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Frederick T Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz The Death of Gogolian Polyphony: Selected Comments on Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends IN 1842 GOGOL' S Dead Souls left off with the portentous question, Whither Rus'? After five years of failing to offer a suitably monumental answer, presumably the next two canticles of a Russian Divine Comedy, Gogol offered his impatient readership Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a preliminary, unfictionalized guide to the national destiny and to its literary corollary, Whither Gogol?l Among the beneficiaries of this epistolary advice-landowners, the clergy, wives of provincial governors -stand the Russian authors, Gogol chief among them. Over half the text concerns itself with literature and mounts the argument that Gogol's own failure to continue derives from Russia's failure to realize her own identity and find her own language. Gogol ends, in the chapter "Easter Sunday," awaiting a solution from above. That solution, argues Mikhail Bakhtin in his essay "Epic and Novel," was something that Gogol had already found and lost, though it was not from above: he got caught between his real "novelistic " gifts-rude, satiric, polyphonic-and a paralyzing aspiration toward the other generative principle of literary creation, the "epic," which entails cultural exclusiveness, authoritarianism, and absolute voice. Dead Souls succeeded because Gogol's lively, perverse imagination and sharp ear thwarted the high, dull intentions with which he began the project: "The form of his epic Gogol modeled on the Divine Comedy; it was in this form that he imagined the greatness of his work lay. But what in fact emerged was Menippean satire. Once having entered the zone of familiar contact he was unable to leave it, and he was unable to transfer into this sphere distanced and positive images. "2 That is, what had been planned as a 158 The Death of Gogolian Polyphony deadly cultural monolith, Russia's great book, turned into the earthy, engaging satire that gave the Russian novel a firm and unlikely start. But Gogol's "epic" intentions kept him from being heir to that legacy when he tried to write his sequel: "Gogol could not manage the move from Hell to Purgatory and then to Paradise with the same people and in the same work; no continuous transition was possible." Caught between"epic" flights and the rude, close view of the lowly, Gogol "lost Russia ... he could not find the proper focus on his binoculars.''3 Bakhtin's category of the "epic" stands in a troublesome relationship to Homer and his influential followers. As written, Dante's Commedia serves better as a triumph of the "novelistic" tendency, for here the central tradition gets both sullied and extended by the interanimation of Latin and the vernaculars, the confrontation of the high style (Virgil and scripture) with native satire, and the multivoiced ventriloquisms of a literary hybrid-almost an oxymoronautobiographical epic. Yet Bakhtin's "epic," that flat, oppressive thing imposed on schoolchildren-a creation of translation, veneration , and cultural conservatism-is just as clearly an operative category in Gogol's thinking and perhaps the source of all his woe. For Selected Passages is itself a meditation on his unreachable Dantesque empyrean. With its Preface, Selected Passages has thirty-three parts and begins and ends with the theme of pilgrimage toward which part 2 of Dead Souls moves. In his last letter, "Easter Sunday," Gogol unmistakably replicates Dante's own moment of emergence from the inferno. As strongly as in the Divine Comedy, national destiny is seen to hinge on individual redemption; conversely, human art may be forgiven its imperfections until the Second Coming perfects the world that it depicts. As in the Purgatorio and the uncompleted part 2 of Dead Souls, the artist becomes emblematic of the rhythms of salvation. Various artists (the starving engraver of "Testament," the painter Ivanov, Gogol himself, even the blind Homer) must suffer through to their reward. Gogol argues that delay itself can be formative , and we may be reminded of the souls learning patience on the ledges of the Mount Purgatory. Redemption comes from loss: The second part of Dead Souls was burned because it was necessary. "Lest the seed die, it will not live again," says the Apostle. It is first necessary to die in order to be resurrected.... Immediately after the flame had carried away the last pages of my book, its content suddenly was resurrected in a purified and lucid form, like the Phoenix from the pyre, and I suddenly saw in what disorder...

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