The Image of France in the Creative Mind of N.V. Gogol

The image of France in Gogol's creative heritage bears an aesthetic and philosophical load. French motifs that fill the stories of the third volume of Essays and the early journalistic works, converge in a common point of intersection - the passage "Rome", where the image of this country gets the maximum development. At the core of the image is Paris, a myth city, a ghost city that consumes man. Personality loses its independence and national identity, which for Gogol is comparable to the loss of his own face, essence and soul. The entire set of connections and relationships between people, depicted in the works of the writer, is formed into a panorama of spiritual disintegration of society and personality. Deep inner contradictions born in the mass consciousness by the clash of different cultural areas, the complexity of national identification of a person become one of the main and universal problems of Gogol's creativity.