Provocation of the fantasy: mystificated quotation of D. S. Merezhkovsky as a literary fact in N. V. Gogol studies

At the beginning of the 20th century, half a century after the death of Gogol, in the periodicals of that time along with the memoirs of his last days of life appeared a story about how the writer's spiritual father, archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, a famous preacher from Rzhev, supposedly asked the writer to “disavow Pushkin”. This theme immediately became one of the most urgent ones in the eyes of the writers of different directions. Thus, Gogol's legacy once again turned out to be the center of ideological disputes and conflicts. Inspite of a rather stormy discussion of this issue at that time, the question of origins of the “spectacular” evidence of the irrepressible, “unreasonable” jealousy of the Rzhev pastor was left untouched. Accepted for granted, this testimony became later paradigmatic while covering the last days of Gogol's life, inevitably reproaching Fr. Matthew (or, on the contrary, making an attempt to “justify” the priest). Meanwhile, a detailed study of this issue offered in this article shows that the author of the notorious phrase was not archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, but one of the key representatives of a new pre-revolutionary era D. S. Merezhkovsky. The mystified “evidence”, taken in 1902 by Merezhkovsky as a basis of his famous writing on Gogol, was initially promulgated by him at the first meeting of the Religious and Philosophical Assemblies, inaugurated in St. Petersburg on November 29, 1901