"Art Is a Reconciliation with Life": Gogolian Paradox and Aesthetic Credo

Abstract

L his discussion of Tolstoy and poetics of didactic Gary Saul Morson notes that from certain theoretical perspectives, absolute gulf separates from reality and text from reader.'1 For Morson, Russian literature as whole, poised between metafiction and didactic fiction, is the literature of frame-breaking. It is, in fact, not so much literature as counter-literature, governed by an anti-aesthetic.2 Consistent with this assessment, Nikolai Gogol is one of many writers who refuse to acknowledge strict divisions between and life, aesthetics and ethics, and he is particularly persistent in stressing permeability of any perceived boundaries between these spheres. In wake of disappointing reception of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol wrote to Vasilii Zhukovskii on January 10, 1848 to reaffirm primacy of in his life. In grappling with question as to what constitutes essence of art, he suggested that a genuine creation of contains within itself something soothing and conciliatory. A work lacking this quality may represent an artist's noble, impassioned impulse and may even be a remarkable phenomenon, but it cannot be called work of art. Gogol concludes that art is reconciliation with life.3 The intent of this article is to examine intriguing relationship that Gogol posits between and life. Gogol's formula regarding reconciling influence of with life has received relatively little comment in critical literature, and reasons are manifold.4 In Vladimir Nabokov's fairly representative critique of this functional approach to art, for