Understanding Gogol’s life and actions

Abstract

Paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, who repeatedly stated that “we are still not thinking”, it can be said that we still do not understand Gogol well. The article contains a reconstruction of the creative image of N.V. Gogol, which acts as a methodological basis for analyzing the personality of a writer or scientist. A hermeneutical analysis of the ideas in the book by Aleksey Davydov, published on the occasion of the anniversary of the great Russian writer, as well as the work “Gogol’s Disease” by the famous Russian psychiatrist and writer V.F. Chizh, which appeared at the very beginning of the twentieth century, is presented. A. Davydov’s book “The Soul of Gogol” seems to be directly aimed against the psychiatric understanding of the tragedy of our great writer. Davydov does not deny Gogol’s mental illness, but considers it secondary, derived from another deeper cause, which is of a purely social, or rather sociocultural nature. This reason is sociocultural contradictions (sociocultural split), which the writer could not overcome within himself