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Nikolai Gogol Watercolor by Alexander Ivanov (Rome, 1841)
The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol
Simon Karlinsky
HARV ARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
1976
Copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Karlinsky, Simon. The sexual labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Gogol; NikolaI Vasil'evich, 1809-1852-Relationship with men. I. Title. PG3335.K34 891.7'8'309 [BJ 76-16486 ISBN 0-674-80281-0
Contents
Introductory Note
vu
THE SEXUAL LABYRINTH OF NIKOLAI GOGOL 1 Notes
297
Annotated Mini-Bibliography of Gogol in English 317 Index
325
Illustrations
Frontispiece
Nikolai Gogol. Watercolor by Alexander Ivanov
(Rome, 1841). Alexander Ivanov: Study for the figure of the crouching slave in "Christ's Appearance before the People," which is a portrait of Gogol. 197 Alexander Ivanov: Two studies for "Christ's Appearance before the People." The figure on the left has Gogol's head. 198 Alexander Ivanov: Head of a young man, assumed to be a portrait of losif Vielhorsky. 199 Nikolai Yazykov in Hanau in 1841. Lithograph by Franz von Hanfstaengl, after a painting by Peter von Cornelius. 212
Introductory Note
This book is neither a biography of Gogol nor an exhaustive study of his writings. At least seven such works already exist in English (see the Annotated Mini-Bibliography) and there would not have been much point in adding one more critical biography to the list. Instead, this is an examination of a particular neglected area in Gogol's life and work-his sexuality and its manifestations in his literary art. Apart from some digressions on matters of style, subject matter, and form, all of which I believe to be pertinent to my subject, I have tried to limit the book's purview to this one theme, an admittedly one-sided approach. But other aspects of Gogol have been extensively explored; the interested reader can easily fill out the rest of the picture from the studies cited in the text and notes and recommended in the bibliography. A detailed account of changing attitudes toward Gogol in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet Union was included in order to explain to the reader why so many generations of Russian critics have failed to notice what I see as the source and the cause of Gogol's personal and literary tragedy. In a recent memoir about the great twentieth-century poet Anna Akhmatova, her friend Lydia Chukovskaya tells us that Akhmatova considered Gogol the most puzzling person who ever lived: "No one can imagine what Gogol was really like. Everything about him is incomprehensible from beginning to end. The individual features refuse to add up to anything." It is the thesis of the present study that an examination of Gogol's homosexual orientation within the context of his biography and writings may provide the missing key to the riddle of his personality. It should be emphasized that, as applied to Gogol in this book, the term "homosexuality" refers to his overpowering emotional attraction to members of his own sex and aversion to physical or emotional contact with women, rather than to any physical sexuality. Much of the evidence for his homosexual
viii
Introductory Note
orientation is circumstantial, and the case for it depends on a multitude of points which may seem less convincing when taken out of their context in the book, but which I believe to be cumulatively valid when considered in their totality. As the text and notes make clear, the subject of Gogol's homosexuali