Elective affinities: Nikolai Gogol, Fedor Tiutchev, and German Romanticism

Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Tiutchev were steeped in the ideals of the German Romantic movement, towards which both writers display a particular affinity. This movement had a significant impact on contemporary Russian culture, which was pulling a variety of heterogeneous elements into its vortex. Taking this affinity into account, this dissertation offers a new reading of Gogol\u27s last book, Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends. In order to clarify the structure of Selected Passages and to demonstrate that language is central to Gogol\u27s Weltanschauung, his early works are first examined. Right from the start, the importance of language and the search for an individual idiom is announced in Gogol\u27s writings. Selected Passages is considered in its entirety. A structural analysis of the book\u27s composition reveals an implicit theory of language underlying the sequence of its parts. Gogol views the contemporary state of language as corrupt and leading to spiritual death. The redemption of humanity is possible only if the original purity of language is restored. Thus, Gogol advocates a regressive movement towards the pure, God-given Word. Gogol insists that the Russian language is undergoing an acute crisis. He foresees a way out of this crisis through the emergence of a new poetic language that will partake not only of the Russian literary language, but of other sources of inspiration as well. Tiutchev\u27s poetry represents just such a language, and is thus one manifestation of Gogol\u27s linguistic advocacy. Introducing a new aesthetic into Russian prosody, Tiutchev opened new vistas for poetry and the Russian language. A comparison between Tiutchev and the German Romantic poet Eichendorff reveals striking similarities between the two poets. This similarity is not to be seen as an instance of one poet influencing the other, but rather that both are responding, to an astonishing degree, to the same aesthetic values