Since 1839, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol began to develop a progressive mental and physical health disorder. At the age of 30, while in Rome, Gogol contracted malaria, and, judging by the consequences, the disease damaged the writer's brain. Seizures and fainting began to occur, which is characteristic of malarial encephalitis. In 1845, Gogol writes: “My body has reached a terrible chill: neither day nor night I could not get warm with anything. My face all turned yellow, and my hands were swollen and blackened and there was nothing warmed by ice, so that their touch to me frightened me myself.
Incidentally, it was at the end of 1845 that Gogol first burned the manuscript of several chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls. There were many rumors about Gogol's "religious insanity", although in the true sense he was not a deeply religious person, much less an ascetic in life. The illness pushed the writer to religious reflections, and the environment in which he found himself strengthened and supported them. True, under the influence of his mother, from childhood, Gogol's consciousness was rooted in the fear of hell and the Last Judgment, fear of the "afterlife" (suffice it to recall the mysticism of his story "Viy").
Yes, Gogol's mother, Maria Ivanovna, was, owing to her difficult fate, a pious woman with a mystical character. She was left an orphan early and married at the age of 14 to 27-year-old Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky. Of their six sons, only one Nikolai survived. He was the first-born, and his mother adored her Nikosha, whom she named after St. Nicholas of Dikansky, tried to give him a religious education. However, Gogol later wrote: "… I was baptized because I saw that everyone is baptized."
Even having visited Jerusalem in February 1848, Gogol felt neither peace, nor joy, nor cheerfulness of feelings, but only, in his words, "insensitivity, callousness and woodiness." He becomes withdrawn, strange in communication, capricious and unkempt in clothes. Even after 1839, even to his beloved mother, Gogol wrote less and less dryly, and when he arrived at his home in 1848, he treated the sisters coldly and indifferently, although he used to tenderly take care of them.
When his sister Maria died, Gogol even wrote the following lines to his mother: "Happy is the one to whom God will send some terrible misfortune and misfortune will make him awaken and look back at himself."
A mental crisis led Gogol to the publication in 1847 of the book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends", which with the ideas of religious repentance provoked a sharp rebuff from the progressive Russian society and even Slavophiles and churchmen (for the author's seditious pride). The fanatic priest Matvey Konstantinovsky, under whose influence Gogol was until his death, intensely "prompts" the writer to abandon all writing activities and brings a terrible confusion to Gogol's soul, because he cannot imagine his life without literary work. However, the purpose of my entire article is different, so it's time to summarize all of the above, because each of us can get sick.
Being in mental and physical distress, moreover, exhausted by long fasting, nine days before his death, Gogol again burns part of the chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls, since the continuation of this work at times seems to him not a divine revelation, but a diabolical obsession. Fear of hell, torture beyond the grave and the Last Judgment hastened his death, for which, in fact, he was preparing in the last weeks of his life.
A few days before the death of Gogol, the owner of the house where he was, Count Tolstoy, joyfully informed the writer, who was lying in bed, that the icon of the Mother of God that had been lost in the house had unexpectedly been found. And Gogol answered irritably: "Is it possible to talk about these things when I am preparing for such a terrible moment!"
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And now a legend
Frequent fainting, especially prolonged ones, caused Gogol in his morbid consciousness to fear being mistaken for the deceased and being buried alive.
The first chapter of "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" begins with ominous mystical words: "Being in the full presence of memory and common sense, here I am setting out my last will. I will bequeath my body not to bury until there are clear signs of decomposition … I mention this because even during the illness itself they found moments of vital numbness on me, my heart and pulse stopped beating … "These lines in combination with the later" terrible " stories that followed after the opening of the grave of Gogol during the reburial of his remains (about the allegedly damaged, scratched casing of the coffin lid, about the unnatural, on the side, and the twisted position of the writer's skeleton), and gave rise to terrible rumors that Gogol was buried alive, that he woke up in a coffin, underground and, in despair trying to get out, died from mortal fear and suffocation.
This eerie, mystical legend, which is based on no historical evidence and is not confirmed by any documentary facts, unfortunately, exists to this day.
However, mysticism really has to do with the remains of the great writer, and one such secret has not yet been revealed.
In the summer of 1931, the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery, where Nikolai Gogol was buried in 1852, was abolished, since a receiver for juvenile offenders was organized on the territory of the monastery (such were the times!). The ashes of Gogol, Khomyakov and Yazykov were transferred to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. The newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, dated August 5, 1988, published for the first time entries from the diary of a former member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Moscow, diplomat and writer A. Ya. Arosev: "They are brutally frank" … May 26, 1934. at Vs. Ivanov, Pavlenko, N. Tikhonov. They said that they dug up the ashes of Gogol, Khomyakov and Yazykov. They did not find Gogol's head (italics mine. - Yu. P.) … ". Here is such a mystical, mysterious fact! It's some kind of devilry!
Probably, the rumors about the stolen head of Gogol were used by M. Bulgakov in his novel "The Master and Margarita", writing about the head of the chairman of the board of MASSOLIT, stolen from the coffin, cut off by tram wheels at Patriarch's Ponds.
Professor of the Literary Institute, writer VG Lidin was present at the autopsy of Gogol's grave and in his memoirs "The Transfer of Gogol's Ashes" writes: "… Gogol's grave was opened almost all day. It turned out to be at a much deeper depth than ordinary burials. Having begun to dig it, stumbled upon a brick crypt of unusual strength, but they did not find a walled-up hole in it; then they began to dig in the transverse direction in such a way that the excavation was to the east, and only in the evening was another side chapel of the crypt discovered, through which the main crypt was in the coffin will be pushed in in due time.
The work on opening the crypt dragged on. It was already dusk when the grave was finally opened. The top boards of the coffin were rotten, but the side boards with preserved foil, metal corners and handles, and a partially intact bluish-purple braid were intact. This is what Gogol's ashes were like: there was no skull in the coffin (italics mine. - Yu. P.), and Gogol's remains began with the cervical vertebrae: the entire skeleton was enclosed in a well-preserved tobacco-colored frock coat; even underwear with bone buttons survived under the frock coat; they had shoes on their feet … The shoes were on very high heels, about 4-5 centimeters, which gives an unconditional reason to assume that Gogol was not tall.
When and under what circumstances Gogol's skull disappeared remains a mystery. At the beginning of the opening of the grave, at a shallow depth, much higher than the crypt with a walled-up coffin, a skull was discovered, but archaeologists recognized it as belonging to a young man … Unfortunately, I could not take pictures of Gogol's remains (photograph. - Yu. P.), since it was already twilight, and the next morning they were transported (there is information that on a simple cart, in the rain. - Yu. P.) to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, where they were buried … Lidin took a piece of Gogol's coat as a keepsake for weaving it into a case for the first edition of Dead Souls, which is in Lidin's library.
Other writers who were present at the reburial of Gogol's ashes also took "souvenirs" with them. So, Vsevolod Ivanov took the rib (!) Of Gogol, A. Malyshkin - the foil from the coffin, and the director of the cemetery, the Komsomol member Arakcheev (a noble name!) Even appropriated the shoes of the great writer. What blasphemy! But even the historian D. Bantysh-Kamensky, who in the era of Nicholas I opened the grave of Prince A. Menshikov, an associate of Peter I, in Berezovo and took his cap as a souvenir, was accused of looting and blasphemy. Soviet morality was somewhat different! Apparently, due to the warped from time to time the foil of the cover of Gogol's coffin and the displacement of his remains in the coffin due to the natural subsidence of the earth, a terrible legend appeared about a writer buried alive!
But where did Gogol's head (skull) go ?! The same V. Lidin tells about one version: “In 1909, when during the installation of the monument to Gogol on Prechistensky Boulevard in Moscow (in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great writer - Yu. P.), the restoration of Gogol's grave was carried out, Bakhrushin (A. A. Bakhrushin, a collector and collector, who founded a theater museum in Moscow in 1894. - Yu. P.) allegedly persuaded the monks of the Danilov Monastery to get Gogol's skull for him and that, indeed, in the Bakhrushinsky Theater Museum in Moscow, there are three unknown skulls: one of them, according to the assumption, is the skull of the artist Shchepkin, the other is Gogol, nothing is known about the third. Lidin clarified that he does not know if there are such skulls in the museum.
So, according to all eyewitness accounts of the reburial of Gogol's remains in 1931, now his remains are buried in the Novodevichy cemetery without a skull.
The mystery of the disappearance of Gogol's skull has not yet been revealed. (I would like to add that outstanding figures of the USSR, being atheists, were buried not inside the territory of the Novodevichy Convent, but nearby, on a section of the prestigious Moscow cemetery not consecrated by the church.)
Yuri Prokhorov