Translated material
Classic game
Nikolai Gogol: 200 years beloved, cursed, admiring, terrifying, tempting and prophesying genius. He created an image of Russia that is frighteningly modern even today, in the 21st century. It belongs to two Slavic cultures that still cannot divide it (p. 6). His "Dead Souls" and "The Inspector General" can be studied as a guide to modern Russian life (p. 8). He left unsolved the riddle of his fate, the secret of a far-sighted and suffering soul (p. 10). The Great Writer Phenomenon Tried to Understand The New Times
But he loved him terribly. Worshiped. And how not to love, if a genius? After all, it beckons, draws in like a funnel. Save yourself who can ... “Come on, come on Vasya! Don't get tired, row!" This is how the stupid idealist Rozanov got lost all his life in three pines: Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov. Until the smart Soviet government came and put everything in order. Old Vasya, in particular, was sent to die of starvation in Sergiev Posad - as unnecessary.
And Gogol, according to her, is not at all scary. On the contrary, he is progressive: a sharp critic of the ugly life of feudal Russia. Of those whom V.I. Lenin called "useful idiots". The time has come for flimsy mud, bloody bones in the wheel and watery materialistic reasoning.
Do you know Russia?
Long before the catastrophe, the idealist Rozanov sculpted Gogol right in the forehead: you, you, Herod, are to blame! Once a genius, then answer. It is with Gogol that the loss of a sense of reality begins in our society, just as from him comes the beginning of aversion to it. His imagination… has corrupted our souls and tore apart our lives, filling both of them with the deepest suffering.”
It turns out that Gogol did not "display" anything so materialistic. On the contrary, he idealistically built the Russian soul. And built, bastard, wrong. Having eclipsed the living Pushkin with his deadly genius and substituting the heavy and lifeless Russia of Gogol in place of the light and light Pushkin's Russia. Where people are not people, but funny dolls made with devilish art.
Constructing the image of Russia, Gogol inevitably conveyed to her something of himself. As Rozanov imagines, partly necrophilic. His sophisticated scent catches the park of carrion fluttering over Gogol's prose. “All Russians have gone through Gogol – this must be remembered. This is the most important thing in the matter... Not just anyone, not some, but all of us... There is no modern Russian person whose soul particle has not been processed and directly made by Gogol.
The idealist Rozanov understood that people always live in someone else's fictional reality. The materialists Lenin-Stalin denied this with their minds, but in reality they were only engaged in crudely implanting into reality the inventions of deeply unhealthy people, bruised by fairy tales about the kingdom of God on earth. Supporting their inventions with fragments of Gogol's Russia.
Do you know Russia? No, you don't know Russia. Anyway, in general. A small piece of her, of course, was seen through lazily lowered eyelids. But Russia as a whole lends itself to observation only with the inner eye. As an image built by someone and embedded in your consciousness. And the history of Russia and even more so. Maybe an image built by Pushkin. Or the image built by Gogol. Or the image built by Comrade. Sharikov, who received a mandate from the party to compose a school course.
That is why Rozanov rages because he clearly sees the measure of responsibility that lies with a genius. Well, it bends, of course. Otherwise, it's impossible. Otherwise, he, along with Gogol, would not be a phenomenon of Russian culture, but some other one. What kind of culture, it turns out, did Gogol kill - having infected the cadaveric poison of laughter, disbelief and anarchism ...
Only Gogol knows all this better than anyone: “Compatriots, it’s scary!” Still, it wouldn’t be scary - alone in front of a bottomless funnel, with the frail shoulders of a madman supporting an ice block the size of one sixth of the Earth. Or pushing a block over the edge?
He died of guilt. Maybe in vain it is so Rozanov? No, not in vain. How and from what he died is your own business. But what he wrote and left is the business of all Russia.
Ah, the trinity bird...
The author did not want to leave the second volume of Dead Souls. This is not Gogol's catastrophe - ours. After the ingenious first volume, he (foreseeing the passionate defamation of the future Rozanov) took upon himself, in the literal sense of the word, increased obligations. Before God and Russia. To create “truly gigantic” images capable of revealing the Russian character in all its might in a new way…etc. etc. Just like comrade. Fadeev before comrade. Stalin. And he couldn't: he overstrained himself. You read the surviving fragments of the second volume - falsehood, undead, inhuman optimism. In color and smell, it resembles “Virgin Soil Upturned”, dried-out purulent bandages and plaster from the mortuary socialist realism.
Couldn't help but burn. Just like an honest writer. I set up an experiment on myself and got a negative result: Russia has no future. At least the version of her that he saw and felt.
We are left with a troika forever frozen in verbal wax, and in the troika - as Shukshin's hero remarks with Gogol's horror - who? A man without a face, whose essence no one tried to guess. Merezhkovsky considered him a devil. Nabokov is the annelid worm in the Michelin tire ad. The idiots from the club of Marxist-Leninists are the representatives of the new class of the bourgeoisie.
Or maybe it's a scoop in the bud? Without honor, without inner faith, with a purely animal ideology - to survive, to make money, and then ...
Ah, trio bird, who invented you and why?! You, dear Nikolai Vasilyevich.
You, sir, invented it. God will forgive you.
It is not your fault, after all, that of all the "Dead Souls" comrade. Stalin managed to extract only a little barefoot girl, whom the coachman Selifan reproaches for not knowing the difference between left and right ... Just like a party opposition that has become confused without a leader.
Or is it your fault? In Russia, the writer is responsible for everything. Well, or before answered. Now everything is different. Now we have comrade Chichikov as chairman of the creative union - either writers, or Morgan filmmakers.
In general, you screwed up, good sir ...