-
The Bird Troika and the Chariot of the Soul: Plato and Gogol
- Northwestern University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Mikhail Weiskopf The Bird Troika and the Chariot of the Soul: Plato and Gogol •THE PROBLEM of Platonism in Gogol's work has long attracted the attention of critics. The first to discuss it were, in the beginning of the century, Innokentii Annenskii and S. K. Shambinago; later V. Zenkovskii related Gogol's artistic types to Platonic ideas, and ten years ago, Jesse Zeldin raised the question of the Platonic nature of Gogolian aesthetics. l But what exactly does Platonism mean here? To what degree is Gogol's Platonism a question of his actual familiarity with Plato's texts, and how much of it is due to a passive adaptation of various Neoplatonic ideas of the Romantic period ? This problem can only be solved by a literary-historical and textual analysis. As long as the comparison of particular texts is replaced by a tempting but loose and unprovable use of metaphors, we are in danger of losing both the philosophical and literary-critical particulars of the subject completely. That is the case, for example, with the famous image of the cave in the seventh book of the Republic . Shambinago calls the world of the heroes of Marriage "the cave," and Zeldin uses the word to designate the sad landscape of Mirgorod and the landowners' Russia of Dead Souls. And this virtually exhausts the comparative analysis. It is not surprising that the direct proof of Gogol's Platonism is based on his early sketch "Woman," inasmuch as it contains an imagined dialogue between Plato and the youth Telecles. However, Gogol's Plato bears no relationship whatever to the real one, with the exception of vague references to the preexistence of the soul and equally vague hints at Plato's broad homosexual theme. Undoubtedly V. Gippius was closer to the truth when he said that "Woman" "arose out of Platonism as understood by the German philosophers," that is, from modernized Neoplatonism.2 But in Russia there was also another many-layered tradition of the reception of Plato, created both by classicism and by Russian 126 The Bird Troika and the Chariot of the Soul: Plato and Gogol Orthodox theology, itself deeply affected by Neoplatonic tendencies .3 The impressive result of this dual attention to Plato was an edition of his works undertaken in the 1780s by the priests Ioann Sidorovskii and Matvei Pakhomov. Furthermore, it was precisely the Neoplatonic aspects of Orthodoxy that assisted the rapid assimilation of theosophic doctrines by the Russian Masonic milieu at the end of the eighteenth and in the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries, when Plato, acclaimed by the Masons, blended unhindered into the receptive and kindred surroundings of "hermetic philosophy," which preached the search for hidden wisdom and the merging of the soul with the deity.4 In this system Plato was grouped with NeoGnostic writers like Jakob Boehme and Louis Claude de Saint Martin . As to the reflection of Platonism in Russian literature, in the eighteenth century it was for the most part limited to the social utopian themes of the Republic, mixed with the story of Atlantis from the Timaeus and Critias.·5 Such was the national substratum of the Russian "Lovers of Wisdom "-an alloy of Eastern theology and European mysticism-that, in its turn, prepared the ground for the assimilation of Schelling's Neoplatonizing philosophy.6 By the 1820s, according to N.K. Kozmin in his book on Nikolai Nadezhdin, thanks to Romanticism, literary interest in Plato "had entered a new stage of growth; politics were put aside ... ; the sensual world as the illusory reflection ofthe immortal world of ideas; poetic creation as an act ... of inspiration bordering on ecstasy ... -these are the points that attract the new literary theoreticians to ancient philosophy."" In other words, attention was now turned to the Ion, Phaedrus, and the image of the cave from the Republic. In the circles of the "Lovers of Wisdom," where the names of "dear Plato and Schelling"8 were confidently united and Romantic imitations of Platonic dialogues were written (by Venevitinov and others), the thought of a new translation of their favorite Greek philosopher often came up-probably a result of Cousin's infectious exampleY But it was not they who acquainted a broad readership with this new Plato. In 1826 Nikolai Polevoi published a retelling of Plato's metaphor of the cave under the title "Supreme Bliss" in the Moscow Telegraph. But a much more important role was evidently played by Nadezhdin, whose Romantic idealism was mixed with...