Gogol’s Sobornost

Nicolai Gogol’s mystical, exotic religious views didn’t quite fit any form of orthodox Christianity. Orthodoxy deeply marked him, especially Orthodoxy monasticism. After his first visit to the monastery at Optina, Gogol wrote that he “took a memory away with me that will never fade. Clearly, grace dwells in that place. You can feel it even in the outward signs of worship. Nowhere have I seen monks like those. Through everyone one of them I seemed to converse with heaven.” But he hat spent six years in Rome (1836-42), and concluded (wholly unlike Dostoevsky!) that Orthodoxy and Catholicism were virtually identical: “Our religion is just the same thing as Catholicism,” he wrote. He described himself, though, as a Protestant, because of the emphasis he placed on personal relationship to Jesus.

Gogol, though, believed that his idiosyncratic brand of Christianity was the hope of Russia, and he believed his fictional writings would serve the purpose of reforming Russia by recovering the Russian spirit. His stories are religious allegories but of an odd sort that befits their odd author.

He populated his stories with grotesque, battered, embattled individuals. They live alone in nondescript tenement houses, scurry to work and scurry home, and are generally chewed up by the machine of Russian life, especially life in Petersburg. In his most famous story, The Overcoat , the principal character is Akaky Akakievich, whose name and story are derived from the story of a hermit, St. Acacius. Akaky has saved and scraped to buy himself a new overcoat, which will make him acceptable in good society and gives him new confidence. The coat gets stolen, and Akaky goes to an official at the police station, an “Important Personage,” who scolds him so harshly that he goes off and dies. But he gets his revenge; Akaky comes back as a ghost who stalks the Important Personage until he is able to steal his overcoat. (“We all came out from Gogol’s overcoat,” Dostoevsky once quipped.)

These pathetic stories and pathetic characters are pointing to a positive value, the Orthodox ideal of sobornost , roughly equivalent to “communion.” The concept had been developed in the 1830s and 40s by the theologian Aleksei Khomiakov. The word comes from a Russian word meaning “assembly” and “cathedral,” and points to the vision of a spiritual community that is not dominated by the state and is not a merely institutional structure. It is a communion and a community, and Gogol depicts the wretched lives of these urban clerks and accountants. What they are missing, what Russia is missing, is sobornost .

Gogol’s magnum opus was to be Dead Souls. He planned three volumes, which he imagined to be a “poem” similar to the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy . Only the first was published, and Gogol burned the second. The finished part on Chichikov, a swindler who travels the country purchasing the papers of dead serfs. He intends to use the papers as collateral to leverage his own purchase of an estate. The owner of the serfs has an incentive to sell of his dead souls; if his serfs have died since the last census, then he will be charged for them in the poll tax. Chichikov promises to take the serf off the owner’s hands and pay the tax, but then he will use the serfs’ papers as evidence that he can afford a loan.

As it stands, Dead Souls ends with a question posed to Russia, which is pictured as a rushing troika: “And you, Russia of mine—are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, struck with the portent, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds? Surely the winds themselves must abide in their manes, and every vein in their bodies be an ear stretched to catch the celestial message which bids them, with iron-girded breasts, and hooves which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission of God? Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!”

In subsequent parts of the poem, Gogol was going to bring Chichikov through a conversion and attempt to depict a true Russian communion of souls, the embodiment of true sobornost . Neither Chichikov, nor, sadly, Russia, realized Gogol’s dream.