Strangely, Ivanov’s health declined in parallel with Gogol’s: he too lost weight, turned pale, and became paranoid. Turgenev suggested that in Rome Ivanov “went a bit crazy: the twenty-five years of solitude took their toll.” In a confidential letter to his friend Annenkov, the writer described how Ivanov began to assure him, “turning white and laughing nervously that he was being poisoned with a special potion, therefore he often did not eat.”8 Ivanov was afraid to drink water in taverns and preferred to fill bottles from fountains.
In his essay on Ivanov, Gogol praised him as the Russian Raphael. He described him as a man who “was dead to everything in the world except his work.” That was now the model of a truly artistic life for Gogol, not the glamorous existence of his former idol, Briullov.
In the end, Gogol did not finish writing Dead Souls and Ivanov did not complete Christ Appearing to the People. Even unfinished, these monumental works occupy a central place in the panorama of Russian nineteenth-century culture.
A painterly approach colors Dead Souls, and Ivanov’s canvas is dominated by a religious idea. Rilke, with his subtle feeling for Russian culture, described this idea as “profound Russian piety that demanded its embodiment in painting.”
Both Gogol and Ivanov became outsiders for the Russian establishment, and yet Tsar Nicholas I supported both. In 1845, in Rome on state business, the tsar visited Ivanov’s studio; he had been warned that the painter was a “crazy mystic,” but he found his magnum opus “wonderful” (the heir, Alexander, liked it very much too).9 Aid from the imperial treasury eased Ivanov’s lot in Rome.
Now the final act of Gogol’s tragedy was starting. Gogol had worked on Dead Souls since 1835. The writer always said that the plot (like that of The Inspector-General) had been “a gift” from Pushkin. By making Pushkin the godfather of Dead Souls, Gogol positioned his novel as the poet’s “sacred will” and thus raised its status.
The plot is extremely simple: the crook Chichikov travels around the Russian provinces, visiting local landowners to buy up their serfs—not living serfs, but dead ones. These serfs, referred to in legal documents as “souls,” had not yet been removed from the tax rolls and therefore could be used fraudulently as collateral for loans from the state treasury, which Chichikov planned to do.
Nothing much happens in the book: Chichikov travels from one place to another, encountering various bizarre landowners. But Gogol turns those owners of “dead souls” into unforgettable characters whose names have become symbols in Russia. (As, of course, did the book’s title.)
Gogol’s concept of the book kept changing, and eventually he came to see it as something like Dante’s Divine Comedy or even Homer’s Odyssey. (He was often compared with Homer later by his fervent admirers in Russia.) Gogol decided that his work was not a mere novel, but a “poem.” This again connected him with Pushkin: “This work of mine is his creation. He made me swear to write it.”
In 1842, with the help of court circles, Gogol managed to get around the censors and published the first volume of Dead Souls in Russia. “Writers, journalists, book sellers, lay people—all say that there hasn’t been so much hullabaloo in the literary world in a long time, with some reviling your work and others praising it,”10 a friend wrote to Gogol from Moscow.
Dostoevsky later confirmed this: “This was the way young people were then; two or three would get together: ‘Why don’t we read Gogol, gentlemen!’ and they would sit and read aloud to one another, perhaps the whole night through.” But such literary acclaim was no longer enough for Gogol. He perceived himself as a prophet exiled from his homeland, whose writing could miraculously transform all of life in Russia: “Like a silent monk, he lives in the world without belonging to it, his pure, unsullied soul conversing only with God.”
When this ideal author (in fact, Gogol’s self-portrait) appeals to Russia, “The sermon will pierce the soul and will not fall on barren soil. Like an angel’s grief, our poetry will flare up and strike all the strings that there may be in the Russian person, bringing holiness into the most coarsened (read: ‘dead’) souls.”
In the summer of 1851, Gogol informed friends that he had finished the second volume of Dead Souls and began reading chapters to them. He planned a trilogy, something like the “Inferno,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradise” of The Divine Comedy. The friends were impressed, but Gogol, hurt by the failure of Correspondence with Friends, was dubious.
He had always suffered bouts of profound melancholy. The condition was exacerbated by his return to Russia in 1848, where everything—climate, landscape, food, authorities—depressed him: “You feel that Russia is not a brotherly warm place, but a cold blizzardy post station, where the station master, totally indifferent to everything, has only one curt reply, ‘No horses!’ ”
Gogol stayed at the house of his Moscow friend Count Alexander Tolstoy. He stopped writing, read only religious books, went to church assiduously, spent his nights in prayer, and imposed a debilitating fast upon himself: he ate once a day, and then just a few spoons of oatmeal soup made with water or cabbage broth. He refused any other food, explaining that it made his “intestines twist.”
On Sunday, February 10, 1852, Gogol asked Count Tolstoy to keep the manuscript of the second volume, explaining, “I have moments when I want to burn all of it. But I would regret it. I think there is something good in there.”11 The count refused: he did not want to feed Gogol’s depression.
Two days later, on Tuesday morning, the count entered Gogol’s room and found him weeping by the stove, where the last manuscript pages were burning: “Look what I did! I wanted to destroy a few things, which I set aside, but I burned everything! How powerful the devil is—look what he made me do!… Now it’s all lost.”
Tolstoy, realizing in horror that Gogol had burned the second volume of Dead Souls, tried to calm him down: “But you can remember it, can’t you?” Gogol stopped weeping. “Yes, I can, I can; it’s all in my head.” (He used to read entire chapters from the manuscript to his friends by heart, like poetry.)
But Gogol had no strength or desire to work or even to live. He never left his room again, lying on the couch with eyes shut and worry beads in his hands, no longer eating or interacting with people.
A week passed this way. The count called in the best doctors in Moscow. A concilium gathered: six doctors examined and palpated the suffering patient (his stomach was so soft and empty that they could feel the vertebrae of his spine through it) and decided that he needed to be bled. They attached six large leeches to his nose, overcoming his resistance.
Gogol groaned and screamed, “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” But they held his hands so that he would not tear off the leeches. They put a mustard plaster on his feet and ice on his head, and poured medicine into his mouth. After a few days of this torture, Gogol breathed his last, with the words “How sweet to die.”
. . .
Gogol’s death at age forty-two stunned the Russian intellectual elite. Turgenev, then thirty-three, proclaimed in the obituary published by the Moscow Gazette, “Yes, he died, that man whom we now have the bitter right given by death to call great; a man whose name marked an era in the history of our literature.”
It was soon discovered that Gogol had kept rough drafts of five chapters from the second volume of Dead Souls, which were published three and a half years later (to mixed reviews). In the meantime, the authorities reacted with bewilderment: how should they respond to Gogol’s demise? Fifteen years earlier, Nicholas I made sure that Pushkin’s end was presented as the death of a Christian. Why did he not want to use the death of the greatest advocate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” for the same propaganda purposes? Many felt that Gogol died “a Christian, saint, and monk.” (A posthumous inventory of his estate showed that all his possessions were worth a miserable 43 rubles, 88 kopecks.)