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:
“We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”
—Mario Puzo, U.S. author, screenwriter, and Francis Ford Coppola, U.S. director, screenwriter. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)