GOGOL AND THE DEVIL

Christ is tenderness, compassion, the beauty of painting, music and literature, peace, humor, good humor, chastity, health and hope. Christ is hope, harmony, stillness. His opponent, on the other hand, represents stillness, envy, revenge, lust, war, terrorism, politics, restlessness, brutal laughter, hatred, evil. They call him not for nothing the prince of lies. They are two forces that rule the world, in the Persian religion they are perceived as Hormuz and Ahriman. Both alternations (the cross and the light in perpetual struggle with the spirit of darkness: the devil) are stamped by Nicolai Gogol 1809-1852 in the novel “The Portrait”. Born in the Ukraine, all of his work was written in Russian and it is, together with Dostoevsky, who best captures the idiosyncrasy of the Russian soul. Let's hope the kyiv butcher doesn't blow up his monument like he did with Pushkin's. Master Gogol tells the story of a watercolourist who lived a dissipated life in the cafes on Nevski Avenue and in the wealthiest neighborhood of Kolomna in the capital of the tsars. His neighbor was a Jewish loan shark that the whole neighborhood feared and had to make loans to forty percent. The old usurer feeling the call of the land goes to visit the painter and asks him to make a portrait of him because he wanted to pose for posterity. When he paints the picture, the artist feels a certain unease when transferring the gaze of that old Shylock to the canvas. He is feeling bad. They give you Basques. Even so, he manages to finish it and presents it to the client. The loan shark tells him that he doesn't like him and rejects him. So the portraitist has to "eat" his work after being received so badly by the client. Good. The work remains in his workshop, but strange things begin to happen. Because the eyes of the model seem alive and disturb the beholder. Sometimes the author of the work has nightmares and he sees the usurer leave the painting and walk around the room. He decides to give it to a friend. This one comes off of him because as a result of acquiring it misfortunes happen to him: his wife and a son die. He chooses to give it to a merchant. Which in turn sells it to a poor painter for twenty kopecks. It was the last money he had left. He sets it up in his bedroom and the glare thing happens again. The portraitist relives paranormal sensations. The gentleman in the painting exhaled fire through his eyes. It was a look that spoke. The next day the landlord comes to collect the rent, he has nothing to pay him with, we will evict you. A guard comes with him who examines the frame of the picture and at that moment a small bag containing the sum of a thousand ounces of gold is released. Without the landlord and the police realizing it, he keeps it in his shirt. From then on, luck began to change. It's everything I'll give you if prostrating yourself before me you adore me of the temptations of Jesus, the poor painter who had nowhere to fall dead becomes the most requested and famous portraitist in Petersburg, all the mothers send their daughters to him to stamp his beautiful heart of palm to the cake and thus be able to marry a good match but after the blessing the curse. All pacts with the devil end with the destruction of those who entrust themselves to him. Chartkov reaches the heights of fame, comes the collapse, fattens, gives himself to pleasures, fumes rise to his head, he is no longer admired and his art declines. As a result of sadness he falls ill and dies.

The narrative is not linear. He has quite a few twists and turns, a luxury only geniuses allow themselves. In the second part he describes the true personality of the artist who painted the devil. It is about an icon painter who is horrified by his work and regretfully enters a charterhouse. The abbot of the monastery asks him to paint a picture of the Virgin. He refuses saying that he doesn't feel clean. He does penance and remains isolated as a hermit in a hut mortifying his flesh, fasting and whipping himself with disciplines. At the end he presents himself to the prior already purified and sets to the task, the result a wonderful, heavenly picture; “for man the intuition of the divine is in art. He is above the passions and pride of Satan.” Gogol had a mystical crisis. And he must have spent some time in a monastery. Consulting with a "starets". From his conversations with the cenobite came the decision as repentance to burn the second part of his great work "The Dead Souls" one of the greatest in universal literature, sinister advice because readers of all time will no longer be able to follow the adventures from Chinoviev the tax collector. Like Las Almas Muertas, the Ukrainian exhibits his irony and social criticism. For example: when things go wrong the Russians take to drink, he says that the doormen of the buildings in St. Petersburg were mostly army graduates. Demobilized, the government gave them that pre