The passage "Rome" was first published thanks to the publication in the journal "Moskvityanin". Readers got acquainted with this work in 1842. The novel “Rome” is an excerpt from the novel “Annunziata”, which Gogol wrote in 1838-1839. However, the work was never completed by the writer.
In the passage “Rome,” Gogol reflected the impressions he received when visiting Italy. There are works and reflections of the author about the fate of this country. Let's get acquainted with the short content of Gogol’s novel “Rome”.
Meet the protagonist
What did Nikolai Gogol tell us in his novel “Rome”? The narrator informed the reader about the feelings of the twenty-five-year-old prince. This heir to one of the noble families was conquered by the beauty of a simple girl, whose name is Annunziata. But precisely because the reader needs to know literally everything, the author conducts a short excursion into the past and introduces us to the life of a young man.
The childhood of the protagonist
The future prince grew in Rome. His education was carried out by teachers and tutors. At the same time, they adhered to the customs of Roman nobles. The abbot was assigned to the future heir of the family. He was considered uncle for him. The abbot was not a very educated person. That is why there is nothing surprising in the fact that the growing prince did not know very much.
Training
Most likely, the young man was destined to remain ignoramus. However, his father, the old prince, suddenly decided to change the methodology of education. He considered it necessary to give his son a prestigious European education, sending him to a university located in the northern part of Italy, in the city of Lucca.
The young man stayed in the walls of this educational institution for six years. After that, he realized that France was attracting him. After all, its influence was well felt throughout Upper Italy.
Trip to france
From a very brief summary of Gogol's Rome, we learn how events developed further. A young man dreams of seeing France. However, he knows that his father, well known for his despotism, will never allow him to go to this country. Nevertheless, fate favors him. Quite unexpectedly, the young aristocrat receives a letter from the old prince, in which he ordered his son to go to Paris and continue his studies there. The young man goes to the city of his dreams. And from the very first days, Paris literally swallowed the young man into the whirlpool of his hectic life. But four years have passed. The young prince began to consider his stay in Paris as something unbearable. He was tired of the gloss of this city, realizing that emptiness was hidden behind the external brilliance. The prince begins to miss his native Italy.
Homecoming
Suddenly, the life of a young man is significantly complicated. The fact is that the father stopped sending him money. The prince is forced into debt, feeling more and more lonely every day. The young man sends a letter to his father, in which he asks to return it to Rome. But soon a banker comes to the young man and gives him a letter from his uncle. From this message, the prince learns that his father is dead, and he must return to Rome in order to dispose of the estate, inheritance and title at his discretion.
Upon returning home, the young man sees that the affairs of his family are in great decline. They are aggravated by litigation, as well as too many servants who need to pay money. The prince is trying to fix the shaky family affairs. That is why he begins to live quite modestly. But at the same time he finds for himself the biggest source of pleasure. For the young prince, Italy itself with its amazing history becomes it. Literally in everything, a young man sees monumentality and grandeur in his country. He is struck by the traces of the greatness of the city of Rome. The prince seeks to learn as much as possible about his people, for which he begins to study history.
Carnival
The prince draws attention to Italian women. He compares them to Roman buildings. Like them, among women he sees either beauties, or, on the contrary, ugly girls and ladies. He believes that there are simply no “pretty” ones.
The prince enjoys women as if in verses in a wonderful poem. However, soon one more was added to his hobbies. This feeling, which declared war on everyone else, and its name is passion.
In Rome, the carnival procession begins. The prince does not want to take part in it. However, he has to wade through the crowd of citizens. In it, he saw the Annunzieta. Fascinated by beauty, as well as calm magnificence emanating from her, the prince immediately falls in love with a girl. Annunzieta noticed the stranger's gaze. However, she was embarrassed and immediately hid her eyes.
In search of a beautiful woman
Pranksters in the crowd sprinkle flour on the prince. A young man, white from head to toe, rushes home. Having changed clothes, he tries again to find the girl he liked in the crowd. And only briefly he manages to notice how a beautiful woman sits in a cart to leave. A young man, surrounded by a crowd, understands that keeping up with the Annunzieta is hopeless. That is why he goes to the good-natured and quick Peppa. This man comes from the rich house of a merchant. However, Peppe went broke, because his passion was a lottery, in which he unsuccessfully invested all his money. Now he has to interrupt random earnings, for which he carries out various assignments.
The young prince takes Peppe away from the crowd in order to conduct an important conversation with him. He wants this man to look for a beautiful stranger for him. However, the young man immediately forgets everything. He sees Rome, which is illuminated by the rays of the setting sun. The city is simply magnificent.
Unfortunately, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol did not manage to finish his novel “Rome”. That is why the reader never found out how the story of those young people with whom he introduced us in his work ended.
Idea of design
Gogol’s novel “Rome” is not an event. It can be called philosophical. In the work two cities are opposed to each other - Rome and Paris. The first of them represents a lull of art and meditation. He sets the man in balance, pacifying in his soul longing and rebellion. Paris, by contrast, is a city of movement, political passion and the cycle. For the prince, Paris and Rome are peace. Gogol shows the first of these cities as the present, and the second as the past. Paris for a young man is the brightness of a minute. Rome for him is the constancy of eternity, its imperishability and deep beauty.
Analyzing Gogol's “Rome”, one can understand that the author showed these two cities not just with symbols. He introduced them as living samples of two civilizations.
The look of the protagonist, which is an analogue of the author, is aimed at the history and art, spirituality and beauty of Rome. This inspires him with the thought of purpose, of inheritance, and of the continuity that comes from the distant past. The brightness of a minute fades before the true breath of eternity, which has no time calculus.
Some reviews of the "Rome" by Nikolai Gogol compare this work of the author with his Notes of a Madman. Already at their creation, the writer allowed his hero to play with the calendar, joke with time and, taking history, arrange a booth out of it in the form of a somersault, walking upside down, etc. In the diary of a madman, time seems to be crazy too. It jumps, breaking with the usual ideas about the sequence of days. In Notes of a Madman, Gogol laughed at the pride of the “present minute”. The hero of Gogol Poprishchin does not understand the minute bet. For him, this is nothing more than an empty phrase. True Chronos, he considers the soul of man, which, unlike time, is infinite.
In his notes from Rome, Gogol also turned over the existing calendar. He dated everything not at all in the 19th century, but used a deeper time. For example, when N.V. Gogol made any notes in Rome, he signed them like this:
"Ms. April, year 2588 from the founding of the city."
By this, he wanted to extend the present day as soon as possible, extending the real minute to the full length of historical unlimitedness.
Journey to Italy
Researchers found that Gogol created his novel “Rome” as a direct reflection of his foreign life. In it, he described the philosophical and historical thoughts that were caused by this journey.
For several months at the end of 1836 and at the beginning of 1837, Nikolai Vasilievich spent in Paris. He was alien to the social and political life that took place in what was then France. In March 1837, Gogol left for Rome. Here in Italy, with short interruptions, he lived until 1841, working on Dead Souls.
Gogol wholeheartedly loved the “eternal city” of Rome with its monuments of art and history. This was confirmed by numerous letters to acquaintances and friends, in which the writer talked about his interest not only in the history of Italy, but also to everything modern that existed in it.
Nikolai Vasilievich most likely already had the idea of drawing up his foreign impressions in 1837. This is confirmed by many of Gogol's quotations about Rome. For example, in a letter from a writer to P.A. Poletnev was given judgments that are close to the idea of a future story:
“Everything is beautiful under this sky; whatever the wreck, the picture; there is some sparkling coloring on a person; a structure, a tree, a matter of nature, a matter of art - everything seems to breathe and speak under this sky ... Before Rome, all other cities seem like brilliant dramas in which the action takes place noisily and quickly in the eyes of the viewer. ”
In the same message, Gogol made a promise that his friends would definitely see his notes.
"In which, perhaps, the impressions of my soul were reflected correctly."
After a year and a half, the writer sent a message to A.S. Danilevsky, in which there were outline notes, anticipating the plan of "Rome". So, Gogol said:
“You have already seen and heard a lot - bustling Paris and carnival Italy. Right, a lot of everything, and a Russian man in the middle. ”
In this quote, it is enough to make only one replacement to see the plot of the story. That is, remove the “Russian man” and insert the “Italian prince” instead.
Critic reviews
Many researchers emphasize the fact that Gogol, as a rule, shows his heroes not in dynamics, but in social statics. And this can be seen in many of his works. The situation in the novel “Rome” is quite different. Gogol chose as his main character not a petty official at all, who is suppressed and enslaved by the bureaucratic machine. He introduced his reader to a man who was able to give a sober analysis of the surrounding reality, who has a wide mind and plays the role of a conscious observer of the central events of his modern time.
Unlike other works of the author, the hero of Gogol’s novel “Rome” is not limited in image. On the contrary, the young prince literally reflects the intellectual life of the writer. Just like the author, the young man was only briefly carried away by Paris. After that, he becomes disappointed in the cultural and political life of France, which was during the time of Louis Philippe. This is precisely what allowed him, having returned to his homeland, to overestimate it and to discover new features in the Italian people and in his culture that he had not guessed before.
The story "Rome" by N.V. Gogol and the soul of Rome merged into a single whole. The great past of his country, the architectural and artistic monuments of the city, as well as the fun of the national carnival are perceived by the prince as the result of his own ideological evolution. The hero realizes that in the world there is a culture of a more harmonious and higher type than that which can be seen in bourgeois Europe. After all, France, in his opinion, has veiled its strange inactivity with a cover of eternal boiling. At the same time, the young prince realizes that the higher and more perfect culture of Rome belongs not only to the Renaissance and not only to the distant past. Her fragments live in the Italian people. These people were able to maintain their independence, internal freedom, self-esteem, despite the political enslavement of the Austrians. The young prince could not appreciate these people until he lived abroad. However, everything has changed. Now he knows and understands everything thanks to disappointment in the political and public life of Paris of the 30s of the 19th century. The Annunziata girl was a symbol of the beauty of the Italian people. Gogol most likely wanted to crown their meeting, which is described in an excerpt from the novel, by a union of young people.
A few years after the publication of the story "Rome" by Gogol, it was noted that in European countries began to reveal themselves destructive and destructive principles. All of them were the forerunners of the powerful and broad revolutionary wave that swept through Europe in 1848. These historical events had a profound effect on Gogol. The writer was afraid that the revolution would roll over to Russia. That is why he defended the old order. Gogol believed that Russia, retaining its patriarchal foundations, was able to develop further without social upheaval. These thoughts are on the second, hidden plane of Rome. The writer, discussing the future of Italy, closely linked these thoughts with the future of his homeland. It is no coincidence that the novel “Rome” was created by the classic precisely at the time when he worked on the first volume of his famous Dead Souls.
Gogol Museum
In 2013, a grand event was held in Rome. Here, in the capital of Italy, a cultural center began to operate, which bears the name of N.V. Gogol. The doors of the apartment in which the Russian writer lived more than 150 years ago are open for visitors. It was here that the classic created his Dead Souls, Taras Bulbu and The Overcoat.
The Gogol Museum in Rome is located on Sistina Street, on the second floor. On the house - a plate with the inscription "Gogol lived here." The apartment recreated the atmosphere that was in it during the residence of the Russian writer. This is the inscription on the call - "Gogol", as well as the mailbox. Nikolai Vasilievich wrote a lot. In response, he also received a large amount of correspondence.
The apartment consists of three rooms. In the hallway is a library. Here the whole wall is lined with shelves. On the hanger you can see the Gogol cane and cloak.
In the evenings, the writer received guests. Almost the whole world of the city has been here. Gogol lived in Rome at the expense of the royal treasury, which allocated him 5,000 rubles. However, this money was not enough for Nikolai Vasilievich. That is why he, after a 2-3-month stay in Rome, went to Petersburg. After returning, the owner offered him other apartments in the same entrance. So Gogol lived here almost everywhere, from top to bottom.