Politics
Gogol was stunned when The Government Inspector came to be interpreted by many, despite Nicholas I's patronage of the play, as an indictment of tsarism. In reality, Gogol himself was an adherent of the Slavophile movement and believed in a divinely inspired mission for both the House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church. Similarly to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gogol sharply disagreed with those Russians who preached constitutional monarchy and the disestablishment of the Orthodox Church.
After defending autocracy, serfdom, and the Orthodox Church in his book Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends, Gogol was attacked by his former patron Vissarion Belinsky. The first Russian intellectual to publicly preach the economic theories of Karl Marx, Belinsky accused Gogol of betraying his readership by defending the status quo.
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Gogol
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“I think the Senate ought to realize that I have to have about me those in whom I have confidence; and unless they find a real blemish on a man, I do not think they ought to make partisan politics out of appointments to the Cabinet.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)