1. Donald Fanger suggests this interest in other media in his analysis of “Povest’ o torn, kak possorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem” in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 104. The quotations from Gogol’ are found in N. V. Gogol', Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1937-1952) 2: 264 and 2: 271. Henceforth all references to Gogol’ will be from this edition and indicated in the text by volume and page number.

2. Gogol’ probably worked on the essay between February and September 1834, although he fabricated a composition date of 1831 for its final publication. Gogol’ no doubt intended to convince his readers that “Skul'ptura, zhivopis', i muzyka” predated the other essays in Arabeski and could stand as a theoretical frontispiece to the collection.

3. Venevitinov's “Skul'ptura, zhivopis', i muzyka” was first printed in Severenaia lira in 1827. It is included in Venevitinov, D. V., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Academia, 1934), 127–130 Google Scholar. Gippius, V. V. mentions the borrowing from Venevitinov in Gogol, trans. Maguire, Robert A. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1981), 42–43 Google Scholar. Venevitinov, of course, himself borrowed the idea from European romantic theory.

4. Most of Russian romantic aesthetic theory derives directly from Friedrich Schelling, largely through the propogation of the German philosopher's ideas by several popular philosophy teachers in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 1820s and 1830s. The Kruzhok liubomudrov, the journal Moskovskii vestnik, and the Slavophiles in general refined Schelling's philosophy for the Russian context, seeing in it native, largely religious, concepts and proof of Russian national originality. See Wsewolod Setschkareff, Schellings Einfluss in der russischen Literature der 20er und 30er Jahre des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1939), chaps. 1 and 2. Gogol’ apparently had a Schellingian devotee as a teacher in his school in Nezhin, and himself imbibed much of romantic philosophy. In “Gogol's Definition of Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 4 (Winter 1967), 120-127, Carl Proffer discusses explicit references to romanticism in Gogol’ but finds himself unable to prove much more than Gogol “s frequent self-contradictions.

5. See, for example, N. I. Nadezhdin's article in Teleskop, in which, strongly influenced by Schelling, the critic discusses the “neobkhodimost', znachenie i sila esteticheskogo obrazovaniia.” Nadezhdin claims that only art can bridge the two opposing worlds of heaven and earth and concludes his essay with a quotation from Psalm 15: 11, in the Slavonic version of the Bible: “Krasota v desnitse Tvoei v konets.” N. I. Nadezhdin, “Neobkhodimost', znachenie i sila esteticheskogo obrazovaniia,” Teleskop 8, 10 (1831), 154, as cited in Setschkareff, Schellings Einfluss, 29.

6. This musical female also differs from the typical woman in Gogol “s prose, where she is most commonly domineering and emasculating, or* on occasion ephemeral and unapproachable; see the essay” Zhenshchina” (8: 143-147), or the description of the governor's daughter in Mertvye dushi (6: 90, 166), as well as the description of the woman with whom Gogol’ had supposedly fallen in love before his abrupt departure for Germany in 1829. (He describes [most critics say “invents” ] her in a letter to his mother on 24 July 1829 [10: 147-148].) The misunderstanding or even fear of women these depictions suggest makes Gogol “s ascription of ideal music to the female realm, at the same time as he asserts that her power is creative instead of debilitating, all the more striking. The tension derived from a combination of the typical romantic image of feminine art and the normally masculine aggressive ideal found in Gogol', however, is material for another study. For discussions of sexuality and gender in Gogol', see Karlinsky, Simon, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976 Google Scholar; Woodward, James, The Symbolic Art of Gogol: Essays on His Short Fiction (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1982)Google Scholar; McLean, Hugh,” Gogol's Retreat from Love: Towards an Interpretation of Mirgorod,” American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress ofSlavists (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 225–244 Google Scholar; Cox, Gary, “Geographic, Sociological, and Sexual Tensions in Gogol's Dikan'ka Stories,” Slavic and East European Journal 24 (1980): 219–232 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bonnett, Gail, “Deity to Demon: Gogol's Female Characters,” Proceedings. Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, XXIIIrd Annual Meeting. April, 1972, ed. Kraft, Walter C. (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 1972), 253–267.Google Scholar

7. Jesse Zeldin, Nikolai Gogol's Quest for Beauty: An Exploration into his Works (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 36.

8. Confirmation of the relation of aggressive power and the ideal can be sought in the other Arabeski essays, where Gogol’ praises Aleksandr Pushkin as a musician-singer, whose “slog ego molniia; on tak zhe bleshchet, kak sverkaiushchie sabli, i letit bystree samoi bitvy” (8: 51). Enormity and terror-invoking strength are features of the architecture he praises, of the historical periods and the geography that fascinate him. The two pieces concerning Cossacks, “0 Malorossiiskikh pesniakh” and “Vzgliad na sostavlenie Malorossii,” further elaborate a vocabulary of violence and majesty, and lead us to the Cossack fiction in Mirgorod. The second article condemns the pre-Cossack Ukraine for its monotony and passionless nature, then praises the Cossacks for their militant and multifaceted strength. The article on song explicitly concerns the Cossacks’ passionate music that expresses a life that is “deiatel'na, raznoobrazna, svoevol'na, ispolnena vsego poeticheskogo” and where is apparent “sila, radost', mogushchestvo” (8: 90, 91). Rightly or wrongly, Gogol’ praises Cossack song for he believes that it “sochiniaetsia ne s perom v ruke, ne na bumage, ne s strogim raschetom, no v vikhre, v zabvenii, kogda dusha zvuchit i vse chleny, razrushaia ravnodushnoe, obyknovennoe polozhenie, stanoviatsia svobodnee” (8: 95).

9. In “Skul'ptura, zhivopis', i muzyka,” Gogol’ associates each of the three arts with classicism, Christianity, and contemporary romanticism respectively. When he translates this hierarchy into prose fiction, he associates the middle term, painting, with an outdated sentimentalism of the eighteenth century instead of with the Christianity of a few centuries earlier.

10. Mann, Iurii, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 14–22.Google Scholar

11. Yankel the Jew might also be mentioned in this context, but anti-Semitism is more banal than either xenophobia or misogyny in Gogol'. The author does not succeed in integrating negative descriptions of the Jews into his schema of the arts as well as he does those of women and Poles.

12. Nabokov uses the term homunculi for the episodic characters Gogol’ creates and discards throughout Mertvye dushi: Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1944), 77. For an analysis of the potential of these lesser characters, along with the narrator, to transcend the stagnation of the plot, see Judith Deutsch, “Perspective from the Threshold: the Troika of Dead Souls,” Ulbandus Review, no. 5 (1987): 3-17.