The Testament chapter from the Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends by N. V. Gogol: Perspective of contemporary critics

Abstract

The paper discusses critical responses to the chapter Testament from N. V. Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. The genre of Testament caused misunderstanding among the majority of critics contemporary to Gogol’s lifetime and became one of the reasons for the rejection of the book as a whole. On the one hand, the structure of the chapter, its thematic range, lexical and stylistic elements bore resemblance to real testaments. On the other hand, Gogol’s no less obvious deviations from the then legal form and practice encouraged the readers to realize the illusion of the chapter’s documentary nature and testified to the literary character of the text. In fact, Gogol created a hybrid form in which the traditional orientation of a testament towards the ‘deathbed’, and, therefore, sacred language found its way into the aesthetic sphere, namely, the relationship between the author and the reader. The author’s self-presentation in Selected Passages... is an attempt to combine hardly compatible aspects. First, it is the orientation of the sacred language towards the highest objectivity and the statement about the underdevelopment of spiritual education. This is indicative of the vulnerability and imperfection of the author’s personality. Second, it is the use of aesthetic potential of literary forms and efforts to overcome their semantic ambiguity to achieve simplicity and artlessness of style. Thus, Testament testifies to Gogol’s search for a new aesthetics of language and introduces new forms of author’s interaction with the reader.