certain direction - such an impression is produced not only by all the other, best works of Pushkin - "The Stone Guest", "Boris Godunov", "Mermaid", etc., but also "Onegin" itself. : - who has a strong predisposition to critical eye on the phenomena of life, only that will be influenced by the fluent and light satirical notes that come across in this novel; - readers who are not predisposed
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to them, they will not be noticed, because they really constitute only a minor element in the content of the novel.
Thus, despite the glimpses of satire in Onegin and the brilliant philippics of Woe from Wit, the critical element played a secondary role in our literature before Gogol. And not only a critical, but almost no other definite element could be found in “its content, if you look at the general impression produced by the whole mass of works that were then considered good or excellent, and not stop at a few exceptions, which, being accidental, alone, did not produce a noticeable change in the general spirit of literature. There was nothing definite in its content, we said, because there was almost no content in it at all. Re-reading all these poets - Yazykov, Kozlov, etc., one wonders that on such poor topics, with such a meager supply of feelings and thoughts, they managed to write so many pages - although they wrote very few pages - you finally come to the fact that you ask yourself: what did they write about? and did they write about anything, or just about nothing? Many are not satisfied with the content of Pushkin's poetry, but Pushkin had a hundred times more content than his associates put together. They had almost everything in uniform, you will not find almost anything under the uniform.
Thus, the merit remains for Gogol that he was the first to give Russian literature a resolute striving for content, and, moreover, a striving in such a fruitful direction as critical. Let us add that our literature and independence are indebted to Gogol. The period of pure imitations and alterations, which were almost all the works of our literature before Pushkin, is followed by an era of creativity that is somewhat freer. But Pushkin's works still closely resemble either Byron, or Shakespeare, or Walter Scott. Not to mention the Byronian poems and Onegin, which was unfairly called an imitation of Childe Harold, but which, however, really would not have existed without this Byronian novel; but in the same way "Boris Godunov" is too noticeable
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obeys the historical dramas of Shakespeare, "Mermaid" - directly arose from "King Lear" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Captain's Daughter" - from the novels of Walter Scott. Not to mention other writers of that era - their dependence on one or another of the European poets is too striking. Is it now? - the stories of Mr. Goncharov, Mr. Grigorovich, L. N. T., Mr. Turgenev, the comedies of Mr. Ostrovsky just as little lead you to the idea of borrowing, just as little remind you of anything alien, as a novel by Dickens, Thackeray , Georges Sand. We do not think of making comparisons between these writers in terms of talent or importance in literature; but the fact is that Mr. Goncharov seems to you only Mr. Goncharov, only himself, Mr. Grigorovich also, every other gifted writer of ours also - no one’s literary personality seems to you a double of any other writer, none of they were not peered over their shoulders by another person, prompting him - one cannot say about any of them "Northern Dickens", or "Russian Georges Sand", or "Thackeray of Northern Palmyra". We owe this independence only to Gogol, only his works, with their high originality, raised our gifted writers to that height where originality begins.
However, no matter how much honorable and brilliant in the title "the founder of the most fruitful trend and independence in literature" - but these words still do not define the whole greatness of Gogol's significance for our society and literature. He awakened in us the consciousness of ourselves - this is his true merit, the importance of which does not depend on whether we should consider him the first or tenth of our great writers in chronological order. An examination of the importance of Gogol in this respect should be the main subject of our articles - a very important matter, which, perhaps, we would recognize as superior to our strength, if most of this task had not already been completed, so that we, when analyzing the works of Gogol himself , it remains almost only to bring into system and develop the thoughts already expressed by the criticism, which we spoke about at the beginning of the article; - additions that actually belong to us will be few, because although the thoughts we developed were
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expressed fragmentarily, on various occasions, but if you bring them together, then there will not be many gaps that need to be filled in order to get a comprehensive description of Gogol's works. But the extraordinary significance of Gogol for Russian literature is not yet completely determined by the evaluation of his own works: Gogol is important not only as a brilliant writer, but at the same time as the head of a school - the only school that Russian literature can be proud of - because neither Griboedov nor Pushkin , neither Lermontov nor Koltsov had students whose names would be important for the history of Russian literature. We must make sure that all of our literature, in so far as it has been formed under the influence of non-foreign writers, adjoins Gogol, and only then will we be presented with the full extent of his significance for Russian literature. Having made this survey of the entire content of our literature in its present development, we will be able to determine what it has already done and what we should still expect from it - what pledges of the future it represents and what it still lacks - an interesting matter, because the state of Literature is determined by the state of society, on which it always depends.
No matter how fair the thoughts about the meaning of Gogol expressed here are, we can, not at all embarrassed by fears of conceit, call them completely fair, because they were not expressed for the first time by us, and we only assimilated them, therefore, our pride cannot be proud of them. , it remains completely on the sidelines - no matter how obvious the justice of these thoughts, there will be people who will think that we place Gogol too highly. This is because there are still many people who rebel against Gogol. Literary fate his in this respect is completely different from the fate of Pushkin. Everyone has long recognized Pushkin as a great, indisputably great writer; his name is a sacred authority for every Russian reader and even non-reader, as, for example, Walter Scott is an authority for every Englishman, Lamartine and Chateaubriand for a Frenchman, or, to go to a higher region, Goethe for a German. Every Russian is an admirer of Pushkin, and no one finds
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it is inconvenient for oneself to recognize him as a great writer, because the worship of Pushkin does not oblige to anything, the understanding of his merits is not conditioned by any special qualities of character, by any special mood of the mind. Gogol, on the contrary, is one of those writers whose love requires the same mood of the soul as theirs, because their activity is a service to a certain direction of moral aspirations. In relation to such writers as, for example, Georges Sand, Berenger, even Dickens and partly Thackeray, the public is divided into two halves: one, which does not sympathize with their aspirations, is indignant at them; but she who sympathizes loves them to the point of devotion, as representatives of her own moral life, as advocates for her own ardent desires and most intimate thoughts. No one was warm or cold from Goethe; he is equally affable and subtly delicate to everyone - anyone can come to Goethe, whatever their rights to moral respect - compliant, gentle and in essence quite indifferent to everything and everyone, the owner will not offend anyone not only by obvious severity, even not one ticklish hint. But if the speeches of Dickens or Georges Sand serve as a consolation or reinforcement for some, then the ears of others find in them a lot of harshness and in the highest degree unpleasant for yourself. These people live only for friends; they don't keep an open table for everyone they meet and cross; another, if he sits down at their table, will choke on every bite and be embarrassed by every word, and, having run away from this difficult conversation, he will forever “remember dashingly” a harsh master. But if they have enemies, then there are numerous friends; and the "gentle poet" can never have such passionate admirers as the one who, like Gogol, "feeding his chest with hatred" for everything low, vulgar and pernicious, "with a hostile word of denial" against everything vile, "preaches love" for good and truth . He who strokes the wool of everyone and everything, he, except himself, does not love anyone and nothing; Whoever is pleased with everyone does nothing good, because good is impossible without offending evil. Whom no one hates, no one owes him anything.
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Gogol owes a lot to those who need protection; he became the head of those who deny the evil and the vulgar. Therefore, he had the glory of arousing in many enmity towards himself. And only then will everyone be unanimous in praising him, when all the vulgar and vile things against which he fought will disappear!
We said that our words about the meaning of the works of Gogol himself will only in a few cases be an addition, and for the most part only a set and development of the views expressed by the criticism of the Gogol period of literature, the center of which was "Notes of the Fatherland", the main figure is the critic who owns " Articles about Pushkin. Thus, this half of our articles will have historical character. But history must begin from the beginning—and before we set out the opinions we accept, we must present an outline of the opinions expressed about Gogol by representatives of former literary parties. This is all the more necessary because the criticism of the Gogol period developed its influence on the public and literature in a constant struggle with these parties, because the echoes of the judgments about Gogol expressed by these parties are still heard - and, finally, because these judgments are partly explains "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" - this so wonderful and, apparently, strange fact in Gogol's work. We will have to touch on these judgments, and we need to know their origin in order to properly assess the degree of their good faith and justice. But, in order not to stretch too much our review of people's attitudes towards Gogol, literary opinions which are unsatisfactory, we will confine ourselves to presenting the opinions of only three journals, which were representatives of the most important of the minor trends in literature.
The strongest and most worthy of respect among the people who rebelled against Gogol was N. A. Polevoy. All others, when they did not repeat his words, attacking Gogol, showed in themselves only a lack of taste and therefore do not deserve much attention. On the contrary, if Polevoi's attacks were sharp, if sometimes they even crossed the boundaries of literary criticism and accepted,
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as it was then expressed, "legal character", - the mind is always visible in them, and, as it seems to us, N. A. Polevoy, not being right, was, however, conscientious, rebelling against Gogol not on low calculations, not on suggestions pride or personal enmity, like many others, but out of sincere conviction.
The last years of N. A. Polevoy’s activity need justification. He was not destined to be lucky to descend into the grave clean from any reproach, from any suspicions - but how many of the people who have long taken part in intellectual or other debates get this happiness? Gogol himself also needs justification, and it seems to us that Polevoy can be justified much more easily than he.
The most important stain on the memory of N. A. Polevoy lies in the fact that he, who at first so cheerfully acted as one of the leaders in the literary and intellectual movement, is he, the famous editor of the Moscow Telegraph, which acted so strongly in favor of enlightenment, destroyed so many literary and other prejudices, towards the end of his life he began to fight against everything that was then healthy and fruitful in Russian literature, took with his Russkiy vestnik the same position in literature that had once been occupied by Vestnik Evropy, became a defender of immobility, rigidity, which is so strong struck in the best era of his activity. Our intellectual life began so recently, we have gone through so few phases of development that such changes in the condition of people seem mysterious to us; meanwhile, there is nothing strange in them - on the contrary, it is very natural that a person who at first stood at the head of a movement becomes backward and begins to rebel against the movement when it irresistibly continues beyond the boundaries that he foresaw, beyond the goal to which he aspired. We will not give examples from general history, although they most likely could explain the matter. And in the history of the mental movement there was recently a great, instructive example of such a weakness of a person who lags behind the movement of which he was the head - we saw this deplorable example in Schelling, whose name in Germany has recently been a symbol of obscurantism, while once
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he gave a powerful movement to philosophy; but Hegel took philosophy beyond the limits that Schelling's system could not cross, and Hegel's predecessor, friend, teacher and comrade became his enemy. And if Hegel himself had lived a few years longer, he would have become an opponent of his best and most faithful students, and, perhaps, his name would also have become a symbol of obscurantism.
It was not without intention that we mentioned Schelling and Hegel, because in order to explain the change in the position of N. A. Polevoy, one must recall his attitude to different systems philosophy. N. A. Polevoy was a follower of Cousin, whom he considered the resolver of all wisdom and the greatest philosopher in the world. In fact, Cousin's philosophy was composed of a rather arbitrary mixture of scientific concepts, borrowed partly from Kant, still more from Schelling, partly from others. German philosophers, with some fragments from Descartes, from Locke and other thinkers, and this whole heterogeneous set was, in addition, remade and smoothed out so as not to embarrass the prejudices of the French public with any bold thought. This gruel, called "eclectic philosophy", could not have much scientific merit, but it was good because it was easily digested by people who were not yet ready to accept strict and harsh systems. German philosophy, and, in any case, it was useful as a preparation for the transition from the former rigidity and Jesuit obscurantism to more sound views. In this sense, she was also useful in the Moscow Telegraph. But it goes without saying that a follower of Cousin could not reconcile himself with Hegelian philosophy, and when Hegelian philosophy penetrated into Russian literature, Cousin's students turned out to be backward people, and there was nothing morally criminal on their part in the fact that they defended their convictions and they called absurd what people who were ahead of them in mental movement said: you can’t blame a person because others, endowed with fresher strength and greater determination, got ahead of him - they are right, because they are closer to the truth, but he is not to blame, he is only wrong.
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The new criticism was based on ideas belonging to the strict and sublime system of Hegelian philosophy - this is the first and perhaps the most important reason that N. A. Polevoy did not understand this new criticism and could not help but rebel against it as a person gifted with a living and ardent character. That this disagreement in philosophical views was an essential basis for the struggle, we see from everything that was written by both N. A. Polev and his young opponent - we could give hundreds of examples, but one will suffice. Beginning his critical articles in the Russkiy Vestnik, N. A. Polevoy prefaces them with a profession de foi, in which he sets out his principles and shows how the Russkiy Vestnik will differ from other journals, and this is how he characterizes the direction of the journal, in which new views prevailed.
In one of our journals they offered us miserable, ugly fragments of the Hegelian scholastics, presenting it in a language that is hardly understandable even for the publishers of the journal. Still striving to destroy the former, as a result of their confused and broken theories, but feeling the need for some kind of authority, they screamed wildly about Shakespeare, created tiny ideals for themselves and knelt before the childish play of poor self-made, and instead of judgments they used abuse, as if abuse was evidence.
You see, the main point of the accusation was adherence to "Hegelian scholasticism", and all the other sins of the opponent are exposed as consequences of this basic error. But why does Polevoy consider Hegelian philosophy to be wrong? Because she is incomprehensible to him, he directly says it himself. In exactly the same way, his opponent presented the main shortcoming, the main reason for the fall of the former romantic criticism, that it relied on the shaky system of Cousin, did not know and did not understand Hegel.
Indeed, disagreement in aesthetic convictions was only a consequence of disagreement in philosophical
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foundations of the whole way of thinking - this partly explains the cruelty of the struggle - because of one disagreement in purely aesthetic concepts it would not be possible to become so hardened, especially since in essence both opponents cared not so much about purely aesthetic questions, but about the development of society in general, and literature was precious to them mainly in the sense that they understood it as the most powerful of the forces acting on the development of our social life. Aesthetic questions were for both primarily only a battlefield, and the subject of the struggle was the influence in general on mental life.
But whatever the essential content of the struggle, its field was most often aesthetic issues, and we must recall, although in a cursory way, the nature of the aesthetic convictions of the school, of which N. A. Polevoy was a representative, and show its relationship to new views.
Let us not, however, go into too much detail about romanticism, about which quite a lot has already been written; we will only say that French romanticism, of which both Marlinsky and Polevoy were champions, must be distinguished from German romanticism, whose influence on our literature was not so strong. (The ballads of Southey, translated by Zhukovsky, are already an English modification of German romanticism.) German romanticism, the main sources of which were - on the one hand, falsely reinterpreted thoughts of Fichte, on the other - exaggerated opposition to the influence French literature XVIII century, was a strange mixture of aspirations for sincerity, warmth of feeling, which lies at the basis of the German character, with the so-called Teutonomania, predilection for the Middle Ages, with wild worship of everything that distinguished the Middle Ages from modern times - everything that was vague in them , contrary to a clear view new civilization, - the worship of all the prejudices and absurdities of the Middle Ages. This romanticism is very similar to the opinions that inspire people in our country who see the ideal of a Russian person in Lyubim Tortsov. Romanticism became even stranger when it crossed over to France. In Germany, it was mainly about the direction, the spirit of literature: the Germans
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there was no need to go to great lengths to overthrow the conditional pseudo-classical forms, because Leesing had long ago proved their absurdity, and Goethe and Schiller presented examples of works of art in which the idea is not forcibly squeezed into a conditional, alien form, but from itself gives birth to a form, to it inherent. The French did not yet have this - they still had to get rid of epic poems with invocations to the Muse, tragedies with three unities, solemn odes, get rid of coldness, stiffness, conditional and partly vulgar smoothness in the style, monotonous and sluggish - in a word , romanticism found in them almost the same thing that we had before Zhukovsky and Pushkin. Therefore, the struggle turned mainly to questions about freedom of form; the French romantics looked at the very content from a formalistic point of view, trying to do everything contrary to the previous: among the pseudo-classics, the faces were divided into heroes and villains, their opponents decided that the villains are not villains, but true heroes; passions were portrayed by the classics with cutesy, cold restraint - romantic heroes began to rage with their hands, and especially with their tongues, mercilessly shouting all sorts of gibberish and nonsense; the classics fussed about foppishness - their opponents proclaimed that all plausibility is vulgarity, and savagery, ugliness is true artistry, etc .; in a word, the romantics had as their goal not nature and man, but a contradiction to the classics; work plan, characters and positions actors and the language itself was created among them not by free inspiration, but composed, invented by calculation, and by what petty calculation? - only to make it all turn out decisively against the way it was with the classics. That is why “everything came out just as artificially and stiffly with them as with the classics, only this artificiality and stiffness was of a different kind: for the classics it was smooth and sleek, for the romantics it was deliberately disheveled. Common sense was the idol of the classics, who did not know about the existence of fantasy; romantics have become enemies common sense and artificially irritated the fantasy to painful tension. After that, it is obvious how simple, natural, understanding of the real
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life and artistry - absolutely no traces. Such were the works of Victor Hugo, the leader of the Romantics. Such were the works of Marlinsky and Polevoi, for whom, especially for Polevoi, Victor Hugo was the ideal poet and novelist. Those who have not read their stories and novels for a long time and have no desire to review them can form a sufficient idea of the nature of romantic creatures by running through the analysis of Abbaddonna, which we have given above. Where did the author of his Reichenbach come from? Was one of the characteristic types of our society then made up of ardent, great poets with deeply passionate natures? - not at all, we didn’t even hear about such people, Reichenbach was simply invented by the author; and is the main theme of the novel - the struggle of fiery love for two women - given by the mores of our society? do we look like Italians, as they appear in bloody melodramas? no, in Rus' from the very calling of the Varangians until 1835, there was probably not a single case similar to the one that was composed with Reichenbach; And what is interesting for us, what is important for you in the depiction of collisions that are decidedly alien to our life? - These questions about the close relationship of poetic creations to the life of society did not even cross the minds of romantic writers - they only bothered to depict violent passions and torn situations in violently phrased language.
We do not at all reproach romanticism by recalling its characterization, but only to deduce considerations as to whether a person who was saturated through and through with similar concepts about art could understand true artistry, could he admire simplicity, naturalness, a true depiction of reality. We do not want to laugh at the romantics - on the contrary, we will remember them with a kind word; they were very useful to us in their time; they rebelled against rigidity, immobile moldiness; if they succeeded in taking literature along the road they liked, it would be bad, because the road led to the dens of fantastic villains with cardboard daggers, the dwellings of phrase-mongers who conceited themselves with invented crimes and passions; but this did not happen - the romantics only managed to deduce
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literature from the motionless and insipid marsh, and she went her own way, not listening to their exclamations; consequently, they did not manage to do harm to her, but they did good, - why scold them, and how not to remember their services with a kind word?
We need to know their concepts not in order to laugh at them - it is useless, let's rather laugh at what is still absurd and wild in us - but in order to understand the sincerity and conscientiousness of their struggle against those who appeared after them who were better than them.
Indeed, could an admirer of Victor Hugo, the author of Abbaddonna, understand an aesthetic theory that made simplicity and animation with questions of real life the main conditions for artistic creation? No, and he cannot be blamed for not understanding what he did not understand; it must only be said that his opponents were right in defending a doctrine higher and more just than the ideas to which he held.
We do not think of taking the side of N. A. Polevoy as an opponent of criticism and literature of the Gogol period; on the contrary, he was completely wrong, his opponent is completely right - we only assert that N.A. Polevoy, as his opponent, had a genuine, unfeigned conviction as his main motive for fighting.
The struggle was cruel and, naturally, entailed innumerable insults to the pride of the partisans of one side or the other, especially of the backward and weaker side, because the victor can forgive insults to a weakening enemy, but the pride of the vanquished can be irritable and irreconcilable. Therefore, it is very possible that the acrimony of N. A. Polevoy’s various antics was intensified by the bitter feeling of consciousness that others took a place ahead of him, deprived him (and his convictions, because he valued his convictions) of primacy, dominance in criticism, that literature she ceased to recognize him as her supreme judge, the consciousness that he did not win, as before, but was defeated, and the painful cries of deeply wounded pride; but all this was only a secondary element that developed in the course of the struggle - and the true, main causes of the struggle were convictions
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disinterested and alien to low calculations or petty vanity. At one time it was impossible not to refute the erroneous judgments of a writer who had such a strong authority; but because of the erroneous direction of his activity, it was impossible to forget either that in essence he always remained a man worthy of respect by character, nor in particular that in former times he rendered many services to Russian literature and education. This was always acknowledged by his adversary with the usual frankness and expressed with fervor in the pamphlet Nikolay Alekseevich Polevoy.
Violent attacks on Gogol are among the most important mistakes of N. A. Polevoy; they were one of the main reasons for the dislike that the public and the best writers of the past decade had for Polevoy. But one has only to realize that he could never get out of the circle of concepts developed by the French romantics, distributed among us by his first magazine, the Moscow Telegraph, and practically realized in his stories and in Abbaddon, and we will be convinced that Polevoy does not could understand Gogol, could not understand better side his works, their most important significance for literature. He could not understand - and, consequently, the enthusiasm aroused in later criticism by these works must have seemed unfair to him; as a man accustomed to ardently defending his opinions, he could not but give a loud voice in a matter whose importance was so strongly indicated both by Polevoy's opponent and by heated talk in the public. That this opinion, based on eclectic philosophy and romantic aesthetics, was extremely unfavorable to Gogol is not at all surprising - on the contrary, it could not be otherwise. In fact, eclectic philosophy has always stopped in the middle of the road, trying to take the “golden mean”, saying “no”, adding “yes”, recognizing the principle, not allowing its applications, rejecting the principle, allowing its applications. "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" were the decisive opposite of this rule to spoil the impression of the whole with an admixture of unnecessary and unfair reservations - they, like works of art, leave an effect that is whole, complete, definite, not weakened by outsiders.
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and arbitrary additions, alien to the main idea - and therefore, for a follower of eclectic philosophy, they must have seemed one-sided, exaggerated, unfair in content. In form, they were the complete opposite of the favorite aspirations of the French romantics and their Russian follower: The Inspector General and Dead Souls do not have any of those qualities for which N. A. Polevoy recognized Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris as a great creation of art. and which he tried to give to his own works: there is a cunning plot, which can be invented only with the highest irritation of imagination, characters invented, unprecedented in the world, situations exceptional, implausible and an enthusiastic, feverish tone; here - the plot is an everyday case, known to everyone, the characters are ordinary, encountered at every step, the tone is also ordinary. It is languid, vulgar, vulgar in terms of people who admire Notre Dame de Paris. N. A. Polevoy acted quite consistently in condemning Gogol both as a thinker and as an esthetician. There is no doubt that the tone of condemnation would not have been so harsh if others had not praised Gogol so much, and if these others had not been opponents of N. A. Polevoy, but the essence of the judgment would have remained the same; it depended on the philosophical and aesthetic judgments of the critic, and not on his personal relationships. And one cannot blame him for the harshness of this tone: when praisers speak loudly, and it is necessary and fair that people who disagree with their opinion express their convictions just as loudly - whichever side the truth is on, it will benefit from that the debate is conducted publicly: contemporaries will understand the essence of the issue more clearly, and the adherents of the just cause will more zealously defend it when they are placed in the need to fight opponents who challenge each step boldly and as strongly as possible. And when
Death tells anger to be silent,
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history will say that if the winners were right and honest, then some of the losers were honest; she credits even these honest vanquished with the merit that their stubborn resistance made it possible to fully speak out for the strength and rightness of the cause against which they fought. And if history considers the time in which we and our fathers lived worthy of memory, it will say that N. A. Polevoy was honest in the case of Gogol. Let us take a closer look at his opinions about this writer.
Some people, with fresher and more penetrating eyes, saw in "Evenings on a Farm", "Mirgorod" and the stories placed in "Arabesques", the beginning of a new period for Russian literature, in the author of "Taras Bulba" and "Quarrels between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich" - Pushkin's successor. The author of the article "On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol", published in 1835, when the "Inspector General" was not yet known, concludes his review with the following words, which could serve as one of the brilliant proofs of his critical insight, if evidence of it were needed were people who, at least to some extent, followed Russian literature:
From contemporary writers no one can be called a poet with greater certainty and without the slightest hesitation than Mr. Gogol ... The distinctive character of Mr. Gogol's stories is: simplicity of fiction, nationality, the complete truth of life, originality and comic animation, always overcome by a deep feeling of sadness and despondency. The reason for all these qualities lies in one source: Mr. Gogol is a poet, a poet of real life. Mr. Gogol has only just begun his career; therefore, it is up to us to give our opinion on his debut and on the hopes for the future that this debut offers. These hopes are great, for Mr. Gogol possesses an extraordinary, strong and lofty talent. At least at the present time he is the head of literature, the head of poets.
Other contemporary critics did not imagine this. "Evenings on the Farm" pleased everyone with the cheerfulness of the story; they even noticed in the author a certain ability to quite vividly depict faces and scenes from the common life of Little Russia; nothing more was noticed in them,
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and they were right. But the old critics were wrong in that they looked at Gogol until the end of his life as the author of "Evenings on a Farm", measuring all his subsequent works with a yardstick, which was suitable only for these first experiments, not understanding in "The Government Inspector" and " Dead Souls" is nothing that has not yet been in "Evenings on a Farm", and seeing signs of a decline in talent in everything that in Gogol's subsequent works was not like "Evenings".
So it was with N. A. Polev. Only the first and weakest works of Gogol remained comprehensible and good for him, because they were not yet dominated by a new beginning that exceeded the level of his concepts. He always continued to find "Evenings on the Farm", "The Nose", "The Carriage" wonderful - rightly seeing in them signs of great talent, although just as rightly not seeing in them works of genius, colossal. But then the "Inspector General" appeared; people who understood this great creation proclaimed Gogol a brilliant writer; N. A. Polevoy, as expected, did not understand and condemned The Inspector General for not being like the “story about the nose.” This is very curious, and it would be strange if we did not see that the critic's philosophical and aesthetic convictions were too indecisive and fantastic to contain the idea expressed by The Inspector General and understand the artistic merits of this great work. Here are the thoughts that the "Inspector General" aroused in N. A. Polevoy:
The author of The Inspector General presented us with a sad example of what harm can be done to a person with talent by the spirit of parties and the laudatory cries of friends, selfish servants and that senseless crowd that surrounds people with talent. It is necessary to thank God rather for hostility than for the friendship of the people about which Pushkin spoke:
These are my friends, my friends!
No one doubts Mr. Gogol's talent and that he has his own indisputable area in the realm of poetic creations. His plot is a good-natured joke, a Little Russian “zhart”, somewhat similar to the talent of the city of Osnovyanenka, but separate and original, although also consisting in the properties of Little Russians. In a kind of joke, in a good-natured story about Little Russia, in cunning simplicity
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view of the world and people, Mr. Gogol is excellent, inimitable. What a charm of his description of Ivan Ivanovich's quarrel, his "Old-world landowners", his depiction of the Zaporizhzhya Cossack life in "Taras Bulba" (excluding those places where the Cossacks are heroes and laugh caricature of Don Quixote), his story is about the nose, about the sale strollers!
So his “Inspector General” is a farce, which is liked precisely because it has no drama, no purpose, no plot, no denouement, no definite characters. The language in it is wrong, the faces are ugly grotesques, and the characters are Chinese shadows, the incident is unrealizable and absurd, but all together it is hilariously funny, like a Russian fairy tale about a lawsuit between a ruff and a bream, like a story about Evil, like a Little Russian song:
Dancing fish with cancer
And parsley with parsnip,
And the chibula with garlic...Do not imagine that such creatures are easy to write, so that everyone can write them. For them, a special talent is needed, one must be born for them, and moreover, often what seems to you a work of leisure, a matter of the moment, the result of a cheerful disposition of the spirit, is hard, long-term labor, the result of a sad disposition of the soul, a struggle of sharp opposites.
We were treated very unfairly with the "Inspector General". Only the public in general acted justly, which is carried away by the impression of a general, unaccountable and almost never makes a mistake in it; but all our judges and noteworthy critics were unfair. Some took it into their heads to disassemble The Inspector General according to the rules of drama, were primly offended by his jokes and language, and leveled him with mud. Others, on the contrary, imaginary friends of the author, saw something Shakespearean in The Inspector General, extolled him, glorified him, and the same story came out as with Ozerov. It is vexing to remember what were, moreover, the motives for immoderate praise. But if they were sincere, they were wrong; and look what evil they did, and, seeing the condemnation of some and the praise of others, the author considered himself an unrecognized genius, did not understand the direction of his talent, and instead of not taking on what was not given to him, intensify his activity in the direction that gained him general respect and fame, recall the words of Sumarokov:
Compose what your nature attracts you to -
Only enlightenment, writer, let the mind
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began to write history, discourses on the theory of the fine, on the arts, set to work on fantastic, pathetic subjects, just as Lafontaine had once argued that he took models from the ancient classics. Of course, the author lost his case. Everything that is said here is not our invention and was not said at random: read the author’s letter enclosed with the new edition of The Government Inspector, which can be preserved as a curious historical feature and as material for the history of the human heart. Could Shakespeare only write about himself and about his creations and talk about the character of his Hamlet in such a way that Mr. Gogol speaks about the character of Khlestakov. And at the same time, this letter breathes such good-natured, poetic sadness.
But, we will be told, consequently, what is the fault of the author's praisers? - The fact that, if they did not lead the author's pride into error, condemnations could have a beneficial effect on the author and turn him to a straight path. Condemnation never destroys us, but praise often and almost always destroys us. Such is the person.
And how can one not have so much respect for oneself that, out of a petty calculation of self-interest, one should not be ashamed to show oneself as blowers of soap bubbles! If, however, praise comes from an unaccountable passion, how can one not be aware of one's concepts to such an extent, how can one not learn from the experiences of the past not to repeat the same tiresome fairy tale in each generation!
Is it possible to blame a person for the fact that he cannot see "neither drama nor goals, no strings, no denouement, no certain characters"? It's like blaming an admirer of "The Russian Tale of the Litigation of a Ruff and a Bream" for not understanding "Hamlet" and not admiring Pushkin's "Stone Guest". He does not understand these works, and only: what do you want to do with him! Such is the degree of his aesthetic development. It can and should be said that he is mistaken if he said that Hamlet is empty and The Stone Guest is boring; it may be added that he is not a judge of these works; but it is impossible to see in his judgments a deliberate aesthetic crime, a desire to mislead others: they are too naive, too compromise the mind of those who pronounce them - they can only be pronounced by someone who really does not see the merits of those condemned
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them works. If he understood at least a little, if he wanted to deliberately mislead others, believe me, he would not have said so, believe me, he would have come up with a slightly better trick. The review we wrote out is harsh to the point of rudeness, but one cannot fail to see that the author does not have a hostile attitude towards Gogol. On the contrary, through a tone that is sharp to the point of insult, one can hear a benevolent desire to return the talented lost sheep to the true path. The mentor is mistaken - the one whom he considers the prodigal son is on the straight path and should not leave him - but you can’t condemn a person if he raises his voice so that he reaches the hearing of a dying young man, stunned, according to the adviser, by insidious flatterers. That these people are not flatterers, we know; that they did not have - unfortunately - a special influence on Gogol, we also know: otherwise he would not have written such "letters to friends" and would not have burned the second volume of Dead Souls. But after all, they don’t call a doctor a criminal who lags behind the modern movement of science, prescribes intricate prescriptions that make you shrug your shoulders in surprise - they simply say about him that he has ceased to be a good doctor and stop paying attention to his advice. - But then Dead Souls came out - and aroused delight, to which there were no examples in Rus', they were praised to the skies as the colossal creation of Russian literature; - from the point of view, to which N.A. Polevoy was rooted, this so exalted work should have seemed even worse than The Inspector General, and it was still necessary to raise his voice so that he could be heard among the deafening cries of praise. And Polevoy expressed his opinion about the new work of the dying talented writer in more detail - not unfounded, like others, but with detailed, well-stated evidence, relating not to external trifles, but to important aspects of the matter.
We have expressed our opinion on Mr. Gogol's literary merits, evaluating in him what constitutes his indisputable merit. Let's repeat our words written out the first half of the review above). We dare to think that such an opinion will not be called an opinion that would inspire prejudice, prejudice, personality
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against the author. The more frankly we say that "The Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls", confirming our opinion, show the justice of what we have added to our opinion about the talent of Mr. Gogol ( written the other half of the review). Chichikov's adventures are also an interesting note for the history of literature and the human heart. Here we see to what extent talent can be carried away from the straight path and what ugliness it creates by going along the wrong path. Where did the "Inspector General" begin, then "Chichikov" ended ...
From everything that Mr. Gogol writes and says about himself, one can conclude that he takes the wrong view of his talent. Buying his creations with hard work, he does not think of joking, sees in them some kind of philosophical and humorous creations, considers himself a philosopher and didactic, forms for himself some kind of false theory of art, and it is very clear that, considering himself a universal genius, he considers the very mode of expression, or language of one's own, is original and original. Perhaps such an opinion about himself is necessary by its nature, but we will not cease, however, to think that, with the advice of prudent friends, Mr. Gogol could be convinced of the opposite. The question is: would he then produce his own beautiful creatures, can be answered positively or negatively.
It could easily have happened that Mr. Gogol would then have rejected everything that harmed him, and just as easily it could have happened that, disappointed in his high opinion of himself, he would have sadly thrown away his pen as an instrument of a joke unworthy of his greatness. . Man is a tricky and complex mystery; but we tend rather to the first of these opinions—whether to say—would rather wish that Mr. Gogol would stop writing altogether than that he should gradually fall more and more and err. In our opinion, even now he has strayed far from the true path, if one considers all his writings, from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka to Chichikov's Adventures. Everything that makes up the charm of his creations gradually disappears from him. Everything that destroys them gradually intensifies.
“Gogol was praised,” says Polevoy: “he dreamed that he was called to write highly philosophical creations, imagined that the language he writes when he goes into high-flown dreams is even beautiful, and look,
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where this led him to - to works like the passage "Rome", recently printed. "Rome" is a "set false conclusions, children's observations, ridiculous and insignificant notes, not imbued with a single bright or deep thought, set forth in a broken, wild, absurd language" - there is "hair resin", and "shining snow of the face", and "the ghost of emptiness, which is seen in to all,” and “women who, like buildings, are either palaces or shacks,” in a word, “Rome” is “nonsense.” This review of "Rome" has its share of truth, and a significant share. We will still have to turn to "Rome", speaking of the gradual development of Gogol's ideas, and then we will notice that Polevoy omitted from sight, calling "Rome" unconditional nonsense - this passage, indeed representing a lot of wild, is not devoid of poetry. We will not dwell on the remarks about the language - we still have to deal with them. “We admit,” Polevoy continues, “that, having read the “letter” at the time of the “Inspector General” and “Rome”, we already expected little from “Dead Souls”, foreshadowed as something great and wonderful. Truly wonderful: "Dead Souls" exceeded all our expectations."
We do not at all think of condemning Mr. Gogol for calling "Dead Souls" a poem. Of course the name is a joke. Why ban the joke? Our condemnation of "Dead Souls" touches on something more important.
Let's start with the content - what poverty! We don’t remember if we read or heard that someone called “Dead Souls” old beep on new way . Indeed: “Dead Souls” is a fragment from the “Inspector General” - again some swindler arrives in a city inhabited by rogues and fools, cheats with them, deceives them, fearing persecution, leaves quietly - and “the end of the poem!” - Is it necessary to say that a joke repeated another time becomes boring, and even more so if it is stretched over 475 pages? But if we add to this that "Dead Souls", making up a crude caricature, rests on unprecedented and unrealizable details; that the faces in them are every one of them unprecedented exaggerations, disgusting scoundrels or vulgar fools - every one of them, we repeat; that the details of the story are filled with such expressions that sometimes you drop the book involuntarily; and finally, that the language of the story, like the language of Mr. Gogol in "Rome" and "Revisor" can be called a collection of errors against logic and grammar -
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we ask, what is to be said of such a creature? Shouldn't we see with a sad feeling in him the decline of the talent of the beautiful and regret one more of our lost hopes, regret it all the more since the author's fall was deliberate and voluntary? - Caricature, of course, belongs to the field of art, but a caricature that has not gone beyond the fine. The Russian story about Eremushka and the midwife, like the Russian fairy tale about the deacon Savushka, the novels of Dickens, the frantic novels of the latest French literature are excluded from the realm of fine art, even if crude farces, Italian buffoonery, epic poems are admitted to the lower department of art. inside out(travesti), poems like Elisha. Is it possible not to regret that Mr. Gogol's wonderful talent is wasted on such creatures!
Art has nothing to do, nothing to settle accounts with Dead Souls.
You see, Polevoy refuses petty nit-picking about the title of "Dead Souls" - for this alone he deserves distinction from other reviewers, whose wit endlessly laughed at the fact that "The Adventures of Chichikov" was called a poem. The poverty of the content in Dead Souls is again one of those judgments, the sincerity of which is proved by their unimaginable naivete, remarks that arouse pity for the one who made them and completely disarm the reader who disagrees with him. But note, however, that Polevoy begins with the essential aspects of the question and even achieves a certain accuracy of reproaches, noticing that "Dead Souls" is a fragment from the "Inspector General" - this will not occur to anyone who understands the difference between the essential content of "The Inspector General" and "The Dead souls”: the pathos of one work is bribery, various disorders, etc., in a word, the predominantly official side of life, the pathos of another is private life,
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psychological depiction of various types of emptiness or wildness. But Polevoy, not noticing a significant difference, looked at the plots of both works from that purely external point of view from which one can find that “Woe from Wit” is a repetition of “Hamlet”, because here and there the main person is a young man with intelligence and beautiful heart, surrounded by bad people, remaining pure among them, indignant, saying a lot of things that seem ridiculous to his listeners, finally recognized as a crazy, dangerous person and unable to marry the girl he loves. The convergence of the plots of The Inspector General with Dead Souls is just as absurd as the convergence of the plots of Hamlet and Woe from Wit; but Polevoy knew how to display the strained features of an imaginary resemblance in a rather skillful way. Was this rapprochement invented on purpose? No, his sincerity is again proved by his naivety - only from a sincere soul can clever man, what, no doubt, was N. A. Polevoy, to say such strange things. Then complaints begin about the exaggeration of characters and positions, about their implausibility, and so on. Let us postpone the analysis of these accusations until the time when we consider Dead Souls, and now we will confine ourselves to the observation that the relationship of romantic aesthetics to the latest works art, throwing off the disheveled sophistication of the French romantics, to people who have learned to write novels with faces and positions that are not similar to the “gigantic images of Victor Hugo” and his “Notre Dame de Paris”, are sufficiently determined by the fact that N. A. Polevoy excludes the novels of Dickens and Georges Sand from the field of art, puts them below the most vulgar farces, on the same level as The Tale of Evil - did N. A. Polevoy have any personalities against Dickens and Georges Sand? Could it be that he condemned them not out of conviction, but out of some extraneous species? By the way, he judges Lermontov in exactly the same way as Gogol. Here are his original words:
You say that the mistake of the old art consisted precisely in this, that it blushed nature and put life on stilts. Let it be; but, choosing from nature and life only the dark side, choosing from them dirt, dung, debauchery and vice, don’t you fall into
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you go to the other extreme, and do you depict nature and life correctly? Nature and life, as they are, present us side by side with life and death, Good and evil, light and shadow, heaven and earth. Choosing in your picture only death, evil, shadow, earth, do you correctly write off nature and life? You are bored with the former heroes of art - but show us a man and people, yes, a man, and not scoundrels, not a monster, people, and not a crowd of swindlers and scoundrels. Otherwise, we'd better take up the old heroes, who are sometimes boring, but do not revolt, at least, our soul, do not offend our feelings. To depict a person with his good and evil, the thought of heaven and the life of the earth, to reconcile for us the visible discord of reality with the elegant idea of art, which has comprehended the secret of life - this is the artist's goal; But are Heroes of Our Time and Dead Souls directed towards it? In vain will you refer to Shakespeare, to Victor Hugo, to Goethe. In addition to the fact that Shakespeare is bad and bad, Shakespeare is not great because Ophelia sings an indecent song in him, Falstaff swears and Julia's nurse says ambiguities - but do your dirty caricatures resemble the creations of Shakespeare's lofty humor, the gigantic images of Victor Hugo ( we're talking about his Notre Dame de Paris), to Goethe's many-sided creations?
Why are we citing literally so many excerpts from N. A. Polevoy’s rude reviews? Because they have one undoubted advantage: coherence, consistency, consistency in the way of judgments. We need to see with what concepts of art Gogol's reproaches for a one-sided direction are necessarily connected - reproaches that are still repeated by people who do not understand their meaning, who do not understand that whoever calls Gogol one-sided and greasy must be equally one-sided and to call Lermontov smutty, to find that A Hero of Our Time is a dirty and nasty work, that the novels of Dickens and George Sand are not only disgusting, but also artistically weak, weaker than the last absurd vaudeville, uglier than the last farce - while it is necessary to stage Victor Hugo between Shakespeare and Goethe, a little lower than the former, much higher than the latter. Whoever thinks this way about Victor Hugo, Lermontov, Dickens and Georges Sand must reproach Gogol with one-sidedness and smut, but does he deserve refutation, does he deserve
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whether attention to the opinion of such a connoisseur? It is sometimes important to know the origin of an opinion and the original, original form in which it was expressed - often this is enough to fully assess the suitability of this opinion for our time - it often turns out that it belongs inseparably to a system of concepts that are impossible in our time. The most pathetic figure is represented not by those people who have an erroneous way of thinking, but by those who do not have any definite, consistent way of thinking, whose opinions are a collection of incoherent fragments that do not stick together. After reading the reviews of Polevoy, we are convinced that all the reproaches made by other people so far against Gogol are borrowed from these reviews; the only difference is that N. A. Polevoy's reproaches made sense, being a logical conclusion from a belief system, although unsatisfactory for our time, but still beautiful and useful in its time; while in the mouths of people who now repeat these attacks, they are devoid of any foundation, any meaning. Having presented many examples of the “trivial” and “implausible” in Dead Souls, many examples of Gogol writing in incorrect and low language (here it is also shown that Chichikov cannot make offers to the landowners for the sale of dead souls the first time, and the fact that Nozdryov cannot sit on the floor at a ball and catch the dancers by the feet, and Petrushka with the smell of the living room, and a drop falling into Themistoclus’ soup, etc., and the “stupid story” about Captain Kopeikin, and the words “Shiry”, “to shake up”, etc. - in a word, everything that only served as food for subsequent witty jokes and noble indignation at Gogol), N. A. Polevoy ends his review as follows:
Let us no longer talk about the style, about the image of expression, but let us say in conclusion: what is the author's concept of art and its purpose, if he thinks that the artist can be a criminal judge of modern society? Yes, even if we assume that such is really the duty of the writer, then perhaps by fictions on modern society Will he point out evil with unprecedented caricatures and warn him? We take on the name that seems ridiculous to the author
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patriots, even "so-called patriots", let them call us Kifs Mokievichs - but we ask him: why does modernity really appear to him in such a hostile form, in which he depicts it in his "Dead Souls", in his "Inspector General" - and why not ask: why does he think that every Russian person carries in the depths of his soul the embryos of the Chichikovs and Khlestakovs? We foresee the indignation and insult of the author's defenders: they will present us as fake patriots, hypocrites, perhaps something even worse - after all, many will not do business with such trinkets! .. Their will, but we will say frankly and affirmatively that, attributing the author good intention, it is impossible not to notice some kind of perverse view of him on many things. You will say that Chichikov and the city where he is are not images of the whole country, but look at the many places in Dead Souls: Chichikov, having left Nozdryov, scolds him bad words- “what to do”, the author adds, “a Russian person, and even in the hearts!” - The drunken coachman Chichikova has gathered with an oncoming carriage and begins to swear - "a Russian man," the author adds, "does not like to confess to another that he is to blame! .." The city is depicted; a frieze overcoat (an indispensable accessory of the city, according to the author) is woven along the street, “knowing only one (alas!) way too worn by the Russian tambourine people!” - Some merchants invited other merchants to a banquet - “a banquet on a Russian foot”, and “the banquet (adds the author), as usual, ended in a fight” ... dear to your heart? Kvass patriotism! Gracious sirs, we ourselves do not tolerate it, but let me say that leavened patriotism is still better than cosmopolitanism ... no matter what? .. yes, we understand each other!
We do not know whether we will have to take up a detailed examination of this reproach, perhaps the most significant of all that was said against Gogol. In the meantime, let us remind the reader that Gogol himself excellently explained the essence of the issue with an anecdote about Kif Mokievich and the following passage in "The Journey from the Theatre" after the performance of "The Government Inspector":
Mister P. Have mercy, brother, what is it? How is it really?
Mister B. What?
Mister P. Well, how do you get it out?
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Mister B. Why not?
Mister P. Well, judge for yourself: well, how about it, right? All vices yes vices; Well, what example is served through this to the audience?
Mister B. Do vices boast? After all, they are ridiculed.
Mister Q. But let me note, however, that all this is, in a way, already an insult, which more or less extends to everyone.
Mister P. Exactly. That's what I wanted to point out to him. This is precisely the insult that is spreading.
Mister Q. How to exhibit the bad, why not exhibit the good, worthy of imitation?
Mister B. Why? Strange question: why? Why did one father, wanting to extricate his son from a disorderly life, did not waste words and instructions, but brought him to the infirmary, where they appeared before him in all horror scary footprints disorderly life? Why did he do it?
Mister Q. But let me tell you: these are already in some way our social wounds, which must be hidden, not shown.
Mister P. It's true. I completely agree with this. We have to hide the bad, not show it. ( Mr. B. leaves. Suitable prince N). Listen, prince!
Prince N. What?
Mister P. Well, however, tell me: how to present it? What does it look like?
Prince N. Why not represent?
Mister P. Well, judge for yourself - well, how can it suddenly be a rogue on the stage - after all, these are all our wounds.
Prince N. What wounds?
Mister P. Yes, these are our wounds, our social wounds, so to speak.
Prince N. Take them for yourself. Let them be yours, not my wounds! Why are you poking them at me? ( leaving.)
Exactly! it is precisely this “in some way our wounds!”, precisely this “we must hide what is bad, not show it!”, precisely this “insult that is spreading!” Right, Mr. P. is a thousand times right! But why do you yourself, Messrs. dissatisfied with Gogol, find Mr. P. ridiculous and absurd? If it's ridiculous, then it's not.
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repeat his words. They only make sense in his language.
It is impossible not to notice in the review of The Inspector General that N. A. Polevoy still does not despair of correcting Gogol, attributing all the blame only to his “flatterers”, does not yet renounce Gogol; - after the release of "Dead Souls" he already considers him a man who has irretrievably died for art, incurably obdurate in his extravagant pride - to write such ridiculous things, of which the "Inspector General" was the first. Here are the last lines of the analysis of "Dead Souls":
If we had dared to take upon ourselves the answer to the author on behalf of Rus', we would have said to him: dear sir! You think too much about yourself - your pride is even funny, but we are aware that you have a talent, and only the trouble is that you have "lost a little pantalik!" Leave your "blizzard of inspiration" alone, learn the Russian language and tell us your old fairy tales about Ivan Ivanovich, about the carriage and the nose, and do not write such nonsense as your "Rome", nor such nonsense as your "Dead Souls"! However, your choice!
We have finished our extracts from N. A. Polevoy's judgments about Gogol. To some of the opinions expressed by him the first time, we shall have to return later, speaking of the opinions expressed by others even now. Others can be left indiscriminately, because their extreme naivete makes any refutation superfluous. But here it remains for us to make two remarks, caused by the sentences of N. A. Polevoy.
Polevoy blames Gogol's "flatterers" for dreaming of himself not as an innocent joker, but as a great writer with a deeply philosophical trend. It would be ridiculous in our time to think that works like The Inspector General and Dead souls", may owe their origin to someone else's influence - creations so deeply felt are the fruit only of the author's own deep nature, and not of extraneous insinuations. In addition, we have already said that people who understood better than others the significance of these lofty works of art had no influence on Gogol. In the next article, we will see
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how little “Dead Souls” was understood by other people who, being admirers of Gogol, were at the same time his friends - these wise Varangian-Russians, if they were to blame for anything, it was only in Correspondence with Friends. Moreover, they were not familiar with Gogol and did not play a significant role in literature in 1834, when The Inspector General was already written. Pushkin knew Gogol much earlier, had some influence on the beginning young man and praised his works, but it is impossible that Polevoy considered him a "flatterer" of Gogol - on the contrary, everyone knows that Zhukovsky and Pushkin were Gogol's patrons, occupying much more in literature and in society. a more honorable place than he, the unknown youth. Meanwhile, while still a completely obscure and insignificant young man, he was already publishing philosophical and grandiloquent articles, in which Polevoy already sees the result of flattery that has gone to his head. Some of these articles are reprinted in "Arabesques", some others are enumerated by Mr. Gennadi. In general, it must be said that in his development Gogol was more independent of extraneous influences than any other of our first-class writers. Everything that is expressed beautiful in his works, he owes solely to his deep nature. This is obvious now to everyone who is not alien to the concepts of Russian literature. And if Gogol's pride ever led him into mistakes, then in any case it must be said that the source of this pride was his own high concept of himself, and not other people's praise. Some people have such a proud and high concept of themselves that other people's praises can no longer have a special influence on them - whoever knew such people will easily see from Gogol's letters and author's confession that he belonged to their number.
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Our other remark refers to N.A. Polevoy himself. According to the last two passages from his review of Dead Souls, others, perhaps, will conclude that he, as the publisher of Russkiy Vestnik, has become unfaithful. own opinions, which were expressed with such energy in the Moscow Telegraph; this conclusion would be unfair. We do not want to say that N.A. Polevoi was ready to repeat in 1842 exactly what he said in 1825 about every single issue. which had been overlooked before, because they had not yet been sufficiently revealed by the historical movement. But the fact is that a person with an independent mind, having reached mental maturity and having worked out certain basic convictions for himself, usually remains forever imbued with their essential content, and this basis of all opinions remains with him forever the same, no matter how the facts around him change. And it is not necessary to consider it a betrayal of conviction if, in accordance with the change in the surrounding facts, such a person, who at first was mainly concerned with exposing one side of them, subsequently considered it necessary to expose the other more strongly. He can become backward without ceasing to be true to himself. So it was with N. A. Polev. He stood up against the classics, but later, when the classics were beaten down on all points, he saw new people who, ignoring classicism, which was already completely exhausted, were fighting against romanticism. Their beliefs differed much more from the beliefs of N. A. Polevoi than the beliefs of N. A. Polevoi from the beliefs of the classics - both of the latter shades belonged to the same sphere of concepts, only changed in different ways - new literary concepts separated from them by a whole abyss. And N. A. Polevoy, without changing his romantic convictions in the least, could say: “Better the piitika of Boileau than the aesthetics of Hegel. Better classicism than works latest literature". And indeed, Genlis is closer to Victor Hugo than Dickens or Georges Sand, "Poor Lisa" has more kinship with "Abbaddonna" than "A Hero of Our Time"
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or Dead Souls. Genlis and Victor Hugo, "Poor Lisa" and "Abbaddonna" are similar, although in that they depict people not at all as they really are. And what do they have in common with novels of new literature?
And this explains the strange, apparently, fact that a person with such a wonderful mind as N. A. Polevoy could not understand 1 works of the new - not only Russian, but in general the whole European literature, explains an incredibly strange mixture of clever and practical critical techniques with naive and decidedly unfair conclusions in the articles of Russkiy Vestnik and other journals published by him in the last half of his life. He drew correct conclusions from principles that became unsatisfactory in the course of time - and neither his mind nor his conscientiousness in the least lose in the eyes of a just judge from the absurdity of the conclusions. On the contrary, a strong mind is found in every line of these extremely naive articles - and as for their conscientiousness, we do not doubt it at all and think that every impartial person will come to the same conviction if he delve into the essence of the matter, short review which we presented.
The last half of the literary activity of N. A. Polevoy needs justification, we said at the beginning of this review; and, in our opinion, it can be satisfactorily justified - it is time to remove the stain from the memory of a person who, acting in recent years erroneously, could be an opponent of literary development and be subjected to just reproach in his time - but now the danger has passed, which represented then his influence on literature - and therefore now it must be confessed: he rightly spoke of himself that he was always an honest man and wished good literature, and that important merits in the history of our literature and development remain inalienably behind him - to admit that he , publishing a collection of his critical articles, had the right to say in the preface:
I lay my hand on my heart and dare to say aloud that I have never been carried away either by malice - a feeling that is contemptuous for me, or envy - a feeling that I do not understand - never what I said and wrote did not disagree with my conviction, and never sympathy
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good did not leave my heart; it has always beaten strongly for all that is great, useful, and good. I dare add that such a constant striving gave me wonderful, delightful moments that rewarded me for the sorrows and sufferings of my life. How many times have I heard sincere gratitude and hello to the young men who said that they owed me moral pleasure and faith in goodness! He will not say about me who will take the trouble to get acquainted with what I have written, - he will not say that I have somehow dishonored the title that I always highly value and appreciate - the title of a writer. My words are not self-praise, but the sincere voice of a man and a writer who values the name of an honest man. Meanwhile, as a man, I paid a bitter tribute to the imperfections and weaknesses of man ... Let the one who himself has not experienced deceit and disappointment in those around him and - even sadder - in himself! If you are still young, my brother, you are not my judge; let the gray hair on your head break through, let your heart grow cold, let your strength get tired of labor and time, and then speak and judge me! ..
I am not my own judge. But no one will challenge my honor that I was the first to make a permanent part of the Russian journal out of criticism, the first to turn criticism into all the most important contemporary subjects. My experiences were imperfect, incomplete, they will tell me, and my followers were far ahead of me in the essence and the very image of the view. Let it be so, and it would be a shame for the new generation not to become higher than us, a generation that is already passing, because it is higher because it is older than us, appeared after us, continues what we started, and we should be satisfied if our labors will have for its historical price... I myself feel, re-reading now, the incompleteness, imperfection of many things... Much renews for me in the present a feeling of consolation, inspires even more a sad feeling, the consciousness of an unachieved dream, of unexpressed ideals. Such a feeling, I think, is natural to everyone who has lived at least and thought. Only ignorance, only stupidity has received on this earth (however, I don’t know if it’s a happy one) the fate of complacency. There is another reward, more precious, with which providence blesses us: the thought that if God gave us something that burned strongly in our soul, greatly disturbed us in the days of our youth with an unconscious, dark sensation, we did not destroy it later in the bustle and disasters of life, did not bury talent in the ground ... Let us not achieve the ideals we are looking for, at least we will rejoice that our life has not been wasted fruitlessly ...
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How much nobility in these words, and what truth emanates from them! Whoever says this does not lie, and indeed, the life of this man did not pass fruitlessly, and we should remember him not with condemnation, but with gratitude.
Footnotes
See Gogol's letter to Maksimovich, dated August 14, 1834, in The Experience of Gogol's Biography, Mr. Nikolai M., placed in Sovremennik, 1854.
See the list of Gogol's works compiled by Mr. Gennadi in the “Patri[estvenny] za[iska] of 1853. Most of these articles, such as, for example, "Sculpture, Painting and Poetry", "On Architecture", "Life", belong to 1831 and were written, of course, before Gogol's name was mentioned in print.
| (1828-1889)
N. G. Chernyshevsky - publicist, literary critic, writer. Born in Saratov in the family of an archpriest. In 1856-62. directed the Sovremennik magazine and published a number of historical and critical articles, among which the famous Essays on the Gogol Period, Lessing, Russian Man on Rendez-vous and articles on Pushkin and Gogol occupy a particularly prominent place. In 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested for his connection with the revolutionary movement and imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress where he stayed for about 2 years. The Senate sentenced Chernyshevsky to 7 years hard labor. In exile in Siberia, and then in Astrakhan, he wrote works on philosophy, sociology, political economy, and aesthetics. In 1863 he published the novel What Is to Be Done? From 1885 until his death, he worked on the translation of Weber's 15-volume Universal History. |
Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature
(Excerpts)
On the contrary, it cannot be said that Gogol did not have predecessors in that direction of content that is called satirical. It has always been the most living, or rather, the only living aspect of our literature. We will not expand on this universally recognized truth, we will not talk about Kantemir, Sumarokov, Fonvizin and Krylov, but we must mention Griboyedov. Woe from Wit is artistically deficient, but is still one of the most beloved books, because it presents a number of excellent satires, presented either in the form of monologues, or in the form of conversations. Almost as important was the influence of Pushkin as a satirical writer, as he appeared mainly in Onegin. And yet, despite the high merits and enormous success of Griboedov's comedy and Pushkin's novel, one must attribute exclusively to Gogol the merit of firmly introducing the satirical - or, as it would be more fair to call it, the critical direction into Russian fine literature. 1) Despite the enthusiasm aroused by his comedy , Griboedov had no followers, and "Woe from Wit" remained in our literature a lonely, fragmentary phenomenon, as before the comedies of Fonvizin and the satire of Kantemir, remained without a noticeable influence on literature, like Krylov's fables. 2) What was the reason for this? Of course, the dominance of Pushkin and the galaxy of poets that surrounded him. "Woe from Wit" was a work so brilliant and lively that it could not but arouse general attention; but Griboyedov's genius was not so great as to gain dominance over literature from the very first time with one work. As for the satirical direction in the works of Pushkin himself, it contained too little depth and constancy to produce a noticeable effect on the public and literature. It almost completely disappeared in the general impression of pure artistry, alien to a certain direction - such an impression is produced not only by all of Pushkin's other best works - "The Stone Guest", "Boris Godunov", "Mermaid", etc., but also by "Onegin" itself: whoever has a strong predisposition to a critical view of the phenomena of life will only be influenced by the fluent and light satirical notes that come across in this novel; they will not be noticed by readers who are not predisposed to them, because they really constitute only a secondary element in the content of the novel ...
... Thus, despite the glimpses of satire in Onegin and the brilliant philippics of Woe from Wit, the critical element played a secondary role in our literature before Gogol.
For the first book of Notes of the Fatherland in 1840, Belinsky wrote an analysis of Griboedov's comedy, which was published around that time in the second edition. This article is one of the most successful and brilliant. It begins with an exposition of the theory of art, written exclusively from an abstract, scientific point of view, although<в нем и ведется сильная борьба против мечтательности, и>it is all imbued with a striving for reality and strong attacks on fantasy, which despises reality ...
... Although this article constantly says that the poetry of our time is "the poetry of reality, the poetry of life", but main task Modern art, however, is presented with a task completely abstracted from life: "Reconciliation of the romantic with the classical," because in general our age is the "age of reconciliation" in all spheres. Reality itself is understood in another one-sided way: it embraces only the spiritual life of a person, while the entire material side of life is recognized as “ghostly”: “A person eats, drinks, dresses - this is a world of ghosts, because his spirit does not participate in this at all”; a person "feels, thinks, is aware of himself as an organ, a vessel of the spirit, a finite part of the general and infinite - this is the world of reality" - all this is pure Hegelism. But in explaining the theory, it is necessary to give its application to works of art. Belinsky chooses Gogol's stories as examples of a truly poetic epic and then analyzes The Inspector General in detail as the best example of a work of art in dramatic form. This analysis takes up most of the article - about thirty pages. It is evident that Belinsky was impatient to talk about Gogol, and this alone already serves as sufficient evidence for the trend that even then prevailed in him. This analysis is excellently written, and it is difficult to find anything better of its kind. But Gogol's comedy, which so irresistibly evokes vivid thoughts, is considered exclusively in an artistic sense. Belinsky explains how one scene follows from another, why each of them is necessary in its place, shows that the characters of the characters are sustained, true to themselves, completely outlined by the action itself without any exaggeration on the part of Gogol, that the comedy is full of lively drama, etc. e. Having explained the qualities of a work of art with the example of The Inspector General, Belinsky already very easily proves that Woe from Wit cannot be called an artistic creation, he discovers that the scenes of this comedy are often not connected with one another, the positions and characters of the characters are not sustained, etc. - in a word, criticism is again limited to an exclusively artistic point of view. Almost no attention has been paid to the significance of the "Inspector General" and the "Woe from Wit" for life.
Footnotes
1 In the latest science, criticism is not only a judgment about the phenomena of one branch of folk life - art, literature or science, but in general a judgment about the phenomena of life, pronounced on the basis of the concepts that mankind has reached, and the feelings aroused by these phenomena when they are compared with the requirements mind. Understanding the word "criticism" in this broadest sense, they say: "The critical trend in fine literature, in poetry" - this expression denotes a trend that is to some extent similar to the "analytic trend, analysis" in literature, which has been talked about so much in our country. . But the difference lies in the fact that the "analytic trend" can study the details of everyday phenomena and reproduce them under the influence of the most diverse strivings, even without any striving, without thought and meaning; and the "critical direction", in a detailed study and reproduction of the phenomena of life, is imbued with a consciousness of the correspondence or inconsistency of the studied phenomena with the norm of reason and noble feeling. Therefore, the "critical trend" in literature is one of the particular modifications of the "analytic trend" in general. The satirical direction differs from the critical one, as its extreme, which does not care about the objectivity of the pictures and allows for exaggeration. (Approx. Chernyshevsky.)
2 We are talking about the direction of literature, about its spirit, aspirations, and not about the development of the literary language - in the latter respect, as has already been noted a thousand times in our journals, Krylov should be considered one of Pushkin's predecessors (Approx. Chernyshevsky.)
Printed by to the full assembly works in 15 volumes, vol. III, Goslitizdat, Moscow, 1947, pp. 17 - 19 and 239 - 240.
First published in Sovremennik, 1855, No. 12; 1856, NoNo 1, 2, 4, 7, 9 - 12.
Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature
(Works of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Four volumes.
Second edition. Moscow. 1855.
The writings of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, found after his death.
Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls. Volume two (five chapters). Moscow. 1855)
Article one
In antiquity, about which only obscure, implausible, but marvelous in their improbability memories are preserved, as about a mythical time, as about "Astrea", in Gogol's words, - in this deep antiquity it was customary to begin critical articles with reflections on how quickly development of Russian literature. Think (we were told) - even Zhukovsky was in the full bloom of his powers, as Pushkin already appeared; scarcely had Pushkin completed half of his poetic career, cut off so early by death, when Gogol appeared - and each of these people, who followed so quickly one after another, introduced Russian literature into a new period of development, incomparably higher than anything that had been given by previous periods. Only twenty-five years separate "Rural Cemetery" from "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", "Svetlana" from "Inspector General" - and in this short period of time Russian literature had three eras, Russian society took three great steps forward along the path of intellectual and moral perfection. This is how critical articles began in antiquity.
This deep antiquity, hardly remembered by the current generation, was not too long ago, as can be assumed from the fact that the names of Pushkin and Gogol are found in its legends. But - although we have been separated from it by very few years - it is decidedly outdated for us. We are assured of this by the positive testimonies of almost all the people who write today about Russian literature - they repeat as an obvious truth that we have already gone far ahead of the critical, aesthetic, etc. principles and opinions of that era; that its principles turned out to be one-sided and unfounded, its opinions - exaggerated, unjust; that the wisdom of that era has now turned out to be vainglory, and that the true principles of criticism, the truly wise views on Russian literature - of which the people of that era had no idea - were found by Russian criticism only from the time when critical articles began to remain uncut in Russian journals.
One can still doubt the validity of these assurances, especially since they speak decisively without any evidence; but what remains undoubted is that in fact our time differs significantly from the immemorial antiquity of which we spoke. Try, for example, to begin a critical article today, as they began it then, with considerations about the rapid development of our literature - and from the very first word you yourself will feel that things are not going well. The thought will present itself to you: it is true that Pushkin came after Zhukovsky, Gogol after Pushkin, and that each of these people introduced a new element into Russian literature, expanded its content, changed its direction; but what is new in literature after Gogol? And the answer will be: the Gogol trend is still the only strong and fruitful one in our literature. If one can recall a few tolerable, even two or three beautiful works that were not imbued with an idea akin to the idea of Gogol's creations, then, despite their artistic merits, they remained without influence on the public, almost without significance in the history of literature. Yes, the Gogol period is still going on in our literature - and after all, twenty years have passed since the appearance of The Inspector General, twenty-five years since the appearance of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka - before, two or three directions changed in such an interval. Today the same thing prevails, and we do not know whether we will soon be able to say: "a new period has begun for Russian literature."
From this we clearly see that at the present time it is impossible to begin critical articles in the way they began in ancient times, with reflections on the fact that as soon as we have time to get used to the name of a writer who makes a new era in the development of our literature with his writings, another one already appears. , with works whose content is even deeper, whose form is even more independent and perfect - in this respect one cannot but agree that the present is not like the past.
To what should such a difference be attributed? Why does the Gogol period continue for such a number of years, which, in the past, was enough to change two or three periods? Perhaps the sphere of Gogol's ideas is so deep and vast that too much time is needed for their complete development by literature, for their assimilation by society - conditions on which, of course, further literary development depends, because only having absorbed and digested the food offered, one can crave a new one only when one has completely secured for oneself the use of what has already been acquired, one must look for new acquisitions - perhaps our self-consciousness is still completely occupied with the development of Gogol's content, does not foresee anything else, does not strive for anything more complete and profound? Or would it be time for a new trend to appear in our literature, but it does not appear due to some extraneous circumstances? In proposing the last question, we thereby give reason to think that we consider it fair to answer it in the affirmative; but by saying: “yes, it would be time to start a new period in Russian literature”, we thereby pose two new questions to ourselves: what should be the distinctive properties of the new trend, which will arise and partly, although still weakly, hesitantly, already arises from gogol direction? and what circumstances hinder the rapid development of this new direction? The last question, if you like, can be answered briefly - at least, for example, and regret that the new brilliant writer is not. But again, one may ask: why does he not appear for so long? After all, Pushkin, Griboedov, Koltsov, Lermontov, Gogol ... appeared before, and how quickly one after another ... five people, almost at the same time - which means they do not belong to the number of phenomena so rare in the history of peoples, like Newton or Shakespeare, which humanity has been waiting for for several centuries. Let now a man appear equal to at least one of these five, he would begin with his creations a new era in the development of our self-consciousness. Why are there no such people now? Or are they there, but we don't notice them? As you wish, and this should not be left without consideration. The case is very tricky.
And another reader, after reading the last lines, will say, shaking his head: “Not very wise questions; and somewhere I read completely similar ones, and even with answers - where, let me remember; well, yes, I read them by Gogol, and in the following passage from the daily Notes of a Madman:
December 5. I have been reading newspapers all morning today. Strange things are being done in Spain. I couldn't even make out them well. They write that the throne has been abolished and that the ranks are in a difficult position regarding the election of an heir. I find this extremely strange. How can the throne be abolished? There must be a king on the throne. “Yes”, they say, “there is no king” - it cannot happen that there is no king. There can be no state without a king. There is a king, but he is hiding somewhere in the unknown. It may be that he is in the same place, but some family reasons, or fears on the part of neighboring powers, such as France and other lands, force him to hide, or there are some other reasons.
The reader will be absolutely right. We really came to the same position in which Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin was. The point is only to explain this situation on the basis of the facts presented by Gogol and our latest writers, and to shift the conclusions from the dialect spoken in Spain to ordinary Russian.
Criticism generally develops on the basis of the facts presented by literature, whose works serve as the necessary data for the conclusions of criticism. So, after Pushkin with his Byronian poems and "Eugene Onegin" came criticism of the "Telegraph"; when Gogol gained dominance over the development of our self-consciousness, the so-called criticism of the 1840s appeared ... Thus, the development of new critical convictions each time was the result of changes in the dominant character of literature. It is clear that our critical views cannot claim either special novelty or satisfactory completeness. They are derived from works that represent only certain foreshadowings, the beginnings of a new trend in Russian literature, but do not yet show it in full development, and cannot contain more than what is given by literature. It has not yet gone far from The Inspector General and Dead Souls, and our articles cannot differ much in their essential content from the critical articles that appeared on the basis of The Inspector General and Dead Souls. In terms of essential content, we say, the merits of development depend solely on the moral forces of the writer and on the circumstances; and if it is to be admitted at all that our literature has recently become smaller, then it is natural to assume that our articles cannot but bear the same character as compared with what we read in the old days. But be that as it may, these last years were not completely fruitless - our literature has acquired several new talents, if not yet created anything as great as "Eugene Onegin" or "Woe from Wit", "A Hero of Our Time" or "The Government Inspector" and "Dead Souls", which nevertheless managed to give us several excellent works, remarkable for their independent artistic merits and lively content - works in which it is impossible not to see the guarantees of future development. And if our articles reflect in any way the beginning of the movement expressed in these works, they will not be completely devoid of a premonition of a fuller and deeper development of Russian literature. Whether we succeed is up to the readers to decide. But we ourselves will boldly and positively confer on our articles another merit, a very important one: they are generated by deep respect and sympathy for what was noble, just and useful in Russian literature and criticism of that deep antiquity, which we spoke about at the beginning, antiquity, which, however, only because antiquity has been forgotten by lack of convictions or arrogance, and especially pettiness of feelings and concepts, does it seem to us that it is necessary to turn to the study of high aspirations that animated the criticism of the former time; unless we remember them, imbue them, our criticism cannot be expected to have any influence on the intellectual movement of society, no benefit to the public and literature; and not only will it not bring any benefit, but it will not arouse any sympathy, even any interest, just as it does not excite him now. And criticism should play an important role in literature, it's time for her to remember this.
Readers may notice in our words an echo of the impotent indecision that has taken possession of Russian literature in recent years. They may say: “You want to move forward, and where do you propose to draw strength for this movement? Not in the present, not in the living, but in the past, in the dead. Those appeals to new activity that set ideals for themselves in the past, and not in the future, are discouraged. Only the power of negation from everything past is the power that creates something new and better. Readers will be partly right. But we are not completely wrong either. For a fallen one, any support is good, if only to rise to his feet; and what is to be done if our time does not show itself capable of standing on its own feet? And what to do if this falling can only lean on the coffins? And we must also ask ourselves, are the dead really lying in these coffins? Aren't living people buried in them? At least, isn't there much more life in these dead than in many people who are called alive? After all, if the writer's word is animated by the idea of truth, the desire for a beneficial effect on the intellectual life of society, this word contains the seeds of life, it will never be dead. And how many years have passed since those words were spoken? No; and there is still so much freshness in them, they still fit the needs of the present so well that they seem to have been said only yesterday. The source does not dry up because, having lost the people who kept it clean, we carelessly, out of frivolity, allowed it to be filled with rubbish of idle talk. Let us discard this rubbish, and we will see that a stream of truth is still beating in the source with a living spring, capable of at least partially quenching our thirst. Or do we not feel thirsty? We want to say "we feel" - but we are afraid that we will have to add: "we feel, but not too much."
Readers could already see from what we have said, and will see even more clearly from the continuation of our articles, that we do not consider Gogol's writings unconditionally satisfying all the modern needs of the Russian public, that even in Dead Souls we find weak sides, or at least not enough developed that, finally, in some works of subsequent writers we see the guarantees of a more complete and satisfactory development of ideas that Gogol embraced only from one side, not fully aware of their linkage, their causes and consequences. And yet we dare to say that the most unconditional admirers of everything that is written by Gogol, who exalt to the skies each of his works, each of his lines, do not sympathize with his works as vividly as we sympathize, do not ascribe to his activity such enormous significance in Russian literature as we attribute. We call Gogol without any comparison the greatest of Russian writers in terms of significance. In our opinion, he had every right to say the words, the immense pride of which at one time embarrassed his most ardent admirers and whose awkwardness is understandable to us:
"Rus! What do you want from me? What incomprehensible bond lurks between us? Why do you look like that, and why does everything that is in you turn eyes full of expectation on me?
He had every right to say this, because no matter how highly we appreciate the importance of literature, we still do not appreciate it enough: it is immeasurably more important than almost everything that is placed above it. Byron in the history of mankind is a person almost more important than Napoleon, and Byron's influence on the development of mankind is still far from being as important as the influence of many other writers, and for a long time there has not been a writer in the world who would be so important for his people, like Gogol for Russia.
First of all, let us say that Gogol should be considered the father of Russian prose literature, just as Pushkin is the father of Russian poetry. We hasten to add that this opinion was not invented by us, but only drawn from the article "On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol", published exactly twenty years ago ("Telescope", 1835, part XXVI) and belonging to the author of "Articles about Pushkin" . He proves that our story, which began very recently, in the twenties of this century, had Gogol as its first true representative. Now, after The Inspector General and Dead Souls have appeared, it must be added that in the same way Gogol was the father of our novel (in prose) and prose works in dramatic form, that is, Russian prose in general (it must not be forgotten that we we are talking exclusively about fine literature). Indeed, the true beginning of each side of people's life must be considered the time when this side reveals itself in a noticeable way, with some energy, and firmly asserts its place in life - all previous fragmentary, episodic manifestations disappearing without a trace should be considered only impulses towards self-fulfillment, but not yet actual existence. Thus, the excellent comedies of Fonvizin, which had no influence on the development of our literature, constitute only a brilliant episode, foreshadowing the appearance of Russian prose and Russian comedy. Karamzin's stories are significant only for the history of the language, but not for the history of original Russian literature, because there is nothing Russian in them but the language. Moreover, they were soon overwhelmed by the influx of verses. When Pushkin appeared, Russian literature consisted of nothing but verse, did not know prose, and continued to be ignorant of it until the early thirties. Here - two or three years before "Evenings on a Farm" - "Yuri Miloslavsky" made a noise - but you just need to read the analysis of this novel, placed in the "Literary Gazette", and we will be palpably convinced that if "Yuri Miloslavsky" was liked by readers, not too demanding in terms of artistic merit, then even then he could not be considered an important phenomenon for the development of literature - and indeed, Zagoskin had only one imitator - himself. Lazhechnikov's novels had more dignity, but not so much as to assert the right of literary citizenship for prose. Then there are Narezhny's novels, in which several episodes of undeniable merit serve only to bring out more clearly the clumsiness of the story and the incongruity of the plots with Russian life. They, like Yagub Skupalov, are more like popular prints than like works of literature belonging to an educated society. The Russian story in prose had more gifted figures - among other things, Marlinsky, Polevoy, Pavlov. But their characterization is presented by the article about which we spoke above, and it will suffice for us to say that Polevoy's stories were recognized as the best of all that existed before Gogol - whoever has forgotten them and wants to get an idea of \u200b\u200btheir distinctive qualities, I advise him to read the excellent a parody once placed in the “Notes of the Fatherland” (if we are not mistaken, 1843) - “An Unusual Duel”; and for those who do not happen to have it at hand, we place in the callout a description of the best of Polevoy's fictional works - Abbaddonna. If this was the best of prose works, then one can imagine what the dignity of the entire prose branch of literature of that time was. In any case, the stories were incomparably better than the novels, and if the author of the article we mentioned, after reviewing in detail all the stories that existed before Gogol, comes to the conclusion that, in fact, “we still didn’t have a story” before the appearance of Evenings on a Farm ” and “Mirgorod”, it is even more certain that we did not have a novel. There were only attempts to prove that Russian literature was preparing to have a novel and a story, which revealed in it a desire to produce a novel and a story. Nor can one say the same about dramatic works: the prose plays given at the theater were alien to all literary qualities, like vaudevilles, which are now being remade from French.
Thus, prose in Russian literature occupied very little space, had very little value. She longed to exist, but did not yet exist.
In the strict sense of the word, literary activity was limited exclusively to poetry. Gogol was the father of Russian prose, and not only was it its father, but quickly gave it a decisive preponderance over poetry, a preponderance that it has retained to this day. He had neither predecessors nor assistants in this matter. To him alone prose owes its existence and all its successes.
"How! had no predecessors or assistants? Is it possible to forget about the prose works of Pushkin?
It is impossible, but, firstly, they are far from having the same significance in the history of literature as his works, written in verse: “The Captain's Daughter” and “Dubrovsky” are excellent stories in the full sense of the word; but what was their influence? where is the school of writers who could be called followers of Pushkin as a prose writer? And literary works sometimes owe value not only to their artistic merit, but also (or even more so) to their influence on the development of society, or at least literature. But the main thing is that Gogol appeared before Pushkin as a prose writer. The first of Pushkin's prose works (with the exception of minor passages) were published "Belkin's Tales" - in 1831; but everyone will agree that these stories were not of great artistic merit. Then, until 1836, only The Queen of Spades was printed (in 1834) - no one doubts that this little play is beautifully written, but no one will ascribe special importance to it either. Meanwhile, Gogol published “Evenings on a Farm” (1831–1832), “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” (1833), “Mirgorod” (1835) - that is, everything that subsequently made up the first two parts his "Works"; in addition, in "Arabesques" (1835) - "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt", "Notes of a Madman". In 1836, Pushkin published The Captain's Daughter, but in the same year the Inspector General appeared, and, in addition, The Carriage, The Morning of a Businessman and The Nose. Thus, most of Gogol's works, including The Government Inspector, were already known to the public when they only knew The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter (Peter the Great's Moor, Chronicle of the Village of Gorokhin, Scenes from chivalrous times" were published already in 1837, after the death of Pushkin, and "Dubrovsky" only in 1841), the public had enough time to be imbued with Gogol's works before meeting Pushkin as a prose writer.
In a general theoretical sense, we do not think of giving preference to the prose form over the poetic, or vice versa - each of them has its undoubted advantages; but as regards Russian literature proper, looking at it from a historical point of view, one cannot but admit that all previous periods, when the poetic form prevailed, are far inferior in significance both for art and for life to the last, Gogol period, the period of the dominance of the poem. What the future will bring to literature we do not know; we have no reason to deny our poetry a great future; but we must say that up to the present time the prose form has been and continues to be much more fruitful for us than the poetic one, that Gogol gave existence to this branch of literature, which is most important for us, and he alone gave it the decisive preponderance that it retains to this day and, in all likelihood, , will keep for a long time.
On the contrary, it cannot be said that Gogol did not have predecessors in that direction of content that is called satirical. It has always been the most living, or rather, the only living aspect of our literature. We will not expand on this universally recognized truth, we will not talk about Kantemir, Sumarokov, Fonvizin and Krylov, but we must mention Griboyedov. Woe from Wit is artistically flawed, but remains one of the most beloved books to this day, because it presents a number of excellent satires, presented either in the form of monologues, or in the form of conversations. Almost as important was the influence of Pushkin as a satirical writer, as he appeared mainly in Onegin. And yet, despite the high merits and enormous success of Griboedov's comedy and Pushkin's novel, Gogol must be credited exclusively with the merit of firmly introducing satirical - or, as it would be more fair to call it, critical - direction into Russian fine literature. Despite the enthusiasm aroused by his comedy, Griboedov had no followers, and "Woe from Wit" remained in our literature a lonely, fragmentary phenomenon, as before the comedies of Fonvizin and Kantemir's satire, remained without a noticeable influence on literature, like Krylov's fables. What was the reason? Of course, the dominance of Pushkin and the galaxy of poets that surrounded him. "Woe from Wit" was a work so brilliant and lively that it could not but arouse general attention; but Griboyedov's genius was not so great as to gain dominance over literature from the very first time with one work. As for the satirical direction in the works of Pushkin himself, it contained too little depth and constancy to produce a noticeable effect on the public and literature. It almost completely disappeared in the general impression of pure artistry, alien to a certain direction - such an impression is produced not only by all the other, best works of Pushkin - "The Stone Guest", "Boris Godunov", "Mermaid", etc., but also "Onegin" itself. : - who has a strong predisposition to a critical look at the phenomena of life, only the fluent and light satirical notes that come across in this novel will influence him; - by readers who are not predisposed to them, they will not be noticed, because they really constitute only a secondary element in the content of the novel.
Thus, despite the glimpses of satire in Onegin and the brilliant philippics of Woe from Wit, the critical element played a secondary role in our literature before Gogol. And not only a critical, but almost no other definite element could be found in “its content, if you look at the general impression produced by the whole mass of works that were then considered good or excellent, and not stop at a few exceptions, which, being accidental, alone, did not produce a noticeable change in the general spirit of literature. There was nothing definite in its content, we said, because there was almost no content in it at all. Re-reading all these poets - Yazykov, Kozlov, etc., one wonders that on such poor topics, with such a meager supply of feelings and thoughts, they managed to write so many pages - although they wrote very few pages - you finally come to the fact that you ask yourself: what did they write about? and did they write about anything, or just about nothing? Many are not satisfied with the content of Pushkin's poetry, but Pushkin had a hundred times more content than his associates put together. They had almost everything in uniform, you will not find almost anything under the uniform.
Thus, the merit remains for Gogol that he was the first to give Russian literature a resolute striving for content, and, moreover, a striving in such a fruitful direction as critical. Let us add that our literature and independence are indebted to Gogol. The period of pure imitations and alterations, which were almost all the works of our literature before Pushkin, is followed by an era of creativity that is somewhat freer. But Pushkin's works still closely resemble either Byron, or Shakespeare, or Walter Scott. Not to mention the Byronian poems and Onegin, which was unfairly called an imitation of Childe Harold, but which, however, really would not have existed without this Byronian novel; but in the same way, Boris Godunov is too noticeably subordinated to the historical dramas of Shakespeare, The Mermaid - directly arose from King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Captain's Daughter - from the novels of Walter Scott. Not to mention other writers of that era - their dependence on one or another of the European poets is too striking. Is it now? - the stories of Mr. Goncharov, Mr. Grigorovich, L. N. T., Mr. Turgenev, the comedies of Mr. Ostrovsky just as little lead you to the idea of borrowing, just as little remind you of anything alien, as a novel by Dickens, Thackeray , Georges Sand. We do not think of making comparisons between these writers in terms of talent or importance in literature; but the fact is that Mr. Goncharov seems to you only Mr. Goncharov, only himself, Mr. Grigorovich also, every other gifted writer of ours also - no one’s literary personality seems to you a double of any other writer, none of they were not peered over their shoulders by another person, prompting him - one cannot say about any of them "Northern Dickens", or "Russian Georges Sand", or "Thackeray of Northern Palmyra". We owe this independence only to Gogol, only his works, with their high originality, raised our gifted writers to that height where originality begins.
However, no matter how much honorable and brilliant in the title "the founder of the most fruitful trend and independence in literature" - but these words still do not define the whole greatness of Gogol's significance for our society and literature. He awakened in us the consciousness of ourselves - this is his true merit, the importance of which does not depend on whether we should consider him the first or tenth of our great writers in chronological order. An examination of the importance of Gogol in this respect should be the main subject of our articles - a very important matter, which, perhaps, we would recognize as superior to our strength, if most of this task had not already been completed, so that we, when analyzing the works of Gogol himself , it remains almost only to bring into system and develop the thoughts already expressed by the criticism, which we spoke about at the beginning of the article; - there will be few additions that actually belong to us, because although the thoughts we developed were expressed fragmentarily, on various occasions, however, if we bring them together, then there will not be many gaps that need to be filled in order to get a comprehensive description of Gogol's works. But the extraordinary significance of Gogol for Russian literature is not yet completely determined by the evaluation of his own works: Gogol is important not only as a brilliant writer, but at the same time as the head of a school - the only school that Russian literature can be proud of - because neither Griboedov nor Pushkin , neither Lermontov nor Koltsov had students whose names would be important for the history of Russian literature. We must make sure that all of our literature, in so far as it has been formed under the influence of non-foreign writers, adjoins Gogol, and only then will we be presented with the full extent of his significance for Russian literature. Having made this survey of the whole content of our literature in its present development, we shall be in a position to determine what? it has already done, and what we must still expect from it—what pledges of the future it presents and what it still lacks—is an interesting matter, because the state of literature determines the state of society, on which it always depends.
No matter how fair the thoughts about the meaning of Gogol expressed here are, we can, not at all embarrassed by fears of conceit, call them completely fair, because they were not expressed for the first time by us, and we only assimilated them, therefore, our pride cannot be proud of them. , it remains completely on the sidelines - no matter how obvious the justice of these thoughts, there will be people who will think that we place Gogol too highly. This is because there are still many people who rebel against Gogol. His literary fate in this respect is completely different from that of Pushkin. Everyone has long recognized Pushkin as a great, indisputably great writer; his name is a sacred authority for every Russian reader and even non-reader, as, for example, Walter Scott is an authority for every Englishman, Lamartine and Chateaubriand for a Frenchman, or, to go to a higher region, Goethe for a German. Every Russian is an admirer of Pushkin, and no one finds it inconvenient for himself to recognize him as a great writer, because the worship of Pushkin does not oblige you to anything, the understanding of his merits is not conditioned by any special qualities of character, any special mood of the mind. Gogol, on the contrary, is one of those writers whose love requires the same mood of the soul as theirs, because their activity is a service to a certain direction of moral aspirations. In relation to such writers as, for example, Georges Sand, Berenger, even Dickens and partly Thackeray, the public is divided into two halves: one, which does not sympathize with their aspirations, is indignant at them; but she who sympathizes loves them to the point of devotion, as representatives of her own moral life, as advocates for her own ardent desires and most intimate thoughts. No one was warm or cold from Goethe; he is equally affable and subtly delicate to everyone - anyone can come to Goethe, whatever their rights to moral respect - compliant, gentle and in essence quite indifferent to everything and everyone, the owner will not offend anyone not only by obvious severity, even not one ticklish hint. But if the speeches of Dickens or Georges Sand serve as a consolation or reinforcement for some, then the ears of others find in them a lot of harsh and extremely unpleasant for themselves. These people live only for friends; they don't keep an open table for everyone they meet and cross; another, if he sits down at their table, will choke on every bite and be embarrassed by every word, and, having run away from this difficult conversation, he will forever “remember dashingly” a harsh master. But if they have enemies, then there are numerous friends; and the "gentle poet" can never have such passionate admirers as the one who, like Gogol, "feeding his chest with hatred" for everything low, vulgar and pernicious, "with a hostile word of denial" against everything vile, "preaches love" for good and truth .15 He who strokes the wool of everyone and everything, he loves no one and nothing but himself; Whoever is pleased with everyone does nothing good, because good is impossible without offending evil. Whom no one hates, no one owes him anything.
Gogol owes a lot to those who need protection; he became the head of those who deny the evil and the vulgar. Therefore, he had the glory of arousing in many enmity towards himself. And only then will everyone be unanimous in praising him, when all the vulgar and vile things against which he fought will disappear!
We said that our words about the meaning of the works of Gogol himself will only in a few cases be an addition, and for the most part only a set and development of the views expressed by the criticism of the Gogol period of literature, the center of which was "Notes of the Fatherland", the main figure is the critic who owns " Articles about Pushkin. Thus, this half of our articles will be primarily of a historical nature. But history must begin from the beginning—and before we set out the opinions we accept, we must present an outline of the opinions expressed about Gogol by representatives of former literary parties. This is all the more necessary because the criticism of the Gogol period developed its influence on the public and literature in a constant struggle with these parties, because the echoes of the judgments about Gogol expressed by these parties are still heard - and, finally, because these judgments are partly explains "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" - this is such a remarkable and apparently strange fact in Gogol's activity. We will have to touch on these judgments, and we need to know their origin in order to properly assess the degree of their good faith and justice. But, in order not to stretch too long our review of the attitudes toward Gogol of people whose literary opinions are unsatisfactory, we will limit ourselves to presenting the opinions of only three journals that were representatives of the most important of the minor trends in literature.
The strongest and most worthy of respect among the people who rebelled against Gogol was N. A. Polevoy. All others, when they did not repeat his words, attacking Gogol, showed in themselves only a lack of taste and therefore do not deserve much attention. On the contrary, if Polevoy's attacks were sharp, if sometimes they even crossed the boundaries of literary criticism and took on, as they put it then, a "legal character", then the mind is always visible in them, and, as it seems to us, N. A. Polevoy, not being right, he was, however, conscientious, rebelling against Gogol not out of low calculations, not out of instillations of pride or personal enmity, like many others, but out of sincere conviction.
The last years of N. A. Polevoy’s activity need justification. He was not destined to be lucky to descend into the grave clean from any reproach, from any suspicions - but how many of the people who have long taken part in intellectual or other debates get this happiness? Gogol himself also needs justification, and it seems to us that Polevoy can be justified much more easily than he.
The most important stain on the memory of N. A. Polevoy lies in the fact that he, who at first so cheerfully acted as one of the leaders in the literary and intellectual movement, is he, the famous editor of the Moscow Telegraph, which acted so strongly in favor of enlightenment, destroyed so many literary and other prejudices, towards the end of his life he began to fight against everything that was then healthy and fruitful in Russian literature, took with his Russkiy vestnik the same position in literature that had once been occupied by Vestnik Evropy, became a defender of immobility, rigidity, which is so strong struck in the best era of his activity. Our intellectual life began so recently, we have gone through so few phases of development that such changes in the condition of people seem mysterious to us; meanwhile, there is nothing strange in them - on the contrary, it is very natural that a person who at first stood at the head of a movement becomes backward and begins to rebel against the movement when it irresistibly continues beyond the boundaries that he foresaw, beyond the goal to which he aspired. We will not give examples from general history, although they most likely could explain the matter. And in the history of the mental movement there was recently a great, instructive example of such a weakness of a person who lags behind the movement of which he was the head - we saw this deplorable example in Schelling, whose name was recently in Germany a symbol of obscurantism, while he once gave the mighty movement of philosophy; but Hegel took philosophy beyond the limits that Schelling's system could not cross, and Hegel's predecessor, friend, teacher and comrade became his enemy. And if Hegel himself had lived a few years longer, he would have become an opponent of his best and most faithful students, and, perhaps, his name would also have become a symbol of obscurantism.
It was not without intention that we mentioned Schelling and Hegel, because in order to explain the change in the position of N. A. Polevoy, one must recall his attitude to different systems of philosophy. N. A. Polevoy was a follower of Cousin, whom he considered the resolver of all wisdom and the greatest philosopher in the world. In fact, Cousin's philosophy was composed of a rather arbitrary mixture of scientific concepts, borrowed partly from Kant, still more from Schelling, partly from other German philosophers, with some fragments from Descartes, from Locke and other thinkers, and this whole heterogeneous set was in addition altered and smoothed out so as not to embarrass the prejudices of the French public with any bold thought. This slurry, called "eclectic philosophy," could not be of great scientific merit, but it was good because it was easily digested by people who were not yet ready to accept the strict and harsh systems of German philosophy, and, in any case, was useful as a preparation for the transition from the former rigidity and Jesuit obscurantism to more sound views. In this sense, she was also useful in the Moscow Telegraph. But it goes without saying that a follower of Cousin could not reconcile himself with Hegelian philosophy, and when Hegelian philosophy penetrated into Russian literature, Cousin's students turned out to be backward people, and there was nothing morally criminal on their part in the fact that they defended their convictions and they called absurd what people who were ahead of them in mental movement said: you can’t blame a person because others, endowed with fresher strength and greater determination, got ahead of him - they are right, because they are closer to the truth, but he is not to blame, he is only wrong.
The new criticism was based on ideas belonging to the strict and sublime system of Hegelian philosophy - this is the first and perhaps the most important reason that N. A. Polevoy did not understand this new criticism and could not help but rebel against it as a person gifted with a living and ardent character. That this disagreement in philosophical views was an essential basis for the struggle, we see from everything that was written by both N. A. Polev and his young opponent - we could give hundreds of examples, but one will suffice. Beginning his critical articles in the Russkiy Vestnik, N. A. Polevoy prefaces them with a profession de foi, in which he sets out his principles and shows how the Russkiy Vestnik will differ from other journals, and this is how he characterizes the direction of the journal, in which new views prevailed.
In one of our journals they offered us miserable, ugly fragments of Hegelian scholasticism, expounding it in a language hardly even understandable to the publishers of the journal themselves. Still striving to destroy the former, as a result of their confused and broken theories, but feeling the need for some kind of authority, they screamed wildly about Shakespeare, created tiny ideals for themselves and knelt before the childish play of poor self-made, and instead of judgments they used abuse, as if abuse was evidence.
You see, the main point of the accusation was adherence to "Hegelian scholasticism", and all the other sins of the opponent are exposed as consequences of this basic error. But why does Polevoy consider Hegelian philosophy to be wrong? Because she is incomprehensible to him, he directly says it himself. In exactly the same way, his opponent presented the main shortcoming, the main reason for the fall of the former romantic criticism, that it relied on the shaky system of Cousin, did not know and did not understand Hegel.
And indeed, disagreement in aesthetic convictions was only the result of disagreement in the philosophical foundations of the whole way of thinking - this partly explains the cruelty of the struggle - because of one disagreement in purely aesthetic terms it would not be possible to become so hardened, especially since in essence both opponents cared not so much about purely aesthetic questions, as much as about the development of society in general, and literature was precious to them mainly in the sense that they understood it as the most powerful force acting on the development of our social life. Aesthetic questions were for both primarily only a battlefield, and the subject of the struggle was the influence in general on mental life.
But whatever the essential content of the struggle, its field was most often aesthetic questions, and we must recall, although in a cursory way, the nature of the aesthetic convictions of the school, of which N. A. Polevoy was a representative, and show its relationship to new views.
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