Enchanted place

Gogol's prophecies

Why Little Russia is not Great Russia
Gogol arranged for Ukraine and Russia the first Slavic bazaar in their joint history. The great sorcerer, dreamer and piercingly perspicacious writer left a different legacy to the two states. Good-natured, generous and well-fed Ukraine - these are colorful, bright, elegant pages, inhabited by garish maidens and generous young men. And although today you can’t get hat-sized dumplings, chickens, bacon, dumplings and sour cream for free on farms, Gogol noticed one thing correctly: the complete gentleness of the people and the equally complete lack of ambition and any kind of messianism. A simple and understandable chain: earned dumplings - ate dumplings - go to bed. Marry, bring children to people and rest in a shady quiet cemetery. And no Pan-Slavism. Even the nightmarish historical section in "Taras Bulba" is not so terrible, because the aggressive hooliganism of the free Cossacks is moderated by the elegant and civilized life of the Polish gentry. Both are Ukraine, which generously drew science and an example from Poland. And Gogol frankly admires both those and others and does not condemn Andriy, who chose Poland and the West, this civilizational magnet.

The Yakhont sea of ​​plums, the crimson sea of ​​cherries and such an abundance that it is enough even for pigs and a thieving headman, beautiful witches and merry lads - this whole sunny little world is unassuming and unpretentious. Even the “brika” of the Cossacks from the farm is “proportionate”. To reach, and only.

But our northern world, which Gogol left us, the world of skinny, evil, corrupt through and through, gray Russia, dejected and hungry Russia - this is a lesson, and a cruel lesson. According to Gogol, the Russian world is a world of monsters and terrible revelations. If you leave the Ukrainian fairy tale and enter the Russian reality. Although the bores Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich and, most importantly, a huge puddle in the town square - this is, after all, our province today, which is dying from poverty, longing and abandonment.

In Notes of a Madman, Gogol foresaw the future of punitive psychiatry, and at the same time that any psychiatry in Russia would be punitive in relation to patients.

Gogol somehow managed to combine disgust towards the corrupt officials that make up the Russian bureaucracy (“One ... decent person: and even that one, to tell the truth, is a pig”), with aching pity for the “little Sims”, for the poor clerical mice , the quietest of which is the unfortunate Bashmachkin, for whom the whole meaning of life is in an overcoat. And this miserable, last of the last is our brother. Gogol taught us mercy, without him there would be no Dostoevsky with his tears of a tortured child. The tear of a tortured official gave rise to phantoms in St. Petersburg. All the others went in exchange for one overcoat. The law of retribution. There are no positive characters in the Russian world of Gogol. The braggart and swindler Khlestakov are no better than their bribery masters. And the fruitless dreamers of the Manilovs have easily survived to this day. The founders of the intelligentsia, which will continue to dream already in Dostoevsky's Possessed and The Idiot.

But the chaise here is different. Nothing proportionate. And a troika bird is harnessed to it. However, where she rushes, the answer has already been given. One hero of Shukshin, a “freaky”, noticed: the coachman Selifan holds the reins, and Chichikov in the britzka. A cart with a lackey and a crook rushing for profit will "fly" to the first ditch. And so many, many times. Until it becomes "proportionate" like the Ukrainian one. And other peoples and states "step aside" out of fear: lest they be hurt in this crazy and senseless movement.

And one more lesson from Gogol: the burning of the second volume of Dead Souls. If you write a comforting lie, go and burn it right there.