Russia in Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol as a Metaphysical Imagological Space

This article postulates the idea that each reality of the world-image Gogol creates in the poem Dead Souls exists at the intersection of two spaces, physical and metaphysical. The border between these worlds is conditional, ghostly, rather than real. As medieval hermeneutics says, every detail of Gogol's world is a signifier; but, according to Gogol's logic, the sign itself has a certain meaning in itself: the visible appears to be the embodied essential which, in its existence, combines constant fluctuations between belonging to one or another area of being. The division of these areas is annihilated, and a unique space is formed. In this space, the simultaneous approval of opposite categories occurs. The specificity of these categories is clarified by two points. Firstly, the oxymoron, which Gogol makes the title of the poem, determines the specifics of its understanding. A dead soul as an animated dead, material death, embodied liminality is an image, the main characteristic of which is its indefinite nature. The sense of Gogol's text lies in clarifying the substantial meaning of “lifedeath”. Secondly, the fact that the work on Dead Souls was carried out mainly in Rome is of fundamental importance. This estrangement likens Russia to the space of death, without any negative connotations, in Gogol's mind. The artist, who lives in Italy, perceives the space of Russia and the hammada of otherness as equally alien. Undoubtedly, there can be no talk of any identity of these two worlds; however, quite obvious parallels are formed between them, which are due to the fact that they occupy the same artistic space in the world image of Dead Souls. In this regard, each inhabitant of Gogol's world exists at each moment on both sides of death and looks at the situation of death simultaneously from the point of view of the body that the soul left, i.e., a dead, inert matter, and the soul that left the body, but at the same time immortal by definition. Thus, in a fluctuating reality, the synthesis of the physical and the spiritual as an ideal of human nature, as perceived by Gogol, is manifested quite timidly, but, at the same time, as perceived by Gogol. The task of the writer becomes not only his insight, but also realization, which turns into the overcoming of death as a combination of two hypostases of a human's stay in the world that are separated in different spheres of being. So, the author examines the content form of Gogol's poem on the example of the total dichotomy of the ontological foundations of being depicted in the text; the content is seen as a modification of the liminal (threshold) schema of the event chain, “the culminating link of which is the crossing of the boundary between life and death,” according to V.I. Tyupa. All this defines Russia in Dead Souls as a metaphysical imagological representation, inherently alien, which makes it impossible to make a final interpretation of the poem.

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