N.V. Gogol’s Works and Censorship

Abstract

For the first time, an analytical review of all, without exception, censorship stories of N.V. Gogol’s works is presented. An objective picture of Gogol's relationship with the censorship is being recreated. The findings of the study allow, with good reason, to judge about the interference of censors in the writer's works in a fundamentally different way, in comparison with the ideas offered by literary criticism of the previous period without solid evidence. Based on a thorough analysis, involving numerous archival sources, the common, stereotypical opinions about the extremely negative role of censorship in Gogol’s fate are being revised. The most significant negative result among all censorship interventions in Gogol's works was the activity of the censor of Westernizing views, opposed to the government, a professor at St. Petersburg University, A.V. Nikitenko. It is the numerous reductions of Nikitenko, a friend of V.G. Belinsky, in Gogol's religious and patriotic book “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” that the writer called “censorship murder”. No less significant was the intervention of the liberal censor in the texts of “Dead Souls”, “Theatrical Travel after the Presentation of a New Comedy” and other works of the writer. It is concluded that, with the exception of this “intrigue” against Gogol by the censor Nikitenko, on the whole Gogol's texts encountered relatively insignificant difficulties in censorship.

Keywords

• gogol
• biography
• creativity
• censorship
• interpretations
• author's intention
• poetics
• social ideology
• history of russia
• spiritual heritage