How do we know what a book means?

The most obvious answer is: “Ask the author,” – if they are still available, that is.

Once, Vissarion Belinsky, a Russian literary critic, asked Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls, about the meaning of his famous play The Government Inspector. Belinsky and the Russian intelligentsia in the mid-19th century interpreted it as a scathing social satire exposing the corruption and moral decay of the Tsarist regime.

To his utter amazement, Gogol’s own interpretation was quite different. He said he had written this story as a mystical parable about what awaits the soul at the Last Judgment. If the soul is “dead,” the “government inspector Khlestakov” – one’s inexorable conscience – will appear out of nowhere and expose the soul’s pettiness and vanity when it least expects it.

Belinsky was outraged and wrote Gogol an angry letter, accusing him of misinterpreting his own story. According to Belinsky, Gogol turned away from the truth of life and toward preaching church sermons.

When I first read this amusing anecdote, it was a revelation. Most of the Soviet-era films and theatrical productions of The Government Inspector that I had seen emphasized Belinsky’s interpretation – largely ignoring Gogol’s own rendering.

Apparently, Gogol’s meaning was too large for the Soviet ideological machine to swallow.

Who was right? It would seem obvious that Gogol’s meaning is the correct one. However, Belinsky’s meaning is not wrong in and of itself. The story reads quite well on the horizontal level as well.

This is why Soviet ideology loved the play so much. The Government Inspector could be read as a scathing social satire of bureaucracy and Tsarism. But it is much, much more than that. By largely ignoring Gogol’s vertical dimension of meaning, Soviet ideology turned The Government Inspector into a parody – as it did with the works of many other classical writers.

But how is it even possible to take something so deep and meaningful and reduce it to something lesser that still reads and sounds “true enough”?

George MacDonald says:

One difference between God’s work and man’s is, that, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is a layer upon layer of ascending significance. – The Fantastic Imagination

If Gogol touched upon something true and eternal in his play, it would always mean more than he intended. Every authentic work of art contains layers upon layers of ascending significance. The problem arises when we mistake a lower layer for the only one. That is when we open the door to a profound distortion of reality.

The Lord of the Rings can certainly be read as a blockbuster, because every spiritual adventure contains elements of one. But Tolkien never meant it to be a blockbuster. To reduce his work to one is to mistake a lower layer of meaning for the whole and give it more significance than it deserves.

The Hobbit can certainly be read as a children’s story, but to reduce it to one is to ignore the vertical dimension of Tolkien’s thought. At a deeper level, it is a story about embarking on life’s ultimate adventure and discovering who you truly are along the way.

Each higher level in this ascending order of significance encompasses all the levels below it, while none of the lower levels encompasses all the layers above it. Only the highest level contains them all, because it opens up into the Logos itself.

What are your favorite works and why?

- I don't speak or read Russian. But my friend does. She was raised in Russia and has been in the states for the last thirty years. I'd like to get her a book in her mother tongue. But I don't know where to start. Any help?

Has anyone read it? I'm a few chapters in.

Tolstoy famously wrote that Asya was “the weakest thing Turgenev has ever written.”

I like it so far.