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GOGOL'S PALINODE
Zoltán Hajnády
Sažetak
In the last ten years of his life Gogol came to have insecurities and doubts about the social utility of literature and for this reason he turned from aesthetics to religious mysticism. This intellectual attitude led to a psychic split, a palinode, and turned the apostle against the genius, which resulted in the denial, renouncement and burning of his earlier writings. What made Gogol throw the second volume of Dead Souls into the flames? Petty, Herostratian motives could hardly have forced such a great spirit to make such a desperate move as to annihilate the sequel of his masterpiece, on which he worked for seventeen years altogether. The whole historical-metaphysical contents of the era and the communicative insufficiencyof the literary language could have played a part in it. The present study aims at deciphering the causes of this book-burning.
In his article Zoltán Hajnády gives an overview of the philosophy of art and religion, the pre- and post-text, which formed a background to the emergence of Gogol’s works, and in whose context they can be interpreted. He comes to the conclusion that Gogol was not satisfied by art anymore, he wanted infinity, the absolute. His crisis had not only aesthetic, but also metaphysical dimensions. He had believed that he would transmit the ultimate message to the world, but was forced to realise that literature is not a totality, not the absolute any more. He tried to condense the totality of life in his epic in vain: the scattered fragments would not form an organic whole. At this point he turned to religion, which still carried elements of universality in his conviction. It was for this reason that he wanted to exchange the life of a literary man for that of a monk. He thought the language of the Gospel to be more universal than that of literature: as opposed to the particular nature of poetry, it enounces the universal truth, ergo evangelization must permeate civilisation.
Gogol wanted to depict paragons, but ended up idealising characters instead, which meant the partial or total omission of negative features, the disproportionate beautification and bucolic representation of reality. As an outstanding artist he clearly saw that unveiled didactic intentions must not appear in a work of art. That is why he threw the second part of his work, which showed Russian life in a beautified form and which would have made his novel seem to be a false decoration of the regime, into the fireplace.
Ključne riječi
Gogol; Dead Souls; paradigm of book’s burning
Hrčak ID:
19246
URI
Datum izdavanja:
11.1.2008.
Posjeta: 2.051 *