Nikolay Gogol: The Russian ‘Malleus Maleficarum’

Abstract

That Gogol had difficulty in dealing with women, both in life and in fiction, is no secret.³ However, in a consideration of women in Russian fiction one can hardly bypass a writer of such importance. He has acquired many reputations: as founder of the so-called ‘natural school’, as a champion of the oppressed, as a symbolist, a religious writer, a proto-Surrealist and many more such labels have been attached to him and his mysterious, complex works.⁴ Despite his own paradoxical sexuality and the general absence of serious portraits of women in his work, much recent interest has been devoted (in the West at least) to problems of sexuality in his fiction, culminating in an extended psychoanalytical study of one short work and an elaborate hypothesis as to his own psycho-sexual motivations.⁵ It is against this critical background that any survey of Gogol’s female characters must be located. Nevertheless, as the two quotations above are intended to suggest, the image of women that emerges from his fiction was not merely conservative, patriarchal and misogynist, but positively and specifically medieval in orientation.

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust which is in women insatiable.¹

In these recurrent fantasies the obscene details are often identical, and their identity sheds some light on the psychological connection between persecuting orthodoxy and sexual prurience. The springs of sanctimony and sadism are not far apart.²