Restoring the Disfigured Human Image: A Gogolian Slap in the Face and Moral Responsibility

Kelly examines Nikolai Gogol's artistic disfigurement of the human image in The Inspector General and Dead Souls. He notes that Gogol's writing is marked by a tension between the depiction of encrusting earthiness and the sense of humankind's potentially elevated and divine nature. A seeming incongruity exists between Gogol's poetics and his philosophy, between the marred visages and moral vacuity of his characters and the conviction that human beings are representatives of the image of God. This incongruity has been highlighted by the responses of Vasilli Rozanov and Sergei Bocharov to Gogol's art. While Bocharov focuses on Gogol's depictions of the face, Kelly explores the paradox of salvation through desecration by examining the human image as a whole. Particularly, he explores Gogol's controversial ideas on "a slap in the face." Furthermore, he suggests that Gogol's art is an embodiment of the idea of salvation through desecration but also that he strives to outline a positive moral and ethical program of restoration that, in admonishing his addressees to accept moral responsibility for others, shows him to be a key literary forerunner of the spiritual position espoused by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.