It is nearly impossible to discuss Nikolai Gogol and his works without mentioning religion, something with which Gogol had a tremendously fraught relationship.
Gogol’s mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a profoundly religious woman. The family went to church regularly, but she also fasted, undertook pilgrimages, and purchased a ceremonial shroud for the local church. Religious ritual was a core part of the Gogol household. However, Gogol did not readily embrace his mother’s practice and belief. He once wrote, “I looked on everything with indifferent eyes; I went to church only because I was told to go or was taken; but while I was standing there I saw nothing but the chasubles and the priest, and heard only the repulsive bellowing of the deacons. I crossed myself only because I saw everyone else crossing himself.” Scholar Vasiliĭ Vasilʹevich Gippius explains that “Gogol absorbed the religious mythology of the world around him,” “took a critical attitude toward such ritual in his youth,” and “arrived at it in his own way, and that was not so direct as might appear to be the case.”
After leaving Russia in frustration over the way The Government Inspector had been staged and received in 1836, Gogol traveled around Europe. It was in Rome where he wrote his most famous work, Dead Souls, which he intended to have a second part. Gogol also began fraternizing with more conservative religious figures while in Rome.
In 1847, Gogol published Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends, which consists of 32 discourses that promulgated the conservative church. Gogol’s admirers condemned the book, with Belinsky calling Gogol “a preacher of the knout, a defender of obscurantism and of darkest oppression.” In 1848, Gogol decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He did not find his soul put at ease, though, and wrote, “Never have I been so dissatisfied with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem, and after Jerusalem...never have my insensitivity, callosity and woodenness been so palpably evident to me.”
Gogol was notoriously unhappy with what he was devising for the second part of Dead Souls, and he could not achieve what he wanted to with the work. Scholar Yolanda Delgado explains, “He was deeply drawn to the land of the great Dante and the literary legacy of the Renaissance, and tried to create his own ‘Divine Comedy.’ Gogol was frustrated that he had only managed to recreate “Inferno” in the first part of “Dead Souls,” so he decided to write his own ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradiso’ in the second volume. He was determined that the continuation of his ‘poem’ would present characters with virtue and integrity—a moral example for his Russian audience. Up till then, Gogol’s readership had largely seen his work as outrageous comedies, apparently missing the deep pathos of the human condition that lay behind the odd humor and absurd characters.”
Falling into deeper depression, Gogol sought advice from spiritualists and became increasingly worried that, due to Dead Souls’ themes, he was headed for perdition. One of the figures whom he grew to depend upon the most was Father Matvey Konstantinovsky. Konstantinovsky saw Gogol’s novel as an abomination and urged him to enter a monastery to atone for his sins.
In February of 1852, Gogol destroyed the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls as well as other things he had been working on. This act distressed him immeasurably and he decided that the Devil had acted upon him. He took to his bed and fell into starvation and torpor; he never recovered.
