“As above, so below”: On Russian genius and national character

Kirill Novikov

Russia undoubtedly presents one of the greatest enigmas. A haunting riddle. As Dostoevsky put it, “it is fearsome because it is indefinable and cannot be defined”. Russia eludes the logical, “Euclidean” understanding. And alongside its mystical allure, a significant facet of its spiritual character is its penchant for “reasoning”, for debate, for deconstructive analysis – a susceptibility to these temptations both from within and from without. Russians reflect and philosophize like no other people. “Here all shores converge, and all contradictions coexist”, observed Dostoevsky. Europeans may recognize this merging of opposites, this coincidentia oppositorum, from philosophical treatises and contemplative moments at their desks. But Russia, and its prophet and articulator, Dostoevsky, grasp the tragedy of these contradictions in the raw. Their philosophy is one of blood and spirit.

Russia is a Sphinx. And it challenges the world to decipher it, threatening otherwise to engulf and annihilate everything in its path. In this regard, Russia is magnificently symbolized by the tragic heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels. In the 20^th century, this threat became palpable as Russia descended into Communism. Russia is many things, but it is certainly not a negligible force that can be dismissed. It compels the world to listen.

The enigma of Russia cannot be deciphered without love. Yet, to love Russia is an endeavor fraught with challenges, pain, and immense responsibility. Love, in its universal form, is intricate and taxing, but a devotion to Russia amplifies these tribulations. Often, Russia displays a paradoxical nature, ungrateful to those who love her, and reciprocating affection with disdain. Indeed, Russia is more than just a vast expanse or cosmos; it also contains chaos.

To solve the enigma of the “macrocosm”, one must glimpse it reflected in the “microcosm” where, as if in a focal point, all rays of the “vast universe”, both light and dark, converge. Such a microcosm is the genius, in whom the universal is mirrored through the lens of the national. A genius is a demonic entity, or more accurately, a daimonic one: they birth and fashion daimons, their own images; they radiate Eros-love; they bestow beginnings, and in a certain sense, they themselves are a “beginning”, a “principle”. They create their own muses and are inspired by them in turn. Countless semi-existent entities gain their true essence thanks to genius and become its inspirers, its creative fate. But a genius, a god-like entity, the “creator of angels and spirits”, is also in essence an angelic, “daimonic” being.

Through the creativity of a genius, we come to fathom the bold assertion of St. Gregory of Nyssa that angels can multiply. The images crafted by genius are precisely these multiplied angels – daimons. They possess their distinct, independent existence and fly through the air. The spirit of genius is intrinsically androgynous, a hermaphroditic entity. Hence, it is a creator of both male and female spirit-images. Within a genius, the male deity Poros (wealth) and the female Penia (poverty) merge. Together, they conceive and give birth to a fearsome, omnipotent, paradoxical daimon – Eros. This demigod is the doppelgänger of all genius. It is inspired, but it also inspires, breathing life into the images it crafts, or rebirthing pre-existing ones, its semi-real inspirers and muses. It births them ominously, demonically, sometimes to their and its own demise.

The poet’s hand is clean, as Tyutchev said, but he might, accidentally, choke the life from you. Though a genius is a creator in essence, they themselves are a created, fallen being, fractured by humanity’s duality. They birth both light and shadow, mirroring the soil from which they have sprung. This especially holds true for Russian geniuses, for upon Russia’s brow rests predominantly the mark of demonic brilliance. Hence, she remains misunderstood, inscrutable, and isolated – as is so often the fate of a genius. For the genius is a king in the wilderness and of the wilderness. The genius and Russia stand face to face with the abyss of freedom, torn tragically between light and shadow. Russia’s light shone in Pushkin, while its darkness was embodied in Gogol. But the antithesis of Pushkin and Gogol demands its synthesis, its resolution. For synthesis is always a revelation. And thus, in the latter half of the 19th century, the works of one of the greatest geniuses of all eras and nations, Fyodor Dostoevsky, blossomed.

He deciphered Pushkin’s enigma and with it, the riddle of Russia’s calling, its culture – a culture profoundly universal, prophetic, and messianic. But Dostoevsky also bore the heavy, torturous infusion of Russia’s darkness. He inherited the ominous legacy of Gogol. Yet, unlike the creator of “Dead Souls”, he did not succumb to spiritual exhaustion, nor did he dissolve into saccharine, intoxicating, venomous lyricism like Alexander Blok, the author of the “Verses About the Beautiful Lady”. Instead, he melded both Pushkin’s light and Gogol’s shadow in the blazing, passionate flame of his tragic revelations. He ventured into eternity, girded with the sword of a grand idea, like a crusading knight.

Torturous, crimson-black shadows settled on Dostoevsky’s face, scorched by passion and agony – settling with the glimmers of that very pyre in which Gogol burned along with the second volume of “Dead Souls” and Blok with his “The Twelve”. This is part of the greater Russian eschatological and apocalyptic inferno, ignited by an ever-present, insatiable need for suffering. The mystery of suffering – never overcome in Gogol, but transcended in Dostoevsky – also remains the enigma of Russia’s agonized, tragic history.

Dostoevsky’s literary lineage, in one crucial dimension, can be traced back to Gogol. Both authors navigate the theme of humanity’s alienation from the Divine – the narrative of a fallen and afflicted soul estranged from God or His grace. Gogol presents this detachment through the visceral terror of forsaken agency and an eerie enthrallment with sin and decay, as palpably felt in “Evenings”, “Mirgorod”, and perhaps most acutely in “Dead Souls”. His narrative realm is one of stasis (consider the double meaning of the term), as though caught in the petrifying gaze of the Viy.

In contrast, Dostoevsky’s rendition of sinfulness pulsates with tragic momentum. His stories are charged with a vigor aimed at surmounting the dualities of life, the harrowing abyss of degradation, and the temptation of pessimism. Dostoevsky transcends the morass of decay and negativity by invoking what could be termed as the “philosophy of the tragedy of freedom” or, alternatively, “the tragic philosophy of freedom”. Thus, he reframes the overarching narrative of sin as a discourse on freedom, an approach conspicuously absent in Gogol’s works.

Whereas the demises of Gogol’s characters – Petro, Khoma Brut, Ivan Ivanovich, Ivan Nikiforovich, Khlestakov, Chichikov, among others – immerse us into a labyrinth of ennui and existential void, the tragic ends of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Ivan Karamazov illuminate our spirits, and “show us the light”, as Berdyaev put it. Such calamities in Dostoevsky’s tales evoke a genuine Christian catharsis. Here, the ancient tragedy of Fate is supplanted by the deeply Christian tragedy of Freedom.

Furthermore, Dostoevsky’s pronounced emphasis on freedom dovetails with eschatological themes: mortality, divine judgment, the afterlife, and eternity. While these themes are subtly intimated in Gogol’s works, particularly in “A Terrible Vengeance”, they resonate in Dostoevsky with unparalleled depth and philosophical gravitas.

The lives of both Gogol and Dostoevsky are marked by catastrophe, but in different ways. Genius is fundamentally a cross to bear, in stark contrast to the light, relatively carefree existence of those with mere talent or minor gifts. The burdens borne by Gogol and Dostoevsky were immense. Yet, while Gogol crumbled and was crushed by their weight, Dostoevsky triumphed. In Gogol, there’s a torturous fear of eternal doom, a peculiar, terrifying attraction to deformity, a scorched, dark anti-Eros, hellish visions, and an affliction of a witch-like nature. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, faced the horrors of actual penal servitude, weighty prophetic insights, epileptic seizures, and a fierce internal battle against the Sodom and for the Madonna.

Both were tormented by the fate of fallen humanity and its disfigured visage. But Gogol could find no compassion either for himself or for the fallen. The gift of empathetic love, as well as the gift of romantic love, were taken away from him. Dostoevsky agonized, feeling pity for the tormented child and his unredeemed tears – and he tasted from the cup of feminine Eros, only to realize its bitterness, its terrors, and its poison. Yet, both unbridled, frenzied compassion and unbridled, frenzied passion are equally catastrophic and deadly to the individual, tearing them apart from within. In the end, both Gogol and Dostoevsky were drawn to a positive ecclesiastical religiosity; both were within the Church.

However, Dostoevsky journeyed through the crucible of the dialectics of faith and disbelief, and the face of Christ’s love was revealed to him. Gogol, it seems, was unfamiliar with the philosophical drama one might call the conquest of faith, and hence, he never experienced the gracious absolution of Christ. Their creative and personal paths were terrifying, and for both, can be expressed in the words of Saint Paul: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” – and perhaps more so for Gogol, to such an extent that despair grips the heart in the face of this earthly vision of Hell.

One of the most burdensome and agonizing features of Gogol’s personal destiny and work is that within him, the dark anti-Eros of a cursed, loveless death (in contrast to the white Eros of a blessed, loving death) animated an artistic apparatus of almost boundless power. From a formal perspective, Gogol is perhaps the most powerful artistic genius of all Russian literature. The harpy-like muses that descended upon Gogol not only prevented him from “eating” – partaking of the world’s fruits, much like the mythical Phineus – but were themselves hideously deformed. Gogol drew inspiration from their grotesqueness and consumed his terrifying sustenance tainted by their omens, feasting and burning in “the eternal shades in heat and frost”.

There was a real “harpy” in Gogol’s life – Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom, however, the writer himself chose as his spiritual guide and “elder”. Deformity and the ugliness inherent in it are the destroyers of existence, and most crucially, of that which is most beautiful – the individual. Thus, Gogol’s tragedy, where his biography and his objective creativity intertwine, manifests as the destruction of the individual by the sheer power of malformation. Where he triumphs and crafts beauty, that beauty is lifeless; it is neither animated nor vivified, but rather, it is frozen and enchanted by the same power that fuels the deformity. One might even say that the formal beauty in Gogol’s work was lifeless, while the ugliness was animated. In any case, for Gogol, the “beautiful” and the “ugly” resembled the very same pannochka, the witch from “Viy”, who simultaneously dazzled as a radiant beauty and repulsed as a loathsome crone.

This tale of the witch (in “Viy”) is a story of Gogol’s very soul. “Those ruby lips were colored with his own heart’s blood”; such is also the magic of Gogol’s own art. The essence of the witch is sheer, cold, passionless lust. This represents the pinnacle of corruption. Chekhov astutely noted in his “Ariadne” that coldness and depravity go hand in hand. Dostoevsky, with singular power, illustrated this through the characters of Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, and old Karamazov. Coldness (the “hardened heart”) signifies not only a lack of interest in spiritual values but even a negative interest in them, that is, hostility and antagonism. Gogol buried the dead and froze the beauty of the world, unworthy of such beauty. And he himself was dying, burying himself within.

Through the unfathomable paths of Providence, by divine permission, the witch offered Gogol a chalice of “cold fire”. And thus, the witch, the demonic creation of his infernal genius, utters in the church “terrible words… words that sounded like the bubbling of boiling pitch”. Soon after, “a whirlwind arose in the church; the icons of the saints fell on the ground”. In “A Terrible Vengeance”, the sorcery of Katerina’s father turns sacred images into “ghastly faces”. This transformation of the icons – as though they were overcome by evil forces – and the whirlwind bringing with it hellish monsters is not just a literary device, but a sort of horrifying symbolic reality in which literature and life are inseparable. It represents the world’s images distorted by sin, the leprous nature of existence. Upon long-suffering Job, too, by divine permission, came the evil forces from the desert, whirlwind, and affliction. Éliphas Lévi, a recognized authority on magic, spoke of the cold gust arising from dark sorcery. Eminent scholar Charles Richet, in his “Treatise on Metapsychics”, described the icy breath felt before the appearance of a specter. All these are harbingers of the tomb’s chill and “him that had the power of death, that is, the devil”.

Gogol was chilled by icy whirlwinds rising up from infernal basements, and he himself began “To strike with a serpentine gaze/ The flowers that in ignorance blaze”, to borrow from Symbolist poet Sologub. He “looked at reality with a lifeless gaze”, concurred Rozanov, and froze it into “wax figures”. He struck down the children, the “flowers of the earth”, and “laughed at those whom no one laughs at”, Rozanov continued. There is no Viy more fearsome than Gogol’s spiritual guide, Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, with his characteristic contempt for theology, philosophy, and art. The most harrowing and bitter fate one could imagine befell Gogol. In the guise of a priest, the Viy came to the deathbed of the great sufferer.

Certainly, there was light, both in Gogol’s life and in his art – this is evident in his “Meditations on the Divine Liturgy”, “Correspondence”, “Arabesques”, and certain other works. However, this light did not play the role of an antithesis to darkness with the same force and significance. In Gogol’s work, there exists a kind of monologue of evil and gloom. Hence, his narrative is not drama, not tragedy, but rather an exposed chasm of doom, a lethal depth; truly “A Terrible Vengeance”. Dostoevsky is not of the same mold. And even though in experiencing and observing the fallen, the humiliated, and the possessed man, Dostoevsky primarily drew from Gogol, the man in his works is not merely shrouded in darkness, he is divided: “Two souls, alas! reside within my breast/ And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother”.

In these lines, it is easy to see the duality of Christianity and its relation to the individual; this duality is also the foundation of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre. The tumultuous agitation of passions, the wisdom of prophetic philosophy, and the unrestrained pursuit of Christ. From this arises the dialectic, the tragedy. But from this also emerges the surmounting of pessimism, an escape from it. Out of the darkness shines light. This light is both the fruit of tragic catharsis and the eternal glow of the Bethlehem star. It’s deeply meaningful that Berdyaev chose for the epigraph to his book on Dostoevsky, perhaps his best work, a verse from the Gospel of John: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not”. Dostoevsky’s tragic art essentially mirrors the tragedy of Christianity in the world. One could say that the work of the author of “The Brothers Karamazov” is synonymous with the tribulations of the Christian idea. And since Dostoevsky “was deeply a Russian man and a Russian writer” and “through him one could decipher the Russian soul” (both quotes by Berdyaev), this reveals the profound essence of the Russian Christian, the Russian cross-bearing, and the notion that the Russian carries Christ in a uniquely profound sense.

It has been fashionable for a century to mock, in a vulgar style, this attribute of the Russian people and simultaneously deride Dostoevsky, as if he hadn’t foreseen the depths of degradation and godlessness the Russian nation would reach over the course of the 20^th century (he did nothing but foresee it). All this signifies a very superficial approach to the theme. To carry God is a terror (Hebrews 12:29: “For our God is a consuming fire”) – and to predominantly be a Christian nation means to undergo all the vicissitudes of crucifixion’s tribulations – up to God-forsakenness and descent into hell. To be God-chosen means to be God-abandoned – in this lies the terrifying paradox of Christian freedom.

The Lord Jesus Christ brought not “peace”, “but rather division” – primarily the division of beauty and ugliness, light and darkness, and, most importantly, the division between freedom and slavery. This division occurs not just between people, but within the spirit of the same person, deep within their individuality, for individuality is communal. Every “I” is simultaneously a “we”. With the advent of Christ, the blending and indifferent combination of these principles becomes impossible. They oppose each other and enter a state of tragic dynamism and tempestuous struggle. And of those who lack this battle of ice and fire, who are “neither cold nor hot”, but “lukewarm”, of them Christ says: “I will spew thee out of my mouth”, meaning such a person ceases to be a Christian, or remains so to a very limited degree. They risk becoming insignificant for eternity. Those upon whom the ray of the Bethlehem star has fallen will find no repose except in the “eternal rest” that comes as catharsis (purification) after a tragic, lifelong battle.

Christ’s light not only enlightens, but also reveals within the depths of our spirit, dreadful sores, festering scabs, and lurking vipers, which would remain unseen if not for this light. Though unnoticed, their dreadful impact would only grow exponentially. The most fearsome enemy is the unseen one. Christ’s light exposes these wounds and also heals them. However, one must endure the pain; otherwise, the comforting Spirit will not manifest.

“Suffering is the origin of consciousness”. In these six words of Dostoevsky lies one of the greatest revelations of thought. Suffering awakens consciousness, and within this consciousness emerges the eternal idea of freedom. Thus, pessimism is overcome. Such are the fundamental ideas of Dostoevsky. They, in a multitude of intermediary versions, combinations, embodiments, transformations, and dialectical conflicts, form the grand assembly of characters forming the cast of Dostoevsky’s novels. Indeed, Dostoevsky is the “national philosopher of Russia”, as the Neokantian A. Steinberg rightly noted in his book “Dostoevsky’s System of Freedom”. Beyond that, Dostoevsky is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable thinkers of all time. He’s distinctly Christian in his thought, a rarity both then and now. Christian philosophers are fairly common, but a genuinely Christian philosophy is exceedingly rare. It’s not just about employing Christian ecclesiastical terminology: it is rare enough that it is not deployed as mere jargon (“The misfortune of Christianity is that it has become rhetorical”, Rozanov once remarked). The core of a Christian philosophy is to see a genuinely Christian problem. This was accomplished by Dostoevsky. His immense credit lies in restoring dignity to philosophy, moving it out of the musty academic office, and demonstrating that it reigns supreme over the world since the world is merely its mantle and shadow.

Dostoevsky, the great psychologist, captured the essence of a nation that grappled with the weight of its own conscience, ever seeking redemption and understanding. Gogol, on the other hand, presents a different facet of the same Russian soul. He plumbs the chthonic depths, revealing a world that is marshy, chaotic, and enshrouded in shadow. His writings echo the eerie laments from the abysses of Russia’s soul, exposing its dark underbelly. If Dostoevsky represents the contemplative spirit of Russia, Gogol paints its wild, untamed passions – the primal, tumultuous forces that brew beneath its surface, always looming, always lurking. Together, they form a dualistic representation of Russia’s character: one elucidates its moral and philosophical quests, while the other lays bare its inherent madness and dark allure.

The genius of both is painted on the very body of the Russian psyche; Providence shall reveal whether the spirit invoked by Dostoevsky will prevail over the Stygian abyss that consumed Gogol.