Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word

2. The Logos of Gogol

Introduction Gogolian text. What is clear is that the very best studies build compelling theories on the foundation of close reading and careful attention to the social and historical background. 2. THE LOGOS OF GOGOL A lot of nonsense does go on in the world ... but nonetheless. when you think about it, there is something in all this. -"The Nose" Scholars have taken both points of view-yes, GogoI's work is a lot of nonsense! some insist, while others have looked for what there might be in all this. The strange difficulties presented by GogoI's texts call into question the very nature ofinterpretation: have we just not discovered the right set of concerns, or is the attempt to do so totally inappropriate to the work? Both assumptions are represented in the present volume. The pro-nonsense party proposes several ways to interpret GogoI's troublesome text Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, while others believe that profound meaning may be uncovered in GogoI's texts if their language, imagery , and motif systems can be related to his philosophy, in which aesthetic and religious thought are continuous. The critical tradition established by Belinskii regards GogoI's later work as the product of a great writer whose religious fanaticism had turned him into a misguided would-be prophet; this interpretation was challenged by Konstantin Mochul'skii in 1934 in Gogol's Spiritual Path (Dukhovnyi put' Gogolia). Showing Gogol's religiosity to be the single most important aspect of his creative personality, MochuI'skii responds sympathetically to the crisis that led him to write Selected Passages. Certainly GogoI's view of the relationship among the writer, human existence, and God is central to any reading of his work. GogoI's logos is the focal subject of inquiry here. Logos has had a variety of meanings. In the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, the concept is associated with the division between a higher reality and the material world, a topos of Romantic thought present in GogoI's earliest writing. In Christian thought, in the New Testament, logos is the message of eternal life and truth, the Word of God, of which Christ is the personification. Christ at once reveals the existence of the Father and is himself the truth of the Father. It is clear from Gogol's voluminous correspondence that he expected his works to affect his Russian audience as the Revelation affected Christianity; Gogol saw his works, fictional or otherwise, as Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer the manifestation ofdivine truth. Short ofincarnation, how might the artist represent the unrepresentable? As John Kopper puts it in his essay, "GogoI's texts ask these questions, but more important, they are these questions." In this he comes close to Saul Morson's view of GogoI's texts as being about the hermeneutic process but rewarding it with their radical uninterpretability. The conference "The Logos of Gogol" set out to identifY systems of thought that define GogoI's sense of his literary mission and to formulate approaches to Gogol's work capable of accommodating new readings. One set of articles investigates Plato, the German Romantic philosophers, Russian cultural myth, and the aesthetics ofEnglish landscape designers, showing their specific contributions to individual works by Gogol. The essays are mutually illuminating, sharing points of contact in their discussion of GogoI's work as a deliberation on and reflection of the relationship between ideal beauty and its distorted reflection in the everyday and explicating GogoI's relationship to Platonic and Neoplatonic thought. The group of essays is unusual in taking seriously the degree to which Gogol consciously incorporated the important philosophical texts of his time into his apparently folksy or absurd fiction. The essays suggest that GogoI's texts are the very thing they are about-Arabesques is a "picturesque" garden, the mute scene in The Inspector General is itself an apocalypse, the Dikanka tales represent the limits of the knowable, Dead Souls is a duplication of Russia's boundlessness. Mikhail Weiskopf finds precise correspondence between Plato's images and Gogol's: the famous cave metaphor from Plato's Republic underlies "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich"; "the chariot of the soul" of the Phaedrus becomes the troika in Dead Souls. Weiskopf distinguishes the utopian Plato of the Republic from the Romantic Plato of the Timaeus and Phaedrus. The examination of the intricate resonance between the Phaedrus and GogoI's "Woman" is all the more convincing in that it is supported by the...