In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter One Preamble to the Afterlife NIKOLAI GOGOL’S AUTHORIAL CAREER coincided with a period of seismic change in Russian literature. By the late 1820s, when Gogol left his home in provincial Ukraine to seek his fortune in the capital of St. Petersburg, the cultural arrangements that had underpinned the Golden Age of Russian poetry had already begun to shift.1 Since the end of the eighteenth century, literary activity had been anchored in a network of familiar associations cultivated by literary circles like Arzamas and the Lovers of Wisdom as well as in the aristocratic salons of Aleksandra Smirnova-Rosset and the Aksakov family—to name just two that would eventually welcome Gogol.2 These associations formed the center of Russia ’s polite society, which prized a diverse conversational repertoire, a theatrical flair for role-playing, and the promotion of social harmony through civility of manners and the judgment of taste. In their writings, gentlemenand gentlewomen-poets drew on the grace and wit of salon conversation; no less did they strive to match the eclectic amplitude of its characteristic topics and moods. Members of polite society recognized each other as equals and their poems spun intimate webs of shared vocabulary, symbols, and allusions . The general atmosphere of sociability, not to mention particular close friendships, infused creative work with a collaborative spirit that sometimes blurred the distinctions among author, critic, and audience. In this way various familiar associations sought to achieve two common goals: to fashion public opinion and to nurture literary talent. Two forces combined to impair polite society’s literary activities. First, Tsar Nicholas’s harsh reprisals against the Decembrists, whose plans for a constitutional monarchy and armed uprising had gestated in the salons, forever changed the profile of Russian literature and its institutional possibilities .3 After the failed revolt in December 1825, aristocratic literary circles lost some of their most favored minds and brightest personalities to execution and exile, among them Aleksandr Bestuzhev, Wilhelm Kiukhel’beker, and Kondratii Ryleev. For the sympathizers who survived the scourge and retained the permission to write, a new censorship code encumbered their activities.4 Beyond these immediate consequences, the cultural elite gener15 ally soured toward the state under Nicholas’s regime. Government service had previously formed a locus of intellectual community and provided a living wage for young men who remained amateur writers; the core members of the Lovers of Wisdom, for example, held appointments together in the archives of the Foreign Ministry. Pushkin’s unhappy career as a gentleman of the bedchamber in Nicholas’s court eloquently illustrated that service to the state—once seen as an activity both socially useful and culturally productive —had now become a restrictive form of bureaucratic discipline. The second force to undermine the dominance of familiar associations over cultural life was the rise of literary commerce. The book trade had already established itself as a profitable enterprise among the lower and middle estates of the Russian empire. Whether from stalls at urban markets or itinerant peddlers in the provinces, low- and middlebrow readers bought chapbooks, loose adaptations of foreign novels, fortune-telling guidebooks, and captioned block prints called lubki. The association of the book trade with such dubious literary achievements caused many members of polite society to balk at the idea of literary commerce, considering it a contradiction in terms. An incipient professionalism was not unknown in these circles , however: Pushkin had earned considerable sums from the sale of his Southern poems, and the almanacs of the 1820s provided their editors— and sometimes their contributors—with modest remuneration. Nevertheless , as the commercial failure of Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava augured in 1829, these semiprofessional undertakings would prove inadequate to the demands of a changing literary environment. A rift had opened between the established social and artistic values of polite society and the demands of a growing reading public. With the exigencies of literary commerce encroaching on the artistic life of polite society, Russian writers faced the need to shape diverse and often contradictory institutional models into a coherent profession of letters . The literary environment that coalesced at this time brought with it fresh creative opportunities. As the market expanded, so did venues of publication —books, journals, newspapers—which in turn enabled the development of new literary forms, particularly longer narrative genres like the novel. Through the medium of the printed word, writers could hope to disseminate their own social and aesthetic values to a broader audience and so extend their influence over public opinion...

Share