For Gogol, "the church is the highest judge of all". "The Church alone is powerful enough to solve all our problems, perplexities and problems". ...the church contains the rules and steering wheel of the new order of things to come...
Devil's Slide: From Devil Spirit to Science Spirit
——See the 2014 edition of "The Spirit of the Devil"
text = empty language
Demons, always seen, but hidden. The magic or fear of demons is that this seeing is involuntary. The devil and those who fear it face each other in the dark without any barriers. In his thriller "VIY", Gogol describes such a terrifying monster, VIY, a demonic monster who can see through. The 2014 edition of "Devil's Spirit" was adapted from this novel by Gogol, but while maintaining the original storyline, major changes have been made, adding more than half of the plot, or reinterpreting it. a completely different theme. In contrast, the 1967 version of "The Spirit of the Devil" (also translated "Evil Spirit") almost simply turned the story into a ghost thriller, with a plot similar to the original.
The original story was to the effect that three seminary students were passing through a village, sleeping on a farm, and an old woman received them. One of the seminary students, Khoma Brut, felt like the old woman was seducing him. The old woman or the witch jumped up, rode on Khoma, and flew over the village. Khoma hated her so much that Khoma overpowered her and beat her repeatedly with wooden blocks. When the old woman was knocked to the ground, she became a beautiful girl. Khoma fled in terror, returned to Kiev, and continued to live as if nothing had happened. Later, the daughter of a wealthy Cossack family is said to have crawled home before dying and asked Khoma to wake her for three nights after her death and recite Bible verses. When Khoma was brought before the dead man, it turned out that this was the man he killed. Unable to escape, he had to guard the dead woman in the church for three nights as required. According to the Ukrainian legend to avoid ghosts, he drew a circle with lime and hid in the circle. As long as he waits until the rooster crows, he can escape. Although the demons danced wildly at night, due to the protection of this circle, those ghosts could not see him and could not approach him, so he escaped for two nights. And on the third night, the female ghost summoned the demon VIY, which could see Khoma, and he had to watch it, the ghosts jumped to Khoma under VIY's guidance. And just like that, Khoma died. When two of Khoma's classmates commented on the cause of Khoma's death, they believed that the reason why he died was because he was psychologically afraid of demons.
The 2014 version of "Devil's Spirit" roughly contains the basic plot of the story, but instead of telling the story from the perspective of Khoma, a seminary student, the possible encounters of Khoma are presented with disrupted retelling, thus adding suspense. Element. Accordingly, the moral of this demonic story has changed.
The original interpretation of this story can be seen in terms of the moral intent of religiousization. As a seminary student, if Khoma had strong religious beliefs, and therefore had the mentality to overcome the temptations and fears of demons, he would not have died. Khoma hated the witch because she was old and ugly, until he saw a beautiful girl, he couldn't bear to kill, but it was too late. And all Khoma did was flee the scene and continue to enjoy life as if nothing had happened. Gogol saw that what the soul wants to love is only beautiful things. As a result, the moral code becomes weak, or secondary. Good and evil are abandoned in the swamps of this shore by the satisfaction of man's will. What Gogol wanted to preach was religion, and a cultural reappraisal with Orthodoxy at its core. Catholicism and Protestantism in the West are considered inconsistent with the true Christian spirit.
There are also interpretations of this story in terms of secularized moral intentions, especially psychoanalytic interpretations. One of the more plausible explanations, I think, is that the evil spirits Khoma saw were just the embodiment of his subconscious guilt. Khoma escaped from the scene of his own evil, and the guilt caused by his actions was transferred into the subconscious. The ugly images of the yokai express Khoma's distaste for his actions. The circle that blocks the monsters is his inner barrier against this feeling. And because of his alcoholism and gradual physical and mental exhaustion, on the third night, the guilt became stronger and the psychological barrier was weakened, so he was scared to death. Such an explanation has its own interest, especially in literary analysis, but for the film "Spirit of the Devil," the significance lies not in the psychoanalytical explanation itself, but in its ability to transform supernatural phenomena of the external world for natural inner world phenomena.
The Spirit of the Devil (2014 edition) features Green, a cartographic scientist from England. The story thus became that scientists from advanced countries used secular technology to break the superstition in a small village in Ukraine, and used the spirit of science to awaken those who were used by religious superstition and bring them to the truth and Good understanding. In this way, the religious moral admonition and possible philosophical irony of the original Gogol story of evil spirits is cancelled, or even reversed. The original story is like a scary story told by an old man to a young man, in order to make the young man follow the rules and obey the moral order of religion. It can be seen from the 1967 edition of "The Spirit of the Devil" that the seminary students in it are very ungodly young people with a rather indifferent moral consciousness. In the 2014 adaptation of "The Spirit of the Devil," the seminary scene was canceled and replaced by girls' courtship activities in the wild - very similar to the description of "Guan Guan Ju Dou", although the tone of the scene looked cooler. In the new version of the story, religion is not only not a moral paradigm, but a tool to suppress human nature - an anti-religious narrative similar to the Enlightenment: in the opposition between science and religion, science represents light and religion represents darkness.
In this backward Ukrainian village, the village branch priest uses religion and fear to control the thoughts of the villagers. He secretly created demons, and declared in public that he used faith in God to resist demons. When Green, a scientist from Great Britain from the West, arrived, the village branch priest declared that this man would bring bad luck. The village chief (the centurion) who died of his daughter didn't believe much in the devil's tricks, so he hired Green, a scientist from Great Britain from the West, to find out the truth. The pastor of the village branch obstructed Greene while inciting the people to reject Greene. The pastor told the people: Don't try to understand the cause, don't search for the cause and effect of things; scientists say this is ignorance, let them say it; scientists think they bring the light of knowledge, but they bring demons ; Drive away the devil with faith! All in all, atheism is evil and immoral. However, enlightenment-minded scientists do not think so, for them, the devil is not brought by knowledge, but by inner darkness.
Taken together, the 2014 version of "Devil's Spirit", although not flawless and curious, is much better than those fantasy films that hollowly promote "love and justice" in terms of theme settings. Mistaking the empty "love and justice" as positive energy is likely to be a refurbishment of contemporary anti-intellectuality. Of course, there will always be fantasies, so-called religion is not necessarily evil, and so-called science is not necessarily factual. Just like when Green mentions Isaac Newton in the film, as if Newton taught him to reject supernatural explanations, in fact, Newton at the time was closer to a Christian scientist. Enlightenment is not complete, and inner clarity is not ready-made.
Appendix I:
The 2014 version of "The Spirit of the Devil"
At the beginning of the film, in the evening, a group of girls "on the River Island" let the water float away the flower basket with candles. go with. A girl (female No. 2) found that the village chief's daughter was missing, so she went to find her. Walking to a remote place, the injured village chief's daughter suddenly grabbed the second girl and pulled her into the water. At this time, a "monster" with multiple horns rescued the second female. The next morning, the village chief's daughter and the second girl were found. The village chief's daughter told the village chief that she would ask Khoma from the seminary to pray for her for three days. died. Khoma was then arrested and went to pray in a church on a hill. At night, Khoma appears to have encountered a ghost. By the morning of the fourth day, Khoma was found unconscious in the church by the village priest, who declared that the place was cursed. The church was sealed off and the surrounding area was made a restricted area.
On the other side of the story, Green, a geographer + institutional expert, was disliked by a possible future father-in-law, so he went to prove his worth. With Isaac Newton as his teacher and Leonardo da Vinci as his example, he drove a special carriage to the East to draw a map. When he came to a forest in Ukraine, he met two of Khoma's classmates - as in the original story, these three seminary students, Khoma was a philosophy major, and the other two were theology and rhetoric majors - which While drinking with Green, the two told Green about their experience of coming to the village with Khoma, who they thought was seduced by a witch. Atheist scientist Green does not believe this statement at all, and believes that this supernatural explanation is not rational at all.
Then, Green came to the village and was hired by the village chief to find out the facts. He was drinking with a group of people at the house of the second girl, and listened to them tell about the rumoured encounter with a ghost during Khoma's nightly prayers. While intoxicated, Green seems to have actually seen the legendary evil spirit Viy. But for atheists, this is just a subconscious dream. In the process of exploration, Green was involved in the struggle for power between the village chief and the village branch priest, and constantly encountered danger. Green gradually understood that there were neither witches nor demons. These were conceived by the emotion of fear, and were exploited by the ill-intentioned priest of the village branch. In the scene of "In the River Island" at the beginning of the story, Khoma picked up the flower basket of the village chief's daughter, and when they were about to develop their love in the open waves, the village branch priest dressed in the skin of a demon maimed the village chief's daughter and knocked him unconscious. Khoma. In that abandoned church, when the pastor of the village branch was about to kill Green, the crumbling cross in the church knocked the pastor off the cliff. When the truth came out, Green drove out of the village and headed for the road to Moscow. Next Green's experience will be staged in "Devil's Spirit 2: Journey to China".
Appendix II:
On Gogol in the History of Russian Philosophy
Gogol recognizes the tragic essence of the essential irreconcilability of aesthetics and morality in the human soul... Only an essence deeper than both beauty and goodness—that is, religion—can unite the two. . . . Gogol went along this path to the point where the whole of culture was linked to the Church - in the same way he now poses the subject of ideology and introduces once and for all the term "Orthodox culture" to Russian thought. idea. ...Gogol called for the transformation of the whole culture in the spirit of the Orthodox Church, ... and this is why Gogol stubbornly assigns the task of witchcraft to art: we cannot repeat Pushkin ... we cannot create art for art's sake... Art faces another task, which is to inspire human beings to fight for the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, we must combine our own creation with the purpose of serving the world unique to the church.
For Gogol, "the church is the highest judge of all". "The Church alone is powerful enough to solve all our problems, perplexities and problems". . . . the church contains the rules and steering wheel of the new and forthcoming order of things—the more I penetrate into it with my own mind, reason, and thinking, the more I will be impressed by its ability to reconcile all contradictions. Surprised by sex and the inability of today's Western Church to reconcile these contradictions... The Western Church will only push humanity away from Christ.
View more about Forbidden Empire reviews
