The Beautiful Afar

The Beautiful Afar () is a so-called "winged expression" (i.e. a catchphrase or a phraseme) in the Russian language. It was first used by Nikolai Gogol in the novel The "Dead Souls" first published in 1842. The expression is used to humorously, sometimes ironically, refer to the often fictitious place of well-being, where a person who is not burdened with routine rests, leads a carefree, unladen, and idle lifestyle.
History of the expression.
The "Dead Souls" were written by the author while residing mostly abroad, mainly in Italy and Germany, but also in France, Switzerland, and Austria. In one of the lyrical digressions of the novel in the second chapter of the first volume of The "Dead Souls", the author exclaims: "Rus'! Rus’! It's you that I see, from my wonderful, "beautiful afar", I see YOU." These lines were written by a writer while living in Italy. By self-admission, Gogol loved Italy and called it 'my dear soul', in a letter to Zhukovsky he writes: "If you knew with what joy I abandoned Switzerland and flew to my dear soul - Italy. She is mine! No one in the world will take her from me."
As an idiomatic expression, "The Beautiful Afar" was first coined by Vissarion Belinsky, in the argument against Nikolai Gogol himself. Belinsky attacked Gogol with an angry letter dated July 3 (15), 1847, about Gogol's journalistic book "Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends" published in the same year: 