Authors

Discussion

 The life and works of Nikolai V. Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь, 1809-52), a writer with a dual Ukrainian-Russian identity, demonstrate the two countries' complex historical intertwining as perceived today.  Gogol's Dead Souls and a story, “Rome,” both written during his stay in Western Europe, particularly in Rome, reveal the author's broad perspectives on Europe and Russia.  The aesthetics of ruins, which Gogol builds into his language, manifests itself as the way landowner characters in Dead Souls ravage and ruin their surroundings as losing their sense of reality. Gogol's intention, reflected through the aesthetics of ruins in the Russian countryside, becomes more apparent when syncretizing "Rome." The present paper will be implicated in examining the paradox of the aesthetics of ruins through the author's construction of language, by using the methods of comparison, enumeration, superimposition, and fragmentation for the purpose of extrapolating the artist's literary and symbolic concepts of space from these two works. Thus, it is necessary to analyze the aesthetics of ruins that go beyond his romantic worldview of ruined spaces that both works have in common. Throughout the analysis of the short story "Rome", one can see how Gogol's obsession with Baroque aesthetics and his prophetic attitude toward the Eternal City of Rome (Roma Aeterna) will lead himself to moot the theme of "looking at Russia”. Accordingly, Dead Souls explores the theme of "overcoming ruins with ruins", by illustrating Pliushkin's use of ruins as a repository of memory. The latter work further analyzes Gogol's intention that the rebirth of Russia is a possibility through creative destruction and ruination, reflecting that the Italian Renaissance was a "Rebirth of Ruin" that was achieved through the excavation of artifacts such as Laocoön and the rediscovery of forgotten Latin manuscripts. The city of Rome, which was repeatedly razed and destroyed by Renaissance popes up to Baroque period, has been resuscitated by themselves under the banner of ‘Renaissance’, many Grand Tour tourists observed, they accordingly documented what is referred to as ‘the aesthetics of ruin’. The latter notion traces back to Petrarch as both his work, Vestigia, and letters to Giovanni Colonna reveal. Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past when he visited the Forum Romanum resulted in his dictum, “For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?” It is the beginning of the spirit of Renaissance. What Gogol intends to materialize in these two is the very spirit and process of rebirth.   The concept of spolia might now be a useful tool, which Gogol often proposes as a way to overcome ruins; he also extends that concept to its counterparts in works of literature.