Reflections on "The Mysterious Portrait"

I need to write more. Every once in awhile I will note down stuff in a personal journal but I have not been very regular in doing so nor are my thoughts fully developed. Perhaps reflecting on the New Year or reading "The Mysterious Portrait" or some other thought process has pushed me to action. Among other as-of-yet undecided writing tasks, I am going to begin keeping a journal of my thoughts after reading books & short stories.

If you have not yet read "The Mysterious Portrait" please read it now.

The story follows Tchartkoff as he goes from a dark and soulful student-artist who becomes corrupted by easy money into a foppish and useless fashionista and ultimate despair. Gogol, the author of "The Mysterious Portrait" was a deeply religious Russian Orthodox. In essence, this is a story of materialism corrupting spiritual struggle, or "podvig". Podvig is a Christian Orthodox belief, according to St Theophan, that "the only true path to virtue to be pain and hard work... lightness and ease are a sign of a false path. Anyone who is not struggling, not in podvig, is in prelest” (spiritual delusion) (The Path to Salvation, pg 209). I am not Russian Orthodox and while I do think that hard work is essential as a path to virtue, I am not convinced of the necessity of pain and pure struggle. I struggled with it a lot because I can feel myself relating to the hard work part but the struggle and religiousity components of the story, which are interlinked with the hard work part, I do not believe are necessary.

There is a real intuitive appeal to contrasting spiritual fulfillment versus earthly pleasure. Tchartkoff makes increasingly banal made-to-order portraits of military men and society ladies. The short story posits that this commercialization of art destroys the transcendental qualities of the art and the artist. Monetary rewards replace spiritual fulfillment, leading artists down a path of hedonic excess rather than artistic growth. There is a legitimate argument that purely commercial art risks becoming kitsch. But it feels wrong to me. I am not convinced that commercialization alone is what drives Tchartkoff to madness. His teacher notes before he gets the painting that Tchartkoff has a foppish streak before Tchartkoff falling under the influence of the artwork. I also find it hard to believe that there were not degenerate artists living in pre-commercial medieval kingdoms as courtiers in nobles courts or as independently wealthy nobles/merchants. Having money allows people to do more degenerate stuff because money is a resource they can use to buy more extravagant stuff and prevents them from thinking about more basic issues which would take up their time from degeneracy (you cant have time to be a degenerate if you have to wash your clothes and make your own food).

What is clearer to me is that Tchartkoff becomes depressed and banal alongside with his work. That the artwork and the artist are mirrors of each other. Transcendetal art produces transcendental artists as they work on the art, itself. So why is it that Tchartkoff produces foppish crap, if not through the effects of money? Why is he dissatisfied with his work? Is it the rote monotony - would he find work in a factory equally miserable? Is it the realization that he failed to reach his potential and has squandered his life? Is it something else? He has three moments of sudden realization. The first is that when he sees the beautiful foreign painting and he realizes that the art he had been producing was meaningless: "All his being, all his life, had been aroused in one instant, as if youth had returned to him, as if the dying sparks of his talent had blazed forth afresh...to think of having mercilessly wasted the best years of his youth, of having extinguished, trodden out perhaps, that spark of fire which, cherished in his breast, might perhaps have been developed into magnificence and beauty, and have extorted too, its meed of tears and admiration! It seemed as though those impulses which he had known in other days re-awoke suddenly in his soul." The second was when he failed to make a new piece of beautiful art and turns to his early works "and all the misery of his former life came back to him. 'Yes,' he cried despairingly, 'I had talent: the signs and traces of it are everywhere visible'" (pgs wtvr). Again, the MISERY of his former life came back to him at the same moment he realizes he had talent. The third was when he saw the mysterious portrait and realized that it was the catalyst for his decline.

I have always been a fan of Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, basically that as long as someone has a sense of meaning, almost any pain and suffering can be survived but that the suffering does not provide the individual with meaning. I think a lack of purpose and meaning is what drives Tchartkoff's decline.

There is also the second part of the short story where it explains the origins of the painting, which did not interest me as much. The father finds purpose in religion and sends his son off to Rome to sit in a tiny studio and make good art. Why didn't the son succumb to Rome's vices? The financial sector in Italy in the 1800s, as far as I can tell, was stronger than it was in Russia at the time Gogol was writing.

So does it actually mean? Money allows for degeneracy as there are more degenerate options available but to say it is the root of it seems a little extreme. I'm at least not convinced that poverty is necessary for good art.