Selected places from friends

In Gogol’s letters of the early forties you can find hints of an event which, as he later says, “made a significant revolution in the work of creativity” of him. In the summer of 1840, he survived the disease, but rather not physical, but mental. Experiencing severe bouts of “nervous breakdown” and “painful anguish” and not hoping for recovery, he even wrote a testament. According to S.T. Aksakov , Gogol had "visions" about which he told N.P. Botkin, who was taking care of him at that time (brother of the critic V.P. Botkin ). Then came "resurrection", "miraculous healing", and Gogol believed that his life was "needed and will not be useless." A new path opened for him. “From here,” writes Aksakov, “Gogol’s constant desire to improve his spiritual man and the predominance of a religious trend begins, which later, in my opinion, has reached such a high mood that is no longer compatible with the human body shell” ^[1] .

Pavel Annenkov also testifies to the turning point in Gogol’s views: “A great mistake will be made by someone who mixes Gogol of the last period with the one who began life in Petersburg then and decides to apply moral traits developed to young Gogol much later, even then, as an important revolution in its existence took place. " The beginning of the “last period” of Gogol Annenkov dates back to the time when they lived together in Rome : “In the summer of 1841 , when I met Gogol, he stood at the turn of a new direction, belonging to two different worlds” ^[1] .

Gogol reported on the designation of “Selected Places” in a still indefinite form in a letter to A.O. Smirnova dated April 2, 1845 , expressing his intention to finish the planned work before leaving for Jerusalem : “This will be a small work and not noisy in name, in relation to to the present world, but necessary for many and which will give me in abundance the money needed for the journey. "

However, the disease and the oppressed state of mind associated with it did not give Gogol the opportunity to immediately begin work. More than a year later, in a letter to Nikolai Yazykov dated April 22, 1846, Gogol mentions “Selected Places” as a plan, which he is just starting to implement: “Try ... to let Ivan Aksakov read my letters written to you about the things that are coming up from us to the lyric poet about the poem “Earthquake” ... Speaking of these letters, you take care of them. As I reviewed everything that I wrote to different people lately, especially those who needed and demanded spiritual help from me, I see that this can be a book that is useful to people suffering in various fields ... I’ll try to publish it by adding something about literature . But for the time being it is between us ” ^[2] .

Gogol also mentions the "Selected Places" as a plan that occupies his imagination, but far before implementation, in a letter to Yazykov dated May 5, 1846.

The most stressful time of work on the book is summer and autumn of 1846 (almost half of the letters are dated this year). Gogol redid the letters (perhaps he saved some of them in draft copies, others were returned to him by correspondents) and writes new chapters. Some are articles, others are messages addressed to specific and certain generalized persons. Among the few initiates in the plan was Vasily Zhukovsky , to whom Gogol read the last two chapters.

“Selected places ...” are based on Gogol’s letters to real people and his friends (in total, the book consists of 31 letters). All recipients are indicated in the text by initials, most of which are easily deciphered. For example: “N. M. Ya-vu ”- to Yazykov; "BUT. O. S-oh ”- Smirnova-Rosset; "AT. A. Zh-mu ”- to Zhukovsky, etc.). While preparing the book, the author asked some recipients to return the letters in order to use them. Today it is not possible to find out if Gogol made editorial corrections to these letters, but most researchers are inclined to believe that such corrections took place.

When sending the first manuscript to Pletnev on Petersburg on July 30 ( n.a. ) in 1846, Gogol demands: “All your business aside, and go in for printing this book under the title:“ Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends “. It is needed, everyone needs it too — that is what I can say for the time being; the book itself will explain everything else to you ... "Gogol is so sure of success that he advises Pletnev to stock up paper for the second edition, which, in his conviction, will follow immediately:" ... this book will be sold more than all my previous works, because it is still since then my only sensible book ” ^[3] .

A very significant blow was dealt to the book by censorship : five letters-articles were excluded altogether, in others banknotes were made and some places were corrected. Alarmed and distressed, Gogol complains to Countess Anna Mikhailovna Vielgorskaya: “In this book, everything was calculated by me and the letters were placed in strict order to allow the reader to be gradually introduced into what is now wild and incomprehensible to him. The connection is broken. The book came out some kind of oglodysh ”(from a letter dated February 6 (n. Art.) Of 1847) ^[3] .

The censorship ordeal of Gogol’s new work was complicated by the fact that a number of chapters of “Selected Places” fell under the new rules for publishing secular “works and translations that contain spiritual objects, in whatever form they may be” ^[4] . The verdict issued by the spiritual censor was brief and disappointing. With a sweeping handwriting, thick ink across the hand-written Gogol sheets, he wrote: “It cannot be printed, because the concepts of the Russian Church and the clergy are embarrassing. Censor Archpriest Timothy Nikolsky . Oct 1st of 1846. " This review sounds especially sharply against the background of Gogol’s unshakable faith in the truth of the image he created of the Orthodox Russian clergy. In a letter to P. A. Pletnev dated October 16 (n.). 1846, Gogol wrote: “If it comes to spiritual censorship, then do not be afraid. Do not just do this in an official way, but call a spiritual censor to yourself and talk to him personally; he will miss <it> and rather, perhaps, what you think. My words about the church say the very thing that our church speaks about itself and in which each of our spirituals agrees to the one ” ^[4] .

Peter Pletnev, who was engaged in the publication of Selected Places, reacted instantly to the “verdict” of spiritual censorship. October 1, 1846, that is, on the same day when Prot. Timofei Nikolsky put his prohibitive painting on the Gogol manuscript, he wrote a letter to the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Count Protasov. Thanks to Pletnev’s appeal at the meeting of the Holy Synod on October 16/18, 1846, the following decision was made: “to entrust the St. Petersburg Committee of Spiritual Censorship with permission to print these [letters] with the amendments listed below, which are specifically indicated and sealed in the office The Holy Synod copies of those letters ” ^[4] .

As a sermon , Gogol’s book focuses primarily on the apostolic epistles, primarily the beloved holy apostle Paul , who “instructs and leads everyone on the direct road” (from Gogol’s letter to his sister Olga Vasilievna on January 20 (n.)) 1847 ^[5] ). Further, this tradition goes through the messages of the Holy Fathers ( Athanasius the Great , Basil the Great , Gregory of Nyssa ), well known to Gogol.

In the Gogol era, the tradition of church words lived in preaching literature, the most prominent representatives of which were Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and Archbishop Innocent of Kherson . Without a doubt, Gogol’s style was fed not only by books, but also by living sources - church sermons that he constantly heard.

The genre of confession has a no less profound tradition, which is represented in Western literature, in particular, by the classic works - “Confession” of St. Augustine and “Confession” by Rousseau . It is closely associated with the epistolary genre, which is very characteristic of Russia at the end of the XVIII - the first half of the XIX century. It is enough to recall the “Letters of a Russian traveler” by Nikolai Karamzin , the “Chronicle of the Russian” by Alexander Turgenev , the “Philosophical Letters” of Pyotr Chaadayev or the letters of Vasily Zhukovsky , including to Gogol himself. In the spiritual literature, this genre was represented by the remarkable work of Hieroschimonhos Sergius - “Letters from the Holy Mountaineer to his friends about the Holy Mountain of Athos”.

Sergei Aksakov noted the naturalness of the epistolary genre for Gogol. According to him, “Gogol is expressed completely in his letters; in this respect they are much more important than his printed works ” ^[5] .

Interesting remarks about the style of the book by Vladimir Nabokov : “The language of these messages of Gogol is almost parodic in his hypocritical intonation, but there are wonderful interruptions in them, when, for example, he uses strong and quite secular expressions, talking about the printing house that cheated him” ^{[6 ]} .

The February issue of the St. Petersburg magazine Finnish Herald already reported to readers: “Not a single book has recently excited such a noisy movement in literature and society, not a single one has given rise to such numerous and diverse rumors ...” ^[3] . A year later, Stepan Shevyrev in The Moskvityanin seemed to sum up his impression of conversations on the same occasion: “For two months after the publication of the book, she was a favorite, living subject of general discussion. There was no evening conversation in Moscow, of course, in those circles where thought and literature penetrate, wherever they talked about it, heated debates would not be heard, fragments from it would not be read ” ^[3] . Chaadaev wrote to Prince Vyazemsky :

You, you hear, are happy with Gogol’s book, but here, on the contrary, we are very unhappy with it. This, I think, comes from the fact that we were more than yours partial to the author. He tricked us a little, that's why we are angry with him. ... it seems to me that the most curious thing in this case was not Gogol himself, but the fact that he created him as he now appeared before us. How do you want, in our arrogant time, pompous with folk arrogance, the gifted writer, smoked with incense from head to toe, not be conceited, so that his head does not spin? It is simply not possible. <...> The shortcomings of Gogol’s book do not belong to him, but to those who extol him to madness, who bow before him, as before the highest manifestation of the original Russian mind, who expect from him some kind of transformation of the Russian word, which impose almost universal on him the significance that finally was imposed on him by that proud, non-native patriotism to which they themselves were infected, and thus gave him an insoluble task, the task of the impossible reconciliation of good and evil: its merits belong to him. Humility, as far as it is in his book, is the fruit of a new direction of the author; the pride manifested in him is inculcated in him by his friends.

After receiving from Vyazemsky a reprint of his article “Languages ​​- Gogol”, Chaadaev continued:

With some pages of the weak, and others and even sinful, in his book there are pages of amazing beauty, full of limitless truth, pages such that, reading them, you rejoice and are proud that you speak the language in which such things are spoken ... He finds me inexpressible sadness when I see all this anger that arose on our beloved writer, who brought us so many tearful joys, just because he stopped entertaining us and, with a sense of grief and conviction, confesses to us and tries, according to his strength, to tell us kind and instructive word. ... but it is impossible, however, to completely justify Gogol himself in him, especially with the spiritual aspiration that appears in his book. ... Do not believe the extent to which people in our land have changed since they clothed themselves with this national pride, unknown to our God-loving fathers. This is what struck me the most in Gogol’s book, and which you did not seem to notice.

- P. Ya. Chaadaev. Complete works and selected letters. T. 2 / Letters of P. Ya. Chaadayev ... - M., "Science", 1991

In a letter to Shevyrev, Vyazemsky said: “... our critics look at Gogol, as a gentleman would look at a serf, who in his house took the place of a storyteller and a comrade and suddenly ran away from the house and tonsured monks” ^[3] .

Among the people who responded positively to the publication of the book was Slavophil Ivan Aksakov : “There will still be a lot of time until all the deep and strict meaning of Gogol, this artist monk, Christian satirist, ascetic and humorist, this martyr of exalted thought and an unsolvable task is understood. ! ” ^[7] .

The famous religious writer Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote that the book “publishes both light and darkness. His religious concepts are vague, moving in the direction of the heart inspiration of the obscure, indistinct, spiritual, and not spiritual. He is a writer, and in a writer he certainly “speaks out of an excess of heart,” or: an essay is an indispensable confession of the writer, for the most part not understood by him, but understood only by such a Christian who was elevated by the Gospel to an abstract country of thoughts and feelings in it darkness Gogol’s book cannot be taken as a whole and for the pure verbs of Truth. There is a confusion; there are many wrong thoughts between many right thoughts. ” ^[8] .

The most violent and implacable critic of Gogol's book was Vissarion Belinsky . Soon after the book was published, he published a sharply negative review in the journal Sovremennik . In June 1847, Gogol responded to the article by personal letter.

I regretfully read your article about me in the second number of Sovremennik. Not because it was regrettable to me that the humiliation you wanted to put me in the mind of everyone, but because the voice of a man who is angry with me is heard in it. And I would not want to make even a person who did not love me angry, especially you, whom I always thought of as a man who loves me. I did not mean to upset you anywhere in my book. How did it happen that everybody in Russia became angry with me, for now I still can’t understand it myself. Eastern, western and neutral - all were upset. (...) You looked at my book through the eyes of an angry person and therefore almost everything took on a different look. Leave all the places that are still a mystery to many, if not all, and pay attention to those places that are accessible to any sensible and reasonable person, and you will see that you made a lot of mistakes ^[9] .

In July of the same year, Belinsky, who was undergoing treatment in the German Salzbrunn, wrote a very sharp open letter to Gogol.

... one cannot bear the offended sense of truth, human dignity; one cannot be silent when, under the cover of religion and the protection of the whip, lies and immorality are preached as truth and virtue. <...>

You deeply know Russia only as an artist, and not as a thinking person, whose role you so unsuccessfully assumed in your science fiction book. And this is not because you were not a thinking person, but because you have been accustomed for so many years to look at Russia from your beautiful far away , and after all it is known that there is nothing easier than from afar to see objects the way we want to see them ... <...>

Therefore, you did not notice that Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, humanity. She doesn’t need sermons (she heard enough of them!), Not prayers (she said them enough!), But an awakening among the people of a sense of human dignity, so many centuries lost in mud and dung, rights and laws that are consistent not with the teachings of the church, but with common sense and justice, and strict, if possible, their implementation. Instead, it is a terrible sight of a country where people trade in people, without even the excuse that the American planters slyly use, claiming that the Negro is not a man ... The most lively, modern national issues in Russia now: the destruction of serfdom , the abolition of corporal punishment, the introduction of the strictest possible implementation, although those laws that already exist. <...>

And at that time, the great writer who, with his wondrously artistic, deeply true creations, so powerfully contributed to the self-consciousness of Russia, giving her the opportunity to look at herself as if in a mirror, is with a book in which in the name of Christ and the church he teaches the barbarian landowner to make more money from the peasants, scolding them with unwashed snouts !. And that should not have made me indignant? Yes, if you would find an attempt on my life, and then I would no more hate you for these shameful lines ... A preacher of a whip, an apostle of ignorance, a champion of obscurantism and obscurantism, a panegyrist of Tatar morals - what are you doing? Take a look at your feet: you are standing above the abyss ... ^[9]

For two and a half decades, the “Letter to Gogol” could not be published in Russia and was secretly distributed only in manuscript lists. It was first printed by Herzen in London , in the Polar Star . It is curious that it was precisely for the distribution of the letter that Dostoevsky was sentenced to death. Ten years later, creating the novel “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” , Dostoevsky will derive the type of hypocrite and grumble of Thomas Opiskin in it. This character will often quote Gogol's book in his speech. For example, the following place: “Oh, do not put me a monument! - shouted Thomas, - do not put it to me! I don’t need monuments! In your hearts, erect a monument to me! And nothing else is needed, no need, no need! ”Is an allusion to Gogol’s words:“ I will not make any monument to me and not think of such a trifle, a Christian unworthy. ” To whom of mine I was really dear, he would erect a monument to me differently: he would erect it in himself ” ^[10] .

An interesting evolution of views on the last book of Gogol Leo Tolstoy . So in 1857 he wrote in his diary: “I read the letters received by Gogol. He just was a rubbish man. Awful rubbish ” ^[11] . In 1887, after reading “Selected Places”, Tolstoy wrote in a letter to P. I. Biryukov : “Lately Gogol’s correspondence with friends has occupied me very much. What an amazing thing! For 40 years it has been said, and it is perfectly said, that which literature should be. The vulgar people did not understand, and for 40 years our Pascal has been lying in the background ” ^[11] .

In the thirties of the 20th century, the theme of the writer's late work was reflected in the book of Gogol’s Spiritual Path by Konstantin Mochulsky .

In the moral field, Gogol was brilliantly gifted; he was destined to abruptly turn all Russian literature from aesthetics to religion, to move it from the path of Pushkin to the path of Dostoevsky. All the features characterizing the “great Russian literature” that became world literature were outlined by Gogol: her religious and moral system, her citizenship and publicity, her military and practical character, her prophetic pathos and messianism . From Gogol begins a wide road, world open spaces. Gogol's strength was so great that he managed to do the incredible: to turn the Pushkin era of our literature into an episode to which there is no return and cannot be ^[12] .

Russian philosopher and theologian Vasily Zenkovsky saw consistent criticism of the West in Selected Places.

Gogol ... felt ... the religious lies of the West, his illness, felt the tragic despair in Western life - not as a result of the exhaustion of his creative powers, but as a result of old sins and religious savagery. Gogol, if you like, calls Europe to repentance, but doesn’t read her departure — and in this respect he was and remains a “Westerner,” for he did not separate himself from the West and did not renounce it, but mourned and was terrified ^[13] .

The liberal tradition in criticizing Gogol’s correspondence is continued by Vladimir Nabokov .

Gogol became a preacher because he needed a chair with which he could explain the moral background of his work, and because a direct connection with readers seemed to him a natural manifestation of his magnetic power. Religion provided him with tonality and method. It is doubtful that she would give him anything else ^[6] .

Gogol’s book was touched upon in his lecture “The Shine and Poverty of Russian Literature”, read in 1982, by Sergei Dovlatov .

Gogol possessed a phenomenal artistic talent of a satirical orientation, possessed a total sense of humor that was not quite usual for a Russian writer, wrote the best novel in Russian - Dead Souls, then went deeper into the search for moral ideals, published his disgraced book Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends , in which he came to the justification of slavery, ruined the artist in himself and died a relatively old and absolutely crazy person ^[14] .

Literary critic Igor Zolotussky believes that the book “has not yet been read.”

Gogol cannot leave the reader cold. He has the right to reproach the author for the excess of words, about which Gogol said that he could not find a worthy expression for his thoughts. This, of course, is felt in "Selected Places." Sometimes they are edifying, moralizing, the author's voice breaks when he switches to pathos , but this is only in places. But in general - this is a book of the heart ^[15] .

• Выбранные места из переписки с друзьями
• Письмо Белинского к Гоголю