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Студенты продолжают изумлять. По итогам курса "How Gogol invented Ukraine" я предложил написать эссе -- как я представляю себе Гоголя-человека. Получил, например, такое:

"My students continue to amaze me. At the end of the course titled 'How Gogol invented Ukraine', I offered them to write an essay on the topic of how I imagine Gogol the man. And this is one of the essays I received:"

(Dmitry Bykov, April 2024, from his FB)


GOGOL AS A FATHER

I had never heard of Gogol’s book “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends,” but it was the book that struck me the most. After this book, I imagined and, it seems, understood Gogol as the real person in flesh and blood, and it is easy for me to imagine him as a father. Sure, as far as we all know, he had no experience of parenthood, and Belinsky generally assumed that the cause of his madness was masturbation. (Belinsky, however, was not a family psychologist either, and, as you have repeatedly shown by your own example, the Russian writer likes to exceed the limits of his competence))). But after this unlucky book I can imagine Gogol as a father - my father, whom I never knew.

I would love Gogol precisely for his pathetic (even bathetic) paternal helplessness. In reality, the father is always helpless, because he is trying to give advice that no one needs. He is trying to protect the child from any dangerous decisions, but the child does not want this continuous guardianship. Gogol pesters and violates absolutely everyone with his advice although no one asks him: he teaches the governor to govern the province having no skills in ruling anything. He teaches the landowner how to manage the estate, although he has never managed his own manor even for a day. He teaches a friend’s wife to fulfill marital duties although he has never been married and seems to be terrified of cohabitation with any other person regardless of gender.

Some explorers say he was attracted to the dead (see Christopher Putney, “Russian devils and diabolic conditionality in Gogols “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”), and in fact the dead souls look somehow safer. The living souls are never interested in our opinions, and perhaps the ideal audience for his letters would be the dead friends who never object. The trouble is that he wanted to teach the contemporaries and coevals. The trouble with all fathers is that they are trying to save their children from life, and this is obviously a failure.

Oh, how I would love this infinitely helpless father, and how he would love me! I know very well that his work would always be more important to him. I fully understand that he would be forever angry with me and a hypothetical mother when he has a writer's block. I even realize that most of the time he could not be disturbed being horribly busy by endless writing and rewriting the same single line as he used to do in creative crisis: Gogol is a fool, Gogol is a fool… But I also know that he would have killed any of my offenders, because for him his OWN was above someone else’s, above rightness, above verity, above duty. This is how he defended his Ukraine from everyone, and if he heard a wise statement, he would certainly murmur: “It must have been a maloross who said that.”(You mentioned such phrase in a letter to Shevyrev or wuddayacallit )

This is how he protected his relatives, putting his mother’s prayer above any prayers. This is how he would protect me, understanding everything about my stupidities and mistakes. And after any of our endless quarrels, which would be daily, this brilliant and helpless man would hug me so that we could cry together. And he would only repeat: “Daughter of mine! Where are you going? What does this terrifying movement mean? Isn't this lightning dropped from the sky? What, what do you want from me? How could you inherit my gift and burden, my fate and stigma? What will happen to you without me, my poor redhead girl?”