Nikolay Gogol's Book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with His Friends" as a Religious Space for Social Communication

Abstract

The article investigates the religious position of Nikolai Gogol as it is expressed in Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends. The author attempts to answer the question of why the society did not accept Gogol’s preaching tone at the time of the publication, while half a century later, it saw Gogol as a harbinger of the new religious consciousness and, in particular, of the acute attention to the inner self. The author reconstructs the public discussions and narratives circulating around Gogol’s position at the time and formulates the problem of the religious individualism as part of the laic Christian discourse. The author argues that the tension between Gogol and his reader is a clash of the idea of the protected value of the inner religious space and Gogol’s ‘project’ of the centralisation of the religious life. The society perceived this clash as Gogol’s individualistic claim. The society failed to notice Gogol’s longing for the religious transfiguration of life beyond his stylistic moralism and archaic form of the text. The author concludes that the educated society denied the Other’s right to religious life as a result of its partially developed individualism. Paradoxically, Gogol, despite his justifying serfdom, was a proponent of the religious individualism and the idea of the intrinsic value of the human being within a wider space of the Christian culture.