N.V. Gogol and Orthodoxy: Hard way to find a way to God

Hieromona Simeon: "From what in Ukraine do with the works of Gogol will really turn over to the coffin"

"Gogol is one of the closest to the church of the classics of Russian literature. We know that Pushkin, and Dostoevsky after a long boring and throwing in the end, the faith has become truly true, and not nominally Orthodox.

Gogol also actively participated in the liturgical life, confessed, was involved. And in the mature years, spiritual questions began to worry even more literary.

Gogol said that the main thing in his life is a soul. Yes, and his very creativity he thought as serving God, obedience, from which he was not entitled to avoid.

But Gogol as Ascetic, a man who lived in a deep spiritual life is little known in our country, "Simeon (Tomacian), a specialist in the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, an author of a candidate thesis, said in an interview with Komsomolskaya Praveth,"

As Simeon's father noted, Gogol wrote entire treatises for religious and moral topics: "For example," a rule of life in the world "and" Reflections on Divine Liturgy. " In order to read in the script, the sacred sources, Gogol even specially studied Greek.

In the Soviet era, this side in the work of the writer was silent. It was believed that "Early" Gogol is a wonderful artist, and in the later years he came crazy a little. Therefore, many spiritual creations of Gogol did not even enter the full (academic) meeting of its writings. And some have learned about some only in recent years.

For example, they found a lot of notebooks, in which Gogol personally rewritten the liturgical texts from church books. Now they are stored in the handwritten department of Pushkin's home. In addition, Gogol rewritten the works of the Holy Fathers: John of Zlatoust, Ephraim Syrina, Vasily of the Great and others. For him it was a source of inspiration. "

But much most of all now do not occupy spiritual treasures, open in Gogol, and who he was: Russian or Ukrainian, he drew the attention of Hieromon. In his opinion, "Gogol considered himself and the other. He wrote "I myself do not know what my soul I have, Khokhlats or Russian." Gogol loved Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also loved Kiev, his native Poltava and Dikanka.

And we now take a drink and artificially divide Gogol. It's all the same as the heart, the soul of inhibition to divide. But for the current Ukrainian authorities, such Gogol, as it is, is inconvenient. Resetting Gogol from the ship of modernity, the Ukrainian nationalists renounced what was in their people the best, the most great.

After all, if not Gogol, the whole world would be much less known about the Ukrainian people, his traditions and a great, disadvantaged spirit. On the other hand, the current attempts to fasten the work of Gogol to a certain ideology also turn out to be failed. After all, he himself wrote that Russians and Ukrainians are two people who complement each other and created in order to live together.

By the vocation of Ukrainians, Gogol considered the preservation of his identity and Orthodox civilization. Namely, Russia became the last stronghold of Orthodoxy after the fall of Constantinople. Gogol believed that only together Russians and Ukrainians can show "something more perfect in humanity." Not in battles for the price of gas, but in some creative affairs.

With all this, Gogol was the devotee of his country and never renounced the fact that he was Ukrainian.

Arguing about why N.V. Hogol wrote his writings in Russian, and not in Ukrainian, Father Simeon remarked: "Gogol in conversations with friends writers always emphasized that for them everyone should have one shrine - this is Pushkin's language.

He considered the Russian language unusually alive, able to accommodate various adverbs and dialects and from this becoming richer, creating a motley palette of shades. When translating Gogol on Ukrainian, a lot is lost, becomes monophonic and monotonous. It's like a picture written by bright colors, take and smear in one color. "

According to him, the modern translations of Gogol in Ukrainian also sin the incomplete and selectivity to the texts of the classics. In the work of "Night Before Christmas" Gogol "shows a related link between Russia and Ukraine, albeit in the humorous genre. This is an episode in which the Cossacks come to ask for help from Empress Catherine, and that helps them.

But when "night before Christmas" translated into Ukrainian this scene was strongly cut off. In the Ukrainian version of the Cossacks no longer bow the Russian queen and do not remind you that it translated its army through the rearness and helped take the Crimea. "

In the story, "Taras Bulba" released in modern Ukraine "In the translation of the Gogolian Nationalist of Nikolai Sadovsky, Gogol's words" Rus "and" Russian ", everywhere scrupulously replaced by Ukraine and Ukrainian. For example, the "wide rackening wig of the Russian nature" is translated as "Wide Glyatsky Za # of Ukrainian Nature."

"The manifestation of Russian power" is replaced by "Ukrainian". But Russian power is Gogol a more general and high concept, which includes Ukrainian power. It's like a phrase: "Birds are wonderful creatures" to translate as "Drozd - a wonderful being," said Simeon's father. "From the fact that now in Ukraine do with the works of Gogol, really turn over to the coffin," the priest noticed sadness.

In addition, the Father Simeon noticed, "if the Ukrainians recognize Gogol" their own ", then they must recognize his concept and read in Russian. But with this they cannot agree. Therefore, Gogol translate and thereby pushes him into the sphere of foreign writers.

By giving up your genius, Ukraine is essentially sawing boring on which it sits. Yes, you can disagree with Gogol, but let him speak a free voice, it is not necessary to censure it, based on the momentary political ideas. Because these ideas will evaporate over time, and Gogol's great creativity will remain. "

. Like other people? To come to God

And this way - through Russia

Without love for God, do not escape anyone, and you have no love for God. In the monastery you will not find it; The monastery go among which God himself was already called there. Without the will of God, it is impossible to love him. And how to love the one whom no one see? What prayers - and strengthened this love with him? See how much now there is now in the light of good and beautiful people who achieve hot this love and hear one only worn and cold emptiness in souls. It is difficult to love who no one has seen. One Christ brought and announced the secret to us that in love for brothers we get a love for God. [118] It is only worth loved by them as he ordered Christ, and the love of God itself will be in the end. Go to the world and purchase love for brothers before.

But how to love brothers, how to love people? The soul wants to love one beautiful, and poor people are so imperfect and so little beautiful in them! How to do it? Thank God primarily for the fact that you are Russian. For Russian now, this path opens, and this path is Russia herself. If only loves Russian Russia, love and all that is neither in Russia. God himself is now leading to this love. Without diseases and suffering, which in such a plurality accumulated inside it and whom we ourselves, would not feel from us to her compassion. And the compassion is already the beginning of love. Already screams on the incompleteness, inappropriate and bribes - not just a resentment of noble on the dishonest, but the cry of all the land, having ever been, that foreign enemies invaded in a countless set, crumbled at homes and imposed a severe yarm for each person; Already those who accepted voluntarily to their homes of these terrible enemies of spiritual, want to free themselves to free themselves, and do not know how to do it, and everything merges into one amazing cry, already insensitive. But straight love is not yet heard in any, - it also does not have it. You still do not like Russia: you can only sadness yes annoyance of rumors about everything bad that neither is being done in it, all this produces only one stale annoyance yes. No, it's not a love yet, you are far from love, this is just one one too long distant to her forever. No, if you really love Russia, you will then be lost by the so-so-aid thought that sometimes sometimes has many honest and even very smart people, that is, in the present time they can do nothing for Russia and as if they are already not needed at all; On the contrary, then only in the whole strength you will feel that the love of Almighty and that it is possible to do everything with it. No, if you really love Russia, you will rush to serve it; Not in the governors, but in Captitipa Corps will go, - the last place that neither goes in it, take, preferring one bit of activity on it with all your current, inactive and idle life. No, you still do not like Russia. And without having fallen in love with Russia, do not love your brothers, and without having loved their brothers, not to reflect your love for God, and not getting up with love for God, do not escape you.

1844 Gogol (From the letter to the gr. A.P.T. ..... Mu)

To understand Gogol must be submitted

The opposite - not to love Russia

what course Molding Gogol can be understood

if you assume the opposite - do not love Russia

and not to serve her - and then Austria and Poland share

Ukraine whom not to defend himself and experience has already been

This is the destruction of all Ukrainian and wrote about it

also xyi century Ivan Vishensky that Polishcolic

priests are less tolerant more powerful:

* "Adorable from the diabal servant and false propeller watelling. Turks are honest eating before God in court, ... rather than baptized lyhas"

* "... All of them are blissful science of the resume - proud, magnifier, writing, pour, ... Welsh, Samokhana Pharisees, slanders, lichnubs"

* "Busting sciences"

* "... and in the artistic penaltime of punishment and crafts (Helleno-or-Latinudreas in the communion of communication, we were skilled that from cherodialectic sologism to the dark and neither wising of the hit-tree" (10);

* "... Having studied a gramatic ..., the row then ... DMUT, Dasklas and wise smiling name, preached, teach"

* "Yako now Latina, Vergia praise from God, and Na Papague deposit, Movyachi: People's People, Rimskoye Faith, Refrigerant Diawn, Evangelter Faith, Novovy Robre Vera, Subotian Faith"

* "Which is in you, in the worldly life being., Alperal premamil, having dressed, strangely reassured, dressed, put in the dungeon ..., greedy greasy, poor subjects, the same image of God, as you, wearel ... ourselves Sweese, but the orphans church lard and eager ... "

and that only Russia should be held - this is true

because The main quality of the Russian man as noted

Gogol is one of the most ascetic figures of our literature, the only one, exceptional in its kind. All his life, like the life of the ink, was a continuous feat and ascent to the heights of the Spirit, but they knew about this side of his personality only the nearest spiritual faces and some of the friends. In the consciousness of most contemporaries, Gogol was a classic type of Satirik writer, an accuser of vices, public and human, brilliant humorist. Gogol in his other quality, as the originator of the holy tradition in Russian literature, as a religious thinker and publicist and even the author of prayers, his contemporaries did not recognize. With the exception of "selected places from correspondence with friends", published with significant censorship seizures and most readers are incorrectly perceived, the spiritual prose of Gogol during his life remained unpublished. The subsequent generations were already able to partly get acquainted with her, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the true appearance of Gogol was to some extent restored.

However, there was another extreme: the religious-mystic criticism of the stroke of the ages (and most of the well-known book of Dmitry Meriazhkovsky "Gogol. Creativity, life and religion". SPb., 1909) - built the spiritual path of Gogol for his measure, depicting him hardly did not painful fanatic , a certain mysticism with a medieval consciousness, a lonely fighter with an unclean force, and most importantly - completely torn off from the Orthodox Church and even somehow opposed to it, why the image of the writer appeared in a completely distorted form.

In the future, almost exclusive Russian abroad, partly align the biases of the modernist approach, in part, in view of the books of the modernist approach, in view of the books of Konstantin Mochulian Gogol (Paris, 1934) and Professor of Protopress Vasily Zenkovsky "N. V. Gogol "(Paris, 1961). However, many topics, such as such a fundamental, like Gogol and monasticism, are practically not affected. This applies not only to biographical moments, but also the inner, ideological life of the writer.

For many years, due to the well-known causes of spiritual and moral works of Gogol not only were not studied, but they were as if seized from the heritage of the writer. In the full academic assembly of the works of Gogol (1937 - 1952) are not included, for example, "reflections on divine liturgia", as not representing "literary interest." For many decades, the Soviet school of literary studies either left at all aside the development of ideological quests Gogol, or explained them too narrowly. Recently, the traditional opposition to the artworks of Gogol is gradually overcommoding, its later journalism, the leading start from V. G. Belinsky. And yet, it is impossible not to admit that today Gogol is not open as a thinker, and its writings are not sufficiently studied in their meaningful and ideological aspects.

The new era, opened by the readers of the work of Gogol of the last period of his life, set a number of problems as a texture and historical and literary nature in front of the researchers. For many decades in the archives of Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg, the manuscripts of Gogol were kept unclaimed - the notebook of his extracts from the works of holy fathers and liturgical books. These materials (about twenty printed sheets) were first published in the Ninette Meeting of Hogol. Published texts show late Gogol in the new light and at the same time make reconsider many traditional ideas about the spiritual appearance of the writer. How Gogol was repeatedly recognized, the writings in their most directly connected with his spiritual education.

One of the fruitful ways to comprehend the personality of Gogol is to identify the circle of his dating. For a long time, many facts of the writer's biography remained in the shadows, for various reasons the researchers did not give them due value. First of all, this refers to the persons of the spiritual title in contact with Gogol in the last period of his life. After forty years after the death of Gogol, his biographer was noted that "We still not only don't know his life enough and have not yet understood his moral personality, but even the nature of his relationship to more or less close people remains little famous and was not almost at all Until now, the subject of careful study. "

Today we still know very little about the nearest surroundings of Gogol, especially in the last decade of his life. And first of all, it concerns such people as Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy and Archpriest Matthew Alexandrovich Konstantinovsky. Almost all written about them in connection with Gogol (including pre-revolutionary researchers) requires revision. Their relationship with Gogol is becoming interpreted as part of a lack of information, and part of it may be part.

The novelty of the approach to the biography and the work of Gogol is primarily in the fact that we consider them through the prism of the Religious Mirosoria of the Writer. Gogol was an Orthodox Christian, and his Orthodoxy was not nominal, but effective, - without taking this, we will understand in his life and creativity. Genius Gogol still remains unknown in the desired completeness not only to a wide reader, but also by literary criticians, which, with the current state of domestic science, are obviously not always able to comprehend the fate of the writer and his mature prose. This study is an attempt to outline the milestones of the spiritual biography of Gogol, especially in his relationship with Russian monastic.

Under the protection of the ward

March 19, 1809 in the town of Great Sorochints of the Mirgorod County of Poltava province in the family of landowners of average wealth of Vasily Afanasyevich and Maria Ivanovna Gogol-Yanovsky Born Son Nikolai. Three days later, the baby was baptized in the local Savior Transfiguration Church. The mother of Gogol, who has two children before he died, barely appeared on the world, gave a vow before the miraculous manner of St. Nicholas, called Dikansky, if she had a son, to infant it to Nikolai, and asked for a local priest to pray until he was known About the birth of a child and will be asked to serve thanks from the gratis. Spank prayer, newborn Nikolai and was met in this world thanksgiving gloomy to God. According to the sister of the writer, Olga Vasilyevna Gogol-Head, Brother loved to remember her, why called him Nikolai.

Among the ancestors of Gogol were people of spiritual title: his great-grandfather was a priest, Grandfather graduated from the Kiev spiritual academy, and his father was a Poltava seminaria. Subsequently, Gogol visited the crossed monastery in Poltava, where the seminary was placed.

Family legends identified the first concepts and beliefs of Gogol. Maria Ivanovna told about the history of his marriage of Maria Ivanovna: "... I gave me fourteen years for my good husband, in seven versts living from my parents. He pointed me the Queen of Heavenly, in a dream being him. He then saw me, not having a year, and found out when he was inappropriate to see me at the same age, and followed me in all the ages of my childhood. "

Maria Ivanovna was distinguished by piousness. After the death of her husband in the spring of 1825, she wore mourning to the end of the life - "From the most rude, woolen dress," as it were, according to the sample of monastic oils, and according to the testimony of her people, it was similar to the magnitude of the monastery. The family on tradition was a pious custom to visit, if possible, walking, holy places in Akhtyrka, worshi, Lubny, Voronezh, Kiev. But more often they visited a manty in the Dikanka, who was disturbing from Vasilievka for thirty miles.

Echoes of this love for pilgrimage are heard in early prose Gogol. So, in the outline of the preface to the story "Scary Revenge" (1831) Ore Panko Panko says: "Well, gentlemen, when will we come to Kiev? I sin, right, before God: I needed, for a long time you need to go to bow to holy places. Someday the old age is very time there: we are with you, Thomas Grigorievich, will guess in the celia, and you are also, Taras Ivanovich! We will pray and walk through the Saint Pechers. "

In the fall of 1844, being abroad, Gogol in a letter to the sister Elisabeth asks Mama, if it happens to be in the dikanka, "bring the samples of Nicholas the Wonderworker from there, which could be worn on the neck in the form of blessings." And in the summer of 1845, one of the critical moments of his life, Gogol asks Mother's prayers about his recovery. "I also ask you," he adds, "Prayer me to send me not only in our church, but even if you can, in the Dikanka, in the Church of St. Nicholas, whom you have always begged for the concept for me."

In Vasilyevka, there was its stone church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, built in the first half of the 1820s by the vow, this mother of Gogol. In the house, for a long time, there was a large, grown in the chest, with a hole done in the lid, through which Grandma Tatiana Semenovna lowered money intended for the temple device. Later Maria Ivanovna recalled: "In our village there was no church. Our father-in-law wanted to buy old and transport to Vasilievka, but soon after that it was forbidden to build wooden, and the intention was left much before my marriage. "

The construction of the temple went slowly, and in the mid-1830s, it was not completed in the mid-1830s (from the letter of Gogol to the mother of December 15, 1834 shows that he is occupied by the preparation of the "Plan for Iconostas"). Nikolai Vasilyevich presented to this church from Jerusalem to presented the icon of St. Nicholas, taken out from Italy. The parents of Gogol and his close relatives are buried near the church. And he himself asked to bury himself in the same place.

With the image of Nicholas the Wonderworker, his heavenly patron, Gogol did not part in his wanders. Everywhere on the way, he met the icons of the ashes of God and left a trace in his soul. So, in 1846, on the eve of the great post, he received from the hope of Sheremeteva's Nikolayevna, the aunt of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, the bilateral road of the Iversky image of the Mother of God with the icon of St. Nicholas written on the back. When a notice of receipt was received from Rome, Nadezhda Nikolaevna answered Gogol: "Finally, after such long wanderings, my blessing reached you, and Nikolai wonderworker will not leave you with his concern from the throne of God ...".

In recent years, Gogol's life in his correspondence is not once the image of St. Nicholas appears. So, in connection with the upcoming marriage of Sisters, Elizabeth, he wrote another sister in Vasilyevka in the spring of 1851: "In all of God's will; Nothing is done without the will of God. So they say - some because they are convinced of, others because they hear how others say. I see and in the current event God's will. But all, however, I don't know if you were right with my sister, having stood up this matter secretly, without a preliminary consistent with my mother or even with me. Confidence in prudence of their actions harms us a lot even in small things, and the matter is very important ... "And then Gogol advises sisters:" Go on foot now in the dikanka aside, pour out God so that the marriage is happily. So that all the way on your mouth was one prayer ... ".

Hogol himself herself instructed this way: "They pray to God all the might of the soul, how much they will get them in you. Your pitch is terrible: he leads you either to happiness or in the abyss. Ahead is all unknown; It is known only that half of the misfortune of ourselves. Pray, go on foot to Nikolai the Wonderworker, Flip to the footsteps of the ashy, the moths about the concept, herself appear from all his strength to Christ, the Savior to our marriage, so that the marriage is fascinated without a meeting with his mother, without thinking about the future and all the importance of such a act, It would be happy. "

Until the end of his life, Gogol firmly believed in the intercession of the great desires of God, St. Nicholas, and, the existence in his homeland, always visited the Dikanka, famous for them in the "Evenings on the farm near Dikanka", and prayed before the miraculous way in the St. Nicholas Church. The beekeeper mentions about it: "Do you know Deca Dikanian Church, Foma Grigorievich? Eh, head! What kind of stories could he let go! " Recall that the three story in the book - "Evening in the day before Ivan Kupala", "Missing grades" and "enchanted place" - they are told by the Dick of the Dickan Church by Foma Grigorievich.

The beginning of the way

In the family Gogol received the origins of faith. In a letter to the mother of October 2, 1833, from St. Petersburg, speaking about the upbringing of the youngest sister Olga, he noticed: "Suggest the rules of religion. This is the foundation of everything. " And then Gogol recalls one case, forever remaining in his memory: "I asked you to tell me about the terrible court, and you, the child, so good, so clearly, they talked about those benefits that expect people for a virtuous life, and So straightening, so scary described the eternal flour sinners, that it shocked and woke up in me all the sensitivity. It regained and subsequently made me the highest thoughts. "

Upon admission to the Nezhinskaya gymnasium of higher sciences in 1821, the twelve-year-old Gogol discovered good knowledge only by the law of God, in other subjects turned out to be weakly prepared. Nezhin, apparently, largely determined the nature of the spiritual formation of Gogol. In addition to teaching Catechism and Holy History with the Geography of Holy Land, he read a peculiar course of moralology, acquaintances of pupils with the creations of the Holy Fathers and Church Teachers, Vasily, Sirin, Ioanna Zlatoust, Isaac Sirin, Ambrose of the Mostolian and others in senior classes. Historian Alexey Ivanovich Markevich, who studied in the Nezhinskaya gymnasium after Gogol, argues: "The only professor who had a strong influence on him was theologian ...".

It is noteworthy that, in addition to Gogol, the fate of two more students of the gymnasium turned out to be associated with Jerusalem. Victor Kaminsky, who ended three years after Gogol, made a pilgrimage to holy places three times and died in Jerusalem himself, and Konstantin Basili - the Russian Consul General in Syria and Palestine - accompanied Gogol in 1848 in his journey to the Holy Land.

By the time of stay of Gogol in the gymnasium and its first literary experiments are also. The most significant of them is the poem "Ganz Kühelgarten", printed by a separate publication in 1829 under the pseudonym V. Alov. After negative feedback in the press, Gogol took all copies from book beads and burned.

It must be said that Gogol's school comrades were a low opinion about his literary abilities, especially in the field of prose. "In verses exercise," they advised him, "and I don't write proku: it's very stupid with you." Belletist from you will not be drambled, it is now visible. " And Gogol himself seems to be inclined at the time more to verses than to prose. "My first experiences," he recalled many years later in the "author's confession," - the first exercises in the states, to whom I got the skill recently in my school, were almost everything in lyrical and serious genus. Neither I myself nor the counterparts, exercises, too, together with me in writings, did not think that I would have to be a writer comic and satirical ... "

But in the theatrical performances of Gogol, as an actor was not equal. "We all thought then," recalled one of the pupils of the gymnasium Timofey Paschenko, - that Gogol will go on stage, because he had a huge talent and all the data for the game on the stage ... "Gogol enjoyed a special success in the role of Mrs. Prostaya Fonvizynsky" " Konstantin Basil told me later: "I saw this play in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, but I always preserved the conviction that not a single actress was able to play the role as well as the sixteen-year-old Gogol then played this role."

Neither literary classes nor scenic successes cooled the warm faith of Gogol in God. So, his school friend Vasily Lyubich-Romanovich recalled that in the church he was "prayers he listened with attention, sometimes even repeated their infrections, as if serving his own Liturgy himself ...". Somehow, Gogol, displeased with singing, climbed to the pollos and began to sing the chorus, clearly pronounce the words of prayers. But the priest, hearding an unfamiliar voice, looked out of the altar and, seeing an outsider, ordered him to retire.

Mercy, grafted Gogol in the family, was truly Christian and subsequently only strengthened in his soul. According to the stories of nonsense, Gogol, in school years, could not pass by the poor in school years, so as not to submit it, and if there was nothing to give, he always said: "Sorry." Once he even happened to remain in debt at one bench. On her words: "Serve Christ for the sake of" He answered: "Tell me." And the next time she turned to him with the same request, he doubled it, at the same time: "My duty is here."

The death of the father, who followed on March 31, 1825, was one of the strongest shocks in the life of a young Gogol - he just turned sixteen years old. He writes his mother from a non-resident letter, in which extreme despair ("wanted to even encroacitate his life") goes into deep submission of the will of God: "I have suffered this blow with a hard Christian hardness ... I bless you, sacred faith! In you, only I find a source of consolation and thicken my sorrows! "

Since then, one of the main features of the Mirosozania Gogol: already never leaves his thought about the inevitability of death. Much later, in a letter to the Mother of January 1847, he explained to her and sisters the reasons that prompted him to printed in the "selected places from correspondence with friends" his will: "Exogenment that it was necessary in explanation of the very appearance of such a book, It is necessary then to remind many of the death that rarely someone thinks of living ... If you were truly and as you should, were instructed in Christianity, then you would all know that the Memory is a mortal - this is the first thing that A man must every minute to wear his thoughts. In the Holy Scripture it is said that the one who remembers every minute his end will never sin. "

Panteleimon Kulish, the first biographer of Gogol, transfers the words, said by Alexandra Smirnova Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov: "In Gogol, it was fine that in the midst of the indispensable condition of his life, that is, his artistic activity, he kept his memory every minute. Often he read the prayer of Vasily the Great: "Lord, the tears of the dignity and the memory of death". These tears of the dignity flowed from his eyes during the solemn last rite of world conjunction. "

Literary Slava

After moving to St. Petersburg, Gogol is immersed in literary life, experiences first failures and successes. With constant external employment, it breaks the dissatisfaction with the bustle, the desire of another, collected and sober life. In this sense, his meditation in the "Petersburg notes of 1836" is very significant: "The Great Post is calm and Grozen. It seems that the voice is heard: "Stop, Christian; Look at your life. " On the streets empty. Care no. Representation is seen in the face of the passerby. I love you, the time of the Duma and Prayer! .. What is so quickly flies by anything not replaceable our time? Who is clinging to himself? Great post - What a calm, what a secluded passage! "

The genuine literary debut of Gogol was the "evenings on the farm near Dikanka" (1831 - 1832), which brought him fame. Approvingly responded about them Pushkin. In a letter to a writer Alexander Waykovo from the end of August 1831, he reports the episode, told by Haholam himself: "I was told that when the publisher went to the printing house, where the" evenings "was printed, then the sets began to jump and snatch, clamping her mouth. The factor explained their greasiness, admitting him that the typewriters were mad with laughter, gaining his book. "

The essay of the beginning of the author liked not only to the Schedule, but also the Empress's sovereign. All your books, starting with the "nights on the farm near Dikanka," Gogol presented to members of the reigning house and the emperor himself. It was a tribute from the pure heart of the Russian subject, a convinced monarchist who did not change his belief to the end of his life.

In early 1835, Gogol issued a collection of "Arabesque", where, along with artistic works, a scientific (historical nature) of the article, and Mirgorod (in two parts) entered, which was the continuation of the "evenings ..." Belinsky proclaimed Gogol of the head of Russian poets. A year later, the auditor was put on the stage, which brought his author to the fame of the dramatic writer.

In the play, many have seen a caricature to Russian officials, and in the playwright - a rowman. According to Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov, there were people who since then hated Gogol. So, Count Fyodor Tolstoy (on the Nick American) spoke in a crowded meeting that Gogol is "the enemy of Russia and that it should be sent to Siberia in shackles."

Meanwhile, it is known that the comedy was permitted to formulation (and, consequently, to the press) due to the highest permission. "If not a high intercession of the sovereign," wrote Gogol Mikhail Shchepkin in April 1836, "My play would not have been on stage, and there were already people who have trouble banned her." The emperor Nikolai Pavlovich was not only attended by the premiere, but also ordered the ministers to watch the "auditor". During the presentation, he slammed and laughed a lot, and leaving the lodge, said: "Well, the play! Everyone got everyone, and me - more than all! "

Gogol hoped to meet the support of the king and was not mistaken. Soon after the setting of the comedy, he answered in the "Theatrical Drive ..." with its ill-wishers: "The generous government deeper than you, a high intelligence of the goal of writing".

In 1842, the first volume of the "Dead Souls" poem, conceived as Epos in three parts, hugging "all of Russia" and "all mankind in mass" was published. In the same year, the collection of essays of Gogol was published in four volumes (the only lifetime). Here for the first time printed a new extended edition of Taras Bulba, as well as "Shinel" - the latter of the written ages written by Gogol. In fact, to thirty-three years, Gogol created and printed almost all his artworks, "as a writer he formed almost immediately.

The early work of Gogol, if you look at it from a spiritual point of view, opens with an unexpected for everyday perception of the part: it is not just a meeting of funny stories in the folk spirit, but also an extensive religious teaching, in which there is a struggle with evil and welcome invariably wins, and Sinners are punished ("Night before Christmas", "Sorochinskaya Fair", "Viy"). The same struggle - but already in a more sophisticated form, sometimes with evil invisible, - revealed and in the Petersburg Hands; As the direct protection of Orthodoxy appears in Taras Bouobuba.

The most famous comedy work of Gogol is the "auditor" - has a deep moral and didactic meaning, clarified by the author in the "Union of the Auditor" (1846): "That the auditor, who is waiting for us at the coffin door." The main creation of Gogol is the same deep, the poem "Dead Souls". At the external level, it represents a series of satirical and household characters and situations, whereas in the final form the book was to show the way to the revival of the soul of the fallen person. The spiritual meaning of the plan is revealed by Gogol in a suicide record: "Be not dead, but the living souls. There is no other door, except as indicated by Jesus Christ ... "

If you take the moral side of the early creativity of Gogol, then it has one characteristic feature - the intention to conduct people to God by correcting their shortcomings and social defects - that is, by external. The second half of the life and creativity of Gogol is marked by directing the eradication of the shortcomings in itself - and thus it goes to a more complex and high, joining the path of theology of justified asceticism. "Talking and writing about the highest feelings and movements of a person cannot be imagined," said Gogol, "you need to conclude this very little bit of this," in a word, you need to become the best. "

In the summer of 1840, Gogol overthrew the name of the disease, but rather not bodily, but spiritual. Testing severe attacks of the "irregular disorder" and "painful longing" and without hoping for recovery, he even wrote a spiritual testament. According to Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov, Gogol was "visions", which he told the worn about him at that time to Dr. Nikolay Botkin (brother Critica Vasily Botkin). Then followed the "resurrection", "wonderful healing", and Gogol believed that his life was "needed and will not be useless." He opened a new way. "Hence," Aksakov writes, "the constant desire of Gogol begins to improve the spiritual person and the prevalence of the religious direction that has reached subsequently, in my opinion, such a high mood, which is already incompatible with the human body."

About the change in the views of Gogol speaks in his memoirs and Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov: "A great mistake will make the one who Mats Gogol of the last period with the one who started the life in St. Petersburg, and he wants to make moral traits to the young Gogol, developed much later, already then As an important coup in its existence happened. " The beginning of the "last period" of Gogol Annenkov refers by the time 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."

The judgment of Annentkov on the sharpness of the "coup" is hardly fairly true: in the 1840s, Gogol's spiritual aspiration only marked more clearly and acquired concrete life forms. One of his friends, Mikhail Maksimovich, a well-known scientist who met him after a three-year break in Kiev in August 1835, recalled that Gogol had already struck him with his deep religious attitude. "It was impossible not to notice the changes in his speeches and the mood of the Spirit," he told, having in mind the walk of Gogol on the old Kiev, "he returned unexpectedly and even thoughtful ... I think that this summer began in a steep turn. In his thoughts, under the impression of the Old Russian shrine of Kiev, who was called Russian Jerusalem in Malorossiyan.

Gogol himself always emphasized the integrity and invariance of its path and the inner world. In the "author's confession" he wrote, responding to the reproaches of critics, argued that in the "selected places from correspondence with friends" he changed his appointment and invaded the limits alien to him: "I did not seduce from my way. I went to the same thing ... - and I came to the one who is the source of life. " In the article "A few words about Gogol's biography", Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov authoritatively testifies: "You will not think that Gogol changed in his beliefs, on the contrary, from the youthful age he remained faithful. But Gogol was constantly ahead; His Christianity became clearer, stricter; The high value of the writer's goal is clearer and the court over himself is severe. "

Gogol has gradually produced ascetic aspirations and the Christian - monastic - ideal is emerging more and clearer. Back in April 1840, he wrote to Nikolay Belozersky, the Chernihiv landowner, with whom he was familiar with the Nezhinskaya Pore: "I am now more gouted for the monastery than for the life of secular." And in February 1842, I was recognized as a poet Nicholas Languages: "I feel that the last bonds binding me with the light. I need privacy, decisive privacy ... I am not born for distillation and feel every day and hour, which is not above the lot in the world, as the title of the monk. "

These words can serve as a response to the question delivered by Gogol three years later, in the title of the article "Whose lot on Earth above," included in the book "Selected places from correspondence with friends."

On the roads of Europe

In early June 1842, immediately after leaving the press of the first volume of "dead souls", Gogol leaves abroad - and a ascetic mood is beginning to prevail in his life. Gregory Pavlovich Galangan, a rich Ukrainian landowner, subsequently the founder of the board of Pavel Gallagan - one of the best educational institutions of southern Russia, who lived at the time in Rome, recalled: "Gogol seemed to me even then very devout. Once gathered in the Russian church, all Russians on the vigil. I saw that Gogol entered, but then he lost him out of sight and thought he retired. A little before the end of the service, I went to the front, because the church was too stuffy, and there in the twilight I noticed Gogol, standing in the corner behind the chairs on my knees and with a dugged head. With the well-known prayers, he beat bows. "

Gogol is adopted for systematic reading of the books of spiritual content, providing preferential attention to the patristic literature. His letters of the first half of the 1840s are filled with requests for the sending of books on theology, the history of the Church, Russian antiquities. Friends and acquaintances play him the creation of the holy fathers, published by the Moscow Spiritual Academy, the writings of St. Tikhon Zadonsky, St. Dimitri Rostovsky, Bishop of the Kharkov Innocent (a famous preacher and spiritual writer), the Rooms of the Journal of Christian Reading. Nikolai sent by the Language "Dobryolism" (Assessment of Ascetic Scriptures in the Church Slavonic language) was for Gogol one of the most pressing books. He does not bypass and Western theology, reading, in particular, Jacques Bossey and the foma Aquinas, as well as the traditionally attributed to the Kempic book "On Imatablishing Jesus Christ".

In the "author's confession", Gogol wrote about this era of his life: "I left the modern one for a while, I drew attention to the learning of those eternal laws that the person and humanity moves at all. The books of legislators, impressions and human nature observers have become my reading. Everything, where only the cognition of the people and the soul of man, from the confession of a secular man before the confession of an anathet and the wilderness, was occupied, and on this road, insensitive, almost he does not know how, I came to Christ, seeing that in him the key to the soul man ... "

In the winter of 1843/44 in Nice, living with his friends Wielgorski, Gogol makes extracts to a special notebook of the works of Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church, taking advantage of Christian reading in 1842 in the main academic journal. This manuscript reached us in two copies stored now in the National Scientific Library of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In addition to the ancient fathers - John of Zlatoust, Vasily of the Great, Ephraim Sirin, Grigory, Nissky, John Damaskina, Kirill Alexandria and others - in this collection also contains excerpts from the compositions of modern Gogol of spiritual writers: St. Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomensky, Zadonsky Navdap, George, Bishop Kostroma and Galich Vladimir (Alavdina), Bishop of Poltava Gideon (Vishnevsky), Archpriest Stephen Sabinina.

The same kind, but a smaller column of his own and partly repeating the first is kept in the Russian State Library in Moscow. With extracts from him, Gogol introduced Alexander Osipovna Smirnov, also lived at that time in Nice. "After lunch, she recalls," Nikolai Vasilyevich pulled the notebook and read the passages from the fathers of the Church. " Gogol tried to teach their secular friends to the irresistible transmittance of time.

At the same time, Gogol appears the need to enter the prayer experience of the Church. In a letter to Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov from Rome of March 18 (n. Art.) 1843, he asks to send him a "prayer was the most extended, wherever almost all prayers written by the fathers of the Church, deserts and martyrs." The result of this spiritual thirst was a thick notebook (about a hundred sheets) of rewritten Gogol from the service mines of church songs and canons (now stored in the handwritten department of Pushkin's house).

These extracts Gogol did not only for spiritual self-education, but also for alleged writing purposes. In the article "What finally the essence of Russian poetry and what is its peculiarity" he, in particular, noticed: "It's still a mystery for many, this extraordinary Lorism is the birth of the Supreme Swords of the mind - which comes from our church songs and canons ..."

The mystery of this lyricism was opened by Gogol and is known not to the first, but from personal experience. According to the content of the notebook, he carefully read Minei for six months - from September to February - and made excerpts every day.

Such a method of reading Gogol - with extracts - can be called "celin", they traditionally used, for example, many monks. Its meaning is to clarify complex, not amenable to accurate understanding from the first time of spiritual issues. In addition, moving from place to place, Gogol could not carry a lot of books with him and had only his compact trampoline library with him - handwritten collections.

As we can see, Gogol was not limited to extracts from the holy fathers, it worked with liturgical texts. Orthodox worship enters into itself all theology. Gogol seems to have discovered it for himself before many, "thus he fell in the spirit to the most authoritative source of knowledge.

The preserved notebooks indicate that Gogol was well known to the Christian book. Apparently, he was looking for ways to become a spiritual writer in his own sense of the word. Spiritual, church literature in shape has a number of differences from literature secular, although there are some common techniques between these types of literature, including artistic. But spiritual creativity has a strictly defined goal, aimed at explaining the meaning of life in Christian verbation. Such work is based on the Holy Scripture and has certain signs. The writer, who took to solve the issues of the innermost life of the "inner man", must be an Orthodox Christian; He must have a blessing for his works from a bishop or priest. He is also obliged to thoroughly know the previous tradition of church literature, and it goes to the Holy Gospel - the source of the spiritual word, sharply different in its orientation from the framework that has breeding fiction in all the diversity of its manifestations. Finally, for the church writer, a living faith is needed in the fishery of God, in the fact that everything is committed in the universe on the incomprehensible plan of its creator.

In his late work, Gogol approached precisely to such an understanding of literature purposes. In Nice, he wrote two spiritual and moral writings for his friends, which they had to be guided in everyday life, - "Rule of life in the world" and "On those mental arrangements and disadvantages of ours that are embarrassed in us and prevent us in calm condition. Leaving Nice in March 1844, Gogol resembles Louise Karlovna Callovna, turning to the whole family at the same time: "You gave me a word to any bitter and difficult moment, praying inside yourself, strongly and sincerely take on reading the rules that I left you, Disinner carefully in the meaning of any word, because all the word is meaningfully and much cannot be understood suddenly. Did you fulfill this promise? Do not neglect anyone by these rules, they all have expired from mental experience, confirmed by the sainted examples, and therefore accept them as the command of God himself. "

This attempt of spiritual instruction can be imagined as a approach to "selected places from correspondence with friends" - in these "rules" contain many ideas of the future book. Here Gogol opened a new genre for himself close to the tradition of patristic literature.

The essence of the creative development of Gogol is that from purely artistic works, where liturgical, church theme was as it were in the subtext, he moves to it directly in "Reflections on the Divine Liturgy", writings like "the rules of life in the world" (actual spiritual Prose), and in the journalism "selected places from correspondence with friends." The new genres of the late creativity of Gogol can be attributed to both prayers, as well as systematized extracts from the creations of the Holy Fathers and Church teachers - Proceedings, characteristic of such a writer-Asketa, which was, for example, Saint Ignatius (Bryanchanin) than for a secular writer . Gogol's prayers, written in the second half of the 1840s, testify to its rich prayer experience and deep churches of his consciousness. Formal writing - without a living faith in God and without obedience to church rules - would not give that alloy of the people's and church in the stylist of Gogol's prose, which is characterized by high spirituality.

Gogol sought to work out this style in which the elements of the Church Slavonic and the People's Language would be merged. This is confirmed by the "materials for the Russian language dictionary", which presents words and dialect and church Slavonic. According to Gogol, the characteristic property of the Russian language is "the most bold transitions from an elevated to simple in the same speech." At the same time, he emphasized that there is no language under the Russian language "not the language that is permitted now in everyday use, and not a book language, and not the language formed during our abuse, but that truly Russian, which is invisibly worn throughout the Russian Earth, despite his foreign trade in his land, which is not yet touched on the case of our life, but, however, everyone hears that he is truly Russian. "

These thoughts went on the basis of the characteristics of the Gogol of the Russian language in the article "What finally the essence of Russian poetry and what is its feature", which can be called the aesthetic manifesto writer. "Our extraordinary language is still mystery ..." says Gogol. - He is simplified and can, alive, as life, enriched every minute, leaning, on the one hand, high words from the church-biblical language, and on the other hand, choosing a label name from countless devices, filled with our provinces, having the opportunity Thus, in the same speech to go up to a height, not available to any other language, and go down to simplicity with a noticeable tangible person ... "

In parallel with the new writings, Gogol works over the second volume of the "dead souls". Scripture, however, was moved slowly. Continuing the poem he does not think now without prior to upbringing his soul. "The essays are so connected closely with the spiritual education of me and I need this time before that time the inner strong upbringing of spiritual, deep education, which is impossible and to hope for the emergence of my new works," he wrote a writer Peter Alexandrovich Pletnev in October 1843. And in July 1844 he answered Nicholas language to his request: "Do you ask whether" dead souls "are written? And they are written and not writhe ... I go ahead - there is an essay, I stopped - the essay is neither. "

One of the most difficult in Gogol was the year 1845. His letters of this pore are full complaints of deteriorating health. The opinions of European doctors, to whom Gogol addressed about his illness, were disgraced. He himself was inclined to attribute his illness to the irrational disorder and the consolation found only in thought that "our recovery in the hands of God, and not in the hands of doctors and not in the hands of any medical facility." The disease was complicated by the depressed mental condition: "The whole concern of the spirit, with which the most difficult to fight ..." (from the letter Nicholas Languages \u200b\u200bfrom the beginning of May (n. Art.) 1845).

Exhausted by ailments, Gogol moves from the city to the city in search of saving treatment and peaceful calmness. In early 1845, he lives in Frankfurt from Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, in mid-January goes to Paris to Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy, then again returns to Frankfurt to Zhukovsky, in May - June is treated on waters in Homburg, in late June comes to Weimar, Then - Berlin, Dresden, Karlsbad ...

His pain was aggravated by the fact that he "wanted to force him to write", while his soul "was not ready" to this. "I suffered myself," he admitted in April 1845 Alexander Smirnova, "he raped writing, suffered from a serious suffering, seeing powerlessness, and several times already hurts himself with such coercion and could not do anything, and everything came out forced and bad."

So, in January - February 1845, Gogol - in Paris in Count Tolstoy. About this time he wrote to Nicholas Languages: "He lived internally, as in the monastery, and in addition he did not miss almost a single dinner in our church." This lifestyle corresponds to the nature of his classes: it is adopted for the study of the Greek language to read in the script of the chinocutioner of the Divine Liturgy. At the same time, Gogol enjoyed books from the library of the rector of the Russian Embassy Church in Paris Archpriest Dimitri Verkhinsky, the former professor of the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy, a connoisseur of St. Writing. At that time, he worked on his main essay - "Monthly Orthodox-Cafe Eastern Church" - one of the first scientific papers on liturgical.

In Gogol's papers, two small notebooks were preserved, where he made a major beautiful handwriting of discharge in Greek and Latin, from the China Liturgy of St. John Zlatoust. The full text of his Latin translation was written off for Gogol by an unspecified person (on the assumption of Academician Tikhonravov on the basis of the handwriting - the face of spiritual title). This notebook out of ten sheets of large-format mail paper is also preserved in the Writer's papers.

In the theological classes, Gogol was helped by the retired teacher-Hellenist Fyodor Belyaev, who knew the Church Slavonic language and Latin well. He lived since 1841 abroad as a mentor in one of the Russian families. In memory of this joint work, Gogol presented him with Greek "Evhology" (a collection of prayers for church worship), published in Rome in 1754, with the inscription: "This book is given by Fyodor Nikolaevich Belyaev, in the sign of friendship and punishment for the rejection of Vasily the Great, from Gogol. Paris. February 26, year 1845. "

In turn, Belyaev personally wrote off in a notebook of a small format Greek text of the liturgy of St. Vasily of the Great with a parallel Latin translation and on the last page made a gift inscription in Slavic Vysia: "Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, as a sign of memory, love and respect from Feodor Belyaeva. Paris. March 16 days 1845. "

Almost daily visits to church services created a high spiritual mood at Gogol. In this regard, he wrote on February 24 (n. Art.) 1845 Alexander Smirnova, that "he was encouraged by God and among the stupid moments of the mental state to taste the heaven and sweet moments."

Turning to the church word, Gogol sought to attract others to him. So, the same Belyaev wrote to him on March 20 (n. Art.) 1845: "Thank you thank you for the thought of paying attention to our Orthodox priests, which thoughts, delight the heart, tear the soul and so on. and so on. Without you, I would not be active in such a reading, but having it only in mind, everything would be postponed, in my opinion, in the distant box. "

In Paris, Gogol is working on a book about the Divine Liturgy, which remained unfinished and seen the light only after his death. The purpose of this spiritual and educational work, as Gogol itself determined, - "show, in which completeness and inner deep connection our liturgy, young men and people, still beginners, are still becoming familiar with its meaning."

However, the desire to comprehend the intimate meaning of the Divine Liturgy arose at Gogol not at this time, but much earlier. In the autumn of 1842, he wrote Mother from Gastein: "... There are many secrets in the depths of our soul, who have not yet opened a person and who can give him wonderful bliss. If you feel that your word has found access to the heart of the soul, then go straight to the church and listen to the Divine Liturgy. As a cool forest among the scorching steppes, then his prayer will take his prayer. "

This faith in the all-time power of liturgical prayer matured from Gogol gradually and after several years of foreign wanderings and mental alarms turned into a desire to convey other accumulated experience. "... for anyone who only wants to go ahead and get better," he wrote in the conclusion of his book, "it is often necessary, as you can, attend the divine liturgia and attentive listening: it is insensitive (that is, imperceptibly, graveyard. - V.V. ) Build and creates a person. And if society has not yet fully broke, if people do not breathe full, irreconcilable hatred between them, then the innermost reason for this is the divine liturgi, which resembles a person about the holy, heavenly love for his brother. "

By the spring of 1845, Gogol's disease intensified. The father of John Bazarov, John Bazarov, testifies to his physical and mental state, at that time the rector of the newly instituted Russian house church in Wiesbaden. In mid-April (N. Art.) He received from Gogol, who lived then in Frankfurt, a note: "Come to me to join me, I'm dying." Father John found him on his legs. When asked why he considers his position so dangerous, Gogol extended his hands and said: "Look! Very cold! " However, the priest persuaded him that he was not at all in such a state to coming at home, and persuaded to come to Wiesbaden, which he performed.

Being in the house of the priest, in the owner's office, Gogol, on its ever-hearing habit, considered his library. Seeing his books, he exclaimed almost with fright: "How! And these unfortunate fell into your library! " "It was exactly the time," explains the father of John, "when he repeated in everything that it was written."

At the end of June - early July (n. Art.) 1845 crisis broke out. As far as death, Gogol writes a spiritual testament, subsequently included in the book "Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends", and burns the manuscript of the second volume. We almost don't have any other information about the unguardment, except for those reported by Gogol in the last of the "four letters to different persons about the" dead souls "printed in the same book:" It was not easy to burn five-year-old labor, produced with such painful tents, where Every string went to shook, where there was a lot of what was my best thinking and occupied my soul. "

In the same letter, Gogol also pointed out for the causes of burning: "The appearance of the second volume in the form in which he was, would make harm, rather than the benefit ... It happens when you can not ride a society or even all the generation to the beautiful, until you show All the depth of its present abomination; There is a time that even do not even talk about high and beautiful, without showing it right away, as day, paths and roads to it for anything. "

Was the burned manuscript completed? Apparently, no. The author of a well-known to researchers of the diary about the stay of Gogol in Odessa, for a long time considered an unknown (in fact - Ekaterina Alexandrovna Khitrovo), conveys a conversation of one lady with Gogol (in January 1851), who asked him, will soon be the end of the "dead souls". To which he replied: "I think - in a year." - "So they are not burned?" - "After all, it was only the beginning ...".

Academician Nikolay Tikhonravov times the boring of the second volume by early July 1845. The basis for this is primarily the words of Gogol himself: "But everything was burned, and, moreover, at that moment, when, seeing death, I really wanted to leave after myself anything, about me better reminiscent." The same time dates Tikhonravov and the "testament" of Gogol, compiled, according to the writer's own recognition, at the moment when he was seriously ill and death was already close.

In the undoubted communication, with the burning of the second volume and the writing of the "will" attempt, Gogol at the end of June - early July (N. Art.) 1845 leave the literary field and enroll in the monastery. This tells about this in their notes Marph Stepanovna Sabinina - the daughter of the Weimar Orthodox Priest Stephen Sabinina.

"17 (29) Jun ... learned that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol and Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy were arrived and were among the Father. The next day they came to his father, and I was first and last seen the famous writer. He was a small growth and very thin; His narrow head had a peculiar form - the phrenologist would say that religiosity and stubbornness are issued. Light hair hung strands around the head. His forehead, as if yesterday, he spoke more over his eyes, who were long and watched; The nose is cut, very long and thin, and thin lips had a satirical smile. Gogol was very nervous, his movements were alive and angular, and he did not sit for a long time in one place: he will rise, say something, go through a room several times and again sit down. He arrived in Weimar to talk to my father about his desire to enter the monastery. Seeing his painful state, the consequence of which was the hypochondriatic mood of the Spirit, the father discouraged him and convinced not to make a final decision. In general, Gogol said a little, revived only when he said, otherwise he sat in thought. He asked me to play chopin him; I just remember that I played him. My mother he gave chromolithography - the view of the Blyowski terrace; She stressed this view into his album and asked Gogol to subscribe to him. He walked around the room for a long time, finally sat down to the table and wrote: "I completely forgot my surname; It seems that he was once Gogol. " He confessed in the evening before his departure, and confession him lasted for a very long time. After the Holy Communion, he and his companion now went to the future way to Russia, having been in Weimar five days. "

Why preclude Stephan Sabinina turned Gogol for such an important issue for himself? Of course, the circle of Russian Orthodox priests in Europe was rather limited, but Gogol had, apparently, and special reasons for this.

The outstanding personality of Father Stephen, a man of huge erudition, was widely known as in Europe, where he lived most of his life and in Russia, the connection with which he never interrupted.

Stefan Karpovich Sabinin took place from the kind of sussanin (his ancestor married the daughter of the Russian national hero of Ivan Susanin Antonide). He was born in 1789 in the family of poor Dycachka village of Moornezh Province; He graduated from a local spiritual school and gymnasium, later taught foreign and ancient languages \u200b\u200bin it (having an exceptional ability to them), and after the end of the course in the St. Petersburg spiritual academy was left in it. In 1823, Sabinin received a priest's place at the Russian diplomatic mission in Copenhagen and has lived in Denmark for more than fourteen years. The circle of his classes was unusually wide: theology, history, archeology, philology. He translated the Bible into Russian with his comments was the first biblical lexicon in Russia (like many other writings and transfers of Sabinina, this work remained in the manuscript and, obviously, lost), wrote Icelandic grammar and several saga works, published articles on Russian philology and Russian antiquities in domestic journals and historical collections published by Professor Moscow University Mikhail Pofodiny. Permanent correspondent of the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy, a valid member of the Royal Society of Northern Antiques, the Society of History and Antiquities of the Russian and Row of Others, Archpriest Stefan Sabinin consisted of correspondence with many scientists and writers: Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, Professors Shevyrev, Pogodin, Bajansky, Szrevnevsky, Czech Slavists Vaclav Gank and Pavel Shafarik.

In 1837, Stefan's father was translated into Weimar and appointed by Grosgersogini of Maria Pavlovna (senior sister of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich). He became the abbot of the Russian Orthodox houses of St. Mary Magdalena. In Weimara, he had many figures of Russian culture: Mikhail Pogodin, Stepan Shevyrev, Prince Peter Vyazemsky, a well-known spiritual writer and Jealous of Orthodoxy Andrei Muravyev, a pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein and others. It should be especially emphasized by the communication of the father of Stephen with people from the nearest surroundings of Gogol: Shevyrev, Pusher, Bajansky. Given all this, it is not difficult to understand the reasons for the appeal to Hahol him.

Fully approached his father Stefan and his wife Alexander Timofeevna, the daughter of the St. Petersburg Archpriest Timofey of Bolsherov. Martha's eldest daughter wrote about the mother in his notes: "My father taught her German, Danish and French, and, moreover, she, from the desire to help her husband, herself studied the ancient Latin, Greek, Jewish and other languages, so all his The writings and translations rewritten always. " Alexandra Timofeevna and herself was engaged in translations, in particular, in verses "Torquato Tasso" Goethe. In addition, she had an extraordinary talent of the painter and for one of his paintings received the Medal of the Academy of Arts.

The Sabinina House in Weimar was a kind of cultural center: there were hardly all travelers-compatriots who were passing around Germany - scientists, writers, composers. Pogodin left a description of his first meeting with this family: "... a wife with her older daughter wrote a picture with oil paints, which with deepeci could take a place in the academic class; Another told the lesson on the piano, some Sonatu of Mozart, sons were sitting behind Latin authors, and his father read a Catholic magazine. So much education, curiosity, I found in the whole family, how many wonder find from some Russian prince or graph ... ".

Sabinins had eleven children, and they all differed in a variety of talents. But perhaps Marta Stepanovna, the author of the quoted notes is one of the wonderful Russian women of the nineteenth century. She possessed a magnificent voice and musical abilities that allowed her to become a member of the musical circle, founded in Weimar the Grand Duchetia Maria Alexandrovna, in twelve years. Young Marfa took lessons from the best German professors, participated in charitable concerts and even made her own choir. Her successes were so striking that Ferenz Leaf offered to engage with her. The Great Composer was close to the Sabinin family, and Martha (Virtuoso Pianist) became his best student. Subsequently, she wrote about the sheet: "The most brilliant and disinterested person, what I knew."

In 1857, Marfa, together with his mother, for the first time went to Russia. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, she gave several concerts that had brilliant success. In 1860, Empress Maria Alexandrovna invited Sabinin (through Freillan Anna Fedorovna Tyutchev, daughter of the poet) Teacher music and educators to his daughter, the great princess of Maria Alexandrovna. Marfa Stepanovna stayed at the courtyard for eight years, he often played in the palace, but was deprived of the opportunity to speak with public concerts: her artistic career was forever ended.

The first personality of Marta Stepanovna was expressed in her public service. Along with his girlfriend, Baronessa Maria Petrovna Frederix Sabinina was one of the founders of the Red Cross Society in Russia (the first years it was called the "Society of care about the wounded and sick warriors"). Both were elected for life with honorary members of society. During the Franco-Prussian War, 1870 - 1871 and the liberation wars of the Balkan peoples against the Turkish Iga Marfa Stepanovna organized Lazaruts, evacuation of the wounded. Its mobility took place both abroad (Germany, France, Serbia, Romania) and in Russia (Petersburg, Crimea). In peacetime, she was also engaged in hospitals; Becoming the monk, headed the community of sisters of the mercy of the Holy Annunciation in the Crimea. In 1876, before leaving for Serbia, the Bishop of Tavrichesky Guri (Karpov) laid an urgent cross for her. Sabinina was awarded many orders and medals. In recent years, she spent secluded in the Crimea: Drew, engaged in music, wrote his memoirs.

Notes Martha Sabinina are published in the "Russian Archive" in 1900 - 1902. The publisher and editor of Peter Bartenev, the publisher and editor of the magazine Petr Bartenev, appeared to writing them, which appears from the letter of Sabinina to him in May 1891 (now stored in the Russian state archive of literature and art): "Thank my mind for good memory, happy Weimar time is unforgettable in my memory. ... if I will be able to write, hear me. "

Sabinet's notes are based on diary records, and they as a source of preferably memoirs written many years later. Although Marfe during her first (and the only) meeting with Gogol was only fourteen years, we can treat her memories with full trust. Unusually born and psychologically convinced by the portrait of Gogol left it. The manner of his behavior, which Sabinina speaks, was also noted by other memoirs, in particular the same proto -erous bazaarov: "Then I happened and also to meet him (Gogol. - V.V.) from Zhukovsky, but he was gloomy, almost nothing He spoke and walked around the room, listening to our conversations. " The record in the Mother's album: "... It seems to be once Gogol" - makes you remember the condemnation by the writer of my writings in the library of Father John Bazarov - Gogol seems to see himself by a monk.

In the diaries record Marfa Sabinina there are inaccuracies. According to her, Gogol and his companion went from Weimar to Russia. In fact, Gogol kept the way to Berlin and drove there in Galle on the way to meet with a local doctor, as his father Stephen advised him. This follows from the letter of Gogol to Zhukovsky dated July 14 (n. Art.) 1845: "For my peace of mind, I needed to thangotten in Weimara. Graph Tolstoy also gove with me. Good Weimar Priest advised me convincingly consult on the road with a famous doctor in Galle, Krokenberg. " About the stay in Weimar and about the "Tambler's very good priest" Gogol also reports in a letter to Nikolai Languages \u200b\u200bof July 25 (n. Art.) Of the same year.

The szvuk of the trip to Weimar can be found in the letter of Gogol "you need to travel in Russia", which entered the book "Selected places from correspondence with friends" and addressed Count Tolstoy, whose mental aspirations were also sent to monastic: "There is no higher name, like monastic, and Yes, God will like us to wear a simple robe of Cherkets, so the desired soul of mine, about which I already have a frightened joy. But without calling God's not to do this. To bring the right to remove from the world, you need to be able to prove with the world ... No, for you, as well as for me, locked the doors of the desired monastery. Monastery is yours - Russia! "

According to Zhukovsky, there was a monasticism of Gogol. "I'm sure," wrote Zhukovsky Plenev in March 1852 from Baden, having received the news of the death of Gogol, - that if he had not begun his "dead souls", whom the end lay on his conscience and did not all be given him, he would long He became a monk and would be calmed completely, having joined the atmosphere in which his soul would breathe easily and freely. "

The last decade of Gogol's life passes under the sign of all amplifying thrust for the night. Not allowing the monastic vises of chastity, non-stopping and obedience, he embodied them in his lifestyle. "Nurse is bliss, which has not yet painted the light. But whom God honored to taste his sweetness and who was already loved by truly his beggar bag, he would not sell it for any kind of treasures of the world. " Gogol did not have his own home and lived with friends, today at one, tomorrow at the other. He refused his share in favor of the mother and remained the poor, - helping the poor to students from the funds received for the publication of their writings. The personal property remained after the death of Gogol consisted of several dozen rubles with silver, books and old things - and meanwhile the foundation created by him "On the auxiliary of poor young people engaged in Nahukhi and Art", was more than two and a half thousand rubles.

Contemporaries did not leave any testimony about the close relationship of Gogol with a woman. The striking fact that he fought the head of unfinished labor on his church attitude to obedience, and practically refused artistic creativity. How difficult this step was for Gogol, it can be judged by his recognition in the "author's confession": "I, right, squeezed, than anyone else, to give up writing when it was the only subject of all my thoughts when I All other left, all the best bait of life, and, as a monk, ripped relationships with all the fact that a man was cute on earth, then not to think about anything other than his friend.

However, the authentic tragedy of the situation was that the monastic warehouse was only one and probably not the main side of Gogol Nature. The artistic principle prevailed in it; Gogol's crisis is a consequence of an internal conflict between spiritual aspirations and writing.

Gogol's love for monastic lifestyle is expressed in the specific words of the prayer compiled by him, which is contained in his notebook 1846 - 1851: "Mercy, Lord. You are mercy. Sorry to my sinner. Coat, yes, I remember that I alone live in you, Lord; Yes, I will not bear anyone except for one of you, hope, yes, I will remove from the world to the Holy Corner of Privacy. " This aspiration of Gogol was open not only to his closest relatives or such literary comrades as Zhukovsky, but also some school buddies.

The reflection of the spiritual life of Gogol of the 1840s can be found in the second edition of the story "Portrait". The artist who created the portrait of the Rosovshchik decides to leave the world and becomes a monk. Having finished yourself with the mobilical life of the hermit, he returns to creativity and creates a picture that strikes the audience as if emanating from her the light of spirituality. At the end of the story, the monk-artist instructs Son: "Sewing the purity of your soul. Who concluded a talent, the cleaner of everyone should be soul. The other will say a lot, but he will not forgive. "

The second editorial office of "Portrait" testifies that Gogol quite consciously went on the chosen way of religious understanding of art. In the story, he would have identified the program of his life. His attempt to leave the world in the summer of 1845, apparently did not imply a final abandonment of creativity, but as it were, he implied the return to him in the new capacity. The path to great art, Gogol believed, lies through a personal feat of the artist. You need to die for the world to relax internally, and then return to creativity.

The intense inner life of these years was reflected in the appearance of Gogol. Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, who met him in 1846 in Paris, recalls: "Gogol has come, but has acquired a special kind of beauty that cannot be otherwise identified as calling the beauty of a thinking person. His face turned pale, looked at him; Deep, the tender work of thought put on it a clear printing of exhaustion and fatigue, but his general expression seemed to me somehow lighter and calmerly. It was a philosopher's face. " Here we see a very expressive portrait that shows us spiritually mature Gogol, who has found their way.

National idea

"The selected places from correspondence with friends" were conceived as a single, solid work. Archimandrite Feodor, almost the only one who tried to consider the subject of the book, noticed that Gogol's thoughts, "how they are scattered in appearance and either scattered in letters have a strict internal connection and sequence, and therefore represent a slender integer." Father Theodore distinguishes three ideological and thematic reservoirs or "department" in the book. "The first make up," he writes, - general and basic thoughts - about being and morality, about the fate of the human race, about the church, about Russia, about the modern state of the world ... "The second" department "consists of thoughts concerning the" art and especially poetry. " The third make up some personal explanations of the author about themselves, about the writings of their own and about him to the public.

The Festore's Father's scheme is sufficiently conditional in nature: these "departments" can redistribute or distinguish others - for example, letters about the duties of various classes and the calling of each individual person ("what is the governor", "Russian landowner", "occupying important place" , "Whose feet on Earth above"). But the main thing is, in which Archimandrite Theodore is undoubtedly right, this is what Gogol's thoughts have a certain internal connection and are subject to the expression of the main idea. This idea is already visible in the names of chapters who amazed the abundance of national accents: "Reading Russian poets before the public," "a few words about our church and clergy", "On the lyricism of our poets", "you need to love Russia", "you need to travel in Russia "," What could be a wife for a husband in simple home everyday, with the current order of things in Russia, "" fears and horrors of Russia "," What is finally the essence of Russian poetry and what is its feature. " In ten of the thirty two chapters of the book, the national idea was carried out in the title. However, in those chapters where her name is absent in the title, we are talking about Russia, and in the preface Gogol asks compatriots to read his book "Several times" and "everyone in Russia" pray for him. It can be said that the main content of the "selected places ..." is Russia and its spiritual future.

Of all Russian writers, no one seems to be so strong as Gogol, did not expose the ulcers of the Russian soul, pointing to the source of them - the fatal separation of most of the Society from the Church. The whole of a mistake of a bay and petty existence, which nests in a cultural environment and adjacent to aspiration to material benefits and entertainment is a consequence of this killing soul of the separation. The only condition of the spiritual revival of Russia Gogol considered the church of Russian life. "There is a prisoner of everything within our land itself, which is still not visible as everyone, - our church, he wrote. - It is already preparing for it suddenly to enter into full rights of its own and doll to the light on the whole earth. It concluded everything that is necessary for the life of truly Russian, in all its relationship, ranging from the state to a simple family, all the mood, all of the direction, everything is legal and the right road "(" Enlightenment "); "We own the treasure, which there are no prices, and not only do not care about feeling, but do not even know where they put it" ("a few words about our church and clergy").

Gogol pointed to two conditions, without which no good transformations in Russia are impossible. First of all, you need to love Russia. What does it mean - to love Russia? The writer explains: "To the one who wishes truly honestly serve Russia, you need to have a lot of love for her, which would have already absorbed all other feelings," you need to have a lot of love for a person in general and deal with a true Christian, in the whole sense of the word. "

It should not be necessary to do anything without the blessing of the church: "For me, mad and the idea of \u200b\u200bintroducing some innovation to Russia, bypassing our church without having collapsed by her blessing. It is even ridiculous even to the thoughts of our vaccine whatever European ideas, as long as they will not paint them with the light of Christ "(" Enlightenment ").

In his book, Gogol acted as a state man, aspiring to the best device of the country, establishing the only correct hierarchy of posts, in which everyone performs their duty in its place and the deeper aware of its responsibility than this place above ("occupying an important place"). From here a variety of email addressees: from the statesman to a spiritual shepherd, from a person of art to a secular woman.

But this is only the outside side of the case. Gogol's apology of Russia, the approval of its Messianic role in the world is ultimately based on the external improvement and the international authority of the country, not at military power (although they are important), and mostly on the spiritual foundations of the national character. Gogol's look at Russia is, first of all, the look of the Orthodox Christian, which is conscious that all material wealth should be subordinate to the highest goal and are directed towards it.

Here is the main Gogol idea and a permanent moment of the temptation for the reproach to the writer in Greater-Cool chasis: Gogol as if Russia stands in front of other peoples in the sense of a more complete incarnation of the Christian ideal. But, according to Gogol, the key to the future of Russia is not only in special spiritual gifts, which the Russian people are bold compared to other peoples, and also in the awareness of them of their restlessness, their spiritual poverty (in the gospel), and in those huge opportunities who are inherent in Russia as a relatively young Christian Power.

This idea is clearly expressed in the wonderful ending "Light Sunday": "Are we better than other nations? Is life to Christ closer than them? We are no better, and life is still unsettled and messy all of them. "Worse we are all" - that's what we should always talk about ourselves ... We still melted metal, not moving into our national form; It is still possible for us to throw away, to push off indecent on them and make everything that is no longer possible to other people who have received the form and challenged in it. "

All the issues of life - domestic, public, state, literary - have a religious and moral meaning for Gogol. Recognizing and taking the existing order of things, he sought to transform society through human transformation. "Society is formed by himself, society is composed of units," he wrote. - It is necessary that each unit performed the position of his position ... It is necessary to remember the person that he is not at all material cattle, but a high citizen of high heavenly citizenship. As long as he will at least not live in the life of the Heavenly Citizen, until it comes in order and earthly citizenship. "

Gogol's book talks about the need for an internal reorganization of each, which ultimately should serve as the key to the reorganization and transformation of the entire country. This thought determines the entire artistic structure of "selected places ..." and first of all their construction.

The location of the letters has a thoughtful composition, embodying a distinct Christian idea. In "Preface", the author announces his intention to go to the great post to the Holy Land and asks for all forgiveness, just as on the eve of the post, for forgiveness Sunday, all Christians ask for forgiveness from each other. The book "Testament" opens to remind everyone about the most important Christian virtue - the memory of death. The central place is occupied by the seventeenth chapter, which is called "Enlightenment".

"Enlighten," Gogol writes, does not mean to teach, or instruct, or form, or even highlight, but all overlooking a person in all its power, and not in one mind, bring all the nature through some kind of cleansing fire. " Without spiritual enlightenment ("The Light of Christ enlightens everyone!"), According to Gogol, there can be no light. Through the entire book, the thought passes, how "enlighten the competent, than illiterate", that is, those who have feathers and paper, officials, local authorities who could enlighten the people, and not multiply evil.

The crown of the book is "bright Sunday", reminding everyone about eternal life. In the "selected places ..." Thus, the reader seems to be the path of the Christian soul during the Great Post (traditionally identified with the wander) - from death to the resurrection, through the sorrow (the head of "fears and horrors of Russia") - to joy.

In his book, Gogol resolutely levened a speech about the "most important." "If the thoughts of the writer are not addressed to important items," he said, "then it will have one emptiness." The grain of the book was originated in 1844 - in the "Relief of Life in the World", which is the depth of thought and laconic form resembles the Apostolic Messages: "The beginning, root and approval everything has love for God. But we have a beginning at the end, and we are all that neither in the world, we love more than God. " Gogol, together with some prominent hierarchs of the Church (such as St. Ignatius, Bishop Caucasian, and St. Philaret, Metropolitan Moscow) anticipate a catastrophic drop in religiosity in society. He, as it were, struck in Nabat, calling on fellow citizens to the indigenous revision of all issues of public and spiritual life of the country. He applied to the sermon and confession to all of Russia.

Both of these genres have a richest world tradition. As a sermon, Gogol's book is focused primarily on the apostolic messages, first of all, the beloved of the Holy Apostle Paul, who "says everyone and takes on a straight road" (from the letter of Gogol to Sister Olga Vasilyevna dated January 20 (n. Art.) 1847 ). Further, this tradition goes through the messages of the patristic (Afanasia of the Great, Vasily of the Great, Grigory Nissky), well-known Gogol. In the "selected places ..." he acts as a preacher and spiritual teacher who can indicate the path of salvation to everyone - from the first to the last person in the state. At the same time, he, like the saint John Zlatoust, teaches and denounces compatriots: "Christian! They kicked out to the street of Christ, to Lazaruts and Hospitals, as if to call him to her houses, her native roof, and think they were Christians! "

In the Gogol Epoch, the tradition of a church word lived in the preaching literature, the most prominent representatives of which were St. Philaret Moscow and Archbishop Kherson Innokenty. Without a doubt, Gogol's style was fed not only by books, but also lively sources - constantly heard by the preaching of church shepherds.

Equally, the deep tradition has the genre of confession, in Western literature submitted, in particular, by classical works - "confession" of Blessed Augustine and "Confessions" Rousseau. It is closely associated with an epistolary genre, very characteristic of Russia of the late XVIII - the first half of the nineteenth century. It is enough to remember the "letters of the Russian traveler" Nikolai Karamzin, the "Chronicle of the Russian" Alexander Turgenev, the "philosophical" letters of Peter Chaadayev or letters of Vasily Zhukovsky, including Gogol himself. In the spiritual literature, this genre was represented by the wonderful work of Jeroshimonach Sergius - "Letters of Svyatogorz to his friends about the Holy Mountain of Athos".

Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov noted the naturalness of the epistolary genre for Gogol. According to him, "Gogol is expressed in perfect in his letters; In this regard, they are much more important than its printed essays. " It is easy to see, however, as for the artistic prose, Gogol is characterized by almost the same confessionalness as for his letters. Recall at least lyrical deviations in its poses and "dead souls".

This side of the "selected places ..." for Gogol himself was very significant. He called his book "By the confession of a man who spent several years within himself." Even before entering her, he asks Shevyreva (in a letter from Naples dated December 8 (n. Art.) 1846) to find in Moscow of his confessor, a priest from the arrival of the church of St. Savva's consecrated father of John Nikolsky, and give him an instance of the book as a continuation His confession.

The ultimate sincerity of the recognition in which many seen the pride of self-esteem, partly was the reason that those who seemed to share the beliefs of Gogol were distinguished. The personality of the author was even more naked censored intervention. "All officials and officials for whom the best articles were written - Gogol complained, - disappeared with articles from the type of readers; One me remained, just as if I published my book exactly then, to put myself for a universal disgrace "(from the letter to the Countess Anna Mikhailovna Vilygorski from February 6 (n. Art.) 1847).

And yet, Gogol remained Gogol, and society, in his opinion, was obliged to accept his confession as confession of the writer, the author of the "dead souls", and not a private person. "In response, he said in the" author's confession "- who will try to me, why I put my inner crate, I can still say that I'm not yet a monk, but a writer. I entered in this case, as all those writers who said what was in the soul. "

Contemporaries reproached Gogol in the fact that he neglected his creative gift. "The main fair charge against you is the following," Shevyrev wrote on March 22, 1847, - Why did you leave art and refused all the same? Why are you neglected for God's gift? ". Just like Belinsky, Shevyrev urged Gogol to return to artistic activities.

"I can't understand," Gogol answered, "I caught this remote thought about the renunciation of my talent and from art, whereas from my own book you could seem to see ... what suffering I had to endure from love for art ... What to do if the soul became the subject of my art, did I blame with this? What to do if I have been made by many special events of my life to look more stricter on art? Who is to blame? The one is to blame, without the will of which no event is performed. "

In his book, Gogol said what should be, in his opinion, art. Its appointment is to serve the "invisible step to Christianity", because the modern person is "unable to meet directly with Christ." According to Gogol, the literature should fulfill the same task as the compositions of spiritual writers, to enlighten the soul, lead it to perfection. In this for him - the only justification of the art. And the higher his view began on art, the more demanding he treated himself as a writer.

The awareness of the liability of the artist for the word and for all of them written it came to Gogol very early. Even in the "portrait" of the editorial office of 1835, the old monk is divided with his son with his religious experience: "Device, My Son, the terrible power of the demon. He is all so much to penetrate: in our affairs, in our thoughts and even in the most inspiration of the artist. " In the "selected places ..." Gogol is with all certainty the question of the appointment of an artist-Christian and about the board that he gives for entrusted to him the gift of God - the Word.

About the person responsibility for the Word is said in the Holy Gospel: "For any idle word, what people will say, they will give the answer ..." (). Gogol rebelled against the idle literary word: "You need to handle the word honestly. It is the highest gift of God man ... It is dangerous to joke a writer with a word. The word rot Yes does not come from your mouth!. If this should be applied to all of us without withdrawal, then how many times it should be applied to those whose field is a word ... "

Konstantin Mochulsky in the book "The Spiritual Way of Gogol wrote:" In the moral region, Gogol was brilliantly gifted; He was destined to turn the whole Russian literature from aesthetics to religion, shifted her from Pushkin's path to Dostoevsky's path. All the features characterizing the "Great Russian Literature", which has become the world, were outlined by Gogol: its religious-moral system, its citizenship and the public, its combat and practical character, its prophetic pathos and messianism. From Gogol begins a wide road, global expanses. Gogol's power was so great that he managed to make an incredible: to turn the Pushkin era of our literature into an episode, to which there is no return and can not be. "

In these words, much truth, although, probably, a fracture in the domestic literature was not so cutting. In the same Pushkin, especially the mature Pushkin of the 1830s, it is impossible not to notice the beginning of the future Russian literature, which, by the way, was well aware of Gogol, calling the poet "Our Prophoapostol".

One of the reproaches, which was presented by Gogol after the release of the book, is reproached in the fall of artistic dating. So, Belinsky in passing claimed: "What is the great truth that when a person is given to Lies, his mind and talent leave him! Do not be on your book put up your name and whether it is turned off the places where you are talking about yourself as a writer, who would have thought that this inflated and untidy noise of words and phrases is the work of the pen of the author "Auditor" and "Dead Souls "?"

No matter how surprisingly, this is a higher depronant judgment for one and a half years, no one tried to refute, although there were people gifted by a subtle artistic taste among readers and connoisseurs. In general, I must say that the study of the style and language "selected places ..." is a matter of the future, when we will have researchers who can relate the book of Gogol with the tradition of the patristic literature and the high style of Russian philosophical poetry of the XVIII - nineteenth centuries (the samples of which are partly indicated by Gogol himself In the articles "On the lyricism of our poets", "What finally the essence of Russian poetry and what is its feature" and an unfinished treatise "The learning book of literature for Russian junior"). But it is enough to uncompressively listen to the music of Gogol Text to understand the full injustice of these reproaches. Re-read the last three pages of "Light Sunday": in this masterpiece of prose, they first sound rare, deaf blows of the fine bell, which in the end are gradually replaced by the joining Easter Blagoves.

Why did this ever suffer value of the holiday? Why does he again come to the wilderness and the gloover to squander into one family of the smaller people and, sadly wounded everyone, goes like unfamiliar and someone else's? .. And the earth has already caught up with incomprehensible longing; worry and worry becomes life; Everything grows and merge, and only in mind of all one giganic image of boredom, reaching every day of immeasuranty growth. All deaf, grave everywhere. God! Empty and scary becomes in your world!

Why is one Russian yet it seems that this holiday is celebrated, as follows, and is celebrated so in one of his land? Is it a dream? But why does this dream come to anyone else, except Russian? What does it matter that the most holiday disappeared, and the visible signs of it are so clearly worn on the face of our land: words are heard: "Christ is risen!" - And the kiss, and every time the saint midnight is solemnly protesting, and the hums of the Ivly Qonory Bells are walking and humble throughout the earth, exactly how would you be? Where the ghosts are so obvious, there are no wish; Where will be going to go there. They do not die that customs who are defined to be eternal. Dying in the letter, but come to life in the spirit. They will die temporarily, die in empty and weathered crowds, but resurrected with a new force in your favorites, then so that in the strongest light from them to break throughout the world. It will not die from our antiquity of the grain that there is truly Russian in it and that consecrated by Christ himself. Speaken by ringing strings of poets, he is delivered by the fragrant mouths of the saint, the fearful - and the holiday of a bright Sunday will be born, as follows, before we have than other peoples! "

Gogol's talent is not a dumb in his journalism, but manifested itself unpredictable for himself for himself for the reading public. Around Gogol there was an atmosphere of tragic misunderstanding. He made a conclusion from sharp critic (maybe incorrect): "It's not my work to teach a sermon. Art already already already occasion. " He returns to the "Dead Souls" with the conviction: "Here is my field" - and works on them to the very death. But the search for a new literary path and thrust for the monocar life remains.

Jerusalem

After Weimar, Gogol was at least twice twice, if not to go into the monk, then at least approach the monastery - at the end of his life, he was going to Saint Athos and went to Optio desert several times. One of the most informative moments of his spiritual life was the pilgrimage in Jerusalem.

The origins of this trip go to the childhood of Gogol. In his house, he undoubtedly heard numerous stories of loved ones and wanderers about the Holy Land and read the books about Jerusalem, produced for the people. This affected later in the early works of the writer. "Did you read ..." Ivan Ivanovich asked after some silence, the book "Travel Korobeinikov to the Holy Places"? True Soul and Hearts! Now such books do not print ... Truly surprisingly, my sovereign, how to think that the simple tradan was held all the places of these ... Genuinely, his Lord himself had to visit Palestine and Jerusalem "(" Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt ", 1832).

In the review of the book "Journey to the Holy Places, committed in the XVII century by the Ierodicon Troitskaya Lavra" (intended for the Pushkin "Contemporary"), Gogol wrote: "Travels in Jerusalem produce a magical effect in our people. This is one of those books that are most and more religious. Almost this makes an impression on them a journey into a tsaregraph, as if an involuntary grate, preserved in the Russian tribe, for the light that once expired from there. Often, the Russian tradesman, the industrialist any scientist, throwing things, went to Jerusalem and Tsaregrad ... "

It is not known exactly when the idea of \u200b\u200bthe trips to the Holy Land arose at Gogol himself, but in early 1842 he received a blessing for it from Holy Innocent, at that time the bishop of Kharkov. Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov so tells about this: "Suddenly, Gogol with the image of the Savior in his hands and a shining, enlightened face. I never had such an expression in my eyes. Gogol said: "I've been waiting for anyone to bless me, and no one did it; Finally, Innokenti blessed me. Now I can declare where I'm going to the coffin of the Lord. " Gogol was accompanied by an excreted Innocent, and that for goodbye blessed his way. In this blessing, he saw the command over.

When the wife of Aksakova, Olga Semenovna, said that the description of Palestine is expecting from him, Gogol replied: "Yes, I will describe it to you, but for that I need to cleanse it and be worthy." The continuation of literary labor, he no longer thinks without prior renewal of the soul: "The cleaner of the mountain snow and the bright heavens should be my soul, and then only I will come into the strength to start the feats and the great field, then only my existence is resolved" (from the letter to Zhukovsky from June 26 (n. Art.) 1842).

During a meeting with the Lord Innochenty Gogol, apparently, it was also agreed to see him in Jerusalem. In May 1842, on the eve of his departure abroad, he sent him a copy of the newly released "dead souls" with a letter, in which he expressed the hope of a meeting at the Holy Sepulcher: "Almighty power over us. Nothing is made without it in the world. And our meeting was appointed over. She is a deposit of a complete meeting at the coffin of the Lord. Do not matter about it and do not think how to arrange it. Everyone will make themselves. I hear in myself that a significant date awaits us. I send you my work! Take a look at him friendly. This is a pale beginning of such labor that the light grace of Heaven will not be much useless ... Your image you blessed me, always with me! "

With this way, the Savior Gogol did not part, and after his death, he was kept by Anna Vasilyevna, sisters of a writer. Later, in the spring of 1845, Gogol (as if answering this gift) appeals to Alexander Smirnova with the following request: "At the exhibition, Academic in St. Petersburg will arrive ... Among other paintings from Rome Savior's head from" Transfiguration "of Rafael, Copied Shapovalov and belonging to me . Send it from my name to Harvests to Kharkiv. "

Pilgrimage in Jerusalem took place only in 1848, although the desire to Hogol kept all these years. He published his intention to go to the holy places, he publicly announced in the preface to "selected places from correspondence with friends," asking for forgiveness from his compatriots, asking the prayers in Russia - "Starting from the saint" and ending those "who do not believe It is at all in prayer, "and, in turn, promising to pray for everyone from the Holy Sepulcher.

In 1847, the Russian spiritual mission was founded in Jerusalem in connection with the increasing flow of pilgrims from Russia. The head of her was appointed Archimandrite Porphy (Uspensky), subsequently Bishop Chigirinsky, the largest expert of the culture of the Christian East. The mission was also saint Feofan, while Hieromona, the future bishop of Tambovsky, Vladimir and Suzdal, the famous Nashinsky, and just graduated from the St. Petersburg spiritual seminary two student. One of them, the priest Pyotr Soloviev, left memories of a meeting with Gogol in January 1848 on a steamer "Istambul", which followed the shores of Syria - to Beirut, where the mission was to go to Jerusalem. Archimandrite Porfiry has recommended Gogol Father Peter as an artist. Gogol showed that a small image of Nicholas the Wonderworker and asked his opinions about the work. "Everyworth, it was clear that he had highly appreciated his artistic attitude to his icon and treated her as shrine," Petr recalled.

From Beirut Gogol, accompanied by his school friend Konstantin Basili, "through Sidon and ancient Tir and Acre" went to Jerusalem. Subsequently, in a letter to Zhukovsky dated February 28, 1850, he described this journey alive and poetic paints: "I saw this land like in a dream. Moving from the night to the climbing of the sun, we sat on the mules and horses in escorts and hiking and horse-haired; Gusem was a long train through a small desert along the wet shore or the bottom of the sea, so on the one side the sea was washed with flat waves horsepie hooves, and on the other hand, sands or whitish plates of starting elevations were stretched, occasionally crumbling shrubs; At noon, the well, laid out with plates reservoir, autonated with two and three olives or sicomoras. There is a hat for half an hour and again on the path until it seems on the evening horizon, no longer blue, but copper from the setting sun, five to six palm trees and together with them cut through the crooked MGLU, the painted painted and poor near, some Sidon or tire. And the same way to Jerusalem himself. "

In mid-February 1848, travelers arrived in Jerusalem. An entry appears in the Gogol's notebook: "Nikolai Gogol - in St. Grad."

The stay of Gogol in the Holy Land is a poorly studied episode of his spiritual biography. According to the testimony of contemporaries, he himself did not like to remember him. When Mikhail Maksimovich, a long-time friend of Gogol, spoke to him about what it would be good if he described his journey to Palestine, he answered: "Maybe I would describe everything on four sheets, but I would wish to write it so So that the reading heard that I was in Palestine. "

And here Gogol takes place at the places of earthly life of the Savior, the Holy Taine of the Lord, and it is praying for the whole of Russia - like its distant predecessor, Igumen Daniel, the first Russian pilgrim, who at the beginning of the XII century brought to the holy coffin lamp "from All Russian land. "

Gogol Description of the Liturgy in the tomb of the Lord is performed by a high inspiration and warm feeling: "I stood in it (Altar. - V.V.) One; Before me, only the priest who committed Liturgy. Deacon, who called on the people to moles, was already behind me, behind the walls of the coffin. His voice was already heard of me in the distance. The voice of the people and choir, who responded to him was still distant. The connected singing of Russian fans, who were led by "Lord, Pomemui" and other church hymns, barely reached the ears, as if emanating from some other area. All this was so wonderful! I do not remember whether I prayed. It seems to me that I was just rejoiced by the fact that I was placed on the spot, so convenient for the messenger and so with a pray. Praying actually I did not have time. So it seems to me. Liturgy rushed, it seemed to me, so quickly that the most winged messengers would not be angry with her. I did not have time to even come together, as I found himself before the bowl made by the priest from the Vertipa for introducing me, unworthy ... "(from the letter to Zhukovsky from Beirut dated April 6, 1848).

This night, spent at the Holy Sepulcher, remained forever in Gogol's memory. Meanwhile, it is possible to bring conclusion from his letters (as often and there are biographers) that the pilgrimage did not give those fruits to which he expected. "I will tell you that I have never been so little satisfied with the state of my own, as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem, - wrote Gogol on April 21, 1848, Matthew Konstantinovsky from Odessa. "Just perhaps I saw myself more about myself and myself, here's the whole result."

However, these humble words acquire a slightly different meaning if we think of what precedes them and what follows after them. "Often I think: for which God is so sleeping for me and suddenly gives me so much," says Gogol at the beginning of the letter, "and I can only explain it to myself that my position is really more dangerous to me, and it is difficult for me to escape than anyone else ... The Spirit-seducer is so close to me and so often deceived me, forcing me to think that I already own what I just strive and that as long as he was only in the head, and not in the heart. "

And further, saying that he has never been so little satisfied with the state of his heart, as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem, Gogol adds: "There was one minute ... But how to make it possible to indulge in a minute, who has already experienced, as close to us the tempter! I'm missing everything, seeing every minute how I go dangerous. Blanks away some kind of ray of salvation: the holy word love. It seems to me how the mile of people are becoming a millenk, than ever before, as if I am much more able to love now than ever before. But God knows, maybe, and it only seems so; Maybe here plays the role of a tempter ... "

"One minute", about which Gogol wrote to the Father Matthew, this, apparently, is the night spent at the altar of the coffin of the Lord, when he acquired the Holy Taine. About the same "minute" Gogol spoke Alexandra Smirnova. According to her, he did not answer when he was asked about the holy places, but she told her only "one night spent in the church".

The genuine result of the Gogol's trip to the Holy Land is the acquisition of real spiritual humility and fraternal love for people. In this sense, the words of Gogol should be understood from the letter from the letter to Zhukovsky from the end of February 1850: "My journey to Palestine was accurately made by me then to find out in person personally and how to see your own eyes, how great the worn is my heart. Friend, great this worn! I was honored to spend the night at the coffin of the Savior, I was honored to join the Holy Taine, who were in the coffin instead of the altar, and at all that I did not become the best, whereas all the earth would have to burn in me and remain one heavenly. "

From the memories of close to Gogol people, it is also possible to understand that he has not been expected from this pilgrimage. So, Olga Vasilyevna Gogol Head writes in his memoirs: "It seems to me that he was disappointed with a trip to Jerusalem, because he did not want to tell us. When they asked him to tell, he said: "You can read the" Journey to Jerusalem "."

As you can see, the judgment of the sister Gogol is based on an external impression, on the unwillingness of his brother talk about his pilgrimage. Meanwhile, from the next words, it is possible to conclude the opposite: "According to his actions, as I noticed, it can be seen that he turned to the Gospel most and I advised me to constantly lay the gospel on the table. "Read more often, you will see that God does not require a long time to stand on prayer, but always remember his teaching in all your matters." He always held the gospel with him, even on the road. When he went with us to the Sorozhintsy, in the crew read the gospel. It was visible to his love to all. I never heard who he condemned. He helped with his career money ... "

Gogol's pilgrimage to the Holy Land was perceived by his relatives and acquaintances. Historian Vsevolod Andreevich Chavets, commenting on the memoirs of Olga Vasilyevna Gogol Head, notes: "And in the family, as in friendly and close circles, the results of the trip Gogol in Jerusalem were all disappointed. We read about it in memoirs. "

However, in memoirs you can read another. So, the Princess Varvara Nikolaevna Repnin-Volkonskaya in his memories as follows describes the arrival of Gogol in their estate Yagotino in 1848: "His face wore a handprint, which consumed in his soul. Before he was clear people; But he was closed for them, and one irony was shown outside. She is cololated with their sharp nose, horrified by his expressive eyes; He was afraid. Now he has been clear for others; He is kind, he is soft, he fraternally sympathizes to people, he is so available, he is indulgent, he breathes Christianity. Then in Odessa, I gave him to read these lines; He told me: "You understood me, but I put too high in my opinion" ".

A change in Gogol noticed others. For example, a major entrepreneur Patriot, Slavophil Fedor Vasilyevich Chizhov wrote on June 1, 1848. Painter Alexander Ivanov from Kiev: "Fourth day came here Gogol, returning from Jerusalem, he seems to be very and very much over his own, and internal successes are expressed in his external peace. "

From the pilgrimage to the coffin of the Lord Gogol brought to his homeland a certificate of authenticity of relics, which his Metropolitan Petras Lestelli blessed: "1848, February 23: in the city of Jerusalem, for the sake of diligence, which showed the Lord to the lively coffin and on the other holy places the spiritual son Our Nikolai Vasilyevich , and bless him a small part of the pebble from the coffin of the Lord and a part of the tree from the door of the temple of the Resurrection, which burned during the fire of September 18, September 30 of the 30th day; These particles are both justice. Metropolitan Petras Maleti and Patriarch's governor in Holy Grad Jerusalem. "

As the memory of the journey of Gogol to the holy places in Vasilyevka, a cypress staff was also kept, presented to them by Sister Olga Vasilyevna, with whom she did not part all her life; Cornelonian cross, pearl cartridge icons with an appearance of an adolescence, flowers from Palestine, consecrated by Jerusalem soap, which washed the Savior's coffin on the night before Easter, and other relics.

Gregory Petrovich Danilevsky, the author of popular historical novels, who personally knew Gogol and who committed a trip to his homeland in May 1852, tells in his memoirs that the local peasants did not want to believe that Gogol died, and among them there was a tale of what was buried among them Someone else's coffin, and Barin seemed to be left in Jerusalem and prays there for them. In this legend, there is a deep spiritual truth: Gogol really moved to Gorey Jerusalem and there from his wonderful, but mysterious and unknown to us, the throne of the Lord, prays for the whole Russian land so that she stood in Orthodox faith and to be more in her Truth and love, because it was the main concern for the Great Soul of the Great Russian Writer.

More than once was going to Gogol in Jerusalem. Once, in 1850, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Soren, Born Smirnova, Daughter Alexandra Osipovna, then another little girl asked him: "I'll take me to Jerusalem?" Gogol answered thoughtfully: "I will not go soon; I need to finish the case before. "

In Jerusalem, Gogola was no longer possible - as he did not have to go and go to St. Athos, where he also sought.

Optina desert

Kozelskaya Vvedenskaya Optina Desert was made by the middle of the nineteenth century one of the centers of the spiritual life of Russia. The rumor about the fertile optucleists elders began to attract the monastery almost all the believers of Russia - from the peasant to the statesman, who were looking for spiritual consolation and instructions, as well as a response to vital issues. Russian thinkers' writers came there - Ivan Kireevsky, Fedor Dostoevsky, Lion Tolstoy, Konstantin Leontyev. In this row was Gogol, who approved with approval not only to the prayer life of the desert, but also to its publishing activities.

In the mid-1840s, on the initiative of Rev. Makaria and his spiritual Chad in the world of Ivan Vasilyevich and Natalia Petrovna Kireevsky in the optical desert began the publication of St. Literature. Among the many books were produced by the creations of St. Isaac Sirin, the Nile of the Sieme, Simeon of the New Theologian, the Maxim of the Confessor, Avva Dorofei. The abbot of the monastery Archimandrite Moses together with the older Makarius sent this literature throughout Russia, primarily in the spiritual seminaries and the Academy, to Athos, as well as the bishops of all the dioceses. It was a concern for the spiritual enlightenment of the Russian people. The same goal had and Gogol.

In the optical desert, Gogol was three times: in June 1850 and in June and September 1851. When he has matured the idea of \u200b\u200bthe first trip - it is not known exactly. The first documentary testimony about the interest of Gogol to Optina refers to 1846. Chamber-Junker Vladimir Mukhanov, who was treated at that time abroad, wrote in August of this year sisters from Ostend: "Here we found Gogol, with whom I got acquainted. He is very remarkable, especially according to the pious feeling of Christian love ... He recently reads us two wonderful letters of young worm for her father, written from the optical desert. We listened to moutigation. How much faith and love in a young devotee, who left the world and all charms in those years, when they seduce the person so much, and dedicated themselves to God! What a quiet and solemn calm in this soul that has reached the pier! ".

In all likelihood, Ivan Kireevsky sent to Optio Gogol. The spiritual son of Rev. Makaria, he like no other understood the meaning of the oldity. "Significant all sorts of books and any thinking," he wrote to his friend Alexander Ivanovich Koshelev, - to find the Holy Orthodox elder, who could be your leader to whom you could tell every idea and hear about her not his opinion, more or less intelligent But the judgment of the holy fathers. Such elders, thanks to God, still have in Russia ... ". Without a doubt, the same thoughts of Kireevsky expressed and Gogol. In any case, in June 1850, Gogol, together with Mikhail Maksimovich, traveling to the south, to Malorossia, climbs to Optina.

June 13, friends left Moscow for long. The first night they spent in Podolsk, where Alexei Homyakov's poet-Slavophila met with his wife and spent the evening in a friendly conversation with them. On June 15, Gogol and his satellite spent the night in a small Yaroslavl, in the morning there was a prayer in the local Nikolaev monastery, the abbot of whom the father of Anthony drove them with tea and blessed everyone by the finifelian sample of Nicholas Wonderworker.

Igumen Anthony was one of the three brothers of Putilovy, famous devotees of Christian piety. For fourteen years, he was the head of the John Preteak Skit, the next fourteen years managed by Maloyaroslavetsky Nikolaev Monastery and then he lived on peace in the optical desert. His brother, Archimandrite Moses, was the abbot of optical for almost forty years; During these years, the monastery was completely transformed and equipped, his publishing activities unfolded, fragmentation bloomed. The third brother of Putilov, Father Isaiah, was the igumen of the Sarov monastery.

On June 16, Gogol and Maksimovich were held in Kaluga, and in the afternoon, Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova, spouse of the Kaluga governor, a long-standing friend of Gogol. Here, in the presence of the famous poet of Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Nikolai Vasilyevich spoke about his intention "Driving in Russia." Panteleimon Kulish tells with the words of Maximovich: "By the way, the journey for long it was for him (Gogol. - V.V.) already as if the beginning of the plan, which he assumed to be subsequently. He wanted to take a journey throughout Russia, from the monastery to the monastery, driving on country roads and stopping to rest at the landowners. It was necessary for him, firstly, in order to see the picturesque places in the state, which the most part was elected by old Russian people to base the monasteries; secondly, in order to explore the villagers of the Russian kingdom and the life of peasants and landowners in all its diversity; Thirdly, finally, in order to write a geographical essay about Russia the most exciting way. He wanted to write it so, "So that a person with the soil on which he was born" was heard. "

From Kaluga Gogol and his companion went to Optio desert. The last two versts to the monastery they went on foot, as it should be placed on pilgrims. On the way, we met a girl with a bowl of strawberries and wanted to buy berries from her. But that, seeing that they are traveling people, did not want to take money from them and gave the strawberries with a gift with the words: "As you can take with strange people." "This desert spreads piety in the people," said Gogol, disammoned by this phenomenon. - And I have repeatedly noticed such an influence of such abode. "

In Optina Gogol, according to the memoirs of the Inok, attended by the all-in-interest, during which "I prayed very hard and heartily aspirations," then visited the elders. It was, apparently, on June 17 (this day in 1850 accounted for Saturday, when a all-sleeping vigil is taken under Sunday). On June 19, travelers left for the estate of Ivan Kireevsky Dolbino, who were in forty versers from the monastery near the city of Bellev.

Here Gogol, the next day, wrote a letter to Optina Hieromonakh Philaret (formerly governor of the Moscow Novospassky Monastery, who has lived in Optina since 1843): "For the sake of Christ himself, pray for me, Father Filaret. Ask your worthy abbot, ask all your brotherhood, ask for everyone who is very much praying and loves to pray, ask prayers about me. My way is difficult; My boyfriend can not move without every hour and without an empty assistance, without every hour and without explicit assistance to God ... "Gogol realized that the Optina Spirit became vital for him:" I need an every minute, I tell you, to be thoughts above everyday grain and on Any place of your travel to be in the Optina desert. "

It was in his first visit that Gogol met the pillars of the Optina monasticity - Reverend Igumen Moses and Starter Makarius. There is a legend that the father of Macarius, who had a gift of witness, premeditated the arrival of Gogol. The old man of Wsenonophone told his spiritual children: "They say he was at that time in his Kellya (who knows, not in this if he came to himself, because Gogol came right here) and, quickly walking back and forth, spoke to the former inching with him:" I am worried about something heart. Exactly, an extraordinary should be accomplished, it is precisely waiting for someone. " At this time, they report that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol came. "

It is almost undoubted that in a conversation with an elder it was a speech about "selected places from correspondence with friends." In the library of the optical desert, a copy of the book with the feedback of St. Ignatius (Bryanchaninova) was kept, rewritten by the hand of Rev. Makaria. It is not known what way this review fell into opto; Perhaps he was brought by Gogol himself, who learned the opinion of the saint (at that time Archimandrite) back in 1847.

Gogol was hardly the only Russian secular writer, whose creative thought could feed the patristic creations. In one of the arrival in Optina (perhaps and in the first), he read a handwritten book - in the Church Slavonic language - St. Isaac Sirin (with which in 1854, a printed edition was prepared by an old Makarius), which became revealed for him. The monastery library kept a copy of the first edition of the "dead souls", which belonged to the Count Tolstoy, and after his death, the transmitted to the Father Clement (Zedergolm), with the litters of Gogol, made on reading this book. On the fields of the eleventh chapter, against the place where it is about "inborn passions", he sketched a pencil: "This I wrote in the" charms "(seduction. - V.V.), this is nonsense - inborn passions - evil, and all The efforts of the rational will of the person must be fixed to eradicate them. Only the smoking sense of human pride could inspire the idea of \u200b\u200ba high meaning of inborn passions - now, when I became smarter, I deeply regret the "rotten words", here written here. I was angry when I was typing this chapter that I was confused, the question of the meaning of a lot of passions a lot and had long occupied me and slowed down the continuation of the "dead souls". I regret that late I found out the book of Isaac Sirin, the Great Ceremony and the Troopy Inok. Right psychology and not a curve, but a direct understanding of the soul, we meet at the racial workers. What the young people confused about the soul in a hit-free German dialectic are not more like a ghostly deception. A person sitting on the ears in everyday tine, not given an understanding of the nature of the soul. "

A visit to Optina produced a deep impression on Gogol. Three weeks later, he wrote Count to Tolstoy from Vasilievka: "I drove on the road to the Optina desert and permanently gone about her memories. I think it's no better on the Afonov Mountain. Grace apparently present there ... Nowhere I have not seen such monks. With each of them, it seemed to me, talking all the heavenly ... For a few miles, driving up to the monastery, you already hear her fragrance: everything becomes friendly, bows lower and farthey for a person more. You try to visit this monastery ... "

In the first arrival of Gogol, his acquaintance with a person of amazing fate, Peter Alexandrovich Grigorov, at that time Rashanforn ink was happening. In the world he was a guards officer and served in equestrian artillery; A funny episode is widely known from the past life. One day, a civilian young man appeared on the Battery of Grigorov (it was near Zadonsk); When Pushkin was recognized in it, a ardent artillery, a fan of the Great Poet, immediately made a cannon Salute in his honor, for which he was planted on Gaupvataht. Peter Grigorov began the nightly life by the famine of the famous Zadonsky Navashnik Georgy, the spiritual proximity to which he retained and turning into the optical desert. They were published "Letters in the Bose of the Honor of the Zadonsky Bogoroditsky Monastery of George" with a brief life view, compiled on the memorization of his Celnikov (including Grigorov himself).

Upon arrival of Gogol, Igumen Moses instructed the Petra novice to show the guest of the temples and other buildings of the monastery. Despite the brevity of acquaintance and conversation, Gogol loved Goggigor and later spoke of him: "He is a glorious person and a real Christian; His soul is such a children's, bright, transparent! He is not at all a cloudy monk running from people, not loving conversations. No, he, opposite, loves all people like brothers; He is always cheerful, always indulgent. This is the highest degree of perfection to which a true Christian can enaches. " Grigorov, at that time, was seriously ill, but his ailment was able to hide her until it was possible.

Gogol told his new friend a lot of curious, in particular, about the miracle in the relics of St. Spiridon Trimifuntsky. In the optical, the following legend was preserved, retailed by the Rev. Ambrose: "From the IV century and the Greek Church, the Greek Church praises with the intelligent relics of the ward of the Holy Spiridon trimifuntsky, which are not only imperishable, but in continuation of the fifteen centuries, they kept softness. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who was at the optical desert, passed the publisher of the lives and letters of the reservoir of Zadonsky George (Father Porphyria Grigorov) that he himself saw the relics of St. Spiridon and witnessed a miracle from these. With it, the relics were shared near the city, as it takes annually on December 12 with a great celebration. All the former were applied here to the relics, and one English traveler did not want to give them proper respect, saying that the back of the cauldron would be cut through and the body was named, then, however, decided to approach, and the relics themselves turned back to him. The Englishman in horror fell on the ground before the shrine. This was witnessing many viewers, including Gogol, on which this case strongly worked. "

At the departure from Optic, already from Vasilievka, Gogol wrote a letter to Grigorov, asking for the abode and his nephew Nikolai Troškovsky, going to the University of Kazan. About visiting the monastery Gogol recalled with cardiac warmth: "Your close to the skies of the desert and the warm welcome is left in my soul my most gracious memory."

In conclusion, Gogol asks prayers, "in the particular Father of Hegumen," and transfers money for prayers (ten rubles with silver) about a safe journey to holy places and about the prosperous end of the essay of his own - "dead souls" - "For true benefit to others Souls. "

Nikolai Trushkovsky came to opto at a very inappropriate moment; Peter Grigorov has just been tonsured in a mantle with the name Porfiry and inexitiously located five days in the temple. But he instructed another person to show the junior monastery and gave him advisory letters to influential persons in Kazan.

Correspondence by Gogol with Father Porphyria continued in the winter of 1850/51. Obviously, in the summer they had a conversation about the books of the reasons of Zadonsky George. Hogol's letters read before: the excerpts of them are in the collection of extracts from the creations of the Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church. Then Gogol used the publication of 1839. Now Father Porfiri sends him the last edition - 1850, in three volumes, supplemented with new letters and "brief news about the life of the reservoir of the Zadonsky Bogoroditsky Monastery George."

Answering a letter of Gogol from Odessa who did not reach us (from December 1850), Father Porphiri wrote to him from the optical desert on January 26 of the next 1851 (last year in his life): "I transmit to you promised me by the book of Zadonsky George ... you will see As he was a poet and his soul sought him to the sky ... I hope that his life will read with pleasure. "

Gogol responded to the father of Porphyria from Odessa on March 6, 1851: "Thank you much and for the letter and for the book of the reclusive. As she came to me by the way to the coming great post! .. How I do not appreciate fraternal prayers for me, when without them I would have long, maybe died. My path is very slippery, and only then can I pass it when they will support me with prayers from all sides. " In the prescription, Gogol passed the spiritual bow to the abbot, Field of Philaret and all the brethren.

This letter, Father Porphiri, apparently, did not have time: he peacefully soiling about the Lord on March 15, 1851, forty-seven years old, joining a few minutes before the death of the Holy Taine. Father Porphiri predicted his death for the week. Externally, it happened as a consequence of a strong cold. During his death-sized disease, Inok had a notice of a close ending, and he was three times in a dream that Nikolai's novice (who, during his life, Porphyry had a special felt) and told him that he was preparing for the outcome of this life. And on the eve of his death, the ninety-year old man Father Hilarion Troekurovsky, who lived in the Lebedyansky subseeter for three persons from Optica and who didn't know anything about the disease of the father of Porphyria, sent him a shirt (in which he was pressed), bubble oils and a piece of rye bread, expressing, however Doubt that the sent will catch in the alive.

For the second time, Gogol was in the optical desert passing from the south to Moscow in June 1851. About this visit, who fell out of the field of view of Gogol's biographers, is known from the record in the diary of the Optina Hieromonach Euphimia (Trunova) dated June 2, 1851: "Popular arrived from Odessa to St. Petersburg (actually in Moscow. - V.V.) Writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. With a special sense of reverence, he served the evening, a memo on the grave of his spiritual friend, the monk Porphyry Grigorova, then the all-night vigil in the cathedral. In the morning on Sunday the 3rd number, he defended Liturgy into the Skit and during the late dinner went to Kaluga, hacked on some kind of business. Gogol left an exemplary sample of piety in the memory of our abode. "

In this arrival, Gogol learned about the circumstances of the death of the father of Porphyry and talked with the elders. Upon returning to Moscow, he writes letters to Igumen Moses and Starta Makaria (the latter was not preserved), in which thanks for the hospitality, asks prayers and sends money to the monastery (twenty-five rubles with silver). The elders, in turn, thank Gogol, and Rev. Makariya, in addition, blesses him to writing a book on the geography of Russia for the youth.

The idea of \u200b\u200bthis work arose from Gogol for a long time and it is with him that the alleged trips through the monasteries are connected. In the sketches of the official letter (July 1850) to a high person, asking material assistance for three years, he sets out his considerations about this: "We need a living, not a dead image of Russia, that essential, speaking its geography, drawn by a strong, living syllable that would put Russian face to Russia even at the initial time of his life when he is given to the power of the governers of foreigners ... This book made up a long time of my reflection. She matures together with today's work and maybe at the same time it will be ready. In success, I hope not so much on my strength, as for the love of Russia, thank God, increasingly in me is increasing, for the prompt of all the most truly knowledgeable of her people who are the road to her future fate and raising their own children, and most of the mercy and help God, without which nothing will accomplish ... "

The old man of Macarius was given the desired blessing, but warned the writer so that he waited for obstacles in a good deed: "If you do not dare to refuse and only the one I can serve that, taking the pen, I stretch my sinful hand on this charter, and your faith will be yours The petition from the Lord to inspire the word to your consolation to me ... In the Bent of your intention about the publication of a useful book, God is strong to give you his help when his holy will will be on this. But, as the holy fathers write, that every holy case or preientore, or the temptation will be followed, then you will be offered in sectors, requiring one's mind. " Gogol did not have time to implement this design.

The third and last time Gogol visited the Holy Abode in September 1851. On September 22, he left Moscow to Vasilyevka for the wedding of Sisters Elizabeth Vasilyevna, intending to drive from there to the Crimea and stay there for the winter. However, reached Kaluga, he went to Optio, and then unexpectedly returned to Moscow. The trip spawned a variety of letters among familiar Gogol. The following is reliably.

On September 24, Gogol was an elder Makaria on the Skit and the next day he exchanged with him notes, of which it is clear that Gogol was in indecision - to go or not to go to his homeland. He appealed to the elder for advice. He, seeing the secret desire of Gogol to return to Moscow, and advised him it. But Gogol continued to doubt. Then the father of Macarius suggested still to go to Vasilyevka. Obviously, the thought of the far journey was frightened by Gogol, and the elder, in complete bewilderment, left a decision for himself, blessing by his presentation of St. Sergius of Radonezh, whose memory was taken on that day.

Probably, during the last meeting of Gogol, some conversation took place between them, the content of which is unknown to us between them. Perhaps Gogol had the intention to stay in the monastery. Rev. Wronsonophone told in a conversation with his spiritual children: "There is a legend that shortly before death, he (Gogol. - V.V.) spoke to his close friend:" Oh, how I lost a lot, how terribly lost a lot ... "-" What ? Why did you lose? " - "Because I have not entered the monks. Oh, why did the father of Macarius, did not take me to his skit? ". This legend is partly confirmed by the testimony of the sister of Gogol Anna Vasilyevna, who wrote to Vladimir Schumnoku, the biographer of the writer, that her brother "dreamed of settleing the optical desert."

According to Rev. Wormonophia, the old man of Macarius took away the desire of Gogol with a certain caution: "It is not known whether Gogol came to Gogol with a father, a conversation about monasticism, was unknown, whether he offered an old man to enter the monastery. It is very possible that the father of Macarius and did not call him, seeing that he would not suffer the difficulties of our life. "

Trinity-Sergiyev Lavra

Upon returning to Moscow from Optina Gogol, he inflicted his visit to the long-time friend, the famous Slavasta-archeographer Osipa Maksimovich Bajansky, who did not travel to the country. To the question: "Why did he grind?" I answered: "So: I got somehow sad", and no longer a word. On the cover (October 1), Gogol decided to go to pray for his mother on her name day. On September 30, he went to Stepano Petrovich Shevyrev, but not to make it at home, left him a note: "I'm going to Trinity in order to pray for the health of my mother, which is a birthday tomorrow. My spirit is extremely exhausted; Nerves are swallowed strongly. "

On the same day, Gogol arrives in Abramtsevo near Moscow. Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov recalls: "In an unexpected need, I arrived in Moscow on September 24 and another day, to my surprise, I learned that Gogol was crushed. On the 30th, I took it with myself to the village, where his appearance, was not expected to be expected, and delighted and delighted. For what reasons, Gogol was crushed - I can't say that he said that he felt a nervous disorder in the optical desert, added, laughing that "besides, it was not good with me forgiven." He smiled, but his eyes were wet and something special was heard in a laugh ... It was noticeable that Gogol was confused by his return without a sufficient reason, apparently and even more the fact that the mother and sisters would be disappeared, deceiving him to see. "

The next day, Gogol went to dinner in Trinity-Sergiev Lavra, which was in thirteen versts from Abramsev. There, along with the father of the Feodor (Bukharev), who met back in 1849, visited students of the Moscow Spiritual Academy. In the preface to his book "Three letters to N.V.Gogol ...", published in 1860, Archimandrite Feodor so talks about it: "Students accepted him with delight. And when it was expressed by Gogol, that, especially living sympathy, he excites him to her noble openness with which he was holding in his case Christ and his truth, then the deceased noticed on it simply: "What? We all work for one owner "."

Despite the brevity of the words told by Gogol, he still expressed his very important idea of \u200b\u200bfuture shepherds that he feels his community with them in serving Christ.

The popularity of Gogol in the walls of the Moscow Spiritual Academy has survived another testimony of its former student - the Mitrofor Archpriest of the Church of the Holy Martyr Yermolaya on the goat swamp in Moscow of Father Sergius Modestov. According to him, many excerpts and typical expressions from the "Dead Souls" some of the students knew by heart. "I remember," he says, "our comrade from the Tver Seminary, Vladimir Nikolayevich Rosivtsev, subsequently a monk and bishop Chrysanf, one of the greeted, especially loved to reclaim these excerpts. About Gogol, even on the class of holy Scripture, lecture was lectured known about. Archimandrite Theodore Buchaev, ranging Gogol almost to the prophets of accusers like Jeremiah, crying about human defects. "

The proximity of the views of his professor and Gogol was also noted by Kazan students of Archimandrite Feodor. So, Valerian Lavrsky, subsequently Archpriest, recorded in his student diary for 1856: "A wonderful resemblance between ideas about. Theodore and the ideas of Gogol; Now we read his correspondence with friends: at the same time, the older students are increful to amazing the amazing similarity between ideas and even the expression of the other. It is known that they were briefly familiar; But who of them borrowed this spirit and look? - It would be incredibly thinking that spiritual from secular. " And nevertheless, it is completely obvious that in this case Gogol affected the Fodorore's father.

On the way back from Trinity-Sergiye Lavra, Gogol in the stroller sent from Abrahamshev, drove to Khotkov, the Pokrovsky Women's Monastery for Olga Semenovna Aksakova and he himself went over to Numbness Magdalene. In the monastery, in the church of the Intercession, the relics of the Holy Parents of St. Sergius Schimonach Kirill and Schimonakhini Mary, near which the Panirchids were read at that time were read. From here Gogol, along with Olga Semenovna, arrived in Abramtsevo, separated in three versts from the monastery. "For dinner, Gogol was afraid," Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov recalled, "and in the evening it was very fun. Malorosiysk songs sang, and Gogol himself sang very funny. It was his last visit Abramsev and the last date with me. "

On October 3, Gogol returned to Moscow. On this day, the wedding of his sister Elizabeth Vasilyevna with a sapper officer Vladimir Ivanovich Bovkov was appointed. In the evening of the same day, Gogol writes a letter to the mother and sisters Anna and Elizabeth: "I could not see you, kindest my mother and my cute sisters, this fall. It can be seen, so it follows and pleased God so that this winter I stay in Moscow ... God, the idea of \u200b\u200bKhosht, wins the nature of the Chin. Therefore, I believe that if you pray for me hard, then the strength will gather here and I will be healthy and good for work and work. "

In the prescription Gogol reported: "On the day of your name, Mother, I prayed in the relics of St. Sergius about you and about all of us. Your health with newlyweds was Pito me at dinner at Aksakov, who all congratulate you. " And Sister Olga, who treated the peasants in Vasilyevka, was informed in the note that she sends her ten rubles with silver on the poor and medicine.

Most Gogol Moscow did not leave.

Secret of the second volume

After the death of Gogol, on the same day, there was a rumor that he burned his papers. Contemporaries were sure that the manuscript of the second volume of the "Dead Souls" was destroyed. The burner date was also named - the night from 11 to February 12. The first publicly announced a burning of the heads of the second volume of Pogodin in the necritologist of Gogol: "In the morning he (Gogol. - V.V.) said Count T:" Imagine how strong an evil spirit! I wanted to burn paper, for a long time already certain, and burned the head of the "dead souls", which I wanted to leave friends for memory after my death. "

But the most pusher himself was not near Gogol in the last days, he wrote from the words of Count Tolstoy. Before the publication, Pogodin sent him a manuscript of an article with a note: "That's what I sketched. Make mercy, graph, correct, add, do anything, - but only I ask you, as soon as possible: the book of my magazine should come out tomorrow. It seemed to me, conscientious to pass silence - that we are nonsense - but I don't know anything and wrote just that you told. So you graduate your good deed. "

Count Tolstoy, reviewing the manuscript, wrote Pogododno: "I think that the last lines of the action and participation of the custody in the burning of papers can also be left (that is, to leave not printed. - V.V.). It was said to me alone without witnesses: I could not talk about it to anyone, and probably the deceased himself would not wish to say it to everyone. The audience is not a confessor, and that she will understand about such a soul, which we, close, did not solve. Here's another note: the last lines spoil all the tranquility of the story about the burning of the papers. " However, Count Tolstoy stipulated that he was sick, and asked for the pussy: "In any case, not to stop at my opinion, which is the opinion of the patient." Pogodin and himself doubted the expediency of publishing these lines, as reported in the response note, but still placed them.

It remains an open question that it was that Gogol burned before mixing. Guessage of contemporaries and later biographers of disgrace. Most believed that the white editorial office of the second volume of the Dead Souls died. There were other assumptions: "Reflections on the Divine Liturgy" were destroyed (over which Gogol worked in recent years of life), politically dangerous papers, - up to the version that Gogol did not burn anything at all, and the manuscripts were hidden by the graphem of Tolstoy. All these hypotheses do not have a documentary confirmation, especially since we do not even know whether Gogol finished the second volume.

Dr. Tarasenkov says about the second volume as a completed manuscript: "" Liturgy "and" Dead Souls "were rewritten by raid him (Gogol. - V.V.) with his own hand, very good handwriting." This message is essentially the only argument in favor of the assertion that Gogol has burned the second volume. It refers to it, for example, commentators of the academic publication. However, Tarasenkov, like all other memoirists, was based primarily on the stories of Count Tolstoy: he could not see the first volume of the manuscripts of the second volume, since he was invited to Gogol on February 13 (that is, immediately after the burning), and he took it only the 16th . However, Tarasenkov does not say that he saw the manuscript, "this could not be because Gogol carefully protected his papers from a prying look.

By the way, Dr. Paurankov was not, as they sometimes consider Gogol's homemade doctor. From the notes of the architect and academician of painting Vladimir Sherwood, it is clear that Tarasenkov used the family of Tolstoy Count: "He was, by the way, Dr. Tolstoy and watched the last time for Gogol's disease, which he described in the brochure and where, by the way, he was reported and me Some facts. " As follows from Tarasenkov's own notes, he saw Gogol during his death-sick disease only three times: 16, 19 and 20 February. Before that, they were barely familiar.

After the death of Gogol, the capniste, Count Tolstoy and Shevyrev found five draft notebooks, who made five incomplete heads of the second volume: four initial chapters, dated 1849 - 1850 and the initial sketch of one of the last chapters (conditionally referred fifth) of earlier . The surviving notebooks have several layers of editing. At various times, corrections for pencil and ink were made to the text, which turned the manuscript little in the draft for subsequent correspondence. All the further work of Gogol remains unknown to us. Not a single manuscript, not a single text of the last editor, except for minor passages, has not yet been detected.

It is characteristic that in the memoirs of contemporaries who listen to in reading Gogol the second volume, we are talking almost exclusively about the initial chapters, that is, about those that we know on the preserved drafts. It is known that before departure from Moscow to Vasilyevka in the summer of 1850, Gogol was reflected and rewritten brought three initial chapters that he read familiar. For about six months before, he wrote a Plenev: "All almost chapters are consistent and even sketched, but it is not more than sketched; actually written two or three and only. "

Most of all Gogol read Shevyrev: until the seventh inclusive. But these were, apparently, only sketches, in any case, these were not decorated. On April 2, 1852, Shevyrev wrote a cousin Sister Gogol Maria Nikolaevna Sinelnikova: "He read me from the second volume ... Seven chapters. He read them, can be said, by heart, according to the written canvas, containing the final finish in his head. " This reading took place in July-early August 1851 at the Moscow region of Shevyreva in the village of Troitsk or Kagulov in the Ryazan road.

The latter who got acquainted with the heads of the second volume of the Dead Souls, was the father Matthew Konstantinovsky. It was probably happening during his last meeting with Gogol shortly before the burning of manuscripts. He is often put in guilt that it was he who pushed the writer to this. Matthew's father filmed that, at his advice, Gogol was burned by the second volume, although he had said that several miscords did not approve and even quietly destroy.

"What happens that you advised Gogol to burn the 2nd volume of the" midwives "? - "Napa and not true ... Gogol used to make his failed works and then restore them again at the best. Yes, hardly he was ready for the 2nd volume; At least I did not see it. It was like this: Gogol showed me several scattered notebooks with the inscriptions: the chapter, as he usually wrote the chapters. I remember, some were inscribed: Chapter I, II, III, then, should be 7, and others were without meaning; I asked me to read and express my judgment. I refused, saying that I am not a connoisseur of secular works, but he urged, and I took and read ... Returning the notebook, I resulted in publishing some of them. A priest was described in one or two notebooks. It was a living person who would have learned everyone, and such features were added, which ... I don't have, and besides, still with Catholic shades, and it was not quite an Orthodox priest. I resulted in publishing these notebooks, even asked to destroy. In another of the notebooks there were sketches ... only the sketches of some kind of governor, which there is no one. I advised not to publish this notebook, I didn't even more than a correspondence with friends for her. "

The testimony of Matthew's father is extremely important for us because it is hardly the only person who at that time was for Gogol authority, even more - the judge of his work, who acquired for the author himself, not so much literary as spiritual and moral meaning. It is difficult to assume that Gogol, having a finished Belovik, could give him to the court scattered notebooks with sketches.

Probably, both Shevyrev, and the Father Matthew were known to the same chapters, and, most likely, it was these chapters that were destroyed by Gogol on the night from 11 to 12 February.

We now do not recognize the true feeling that Gogol experienced, burning the manuscript. Poshodin in the article-necrologist "The Concent Gogol" was crying about this event: "It was this action to the greatest feat of Christian selflessness, in his very difficult sacrifice, which can only bring our pride, or there was a deep hidden frost in it, the highest spiritual charity, Or finally, there was one cruel soul disease? ".

These questions there are practical answers. Some Gogol contemporaries believed that he burned the manuscript per minute of madness. This version adheres to Konstantin Mochulsky. "Undoubtedly, he writes, - that Gogol burned in a state of waiting; After waking up, he repent in it and cried. " With such a thing, it is impossible to agree.

Gogol's decision to burn manuscripts was not sudden. This is how I tell about it: "At night, on Tuesday, he prayed for a long time in his room. At three o'clock called his boy and asked him whether he was warm in the other half of his chambers. - "Fresh," he answered. "Give me a raincoat, let's go: I need to dispose there." And he went, with a candle in his hands, tracing in every room through which he passed. Come, ordered to open the pipe as quiet as possible, so that no one would wake anyone, and then squeeze the portfolio from the closet. When the portfolio was brought, he took out a bunch of notebooks tied with ribbon, put it in the oven and lit a candle from his hands. The boy, guessing, fell before him on his knees and said: "Barin, what you do it!" - "Not your business," he answered, - Pray! ". The boy began to cry and ask him. Meanwhile, the fire went out after burned the corners of the notebooks. He noticed it, took out a bundle from the stove, unleashed the ribbon and laid the sheets so that it was easier to take fire, he lit again and sat down in a chair before the fire, waiting until everything burns and eating. Then he, cross, grogied in her old room, kissed the boy, lay down on the sofa and cried. - "other it was necessary to burn," he said, thinking, - and for another would be prayed for God for me; But God will give, recover and I will correct everything. "

This is the most complete story based on the testimony of the Gogol servant seeds and the graph of Tolstoy. It follows from it that Gogol gig a manuscript after a long prayer, there was nothing in his actions, which would resemble a frenzy. A separate study of sources is to conclude that Gogol acted consciously consciously.

Literary critic Vasily Hippius suggested that the burning was the result of a fatal accident. In his opinion, Gogol did not verify the contents of the tutu touched by a ribbon. It is hardly so. Moreover, according to Shevyrev, Gogol selected the paper: "Some postponed into the portfolio, others were rejected. These latter ordered the boy tie the tube and put in the fireplace. "

Wide distribution has a version that Gogol gig a manuscript, being dissatisfied with his work as an artist. She was adhered to, for example, such an authoritative specialist as academician of Tikhonravov. According to him, the death burner "was the conscious business of the artist who was convinced of the imperfection of everything that was developed by his many-life painful work." However, evaluating the aesthetic, the artistic side of the second volume is difficult because we are dealing with draft chapters and sketches. Therefore, there is no reason to talk about the failure of a creative nature. It is not known how the burned chapters would look in Belovik. After all, we do not appreciate the artistic advantages of drafts of the first volume, we have no rights to this, "they are not charged by the author. And yet we note that listening to the heads of the second volume in reading Gogol in the overwhelming majority responded to them very high. So, on August 29, 1849, Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov reported to Son Ivan: "I can't hide our overall joy from you: Gogol read us the first chapter of the 2nd Tom" Dead Souls ". Thank God! Talent began to be higher and deeper ... ".

In early January 1850, Gogol again read the first chapter by Aksakov, but already in a recycled form. Ivan Sergeevich, who was present at reading, wrote his relatives from Yaroslavl on January 9 of this year: "Thanks to Gogol! Everything cleaned by him performed in front of me in separate parts in all its mighty beauty ... If I had more complaints, I would quit write: He came to such a degree of superiority, that all the others in front of him. "

According to the testimony of contemporaries who listened to Gogol's first chapters of the second volume from 1849 to 1851, the final text was different from those drafts that reached us. These differences relate mainly to a more thorough finish of the work. However, no doubt, the preserved chapters have high advantages, are a kind of art will of Gogol of Russian prose the second half of the nineteenth century.

Gogol, like any writer, of course, had doubts, partly checking the impression of newly written things on the listeners. However, the highest judge was he for himself. And he judged Gogol his works in the light of the Gospel. "Any person should be fulfilled on Earth aware of good and honestly," he said in 1850. "Feeling, as it adds to the years, that for any word, what has been said here, will give an answer there, I must subjected my essays incomparably greater consistency and carefulness than how much does a young not tested by the writer."

In this regard, the words of Sergey Timofeevich Aksakova, who wrote to Shevyrev, after the death of Gogol: "... The most recent date with my wife Gogol said that he will not print the second volume that everything is not good in it and what everyone needs to remake everything." Vera Sergeyevna Aksakov also testifies in his memoirs that Gogol in the winter of 1851/52 has seen several times with her mother, and once the question of Olga Semenovna, whether he thinks to print the second Tom, answered: "No, not soon, much lacks much, and If we now had to start, I would immediately start. "

Gogol wanted to write his book so that of it the path to Christ was clear for everyone. We will remind his words that have been told about the burning of the second volume in 1845: "... There is a time that even not to talk about high and beautiful, not showing right right as day, paths and roads to him for anything." The goals set by Gogol were far away beyond literary creativity. The inability to fulfill its intention, as great, how uncomfortable, becomes his personal writer tragedy.

"God created me and did not hide my appointment from me," he wrote Gogol in "four letters to various persons about the" dead souls "," explaining the cause of the burning of the second volume in 1845. - I'm not born at all, to make an era in the field of literary. My business is easier and closer: my business is the one who must first think about the person, not only one me. My business is a soul and a solid matter of life. And therefore, the image of my actions should be durable, and I must compose firmly ... ZhGU, when you need to burn, and, right, I do it as necessary, because without prayer I do not proceed to anything. "

As you can see, Gogol leaves no reasons for other interpretations of his act. The submission of the will of God, without which nothing is performed in the world, he believed, there is an indispensable condition for the artist working God. "I don't have a case before, I kill my picture, or my death will caress me at the work itself," he wrote to Alexander Ivanov on December 28 (n. Art.) 1847, - I must work to work until the last minute, without misleading From his own side. If my picture had died or burned down before my eyes, I should be as fucked as if it existed, because I did not yawn, I worked. The owner who ordered it saw. He made it burned. This is his will. He knows better than I need for what you need. "

The writer in famous cases has a misfortune to bring harm and after death. The author dies, and the work remains and continues to destroy the human souls. This perfectly understood Gogol. In the article "What finally the essence of Russian poetry and what is its peculiarity" he recalls the fan of Krylov "Writer and Robber". The moral of this fable is guessed in the words of Gogol from his "testament": "Heads all the dying composition of my, sick-giganic age and the fruits, whom we sowed in life, without glare and not hearing, what horribles from them will come out ..."

In the preserved chapters of the second volume, the landowner Kostagzhoglo says: "Let it be brought into the world, so not through my hands. Let I Be before God's right ... "the szvuk of the Savior's words is heard in this river:" Mount the world from temptations: for it is necessary to come to temptations; But the grief of that person, through which the temptation comes "(). Saint Filaret, Metropolitan Moscow, Involving this Gospel saying, writes: "Truly crying sin and terrible, but the temptation more. My sin, with the help of your grace, can I stop and repent of cleaning; But the temptation, if he was filed with wine and moved to others, I was no longer abandoning, neither to clean up. "

Another contemporary Gogol, St. Feofan, the Navdapa talks about the same: "The temptation is growing and increases the troubles of the seducer himself, and he does not feel even more expanding in the temptation. The benefit that the threat of God for the temptation here, on Earth, almost does not fulfill in the aspiration of correction; it is postponed to the future trial and reward; Then only the seductors will feel how great the evil temptation. "

Without a doubt, I was afraid to write to the temptation to sin and Gogol. In the last decade, he significantly appreciated his former writings, while reviewing them with the eyes of a Christian. In the preface to "selected places from correspondence with friends", Gogol says that he wanted to redeem the uselessness of everything, they have decorated it written. These words caused a lot of complaints and prompted many to think that Gogol was reversed from their former works. Meanwhile, it is obvious that he speaks about the uselessness of his writings in the sense of religious, spiritual, for, as he writes from Gogol, in his letters, according to the recognition of those they were written, is more necessary for humans than in his writings.

"You need to handle the word honestly," said Gogol. - It is the highest gift of God man. The trouble is to pronounce his writer ... When he was still in a slightness of his own soul: it will come out of it that the word will come out that all the opposite. And then with the cleanest welcome of good, you can produce evil. "

Talent given to him by God, Gogol wanted to send to glorify God and benefit to people. And to reach it, he had to clear himself with a prayer and truly Christian life. The transformation of the Russian man, about which Gogol dreamed, was performed in himself. His life he continued his writings.

The embryos of those passions who brought his heroes to their insignificance and vulgarity, Gogol found in himself. In 1843, answering the question of one of his friends, why the heroes of the "dead souls", being far from being portraits of real people, being in themselves the properties of everything unattractive, unknown why close soul, Gogol said: "... my heroes Because the soul is close, that they are from the soul; All my last writings are the story of my own soul. " And then I noticed: "Do not think, however ... so that I myself was the same freak, what are my heroes. No, I am not like them. I love good, I'm looking for him and burn them; But I do not love my abominations and do not hold their hand, like my heroes; I do not like those light of my who give me from good. I am fighting with them, and I will fight, and I will kick them, and God will help me. "

"In the same answer, you will find the answer and other requests, if you look at the clarity," Gogol continued. "You can also explain why I still have not exhibited the reader of the phenomena of comforting and did not choke in my heroes of virtuous people. They do not invent them in the head. While you won't be very much. Although you will like to be a copper forehead on them, until you have a copper forehead and you will not win a lot of good qualities in the soul, it will be all that will write your pen, and, like the earth from the sky .

While most of the readers feared over his heroes, considering themselves immeasurably above them, Gogol suffered and languished, realizing that he was imperfect. He felt that he was not only not possible positive heroes, but they could not succeed. Why it is so, partly can be understood from the writings of St. Ignatia (Bryanchaninov). In the article "Christian Shepherd and Christian-artist", he expresses a deep thought: "Most of the talents sought to portray in the luxury of human passions. Pictures depicted by singers, depicted painters depicted by the music of evil in all sorts of diversity. The talent of man, in all its strength and unhappy beauty, developed in the image of evil; In the image of good, he is generally weak, pale, stretched ... when the talent is learned by the gospel character, "and this is with difficulty and internal struggle," then the artist is illuminated by inspiration over, only then he can speak sacred, sing sacred, to paint sacred. "

Amazes the amazing similarity of two crisis episodes in the life of Gogol. And in 1845, and in 1852, dissatisfaction with artistic creativity leads to an increase in spiritual concentration. Burning as a result of the impossibility of embodying the artistic intention can be considered both as cleansing as self-immolation that led in the second case to actual death. One of the few who, apparently, understood the meaning of the tragedy of Gogol, was his spiritual father, Rzhevsky Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky. "The ordinary phenomenon of our Russian life repeated with him, he said. - Our Russian life has a lot of examples of the fact that the strong nature, who are busting by the fuss of worldly or finding themselves incapable of formerly wide activities, left everything and went to the monastery to seek inner peace and purification ... So it was with Gogol. He had previously said that he was "a mental monastery", and before death he wished him even more. "

The spiritual meaning of the death of Gogol did not hide from the most insightful contemporaries. Princess Varvara Nikolaevna Repnina-Volkonskaya wrote in his memories: "I understand that Gogol burned his creation and I do not understand the crying of S. T. Aksakova and the perplexity of many about the fact that Gogol did not remain the same Gogol, a humorist, and Made a true Christian. Everything and everything should disappear; In the new, renewed world, the decent will not have the place, and Gogol renewed in the kingdom of heaven is no longer Gogol, but the immortal smashing soul, chanting "holy, holy, holy!".

In the St. Petersburg studio of our TV channel, the abbot of the christmas christmas of the Blessed Virgin Mr. Svetogorsk, Mikhail Kotov, is responsible for questions.

(Decoding is made with minimal editing oral speech)

Dear friends, today, with my father, Mikhail will continue to talk about Russian literature, and our current topic: Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol and Orthodoxy. " Let us explain to our TV viewers why we decided to talk today about Gogol.

Since our transfer comes out on the church channel, I would first like to say that Nikolai Vasilyevich, probably, the only one of our classics (and in our program we consider it precisely them) I put such a high goal - literary ministry as a conscious ministry exactly Orthodoxy . And this thesis we will try to prove during the transfer.

One of the researchers of the creativity of Nikolai Vasilyevich wrote about him ("The Spiritual Way of Gogol"): "In the moral region, Gogol was brilliantly gifted; He was destined to turn the whole Russian literature from aesthetics to religion, move it on the path of Dostoevsky. All features characterizing the "Great Russian Literature", which has become the world, were outlined by Gogol: its religious moral system, its citizenship and the public, its combat and practical character, prophetic pathos and messianism. From Gogol begins a wide road, world expanses. "

In 2009, the whole full of literary consciousness celebrated the Great Anniversary - 200 years since the birth of our unforgettable classics. For the first time in history, a complete collection of all the writings was published and, most importantly, Gogol's letters. These are 17 huge volumes. And it should be noted that this edition has become possible thanks to the church. No secular publishing house took this work. The publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate on the blessing of our His Holiness Patriarch Kirill and already a disastrous blessed Metropolitan Vladimir publishes this work.

And what is 17 volumes of Gogol? It is to stop all current projects, be sure to allocate time on this amazing work. Two people: Vladimir Alekseevich Voropaev - Professor of Moscow State University, doctor of philological sciences, heading the Gogol Commission at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Igor Alekseevich Vinogradov, who is also engaged in the work of Gogol, presented us with a real holiday. Why?

The fact is that we know Gogol on the school program, maybe even on the program of the Institute as a bright satirist. He is a surprisingly funny writer, with his intelligent laughter, quite thin and even, as a rule, it is laughter through tears. And I did not occur to anyone that the whole volume was gained, where Gogol makes discharge from the holy fathers. Such names like Athanasius Great, Kirill Alexandrian, John Zlatoust, Vasily Great, John Damaskin and so on, and so on, Nikolai Vasilyevich were close, and he advised everyone: "Read the Holy Fathers; And read marks. " The Bible of Nikolai Vasilyevich's Bible is also known, especially with marks, especially their many on the messages of the Apostle Paul, which he loved very much. By the way, the messages of the Apostle Paul loved John Zlatoust and interpreted them in many of them.

Nikolai Vasilyevich also wrote two amazing works, which were not even included in the many collections of writings published in Soviet times - these are "selected places from correspondence with friends", its author's confession, and the work of "reflections on divine liturgia", which although is Chernivikov, but not lost its relevance so far.

We know, and still repeat sometimes this is the cliché that Nikolai Vasilyevich is a very mysterious figure, around which there are many unsolved secrets: it seems that I would die myself hunger and it seems to be crazy; And almost alive him buried and so on. But thanks to the work of respected professors today, we can objectively look at this amazing person.

Why this edition came out as in Russia and in Ukraine? First, Nikolai Vasilyevich himself Gogol is a living example of the unity of two Slavic peoples. This publication is intended primarily not to disconnect the two of these people, but to combine them: this is our overall beginning. There is evidence that Nikolai Vasilyevich himself said that both Malorus, and the Velikorsu ... two twins, that is, this is one people. He never shared them on a national sign. Moreover, we are talking in the same language - the language of prayer, Church Slavonic. In addition, in the middle of the XIX century there were very few translations of the holy fathers (which I listed) into Russian, and Gogol read them in the Church Slavonic translation.

Of course, when you start to discover these things for yourself, then such familiar to us "Evening on the farm near the Dikanka" sounds completely different. And we can read the "auditor" already metaphysically, that is, not only from the comic side - both on the ridiculous venge of the orders, but also from the spiritual. Also on the "dead souls". And, of course, to touch the amazing problem, over which Gogol as a great artist suffered at the end of life: is it worthy what he writes in order to enter the light? He imposed very high demands.

Boris Zaitsev in emigration expressed such a thought: "All great artists, all great writers are inherent in what they start with artistic works, and finish with spiritual." It is in music: How major works in Mozart, and suddenly at the end of the life of Minor - "Requiem". Or, for example, we know Rakhmaninov, Tchaikovsky, who at the end of their creative paths appealed to the spiritual topic, wrote music for all-bedic vigil, Divine Liturgy.

The same happened with Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. And misunderstanding just from that happened that they simply did not understand. In addition to himself, these spiritual quests were not needed most of the society to which he applied. From here - madness. We know the words of the Apostle Paul: "The fact that from the Holy Spirit, a mental person does not accept, because it seems to him insane." Of course, if we do not understand something, it is very easy to say: yes it is madness. Although, of course, Nikolai Vasilyevich was absolutely healthy.

In general, there is still such a template in our life in our life: as soon as a person appeals to the religion, the circle of his acquaintances immediately seems to be something wrong with his head. Although if you recall the famous Kiev psychiatrist of the Sikorsky, who wrote to the revolution, a sufficiently large number of works, he really says that a religious feeling is a sign of human normality. A believer is a mentally healthy person.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was always on his way to religion. He had a very pious family. Yes, at the end of life, he experienced a crisis, but it was not a sign of his madness, but the fact that Nikolai Vasilyevich becomes one step above. Maybe this lies the key to the rays of his secrecy.

If we start from the first collection of Gogol "The Evenings on the farm near the Dikanka", we will see that here he is very masterfully, with a sparkling laugh inherent to him shows quite serious things. First, it suggests that it is not only this world for him, but the world is spiritual. After all, when he entered the literature with this collection, he was only 22 years old, it is absolutely young. When he writes about it, many of his peers just began to doubt the existence of the spiritual world. The idea of \u200b\u200bEnlightenment, Razio ... Everyone tried to explain logically, and what the spiritual worlds there are all the remnants of the past. Not. Nikolai Vasilyevich directly suggests that the two of these worlds exist in parallel and even interact with each other. And starting with the "nights on the farm near the Dikanka" further, our great classic will make this topic by General - direct dear throughout his work.

Attention and the ritual, folklore side. How surprisingly Gogol knows the tradition of folk culture, which, by the way, is very lacking in our lives. We know many directions and trends and in culture, both in art and in popular music and, as a rule, do not know their root, folk songs, fairy tales and sayings, although this is not a useless thing.

Another point, which will then be present in the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich, is a sparkling laughter as the principle of fighting evil. We know with you that we are afraid of laughter. As Gogol himself wrote, even the one who is not afraid of anything is afraid to be funny. Seeing the evil of this world and understanding it perfectly - and he had absolute rumor for evil, it was his gift, his torment and, you can even say, his cross - through a laughter he won it evil. Transformed from the inside himself and wanted to transform compatriots. Not always, of course, compatriots understood this principle, sometimes they just laughed without working on themselves.

And for the second collection "Mirgorod" the theme of Godothesia, the upstation, which is also characteristic and for our time no less than for the second half of the XIX century, also becomes such a dominant. What does Nikolai Vasilyevich want to say here? First, he does not just want to show that evil exists in this world, and for the first time trying to show ways out of these deadlock situations. In the last transmission, we considered it "Starlavetsky landowners." Someone can even say that it seems to be a primitive. But with this simplicity, amazing depth and amazing talent.

And continues this topic of his world-master's masterpiece - "Taras Bulba". Many Christians set themselves the same question: whether a Christian has the right to take a weapon in his hands, whether he has the right to kill. And the holy fathers have different opinions on this. Someone says he has no right. For example, Kirill Alexandrian we find that the Military Case is not just a deserve case, but the case, worthy praise. But in which case? If a Christian protects his homeland, his family. If protects your faith. The religious war, which Nikolai Vasilyevich shows, is, of course, the war is right. And here we can say that the truth is on the side of the Cossacks who fight with the speech of the compulcade and for their homeland, and for their faith: too many things hurt.

For example, we know an amazingly funny story "How Ivan Ivanovich was quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" and we know how it ends: "How boring to live in this world, gentlemen!" Where does this boredom come from, if so funny? For Gogol, boredom is a synonym for boredom. And fear of God as a religious category, and in general fear before evil. He will even write in one of his work: "Scary! National! The devil is already without a mask walks in this world! " We know that the devil takes various kinds of lichnas: this is a smoothie, a very cunning creature, which, if it acts directly, is easy to recognize. He is trying to enter our life under different masks. And Gogol writes that in the middle of the XIX century he no longer needs any masks. So he is already straightforward in this world. Gogol sees it, and others surrounding it. Gogol is perfectly heard, and the surrounding it - no. Therefore, he hits the Nabat - speaks of these things, and they do not understand him.

And here we can say that when such masterpieces appear as the "auditor" and "dead souls", they become the turning stage, which will lead to a spiritual crisis. If the "auditor" in the metaphysical, spiritual plan is like the city of the soul, then the "dead souls" is an already mental country.

Of course, in 150 years, a lot is written about the "auditor", and this is probably one of the best works on the theater scene. Gogol gives a lot of material to actors, directors. And even if the actor does not quite talented this work, will already be wonderful. If the actor is talented, like, for example, Mikhail Shchepkin, then it will be ridiculous, and interestingly doubly. But what is surprising - Gogol is dissatisfied. That laughter he called in the public is not the reaction that Gogol would like to awaken. Many, of course, with the submission of Belinsky - the famous legislator of fashion in the literature, understand it simply as a parody of modernity, the public. By the way, Nicholas I watched this play and, when I went out, said: "Well, the fiel! Everyone got everyone, and I all! " Of course, Nikolai Vasilyevich all this makes specially. And in order to laugh, and in order to endure.

But in ten years a work appears under the title "Annation of the" auditor "," where Gogol will give us to understand how to understand the "auditor". There he will write: "Look at the city, which is depicted in the" Revolution ". Where do you find such a city? It is simply no on the map. This is the city of our soul. And those officials? After all, these are solid freaks. We do not have such officials. One, two, but after all there are good, honest, fair, and here is not one. " That is, it actually has a little relationship. Then what? This is related to our soul. Officers, crowning treasury, are passions that are trusted by a rich treasury of our soul. Gogol suggests that the "auditor" is terrible, which expects us for a coffin board.

One interesting episode. At the end of the XIX century, the "auditor" was given somewhere in the south, and there was an unusual viewer: the brotherhood of one monastery was sitting. When the actors went on stage and began to chase this comedy, there was no laughter in the hall. The father of Hegumen, and the economy, and the king, the brotherhood of the monastery were sitting. Then the actor remembers that when he came to the monastery to worship the relics, the monk, who was on duty at the relics, told him at the exit: "Monday, my son, in the heart of his semidious auditor and landscaping his sincere, for no one either day Or an hour ,, result, he will make a recovery to recover. I will not slow down to arrive at an hour, when we do not wait, and check all our things, everything will be judged. " Amazing! The monastery of the monastery understood the play, without even certainly "the interchanges of the" auditor "", just as Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol conceived her. Unfortunately, this side was hidden from our compatriots very long. And today we, of course, have the right to look at this work from this point of view.

The same with the poem "Dead Souls": After all, it is not thinking about a one-dimensional work. Moreover, the whole cheese boron flared around the second volume with his burning, and, it turns out that there were three volumes on the plan. In the first volume, Gogol really shows and exposes things, not quite multiplied for each of us, in the second looking for the road, and in the third volume he finds this road. That is, the author does not just give negative, he gives a positive.

The issue of the viewer from the Krasnodar Territory: "I have a question about the reflection of Gogol about liturgy. I myself did not read, I read my wife, which I really liked. But I heard the opinion about this work of our favorite professor, who appreciated him as "solid Catholicism." How is it, in your opinion? "

You avened us a little: we wanted to paint about it at the end. But if the question came, they will answer.

Dear Professor, of course, has the right to such a point of view. But we said that "reflections on the Divine Liturgy" are drafts, not a finished work. Gogol with Catholicism had a fairly dense relationship: he lived abroad, and he also visited the Salon of Princess Volkonskaya, who belonged to Catholicism with a large pitue and, being an Orthodox Christian, crossed. There is even a letter of Gogol to the mother, where he writes: "Well, Orthodox, Catholics, in principle, we have nothing to share: we have one, the dogmas alone" is quite dubious things for an Orthodox person. But afterwards, Gogol himself refuses.

I do not know what reason the respected professor did conclusion about Catholicism in the "Reflections on the Divine Liturgy", because this work is already mature Gogol. And he drawn not even to the church people, but to those who only find their way to the temple, their way to God, and explains many things. By the way, the famous spiritual writer Muravyov has a similar work, actually the contemporary of Gogol, who also writes about Orthodox worship.

Therefore, I probably did not agree, but I do not pretend to absolute truth. "Reflections on Divine Liturgy" are good enough to see their newcomer. To, maybe with them to start your understanding of the most important mystery and the most important service of our Orthodox Church.

- Thank you, Father Mikhail, we can return to the "dead souls".

It turns out that Paphos "Dead Souls" was also not understood. For the "auditor", Gogol applauded, and he was dissatisfied, because he, as it were, caused a spiritual struggle. After all, an amazing epigraph is taken: "There is nothing to make a mirror, if Ryzh Kriva." After all, the "mirror" is how Gogol reflected Russian reality. Everyone see that this reality is gloomy, it is even funny, it is necessary to laugh over it and fix it - and everything will be fine. So I understood Belinsky and many ... I will not say thinners: the thought is too weak, but more figures.

We have already looked at how Gogol understood it. The mirror itself has a spiritual meaning. For example, at the Tikhon Zadonsky we find: "That for the children of the century of this mirror, the more for the Christian is the Gospel." We look at the mirror several times a day: here we will fix it here, we will fix it here, only then we will go to people. The same gospel for a Christian: it is necessary to watch and smell your thoughts, desires, actions and actions with what Christ left us. And therefore it turns out that in many moments there is a row of a curve, a mirror has nothing to do with it, the clergy does not need to scold. And Gogol is trying to reach it.

In the "dead souls", as we said, it is not just a city's city, but a whole soulful country. Nikolai Vasilyevich himself confesses to the "author's confession" that when he portrayed these manilov, dogs, boxes and other landowners, he took some particular passion. Of course, resorted to the hyperbole, showed all this hypertrophic. And noticed that, most importantly, in himself and his friends, showing in such a light.

Of course, Gogol draws attention to Russian reality, but in the first place its general line - the rat, a Christian, his gaze inside itself. The society is composed of units, it is necessary that the unit will be healthy to be healthy. Therefore, his reception - laughter over passions, vices - has a spiritual meaning. Over the vices it is necessary not only to laugh, they must be defeated, and it is necessary to start with themselves - the thought, worthy of attention.

I now remembered the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol "Portrait", because this is his first work, which I understood not just as satirical. It had such moments, thanks to which I, as a schoolboy, first paid attention to myself: What am I? What changes occur with the artist, how it begins to eat his own vanity - you can trace such a parallel.

After all, then the hero becomes a monk and gives the instruction to his son that the art area is quite thin and the devil is quite thin: he tries to fit into it downstream, and sometimes straight. In general, the gift of words for Gogol is the highest gift, he feels his responsibility in connection with the words of the Savior himself: "From the words of their words, they will be justified from the words." For each idle word, a person will give an answer to the court.

Therefore, Gogol understood: "Auditor" has the highest success. As, for example, there are such eccentrics Olympic champions: He won the gold medal, and comes unhappy. Why? Because I wanted to jump not on a meter seventy five, but on a meter eighty. He was given a medal, he is the Olympic champion, but he did not jump for a meter eighty. So Gogol: He took this height, but his artistic creativity had already worried about it, and the spiritual side was worried, and they did not understand and even, we could say, they moved away from it.

There was even such an episode. Nikolai Vasilyevich comes to visit his friend, sees his works on his shelf, including the "auditor" and "Dead Souls", and says: "How? Are you reading them?! " He even regretted that they wrote them.

And this amazing struggle inside Gogol, when he wants to get on the path of the spiritual writer from artistic creativity, and led to the fact that he burned the second volume of the "dead souls". By the way, many researchers say that a completely second volume was not written, only part of it was written. Seeing that the first volume went no longer to the side, there was no point in adding the second.

- The issue of the viewer: "How from an Orthodox point of view to evaluate the murder of Son Taras Bullbog?"

Unambiguous questions and can not be. Gogol as a real writer sets these questions. What is good real literature? Much ends on such halftons. And we as co-authors - and reading an artistic work, we are co-authors - should be at least one height with the author to at least understand it.

Here Gogol offers a kind of choosing what happened to the son of Taras Bulba. Unfortunately, he becomes a straight path of betrayal. There is an adaption of Taras Bulba, wonderful, but, unfortunately, not quite spiritual reading. There is a moment that love arises between Andreykaya and Pannachka, and even a child is born, and Chado is already the burden of God, because God gives children. That is, there is a completely different meaning that takes a little bit from the essence. And in Gogol, it is a passion and direct betrayal. This is the betrayal of the father, mother, the native family, the betrayal of faith.

We did not speak in vain about a religious war. Becoming consciously on the side of the enemy, Andrei turns out to be for Taras too by the enemy. And Taras Bulba perfectly understands that this is his son. And this tragedy of the murder was not easy to eat so much on the conscience of Taras himself, but he just takes a firm position - this is war to the end.

- Let's continue our conversation about the works of Nikolai Vasilyevich.

This is the spiritual flour of Gogol, when he understands that, despite all the artistic height, the spiritual meaning of his works is not entirely understood ... He is working on a work that calls "selected places from correspondence with friends."

Moreover, the release of a book in the XIX century was an event of a global scale, it is like today to build a nuclear power plant on the ocean. This is a big author's creative resource. Gogol was a lively classic, the head of Russian literature at one time. Then the writers like Turgenev, Dostoevsky, just started into literature. All of them looked at Gogol from the bottom up. And suddenly it became known: the author of popular works writes a new book. Of course, the interest was colossal.

This book comes out. This book is read. And this book scold. And not only the people who were enemies of Gogol scold, but even his friends scold, essentially his comrades. This is an epistolary genre - letters. But in the letters it is very deeply revealed. The addressees of these letters are specific. For example, the recipient of the letter of the governor's real historical face - Smirnova-Rosset, the wife of the Kaluga governor.

Or in the chapter "On our clergy" Gogol says that, of course, "Chernukhi" enough, but it shows a positive example of our shepherds. And why should he be silent about it?

Then he was already heard to change the constitutional system, the monarchy itself - these ideas roam already starting from the Decembrists. For Gogol, all these changes, not blessed by the church, not lit by Christ, do not have any soil.

In this book he has an article "We must love Russia." How can you love Russia? Only knowing her culture, history, her people. And many people who called then swept - but something much came out, "neither culture nor the story knew and did not want to know.

For Gogol, there was a flour consciousness that formally Orthodox Russia, that is, the reading public, the Russian society does not know Orthodoxy as such. It was to be painful for him why he writes "Reflections on Divine Liturgy." Why here, in the "selected places", gives these articles. By the way, the book of Article "Light Sunday" ends.

Gogol, with all the despondency, which often attacked him, with all the terrible paintings, believes not in the letter of the law, but in the grace of salvation. And we can relate to the "word about the law and grace" Metropolitan of Hilarion - a work from which Russian literature begins, and Russian theology.

The clergy itself perceived this book is also ambiguous. For example, Archimandrite Fedor from Trinity Sergieva Lavra responded to this book. Saint Innokenti (Borisov) is also positive. But the saint Ignatius (Bryanchaninov), which was still in San archimandrite, most accurately described this book. He writes that in this book the light is mixed with darkness. Gogol himself believed that for St. Ignatia as some worldly things are incomprehensible for the monk. But here Nikolai Vasilyevich, perhaps, was really mistaken, because the saint of Ignatius was present in the world, he knew him perfectly, he himself was gifted.

Here the saint is in mind the case of Gogol's preaching, which in this book not only confessed in some things, but taught, instructed. And the sermon is still not the case of a secular person. And he instructed Gogol from height. It was, of course, not his height, but the height of the gospel and the patristic. But it was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Of course, we understand how we perceive when someone is trying to learn us: "You can learn anyone, but not me. I know everything perfectly, I'm good, "and so on. Today this book must be read, it must be a desk book of any believer and a patriot of Russia. The sharp confrontation today has become much softer, and even the tone of Gogol, which then seemed arrogant, no matter how little she watched that sharpness.

What is light in this book? The fact that Gogol is based on his judgments on the Holy Fathers: This is his favorite reading. People Writers of the XIX century we consider Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol. But the historians of literature talk about the opposite. People's writers were St. Tikhon Zadonsky and Dimitri Rostovsky. All competent Russia read them. And in quantitatively, the spiritual literature was more than secular. Therefore, Gogol reads not only those ancient fathers, which we told at the very beginning of the transfer, but he is also known for the works of Filaret of Moscow, and Innocent Borisov, the same Tikhon Zadonsky, whom he has immensely loved and very often read. And the spiritual beauty of this book is just in it. Gogol comprehends the public, and the life life of Russia from the height of the Orthodox faith.

Unfortunately, he has a bitter phrase, which has not lost relevance and now, is the phrase about the church. Gogol suggests that the church as a source of life, as we did not have introduced to our today's life. How relevant these words are! Gogol beats in Nabat, essentially. Then he will do it and Dostoevsky. It will try to make Tolstoy, but will leave completely in the other direction. The same voices were distributed from the church itself. Says St. Ignatius (Bryanchanin). Feofan (Govorov) directly says that another one or two generations - and there will be trouble in Russia. And indeed, we know: in 1917 the revolution in Russia. John Kronstadtsky said: "Russia, be the such as Christ you need." And it sounded on the eve of his death, that is, at the beginning of the XX century.

Therefore, this is an incomprehensible work, and maybe incomprehensible until now. It is published, it is necessary to see it. You can discuss, it is not scary, but it is necessary to know.

As for the spiritual quest Nikolai Vasilyevich, of course, they led not only to the flour, but also gave consolation. This is the only one of our writers who lived, probably like a monk, not giving monastic vises of chastity, non-childness and obedience. The first vow is chastity. We have no testimony about some kind of love of Nikolai Vasilyevich. No, we will not find. Most dough is visible from his life: according to the word Evangelsky, he did not have where the chapter was complicated. He died in the apartment at his friend Count Tolstoy. Obedience we see, it is obedience to the mother of the Church. And here samples with Catholicism go far, far, this is already a true Christian.

Gogol had spiritual mentors. By the way, they were also rolled. For example, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, Rzhevsky Archpriest. Count Tolstoy, in the house of which was pressed to the Lord Nikolay Vasilyevich, was a man sufficiently pious, religious. Once he was even the governor of Tver, where they met Gogol. Archpriest Matthew a lot of spiritually ocked Gogol, especially at the end of life. Gogol was personally familiar with the old man Makarius, who did not take him into the skete when he wanted to stay in the optical desert. Nevertheless, the correspondence with the old man is known. Therefore, there is no self-adhesive and not some free reading, but deep roots in Christianity Nikolai Vasilyevich himself.

Hence, of course, his call, which he repeats after Pushkin. What should be art? What should be real literature? What is this ministry? This ministry is prophetic. As the prophets led God's truth, which also did not always listened. The greatest prophet Isaiah, as we say, the Old Testament Evangelist (so wonderful he was able contact The arrival of the Messiah), not just rooted something like Gogol, but they killed, repeated wooden saw. Of course, criticism, even constructive, sometimes not accepted by society. Therefore, I got and Nikolai Vasilyevich.

Today, the sharpness of this problem is largely smoothed, and we are simply obliged to re-read the classics and, maybe from this point of view, to see: and how not the rights of Nikolai Vasilyevich were wrong?

By the way, "chosen places from correspondence with friends" served for Russian literature and Russian national thought and a stumbling block, and some "brand stone". Because the work of Belinsky writes his famous "letter to Gogol." First, he writes in Russia, but here censorship: you won't write a lot. Then he leaves to Germany, and at this time Gogol is abroad. Imagine, two Russian writers argue about something abroad - who will be read? Of course, no one. And there Belinsky, of course, he attacks Gogol. There is a direct brand: the critic says that the talent from Gogol is dried, that he is no longer the writer at all, does not go to the other side and in general the literature should fight with Orthodoxy, and he calls him. Literature should fight autocracy and nationality, that is, the code of Russian civilization, and Gogol, on the contrary, it protects.

And Nikolai Vasilyevich answered the letter of Belinsky strong enough, but ripped him. Why is it known? Today it was glued, and there is an opportunity to read. In the Soviet school studied the letter of Belinsky to Gogol, but did not read the answer of Gogol. Be sure to know this answer. Today there is such an opportunity. Nikolay Vasilyevich simply lays everything around the shelves. But why doesn't he send this tough answer? Belinsky is not just like this abroad, it is treated. Gogol comes like a true Christian. For Belinsky, patient with consume, any moral over-excitation is fraught with death. Of course, such a letter of Gogol "Furious Vissarion" would initiate. And Nikolai Vasilyevich does not send this letter, but sends a soft, conciliatory: "You're right, and I am right. And I'm wrong somewhere, and you have some sides ... "That is, we see that even in everyday life, that high plank was carried out by Nikolai Vasilyevich.

I think the viewers will agree that it is very important to talk about it and consider the literary works of Gogol at such an angle.

You can say a few words about another key for the school program. Unfortunately, not everyone is mastered by reading the "Taras of Bulba", but "Shinel", at least I remember, can mask everything. Probably worth, at least a little, pay attention to it.

- "Shinel" is included in the "Petersburg Tale" cycle. This name was not given to Gogol himself (as "evenings on the farm near Dikanka", "Mirgorod"), but used to combine works in the cycle. It is very important here what we are constantly talking about in our programs: "Do not look for a treasure on Earth, where moles and rza and thieves dug up. Look for yourself treasures in the sky, where neither the thief or rye. Where is your treasure, there will be your heart. " This is a leitmotif of this work.

With the light hand of Belinsky, then Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubova still in school this work is studied as the story of a "little man" Bashmachkina, the victims of the Nikolaev regime. But Akaki Akakievich first of all the victim of his own worthlessness. And he will be so for any mode. The mode here is nothing. It is very important to see in this work that for the Bashmachkna himself there is no spiritual sky, all his treasures are here, it is not for nothing that he pays so many time. There is a wonderful phrase of Gogol: "The eternal idea of \u200b\u200bthe future overcoat." Not "eternal life", not "future life", but the "eternal idea of \u200b\u200bthe future overcoat." Such an "eternal idea" is among each of us: someone has a car, someone has a house, some other passion.

When Akaki Akakievich moved to the Lord, he had a rumor about the ghost, like Akakia Akakiyevich, who breaks over Sineli. This "Eternal Idea of \u200b\u200bthe Future Shinel" does not give him peace and in the future life. And where is your treasure, there will be your heart there. And even there, on the spiritual sky, he rushes his eyes here - the hell.

Another important postulate - Gogol first draws attention to the "little man" and makes us even love such a worthlessness. Is it possible to really love such a worthlessness? "You can," says Gogol. He directly writes that you can love my homeland, only compassioned her. And this particular trouble Akakia Akakievich is one of our homeland pain. And compassing her, you will love your neighbor, and loving your brother, you will love God. This is the direct commandment of Christ himself. As the Apostle John theologians writes in his message: "We have a commandment from him - to love God through your neighbor."

Most likely, Dostoevsky said the famous phrase: "We all came out of Gogol" Sineli "." And he accurately came out of the "Sineli", because he agrees his heroes, loves them. Even our First Hierarchs of Vladyka Anthony (Khrapovitsky) in the lessons of pastoral theology advised students of spiritual schools to read the works of Dostoevsky as a work of love. Therefore, it seems not to know this about this today.

- In the remaining time, there is an opportunity to say the wish to our television viewers within the framework of today's theme.

I would like to wish to all of us, dear viewers, moral resistance, because without the excellent of good from evil, without the spiritual foundations of our life there will be no transformation of Russia to which we are so strive today. The call of Gogol did not hear how Ilyina, Aksakov, Kireevsky, and listened to the call of absolutely other people, who led to Smoot, blood, revolution. And I want to see the call of Nikolai Vasilyevich, like many other classics, after all, was still heard.

What is this call? This is a call to love our homeland, reforming to our Fatherland. To love our faith, to serve the mother of the Church and, of course, to keep the hail of his own soul to be a healthy unit of this society.

Lead Mikhail Bushetsev
Recorded Ksenia Sosnovskaya

N.V. Gogol was religious, sincerely believers and continued to look for the end of the life of new depths of faith by man. But here he remained a completely sensible person. On the one hand, he gave one of the detailed descriptions and interpretations of the Divine Liturgy ("Divine Liturgy", p. 315-372), on the other, it is very practical, for example, arguing about the state of priests of priests:

- "A rustic priest can say much more truly necessary for a man than all these books" (p. 159).

In the same time:

- "... the reason for the evil is only the one that the priests began to negotively fulfill their positions" (p. 150). And generally speaking:

- "... Many of the spiritual, as I know, dug from many of the inconsistencies that have emerged lately, almost assured that no one listens to them (the 40s of the XIX century! - S.Kh.) that words and preaching rhone The air and evil allowed their roots so deeply, which can not already think about his eradication "(P. 135-6). Therefore:

- "... Pay attention to urban priests ... Do not neglect anyone from them, despite the simplicity and ignorance of many" (P. 148-9). "Who is bored and marriage (from urban priests - s.), Pour him bishop"(P. 150).

Through the question about the priests, Gogol again comes out on the evil of the day:

- "The terrible truth of the present century did not quite openly, which now everyone sins to one, but they are not sinner, but indirectly. This has not yet heard well a preacher himself; Because the sermon is faded into the air, and people are deaf to his words "(p. 136); "... after such a sermon ... it is still getting up with his sinlessness" (ibid).

- "... I would rather the opinion that the priest, not fully applied in his business and is not familiar with people, his surrounding, it is better not to pronounce the sermons at all." (P. 161).

Church of Gogol - "... The Supreme Instant is only ... and the solution of life issues - in it" (pp. 313). According to Gogol - "Mad and the idea of \u200b\u200bintroducing some innovation in Russia, bypassing our church, without having collapsed by her blessing" (P. 109). Gogol is even negotiated about the "such criminal crime, which is the non-recognition of God in the form, in which he commanded to recognize His Son himself" (P. 99).

What do you say? Each friend finds what is close to him, it is expensive. The religious "bias" of Gogol is obvious. But it is also obvious a very secular nature of the bulk of its specific reasoning. In the very religious aspect of Gogol, we find a lot of wonderful philosophical generalizations. This is the characteristics of a Christian, the knowledge contained in Christian texts:

- "... Christian at all sorts of sage, business maker everywhere" (p.188).

- "All this globality of the human-loving law of Christ, all this relationship of a person to humanity can move out of us anything on their small field" (P. 308).

Here are the advice of Gogol in relation to Divine authority:

- "... Put it in the face of God, and not before your face; Show him what he sin against God, and not against you "(p. 156).

- "You can apologize to God ... Do only cleverly. "Pray and to the coast of Great," says the proverb "(p. 175). Etc.

In Gogol's statements, the reflexive nature of reasoning about the Divine Authority is found - this fellow traveler of any forming philosophy:

"The god of the news maybe, and there was also a will of that, without the will of which nothing is done in the world ..." (p. 310). Or:

- "Without the will of God, it is impossible to love him. And how to love the one whom no one saw? " (P. 128).

Aesthetics Gogol

(on the example of Russian poetry of the XVIII - the first half of the XIX centuries.)

Above the statements of N.V. Gogol, containing obvious aesthetic elements: about wrinkled ideals in their perverted, caricature forms; About one-sided ideal representation of the subject, hero, etc. They can be supplemented:

- "... so the urge of the poet so that of us to take and we will also return to us in the purified and best form" (P. 231).

N.M. Languages:

- "Allen in the solemn hymn of an invisible worker" (p. 105). "Their beautiful poverty will rise so that ... to everyone ... I wanted to be the poor" (ibid).

Continuing the topic of the transformed ideal, about the comedy of Fonvizin "Lady":

- "These are the irresistible-terrible ideals of the degradation, which can only be achieved by one of the Russian Earth, and not another people" (p. 247).

The aesthetics of Gogol is also dialectical and objective (realistic), like all other parties of his philosophical culture. Whatever the subject of the poet itself, Gogol himself, the poet is taken as a special objective, developing in itself and through other phenomenon. It is enough to apply to his judgments about Lomonosov, Kryonov, Pushkin, etc.:

- "Lomonosov stands ahead of our poets, as joining ahead of the book" (P. 215).

- "On Derzhavina can be said that he is a singer of magnifies" (P. 217).

- "In front of our other poets, Zhukovsky is the same as the jeweler in front of other masters, that is, a master engaged in the last finish of the case" (P. 224-5).

About the wings: "The poet and the sage merged into it together" (P. 243).

About Lermontov: "No one has yet written we have such a right wonderful and disrupted prose" (P. 235).

Goethe at Gogol is a person, full of "some germanic genuine and theoretically German attraction to boost to all times and centuries" (P. 228).

- "... Pushkin appeared. It is the middle. Neither the distracted ideality of the first (Derzhavin - S.Kh.), nor the preisetra of the volutensive luxury of the second (Zhukovsky - S.Kh.) "(P. 226).

- "None of our poets was so stingy for words and expressing, like Pushkin, did not look cautiously for himself, so as not to say the unlimited and superfluous" (ibid). "Recently, he got a lot of Russian life and spoke about everything apt and cleverly, that at least write down every word: it cost him the best poems" (p. 232).

- "Captain's daughter" - "Resolutely the best Russian work in a narrative way" (p. 231).

Pushkin at Gogol is "a wonderful image, on everything that responds and one is only not a surgical response" (p. 228).