Unfortunately, Gogol's Ukraine is over. I don't know about Russia — "Dead Souls" is not finished by the author, and therefore his prophecy about the Russian fate remained unsaid. But it seems that it is over with Ukraine.

Some patriots claimed in excessive zeal that Ukraine was a fake state in general, that it was created by Lenin and Stalin, cut from pieces and never was united at all, and therefore God himself ordered it to be pulled apart to Novorossiya and conditional Galicia, which is not a pity to leave Poland. Similar thoughts were expressed by the main Russian geopolitician. The problem is that all these people, including the chief geopolitician, have no idea how nations are created at all. They sincerely believe that a nation, as a territory, can be sewn from pieces, bought with American or Russian money, marked with borders on a map — whereas a nation is an intellectual product, the result of spiritual, cultural, religious effort. The nation is not made up by politicians, but is invented by writers, personified by artists, framed by artists; Ukraine was created not by Lenin and Stalin, not by Bandera and Mazepa, but by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. National literature is what a country and its people want to know about themselves, what they like (not necessarily flattering). For example: Germany was formed by Schiller and Goethe (later this image was most noticeably corrected by Wagner and Nietzsche, and he could have died after fascism and its defeat, but, fortunately for Germany, it had Thomas Mann, who in Faustus threw all his strength to separate the fascist from the German, returned to the fatal Faustian fork and showed that it is possible to go in the other direction; all this is a topic for a long separate conversation). England was written — at the beginning of the modernist era, when modern European nations were being formed — by Dickens and a galaxy of his brilliant students: Kipling, Stevenson, Chesterton, Wilde (Wilde too, although how French he is in England!), Shaw and Galsworthy. The same Gogol tried to invent Russia — and broke under this burden; later Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin continued his work. Dostoevsky was still busy with something else — he invented an image of the Russian soul, not so much an export as a flattering one for internal use, an image of a hysterical, criminal, self—intoxicated, obsessed with mania, uneducated, ignoble - and moreover terribly self-respecting, because such a soul is supposedly closer to God. Why all of a sudden? From the fact that a harlot followed Christ most stubbornly, and a robber sympathized with him on the cross? But the vast majority of the apostles, except for the treasurer, were still decent people.

Gogol created the image of Ukraine, which ends today for three reasons — because all three of its foundations are cut today. Russian Russians, that is, a country adjacent to Russia, vitally close to it, recognizing the power of the Russian tsars over itself and closely connected with Russian culture, not to mention the common faith. It is enough to recall "The Night before Christmas".

But the fact that Ukraine has been a historical ally of Russia for at least the last two hundred years, today it is prescribed to forget: between two peoples — or two parts of a single people, as many believe — a wedge has been driven for a long time, if not forever. And such a division is predicted by many, most clearly by Aksenov: the imperial nation has the most vicious, most cursed enemy — its part, which wished to be free. Ukraine could become a Mecca for those Russians who do not consider themselves imperials, but in its current state it is hardly capable of this: the bitterness there is now such that no Russian, whether he is a supporter of a free Ukraine three times, will not be perceived as a friend there. At the first disagreement, at the first attempt to criticize the Ukrainian order, he will hear in response: he was a slave, he remained a slave. Ukraine is not to blame for this — or is no more to blame than Russia — but there will be no unity for a long time now. And this is closely related to the second reason why the Gogol matrix no longer works: the nation lives in new circumstances, it does not want to be absorbed by Russia, but it also does not want to dissolve into the West. She would have to reinvent herself. Gogol's Ukraine was the southwestern, best, most fertile part of Russia — the new Ukraine is forced to maneuver between new mythologies, look for another identity, get used to the forced buffer, frontiersman, border role. She was an outpost of Russia in Europe, now she wanted to be an outpost of Europe on the borders of Russia — and this is a completely different matter. It will have to actualize its completely different features — namely European ones, and it is difficult to cope with this in today's Ukraine, since the tradition is different, and the Soviet experience will not be so easily forgotten, and you will not switch to the Latin alphabet. Of course, Pan Danilo Burulbash, as Gogol wrote him in "Terrible Revenge", is quite a traditional European knight, and the "Terrible Revenge" itself is a legend rather German, Gogolian, than Ukrainian; but the symbol of the Ukrainian was not Danilo Burulbash, but Taras Bulba, who is opposed to Europe in everything. It's scary to imagine a politically correct Bulba, who sincerely patronizes the Jew Yankel, provides humanitarian aid to a starving Polish woman, and says to Andriy: well, my son... Nothing, nothing... there is no bond holier than family ties! Ukraine, which Gogol invented as wild and ardent, will now have to dress up as a European woman, and the image of a broad, brusque and beautiful Oksana is gradually being replaced in the Ukrainian consciousness by the image of a cultured, nervous, patriotic, but cosmopolitan Lesya Ukrainka. However, Ukrainians have never had that meekness, submissiveness, blind devotion to her husband that patriots attribute — and prescribe — to the ideal Russian woman; rather, they are similar to Sholokhov's Cossacks, so it will be easiest for them to make this evolution.

The third feature of the new Ukrainian world, the third difference between it and the Gogol matrix, is that this new world is already an adult, whereas the Gogol world is largely children's, folklore, fairy-tale. You can write as much as you like about the disgusting Gogol character, Gogol's anger, even Gogol's madness — we will return to this topic later to debunk the myth — but it is necessary to judge the artist first of all by his creations, and Gogol's creations give out exactly the character that he created and described: light. Of course, the Gogol type — like the beloved protagonist Rudy (Red) Panko or the narrator in Mirgorod — is characterized by fits of melancholy, hypochondria, even melancholy — "It's boring in this world, gentlemen!" — but in general, Gogol and most of his heroes are kind, generous, cheerful, full-blooded, mentally healthy, patriotic, mocking, outgoing, and Ukraine, created by Gogol, is a country of eternal celebration, where the night scum, it seems, exists only to make it more interesting; a country where devils are tamed, and mermaids are so seductive that they cause, first of all, not fear, but a slight poetic longing for unattainable perfections. Gogol molded his Ukraine from German romance, from Eastern European legends, from folklore - and it came to life, and imitated Gogol's prose always, even in tragic, furious (after all, never malicious) Shevchenko poetry. The present Ukraine will not be kind for a long time and at least calm: its romantic period is over. Who will now create a new Ukrainian nation? It's not the presidents who form it! The very melody of the singing Ukrainian speech, the very sounds of the Ukrainian night will change after the war. Even Russian folklore, which was stable, changed irreversibly after the civil war — what can we say about Ukraine, which is smaller, more mobile, and more vulnerable! Funny and harmless mutual banter — lazy Ukrainians, angry Muscovites — all in the past. Ukrainian culture faces a titanic task — to invent a new Ukraine. The Russian culture faces a much larger task: to think of Russia, which Gogol began to build, built the St. Petersburg myth in "Arabesques" for two hundred years ahead — but, bogged down in the Russian rainy space, he did not finish the main thing.

Russian secular culture differs from Western culture primarily in that it has existed for only three centuries — and in one nineteenth century it has traveled a path that took at least seven centuries for Europe. Russian Russian of the XIX century — Krylov and Karamzin, at the end — Blok; when Pushkin's elder friend Vyazemsky died, Lenin was eight years old; Russian dramaturgy of this century began with "Sneak" (1798), and ended with "Cherry Orchard" (1903). Classicism — sentimentalism — Romanticism — realism — modernism: all this fit, read, into one human life. At such a speed and late start, it is quite natural to borrow a lot from the West — which Russia looks at with an eternal ambivalent combination of adoration and ridicule, delight and envy; Russian literature is its own, a firm hand in someone else's glove, continuous borrowing and ridiculing of other people's forms. Pushkin turned the pathos of Byron's Don Juan inside out, preserving its form; Tolstoy saturated the form of Hugo's free journalistic novel with new content; Dostoevsky borrowed the detective stories of Dickens — and partly the techniques of a police novel-feuilleton — but in his detectives they are not looking for a criminal, but for God. Gogol competed with Homer, because every nation begins with war and wandering; for Ukraine, "Taras Bulba" became such a combination of "Iliad" and "Odyssey". Russia needed its own "Odyssey" — and while Zhukovsky was translating Homer's poem about the wanderings of the cunning man, Gogol, unable to refrain from friendly mockery, wrote his own shadowy "Odyssey", which he also called a poem. For Ukrainian culture, this is not the first experience of translating ancient plots into domestic vernacular realities: the whole of reading Russia had Kotlyarevsky's "Aeneid" in memory. Gogol decided to transfer the Odyssey to Russian soil. Here you have the sirens luring the wanderer — Manilov, and Polyphemus-Sobakevich, and Circe-A Box with an obsessive theme of swinishness, and Scylla-Plyushkin, an all-consuming tear in humanity, and Aeolus-Nozdryov, with one exhalation from his nostrils, carrying Odyssey—Chichikov away from the goal; but here's the thing - Chichikov has No Ithaca! He has nowhere to return to, and therefore his Odyssey does not end with anything.

Conversations about Gogol's madness (especially well-known, of course, is the book by Rostov psychiatrist V. F. Chizh about Gogol's dementia) have no basis, since we do not observe any degradation in his work. The second volume of "Dead Souls" is no worse than the first, there is no more nonsense in "Selected Places" than in early correspondence combining self-deprecation with fantastic conceit; after all, Gogol began burning his writings long before 1852, so we do not observe anything fundamentally new in his behavior. Even mania religiosa in his case is not so sharply expressed — does European culture know such religious insanity! — and in any case, his correspondence with the fatal fr. Matvey did not affect his creative abilities in any way. The thing is different — Gogol set himself the titanic task of writing all Russian literature, as he had written all Ukrainian literature before; and he almost managed it — but he suffocated like a fish in the sand. It is impossible to describe reality while it is not there. Gogol was able, standing on tiptoe, to see new types, to look beyond the edge of a dead time, a frozen epoch in which not such nervous people as him were suffocating — it was necessary to have Nekrasov's cynicism, Shchedrin's self—irony to endure it; he was able to see Kostanjoglo - the future Levin, and Ulinka — the future Turgenev girl and Tentetnikov — the future Oblomov, whose laziness is more complicated than Manilov's laziness, and in a sense nobler, because there is rather inaction in it, a kind of Russian zen. But he could not invent the life, environment, and sphere of activity of these "new people"; one can only imagine what a grandiose pamphlet the anti—nihilistic part of the "Dead Souls" would turn out to be - the people of the thirties and forties rarely loved nihilists, because they could not forgive their own abused youth, in which new people were certainly not to blame; the only exception was Turgenev. But Gogol did not live — and did not finish "Dead Souls"; and how could he finish them? All Ukrainian heroes have a place to return to — in Ukraine, the feeling of home is acute, like the "Old—world Landlords"; but the whole of Russia is homeless, one endless road, one sucking emptiness.