GOGOL'S REFLECTIONS ON HAPPINESS (BASED ON "DEAD SOULS" AND "SELECTED PASSAGESFROM CORRESPONDENCE WITH FRIENDS")
This paper is devoted to the peculiarities of N.V. Gogol's ideas of happiness in "Dead Souls" and «Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends". Following his contemporaries, the author turns to the central question of the era - the reflection on the history of the human soul, the analysis of the reasons for the shallowing of the meaning of personal existence. Following Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol attempts to analyze the process of the tragic disintegration of the human personality, the disintegration into "internal" and "external" person. Accordingly, the question of the inner man, of the deadness of the soul is not just a Gogolian question, it is in many ways an epochal one. For Gogol, the main task in these works was not just to show vulgarity as a tragic sign of the era, not just to express mockery and show the depths of the "vileness" of man. For him, the function of the satire to which he refers is close in its influence to the tragedy of the ancient world; the satire, according to Gogol, was to fulfill a cathartic function, that is, it was to make the Russian man, Russian society fear, experience suffering and come to understand the true foundations of life, to understand what a real person is, what true happiness is, as a result, it was to lead thinking and feeling people through purification to transformation and spiritual revival and rid Russian society of vices. For Gogol it is thoughts of spiritual enlightenment that become the sign of man's accession to true happiness.