Biographical Ten
Final Flight of the
Buffleheaded Goo-Goo Bird
(1846-1852)
The preacher in Gogol was now in total control, the
sanctimonious religious fanatic. Well-meaning friends, those like Aksakov, who
cherished the great fiction he had written, tried to rein him in. But it was
far too late. He went on travelling around Europe, foot firmly implanted on the
neck of his own best creativity, nursing his mad plan for edifying all of
mankind. He stayed with Vasily Zhukovsky and his family repeatedly, in various
parts of Germany. The great poet spent a lot of time with Gogol over the years;
he must have had some insights into Gogol’s character. But Zhukovsky never
wrote a memoir of Gogol. Other than a few scattered notes in reminiscences
Gogol’s other “friends” never did either: Pletnyov, Vjazemsky, Sheviryov,
Khomyakov, Pogodin, Smirnova, the Vielgorskies. The main exception is Aksakov.
Why were they so reluctant to write
about the man who was generally recognized for years as Pushkin’s successor,
the greatest creative writer that the land of Rus had to offer? Probably
because he mystified them. They could not reconcile the man with the great
works because the two were not reconcilable. The Gogol they saw in their
presence was a man of highly limited vision.
“While he was endowed with a superhuman
power of creative imagination (in which in the world’s literature he has had
equals but certainly no superior), his understanding was strikingly inadequate
to his genius. His ideas were those of his provincial home, of his simple,
childish mother, modified only by an equally primitive romantic cult of beauty
and of art, imbibed during the first years of his literary career” (D.S.
Mirsky).
Selected
Passages from Correspondence with Friends, which Gogol termed his “only sane book,” was published in
January, 1847, and it turned out to be a thoroughly insane book. There is an
air of derangement about the text from the start, beginning in the preface, in
which Gogol mentions that God has brought him back from the brink of death, and
he now deems it necessary to enlighten each and all about certain matters
sacred to God. This is followed by a Will and Testament, beginning with
instructions not to bury his body until it showed clear signs of decomposition,
inasmuch as there had been times when he went into a condition of comatose
numbness, when his heart stopped beating and no pulse could be detected.
