Spiritualization of Power and Service in Late Gogol: Motive Sources
Authors:   Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow, Russian Federation), Ivanitskiy Alexander I. 
Published: December 2020

In his report at the Lotman Readings at the Russian State University for the Humanities (2019), M. Velizhev showed that the testament that opens Gogol’s Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’yami [Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, 1847] bears signs of a notarial will. This reflects the counter spiritualization of the power and service in Correpondence, so its motivation that can clarify the logic of Gogol’s artistic evolution. All power positions in Gogol’s book are sacred, being created by the “government foresight” inspired by heaven. Consequently, Lord signifies Himself in the authority ladder. Therefore, the semantic elevation of love to God follows the same hierarchy of the civil service – to the monarch who transfers it to God. This makes the service hierarchy the main target of the human enemy who invades the world in the form of a doppelganger-official, eroding the meanings of administrative positions and replacing the “divine service” ladder with an antipode doublet. Gogol’s equations of “sacra” and service caused his movement to St. Petersburg (1828), equally alien to the traditional culture of both Little Russia and Russia. In this alienness, Gogol, who preserved the folklore worldview, saw the same daemonic trickery as in Dykanka. It appears as a general hoax in the finale of Nevsky Prospekt, and gets apocalyptic proportions in the first edition of The Portrait. However, in the capital of the empire, which includes the church in itself, Gogol tied the religious principle to the imperial one, which split the meaning of the Petersburg power into “heavenly” and daemonic. The consistent implementation of these meanings forms the plot of The Inspector General – with the visits of Khlestakov and the real inspector. In letters to S.T. Aksakov (1844), to N.F. (1849) Gogol endowed the devil with Khlestakov’s characteristics on the one hand, and on the other, explained the gossip about Khlestakov – “inspector” as the devil’s trick. Khlestakov’s chimericity is noted by Khlestakov’s servant Osip (“a general, only the other way round) and Shpekin (“He’s neither one thing nor another. The devil knows what he is”). Khlestakov not only confirms it, introducing himself as the author of “another ‘Yuri Miloslavsky’”, but in drunken boast endows a demonic background (“I am everywhere, everywhere!”). The Governor translates it from the subtext into the text, congratulating his wife, “. . . to marry into a family of such a devil.” The capital he personifies is also illusory, being a “black hole” in Osip’s praises. The real auditor presents Petersburg as a source of just imperious punishment, which the “silent scene” endows with the symbols of the Last Judgment, since in the Governor’s appeal to the public (“You are laughing at yourself, oh you!”) the bureaucratic vices can be interpreted as panhuman. In Razvyazka “Revizora” [The Resolution of The Government Inspector. 1846], the state is shown equal to the human soul, where officials are “passions”; Inspector is conscience “at death’s door”; Khlestakov is a “secular conscience” with which a person conforms every day. A person equal to the world carries within himself the potentials of all vices, and the death of the soul marks the death of the world. In Correspondence Gogol endowed himself with such a universal “I” creating the potential for spiritual crisis. The inexplicable divergence of Russian reality with the ideal appeared to him as the death of his soul, and with it – of the great world equal to it.