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After the triumph of 1812 the idea of the peasant's soul, of his selfless virtue and self-sacrifice, began to be linked to the notion of Russia as the saviour of the West. This was the mission that Gogol first developed in Dead Souls. In his earlier story 'Taras Bulba' (1835) Gogol had attributed to the Russian soul a special kind of love that only Russians felt. 'There are no bonds more sacred than those of comradeship!' Taras Bulba tells his fellow Cossacks:

The father loves his child, the mother loves her child, a child loves its mother and father. But this is not the same, my brothers; a beast also loves its young. But the kinship of the spirit, rather than the blood, is something only known to man. Men have been comrades in other lands too, but there have never been comrades such as those in the Russian land… No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves - that does not mean to love with the head or with

some other part of you, it means to love with everything that God has given you.³⁴

* Such claims were often made by Russian nationalists. In the 1900s, when a practical joker let loose a report that an old Russian peasant had flown several kilometres on a homemade aeroplane, this was taken as a proof that the patriarchal system of Russia was not only better than the West's -it was cleverer as well (B. Pares, Russia (Harmonds-worth, 1942), p. 75).

The closer Gogol came to the Slavophiles, the more convinced he was that this Christian brotherhood was Russia's unique message to the world. Here was the providential plan for the 'Russian soul' which Gogol hinted at in the unforgettable troika passage at the end of the first volume of Dead Souls:

Is it not like that that you, too, Russia, are speeding along like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake? The road is like a cloud of smoke under you, the bridges thunder, and everything falls back and is left far behind. The spectator stops dead, struck dumb by the divine miracle: it is not a flash of lightning thrown down by heaven. What is the meaning of this terrifying motion? And what mysterious force is hidden in these horses the like of which the world has never seen? Oh horses, horses - what horses! Are whirl winds hidden in your manes? Is there some sensitive ear, alert to every sound, concealed in your veins? They have caught the sound of the familiar song from above, and at once they strain their chests of brass and barely touching the ground with their hoofs are transformed almost into straight lines, flying through the air, and the troika rushes on full of divine inspiration. Russia, where are you flying to? Answer! She gives no answer. The bells fill the air with their wonderful tinkling; the air is torn asunder, it thunders and is transformed into wind; everything on earth is flying past, and, looking askance, other nations and states draw aside and make way for her.³⁵

The 'Russian principle' of Christian love, to be revealed by Gogol in the second and third volumes, would save humanity from the selfish individualism of the West. As Herzen put it after reading Gogol's novel, 'in potentia there is a great deal in the Russian soul'.³⁶

The longer Gogol worked on his novel, the greater was his sense of a divine mission to reveal the sacred truth of the 'Russian soul'. 'God only grant me the strength to finish and publish the second volume', he wrote to the poet Nikolai Yazykov in 1846. 'Then they will discover that we Russians have much that they never even guessed about, and that we ourselves do not want to recognize.'³⁷ Gogol looked for inspiration to the monasteries - the place where he believed this hidden Russian spirit was to be revealed. What he most admired in the hermits of Optina was their apparent ability to master their own passions and cleanse their souls of sin. It was in such discipline that he saw the

solution to Russia's spiritual malaise. Once again it was the Slavophiles who pointed Gogol towards Optina. Kireevsky had been there many times to see Father Makary in the 1840s, when the two men had brought out a life of Father Paissy and translated the works of the Church Fathers from the Greek.³⁸ Like all the Slavophiles who followed him, Kireevsky believed that the hermits of Optina were the true embodiment of Orthodoxy's ancient spiritual traditions, the one place where the 'Russian soul' was most alive, and by the time Gogol returned to Moscow from abroad, its salons were all filled with Optina devotees.