During the winter of 1843–44, Gogol&soft; wrote (in a
privately-circulated text that he urged his closest friends to read
carefully and often) that the devil's true temptation is despondency
(desperation, which is the murder of the soul, the most terrible
of all evil deeds committed by man, for it severs all paths to
salvation and therefore it is hated by God the most of all
sins.
passions
or evil
thoughts,
the forerunners of the seven deadly sins—and
the one most feared by Christian monastics. In his seventh-century
guidebook to attaining the monastic ideal, one of eight deadly vices, and indeed the
gravest of them all.
In its most typical conception acedia
leads to boredom, rudeness, aversion to others, spite, and aggression.
Like the other deadly vices, acedia is the property of its own
specialized demon who takes advantage of any opportunity to subjugate
its victims; acedia's designated demon is commonly known as the
noonday
or midday demon,
the daemonium
meridianum featured in the ninety-first Psalm in the Septuagint
Bible.
That Gogol&soft; would seem preoccupied with acedia or despondency
in 1844 comes as no surprise, given the way in which his increasingly
paranoid religiosity and obsession with the devil were evolving during
his final decade. What is extraordinary, however, is that ten years
earlier Gogol&soft; had deeply imbued one of his most comic tales,
This paper will examine