The hypothesis of this dissertation is that Gogol's Arabesques, with its interweaving of genres, of fiction and non-fiction, sets a pattern for the whole of Gogol's writing. Throughout his career, Gogol wrote numerous non-fictional "commentaries" of a metaliterary nature in which he provided explanations of his artistic practice, expounded on his views of art, and developed his theories regarding the effect his art ideally should have on his readership. Critical to the methodology of this dissertation is the idea that Gogol's fictional works need to be examined within the framework of these "commentaries" and not as something independent of or in opposition to them. All of Gogol's oeuvre should be read as in the genre terms of Arabesques, with its intermingling of art and commentary on art. The dissertation provides a chronological examination of Gogol's fiction and his metaliterary commentary, with specific emphasis on analyzing their linkages.
This approach reveals a fundamental unity in Gogol's thought and art. Though the last decade of Gogol's life is often dismissed as being artistically barren, the aesthetic concerns that Gogol discusses during his last years are precisely those that occupied him from almost the beginning of his career. Gogol always adhered to the view that genuinely aesthetic art was "moral" in the sense
that it should prompt readers to engage in introspection. Critical to his oeuvre is the concept of "ascent through descent," the notion that an ideal can be portrayed not only through its positive embodiment, but through distortions of the ideal. Both the petrifying power of fear and the transfixing power of beauty can be means of arousing readers to pursue that ideal. Gogol's Dead Souls, which he classified as a poema (a genre that he first detailed in Arabesques), was intended to embrace the entirety of his vision, his positive and negative aspects, and to animate his compatriots by alternately reproaching and encouraging them with all the registers of the all-encompassing Russian "word." Gogol's admonition, "Be living and not dead souls," written just before his death, thus serves as a fitting capstone to his literary achievement.