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Conclusion THE SOVIET MONUMENT to Gogol did not spell the end of his afterlife any more than it arrested the evolution of the classics in Russia. It does, however, mark the culmination of several underlying themes in these twin stories and so provides an occasion ripe for some closing remarks. This book has shown that the classic represents a sociocultural status affirmed through conventions of reading, habits of mind, and forms of symbolic expression that are themselves achieved and sustained by discrete institutional structures and cultural practices. The classic’s authority originates within the domain of literature but ultimately resonates well beyond its borders in society at large. As the story of Gogol’s afterlife suggests, this extension has both quantitative and qualitative aspects. First, Gogol’s audience multiplied to embrace readers who stood at a significant social distance from the writers and critics who defined the literary profession. In this more diverse social and cultural milieu, Gogol served not as an exemplar of literary craftsmanship but as a bearer of a civic discourse and a role model for civic behavior. Partly in order to reach a broader audience, his life and work took on nonliterary forms: musical, pictorial, and—not least of all—sculptural. The Soviet monument to Gogol crystallizes both these ideological and formal elaborations of his art and symbolizes the significant degree to which the classic is, in one scholar’s apt formulation, “literature that has left the book.”1 As Gogol’s social and cultural authority grew, he inevitably became an object of ideological competition. The wrangle began during Gogol’s lifetime with the publication of Arabesques and Mirgorod and continued through the appearance of The Inspector General, Dead Souls, and, most acutely, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Taking a cue from Gogol’s own preoccupation with Russia, critics like Vissarion Belinsky and Konstantin Aksakov placed his thematic and symbolic treatment of national identity at the center of the debate about the future of Russian society . The Great Reforms made these debates less abstract—less a matter of drawing room conjecture—and thus raised the stakes of the competition. 162 As the size of the Russian reading public increased, the educated classes envisioned Gogol and his fellow classics as the foundation for a new national identity that could vie with the official nationality of the tsarist regime. The liberal intelligentsia enjoyed a substantial measure of success in this enterprise toward the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, as the appearance of Nikolai Tikhonravov’s tenth edition of Gogol’s works and the reaction to the centennial celebration demonstrate, members of the intelligentsia regarded their own success with a certain ambivalence. It gradually became clear that the broad dissemination of the classics and their penetration into the mass cultural consciousness of Russia threatened the intelligentsia’s command over this important literary legacy. In the end, however, it was not the dilution of the intelligentsia’s influence by the mass reading public, but the monopolization of cultural institutions by the Soviet state that formed the most potent threat. Certainly the Soviet monument to Gogol marks a nadir in the liberal intelligentsia’s ongoing effort to claim the authority of the classics as its own. The inscription on the pedestal and the bust’s resemblance to the Great Leader left no doubt about the state’s intention to co-opt Gogol’s literary legacy. Ironically, this arrangement may have provided the intelligentsia with a certain competitive advantage when the dissident movement took shape after Stalin’s death. In official culture, the Communist Party continued to fashion the exemplary writers in its own image; a current of authority still coursed back and forth between the charismatic figure of the classic author and the imposing might of the postwar superpower. And yet, this very concentration of authority provided an easy target for the dissident intelligentsia. Competition over the classics took the form of a simple binary opposition in which every gesture of the state could be defused by a reversal or inversion. Take, for example, an episode described by Andrei Sinyavsky in his history of Soviet civilization: At his trial, when Pavel Litvinov, grandson of the renowned diplomat, raised to be a Communist, was asked who had influenced him, he said: “The Russian classics.” The judge was amazed: “How? In what way? Can the Russian classics really teach dissidence?” Yes. Providing one reads [them] not just with one’s eyes but with one’s heart and receives these books as...

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