Decembrist
▪ Russian history
Russian Dekabrist,
any of the Russian revolutionaries who led an unsuccessful uprising on Dec. 14 (Dec. 26, New Style), 1825, and through their martyrdom provided a source of inspiration to succeeding generations of Russian dissidents. The Decembrists were primarily members of the upper classes who had military backgrounds; some had participated in the Russian occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars or served elsewhere in western Europe; a few had been Freemasons, and some were members of the secret patriotic (and, later, revolutionary) societies in Russia—the Union of Salvation (1816), the Union of Welfare (1818), the Northern Society (1821), and the Southern Society (1821).
The Northern Society, taking advantage of the brief but confusing interregnum following the death of Tsar Alexander I, staged an uprising, convincing some of the troops in St. Petersburg to refuse to take a loyalty oath to Nicholas I and to demand instead the accession of his brother Constantine. The rebellion, however, was poorly organized and easily suppressed; Colonel Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, who was to be the provisional dictator, fled immediately.
Another insurrection by the Chernigov regiment in the south was also quickly defeated. An extensive investigation in which Nicholas personally participated ensued; it resulted in the trial of 289 Decembrists, the execution of 5 of them (Pavel Pestel, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, Pyotr Kakhovsky, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Kondraty Ryleyev), the imprisonment of 31, and the banishment of the rest to Siberia.
Gogol, Nikolay
▪ Russian writer
Introduction
born March 19 [March 31, New Style], 1809, Sorochintsy, near Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]
died Feb. 21 [March 4], 1852, Moscow, Russia
Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist, whose novel Myortvye dushi (Dead Souls) and whose short story “Shinel” (“The Overcoat”) are considered the foundations of the great 19th-century tradition of Russian realism.
Youth and early fame.
The Ukrainian countryside, with its colourful peasantry, its Cossack traditions, and its rich folklore, constituted the background of Gogol's boyhood. A member of the petty Ukrainian gentry, Gogol was sent at the age of 12 to the high school at Nezhin. There he distinguished himself by his biting tongue, his contributions of prose and poetry to a magazine, and his portrayal of comic old men and women in school theatricals. In 1828 he went to St. Petersburg, hoping to enter the civil service, but soon discovered that without money and connections he would have to fight hard for a living. He even tried to become an actor, but his audition was unsuccessful. In this predicament he remembered a mediocre sentimental-idyllic poem he had written in the high school. Anxious to achieve fame as a poet, he published it at his own expense, but its failure was so disastrous that he burned all the copies and thought of emigrating to the United States. He embezzled the money his mother had sent him for payment of the mortgage on her farm and took a boat to the German port of Lübeck. He did not sail but briefly toured Germany. Whatever his reasons for undertaking such an irresponsible trip, he soon ran out of money and returned to St. Petersburg, where he got an ill-paid government post.
In the meantime Gogol wrote occasionally for periodicals, finding an escape in childhood memories of the Ukraine. He committed to paper what he remembered of the sunny landscapes, peasants, and boisterous village lads, and he also related tales about devils, witches, and other demonic or fantastic agents that enliven Ukrainian folklore. Romantic stories of the past were thus intermingled with realistic incidents of the present. Such was the origin of his eight narratives, published in two volumes in 1831–32 under the title Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka). Written in a lively and at times colloquial prose, these works contributed something fresh and new to Russian literature. In addition to the author's whimsical inflection, they abounded in genuine folk flavour, including numerous Ukrainian words and phrases, all of which captivated the Russian literary world.
Mature career.
The young author became famous overnight. Among his first admirers were the poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky, both of whom he had met before. This esteem was soon shared by the writer Sergey Aksakov and the critic Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), among others. Having given up his second government post, Gogol was now teaching history in a boarding school for girls. In 1834 he was appointed assistant professor of medieval history at St. Petersburg University, but he felt inadequately equipped for the position and left it after a year. Meanwhile, he prepared energetically for the publication of his next two books, Mirgorod and Arabeski (Arabesques), which appeared in 1835. The four stories constituting Mirgorod were a continuation of the Evenings, but they revealed a strong gap between Gogol's romantic escapism and his otherwise pessimistic attitude toward life. Such a splendid narrative of the Cossack past as “Taras Bulba” certainly provided an escape from the present. But “Povest o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem” (“Story of the Quarrel Between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich”) was, for all its humour, full of bitterness about the meanness and vulgarity of existence. Even the idyllic motif of Gogol's “Starosvetskiye pomeshchiki” (“Old-World Landowners”) is undermined with satire, for the mutual affection of the aged couple is marred by gluttony, their ceaseless eating for eating's sake.
The aggressive realism of a romantic who can neither adapt himself to the world nor escape from it, and is therefore all the more anxious to expose its vulgarity and evil, predominates in Gogol's Petersburg stories printed (together with some essays) in the second work, Arabesques. In one of these stories, “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (“Diary of a Madman”), the hero is an utterly frustrated office drudge who finds compensation in megalomania and ends in a lunatic asylum. In another, “Nevsky prospekt” (“Nevsky Prospect”), a tragic romantic dreamer is contrasted to an adventurous vulgarian, while in the revised finale of “Portret” (“The Portrait”) the author stresses his conviction that evil is ineradicable in this world. In 1836 Gogol published in Pushkin's (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich) Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) one of his gayest satirical stories, “Kolyaska” (“The Coach”). In the same periodical also appeared his amusingly caustic surrealist tale, “Nos” (“The Nose”). Gogol's association with Pushkin was of great value because he always trusted his friend's taste and criticism; moreover, he received from Pushkin the themes for his two principal works, the play Revizor (The Government Inspector, sometimes titled The Inspector General), and Dead Souls, which were important not only to Russian literature but also to Gogol's further destiny.
A great comedy, The Government Inspector mercilessly lampoons the corrupt bureaucracy under Nicholas I. Having mistaken a well-dressed windbag for the dreaded incognito inspector, the officials of a provincial town bribe and banquet him in order to turn his attention away from the crying evils of their administration. But during the triumph, after the bogus inspector's departure, the arrival of the real inspector is announced—to the horror of those concerned. It was only by a special order of the tsar that the first performance of this comedy of indictment and “laughter through tears” took place on April 19, 1836. Yet the hue and cry raised by the reactionary press and officialdom was such that Gogol left Russia for Rome, where he remained, with some interruptions, until 1842. The atmosphere he found in Italy appealed to his taste and to his somewhat patriarchal—not to say primitive—religious propensity. The religious painter Aleksandr Ivanov, who worked in Rome, became his close friend. He also met a number of traveling Russian aristocrats and often saw the émigrée princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a convert to Roman Catholicism, in whose circle religious themes were much discussed. It was in Rome, too, that Gogol wrote most of his masterpiece, Dead Souls.