The role of mysticism in the work of Gogol. Mystic Gogol. Was a great writer buried alive? Black cat story

Nikolai's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol, was 14 years older than his mother, and the story of their acquaintance is truly amazing. As a teenager, Vasily saw his future wife Maria in a dream in the form of a baby. A loud voice announced: “Vasily! Your future wife is born! Love the baby!" A few days later, a daughter was born to the neighbors Kosyarsky, and he began to nurse her, recognizing in her a baby from a dream ...
They got married when Mary was 15 years old. For many years they had no children, and only after passionate prayers to Nikolai Ugodnik, to whom the church in Dikanka was dedicated, was born the first-born, named after St. Nicholas.
Vasily Gogol died in 1825 from a very strange and rare disease - "fear of death." In those days, it was believed that the person who suffered from it was guilty before God, and the disease itself was inherited.
All the first works of Nicholas are closely connected with the ancient folk beliefs and customs. In "May Night" we are talking about the holiday of Rusalia. Everything is here: demonic games, evil spirits, witches, "dancing and splashing of mermaids with pipes", werewolf. Gogol broadcasts through the mouth of his hero: “Who in his lifetime has not known evil spirits?”
There are many ways to communicate with evil spirits, and all of them are described in the works of the great esotericist Gogol, whom all acquaintances and even Pushkin himself considered a fair "contactee" with the dark devilish world. You can use evil spirits for your own purposes, Gogol assures, as in the "Sorochinsky Fair" gypsies selling fear. You can, obeying her, follow her instructions in everything, like Petro from “The Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”. But you can also outwit, leave evil spirits in the cold, as does the Cossack messenger from The Lost Letter.
When Gogol began his literary career, few educated Russians took seriously what we today call paranormal or psychic phenomena. Some contemporaries believed that Nikolai Vasilievich was endowed with a rare ability to evoke the souls of people, like the sorcerer from "Terrible Revenge", to influence them, subjugating them to his power.
Gogol felt free and at ease only in the circle of his closest people. He told scary stories and fairy tales, joked wittily, and even… sang romances in a wondrous tenor voice! In an unfamiliar society, the writer became gloomy, withdrawn, hid in the corners of rooms, or climbed onto a sofa or couch, covered his head with something and fell asleep soundly. The noise of the guests was nothing to him. It took a lot of work to persuade Gogol to meet new people. If he succeeded, then his mood quickly deteriorated, and he strove to leave, referring to ill health. It is worth reminding you, readers, that it is sorcerers who try to communicate only with “their own”, perceiving it as a threat of invasion by “strangers”.
Many contemporaries pointed to special abilities, as well as characteristic details of Gogol's behavior. For example, the writer Aksakov testified that he found Gogol at work “in the following fantastic attire: instead of boots - long striped woolen stockings above the knees, instead of a frock coat - a purple velvet cloak, a long satin burgundy-black scarf wrapped around his neck; on his head is a crimson astronomer's cap embroidered with gold. Gogol looked for a long time at his friends Aksakov and Zhukovsky, who disturbed him - obviously not recognizing them. He was in a state of trance. This and other similar testimonies (including Pushkin's) emphasize Gogol's ecstatic state, pain, incredible nervousness, the ability to fall into a trance, a rare gift to instantly abstract from others - these are all well-known properties of shamans and sorcerers.
Every sorcerer and shaman suffers the so-called "shamanic disease", a state in which he is between life and death. It is known that Gogol, traveling through Italy, suffered from an illness - he was visited by terrible visions in reality. After this he became exceedingly devout, and spoke to his friends in no other than the tone of a prophet.

Gogol created all his early works in the seven years he lived in St. Petersburg. Then he moved from place to place and composed " Dead Souls". This took about 15 years. He worked hard, but printed almost nothing. Then he suddenly began to burn what was written: he burned the second volume of Dead Souls, wrote it again and burned it again ... From the point of view of a priest of an ancient pagan religion or a sorcerer, these actions, incomprehensible to others, have a deep meaning. The gods must give the best that you have. And what burns in the fire immediately falls to the divine throne.
The death of the writer was strange, just like his life. Gogol fell ill for no apparent reason and began to refuse food. During his illness, being in a semi-conscious state, he constantly repeated the words of his insane hero from Notes of a Madman.
Incredible events accompanied the reburial of the writer's body in 1931. Then it was decided to transfer the ashes of Gogol from the cemetery of St. Danilov Monastery to Novodevichy. The ceremony was attended by almost 30 famous writers. These were the years of militant atheism, and no one thought about the sacrilege of such an action. Imagine the shock of the audience when a skeleton without a skull was found in the opened coffin, and someone's head was buried separately nearby.
The rituals of the dismemberment of bodies during burial are known to archaeologists who excavated mounds in Ukraine and southern Russia. But the age of these burials is 3-4 thousand years. What happened to Gogol after his death? Most likely, no one will ever be able to answer this question.
It is reliably known that after the burial, a certain writer A. Ivanov went to Leningrad, blasphemously taking the rib of Gogol's skeleton as a "souvenir". There he went to his friends, hung up his coat in the hallway (he checked that there was a rib wrapped in an old newspaper in an inside pocket). In a conversation, he hinted to his friends that he had a unique little thing. They asked to be shown. Ivanov went out into the hallway, reached into his coat pocket... and the rib was not there! Except for three friends who did not leave the hall, and he himself, there was no one in the house, the doors were bolted. A week later, the grave robber Ivanov died suddenly from an unknown attack of wild fever and loss of pulse.
Another lover of "memorial souvenirs", the writer I. Malyshkin, who dragged the foil from the coffin decorations, did not live even a month after that - in a state of depression, he hanged himself in the attic of the building of the Union of Writers of the USSR. The director of the cemetery, S. Arakcheev, who removed the yellow leather boots from the bones of Gogol's skeleton, was moved by his mind: every night he dreamed of these boots and Gogol, threatening him with his finger from the darkness; the boots came to life and choked the thief. The frightened party member found the grandmother-sorceress and thumped the old one at the feet, they say, what should he do with such a misfortune? “And bury these boots next to the coffin of the deceased you robbed!” - advised the witch. Arakcheev did just that, he stopped having nightmares, and his overstrained psyche could no longer recover ...
It should be noted that not everyone believes in terrible stories related to the manifestations of clairvoyance and telepathy of N.V. Gogol during his lifetime, his communication with the forces underworld, falling into a trance, etc., and especially - in the details of his reburial and the subsequent events associated with the sudden death of people involved in looting the grave of the great writer. Some today attribute all these superstrange things to the wild imagination of Gogol's contemporaries first, and then those who defiled his ashes by digging up and opening (and plundering!) the coffin with the remains of the author of Dead Souls. It remains for us to recall the words from the will of Nikolai Vasilyevich:
“It will be shameful and hard on those who are attracted to the disappearing flesh, which is no longer mine, and may they be punished for this ...”

Alexander Evteev,
esoteric, Kyiv

Square

Amazing mysterious world N. Gogol surrounds many from childhood: delightful images of The Night Before Christmas, bright folk festivals at the Sorochinskaya Fair, terrible stories about May Night, Viy and Terrible Revenge, from which the whole body is covered with small goosebumps. This is only a small list of the famous works of N.V. Gogol, who is considered the most mystical Russian writer, and abroad his stories are equated with the gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In this article, you will learn Interesting Facts from the biography of Gogol, which are considered mysterious and mystical. Get ready to get goosebumps!

Gogol was born in a rural Ukrainian large family, he was the third child of twelve. His mother is a woman of rare beauty - she was 14 years old when she became the wife of a man twice her age. They say that it was the mother who developed the religious and mystical worldview in her son. Maria Ivanovna was distinguished by her natural view of religion, she told her son about ancient Russian pagan traditions, Slavic mythology. Gogol's letters to his mother dating back to 1833 have been preserved. In one of them, Gogol writes that a mother in childhood told her child in colors what the Last Judgment is, what will await a person for virtuous deeds, and what fate will overtake sinners.

Childhood, adolescence and youth

Nikolai Gogol from an early age was a closed and uncommunicative person, even close relatives could not imagine what was going on in his head and soul. The boy lived apart, had little contact with his brothers and sisters, but spent a lot of time with his beloved mother.

Gogol later said that at the age of five he first experienced panic fear.

“I was 5 years old. I was sitting alone in Vasilievka. Father and mother left ... Twilight descended. I clung to the corner of the sofa and, in the midst of complete silence, listened to the sound of the long pendulum of the old wall clock. There was a buzzing in my ears, something approaching and leaving somewhere. Believe me, it already seemed to me then that the knock of the pendulum was the knock of time passing into eternity. Suddenly, the faint meow of a cat broke the peace that weighed on me. I saw her, meowing, cautiously creeping towards me. I will never forget how she walked, stretching, and her soft paws weakly tapped her claws on the floorboards, and her green eyes sparkled with an unkind light. I got scared. I climbed onto the couch and leaned against the wall. “Kitty, kitty,” I muttered, and, wanting to encourage myself, I jumped off and, grabbing the cat, which easily gave itself into my hands, ran into the garden, where I threw it into the pond and several times, when it tried to swim out and go ashore, I pushed it away with a pole. I was scared, I was trembling, but at the same time I felt some satisfaction, maybe revenge for the fact that she scared me. But when she drowned, and the last circles on the water fled, complete peace and silence settled in, I suddenly felt terribly sorry for the “kitty”. I felt remorse. I felt like I drowned a man. I cried terribly and calmed down only when my father, to whom I confessed my deed, whipped me.

Nikolai Gogol from childhood was a sensitive person, succumbing to fears, experiences, life's troubles. Any negative situation was reflected in his psyche, when another person could withstand such a thing. The child drowned the cat because of fear, he seemed to have overcome his fear through cruelty and violence, but he realized that panic cannot be overcome in this way. It can be assumed that the writer was left alone with his fears, since his conscience did not allow him to use violence again.

This situation is very reminiscent of the moment in the work “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, when the stepmother turned into a black cat, and the lady hit her in fear and cut her paw.

It is known that Gogol drew as a child, but his drawings seemed mediocre, incomprehensible to others. Such an attitude towards his art, again, could have a negative impact on self-esteem.

From the age of 10, Nikolai Gogol was sent to the Poltava gymnasium, where the boy became a member of a literary circle. It is not known why Gogol developed such low self-esteem, but it was precisely this self-isolation that provoked a mental breakdown in maturity.

The first attempt to bring his work to the people's court

Nikolai Gogol began to create, he wrote a lot, but he ventured to show his work "Hanz Küchelgarten". It was a failure, criticism was unfavorable to the story, then Gogol destroyed the entire circulation. Before becoming a writer, Gogol tried to become an actor and enter the official service. But the love of literature still captured the young man, who was able to find a new approach to this type of art. It was Gogol who touched on the other side of life and showed how they live in Little Russia! The collection "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" made a splash! His mother Maria Ivanovna helped to collect material and develop plots for the writer. For many years Gogol successfully worked in the literary field, corresponded with Pushkin and Belinsky, who were delighted with his works. Despite his fame, Gogol never became an open person, but on the contrary, over the years he led an increasingly reclusive lifestyle.

By the way, Pushkin gave Gogol the pug Josie, after the death of the dog Gogol was attacked by longing, because the writer definitely had no one closer to Josie.

Question about writer's homosexuality

Gogol's personal life is surrounded by conjectures and assumptions. The writer has never been married to a woman, perhaps even had no intimacy with them. There are references in a letter to his mother that Gogol wrote about a beautiful divine person whom he did not want to correlate with an ordinary woman. Contemporaries say that it was an unrequited love for Anna Mikhailovna Vielgorskaya. After that case, more women there were no men in Gogol's life, just as there were no men. But researchers believe that letters to men are highly emotional. In the unfinished work "Nights at the Villa" there is a motif of love for a young man suffering from tuberculosis. The work is autobiographical, hence the researchers had a hunch that, perhaps, Gogol had feelings for men.

Semyon Karlinsky argued that Gogol is a very religious person, God-fearing, therefore he could not include any intimate relationships in his life.

But Igor Kon believes that it was God-fearing that prevented Gogol from accepting himself as he is. Therefore, depression developed, fears of being incomprehensible appeared, as a result, the writer completely fell into religion and brought himself to death, the sea of hunger - these were attempts to cleanse himself of sinfulness.

Candidate of Philological Sciences L. S. Yakovlev names attempts to define sexual orientation Gogol "provocative, outrageous, funny publications."

Eggnog

Nikolai Gogol was madly in love with goat's milk combined with rum. The writer jokingly called his amazing drink “mogul-mogul”. In fact, the mogul-mogul dessert appeared in ancient times in Europe, was first made by the German confectioner Keukenbauer. So the famous beaten egg yolk with sugar has nothing to do with the famous writer!

Writer's phobias

Gogol was terribly afraid of thunderstorms.
When stranger in society, he left so as not to collide with him.
IN last years generally ceased to go out and communicate with writers, led an ascetic lifestyle.
I was afraid to look ugly. Gogol terribly disliked his long nose, so he asked the artists to depict a nose close to the ideal in portraits. On the basis of his complexes, the writer wrote the work "The Nose".

Lethargy or death?

Gogol constantly thought about being buried alive and was terribly afraid of such a fate. Therefore, 7 years before his death, he made a will, where he indicated that he should be buried only when visible signs of decomposition appeared. Gogol died at the age of 42, after fasting before Lent for 15 days. On the night of February 11-12, a week before his death, the writer burns the second volume of Dead Souls in the oven, explaining that he was beguiled by an evil spirit. The writer was buried on the third day after his death. In 1931, the necropolis where Gogol was buried was liquidated and a decision was made to transfer the writer's grave to the Novodevichy cemetery. After opening the grave, they discovered the absence of Gogol's skull (according to Vladimir Lidin), later there is a rumor that the skull was in the grave, but turned on its side. This information was not made public for many years, and only in the 90s they again started talking about whether Gogol was accidentally buried in a state of lethargic sleep?

There are some facts confirming that Gogol could have been buried alive. I am posting what I have been able to find.

After suffering from malarial encephalitis in 1839, Gogol often fainted, which led to many hours of sleep. Based on this, the writer developed a phobia that he could be buried alive while he was unconscious.

But there is no official evidence that in 1931, during the opening of the grave, a skull turned on its side was found. Witnesses to the exhumation give different testimonies: some say that everything was in order, others claim that the skull was turned to the side, and Lidin did not see the skull at all in its proper place. The presence of a death mask completely debunks these myths. It cannot be done on a living person, even if he is in a lethargic sleep, because the person will still react to high temperature during the procedure and will begin to suffocate from filling the external respiratory organs with plaster. But this was not the case, Gogol was buried after a natural death.

Death mask of Gogol

“I am considered a riddle for everyone, no one will solve me completely” - N.V. Gogol

The mystery of Gogol's life and death causes numerous disputes among literary critics, historians, psychologists, doctors and scientists. Over time, like many of his characters, he himself became a semi-fantastic figure.

Gogol's staircase

As a child, little Gogol listened to his grandmother's stories about the stairs along which the souls of people rise to heaven. This image was deeply deposited in the memory of the boy, Gogol carried it through his whole life. Stairs of various kinds now and then we meet on the pages of Gogol's works. Yes, and the last words of the writer, according to eyewitnesses, was the cry “Ladder, quickly give the ladder!”

Love for sweet

G naked had a sweet tooth. He could, for example, without outside help, eat a jar of jam, a mountain of gingerbread cookies and drink a whole samovar of tea in one sitting ... "In the pockets of his trousers he always had a supply of sweets and gingerbread cookies, he chewed without ceasing, even in classes during classes. He climbed somewhere in the corner, away from everyone, and there he already ate his delicacy," his friend from the gymnasium describes Gogol. This passion for sweets remained until the end of days. In Gogol's pockets one could always find a lot of all sorts of sweets: caramels, pretzels, crackers, half-eaten pies, sugar cubes ...

Another of the curious features was the passion for rolling bread balls. The poet and translator Nikolai Berg recalled: “Gogol either walked around the room, from corner to corner, or sat and wrote, rolling balls of white bread, about which he told his friends that they help to solve the most complex and difficult problems. When he was bored at dinner, he again rolled the balls and imperceptibly tossed them into the kvass or soup of those sitting next to him ... One friend collected a whole heap of these balls and keeps them reverently ... "

What else did Gogol burn?

The first work that turned into ashes was a poem in the spirit of the German romantic school "Hans Küchelgarten". The pseudonym V. Alov saved Gogol's name from criticism, but the author himself took the failure very hard: he bought up all unsold copies of the book in stores and burned them. Until the end of his life, the writer did not admit to anyone that Alov was his pseudonym.

On the night of February 12, 1852, an event occurred, the circumstances of which are still a mystery to biographers. Nikolai Gogol prayed until three o'clock, after which he took a briefcase, removed several papers from it, and ordered the rest to be thrown into the fire. Crossing himself, he returned to bed and wept uncontrollably. It is believed that on that night he burned the second volume of Dead Souls. However, later the manuscript of the second volume was found among his books. And what was burned in the fireplace is still unclear.

Gogol is a homosexual?

The ascetic lifestyle that Gogol led and the writer's excessive religiosity gave rise to many fables. Contemporaries of the writer were surprised and frightened by such behavior. Of the things he had with him only a couple of removable underwear and kept it all in one suitcase ... Rather unsociable, he rarely allowed himself the company of unfamiliar women, and lived a virgin all his life. Such isolation has given rise to a common myth about the writer's homosexual inclinations. A similar assumption was put forward by the American Slavist, historian of Russian literature, Professor Semyon Karlinsky, who stated in his work “The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol” about the “oppressed homosexuality” of the writer, suggesting “suppression of emotional attraction to members of the same sex” and “aversion to physical or emotional contact with women”.

According to the literary critic I.P. Zolotussky, Gogol was not indifferent to women, including A.M. Villegorskaya, to whom he made an offer in 1840, but was refused. Vladimir Nabokov also objected to the representatives of the psychoanalytic method. In his essay "Nikolai Gogol" he wrote: "A heightened sense of the nose eventually resulted in the story 'The Nose' - truly a hymn to this organ. A Freudian could argue that in the world of Gogol turned inside out, human beings are upside down and therefore another organ obviously plays the role of the nose, and vice versa, but “it’s better to completely forget about any Freudian nonsense” and many others. others

Was Gogol buried alive?

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol died on February 21, 1852. And on February 24, 1852, he was interred in the cemetery near the Danilov Monastery. According to the will, no monument was erected to him - Golgotha towered over the grave. But 79 years later, the ashes of the writer were removed from the grave: the Danilov Monastery was transformed by the Soviet government into a colony for juvenile delinquents, and the necropolis was subject to liquidation. Only a few graves were decided to be transferred to the old cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. Among these “lucky ones”, along with Yazykov, Aksakovs and Khomyakovs, was Gogol ... The whole color of the Soviet intelligentsia was present at the reburial. Among them was the writer V. Lidin. It is to him that Gogol owes the emergence of numerous legends about himself.

One of the myths concerned the writer's lethargic sleep. According to Lidin, when the coffin was taken out of the ground and opened, those present were bewildered. In the coffin lay a skeleton with a skull turned to one side. No one has found an explanation for this. I recalled the stories that Gogol was afraid of being buried alive in a state of lethargic sleep and seven years before his death he bequeathed: “My body should not be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating. What they saw shocked those present. Did Gogol really have to endure the horror of such a death?

It is worth noting that in the future this story was subject to criticism. The sculptor N. Ramazanov, who took off Gogol's death mask, recalled: "I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the coffin was prepared ... finally, the incessantly arriving crowd of people who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased forced me and my old man, who pointed out traces of destruction, to hurry ... "There was also an explanation for the rotation of the skull: the side boards of the coffin were the first to rot, the lid falls under the weight of the soil, crushes on the dead man's head, and it turns on its side on the so-called "Atlantean" vertebra.

Was there a skull?

However, Lidin's violent fantasy was not limited to this episode. A more terrible story followed - it turns out that when the coffin was opened, the skeleton did not have a skull at all. Where could he go? This new invention of Lidin gave rise to new hypotheses. They remembered that in 1908, when a heavy stone was installed on the grave, a brick crypt had to be erected over the coffin to strengthen the foundation. It was suggested that it was then that the writer's skull could have been stolen. It was suggested that it was stolen at the request of a Russian theater fanatic, merchant Alexei Alexandrovich Bakhrushin. It was rumored that he already had the skull of the great Russian actor Shchepkin ...

Gogol's head and ghost train

It is said that Gogol's head was adorned with Bakhrushin's silver laurel crown and placed in a glazed rosewood case lined with black morocco on the inside. According to the same legend, the great-nephew of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol - Yanovsky, a lieutenant of the Russian imperial fleet, having learned about this, threatened Bakhrushin and took his head off. Allegedly, the young officer wanted to take the skull to Italy (to the country that Gogol considered his second homeland), but he could not complete this mission himself and entrusted it to one Italian captain. So the head of the writer ended up in Italy. But this is not the end of this incredible story. The captain's younger brother, a student at the University of Rome, went with a company of friends on a pleasure railway trip; deciding to play a prank on his friends by opening the skull box in the Channel Tunnel. They say that at the moment when the lid was opened, the train disappeared ... The legend says that the train - the ghost did not disappear forever. Allegedly, he is sometimes seen somewhere in Italy ... then in Zaporozhye ...

Today is the birthday of our great countryman Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

« His life is such a great, formidable poem, the meaning of which will remain unsolved for a long time.". I. Aksakov

Gogol - postal
postcard from the beginning of the 20th century

In most cases, our contemporaries, as well as the contemporaries of the writer himself, Nikolai Gogol, are and were presented as a type of writer - a satirist, an exposer of social vices and a great humorist. He is completely unknown as a mystic, as a religious thinker and publicist, and even (!) Author of prayers. Of all the spiritual prose of the reader, they know (and only a few) only "Selected passages from correspondence with friends." For the first time, D. Merezhkovsky spoke powerfully about Gogol's spirituality by publishing the book “Gogol and the Devil. Research ”(although the book was published under other names). In the last century, K. Mochulsky, V. Zolotussky and Protopresbyter Vasily Zenkovetsky addressed the topic of Gogol's spirituality. And, finally, already today, V. Voropaev covered this topic.

Gogol was indeed a mysterious man. There are too many incomprehensible and inexplicable acts around his name, connected primarily with his death and the burning of the second volume of Dead Souls.

Often in the literature about Gogol, the opinion is repeated or tacitly admitted that his vocation was exclusively literary, that, having “hit into mysticism”, he ruined his talent and “minds other than his own business”, that the whole spiritual path of the writer was one regrettable misunderstanding. But Gogol himself, in a letter to his mother, pointed out: “Try to see me better as a Christian and a person than a writer,” since he was not only a great artist, he was also a moral teacher, a Christian ascetic, and a mystic.

Start

Gogol came from an old Little Russian family, in which intense religiosity (great-grandfather was a priest, grandfather graduated from the Kyiv Theological Academy, father - Poltava Seminary) was combined with hereditary mysticism. Gogol's mother, Marya Ivanovna, was a pious and even superstitious woman. Her happy family life started with a mystical vision. “They married me off at the age of fourteen, for my good husband, who lives seven miles from my parents. The Queen of Heaven pointed me out to him, appearing to him in a dream. Before her death, if possible, on foot, she visited the holy places in Akhtyrka, Lubny, Kyiv. And after the death of two first-born babies, she begged her “Nikosha” from the image of Nikolai Dikansky.

All her life she lived in inexplicable, tormenting anxieties, which were partly inherited by Nikolai, who was also sometimes cheerful and cheerful, sometimes “lifeless”, as if frightened from childhood for life.

K. Mochulsky writes: "Faith in God had to come to him in a different way - not from love, but from fear." Gogol himself confessed this to his mother: “Once, I vividly, as now, remember this incident - I asked you to tell me about the Last Judgment, and you told me, as a child, so well, so understandably, so touchingly about the blessings that await people for a virtuous life, and so strikingly, so terribly described the eternal torments of sinners that it shocked and awakened all sensitivity in me, it inspired and subsequently produced in me the highest thoughts. The terrible picture painted by the morbid imagination of the mystically gifted mother "shook" Gogol. He remained an impressionable, unbalanced child.

Gogol describes the mystical experience of childhood with extraordinary force in “Old World Landowners”: “You, no doubt, have ever heard a voice calling you by name, which common people explain by the fact that the soul yearns for a person and calls him, and after which death immediately follows. I confess that I have always been afraid of this mysterious call.

Dreaming and throwing

As you know, Nikolai Gogol spent 7 most romantic years in his life at the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences. It was here that he took up theology seriously.

Gogol's comrades often teased the withdrawn, arrogant and slovenly young man, but respected him. A. S. Danilevsky, Gogol’s closest lyceum friend, wrote: “The comrades loved him, but they called him the “mysterious dwarf.” They laughed at him a lot, made fun of him. Gogol, in turn, was friends with a small circle, calling everyone else "existents" and treating them with disdain. He fancied himself a romantic, like Childe Harold, and his romanticism craved self-affirmation. But this desire was driven by fear.

The fear of death, in the young Gogol, takes the form of fear of being buried alive, of a "dead" life in a "black apartment of uncertainty in the world." “How hard it is to be buried together with the creatures of low obscurity in the silence of the dead,” he wrote to Comrade Vysotsky in 1827. But there are still rumors that Gogol was buried alive...

He believed in his own "special and mysterious" calling, but the ministry was vague to him. He now wants to become a judge, because “here only he will be truly useful to mankind,” then he is going to go to America, and before going to St. Petersburg, he boasted to his uncle that: “You still do not know all my virtues. I know some crafts: a good tailor, I paint the walls with alfresco painting pretty well, I work in the kitchen and I already understand a lot of things from the art of cooking. Although, if he drew a little, he was neither a cook nor a tailor. The tendency to exaggeration, the lack of a sense of reality were a feature of his psyche.

"Psycho" Gogol on various occasions. When he published his poem “Hanz Kühelgarten” with his last money, criticism severely “riden” the book, and Gogol, according to P. Kulish, “rushed with his faithful servant Yakim through bookstores, took away copies from booksellers, rented a hotel room and burned everything to the last.” That is, Gogol's experiments with "burning" appeared in his youth...

"Tails of Mind"

When the fugitive “sobered up by Europe” returns to St. Petersburg, he meets writers and begins to actively write and publish his super-famous “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”. But later, turning to his friend A. Smirnova, Gogol remarks that one should not judge him by the works of this period, because he is not yet an established writer, and in his books “there are some tails of the state of mind of my then, but without my own recognition, no one will notice or see them.” What are these "tails"?

In "Evenings" Nikolai Gogol combined two literary traditions - the Ukrainian folk tale with its primordial dualism, the struggle of God and the devil, and the Germanic romantic demonology with witches and devils. The gloominess in the stories is growing - if in The Lost Letter or The Night Before Christmas the devilry is funny, then in The Terrible Revenge or Viy laughter gives way to horror - it’s not in vain that the film based on Gogol with Kuravlev is considered the first Soviet horror film and even survived a remake. The gloomy Basavryuk, sorcerers, the dead emerging from the graves on the banks of the Dnieper, and other evil spirits appear in the book.

But the book was received lively and cheerfully. As Pushkin wrote: "Everyone rejoiced at this lively description of a singing and dancing tribe ... this cheerfulness, simple-hearted and crafty at the same time." However, based on Gogol's "Author's Confession", the writer himself was not laughing: "I found attacks of melancholy inexplicable to me. To amuse myself, I invented for myself all the funny things that I could think of.

In his works, indeed, with an excess of death and hopelessness. In "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" Basavryuk wins; in Terrible Revenge, everyone who has touched the evil force is condemned to death - Danilo, Katerina, her little son. The "quarrel" between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich ends in the death of the heroes. Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna die in The Old World Landowners, Taras Bulba and both of his sons perish; the artist Chertkov goes mad and dies in Portrait, the artist Piskarev goes mad and cuts his throat in Nevsky Prospekt, the official Poprishchin goes mad in Notes of a Madman...

After "Evenings" Gogol finds a strange inactivity, apathy, "confusion of thoughts", which he tried to stir up by going into the study of history. Death was a certain special theme of his life and his work.

Quest and Faith

After the release of Volume 1 of Dead Souls, Gogol left for Europe, which caused persistent rumors about Gogol's conversion to Catholicism, when he became seriously carried away by this Christian trend and even made friends with Cardinal Mezzofanti, with Abbot Lanchi, through the famous Zinaida Volkonskaya, who converted to Catholicism. But this turned out to be gossip - he was a deeply Orthodox person.

The well-known Little Russian rich man and philanthropist Grigory Galagan recalled: “Gogol seemed to me even then very pious. Once all the Russians gathered in the Russian church for a vigil. I saw that Gogol also entered, but then I lost sight of him and thought that he had left. A little later, I went out into the hall ... and there, in the semi-darkness, I noticed Gogol, in the corner behind a chair on his knees and with bowed head.

At this time, Nikolai Vasilievich begins systematic reading of spiritual literature. In the "Author's Confession" he remarks: "I left for a while everything modern, I paid attention to the recognition of those eternal laws by which man and mankind in general move." He now writes more on liturgical and ecclesiastical topics. Tries to write prayers.

By 1845 (according to the testimony of Marfa Sabinina) Gogol was even going to go to obedience to a monastery. “There is no higher rank than a monastic one, and may God grant us someday to put on a simple robe of a monk, so desired by my soul, about which even the thought of me is a joy. But this cannot be done without the call of God, ”wrote Nikolai Vasilyevich. Gogol traveled several times to Optina Pustyn and conversed with the holy fathers.

As it turned out, back in 1842, Gogol received the blessing of Bishop Innokenty of Kharkov for a trip to Jerusalem. But Nikolai Vasilyevich got there only in February 1848. He remembered his night at the Holy Sepulcher for the rest of his life. “I don’t remember if I prayed... It seemed to me that the Liturgy rushed by so quickly that the most winged prayers would not be able to keep up with it...”

Gogol and death

After that, according to testimonies, he felt that he was ill with the very disease from which his father had died, "fear of death came over him." Gogol prophetically depicted his death in The Old World Landowners and died for the same reason that Afanasy Ivanovich died. “He completely submitted to his spiritual conviction that Pulcheria Ivanovna was calling him: he submitted with the will of an obedient child, dried up, coughed, melted like a candle, and, finally, died out like she did, when there was nothing left that could support her poor flame.” This is the exact diagnosis of the author's own illness: Gogol died because he was called, he also "submitted" and also "melted like a candle."

Believing in the inevitability of death, Gogol prepared for it - he fasted, took communion and prayed for a long time, practically without sleep. One day, exhausted, he fell asleep on the couch, but suddenly, waking up, he sent for the priest, asking him to take communion and unction again, since he saw himself dead, heard some voices, and now considers himself dying.

On the night of February 12, Gogol burns the final copy of the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. There is a mystery in this event that will forever remain a mystery. There are many versions and memories of this and they are often contradictory. However, it is obvious that Gogol was worried about what he had done, because he said that he wanted to give the papers to friends. The next day, Gogol said to A.P. Tolstoy: “Imagine how strong the evil spirit is! I wanted to burn the papers that had already been determined for a long time, but I burned the chapters of Dead Souls, which I wanted to leave for friends as a keepsake after my death.

The erroneous version is also supported by the fact that for some reason Gogol did not throw the entire second part into the fire, "forgetting" the manuscript with the first four and one of the last chapters of the poem in the closet. And after 9 days he died, saying in full consciousness: "How sweet it is to die ...".

Aksakov said about Gogol: “We think that the meaning of Gogol's life will never be unraveled, he lies in that area on the threshold of which all human conjectures languish. But what a mournful, what a terrible path! What continuous, varied and sophisticated suffering bought his greatness! .. Gogol's soul, extremely lonely and unhappy; a pathetic and prophetic soul, a soul that endured inhuman trials and came to Christ.”

Gogol ended his main spiritual book, Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, with the chapter Bright Sunday, where he reminds the reader of eternal life. This year, the first after his 200th birthday, his birthday fell on Holy Week, which precedes Bright Sunday, on which we must also remember Gogol - our great, Orthodox fellow countryman!

Viktor SHESTAKOV, "Poltava region"

Probably, there is no more mysterious and mystical writer than Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Rereading his biography, many ask questions. Why Gogol never married? Why has he never had his own house? Why did he burn the second volume of Dead Souls? And, of course, the biggest mystery is the mystery of his illness and death.

Gogol's life is sheer torture, the most terrible part of which, proceeding on a mystical plane, is beyond our sight. A person who was born with a sense of cosmic horror, who saw quite realistically the intervention of demonic forces in a person’s life, who fought the devil to the last breath, this same person “burned out” with a passionate thirst for perfection and an indefatigable longing for God.

The great Ukrainian and Russian writer, Gogol, like no one else, had a sense of magic, conveying in his work the actions of dark, evil magical powers. But Gogol's mysticism is inherent not only in his works, but also in his life, starting from the moment of birth.

The story of the marriage of his parents, father Vasily Gogol, to mother Maria Kosyarovskaya was also covered with mysticism. As a boy, Vasily Gogol went with his mother on a pilgrimage to the Kharkov province, where there was a wonderful image of the Mother of God. Having stayed overnight, he saw in a dream this temple and the heavenly queen, who predicted his fate: “You will be obsessed with many diseases (and it was so, he suffered from many diseases), but everything will pass, you will recover, get married and here is your wife.” Having uttered these words, she raised her hand, and he saw at her feet a small child sitting on the floor, whose features were engraved in his memory. Soon, Vasily, while visiting a nearby town, saw a seven-month-old girl in the nanny's arms, which resembled the features of a girl from a dream. 13 years later, he again had a dream in which the gates opened in the same temple, and a girl of extraordinary beauty came out and, pointing to the left, said: “Here is your bride!”. He saw a girl in a white dress with the same features. After a short time, Vasily Gogol got married to thirteen-year-old Maria Kosyarovskaya.

Some time after the marriage, the son Nikolai appeared in the family, named after St. Nicholas of Myra, before miraculous icon whom Maria Ivanovna Gogol made a vow. Nicholas grew up in a God-fearing religious family, and his mother constantly took him to church from an early age. On the other hand, he was surrounded by Ukrainian culture, rich in legends, beliefs about otherworldly demonic forces. In addition, he grew up as a very sickly boy, and right up to the gymnasium he often had incomprehensible nervous attacks.

At the end of the gymnasium, Nikolai Gogol, having moved to St. Petersburg, begins his work with mystical stories, which brought him great popularity. According to his confession, he took all the plots from folk art. His characters - Viy, the Devil, the Witch - are so organic in his works, as if they really existed, Gogol's mysticism literally permeates them.

Nevertheless, Gogol considered Dead Souls to be the main book of his life. He looked at this work as something that lay outside his power, where he had to reveal the secrets bequeathed to him. “When I write, my eyes open with an unnatural clarity. And if I read what I have written as yet unfinished to anyone, the clarity leaves my eyes. I have experienced this many times. I am sure that when I have done my service and finished what I am called to do, I will die. And if I let out the unripe into the world or share the small things that I do, then I will die before I fulfill what I was called into the world for, ”he told his friends.

It is believed that it was the second volume of Dead Souls that he burned that night. However, later the manuscript of the second volume was found among his books. And what was burned in the fireplace is still unclear.

After that night, Gogol went deeper into his own fears. He suffered from taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive. This fear was so strong that the writer repeatedly gave written instructions to bury him only when there were clear signs of cadaveric decomposition.

N. V. Gogol died on February 21, 1852 in Moscow, he was buried at the St. Danilov Monastery. In 1931, after the closure of the monastery and the cemetery, the remains of Nikolai Gogol were transferred to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. It was then that it was discovered that a skull had been stolen from the deceased. According to many witnesses, the skeleton of the deceased was turned upside down, so there is reason to believe that Nikolai Vasilyevich's fears of being buried alive were not in vain.