Pushkin's "Fountain," as distinct from Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets (or Lermontov's Hero of Our Time), has a balanced structure and a plot free from morbidity or melodrama. His picture of the captive Polish maiden at the court of the Tatar khan in Bakhchisarai inspired one of the most popular ballets of the Stalin era, and became, through the magic of Galina Ulanova's characterization, a suggestive symbol of a European heritage in bondage to despotic, quasi-Oriental rule.
Pushkin remained essentially a classical European even while staying inside Russia and visiting no more than the periphery of the classical world. Gogol and Ivanov, on the other hand, became profoundly and selfconsciously Russian even while leaving their native land and journeying to the very heart of classical culture: to Rome, the artistic and religious capital of the Western world. A Russian colony had assembled there around Zinaida Volkonsky. She had brought with her a rich art collection and memories of her intimate friendship with Alexander I and the poet Venevitinov. She seems to have viewed herself as a kind of Russian Joan of Arc-having written, and sung the title role in, an opera of that name.99 It was in Rome, in the shadow of the Volkonsky villa, that Gogol and Ivanov were to create their greatest masterpieces.
The two artists brought to their new home a profound conviction that their work must in some way exemplify Russia's redemptive spiritual mission in the world. They sought, as it were, to provide the artistic guides and weapons for the "spiritual conquest of Europe" that the prophets of the
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thirties were predicting for Russia. Gogol had a special sense of responsibility born of the feeling that he had succeeded Pushkin as the first man of Russian letters. Ivanov felt a similar sense of special responsibility as the son of the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.
Each man devoted his life to one great work which was never really completed. Each became more politically conservative toward the end of his life (as did many of the Slavophiles), believing that Nicholas I and the existing powers could alone bring about a new order. Most important-and fateful for the subsequent history of Russian creative art-each came to believe that aesthetic problems should be subordinated to moral and religious ones. Each remained unmarried and apparently unmoved by women. Each life ended in strange wanderings, partial mental derangement, and a death that was unnecessary and-like that of Venevitinov, Pushkin, and Lermontov before them-brought on by their own actions. Unlike these earlier poets, however, the new prophetic artists included in their wanderings the idea of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and ascetic self-mortification.
Their work was-as they had wished it to be-uniquely Russian and quite unlike anything else in the world of art. By commanding the fascinated attention of Russia in their last years, they helped excite others with their blend of stark realism and aesthetic moralism. They swept aside not only the conventions of classicism but the sentimentality of romanticism as well. Despite their final conservatism, these two figures were idolized by radical and disaffected intellectuals who helped invest their anguish with an aura of holiness that had previously been confined to saints and princes.
The main point about Gogol's advent into Russia is that Russia was, or at least appeared to be, a "monumental," "majestic," "great power," yet Gogol walked over these real or imaginary "monuments" with his thin weak feet and crushed them all, so that not a trace of them remained.100
Gogol was the first of those original Russian prose writers whose work requires analysis from a religious and psychological as well as a literary point of view. He shared the sense of loneliness and introspection that had been characteristic of many fellow Ukrainians from Skovoroda to Shev-chenko. Yet both the form and content of his work is deeply Russian. His early career is at least superficially typical of the romanticism of the twenties and thirties: beginning with weak, sentimental poetry on German pastoral themes, followed by an abortive attempt to flee to America, vivid stories about his native Ukraine (Mirgorod), Hoffmannesque sketches about St. Petersburg and the meaning of art (Arabesques), and a brief career as teacher and writer of history. His early career culminated in 1836 in the satirical play the Inspector General; and his last great work, Dea4„$puls,
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appeared six years later in the familiar romantic form of observations during a voyage through the countryside.
The triumphal appearance of the Inspector General in the same year as that of Glinka's Life for the Tsar and Briullov's "Last Days of Pompeii" marks a kind of watershed in the history of Russian art. The three works were hailed as harbingers of a new national art capable of engaging dramatically a broader audience than that of any previous Russian art. Yet Gogol's work with its "laughter through invisible tears" at the bureaucratic pretense of Nicholaevan Russia was far different in tone from the heroic theatricality of the other two. The contrast is made even more striking by the divergent pattern of Gogol's subsequent personal career. For, whereas Briullov accepted imperial patronage and Glinka became Kappelmeister to Nicholas I, Gogol left Russia altogether in the wake of his great success. He was driven by a strange inner compulsion to pronounce through art what others were expressing through philosophy and history: a new word of redemptive hope for Russia and all humanity.
After visiting Paris, which he found even more vulgar and venal than St. Petersburg, Gogol settled in Rome and set forth on his effort to rise above the negativism of the Inspector General with a trilogy to serve as a Russian Divine Comedy. His sense of mission was intensified by the death of Pushkin in 1837, and his fame increased by the successful appearance in 1842 of The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, the first part of his great work. Yet in the remaining ten years of his life, Gogol was unable to make further progress on his project. Dead Souls remains, like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, the glorious first part of an uncompleted trilogy. Other Slavic exiles in Italy were also trying to write a new Divine Comedy. Juliusz Slowacki's Poem of Piast Dantyszek about Hell was a Polish Inferno; but whereas Slowacki went on to provide a Paradiso in a poetic "rhapsody" King Spirit, and Krasinski finished his Undivine Comedy, Gogol's terrifying honesty never permitted him to go beyond the Inferno of Dead Souls. Unlike his Polish contemporaries-and indeed most popular patriotic literature of the day-Gogol was not seduced by idealistic and nationalistic appeals. He could only sweep the stage clean without providing any positive answers.
In Dead Souls (as in another of his unforgettable pictures of provincial pettiness, "How the Two Ivans Quarreled") Gogol borrowed in part from an earlier picaresque writer from the same section of the Ukraine, Vasily Narezhny. The satirical style and vivid tableaux of Dead Souls are often reminiscent of Narezhny's Russian Gil Bias. But just as Gogol distorts the name of Narezhny's hero (Chistiakov) in the direction of caricature (Chichikov), so he transforms the image of a picaresque hero from a