Nationalism of Nikolai Gogol': Betwixt and Between?1, The

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2007 by Ilnytzkyj, Oleh S

About The Government Inspector Bojanowska writes: "Gogol' laughs maliciously, or, to put it more precisely, Gogol's scathing satire is not balanced by the layer of sympathy that characterizes his portrayal of provincial Ukraine" (p. 190). The play "shows Russia as infected with the Petersburg ethos..." (p. 196). "Though the mission of Petersburg was to civilize the periphery, the comedy shows that it corrupts, rather than civilizes, the Russian heartland. The national capital is a cancer on the body of Russia" (p. 197). On die public reception of the play, she notes: "It is a testament to how intensely Russia craved a national self-image that this contemporary social satire, hardly a genre that can gratify patriotic pride, came to be viewed in terms of a national icon. In part, the author's Ukrainianness inspired a feeling of defensiveness about being portrayed in such an uncomplimentary way by an outsider, and this appears to underlie the widespread charges of slander" (pp. 197-198). "The media moguls ingeniously asserted that the comedy portrayed not a Russian but a Ukrainian or a Belorussian town" (p. 199). The responses to the play and the reaction of the audience dismayed Gogol' and Bojanowska goes into some detail to show his responses and rationalizations, as he set out to 'neutralize' "the politics of his play" (p. 207). She concludes: "His struggle with The Government Inspector is marked by persistent reinterpretations of the work's meaning in order to make it less noxious to Russian national pride" (p. 208).

The section on Dead Souls (p. 210) begins with a quotation from a letter Gogol' wrote to M. Pogodin from Geneva in 1836. There he complains about the "ugly mugs in Russia." "Now before me and around me are foreign lands," he says, "but in my heart there is only Russia [Rus'], not repulsive Russia, but a beautiful one" made of select friends and people witii "the right taste" (p. 210). This is a period when Dead Souls was anticipated as a major literary and national event. Through a portrayal of the Great Russian heartland, Gogol' was to ease his "integration in Russian metropolitan culture" (p. 211), satisfy the national needs of Russians and help relieve society's fretfulness about his own national orientation. "[A]s far as the Russians were concerned, Gogol's Ukrainian background was becoming a liability in the 1840s, all the more so since his works on Russian themes failed to conjure up the nationalistic affirmation that Russia craved" (p. 211). "Gogol's uncomplimentary literary images of Russia made it all die more imperative for him to prove his love for it..." (p. 211). "Gogol thus started a campaign aimed to convince his Russian friends and supporters of his loyalty to Russia. He painted die task of writing Dead Souls as his highest patriotic duty..." (pp. 211-212). "All the while Gogol cultivated his feeble love for Russia, or at least pretended to do so, he kept referring to his actual experience of it as a nightmare" (p. 213).