Gogol's Ghosts On the History of Nikolai Gogol in Russian Literary Criticism (1891--1944)

"Gogol's Ghosts" reexamines a radical change in perceptions of the writer Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) that occurs in Russian literary criticism during the Modernist period. For much of the nineteenth century the conventional wisdom considered Gogol the founder of Russian realism, but with the fin de siecle this consensus began to disintegrate, beginning with the writings of Vasilii Rozanov, who vehemently refused to accept Gogol as a realist, and later thanks to the efforts of critics associated with Symbolism and Formalism to make Gogol their own. Robert Maguire has described the result of these revisions in terms of a shift in reference: the "source of Gogol's art" was relocated from the "external world" to an "internal world," that is, from an objective reality to a subjective state of the soul. Instead of depicting the world as it is, as the Symbolist Valerii Briusov argued, Gogol populated it with the specters of his imagination.;With few exceptions, this understanding of the shift in criticism determined the course of twentieth-century Gogol scholarship, and it continues to exert a powerful influence in our own. When we read Gogol today, more often than not we do so in search of an aesthetic consciousness as it emerges and develops in Gogol's work. We attempt to read his "specters.".;However, my dissertation argues that maintaining this narrative of the turn in Gogol criticism and the mode of reading it has inspired requires forgetting other aspects of the modernist critical legacy. Above all it requires ignoring the sheer negativity of Rozanov's initial critique: while Rozanov, anticipating his successors, at first attempts to read Gogol's works as psychobiography, he gradually fails to recognize anything in them but an inhuman, Medusa-like excess of writing. The question becomes not one of this or that referent, but of reference as such. My dissertation aims to return this question to Gogol's critical history, through close readings of criticism by Rozanov, Briusov, Annenskii, Eikhenbaum, Bakhtin, and Nabokov, among others, and to bring it to bear on the reading of Gogol's works, such as "Overcoat," "Portrait," and Dead Souls.