The metamorphosis of the old woman into a beautiful young maiden when she is beaten by the protagonist is a pivotal moment in the final version of Gogol&soft;'s Vij (1842) and marks a significant departure from the original Mirgorod text. V. V. Gippius has remarked at the deliberateness with which Gogol&soft; approached the metamorphosis, noting that it occurs gradually not in the storyline itself, but rather, in the process of Gogol&soft;'s own revisions. Yet in charting the figure's gradual transformation, Gippius fell short, for the change into a beautiful woman is not final even within the revised storyline. Nor is it the first time the old crone metamorphoses before the hero's eyes. A closer examination of this metamorphosis, particularly in light of Gogol&soft;'s theoretical work, reveals that the transformation is even more gradual—and probably more deliberate—than Gippius guessed.

Gogol&soft; began work on Vij in 1833, just three years after the publication of

Although many critics have commented upon Xoma Brut's fleeting vision of the Alcinoe-like water-nymph during his erotic ride with the old woman, few have included it as a step in the woman's transformation into a beautiful maiden or integrated this moment into a coherent reading of the text. I argue that the description of the water-nymph, which is the lyrical climax of the tale, corresponds to the artist's creative vision at the moment of its conception—the unembodied feminine ideal of Gogol&soft;'s Romantic aesthetics. I show that as the story progresses, she continues to metamorphose: with each of Xoma Brut's subsequent encounters with her she is described in increasingly masculine and material terms until she is finally nothing more than a purely bodily—and grammatically masculine—corpse (trup). This transformation is echoed by a shift in Gogol&soft;'s use of verbs of sight that reinforces Xoma's changing relationship with what begins as his own internal vision and turns into a separate, independent material being, the object of his gaze.

My analysis of these parallel shifts in the text leads to several layers of metaliterary interpretation. First, I compare Xoma's fear of the dead maiden to a writer's anxiety over losing the essence of cherished ideas when they are given fixed form in writing: Xoma's terror grows as he faces ever more concrete, fixed, and masculine versions of his former ideal. While it might appear that Gogol&soft; presents this as a universal and unresolvable dilemma for the artist, I suggest that he sets up this model only to disprove it. In my conclusion I contrast the unsuccessful artist Xoma with Gogol&soft; himself, hypothesizing that the continual transmogrification of the female body could represent Gogol&soft;'s own method of selecting, appropriating, and exploiting existing folkloric and literary forms as he searched for a new, individual form of expression.