Mikołaj Gogol w kręgu problemów etyki i religii

Abstract

In the article (the matter of which was considered by nobody in Poland during the last half of the century) the author exanines a problem of place and role of religious inspiration in the output of a distinguished Russian dramatist, novelist and short-story writer of the first half of the 19th century, and the meaning that theology, ethics, spirituality, East-Christian and Byzantine-Slavonic rites had in a creative evolution, life and transformation of writer’s skills of the author of the corned The Government Inspector and the novel Dead souls. In a special way the author deals with a history of formation of a creative concept of Gogol’s The Government Inspector – successive wordings, author’s interpretations of the drama itself and also its stage adaptations – and a story of writer’s work on Dead souls especially its subsequent volumes. Finally epistolary-publicistic series Selected fragments of correspondence with friends is considered as a direct cause of a ultimate creative crises of the writer and his premature withdrawal from literature and also his illness and death. The last part of the paper is devited to Gogol’s religious writings sensu stricto, with an exposition of his theologically-liturgical treatise Reflections on Divine Liturgy.