Natasha's Dance

2

'I stopped at the Hermitage at Optina', Gogol wrote to Count A. P. Tolstoy, 'and took away with me a memory that will never fade. Clearly, grace dwells in that place. You can feel it even in the outward signs of worship. Nowhere have I seen monks like those. Through every one of them I seemed to converse with heaven.' During his last years Gogol came to Optina on several occasions. He found comfort and spiritual guidance for his troubled soul in the tranquillity of the monastery. He thought he had found there the divine Russian realm for which he had searched all his life. Miles away from the monastery, he wrote to Tolstoy, 'one can smell the perfume of its virtues in the air: everything becomes hospitable, people bow more deeply, and brotherly love increases'.²³

Nikolai Gogol came from a devout family in the Ukraine. Both his parents were active in the Church, and at home they kept to all the fasts and religious rituals. There was a tinge of mysticism in the Gogol household which helps to account for the writer's life and art. Gogol's parents met when his father had a vision in the local church: the Mother of God had appeared before him and, pointing to the young girl standing next to him, had said that she would become his wife, which indeed she did.²⁴ Like his parents, Gogol was not satisfied by the observance of the Church's rituals. From an early age he felt a need to experience the divine presence as a drama in his soul. In 1833 he wrote to his mother:

[in my childhood] I looked at everything with an impartial eye; I went to church because I was ordered to, or was taken; but once I was there I saw nothing but the chasuble, the priest and the awful howling of the deacons. I crossed myself because I saw everyone else crossing themselves. But one time - I can vividly remember it even now - I asked you to tell me about the Day of Judgement, and you told me so well, so thoroughly and so touchingly about the good things which await people who have led a worthy life, and you described the eternal torments awaiting sinners so expressively and so fear-somely that it stunned me and awoke in me all my sensitivity. Later on it engendered the most lofty thoughts in me.²³

Gogol never had religious doubts, as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did. The torments of his final years arose only from doubts about his own merits before God. But the intense nature of the writer's faith could not be contained within any Church. In some ways, as he himself acknowledged, his faith had much in common with the Protestant religion, in the sense that he believed in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.²⁶ Yet in the six years which Gogol spent in Rome, from 1836 to 1842, he also became close to the Catholic tradition, and if he chose not to convert to Rome, it was only, in his words, because he saw no difference between the two creeds: 'Our religion is just the same thing as Catholicism - and there is no need to change from the one to the other.'²⁷ In the final version of Dead Souls, which he never published, Gogol planned to introduce the figure of a priest who would embody Orthodox and Catholic virtues. He seems to have been searching for a Christian brotherhood that would unite all the people in a spiritual Church. This is what he thought he had found at Optina and in the idea of the 'Russian soul'.

Gogol's fiction was the arena of this spiritual search. Contrary to the view of many scholars, there was no real divide between the 'literary works' of Gogol's early period and the 'religious works' of his final years, although he did reveal a more explicit interest in religious issues later on. All Gogol's writings have a theological significance - they were indeed the first in a national tradition that granted fiction the status of religious prophecy. Many of his stories are best read as religious allegories. Their grotesque and fantastic figures are not intended to be realistic - any more than icons aim to show the natural world. They are designed to let us contemplate another world where good and evil battle for man's soul. In Gogol's early stories this religious symbolism is embedded in biblical motifs and sometimes quite obscure religious metaphors. 'The Overcoat', for example, has echoes of the life of St Acacius - a hermit (and tailor) who died after years of torment by his elder, who later repented of his cruelty. This explains the hero's name, Akaky Akakievich - a humble civil servant of St Petersburg who dies unloved, robbed of his precious overcoat, but who then returns to haunt the city as a ghost.²⁸ After the 'failure' of The Government Inspector (1836) - a play intended as a moral

parable but which the public look as a hilarious satire - Gogol sought

to drive his religious message home. The work to which he then devoted all his energies was envisaged as a three-part novel called Dead Souls - an epic 'poem' in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy -in which the providential plan for Russia was at last to be revealed. The grotesque imperfections of provincial Russia exposed in the first, and only finished (1842) volume of the novel - where the adventurer Chichikov travels through the countryside swindling a series of moribund squires out of the legal title to their deceased serfs (or 'souls') -were to be negated by Gogol's lofty portrait of the 'living Russian soul' which he was intending for the second and third parts. Even the roguish Chichikov would eventually be saved, ending up as a paternal landowner, as Gogol moved towards the Slavic idyll of Christian love and brotherhood. The whole conception of the 'poem' was Russia's resurrection and its spiritual ascent on an 'infinite ladder of human perfection' - a metaphor he took from the parable of Jacob's ladder in the Book of Genesis.²⁹

Gogol's divine vision was inspired by his champions, the Slavophiles, whose fantasy of Russia as a holy union of Christian souls was naturally attractive to a writer so disturbed by the soulless individualism of modern society. The Slavophile idea was rooted in the notion of the Russian Church as a free community of Christian brotherhood - a sobornost' (from the Russian word 'sobor' which was used for both 'cathedral' and 'assembly') - as outlined by the theologian Aleksei Khomiakov in the 1830s and 1840s. Khomiakov came to his conception from a mystical theology. Faith could not be proved by reasoning, he said. It had to be arrived at by experience, by feeling from within the Truth of Christ, not by laws and dogmas. The True Church could not persuade or force men to believe, for it had no authority except the love of Christ. As a freely chosen community, it existed in the spirit of Christian love that bound the faithful to the Church - and this spirit was its only guarantee.

The Slavophiles believed that the True Church was the Russian one. Unlike the Western churches, which enforced their authority through laws and statist hierarchies like the Papacy, Russian Orthodoxy, as they saw it, was a truly spiritual community, whose only head was Christ. To be sure, the Slavophiles were critical of the established Church, which in their view had been spiritually weakened by its close

alliance with the Tsarist state. They espoused a social Church, some would say a socialistic one, and many of their writings on religion were banned as a result (Khomiakov's theological writings were not published until 1879).³⁰ The Slavophiles were firm believers in the liberation of the serfs: for only the communion of fully free and conscious individuals could create the sobornost' of the True Church. They placed their faith in the Christian spirit of the Russian people, and this was the spirit which defined their Church. The Slavophiles believed that the Russian people were the only truly Christian people in the world. They pointed to the peasantry's communal way of life ('a Christian union of love and brotherhood'), to their peaceful, gentle nature and humility, to their immense patience and suffering, and to their willingness to sacrifice their individual egos for a higher moral good - be that for the commune, the nation or the Tsar. With all these Christian qualities, the Russians were far more than a nationality -they bore a divine mission in the world. In the words of Aksakov, 'the Russian people is not just a people, it is a humanity'.³¹

Here was the vision of the 'Russian soul' - of a universal spirit that would save the Christian world - which Gogol tried to picture in the second and third volumes of Dead Souls. The concept of a national soul or essence was commonplace in the Romantic age, though Gogol was the first to give the 'Russian soul' this messianic turn. The lead came from Germany, where Romantics like Friedrich Schelling developed the idea of a national spirit as a means to distinguish their own national culture from that of the West. In the 1820s Schelling had a godlike status in Russia, and his concept of the soul was seized upon by intellectuals who sought to contrast Russia with Europe. Prince Odoevsky, the archpriest of the Schelling cult in Russia, argued that the West had sold its soul to the Devil in the pursuit of material progress. 'Your soul has turned into a steam engine', he wrote in his novel Russian Nights (1844); 'I see screws and wheels in you but I don't see life.' Only Russia, with her youthful spirit, could save Europe now.¹² It stands to reason that young nations like Germany and Russia that lagged behind the industrializing West would have recourse to the idea of a national soul. What such nations lacked in economic progress they could more than make up for in the spiritual virtues of the unspoilt countryside. Nationalists attributed a creative spontaneity

and fraternity to the simple peasantry that had long been lost in the bourgeois culture of the West. This was the vague Romantic sense in which the idea of the Russian soul began to develop from the final decades of the eighteenth century. In his essay 'On the Innate Qualities of the Russian Soul' (1792), Pyotr Plavilshikov maintained, for example, that in its peasantry Russia had a natural creativity that had more potential than the science of the West. Carried away by national pride, the playwright even claimed some unlikely firsts:

One of our peasants has made a tincture which all the learning of Hippocrates and Galen failed to find. The bone setter of the village Alekseevo is famous among pioneers of surgery. Kulibin and the mechanic Sobakin from Tver are marvels in mechanics… What the Russian cannot grasp will for ever be unknown to men.³³*

After the triumph of 1812 the idea of the peasant's soul, of his selfless virtue and self-sacrifice, began to be linked to the notion of Russia as the saviour of the West. This was the mission that Gogol first developed in Dead Souls. In his earlier story 'Taras Bulba' (1835) Gogol had attributed to the Russian soul a special kind of love that only Russians felt. 'There are no bonds more sacred than those of comradeship!' Taras Bulba tells his fellow Cossacks:

The father loves his child, the mother loves her child, a child loves its mother and father. But this is not the same, my brothers; a beast also loves its young. But the kinship of the spirit, rather than the blood, is something only known to man. Men have been comrades in other lands too, but there have never been comrades such as those in the Russian land… No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves - that does not mean to love with the head or with

some other part of you, it means to love with everything that God has given you.³⁴

* Such claims were often made by Russian nationalists. In the 1900s, when a practical joker let loose a report that an old Russian peasant had flown several kilometres on a homemade aeroplane, this was taken as a proof that the patriarchal system of Russia was not only better than the West's -it was cleverer as well (B. Pares, Russia (Harmonds-worth, 1942), p. 75).

The closer Gogol came to the Slavophiles, the more convinced he was that this Christian brotherhood was Russia's unique message to the world. Here was the providential plan for the 'Russian soul' which Gogol hinted at in the unforgettable troika passage at the end of the first volume of Dead Souls:

Is it not like that that you, too, Russia, are speeding along like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake? The road is like a cloud of smoke under you, the bridges thunder, and everything falls back and is left far behind. The spectator stops dead, struck dumb by the divine miracle: it is not a flash of lightning thrown down by heaven. What is the meaning of this terrifying motion? And what mysterious force is hidden in these horses the like of which the world has never seen? Oh horses, horses - what horses! Are whirl winds hidden in your manes? Is there some sensitive ear, alert to every sound, concealed in your veins? They have caught the sound of the familiar song from above, and at once they strain their chests of brass and barely touching the ground with their hoofs are transformed almost into straight lines, flying through the air, and the troika rushes on full of divine inspiration. Russia, where are you flying to? Answer! She gives no answer. The bells fill the air with their wonderful tinkling; the air is torn asunder, it thunders and is transformed into wind; everything on earth is flying past, and, looking askance, other nations and states draw aside and make way for her.³⁵

The 'Russian principle' of Christian love, to be revealed by Gogol in the second and third volumes, would save humanity from the selfish individualism of the West. As Herzen put it after reading Gogol's novel, 'in potentia there is a great deal in the Russian soul'.³⁶

The longer Gogol worked on his novel, the greater was his sense of a divine mission to reveal the sacred truth of the 'Russian soul'. 'God only grant me the strength to finish and publish the second volume', he wrote to the poet Nikolai Yazykov in 1846. 'Then they will discover that we Russians have much that they never even guessed about, and that we ourselves do not want to recognize.'³⁷ Gogol looked for inspiration to the monasteries - the place where he believed this hidden Russian spirit was to be revealed. What he most admired in the hermits of Optina was their apparent ability to master their own passions and cleanse their souls of sin. It was in such discipline that he saw the

solution to Russia's spiritual malaise. Once again it was the Slavophiles who pointed Gogol towards Optina. Kireevsky had been there many times to see Father Makary in the 1840s, when the two men had brought out a life of Father Paissy and translated the works of the Church Fathers from the Greek.³⁸ Like all the Slavophiles who followed him, Kireevsky believed that the hermits of Optina were the true embodiment of Orthodoxy's ancient spiritual traditions, the one place where the 'Russian soul' was most alive, and by the time Gogol returned to Moscow from abroad, its salons were all filled with Optina devotees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mentor at Optina, could not endorse Selected Passages. The elder thought that Gogol had not understood the need for humility. He had set himself up as a prophet and had prayed with all the fervour of a fanatic, but, without the truth or inspiration of the Holy Ghost, that was 'not enough for religion'. 'If a lamp is to shine', he wrote to Gogol in September 1851, 'it is not enough that its glass merely be washed clean: its candle must be lit within.'⁴⁵ Nor could Makary agree with the writer's social quietism. For the calling of his monastery was to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Makary's criticisms were a crushing blow for Gogol, all the more so since he must have realized that they were fair: he did not feel that divine inspiration in his soul. As soon as he received Makary's letter Gogol broke off all relations with Optina. He saw that he had failed in his divine calling as a writer-prophet. He felt himself unworthy before God and began to starve himself to death. Instructing his servant to burn the manuscript of his unfinished novel, he took to his deathbed. The last words he uttered as he died, aged forty-three, on 24 February 1852, were, 'Bring me a ladder. Quickly, a ladder!'⁴⁶