Portrait of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
Artist F.A.Moller
Italy, Rome
1840’s
Oil on canvas
62,0 х 49,0 cm
Acquisition: from the Museum of everyday life of 1840’s (previously in the collection of the Khomyakovs); 1930
Showcase 8
The artist made the portrait of Gogol in Rome, in a fruitful period when the writer was working on the poem “Dead Souls”, the book on Russian being. Rome and Russia were deeply connected in Gogol’s irrational consciousness. Gogol was writing a Russian poem while reading an epic of Rome.
The Eternal City encouraged Gogol to reinterpret his story of “The Government Inspector” (“Revisor”) about a swindler Khlestakov who was tricking a district town, into a large-scale cycle about a swindler Chichikov who would trick a whole region and then all Russia. In Russian literature, Chichikov was the first in the series of the characters of purchasers, entrepreneurs, capitalists who did absolutely nothing without cheating.
The first part of the poem “Dead Souls” published in 1842, was intended to be an image of underworld, the second part was to represent a purgatory, and the third – sort of paradise. Gogol started the work on the second part while writing the first volume. “Dead Souls” is a dirty court leading up to an elegant building” – that’s how author’s idea of the first part of the poem was explained by V.N.Repnina, Gogol’s great admirer who had listened to the reading of the first two chapters of the second part.
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