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

Chapter Two Opus Posthumous GOGOL FIRST ENTERTAINED the idea of addressing his audience in a new voice in 1845, when, frustrated with his attempts to complete the second volume of Dead Souls, he thought to write a “small work, without a striking title by the standards of today’s society, but useful to many” (12:472–73). Illness prevented him from carrying out his plan immediately , but by the middle of 1846 he had become convinced that a collection of extracts from his personal letters would prove beneficial to his readers. Gogol’s friends and associates knew that the future of his novel had become implicated in a course of religious discipline and spiritual enlightenment . Notwithstanding occasional rumors that filtered back to artistic circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow, however, the reading public as a whole had yet to learn of this latest stage in the development of Gogol’s authorial vocation. A peculiar urgency marked his work on the project: after years of delays connected with the second volume of Dead Souls, he compiled the manuscript of his new book in not much more than five months. During the summer and fall of 1846, he sent installments of the text to his friend Petr Pletnev, along with instructions for its publication. Despite Pletnev’s valiant efforts—including an appeal to the tsarevich, the future Alexander II—five of the original thirty-two letters fell to the censor’s knife, and many of the remaining twenty-seven required excisions and emendations . Thus mutilated, on 31 December 1846 Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends came hobbling into the public eye. Here was a bizarre and unforeseen work from the author of Mirgorod , The Inspector General, and Dead Souls. As Gogol explained it in the foreword, a near-death experience had moved him to write a last will and testament in which he exhorted friends to publish selections from his personal letters upon his death. Having recovered by the grace of God, he now resolved to undertake the task himself. From those of my most recent letters I have managed to retrieve I am myself selecting everything that most relates to questions now occupying society, having omitted everything that could acquire meaning only after my death and excepting everything that could have significance only for a few. 34 I am adding two or three literary articles and, finally, I am appending the last will and testament itself, so that in case of my death . . . it should immediately obtain legal force, having been witnessed by all my readers. (8:215–16) What possible motives could Gogol have had for publishing his last will and testament? Surely there was no legal reason for it to be witnessed by all his readers. And on what topics did he feel compelled to expatiate before the public? A few literary articles seemed natural enough, but Selected Passages also contained letters on customary religious themes that veered in tone from humble confessions to overbearing sermons: “The Significance of Illnesses ,” “On Helping the Poor,” “The Christian Goes Forward,” “Enlightenment ,” “Whose Lot on Earth Is Higher,” and “Easter Sunday.” To this spiritual instruction Gogol added his views on society and its institutions, including landowners and socialites, the church and the village courts. Confusing matters further, the collection was not quite what Gogol claimed it to be. We have good cause to believe that he wrote some “excerpts” exclusively for Selected Passages, and that the letters which did derive from his actual correspondence were in certain cases substantially reworked for publication .1 No less significant, Gogol took great care in planning the book, which in its original design maps the trajectory of a spiritual transfiguration, from death through enlightenment to resurrection.2 What attitude, then, should a reader strike toward Selected Passages? Should its ideas be taken at face value, or rather as allegories to be read figuratively within the context of the book’s overall design?3 What distances, if any, separate its narrator, implied author, and author?4 Hindsight permits us to broach such questions critically, but Gogol’s contemporaries had no reason to doubt the sincerity of the foreword; this was not the rollicking voice of a Rudyi Pan’ko, after all. So forthright was the identification of the biographical author with the book that its literary qualities were necessarily obscured . “I ask [my readers],” Gogol wrote, “not to nurture concealed anger against me, but instead nobly to expose all the shortcomings they may find in the book...

Share