The first of this new generation to emerge was Nikolai Gogol’. Gogol’ was the son of a provincial Ukrainian landowner, and on his father’s side even the noble ancestry was rather recent. He attended the lycée in nearby Nezhin, an institution of the highest educational quality but lacking the connections with the court and the high aristocracy of Pushkin’s school in Tsarskoe Selo. On graduation the young Gogol’ found a position in St. Petersburg at a school for the daughters of military officers. His livelihood came from the school and soon from his writings after his first great success, a series of comic stories from Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka. Gogol’ eventually met Pushkin, who published some of his stories, and Zhukovskii, who appreciated his talent but never played the role of patron with Gogol’ that he had in other cases. Gogol’ was something of a loner, and at first he did not need Zhukovskii’s patronage. There was already enough variety of outlets for his work and they paid enough to keep him going. Nevertheless, the Russian market was still too narrow to provide more than a modest living and Gogol’s poor health left him vulnerable. The solution found by Zhukovskii and others of his friends after 1840 was a series of direct grants from the tsar himself, one of the last examples of court patronage of literature. Nicholas I liked most of the work done by Gogol’, and the grants came regularly until the writer’s death.
Gogol’ brought new themes into Russian literature. His stories of St. Petersburg, often fantastic and grotesque, introduced an urban theme into Russian literature that was previously absent. The capital was growing, both because of the expansion of the central bureaucracy and because of the city’s role as a port and an industrial center. The St. Petersburg that Gogol’ knew was the city of the impoverished clerk and the lonely wanderer in a vast and cold mass of huge buildings, not the city of glittering balls and brilliant salons. The heroes of these stories were such little people as the clerk in “The Overcoat,” but St. Petersburg also inspired the fantastic strain in his writing, with stories such as “The Nose,” in which the nose of a minor bureaucrat leaves his face and roams around the city in a carriage wearing an official uniform.
Gogol’ remained all his life the product of the Ukrainian provinces, deeply religious, nationalistic, and conservative in his political views. He took the conservative ideal for Russia seriously and realized that the reality was different. His first play, “The Inspector General” of 1836, was a scathing satire of provincial life and official corruption. Poorly performed at first, it was not a success until much later, though it showed the direction in which he was heading. Nicholas I liked it, as he saw himself struggling with the corruption and incompetence of the Russian bureaucracy, and found an echo of that effort in the play. His greatest work, the novel Dead Souls (1842), was a picaresque account of the adventures of a swindler traveling through provincial Russia. Again Gogol’ saw Russia’s shortcomings from the point of view of a conservative ideal of autocracy and Orthodoxy, but it was a sign of the times that reaction to the novel divided very much along ideological lines. The pro-government conservatives Bulgarin and Senkovskii hated it. More independent conservatives, the Slavophiles, and the Westernizer Vissarion Belinskii loved it, but for different reasons. The Slavophiles saw it as an apotheosis of Russia and its mystical future, while Belinskii praised it for its unvarnished portrayal of Russia’s present.
The debate over Dead Souls was a harbinger of the future: literature was fast becoming a battleground of political and cultural ideology. It was changing in other respects, for Zhukovskii left for Europe in 1842 in search of better health and never returned to Russia. He had no replacement at the court, and Russian literature no longer had a patron with the ear of the tsar himself. By the 1840s the “fat journals” pioneered by Senkovskii and Pushkin fought lively and vituperative battles over Gogol’, Lermontov, Goethe, and Georges Sand. The most powerful of the younger writers was Fyodor Dostoevskii, whose early works took up the thread of Gogol’ in his Petersburg stories, with his own tales of impoverished seamstresses and other little people of the great metropolis. The commanding figure of the decade in criticism was the critic Vissarion Belinskii, the main spokesman of the Westernizers.
Belinskii came to be seen in Russia as the archetypical “committed” critic who judged works of art by largely utilitarian standards and by their significance for the reformation of Russian society. This judgment placed him in the straightjacket of the conceptions of a later generation, for Belinskii’s view of art was essentially historical, a view derived from his Hegelian youth. Belinskii got from Hegel the idea that art was one of the many manifestations of the Idea in history, alongside philosophy or the development of the state. Art was, in his words, “thinking in images,” and thus was the equivalent of political or social thought in another form. Since the development of the Idea in society was the progress of freedom, art in Russia should reflect the movement of the country toward that ideal. Art that did not was condemned to ultimate insignificance and was considered bad art to boot. This theoretical framework gave him a basis for his total rejection of older Russian culture, his qualified approval of the eighteenth century, and his enthusiastic approval of Pushkin, Lermontov and particularly Gogol’. In Gogol’ he saw a relentless critic of the existing order of Russian society, the satirist of nobility and state alike. His appreciation of Gogol’ was only partly correct, for Gogol’s satire came from a conservative position with a religious basis, the idea that Russia was not yet living up to its potential to create a society profoundly different from the West. Here Belinskii parted company with Gogol’ entirely, for the critic was a firm Westernizer. To him Russian society was only acceptable insofar as it approached the standard of an idealized West, a West that itself needed to be transformed by the French utopian socialism that became Belinskii’s credo.
The discussion of literature was to a large extent a discussion of political and social issues that could not otherwise be aired in print. Eventually they broke out into the open, or partly so. Gogol’s publication of his conservative manifesto, Selections from Correspondence with Friends, in 1847 created huge controversies, muffled by censorship, for he seemed to be not just supporting the existing state and church but losing faith in literature itself. Belinskii’s response, the letter to Gogol’ in 1847, became a classic example of liberal and radical thought in Russia for the next two generations. “The public…looks upon Russian writers as its only leaders, defenders, and saviors from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality.” In Belinskii’s mind, “Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism…but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity.” The Russia of his day needed to start with the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment and the establishment of legal order. Belinskii’s life was perhaps as important as his views, for he was the first important example of the Russian intelligentsia, the educated stratum of society that took Russian culture out of the hands of the nobility. Himself the grandson of a priest and the son of a military doctor, he was only technically a noble because of his father’s promotion in the army. He survived, and survived very poorly on his income from his articles and editiorial work in the journals where he published, most importantly The Contemporary, originally Pushkin’s journal and a publication that would have a remarkable future.