The great masters of Russian literature

It may be said, that the emancipation of literature in Russia dates back scarcely fifty years. All the Russian writers, whether of poetry or prose, with the exception possibly of one or two satirists, were little more than imitators. Some of the most valued authors during the first half of this century, Zhukovsky for example, owed all their fame to translations. Pushkin himself, who, on the recommendation of Merimée, has for some time been admired in France, did not venture far from the Byronic manner. He died, to be sure, just at the moment when he had found his path. He suspected the profit that could be made from national sources; he had a presentiment that a truly Russian literature was about to burst into bloom; he aided in its production. His greatest originality lies in his having predicted, preached, perhaps prepared or inspired Gogol.

Nikolaï Gogol[1] was born in 1810, in a village of the government of Poltava. His father, a small proprietor with some education, obtained for him a scholarship in the college of Niézhin. Fortunately the young Gogol was able to hold his own in rebellion against the direction of his instructors, and neither the dead nor the living languages brought him any gain. He thus failed of becoming a commonplace man of letters, and consequently had less trouble in the end with discovering his original genius.

In his father’s house, on the other hand, he received a priceless education, such as Pushkin, in spite of all his efforts, vainly attempted to obtain. He was imbued with the poetry of the people. His childhood was entertained by the marvellous legends of the Malo-Russians. Gogol’s grandfather was one of those Zaparog Cossacks whose heroic exploits the author of “Taras Bulba” was destined to celebrate. He excelled in the art of story-telling, and his narrations had a tinge of mystery about them that brought the cold chills. “When he was speaking I would not move from my place all day long, but would listen, ... and the things were so strange that I always shivered, and my hair stood on end. Sometimes I was so frightened by them, that at night every thing seemed like God knows what monsters.” This fund of mainly fantastic and diabolical legends afterwards furnished the grandson of the Ukraïne village story-teller, with the material for his first original work.[2]

Gogol’s first attempts were not original: he began too early. Scarcely out of the gymnasium, he began to write in rhyme; in the morning trying all the styles in vogue, at evening making parodies upon them. He established a manuscript journal “The Star” (Zvyezd). The student intoxicated by reading Pushkin still remained in the trammels of uninspired verse, in the formulas of romanticism. Some characteristics already began to reveal the precocious observer, the brilliant satirist. Thus his prose articles, clandestinely introduced, had a tremendous success never equalled in his ripest years, even by his comedy of “The Revizor.”

After his studies were ended, Gogol was obliged to conquer the favor of a public less complacent than the rhetoricians and philosophers of Niézhin. He obtained (1830) an exceedingly modest office in the Ministry of Appanages (Udyélui). But in the bureau, where, like Popritshchin in the “Recollections of a Lunatic” his service was limited to sharpening dozens of pens for the director, he worked out a comedy on the pattern of Scribe’s, and spun a cottony idyl in the German style. The comedy was hissed by the public, and the idyl was so unkindly received by the critics that Gogol had this attempt withdrawn from the market.[3]

Gogol almost simultaneously shook off the double yoke of bureaucratic slavery and literary imitation. Instead of following, like so many others, in the track of French, English, or German writers, he determined to be himself. He went back over the course of his early years to find in this way in all their freshness the impressions of his childhood; he returned to his first, his real masters, and began once more to get material around the Malo-Russian hearth. He appealed to his mother for recollections; he besought the aid of his friends; he put them like so many bloodhounds on the track of half-forgotten legends, half-vanished traditions; he collected documents of every sort and kind: and when he was sufficiently permeated with savagery to think and speak, if need were, like a Cossack of the last century, he created a work at once modern and archaic, learned and enthusiastic, mystic and refined,—Russian, in a word,—and published it under the title “Evenings at the Farm” (Vetchera na Khutoryé bliz Dikanki).

This series of fantastic tales, published in the reviews under the pseudonyme of Rudui Panko (Sandy the little nobleman), produced a singular effect. The Russian reader was surprised and charmed in the same way as a French traveller, who, after having visited all the countries and admired all the floras of the world, should discover the banks of the Seine, and declare that he was willing to exchange the splendors of the savannas for a tuft of turf and a bunch of violets. No one was more struck with the value of these tales than Pushkin. He recommended their author to Pletnef, minister of public instruction; and Gogol was appointed professor. The servitude was still more onerous than that of the bureaucracy. The young writer had too much originality to bend under it very long: a second time he escaped, and took his departure for the Ukraïna.

The Zaparog Cossack’s grandson used to say that there was material for an Iliad in the exploits of his ancestors. He buried himself in the study of the annals of Little Russia; he collected the traditions; more than all, he picked up the national songs of the Ukraïna,—those kinds of heroic cantilenas composed by the players of the bandura. A modern diaskenastes, he constructed a body out of all these poetic remains, joined them together by means of a romantic plot, and renewed the astonishment caused by the appearance of “Evenings at the Farm,” by publishing “Taras Bulba.” The minister was convinced that a man who could thus revivify history could not fail to be skilled in teaching it: he therefore offered Gogol the chair of mediæval history in the University of Petersburg. The romancer gave only one lecture, his opening lecture. This day he dazzled his audience. The remainder of his course was for both students and professor only a long-continued bore, which ended finally in his losing the place.

Gogol dreamed of a different success. In 1835 he published his comedy, “The Revizor” (The Inspector General). It was applauded, and, what was of more value, it was desperately attacked. The author gained as many admirers and enemies as “Tartuffe” cost Molière. At Petersburg, as at Paris, the masterpiece was produced on the stage, and kept before the public, only by a fortunate caprice on the part of the sovereign.

Gogol’s health, which had long been failing, caused him about this period to leave Russia. He lived many years in Italy. There he completed his great romance, “Dead Souls” (Mertvuia Dushi). The work appeared in complete form in 1841.[4] The author had reached a state of nervous irritation and hypochondria, which was more and more manifested in his correspondence, published in part towards 1846. The last years of Gogol’s life were only a long torture. A sort of mystic madness took possession of his brain, exhausted or over-excited by production: death put an end to his nervous disease (1852).

Dreaminess and banter are the two natural tendencies, the two favorite pleasures, of the Russian mind. They are also the two elements of Gogol’s talent. At the beginning of his career as a writer, and during the sprightly years of his youth, it is dreaminess which prevails: the narrator penetrates with enthusiasm into the untrodden paths of the Malo-Russian legends. On the track of witches, of Rusalkas, he finds the unpublished poetry of the forests, the ponds, the wide stretches, and the sky of the steppes. These lovely days pass. With age, this restless spirit grows gloomy and melancholy. The observer’s eyes turn from the pacifying spectacle of nature, and attempt only to notice the vexing absurdities of humanity.

The satirical spirit in Gogol is first expressed in verse. He is poetical only in prose; but his prose is equal to the most beautiful verse. In truth, poetry is not rhyme, or metre, or even rhythm: it is the power of touching, of recording its impressions in vivid and genuine images. To feel emotion suitable for poetic expression, there is no need of picturing lofty heroes, or of spreading marvellous landscapes before the eyes. Properly speaking, a Malo-Russian peasant is like a hero in Corneille; and the imagination of an author, and therefore of his reader, can just as well be stirred by the view of a bit of the flat and naked steppe, as by the sight of the Bay of Naples or a sunset on the ruins of the Coliseum.

Gogol understood this, and, what is far better, made it understood. Instead of preparing his imitation of Werther and his copy of Childe Harold in the fashion of so many others, he had the courage to go to Nature for his models. And in this Russian nature, the wild grace and strange flavor of which he was, so to speak, the first to feel, that which attracts him more than all else is its unostentatious aspect. His field of observation is the village. His heroes are unimportant people, half-barbarous peasants, true Cossack lads, hard drinkers, with circumscribed intellectual training, with superstitious imaginations; in a word, very simple souls, whose artless passions are shown without any veil, but whose very ingenuousness is a deliriously restful contrast to our romantic or theatrical characters, so artificial in their labored mechanism, so insipid and perfunctory in the refinements of their conventionality.

Gogol places his characters in their natural surroundings. It is the hamlet bordering on the steppe, monotonous and infinite, deserted and mysterious. All this country appeals to the writer’s imagination, as well as to that of those Malo-Russians, whose history, past and present, he will describe for us in turn. Each shrub inshrines a memory; each winding valley veils a legend. In yonder stretch of water, beset with rushes and starred with nenuphars, the sceptic traveller in his indifference sees only a sort of marsh. The peasant who is here a poet, and the poet who remembers that he was once a peasant, know well who the Rusalka is who has been hiding there these many years. From its surface, on nights when the moon lights up the silvery mist, the queen of the drowned comes forth with her train of virgins, to find and drag into the depths of the water her stepmother, the witch whose evil deeds drove her to suicide.

But to move those whom she has brought forth, this land of the Ukraïna has no need of being wrapped in mystery. Gogol has only to pronounce the name of the Dniépr to arouse a sort of passionate woe, whose expression, unhappily almost untranslatable, equals in beauty the accents of the noblest poetry.

[5]“Marvellous is the Dniépr in peaceful weather, when he rolls his wide waters in a free and reposeful course by forests and mountains. Not the slightest jar, not the slightest tumult. Thou beholdest, and thou canst not tell if his majestic breadth is moving or is stationary. It is almost like a sheet of molten glass. It might be compared to a road of blue ice, without measure in its breadth, without limit to its length, describing its wondrous curves in the emerald distance. How delightful for the burning sun to turn his gaze to earth, and to plunge his rays into the refreshing coolness of the glassy waves, and for the trees along the bank to see their reflections in this crystal mirror! Oh the green-crowned trees! They stand in groups with the flowers of the field by the water-side, and they bend over and gaze, and cannot weary of gazing. They cannot sufficiently admire their bright reflection, and they smile back to it, and greet it, waving their branches. They dare not look towards the middle of the Dniépr: none but the sun and the azure sky gaze at it. Some daring bird occasionally wings his way to the middle of the Dniépr. Oh the giant that he is! There is not a river like him in the world!

“Marvellous indeed is the Dniépr on a warm summer’s night, when all things are asleep,—both man and beast and bird. God only from on high looks down majestically on sky and earth, and shakes with solemnity his chasuble, and from his priestly raiment scatters all the stars. The stars are kindled, they shine upon the world; and all at the same instant also flash forth from the Dniépr. He holds them every one, the Dniépr, in his sombre bosom; not one shall escape from him, unless, indeed, it perish from the sky. The black forest, dotted with sleeping crows, and the mountains rent from immemorial time, strive, as they catch the light, to veil him with their mighty shadow. In vain! There is naught on earth can veil the Dniépr! Forever blue, he marches onward in his restful course by day and night. He can be seen as far as human sight can pierce. As he goes to rest voluptuously, and presses close unto the shore by reason of the nocturnal cold, he leaves behind him a silver trail, flashing like the blade of a Damascus sword, and then he yields to sleep again. Then also he is wonderful, the Dniépr, and there is no river like him in the world!

“But when the black clouds advance like mountains on the sky, the gloomy forest sways, the oaks clash, and the lightning, darting zigzag across the cloud, lights up suddenly the whole world, terrible then the Dniépr is! The columns of water thunder down, dashing against the mountain, and then with shouts and groans draw far away, and weep, and break out into tears again in the distance. Thus some aged Cossack mother consumes away with grief, when she gets ready her son to take his departure for the army. With many airs, a genuine good-for-naught, he dashes up on his black steed, his hand on his hip, and his cap set jauntily awry; and she, weeping at the top of her voice, runs after him, seizes him by the stirrup, strives to grasp the reins, and twists her arms, and breaks into a passion of scalding tears. Like dark stains in the midst of the struggling waves, emerge uncannily the stumps of charred trees and the rocks on the shelving shore. And the boats moored along the shore knock against each other as they rise and fall. What Cossack would dare embark in his canoe when the ancient Dniépr is angry? Apparently yonder man knows not that his waves swallow men like flies.”

The same powerful and charming feeling is found in all the descriptions which are scattered throughout Gogol’s work. One must read in “Taras Bulba” the celebrated description of the beauty of the steppe at different hours of the day. What a picture it is of this ocean of gilded verdure, where, amid the delicate dry stalks of the tall grass, shine patches of corn-flower with their shades of blue, of violet, or of red; the broom with its pyramid of yellow flowers; the clover with its white tufts; and in this luxuriant flora a corn-stalk, brought thither God knows how, lifting itself with the haughty vigor of a solitary fruit! The warm atmosphere is vocal with the cries of unseen birds. A few hawks are seen hovering; a flock of wild geese sweep by, and the prairie-gull mounts and swoops down again, now black and glistening in the sunbeam. Then it is the evening twilight, with its vapors descending denser and more dense, its perfumes rising more and more penetrating; the jerboas creep out from their hiding-places; the crickets madly chirp in their holes; and “one hears resounding, like a vibrating bell in the sleepy air, the cry of the solitary swan winging its way from some distant lake.”[6]

What gives this picturesque and vivid prose a singularly penetrating accent, is the writer’s emotion. His admiration has a truly passionate character, and this passion breaks out in cries of joy, even in expletives. “The deuce take you, steppes, how beautiful you are!” There is in this a flavor of savagery which takes hold of us like a novelty, and which must have been as agreeable to the Russian taste as the secretly preferable national dish after too long use of foreign insipidities.

And even for many Russians, this nature which Gogol studied and described, or, more accurately speaking, sang with a sort of intoxication, was a sort of new world offering every attraction. Nothing is more peculiar than the little Russian landscape with its solitudes, its lakes, its vast rivers, the incomparable purity of its sky, icy and burning in turn. Here there is material to tempt the palette of colorist most enamoured of the untouched (épris d’inédit). But what painter’s palette has colors sufficiently powerful to express as Gogol has done the profound, ineffable poetry of the sounds and gleams of the night?

[7]“Do you know the Ukraïne night? Oh! you do not know the Ukraïne night. Gaze upon it with your eyes. From the midst of the sky the moon looks down. The immense vault of heaven unrolls wider and still more wide; more immense it has become; it glows; it breathes. The whole earth is in a silvery effulgence, and the marvellous air is both suffocating and fresh. It is full of tender caresses. It stirs into movement an ocean of perfumes.

“Night divine! enchanting night! silent, and as though full of life, the forests rise bristling with darkness; they cast an enormous shadow. Silent and motionless are the ponds: the coolness of their darkling waters is gloomily enshrined between the dark green walls of the gardens.

“The cherry-trees and wild plums stretch their roots with cautious timidity towards the icy water of the springs; and from their leaves only now and then are heard faint whisperings, as though they were angry, as though they were indignant, when the gay adventurer, the night wind, glides stealthily up to them and kisses them.

“All the landscape sleeps; and far above, all is breathing, all is marvellous, all is solemn. The soul cannot fathom it: it is sublime. An infinite number of silver visions arise like a harmony in the depths. Night divine! enchanting night! And suddenly all is filled with life,—the forests, the ponds, the steppes. Majestically the thunder of the voice of the Ukraïne nightingale rolls along; and it seems as though the moon drank her song from the bosom of the sky.

“A magic slumber holds the village yonder in repose. Still more brilliant in the moonlight the group of little houses stands out in relief; still more blinding are their low walls in contrast with the shade. The songs have ceased; all is now still. The pious folk are already asleep. Here and there a narrow window shows a gleam of light; on the doorstep of some cottage, a belated family are finishing their evening meal.”

Gogol excels not only in picturing the grand aspects of the Ukraïne landscape. He has sketches filled in with adorable detail; and nothing is more curious than the contrast between the lyricism with which he celebrates the seductions of the Malo-Russian sky, and the fine, discreet, restrained tone of so many familiar impressions. The feeling for nature finds in Gogol all manner of expression: he passes in turn through every gradation.

Sometimes it is a vigorous sketch made with a few strokes, at once broad and accurate, dominated by a strange and grandiose theme:—

[8]“In places the black sky was colored by the burning of dry rushes on the shore of some river or out-of-the-way lake; and a long line of swans flying to the north, struck suddenly by the silver rose-light of the flame, were like red handkerchiefs waving across the night.”

Sometimes it is a picture full of detail, whose motives have been strangely brought together and treated delicately, elaborately, as with a magnifying-glass:—

[9]“I see from here the little house, surrounded by a gallery supported by delicate, slender columns of darkened wood, and going entirely around the building, so that during thunder-showers or hail-storms the window-shutters can be closed without exposure to the rain; behind the house, mulberry-trees in bloom, then long rows of dwarf fruit-trees drowned in the bright scarlet of the cherries and in an amethystine sea of plums with leaden down; then a large old beech-tree, under the shade of which is spread a carpet for repose; before the house, a spacious court with short and verdant grass, with two little foot-paths trodden down by the steps of those who went from the barn to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the proprietor’s house. A long-necked goose drinking water from a puddle, surrounded by her soft and silky yellow goslings; a long hedge hung with strings of dried pears and apples, and rugs put out to air; a wagon loaded with melons near the barn; on one side an ox unyoked and chewing his cud, lazily lying down. All this has for me an inexpressible charm.”

Here we have a realism anterior to our own, and, if I may be allowed to say so, far superior. Here we do not find, as we do elsewhere, features collected and reproduced with the conscientiousness—or rather the lack of conscientiousness—of a photographic camera: a choice is shown, a soul-felt attention. The observer’s notice is that of a poet: the external world is no longer reflected in a glass lens, but is caught by a quivering retina; the image which is transferred to the book is no less alive, and what the writer has felt in this manner the reader feels in turn.

Just so far as purely descriptive description produces an impression of puerility, of unlikeness, and, when it is carried to extremes in the style of our realists, of fatigue and disgust, to the same degree does it here afford interest, picturesqueness, appropriateness. Who could fail to see, or who would refuse to admire, the pose of “yonder wooden cottages, leaning to one side, and buried in a thicket of willows, elders, and pear-trees”? They have something better than a physiognomy: they have a language.

“I could not tell why the doors sang in this way. Was it because the hinges were rusted? Or had the joiner who made them concealed in them some secret mechanism? I do not know; but the strangest thing was, that each door had its own individual voice. That of the sleeping-room had the most delicate soprano, that of the dining-room a sonorous bass. As to that which closed the ante-room, it gave forth a strange, tremulous, and plaintive sound, so that by listening attentively these words could be distinctly heard: ‘Batiushki! I am freezing.’ I know that many people do not like the squeaking of doors: for my part, I like it very much. And when I happen to hear in St. Petersburg a door crying, I suddenly perceive the scent of the country, together with the memory of a small, low room, lighted by a taper set in an ancient candlestick. Supper is already on the table, near the open window through which the lovely May night looks into the room. A nightingale fills the garden, the house, and the slope to the river gleaming in the gloomy distance, with the glory of his voice; the trees gently rustle. Bozhe moï! what a train of memories arise within me!”

We must draw attention to the exclamations which in Gogol serve for the passionate conclusion to his most accurate descriptions. They give us the key to his poetic realism. It is feeling which stored away the impression in the treasure-house of the memory; it is feeling which calls it up again, and places it before the reader, kindled with all the fires of the imagination.

This power of resurrection which makes the poet a god, Gogol applies equally to facts and to ideas, to men and to things, to legends and to history. His whole work shows it, but nothing in his work shows it more clearly than his early writings. Here imagination plays the leading part. In the works of his riper years, it is observation which comes to get the mastery, forcing itself everywhere. The part played by poetry, by fancy, grows less and less. The author of “The Revizor,” of “Dead Souls,” no longer takes pains, except rarely, to distinguish by his characteristic touch his models of coarseness, platitude, or ugliness.

The writer of the “Evenings at the Farm” is still content to vivify or revivify in his half-imaginary, half-biographical tales, artless lovers, full of passion and pathos, heroes of epic grandeur, good old folks of the vanished past, of odd exteriors, of ridiculous aspect, but charming by their glances, stirring by their smiles, as in the pale, faded pastels of a bygone age. Such are the figures which Gogol afterwards ceases to depict for us: it is these which we are going to endeavor to take out from his first collection, so as to examine them entirely at our ease.

This collection of “Evenings at the Farm” is divided into two parts, bearing, by way of sub-title, the town names, Didanka and Mirgorod.

Each part contains two groups of novels. In the “Evenings near Didanka,”[10] the first group contains “The Fair at Sorotchintsui,” “St. John’s Eve,” “The May Night, or the Drowned Girl,” and “The Missing Paper.” The second group includes “Christmas Eve,” “A Terrible Vengeance,” “Ivan Feodorovitch Shponka and his Aunt,” and “An Enchanted Spot.”

The “Evenings near Mirgorod” contain four novels in two groups: in the one, “Old-time Proprietors”[11] and “Taras Bulba” (in its first form; shortly afterwards the author recast it and developed it); in the other, “Vii,” which has been translated into French under the title “The King of the Gnomes,” and “The Story of how Ivan Ivanovitch and Ivan Nikiforovitch quarrelled.”[12]

The novels of the first part have especially a fantastic character. The Devil, who holds such a place in the imagination of the Malo-Russian peasants, is the principal hero of some of the stories, “The Fair at Sorotchintsui” for example. Witches also play a preponderating part in his mysterious tales. But here the witch is not that wrinkled, toothless, unclean being, hiding herself like an abominable beast in some, ill-omened hovel. She is generally a beautiful girl, with eyes green as an Undine’s, with skin of lily and rose, with long hair yellow as gold or black as ebony, with delicate level, haughty eye-brows. Sometimes, as in “Vii,” it is the proprietor’s daughter, and those who are impudent enough to stare at her are lost: witness the groom Mikita.

This groom had no equal in the world. Enchanted by the maiden, he becomes a little woman, a rag, the deuce knows what. Did she look at him? The reins fell from his hand. He forgot the names of his dogs, and called one instead of the other. One day, while he was grooming a horse at the stable, the maiden came and asked him to let her rest her little foot upon him. He accepted with joy, foolish fellow! but she compelled him to gallop like a horse, and struck him redoubled blows with her witch’s stick. He came back half dead, and from that day he vanished from mortal sight. “Once when they went to the stable, they found instead of him only a handful of ashes by an empty pail. He had burned up,—entirely burned up by his own fire. Yet he had been a groom such as no more can be found in the world.”

Artless but not silly sorcery. It is the timid homage, pathetic from its very timidity, which is offered by these barbarous souls to the eternal power of beauty and love.

These witches of Gogol, so bold and novel in their conception, put me in mind of a painting of the Spanish school, attributed to Murillo. This canvas, which I saw several years ago in a private gallery, is a Temptation of St. Anthony, interpreted in an unlooked-for way. A young man of thirty years, whose features are those of the painter himself, with sunburned face and passionate eyes, bends towards his mistress, a lovely girl with piquant charm, sal y pimienta, who is leaning on his shoulder, while her mouth is arched at the corners of the lips in a smile of irresistible seduction.

In these tales of Gogol, the marvellous abounds. But it abounds equally in the life of these Malo-Russians whom the author has wished to depict for us. The supernatural affrights and charms them. If the legends of the Ukraïna are lugubrious, yet they never weary of hearing them told. The young girl who at the first sound of the serenade lifts the latch, steals out from the door, and joins the love-stricken bandura-player, desires no other entertainment on the border of the pond which in the uncanny lights of the night reflects in its waters the willows and the maples:[13] “Tell me it, my handsome Cossack,” she says, laying her cheek to his face and kissing him: “No? Then it is plain that thou dost not love me, that thou hast some other young girl. Speak! I shall not be afraid. My sleep will not be broken by it. On the contrary, I shall not be able to go to sleep at all if thou dost not tell me this story. I shall be thinking of something else. I shall believe—come, Lyévko, tell it.” They are right who say that the Devil haunts the brain of young girls to keep their curiosity awake.

Lyévko, however, yields, and unfolds the old legend. It is the story of the daughter of the sotnik (captain of a hundred Cossacks). The sotnik had a daughter white as snow. He was old, and one day he brought home a second wife, young and handsome, white and rose; but she looked at her stepdaughter in such a strange way that she cried out under her gaze. The young wife was a witch, as was seen immediately. The very night of the wedding, a black cat enters the young girl’s room, and tries to choke her with his iron claws. She snatches a sabre down from the wall, she strikes at the animal, and cuts off his paw. He disappears with a yell. When the stepmother was seen again, her hand was covered with bandages. Five days later the father drove his daughter from the house, and in grief she drowned herself in the pond. Since then the drowned girl has been waiting for the sorceress, to beat her with the green rushes of the pond; but up to the present time the stepmother has succeeded in escaping from all her traps. ‘She is very wily,’ says the poor Undine. ‘I feel that she is here. I suffer from her presence. Because of her, I cannot swim freely like a fish. I go to the bottom like a key. Find her for me.’

Lyévko the singer hears the drowned girl thus speaking to him in a dream. But this dream is a reality; for when he wakes, Lyévko, who has tracked and caught the stepmother in the circle of the young shadows, finds in his hand the reward of the Queen of the Lake. It is a letter containing an order for the marriage between Lyévko and Hanna, his fiancée. The order is given by the district commissioner, to Hanna’s father, who has hitherto shown himself recalcitrant. “I shall not tell any one the miracle which has been performed this night,” murmurs the happy bridegroom. “To thee alone will I confide it, Hanna; thou alone wilt believe me, and together we will pray for the soul of the poor drowned girl.”

In this collection of “Evenings at the Farm” figures the heroic story of a great character, the life of the atamán Taras Bulba. Gogol afterwards turned this epopée into prose, but the after-touches did not change the character of the early composition. The hero of “Taras Bulba” is one of those Zaparog Cossacks who played such an important part in the history of Poland, and later in the history of Russia. After the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Zaporozhtsui, who formed a military republic, or, if the term is preferred, an association of cavalry bandits, became the terror of the neighboring peoples. They had on an island in the Dniépr a permanent camp, the Setch, where, even in times of peace, young Cossacks came to perfect themselves in the noble game of war. Women were rigorously excluded from the Setch. The men were quartered in divisions, or kurénui; each kurén had its chief, an atamán (hetman); the entire camp was commanded by a supreme chief, the atamán-kotchevóï.

The romance of “Taras Bulba” opens in the most original fashion.[14] The two sons of the Cossack Taras are just back from the divinity school, to which they will not return. The father, a vigorous Zaporozhets, who has grown gray in harness, receives them with sarcastic observations about their long robes. It is a sort of test like that which Don Diego gives his sons in the “Romancero.” The eldest of Bulba’s sons, Ostap (Eustace), behaves like Rodriguez. “Though thou art my father, I swear to thee, if thou continuest to laugh at me, I will give thee a drubbing.”

After an exchange of well-directed blows on either side, Taras kisses effusively his son whose courage and strength he has just experienced; he rudely rallies Andriï (Andrew), the younger, on his gentleness: “Thou art a puppy so far as I can judge. Don’t listen to they mother’s words: she is a woman; she knows naught. What need have ye of being coddled? A good prairie, a good horse, that’s all the delicacies that ye need. See this sabre: behold your mother, lads!”

The poor woman is not at the end of her trials. Taras announces his immediate departure with his sons: she protests amid tears and lamentations; the Cossack ill-uses her, and cuts short her complaints. The two sons spend in their father’s house just time enough to give the narrator a chance to describe this interior so characteristic and brilliantly colored. On the wall hang all the exquisite ornaments in which barbarous man delights,—sabres, whips, inlaid arms, reins worked in gold wire, silver-nailed clogs. On the dressers are the products of civilization brought from different corners of the world,—masterpieces of Florentine engravers, of Venetian glass-blowers, of Oriental goldsmiths; and in contrast with all this treasure, the fruit of pillage, piles of wood, the stove made of the enamelled bricks loved by the Ukraïne peasant, and the “holy images” in hieratic posture, these Lares indispensable at every Malo-Russian fireside.

The old Bulba has declared at table, before all the sotniks of his polk[15] who were present in the village, that he should be off next day. The mother spends the night in tears, crouching by her children’s bedside, gazing upon them with a look full of anguish like the swallow of the steppe on her nest. She still hopes that when he wakes, Bulba will have forgotten what he vowed in the exaltation of the bowl.

“The moon from the height of heaven had long been lighting up all the dvor filled with sleepers, the thick mass of willows, and the tall grass in which the palisade which encircled the dvor drowned. She sat all night by the heads of her beloved sons: not for a moment did she turn her eyes from them, and she had no thought of sleep. Already the horses, prescient of dawn, had all stretched themselves upon the grass, and ceased to feed. The topmost leaves of the willows began to whisper, and little by little a stream of incessant chattering descended through them to the very base. Still she sat in the selfsame place; she felt no fatigue at all, and she wished in her inmost heart that the night might last as long as possible. From the steppe resounded the sonorous whinnying of a foal. Ruddy streaks stretched across the sky. Bulba suddenly waked up, and leaped to his feet. He remembered very well all that he had determined upon the evening before.”

The preparations for the departure are described in detail with Homeric satisfaction. Bulba commands the mother to give her sons her blessing: “A mother’s blessing preserves from all danger on land and on water.” The farewell is heart-rending: the poor woman seizes the stirrup of her youngest, Andriï, clings to his saddle, and twice, in a paroxysm of maternal delirium, throws herself in front of the horses, until she is led away. Here we see the features of a painting rapidly sketched by Gogol in another novel. The elements of this scene would, moreover, be found elsewhere still. It goes back to the ancient dumas, the cantilenas of the Malo-Russian, the traces of which are constantly found in the epic of “Taras Bulba.”

They depart. As they ride along, their minds are filled with melancholy thoughts. Andriï reviews mentally a romantic adventure, the beginning of which dates from his life at the seminary. At Kief, in order to pay back a joke which had been played upon him, he made his way into the room of a wild Polish girl, the daughter of the voïevod of Kovno. The Polish girl made sport of him as though he were a savage; he put up with his dismissal, but fell in love with her. It is natural to conjecture that this love will have a decisive influence upon Andriï’s conduct, and that the beautiful girl will appear again. For the time being, the activity of the adventurous life just beginning drives away these recollections. The Cossacks cross the steppe, and the narrator makes us realize the wholly novel charm of this primitive existence, with its sensations no less strong than simple, in these immense spaces which under apparent monotony are so varied and marvellous.

They reach the Setch, and nothing equals the vigor, the color, the life, of the scenes which the story-teller’s imagination brings before our eyes. When they disembark from the ferry-boat, which after a three-hours’ passage has brought them to the island of Khortitsa, Taras Bulba and his sons reach the camp by an entrance echoing with the hammers of twenty-five smithies, and encumbered with the packs of pedlers. A huge Zaporozhets sleeping in the very middle of the road, with arms and legs stretched out, is the first spectacle which attracts their admiration. Farther, a young Cossack is dancing with frenzy, dripping with sweat in his winter sheepskin: he refuses to take it off, for it would quickly find its way into the pot-house. The merry fellow has already drunk up his cap, his belt, and his embroidered hilt. You feel that here is a young, exuberant, indomitable race. You have to go back to the Iliad to meet such men, and to Homer to find again this freshness of delineation. Other scenes awaken comparisons such as the author of “Taras Bulba” scarcely anticipated. His hero finds well-known faces, and he asks after his ancient companions in arms. They are questions of Philoktetes to Neoptolemos, and the same replies, followed by the same melancholy regrets: “And Taras Bulba heard only, as reply, that Borodavka had been hanged at Tolopan; that Koloper had been flayed alive near Kizikirmen; that Pidsuitok’s head had been salted in a cask, and sent to Tsar-grad (Constantinople) itself. The old Bulba hung his head, and after a long pause he said, ‘Good Kazaks were they.’”

I shall not dwell upon the scenes in which Gogol has described for us the customs of the Setch, such as the election of the new kotchevóï; and the wiles of these Zaporogs, in their longing for pillage, to take up the offensive without having the appearance of breaking treaties. From the Ukraïna, news is brought which arrives at the very nick of time. The Poles and the Jews have been heaping up deeds of infamy: the Cossack people is oppressed; religion is odiously persecuted. The whole camp breaks into enthusiastic fervor. They fling the Jew pedlers (kramari) into the water. One of them, Yankel, has recognized Taras: he throws himself on his knees groaning; he reminds him of a service which he had once done Bulba’s brother; finally he escapes punishment, thanks to this scornful and brutal protection. A few hours later, Taras finds him established under a tent, selling all sorts of provisions, powder, screws, gun-flints, at the risk of being caught again, and “killed like a sparrow.”

“Taras shrugged his shoulders to see what was the ruling power of the Jewish race.” We catch a glimpse here of that lively humor which is common in Gogol, and that keenness of observation which is always heightened by a satiric flavor.

The Zaporogs invade the Polish soil. They lay siege to Dubno. One night, Andriï sees rising before him a woman’s form. He recognizes an old Tartar servant of the voïevod’s daughter. She comes in her young mistress’s name to beg a little bread. The besieged town is a prey to all the torments of famine. Andriï is anxious instantly to make his way inside the walls. He is introduced by a subterranean passage by which the old woman reached the camp. Andriï sees once again the woman whom he loves, and it is all over with him. “He will never see again the Setch, nor his father’s village, nor the house of God. The Ukraïna will never behold again one of its bravest sons. The old Taras will tear his gray hair by handfuls, cursing the day and the hour when to his own shame he begot such a son.”

Here the romance halts to make room for the epos. Help comes to the city almost immediately after Andriï’s defection. This news is brought by Yankel, who, true Jew that he is, has succeeded in penetrating the city, in making his escape, in seeing every thing, hearing every thing, and putting a good profit into his pocket. What consoles Taras for Andriï’s treason is Ostap’s bravery, who is made atamán on the battle-field. One must read the exploits of giants, where the cruelty of the carnage is relieved by the beauty of the coloring. Pictures of heroic grandeur light up these sinister scenes, and the magic of a sparkling palette makes poetical the strong touches of the boldest realism.

Suddenly the news reaches the camp of the Zaporogs, that the Setch has been plundered by the Tartars. The old Bovdug, the Nestor of this second Iliad, proposes a plan which divides the besieging army in such a way as to protect at once the interests and the honor of the Cossack nation. One part sets out in pursuit of the Tartars: the others remain under the walls of the city, with the old Taras as atamán. One would like to quote from beginning to end these lists of heroes, with their Malo-Russian names so nearly uniform in termination. One would like to reproduce these parentheses, these episodes devoted to the complaisant enumeration of the deeds of prowess of all these braves. The separation is marked by a melancholy full of grandeur. The feeling of the solidarity which has grouped all these men, of the brotherhood which unites all these sons of the Ukraïna, is expressed with rare power. Taras perceives that it is necessary to create some diversion for this profound melancholy. He gives his Cossacks the solace of precious wine, and the stimulus of a fortifying word. They drink to religion, the Setch, and glory. “Never will a splendid action perish; and the glory of the Cossacks shall not be lost like a grain of powder dropped from the pan, and fallen by chance.”

The battle begins anew; the cannon make wide gaps in the ranks, and many mothers will not see again their sons fallen this day. “Vainly the widow will stop the passers-by, and gaze into their eyes to see if among them is not found the man whom best she loves in all the world.” What an accent in all that, and how we discover in the labored arrangement of the writer, the native force of the primitive song, the depth of the feeling of the people! This arises in fact from the Malo-Russian folk-song; and so also do those challenges which recall those of the heroes of Argos or of Troy, and that sublime death-refrain which each hero murmurs as he dies, “Flourish the Russian soil!” and likewise those rhythmic questions alternating with replies like couplets, “Is there yet powder in the powder-flasks? Is not the Cossack power enfeebled? Do not the Cossacks now show signs of yielding?”—“There still is powder in the powder-flasks; the Cossack power is not enfeebled; the Cossacks do not yet begin to yield.”

At the height of the battle, Andriï, who is fighting like a lion at the head of the Poles, finds himself suddenly face to face with Taras Bulba. Here follows an admirable scene, and long admired, but admired in an imitation. Is not the conclusion of “Mateo Falcone” an invention stolen from Gogol? In the two tales, the father becomes the arbiter of the treason committed by the son; the details of this execution, the accompanying words, the calculated impression of coldness in the account, meant to add to the horror of the deed,—all the resemblances seem to form a literary theft, the traces of which Merimée would have done better not to hide; and we have almost the right to impute to him this intention when we see the part that he took in disparagement of “Taras Bulba.”

This tragedy is followed by a new drama still more painful. Ostap is taken prisoner, and carried to Warsaw for execution. Taras, left for dead, is picked up by his followers. He recovers, and, unable to survive his beloved son, goes to risk his life in the attempt to rescue him. Through Yankel’s craft he makes his way into Warsaw, but the assistance of the Polish Jews fails to get him within the prison walls. He arrives only in time to see the execution of the Cossacks. Ostap is broken on the wheel before his father’s eyes. In a moment of weakness the heroic lad utters the cry of the Crucified on Golgotha: “Father, where art thou? Dost thou hear this?”

“Yes, I hear,” replies a mighty voice from the midst of the throng. “A detachment of mounted soldiers hastened anxiously to scan the throng of people. Yankel turned pale as death, and when the horsemen had got a short distance from him, he turned round in terror to look for Taras: but Taras was no longer beside him; every trace of him was lost.” A little later on, and Taras has seized his arms, and is making a terrible “funeral mass” in honor of his son. At last he dies, pinned down like Prometheus, and burned alive; but from the midst of the flames he tastes the triumph which his last shout of command has just assured to his soldiers.

When Gogol was spoken of to the great romancer Turgénief, he said simply, “He is our master; from him we get our best qualities.” But when Turgénief came to speak of “Taras Bulba,” he grew animated, and went on with an accent of admiration which, for my part, I cannot forget, and said, “The day when our Gogol stood the colossal Taras on his feet, he showed genius.”

It would have been a very delicate question, to ask Turgénief his opinion of another of Gogol’s little masterpieces, “Old-time Proprietors.” The question would have seemed indiscreet to the author of “Virgin Soil;” for when this last romance of Turgénief’s appeared, all the Russian readers, when they came to the charming chapter where the two old men, Fímushka and Fómushka, come upon the stage, uttered the same cry: “It is Gogol, pure and simple! it is the Starosvyétskié Pomyéshchiki!” If the model and the imitation are examined closely, a great quantity of differences in detail are unravelled; and it may be said that here as elsewhere Turgénief is personal, original in his work, in his own fashion. But at first glance one has the right to be struck by the resemblances.

“Old-time Proprietors” is a novel of a number of pages. In this novel there are no intrigue, no abrupt changes, nothing fantastic, no theatrical climaxes, no surprising characters, no unexpected sentiments. Gogol dispensed with all the elements of success: he seems to have wished to reduce the interest to the minimum, and he wrote a masterpiece.

He introduces us to one of those country houses whose appearance alone tells the story of the calm and peaceful life of its inhabitants: “Never had a desire crossed the hedge which shut in the little dvor.”

In this habitation of sages, all is friendly, all is kindly, “even to the phlegmatic baying of the dogs.” What is to be said of the reception which we meet with at the hands of the owners of the dwelling? The husband, Afanasi Ivanovitch, generally sitting down and bent over, always smiles, whether he be speaking or listening. His wife, Pulkheria Ivanovna, on the other hand, is serious; but there is so much goodness in her eyes and in all of her features, that a smile would be too much, would render insipid her expression of face which is already so sweet.

Afanasi Ivanovitch and Pulkheria Ivanovna had grown up without children: thus they had come to love each other with that affection which is usually reserved for beings in whom one’s youthful days seem to bloom anew. Their youth had been full of life, however, like all youth, but it was far away. The husband had served in the army; he had eloped with his sweetheart. But this wild period had been followed by so many days of a calm, secluded, uniform, absolutely happy existence, that they never spoke of the past, and it may be doubted if they ever thought of it either.

These delicious hours are disturbed only by such events as an indigestion, or a pain in the bowels. They are filled only by collations and repasts of greater or less degree. They leave room for no other care than that of varying the bill of fare, of bringing into agreement the most diverse viands, of tempting appetites sated but not satiated.

At first thought, nothing seems more commonplace than such a subject. What poetry, what interest even, could be attached to that complaining belly whose ever-recurring pangs must be lulled to sleep the livelong day and a portion of the night? Herein shines forth all the power of Gogol’s talent. He paints egotism for us, double egotism: but he paints it with such delicate shades that the picture excites something more than admiration; it arouses a sort of sympathy.

Gogol knows well that happy people are the best people; that their joy radiates out, as it were, and that it warms, lightens, enlivens, just as sadness, even though legitimate, chills, wounds, warns away, every thing that approaches it. The two old people are happy, not so much by the quality of the pleasures which they taste, or by the value of the goods which they enjoy, as by the assurance which they feel that as long as they live they are not going to see this luxurious abundance disappear, nor these far from ruinous pleasures lose their flavor. Notwithstanding the thefts of the prikashchik, of the housekeeper, of the hands, of the visitors, of their coachman, of their valets, “this fertile and beneficent soil produced all things in such quantity, Afanasi Ivanovitch and Pulkheria Ivanovna had so few necessities, that all these depredations could have no injurious effect on their well-being.”

These two fortunate people are worshipped for their indulgence, which comes from unconcern; and for their liberality, which takes its rise, if not from the vanity of giving, as La Rochefoucauld would have expressed it, yet at least from the need of feeling further satisfaction, after having taken full enjoyment of what is indispensable, in allowing others to have a certain portion of the superfluous.

In the same way their pity is, above all, a selfish consideration, and a movement of dismay at the idea of falling into such disagreeable or trying situations as they have seen in the cases of others. “Wait,” says Afanasi Ivanovitch to each visitor: “we don’t know what may happen. Robbers may attack you, or you may meet with rascals.” “God protect us from robbers!” said Pulkheria Ivanovna: “why tell such stories when it is night?”

In this association for happiness, which is scarcely any thing else than the joining of two aspirations towards well-being, how did Gogol succeed in bringing about his return to the idea of sacrifice? In point of fact, one of these good old egotists acts to a certain degree in a spirit of self-sacrifice, without ever rising above self-love; becomes partially absorbed in the affection of the companion, who is more indifferent, more inclined to accept fondling without offering return. All love, it has been said, is reduced in last analysis to this: the one kisses, the other offers the cheek. In this case the one who offers the cheek—that is to say, the one who permits the fondling, and limits all manifestations of feeling to not ill-natured but not kindly teasing—is the husband. His wife adores him after her fashion. This adoration it is vain to express in vulgar language, and translate by attentions of far from exalted order: it is real, and it brings to the reader’s lips a smile full of indulgence, even at the moment when it compels from the eyes a tear of a rare quality, the discreet witness of the deepest and purest feeling.

This good old woman feels that she is dying; and at the moment when death “comes to take her,” she knows only one grief,—that of leaving alone, and, as it were, orphaned, this poor old child for whom she has lived, and who without her will not know what to do with his sad life. With prayers, even with threats, good soul that she is, she intrusts him to a maid-servant old as themselves; and after making all arrangements and dispositions, so that her companion “need not feel too sorely her absence,” she goes whither death calls her.

Afanasi Ivanovitch at first is overwhelmed with grief. On his return from the funeral, his solitude comes to him with the sensation of an irreparable void; “and he began to sob bitterly, inconsolably; and the tears flowed,—flowed like two streams from his dull eyes.” Is it not striking to find here the expressions of Homer? “He sat down, pouring forth tears like a stream of dark water, which spreads its shady water along the cliff where even the goats do not climb.” And is there not here, as in the epic tale of Taras Bulba, the power of the pathetic, the savory freshness of emotion, the secret of which is known only to primitive poetry?

But what is not primitive, what, on the contrary, reveals Gogol as a very well-informed writer, a very watchful psychologist, a satirist whose scheme was well thought out in advance, and whose slightest details are calculated with perfect precision, is the little parable which at the most touching moment of this tale interrupts its thread, and brings out its hidden significance, its moral bearing, its psychological lesson.

Gogol leaves the husband and wife at the very hour of their most touching separation, and tells us rapidly the romance of a young man madly in love with a mistress who is dying. In the effervescence of his grief, the lover twice in succession tries to kill himself: the first time, by a pistol-shot in the head; somewhat later, when he is barely recovered, by throwing himself under the wheel of a passing carriage. Again he recovers; “and a year later,” says Gogol, “I met him in a fashionable salon. He was seated at a table, playing boston, and was saying in a free and easy tone, ‘Little Misery.’ Behind him, leaning on his chair, stood his young and pretty wife, toying with the counters in the basket.”

The old Afanasi Ivanovitch does not try to kill himself; but he dies slowly day by day from the ever-growing regret for her whom he has lost, from the wound, always more keen and more deep, which has been left in his heart, or, if the expression be preferred, left in his very flesh by the torn cluster of his imperishable habits.

“I have never written from imagination,” said Gogol: “it is a talent which I do not possess.” “Pushkin,” he says in another place, “has hit it right when in speaking of me he declared that he had never known in any other writer an equal gift of making a vivid picture of the miseries of actual life, in sketching with a firm touch the nothingness of a good-for-nothing man.” This talent, which will be seen illustrated in such a brilliant way in the great romance of “Dead Souls,” already begins to give a striking character to the stories written by Gogol about St. Petersburg. Here he describes in a most fascinating way the mortifications, the humiliations, the tortures even, which he had felt or anticipated at the time of the painful beginning of his literary career, and his wearisome sojourn in the bureaucracy.

“The Portrait,” for example, is a fantastic tale which is distinguished from the stories of the former collection by a satiric accent full of bitterness. It is the account of a painter kept in the depths of wretchedness just as long as he takes his art seriously. A happy chance places in his hands a sum of money which allows him to engage rooms on the Nevsky Prospekt. He allows trickery to usurp the place of work. He grows rich from the day when he loses his talent: however, the feeling of having deserted his ideal follows him like remorse, and this remorse leads him straight to madness.

“The Cloak” is the story of a small official, gentle, conscientious, but timid, slow, and absent-minded. The poor devil has a fixed purpose,—the purchase of a cloak to keep him from the cold. This never-to-be-realized idea finally unsettles his somewhat feeble brain.

It is noticeable that the most lugubrious refrains serve for the conclusion of these different moral analyses. “The recollections of a Lunatic,” known in France under the title “Les Mémoires d’un Fou,” take the reader one step farther into this region of mental trouble, which is explored with a boldness truly disquieting. Involuntarily one thinks of the author’s own final insanity; and the tale has the effect of a prelude, or at least of a prognostication.

At the risk of repetition, I lay especial emphasis upon this evolution which took place in the mind and in the work of Nikolaï Gogol. In the “Evenings at the Farm,” the satirical note scarcely appears, except in a few details; it is found tempered, and as it were refreshed, by a pure breath of poetry; Nature spoke there almost as much as man, and she spoke a language of very penetrating sweetness and of superb grandeur. In the novels on St. Petersburg, satire has already entirely usurped her place. There is added, to be sure, an element of fancy, and of caprice, which is no longer the poetry of the first novels, but which still draws on the imagination; a troubled, unregulated imagination, which in Gogol shows a physical and moral state sufficiently akin to the hyperæsthesia of seers, of the insane. This period of excitement is followed by several years of rather morose observation and contemplation, during which Gogol writes or plans for his two great works, the comedy of “The Revizor,” and the romance of “The Dead Souls.” Here we are in full satire, and the satire is fully in the domain of reality,—reality often vulgar, and sometimes odious. The author paints only what he sees; and if amid the objects of his contemplation, and his keen pitiless glance, there passes often as it were a shade of illusion, it is only a gloomy illusion, a reflection of melancholy obscuring the real day, and making the colors of things more sombre, the aspect of men more pitiable.

It is not that the romance of “The Dead Souls,” and especially the comedy of “The Revizor,” have not details, or even whole scenes, which are very amusing. There is no satire without gayety; and Gogol understands how to indulge in raillery, that is to say, how to make fun at the expense of another, as perfectly as any satirist that ever lived. But never was laughter more bitter than his, and it never came nearer the ancient definition, “cachinnus perfidum ridens.” This bitterness of style is only too well explained by a morbid state of mind, the first manifestations of which can be traced back even to Gogol’s infancy, while its tragic end was madness.

The comedy of “The Revizor” (The Inspector-General) is therefore a satire,—a satire on Russian functionaryism. The action takes place in a small provincial city. The tchinovniks of the district have met at the mayor’s, for news has just been brought of the approaching visit of the revizor. “What can you expect?” asks the mayor[16] with a sigh: “it is a judgment from God! Hitherto it has fallen on other cities. It is our turn now.”

Like a prudent man, he has taken his measures, and he advises the other employees to do likewise. “You,” he says to the director of the hospital,—“you will do well to take pains that every thing is on a good footing.... Let ’em put on white cotton nightcaps, and don’t allow the patients to look like chimney-sweeps as they usually do.—And you,” he says to the doctor, “you must look out that each bed has its label in Latin, or some other language.... And it would be better not to have so many patients, for they won’t fail to throw the blame on the administration.” The director of the hospital explains the method of treatment which is adopted. No costly medicines: man is a simple being; if he dies, he dies; if he recovers, he recovers. Besides, any other method would be scarcely practicable with a German doctor who does not understand Russian, and consequently cannot tell at all what his patients say.

“You,” he says to the justice of the peace, “pay attention to your tribunal! Your boy brings his geese into your great hall, and they come quacking between the legs of the plaintiffs.... And your audience-chamber looks like—the Devil knows what! a horsewhip in the midst of briefs! and the assessor, who always exhales an odor as though he had just come out of a distillery!” But the most serious part of the matter is the rumors of corruption. “A trifle,” replies the justice: “a few grey-hounds as presents.” And he immediately returns allusion for allusion: “Ah! I did not say that if some one had presented me with a five-hundred-ruble shuba, and a shawl for my wife”—The mayor interrupts warmly, with that tone of hypocrisy so common to the Russian tchinovnik, “That’s all right! Do you know why you take presents of dogs? It’s because you don’t believe in God. You never go to church. I at least have some religion: Fridays I go to mass. But you—Ah! I know you well. When you begin to descant on the way the world was made, your hair stands up on your head.

“And you,” he says to the principal of the college,—“you watch over your professors. Their actions are suspicious; there is one who so far forgets himself in his chair as to put his fingers behind his cravat, and to scratch his chin: it is not necessary to teach the young habits of independence.” The postmaster remains. The mayor urges him to open a few letters, so as to assure himself that there are no denunciations. “You need not teach me my trade,” replies the postmaster: “I have nothing else to do.” In fact, it is his daily amusement: he could not do without this reading. Some letters are as well composed as the Moscow journals. He has at this very moment in his pocket a young lieutenant’s letter,—reminiscences of a ball, an elegant description. The mayor begs him to hold back every petition of complaint. “There’s nothing to fear any other way. It would be a different thing if this were generally the custom; but it’s just a little family affair, the way we do it.”

Two loungers of the place,[17] two self-important bustlers, in their eager rivalry of tittle-tattle and gossip, run up all out of breath, and, after a great deal of desultory talk, are delivered of the great news. He has come, the government tchinovnik, the revizor; he saw them eating salmon at the hotel; he cast a terrible look at their plates. “Akh! God in heaven,” cries the mayor; “have pity upon us, miserable offenders!”

And here follows a general confession, a recapitulation of the most recent sins of moment: an under-officer’s wife whipped, prisoners deprived of their rations, wine-shops established in open defiance of the law, the streets not swept. “How old is he? He’s a young man; then there’s more hope than with an old devil. Quick! orders, measures; and let us get ahead of him. My hat! my sword! but the sword is ruined.

“That cursed hatter! He sees that the mayor has an old sword, and does not send him a new one. What a pack of villains! Akh! my fine fellows! I am perfectly sure they have their complaints all ready, and that they will rise up right out of the cobble-stones. Let everybody take hold of the street. The Devil take the street! Fetch me a broom, I say, and have the street cleaned in front of the hotel; and let it be well done.—Listen! Take care there, you! I know you well. You put on a saintly look, and yet you hide the silver spoons in your boots. You look out! Don’t you dare to stir me up! What kind of a job did you concoct at the tailor’s? He gave you two arshins of cloth to make you a uniform, and you gobbled up the whole piece. Attention! You steal too much for your rank.”

That phrase has taken its place among the popular proverbs in Russia, and our Molière has not many more pointed. Exactly as in Molière, the situation is spun out and renewed with a liveliness which suffers no loss of force. On the mayor’s lips, command follows command; ideas crowd upon one another; words get tripped up; exclamations of fury, of terror, fly out; the note of hypocrisy mingles with his main characteristic, the violence of which forces its way to the surface under false appearances. And this inward trouble is rendered visible, as it were, by stage tricks, not free from vulgarity, but extremely amusing. “You have the hat-box in your hand: here is your hat.” All this forms a rude, rough, but new and irresistible element of comedy.

The personage who thus sets a whole city by the ears is a poor devil, himself in a peck of trouble. Kléstakof has left Petersburg, where he is a small official, in order to spend his vacation in the province. On the way he has gambled, has emptied his pockets, and he is waiting for his father to send him a fresh supply of funds to pay travelling expenses and the landlord’s bill. We learn all these details from his valet Osip. He it is who, in his description of the situation, gives us the key to his master’s character. “One day he lives like a lord, the next he perishes with starvation. But we must have carriages. Every day he sends me to get theatre-tickets. This lasts a week, and then he tells me to bring him his new suit of clothes from the nail. A suit costs him a hundred and fifty rubles. He spends twenty rubles for a waistcoat. I won’t answer for the trousers: it’s impossible to tell what that amounts to. And the wherefore of all this? the wherefore? I will tell you. He does not attend to his business; he goes for a walk on the Preshpektive (the Nevsky Prospekt). He plays his game. Akh! if the old gentleman knew all this business, he would not bother his head whether his son held a place in government: he would take off his shirt, and give him such a drubbing as would warm him up for a week.”

In this comedy of “The Revizor,” the valet Osip fills a comic rôle quite like that of the fool in Shakspeare, or the gracioso in the Spanish comedy. The Russian buffoon, however, is a clown rather than a joker. He does not enliven the scene with jests: he makes the spectator split his sides by his artless blunders. This smacks of farce, and may seem overdone. But exaggeration in this way is not in the power of every one. It is the splendid fault of Aristophanes, and even of Molière. Let us remember what Fénelon, La Bruyère, and Rousseau said of it. And after all, in spite of the famous definition, is it not the greatest triumph of the comic poet to make the fastidious laugh, and especially smile? An excellent actor of our own time defined the great comedian as one who has only to show his grimace at the opening of a door, to make the whole public shout with laughter. Are not the author and the actor of genius told by the same characteristic? Have not both of them the secret of this grimace?

To return to the analysis of the piece: Kléstakof scolds his valet because he no longer dares to report the traveller’s complaints at the office. The landlord treats this stranger as a man who does not pay his bills. After many negotiations he permits him to have some dish-water as apology for soup, and some burned sole-leather in place of the roast. Amid the vociferations wrung from him by such an outrage, Kléstakof beholds Osip returning to announce a call from the mayor. He imagines that the official has come in order to put him in arrest, with which he was threatened only a few moments since; and he endeavors immediately to exonerate himself in the mayor’s eyes. His explanations, enigmatical for the still more anxious visitor, clear only for the reader or the audience, have no other effect than to increase the terror of the high functionary, who thinks that he is in the presence of a crafty inspector-general. In the incoherent remarks, full of ingenuous confessions, which the little tchinovnik makes to him, the mayor hears only certain portentous words,—the prison, the minister. He is only half re-assured when the conversation offers him a chance to proffer some money and insist on its acceptance.

Kléstakof finally blurts out how matters really stand. “I am here, and I have not a kopek.” The mayor sees in this avowal only a further illustration of cunning. He immediately offers his services. The stranger borrows two hundred rubles of him. “Take it,” he says eagerly; “don’t trouble to count it, it isn’t worth while:” and instead of two hundred rubles, he slips four hundred into his hand. And now behold our two sharpers delighted to find themselves so easily in agreement. Kléstakof suspects that there is some misunderstanding, but he takes pains not to say a word which may bring about an explanation. The mayor thinks that he can detect, under Kléstakof’s ambiguous actions, an immensely profound plan. “He wants his incognito respected. Two can play that game. Let us make believe not know who he is.” While the traveller’s baggage is transported to a place more worthy of him,—that is, to the mayor’s own dwelling,—they drive off in a drozhsky to visit the college and the hospital. They hastily turn their backs on the prison, which offers not the slightest attraction for Kléstakof. “What’s the good of seeing the prison? It would be much better to give our attention to institutions of beneficence!”

Here we are now in the mayor’s house. They are waiting for Kléstakof; and the entrance of this important personage is very well led up to by two or three scenes of chattering, in which the voices of the mayor’s wife and daughter are dominant. At last he appears, followed by the mayor and other tchinovniks of the district. They have just returned from visiting the hospital; that is to say, from enjoying a bounteous collation at the superintendent’s. The ice is broken: tongues are unloosed; Kléstakof’s performs wonders.

First come the exquisite courtesies of the introduction, then the expatiation on the charms of the capital; and instantly there begins a series of inventions grafted by Kléstakof one upon the other.

Here is the summing-up which loses the devil-possessed movement, but not the comic value of the scene.

At the ministry, Kléstakof is the intimate of the direktor; on the street, he is recognized as he is out walking; the soldiers leave the guard-house, and present arms; at the theatre, he frequents the green-room; he composes vaudevilles; he is the friend of Pushkin, “that great original;”[18] he writes for the magazines; he wrote the articles on the “Marriage of Figaro,” “Robert le Diable,” “Norma.” It is he who writes under the signature of the Baron de Brambeus. A book is mentioned: “I wrote it;” the daughter objects that it bears on the title-page the name of Iuri Miloslavski; he replies to the objection [by declaring that there is another book by the same name, which he wrote]. The balls which he gives at Petersburg are marvellous beyond description; he collects around his whist-table the minister of foreign affairs, the ambassadors of France and of Germany. From time to time a glimpse of the truth shines through this tissue of improvised boastings, but he leisurely recalls the phrase imprudently uttered. His importance increases at every new effort of his imagination. Once he had been offered the direction of the ministry: he would have been glad to decline, but what would the Emperor have said? Therefore he accepts the office, and with what hands! He inspires everybody with awe; all bow in the dust before him; the council of state trembles at sight of him; at a moment’s notice he will be made field-marshal.

The adventurer would not make any end of speaking, did not intoxication become a factor, and cut short his flow of words. The tchinovniks, whose dismay has reached the highest pitch, respectfully assist him to leave the dining-room, to sleep off the effects of his glory and his wine on a bed in a neighboring room. “Charming young man!” say the mayor’s wife and daughter in chorus. “Terrible man!” declares the mayor, in an anxious and dubious tone, for he has detected in all this braggadocio some grains of falsehood. “But how can one speak of any thing without a little prevarication? The certain thing is that he makes fools of the ministers, that he goes to court.” And while the false revizor is snoring peacefully, taking his mid-day nap, they turn to his valet Osip as a make-shift. He also unflinchingly receives flatteries, compliments, and fees.

But now follows the truly new and powerful part of this bold satire. How to wheedle the ferocious inspector? Is he a man to accept money? This attempt at corruption may lead to Siberia. The justice essays the risk with fear and trembling. The bank-note which he held in his hand slips out. To his great dismay, he sees the revizor make a dash for the note; to his great delight, he hears the words, “You would do me great pleasure by lending me this.”—“Why, certainly, only too much honor.” And discreetly he allows another to take his place.

The postmaster enters in great style, and assumes his most official attitude. Kléstakof cuts short the formalities of the interview: “Could you not lend me three hundred rubles?” A new and eager acquiescence; a new and still more eager disappearance.

The college principal appears: Kléstakof, now in good humor, offers him a cigar, indulges in rollicking conversation, all of which completely dumbfounds the poor man’s brain, which is already full of perplexity. But a new forced loan of three hundred rubles is accomplished in four words; and the principal takes to his heels, crying, “God have mercy, he has not visited my classes yet!”

The director of the hospitals has hoped to whiten himself at the expense of the other tchinovniks. He has brought against them a complaint which our adventurer has but to take action upon. The false revizor consents that all the details should be transcribed for him. What the director does not think to proffer is the sum of four hundred rubles; but this is finally demanded of him, and paid over without a word.

It is more difficult to extract a little money from the two gossips who were the first to discover, in the traveller at the inn, the stuff of which an inspector-general is made. This devil of a man nevertheless has the skill to extort a little something from them. They are not tchinovniks, to be sure, but how gayly they swell the ranks of the procession! Gogol justifies their visit in showing them up in the capacity of petitioners. The one wants to legitimize a bastard son of his, “born, so to speak, in wedlock,” and consequently half legitimate. The other would like to have his name mentioned, on some suitable occasion, before the court and the Emperor: “nothing but these words, ‘in such and such a village lives such and such a person;’ yes, nothing more,—‘such an one lives in such a village.’”

This train of tchinovniks has its counterpart full of eloquent, and even melancholy, humor. Kléstakof has just finished counting his money; he finds the part easy to play, and full of profit. But Osip, whose dull head contains more sense than his master’s giddy pate, advises him to have his post-horses put in, and to pack off while yet there is time. Kléstakof admits that his reasoning is good; still, the farce is so pleasant that he cannot refrain from writing to one of his friends, a Petersburg journalist. It is easy to conjecture that this letter will never reach its destination, and that it will serve to bring about the dénoûment.

Suddenly voices are heard outside the house. It is the merchants, the hatter at their head, coming to bring their complaints before the revizor. The mayor steals from them shamelessly: when they complain, he slams the door in your face, saying, “I will not apply the knout, for that’s against the law; but I will make you eat humble pie.” A woman comes, complaining that her husband had been forcibly conscripted as a soldier, in place of two others who had escaped service through the aid of bribes. “Your husband is a thief: he is already, or he will be,”—that is the excuse offered her by this “blackguard of a mayor.”

But it is a real inspector-general’s business to perform the functions of his office. Kléstakof has enjoyed the profits, and thinks that he can confine his duties to that. At this moment the sick appear in their hospital dressing-gowns, fever and pestilence in their faces: the false revizor rudely drives away all this importunate throng, and shuts the door fast.

In happy contrast to the lugubrious impression of these scenes, the author introduces some inventions of charming buffoonery. The mayor’s daughter enters. To beguile the time, Kléstakof makes love to her, kisses her, falls on his knees before her. The mother appears, and expresses her astonishment—but in the fashion of Bélise, in the “Femmes Savantes;” such homage as that is befitting. The daughter departs after a sharp reprimand. The extempore lover, now addressing the mother, continues the wooing which he had begun with the daughter, who returns just as he throws himself on his knees for the second time. The mayor comes in unexpectedly, and almost chokes with surprise to hear an inspector-general ask for his daughter’s hand. How can he deny himself such an honor? The agreement is made on the spot, and the two lovers fall into each other’s arms.

Just at this moment the valet Osip comes, and, twitching his master by the tail of his coat, announces that the horses are ready. The adventurer, recalled to reality, ventures a brief explanation: a very wealthy uncle to visit, a day’s journey distant. The post-chaise departs; and the act ends with the postilion’s command to his horses, “Off with you, on wings!”

The dénoûment has been unnecessarily anticipated. It has a gayety, a dash, a variety in its detail, which make it amusing, fascinating, rich in surprises. Nevertheless it is only the identical dénoûment of our “Misanthrope,” the all-revealing letter in which each character of the drama receives his share of epigrams. Gogol’s humor is given free play in this series of rapidly sketched portraits, the originals of which are united around the reader, who is spared no more than the rest. The development of the idea has an inexhaustible verve; but the idea itself belongs to Molière, and Merimée long ago ascribed to him all the honor of it.

What belongs to Gogol, what gives the dénoûment of “The Revizor” an original coloring, is the mayor’s comic fury at finding that he has been cheated in such a fine fashion. His new title of father-in-law of an inspector-general had already begun to exalt him, to intoxicate him. He has crushed the merchants with it. He has overwhelmed them with the lightning of his glance. He has dismissed them with one of those deep phrases, such as paint the Russian tchinovnik with his redoubtable hypocrisy: “God commands us to forgive: I have no spite against you. You will only be good enough to remember that I am giving my daughter in marriage, and not to the first noble that comes along. Endeavor to have your congratulations suitable to the occasion. Don’t expect to get off with a smoked salmon or a sugar-loaf. Do you hear me? Go, and God protect you!” The sly old dog has already begun to dream of a general’s epaulets: it can be seen how he is puffed up; he receives with the air of a prince the unctuous compliments of the other tchinovniks. Suddenly the pail of milk falls, and the milk is spilt; the balloon bursts! In all that comes to pass, there is only sheer comedy; a skilful sharper, and duped rascals. The one who is most duped of all, the mayor, gives himself up to a storm of the most amusing frenzy. “You great fool!” he says to himself, pounding himself, “idiot! you have taken a dish-clout for a great personage! And this very moment he is galloping off down the road to the sound of the bells. He will tell the story to everybody. Worse than all, he will find some penny-a-liner, some scribbler, to cover you with ridicule! Behold the disgrace of it! He will not spare your rank or your office, and he will find people to applaud him with their voices and their hands. You laugh? Laugh at yourselves, yes. [He stamps with passion.] If I only had ’em! these scribblers! Cursed liberals! Spawn of the Devil! I’d put a bit on ’em! I’d put a curb on ’em! I’d crush the whole brood of ’em.”

And behold what adds a still keener flavor to this adventure.

At the very moment when the mayor, out of his wits at having been capable of mistaking this fop for an inspector-general, is trying to find the one who egged him on to commit this blunder, a policeman enters, and says, “You are requested to repair instantly to the revizor, who has come on a mission from Petersburg. He has just arrived at the hotel.” The whole company are, as it were, thunderstruck; and the curtain falls on a scene of silence, the arrangement of which Gogol provided for with the minute accuracy of a realistic writer, for whom attitudes and facial expression are the indispensable complement of a moral painting. In point of fact, they are, especially at times when a lively emotion tears away all masks, the faithful and legible translation of character.

After having laid bare the vices of the Russian administration, in his satiric comedy of “The Revizor,” Gogol attacked the social question in his romance of the “Dead Souls.” He set himself to work at the very moment when the Tsar Nicolas, in a liberal humor, proclaimed in a ukaz of prodigious power the principle of the abolition of serfage. Unhappily this liberal policy of the throne was not strong enough to hold its own before the dissatisfaction of the higher classes: the decree was not put into effect. But the impulse was given, and Gogol’s satire once more became the echo of the popular feeling.

The very title of the romance was a satiric touch, the significance of which could not escape a Russian, but which for a French reader needs rather a long explanation. At the time of serfdom, a Russian proprietor’s fortune was not valued according to the extent of his lands, but according to the number of male serfs which were held upon them. These serfs were called “souls” (dushi). The owner of a thousand souls was a great proprietor; the owner of a hundred souls was only a beggarly country squire. The proprietor paid the capitation tax for all the souls on his domain; but, as the census was rarely taken, it happened that he had long to pay for dead serfs, until a new official revision struck them out from among the number of the living. It is easy to see what these dead souls must have cost a proprietor whose lands had been visited by famine, cholera, or any other scourge; and his interest in getting rid of them will be explicable.

What seems more surprising is, that there were people ready to purchase them. But here, again, it is sufficient to lessen the strangeness of the fact, if we accompany it with a simple explanation. There was in Russia, at the time to which Gogol’s novel transports us, a sort of bank, established and supported by the State, and directed by the managing boards of certain institutions for orphan boys and girls, deaf-mutes, and others. This bank borrowed money at four per cent, and loaned on deposits. Here a man could pawn his personal property, or mortgage his real estate and his peasants up to ten thousand souls, say at two hundred rubles a head; in other words, up to two million rubles. Here is a reason why the hero of Gogol’s romance, Tchitchikof, a former customs officer, dismissed for embezzlement, purchases dead souls. He hopes some day to possess a sufficient number to populate an out-of-the-way estate in a distant province of the empire, and to pawn this domain to the State for a sum large enough to permit him to go and live in grand style abroad.

As can be seen, the motive of the book has lost its point since the abolition of serfage, and this motive never was very interesting except for Russian readers. But this motive serves Gogol only as a piquant pretext for a series of studies of provincial life in Russia. These studies have an originality, a variety, and sometimes a force, so great that it is to be feared lest our analysis can give only a very feeble notion of it.

The hero of “Dead Souls” is a veritable hero of a realistic romance; that is to say, he has nothing which justifies the title of hero. He is neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor lean, neither stiff nor pliant; he cannot any longer be taken for a young man. He is more prudent than courageous, more ambitious than honorable, more obsequious than dignified, more scrupulous of his bearing than of his conduct; at once capable of trickery, and guilty of heedlessness; without talent, but not without expedients; with no foundation of goodness, but not without some small change of benevolence; without conscience, but not lacking a certain varnish of decency and gravity. This characterless[19] personage is brought out in a sort of relief by the very frame in which the author has ingeniously placed him. Tchitchikof travels across the province; and Gogol does not separate him from what is his indispensable accompaniment in his outlandish Odyssey,—I mean from his coach, his horses, and his servants.

Petrushka, his lackey, is a blockhead of thirty summers, with a big nose, thick lips, coarse features, and with a skin exhaling an odor sui generis which clings to every thing that comes in his vicinity. He speaks rarely, and reads as much as possible; but little difference makes it to him, what the nature of the book may be. He does not bother his head with the subject. “What pleased him was not what he read: it was the mere act of reading. It did not trouble him to see that he was eternally coming upon words the meaning of which the deuce alone knows.”

The coachman, Selifan, is a little man, as talkative as Petrushka is silent. He fills the long hours of the journey across the deserted steppe or the monotonous cultivated fields, with monologues laughable in their variety. For the most part, he addresses his incoherent discourse to his horses. With his reproaches, sometimes accompanied by a blow of the whip under the belly or across the ears, he stirs up “Spot,” a huge trickster, harnessed on the right for draught, who makes believe pull so that one would think that he was doing himself great injury, but in reality he is not pulling at all. The bay, on the contrary, is a very “respectable” horse: he does his work conscientiously; as does also the light sorrel, surnamed the Assessor because he was bought of a justice. The coachman, Selifan, who understands the spirit of his animals, finds no subject too lofty for their comprehension. He quotes their master’s example, who is a man to be respected because he has been in government service, because he is a college councillor;[20] and when once he enters into these abstract and subtile considerations about duty, he goes so far, he soars so high, that he regularly gets lost in the confusing network of Russian roads, and sometimes he finishes his discussion in the bottom of a slough.

As to the carriage, it also has its strange physiognomy, and, so to speak, its national stamp. It is the britchka, with leather flaps fortified with two round bull’s-eyes; the britchka, whose postilion, not booted in the German fashion, but simply with his huge beard and his mittens, seated on no one knows what, whistles, brandishes his whip, shouts his song, and makes his team fly over the trembling earth.

In this equipage Tchitchikof reaches the village of N——. He introduces himself to the mayor, to the vice-mayor, to the fiscal attorney, to the natchalnik of the court, to the chief of police, to the vodka-farmer, to the general director of the crown works. His politeness, his flattering words skilfully accommodated to each of these gentlemen, his air of concern in presence of the ladies, immediately give him the reputation of being a man of the best tone. He is overwhelmed with invitations; he makes his first appearance in the fine society of N—— on the occasion of a party given by the mayor. The throng of functionaries is divided into two classes,—the “slenders” (fluets), who hover like butterflies around the ladies, jargon gayly in French, and in three years succeed in mortgaging all their paternal property to the Lombard; and secondly the “solids” (gros), who thesaurize without making any stir, buy estates in the name of their wives, and some fine day go into retirement, so as to go and live like village proprietors, like true Russian barins, until their heirs, who are generally the “slenders,” come to take possession of the inheritance, and make a single mouthful of it.

In this somewhat monotonous throng, Tchitchikof’s attention is attracted by two country gentlemen,—Manilof, a Russian Philinte, extremely fair-spoken, assiduous, and sensitive; and Sabakévitch, a colossus of brusque manners, of laconic speech. Both of them invite the new-comer to honor with his presence their dwellings, which are only a few versts distant. Here the novelist’s plan becomes apparent. He is going to take his hero and his readers from visit to visit, through all the households of these provincial proprietors, whose foibles he intends to make sport of, and whose vices he intends to scourge. And what the traveller’s business will bring under our observation in his peregrinations, will be the condition of the serfs under different masters,—a precarious and ill-regulated condition under the best, lamentable under those who are bad. Thus the importance of the literary value in the romance of the “Dead Souls,” whatever it may be, fades before the political and social aim of the conception. Or, rather, here may be seen the new and durable character which Gogol impressed upon the national romance. He applied that form in which fancy reigns to the real description of Russian life: that is to say, he devoted it to the portraying of those abuses of every sort in which the Russian is still, to a certain degree, swaddled; to the expression of the sufferings under which the thinking class, more oppressed to-day than the serfs of yore, feel themselves more and more crushed; finally, to the translation of all those obscure but insistent desires, those vague but ardent aspirations, which are summed up in the old Muscovite cry “Forward!” repeated to-day in a whisper, from one end of the country to the other, like a watchword.

The first household which Gogol brings us to visit, in company with the purchaser of dead souls, is that of the Manilof family. At the very approach to the village of Manilovka, you begin to feel an impression of vulgarity, of vapidness, and of ennui. The country is poor, but it does not exclude pretentiousness: in the bottom is a greenish pond, like a billiard-cloth, and on the higher part of the rising ground a few atrophied birches. Under two of these decrepit and consumptive trees stands an arbor with flat roof, with green painted lattice-work, the entrance of which is made by two little pillars with a pediment, on which can be read the inscription: “Temple de la méditation solitaire.”

The frame is entirely appropriate to the characters. Manilof is a pale blonde, with eyes blue as faïence. “His ever-smiling face, his ever-sugared words, make you say at first, ‘What a good and amiable man!’ The next minute you will not say any thing; and the third you ask yourself, ‘What the deuce is this man, anyway?’” Above all, he is a man weary of life. He has not a passion, or a hobby, or a fault. He has nothing decisive in his character. At one time he was in the service; and he left in the army the reputation of being a very gentle officer, but a “spendthrift of Levant tobacco.” After returning to his estate, he allowed the management of it to go as chance would have it. “When one of his peasants came to find him, and said, scratching the nape of his neck, ‘Barin, let me go and find some work so as to earn enough to pay my obrok (quit-rent);’—‘All right, go ahead!’ he replied, drawing a full whiff from his pipe; and he did not take the trouble to think that this man wanted to get out of his sight so as to have a better chance to indulge in his habits of drunkenness.” Manilof himself is continually plunged in a sort of somnolent revery which is like intoxication of the mind. His thoughts do not emerge from the embryonic state, but they come back with the persistence of the fixed idea in the brain of a man who has no ideas. His bureau always has the same book open at the same place. The parlor of his house was hung round with silk and luxuriously furnished many years ago. It has always lacked two arm-chairs, “which aren’t done yet;” and this has been so since the first days of his marriage. A bronze candelabrum, which is an object of art, has as a pendant a wretched copper candlestick, out of shape, humpbacked, soiled with tallow.

This disorder disturbs no one in the house. Manilof and his wife are enchanted with every thing,—with themselves, with their children, with their neighbors, with the city of N——. Every tchinovnik is the “most distinguished, the most lovable, the most honorable of men.” People so prone to admiration and to praise melt into gush at the visit of their guest. He, in his turn, praises Manilof’s merits to the skies, goes into ecstasies over the precocious intelligence of their two sons Alcides and Themistocles; and when he has charmed them all by his delicate attentions, he takes Manilof aside, and asks if he has lost many peasants since the last census. The proprietor, in great perplexity as to what answer to give, summons his prikashchik, formerly a peasant, who has cut his beard and thrown his kaftan to the winds, a great friend of the feather-bed and fine down foot-warmers, godfather or relative of all the big-wigs of the village, a tyrant over the poor devils whom he loads down with fees and tasks. The chubby old fellow, who gets up at eight o’clock in the morning, and who gets up simply to put his red-copper samovar on the table, and then to tipple his tea like a gourmand for an hour and a half, has no greater knowledge than his master about the insignificant question of the mortality of the serfs. “The number of the dead? That’s something we don’t take note of. How’s that?—the number of the dead? No one has had the idea of counting them, naturally.”

Tchitchikof asks to have an exact list made out, with the names, surnames, nicknames, dates of birth, color of eyes, tints of hair. When the prikashchik has gone, Tchitchikof comes to the delicate explanation. At first Manilof takes his guest to be crazy; but his face has nothing about it that is not re-assuring. He still hesitates, in the fear of some illegality. The purchaser dispels this fear. The bill of sale will not say any thing about dead souls. “Dead? Never! We will have them entered as living; they are so inscribed on the official registers. No one shall ever induce me to break the law. I respect it. I have suffered enough from my uprightness during my career as a tchinovnik. Duty first, the law above all things. That’s the kind of man I am, and I shall die the same. When the law speaks, there must be no objections!” Manilof is therefore re-assured; and when he is convinced that the crown has only to gain by this exchange of property, even though it be fictitious, he offers all his dead souls for nothing. He would like to have many other occasions to show his new friend “all the drawing of his heart, all the magnetism of his soul.” The friend takes his departure, promising the precocious children some toys; and “when the cloud of dust raised by the britchka had drifted away, Manilof came into the house again, sat down, and abandoned himself to the sweet thought that he had shown his crony a perfect amiability, such as might have been expected from his eminently benevolent and complaisant soul.”

Not all his negotiations come to this successful issue with such ease. In driving over to the house of the laconic giant Sabakévitch, the equipage gets off the track, and the carriage is overturned directly in front of a country-house where an old Russian lady, Mrs. Karabotchka, lives. As in the case of Manilof, the appearance of the landscape in some degree gives the clew to the character of the native. The landscape is little else than a nest for poultry. Fowls of every sort fill the court-yard, behind which stretch vegetable-gardens, variegated here and there with fruit-trees protected by great webs of thread. Amid this vulgarly utilitarian nature, rises a pole which ends in a bar shaped like a cross; and on the arm of this cross is nailed a nightdress, surmounted by a damaged bonnet belonging to “the lady and mistress of all this property.”

Tchitchikof does not waste so much politeness upon Nastasia Petrovna (these are the lady’s given names) as upon Manilof. He is Russian; that is to say, he possesses in perfection all those shades of speech and all those different intonations by which it is possible to show the one with whom you are speaking, veneration, respect, deference, esteem, vulgar consideration, disdainful familiarity, and, descending still lower, all degrees of patronage, even to the extreme limit of scorn. Accordingly he opens his project in free-and-easy style. But the proposition shocks the worthy woman. “What do you want to do with my dead?” she asks, fixing upon him two great eyes streaked with yellow saffron. She suspects some shrewd trick in this business; and her obstinacy, characteristic of the narrow-minded but calculating baba, finally exasperates the purchaser, who gets carried away, pounds the floor with a cane-seated chair within his reach, and to the old woman’s horror mingles the name of the Devil in his furious exclamations. These violent actions, however, have less effect than a promise deftly introduced into the conversation: “I wanted to buy of you your various farm products[21] because I have charge of various crown contracts.” This mention of the crown brings the old blockhead to terms. “Nu, yes, I consent. I am ready to sell them for fifty paper rubles. Only look, my father, at that question of supplies. If it happens you want rye-flour or buckwheat, or grits, or slaughtered neats, then please don’t forget me.” One good turn deserves another. The contract is instantly drawn up; and Mrs. Karabotchka, seeing her guest fetch forth from his travelling outfit a supply of newly stamped paper, arranges to have him leave a package for five rubles in case of necessity.[22]

All this comedy would be well worth translating word for word. The situation already treated in the preceding canto is here renewed with consummate art. The characters are developed in broad light: the contrasts are forcibly brought out; the drawing is full of freedom in its requisite vulgarity; the coloring is full of brilliancy in its rather trivial boldness. This country scene is itself enclosed between two capital bits of narration, opening and ending the chapter or canto with a symmetry of the most skilful effect.

At the beginning of the episode comes the soliloquy of Selifan the coachman, with his horses, already mentioned; the britchka’s wanderings in a pouring rain, across roads torn up by the storm; finally the catastrophe which sends the whole equipage to the bottom of a ditch into the mud.

At the end of the canto we have the britchka’s return guided by a little girl of the neighborhood, a sort of wild Indian with bare legs literally shod with fresh mire. Selifan drives his team with a silent care which makes a pointed contrast with his loquacious spirit the day before. The horses, especially the mottled one, miss his discourses; for he substitutes for them a hail-storm of treacherous goads in the fat, pulpy, soft, delicate, and sensitive portions of their bodies. At last, when the carriage has emerged from the region of mud, and has passed all these roads, running, in every sense of the word, “like crawfish at market when they are allowed to escape from the bag;” and when the coachman has reached the highway, and caught a glimpse of the public house, “he reined in his team, helped the little maiden to dismount, and, as he helped her, he looked at her for the first time. He muttered between his teeth, ‘What muddy legs! hu! hu! hu! all the way from here home, she will soil the clean grass!’ Tchitchikof gave the little maiden a copper coin, about two kopeks: she turned her back quick as a flash, and off she went, starting with five or six mad gambols; she was enchanted at the splendid gift, still more enchanted at having been allowed to sit on the coach-box of the britchka.”

At the public house Tchitchikof falls in with a character whom he has already met at the crown solicitor’s at dinner, where his familiarity surprises him, less, however, than his skill at cards, and the suspicious way in which the other players watch his fingers. He is a terrible braggart, and he carries off the traveller willy-nilly. Once again the domain resembles the owner. Nozdref is a great hand for going to fairs, a mighty tippler, a mighty gambler, a mighty liar, or, as they say in Russia of these impudent improvisers, “a mighty maker of bullets.” He is always ready to sell all his possessions at a bargain. He sometimes wins at play, and he spends his gains in purchases of every sort. The booths at the fairs in a few hours absorb all his winnings. Generally he loses; and, with the forlorn hope of getting back his money, he casts into the same hole his watch, his horses, and both carriage and coachman. Some friend has to carry him home in a simple short overcoat of Bokharian stuff, despoiled and shorn, but filled only with thoughts of having his revenge next market-day. This imbecile’s country-house has nothing more remarkable than his kennels, where beasts of every race growl and bark. As to the mill, the clamp which tightens the mill-stone is missing. The fields lie fallow. Nozdref’s work-shop is adorned only with Turkish guns, swords, poniards; add to that, pipes of every clay and of every size, and an old hand-organ. Here the negotiations about dead souls do not run smoothly. Nozdref treats his man as though he were a liar, a sharper: he wants to compel him to a bargain no less preposterous than disadvantageous; then he offers to put up souls at lansquenet. Tchitchikof, in spite of insults, accepts only a part of the queens; and the game has hardly begun before he refuses to play in consequence of the strange pertinacity shown by his adversary’s sleeve in pushing forward the cards which are not in the game. Hence a terrible quarrel. Nozdref seizes the suspicious player by the throat, and calls his valets to thrash him. The comedy is changing into a tragedy. The purchaser of souls is paler than one of his dead. At the critical moment a carriage drives up, and from it descends the deus ex machinâ, a police-officer, who comes to arrest Nozdref for assault and battery committed by him and some other gentlemen on the person of a Mr. Maksimof, whom they had beaten on leaving some orgy.

The procession of vices and absurdities sweeps on. Next to Nozdref, the rascally brutal gambler, appears Sabakévitch, the Russian gormandizer,—a colossus with enormous feet, with a back as wide as the rump of a Viatkan horse, with arms and legs huge as the granite posts which fence in certain monuments; a man capable of wrestling with a bear, himself a bear, as his surname Mikhaïl, which is the nickname of the bear in Russia, sufficiently indicates.[23]

After Sabakévitch comes the miser Plushkin, a portrait whose hideous relief outdoes the effect of Balzac’s Grandet. The village where he lives still preserves traces of former wealth, rendering more noticeable and more frightful the state of degradation and wretchedness into which the present proprietor has let it fall. The appearance of the miser on his threshold, his sullen reception of the traveller, the characteristics of his dress and his person, the enumeration of the treasures which fill his sheds, the utensils crowding his office, the bric-à-brac loading his what-not, the description of his stingy ways, the contrast with his wise and happy past, the account of his domestic troubles, and of his rapid transformation under the influence of anxiety and loneliness,—all this makes this canto not only a picturesque painting, a most lively comedy, but, more than all, a psychological study as deep as it is novel. In fact, avarice may have been as well described in its effects; it had never before been so studied in its principles, and, as it were, determined in its essence.

Plushkin has sold Tchitchikof all his dead souls, and all his runaway serfs into the bargain. The list of the different purchases already concluded reaches a respectable length. The names, surnames, nicknames, description, and other particulars, complaisantly noted down by those who sell, give Tchitchikof the illusion of having actual property. His imagination brings all these dead to life. He knows their ways, their faults, their habits, the distinctive characteristics of each. The only thing that is left is to have all the purchases sanctioned by the tribunals. Now or never is the chance to show up in satire the Russian tchinovnik and his incurable corruption. The cunning tricks of the clerks, whose slightest service must be bought, the natchalnik’s collusion, the character of the witnesses, the method of blinding the chief of police as to the nature of the contract,—here would be the material for another comedy in the style of “The Revizor.”

Every thing comes out just as Tchitchikof desires. In the village, he marches from ovation to ovation: he seems at the height of his good fortune. But, unhappily for him, Nozdref meets him at the mayor’s ball, and publicly and in a loud voice makes sport of him on account of his craze for purchasing dead souls. This mysterious word has its effect. Tchitchikof is shunned as a dangerous man. The tattle of a whole idle village ravins on his reputation. Justice is stirred up: it imputes to him all sorts of misdemeanors and even crimes. True, these imputations almost instantly are shown to be false; but public opinion does not make charges against an innocent man for nothing. Suspicion always hovers about him. Every townsman goes a little farther than what has been already supposed. One day the postmaster comes declaring that Tchitchikof is Capt. Kopéïkin. This Kopéïkin is a robber chieftain, known by his wooden leg and his amputated arm. It is needless to say that Tchitchikof possesses all his limbs.

Finally Nozdref, who has done all the harm, makes partial reparation. He tells Tchitchikof what is thought and said about him in the city of N——. The man of “acquisitions” has his britchka cleaned and greased, straps his valise, and gives Selifan his orders for their departure. Selifan scratches the nape of his neck at this order to depart. What did this expressive pantomime mean? Did he regret the wine-room, and his friends the tipplers, he with the tulup thrown negligently over his shoulders? Was he deep in some love-affair, and did he mourn the porte-cochère, under the shelter of which he squeezed two whitish hands at the hour when the bandura-player, in red camisole, claws his instrument? Did he merely turn a melancholy glance towards the kitchen with its savory perfume of sauer-kraut, and look with dismay on the weariness of the cold, the wind, the snow, and the interminable roads, following this life of contemplation? “His gesture might signify all that, and many other things; for among the Russians the action of scratching the nape of the neck is not the indication of two or three ideas, limited in number, but rather of an infinite quantity of thoughts.”

They depart. A new Odyssey begins; that is to say, a new series of visits, and a new gallery of portraits. This time the author seems to have desired to soften his satire, and to add to the critical portion of his work certain theories, or, at least, certain counsels. Taking as his text Andréi Tentyotnikof,—a sweet-tempered and easy-going gentleman, who is slowly consuming away in the vague torment of a sentimental life,—he propounds his ideas on education, and lays out his programme of studies in the fashion of Rabelais, his favorite author. In contrast to Andréi he places the charming figure of Julienne, daughter of the old general Betrishef. Those who blame Gogol for never having created an elegant and graceful heroine have not read the thirteenth canto of “Dead Souls.” Never to be forgotten when once met is the dazzling amazon, whose portraiture thus begins: “The person so suddenly introduced was bathed and caressed by the light of heaven; she was as straight and as agile as a rosewood javelin.” Andréi is in love with her. But this romance is scarcely begun before it is hidden from us, and in its place comes satire again.

We fall back into vulgar life, and into the most beastly epicureanism, with the gastronomist Peetukof. This jovial fat-paunch has a splenetic neighbor. With good health, and eighty thousand rubles income, the handsome, gentle, and good Platonof is bored. He has only this word on his tongue: ennui. His brother-in-law Konstantin is apparently the only one of these Russian grandees whom Gogol has been pleased to spare. Industrious as an ox, he demands of his serfs constant labor. “I have discovered,” he says, “that when a man does not work, dreams come along, his brains run away, and he becomes a mere idiot.” This proprietor has, moreover, no claims to noble descent. “He took very little thought about his genealogical tree, judging that the possession of proofs was not worth the labor of research, and that such documents have no application to agriculture.” Finally, he contented himself with speaking Russian without going round Robin Hood’s barn, and, without any admixture of French, in thorough Russian style.

This wise man has made his property a model domain, and he would like to see the country peopled with good proprietors like himself. He lends Tchitchikof money to purchase an estate in the neighborhood. But we may conjecture that the adventurer will not settle down so soon. In fact, we are yet to see other absurd specimens; for example, the fool Koshkaref, who, though within two steps of ruin, plays with governmental forms. He has transformed his domain into a little state divided into bureaus, with such inscriptions as these: “Depot of Farm Utensils;” “Central Bureau for the Settlement of Accounts;” “Bureau of Rural Matters;” “School of High Normal Instruction;” etc. It is needless to say, that, through the fault of the employees, the bureaus do not work; for the Bureau of Edifices has taken his last ruble, and the poor sovereign’s ruin is rapidly drawing nigh.

Finally, the spectacle on which the narrator longest holds our attention is that of the poverty whereto the various faults or vices, touched by our finger in this tale, bring the great majority of the small proprietors of Russia. Klobéyef has been ruined this ten years. He still lives, and his existence is a problem. To-day is a gala day, grand dinner, play by French actors: the next, not a morsel of bread in the larder. Any one would have hung himself, drowned himself, or put a bullet through his head. Klobéyef finds the means of keeping up this alternation of luxury and wretchedness. He is a well-bred, enlightened, intelligent man: he absolutely lacks common-sense. When he is in trouble, he opens some pious book; and when the compassion of his old friends, or the charity of some strange lady on the lookout for good works, succeeds in rescuing him, for the time being, from the final tragedy, he ascribes praise to Providence, thanks the holy images, and begins to bite off from both ends this fortune come from Heaven.

With this portrait we must end the analysis of “Dead Souls.” The impression, as can be seen, is truly heart-rending. According to the author’s own statement, “it is a picture of the universal platitude of the country.” The story is told, that the scoffer Pushkin, after hearing his friend Gogol read this romance, said to him, in a voice broken by emotion, “Good God! the sad thing is our poor Russia.” It is indeed this state of moral wretchedness which Gogol strove above all to make the Russian reader feel, even though he had to do so at the cost of his own popularity.

I shall pass briefly over the last part of the romance, which is only an arrangement drawn from the author’s notes. The adventurer is seen for the second time in the clutches of the law. He has forged a will, like Crispin in “Le Légataire;” and he is only released from prison by the intercession of an old philanthropist, who finally succeeds in softening the governor-general’s severity. Tchitchikof has agreed to become an honest man, or at least to marry, and to found a line of honest folk.

It has been thought that in this violent but straightforward governor, “animated by healthy hatreds” as Alceste says, Gogol meant to picture the Tsar Nicholas. Gogol belonged, indeed, to an epoch when Russia as yet expected her salvation and delivery from above. However, the tsar is not mentioned here more than elsewhere in “Dead Souls;” and the author, whose patriotism shines forth in so many places in the book, does not seem to have cared, as might have been expected, to personify the country in the emperor. I might adduce, in proof, all the passages where, by way of compensation, words about Russian soil, Russian horsemanship, Russian idiom, etc., bring out, through the ironical and trivial prose of the satire, the poet’s passionate lyric utterances which were revealed to us in his first writings. Here is a fragment which deserves to be enshrined in an anthology along with the piece about the Dniépr or the “Ukraine night:”—

“Russia! Russia! from the beautiful distant places where I dwell[24] I see thee, I see thee plainly, O my country! Thy nature is niggardly. In thee there is nothing to charm or to awe the spectator.... No: there is nothing splendid in thee, Russia, nothing marvellous; all is open, desert, flat. Thy little cities are scarce visible in thy plains, like points, like specks. Nothing in thee is seductive, nothing even delights the eye. What secret mysterious force, then, draws me to thee? Why does thy song, melancholy, fascinating, restless, resounding throughout all thy length and breadth, from one sea to the other, ring forever in my ears? What does this song contain? Whence come these accents and these sobs which find their echo in the heart? What are these dolorous tones which strike deep into the soul, and wake the memories? Russia, what desirest thou of me? What is this obscure, mysterious bond which unites us to each other? Why dost thou look at me thus? Why does all that thou containest fix upon me this expectant gaze? My thought remains mute before thy immensity. This very infinity, to what forebodings does it give rise? Since thou art limitless, canst thou not be the mother country of thoughts whose grandeur is immeasurable? Canst thou not bring forth giants, thou who art the country of mighty spaces? This thought of thy immeasurable extent is reflected powerfully in my soul, and an unknown force makes its way into the depths of my mind. My eyes are kindled with a supernatural vision. What dazzling distances! What a marvellous mirage unknown to earth! O Russia!”

---

As M. Dupuy does not pretend to give any thing more than a hasty résumé of biographical facts, the reader may like to have for reference a more definite and fuller account of the lives of the three great authors whose literary work has been analyzed. The main authority which I have consulted has been P. Polevoï’s “History of Russian Literature, in Sketches and Biographies” [Istoriya Russkoï Literaturui f Otcherkakh i Biografyakh, fourth edition, published in 1883.] Some of his dates differ slightly from those commonly accepted. How far a man’s judgment is to be accepted who writes with the fear of the censor in his eyes, is a question; but there are a few quotations in Polevoï which are surprising in their liberality. The work is a valuable compound of literary fact and criticism, and it is illustrated with capital woodcuts.

Nikolaï Vasilyévitch Gogol-Yanovsky was born on the 31st of March, 1809 (N.S.), in the little town of Sorotchintsui, in the Government of Poltava. His father, Vasíli Afanasyévitch Gogol, was the son of a regimental clerk: at the time when the Zaparog Cossacks were still in existence, this position was considered highly respectable. Only two generations separated Gogol from the time of the Cossack wars; and his grandfather, the regimental clerk, used to relate to his family a great many stories of that time. Gogol was surrounded from his earliest childhood by a life that was hardly freed from its mediæval, warlike, half-wild character. It was full of fresh recollections of the olden times, of legends and war-songs; it was a life in which religious fervor was intermingled with a swarm of popular prejudices. Gogol’s grandfather was a lively representative of the just vanishing past, and not in vain does Gogol speak about him often in his Vetchera na Khutoryé (Evenings at the Farm). Gogol was indebted to his grandfather for at least half of his Malo-Russian tales. “My grandfather,” he says, in his sketch in his Vetcher Nakanunya Ivána Kupála (“The Eve of Ivan Kupalo’s Day”). “My grandfather (may he prosper in heaven! may he eat in the other world little wheaten rolls, with poppy seeds and honey!) was able to tell stories in a wonderful way. When he told stories, I would sit the whole day without moving from my place, and never cease to listen.... It was not so much the marvellous tales of the olden time, about the invasions of the Zaporozhtsui (Cossacks) and the Poles, about the brave deeds of the old heroes (Polkova, Poltor-Kozhukh, and Sagaidatchnui), that interested us, as the legends about some olden deed, which used to make the shudders run down my back, and my hair stand on end. Sometimes my fear would be so great from them, that every thing would appear to me like God knows what monsters.”

While his grandfather was a representative of the vanishing past, his father, Vasíli Afanasyévitch, appeared as the representative of modern times. He was a well-read man and full of experience, was fond of literature, subscribed to magazines, and at the same time was endowed with a gift of relating stories, and of enhancing them with Malo-Russian humor. His farm, Vasilyevka, was the centre of society for the district. Among the varied festivals in this farm, Gogol’s father used often to get up private theatricals. At these spectacles they used to give Kotlyarevsky’s just published comedy Natalka Poltavka (“The Girl from Poltava”), and Moskal Tcharivnik (“The Charming Muscovite”). Thus Gogol was early attracted to the stage.

Gogol’s father wrote, in imitation of Kotlyarevsky, several comedies which were played at Vasilyevka. Gogol was taught to read at home by a hired seminarist. Afterwards he was taken, with his younger brother Ivan, to Poltava, where he was taught by one of the teachers of the gymnasium. While the children were at home on their vacation, Ivan died; and Gogol was not sent back to Poltava, but remained for some time at home. Meantime, the governor of Thernígof, the prokuror (attorney-general) Bazhánof, informed Gogol’s father about the opening at Niézhin, of a gymnasium for higher learning, founded by Prince Bezborodko, and advised him to place his son in the boarding-school connected with the gymnasium. This was done in May, 1821. Gogol entered as a paying pupil, and at the end of a year he received the government scholarship. It cannot be said that Gogol was much indebted to this gymnasium of the higher education, or that he gained there any solid knowledge of any kind whatsoever, even in the very elementary branches. He studied his lessons very superficially; but as he had a good memory he got a smattering of the lectures, and, by studying hard just before the examinations, he was promoted in due time. He especially disliked mathematics, and he had a very slight inclination even for the study of languages. After graduation he could not read a French book without a dictionary. Against German and English he had a curious spite. He used to say, in jest, that he did not believe that Schiller or Goethe knew German; “surely they must have written in some other language.”

The slight progress made by Gogol in the modern languages was more than rivalled by his backwardness in the classic tongues. “He studied with me three years,” says Kulzhinsky, Gogol’s Latin teacher at the Niézhin gymnasium, in his “Reminiscences,” “and he could not learn any thing except the translation of the first sentence of the “Chrestomathie” by means of Koshansky’s grammar, ‘Universus mundus plerumque distribuitur in duas partes, cœlum et terram’ (for which he was nicknamed universus mundus). During the lectures, Gogol used to hide some book or other under his desk, paying heed neither to cœlum nor terram. I must confess that neither under me nor under my colleagues did he learn any thing. The school taught him only some logical formality and directness of understanding and thought; and, more than that, he learned nothing with us.”

Not even the Russian language was accurately learned by Gogol in the gymnasium of the higher sciences, according to the testimony of his biographer. “His school letters,” says he, “can be distinguished by the absence of all rules of orthography. To make them plainer, I used to arrange the punctuation-marks as it was necessary; I used to change the capital letters, of which he was very extravagant; and I often corrected his blunders in the endings of adjectives.”

The only thing that Gogol acquired in the gymnasium was the art of drawing, and his letters to his relatives prove that he took great pleasure in spending much time in this art.

As he was towards the bottom of his class in his studies, he was at the same time greatly distinguished by his love of mischief; and he was a great favourite with every one. His comrades were especially drawn to him by his inexhaustible humor. Even in childhood could be seen in him his spontaneous wit; and at the same time, no one could copy or imitate a character as well as the little Gogol.

He was an indefatigable reader. He especially liked Pushkin and Zhukovsky. His parents subscribed to the Vyestnik Yevropui (“Messenger of Europe”), and the reading of this and the almanacs aroused in him a desire to write. At first this came in the form of parodies. While he was at Niézhin, a certain scholar showed some signs of poetical passion; and Gogol collected this fellow’s verses, and put them in the form of an almanac, which he called Parnassky Navoz (“Manure from Parnassus”). These parodies suggested to him to publish a serious written journal, and his enterprise cost him great trouble. He had to write articles on all subjects, and then copy them, and, what was more important, to make a volume out of them. He spent whole nights trying to decide upon his titlepage, on which was ornamented the name of his journal “The Star” (Zvyezdá). It was all done stealthily, without the knowledge of his friends. Early in the month, the journal made its first appearance. In “The Star” were published Gogol’s story, “The Tverdislavitch Brothers,” which was an imitation of contemporary fiction, and some of his poems. In Gogol’s lofty style, which he now affected, he also wrote a tragedy, “The Murderers” (Razboiniki) and a ballad, “Two Little Fish” (Dvé Ruíbki), touching on the death of his brother. He also wrote at this time “Hans Küchel-Garten,” a rhymed idyl, which tells how an ideal young man leaves his sweetheart through his thirst for grandeur, but, after vain wandering, returns again to his home, and shares with his love happiness under a straw thatch. Gogol’s comic talent, however, in spite of his belief in a lofty style, began to find means of expression. Thus, among other things, he wrote a satire on the inhabitants of the town of Niézhin, under the title “Something about Niézhin; or, no Law for Fools,” in which he depicts the typical people of the town. It was divided into five parts,—“The Dedication of the Church in the Greek Cemetery,” “The Election to the Greek Magistracy,” “Swallowing-all Fair,” “The Dinner to the Predvodítel of the Nobility,” and “The Coming and Going of the Students.”

On returning once to the gymnasium after his vacation, Gogol wrote a comedy in Malo-Russian, which was played in his father’s theatre; and thus he made his début as a director and actor.

Blackboards served as scenes, and the insufficiency of costumes was made up by imagination. Then the schoolboys clubbed together, and got scenery and costumes, copying what Gogol had seen in his father’s theatre, the only one that he had ever attended. The direction of the gymnasium, wishing to encourage the study of French, introduced pieces in that tongue; and the repertory of the little school theatre soon was composed of comedies by Molière, Florian, Von Vizin, Kotzebue, Kniaznin, and Malo-Russian authors. The townspeople heard about the theatre, and it soon became very popular; and a few years ago people were still living in Niézhin who could remember how successfully Gogol took the rôle of old women.

Towards the end of his course, Gogol and his comrades subscribed quite a sum of money, and bought a library, which contained the works of Delvig, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and other distinguished contemporaries, and subscribed to several journals. Gogol was made librarian. He was so indefatigable that he made every person who took a book finish it, and so careful of their cleanliness that he used to wrap up the fingers of his readers in paper.

Gogol graduated in 1828, with the rank of the fourteenth tchin. Even at this time he was very religious, as can be seen in his correspondence with his relatives. “After the death of his father, in 1825, he writes to his mother, ‘Don’t be worried, my dearest mámenka. I have borne this shock with the strength of a Christian. It is true, at first I was overwhelmed with this terrible tidings. However, I did not let anybody see that I was so sorrowful; but, in my own room, I was given over mightily to unreasonable despair. I even wanted to take my life. But God kept me from it. And towards evening, I noticed only sorrow, but not a passionate sorrow; and it gradually turned into an uneasy, hardly noticeable melancholy, mingled with a feeling of gratitude to Almighty God. I bless thee, holy faith! In thee only I find a source of consolation and compensation for my bitter grief.’”

At the same time he was a fiery enthusiast; he imagined himself a great benefactor of his fatherland. For this reason he felt inclined to a governmental situation. He wrote his mother in 1828 that he was not understood: some, he said, took him to be a genius; others, to be a stupid. He tried to be one of the romanticists; and, like all of those budding geniuses, he thought that he had a great deal to put up with from people. In the same letter he writes his mother how much ungratefulness, coldness, vexation, he had been obliged to bear without complaint and without grumbling. He writes one of his friends that the people of Niézhin, not excepting “our dear instructors,” have heaped upon our genius the pressing heaps of their earthiness, and crushed us. Two features of Gogol’s life at this time are interesting as showing his development,—a tendency to asceticism, which led him to a stern self-restraint, turning all the pleasures and interests of his life to a spiritual and intellectual sphere. “My plan of my life,” he writes to his mother in 1829, “is wonderfully stern and exact. Every kopek has its place. I refuse myself even very extreme necessities, with a view of being able to keep myself in the position which I am now, so that I can satisfy my desire of seeing and feeling the beautiful (prekrásnoe). With this view I lay up all my annual allowance, except what is absolutely necessary.”

In 1829 Gogol first went to Petersburg, where, in spite of his vivid dreams of success and glory, he found the hard realities of life, and met with discouraging failures. He wrote his mother: “Everywhere I met with disappointments; and, what is strangest of all, I met them when I least expected them. Men entirely incapable, without any letters of introduction whatever, easily succeeded where I, even with the aid of my patrons, failed.” He also fell in love with a girl of high rank; and in his letter to his mother he speaks about it, but does not mention her name: “For God’s sake, don’t ask her name. She is very, very high.... No, it is not love: I, at least, never heard of such a love. Under the impulse of madness and horrible torments of the soul, I was thirsty to intoxicate myself only with the sight of her, only the sight of her I looked for. To look upon her once more was my only desire, which grew stronger with an unspeakable, gnawing anguish. I looked upon myself with horror, and I saw all my horrible situation. Every thing in the world was strange to me, life and death were equally intolerable, and my soul could not account for its impulses.”

His mental state arising from all these disappointments became so serious that he went abroad with money that his mother sent him to pay a mortgage on their estate, and told his mother to take his portion of the estate in exchange for it. He went to Lübeck by sea, staid there a month, took a few baths, and returned to Petersburg without seeing any thing more of Europe. At all events, he returned, sobered, refreshed, and strengthened, in September, 1829. In April, 1830, Gogol found a very insignificant place in the ministry of Appanages. The whole outcome of this year of servitude was the knowledge of tying up papers, and a vivid memory of various types of Tchinovniks which he used to advantage in his works later on.

In 1829 he wrote his poem “Italy,” and sent it anonymously to the publisher of Suin Otetchestva (Son of the Fatherland.) Soon afterwards he published “Hans Küchel-Garten,” which had been written while he was in the gymnasium. It was signed Alof, and brought a review full of unmerciful ridicule. This review cut Gogol so keenly that he immediately withdrew the story from circulation. Buying up all the copies that he could get hold of, he hired a room in a hotel, and made a grand holocaust of them. The last tendencies of his immature, imitative romanticism went up with the incense of the fire and smoke. He soon saw that a new spirit was invading Russian literature: historical novels were becoming fashionable. So Gogol writes to all his friends and relatives in Malo-Russia to send him every possible scrap about the history of that region, about the habits, manners, customs, legends, games, songs, of the Cossacks. “It is very, very necessary for me,” he would add. He was working over his “Evenings on the Farm near Dikanka.” In February, 1830, there appeared anonymously in the Otetchestvennuie Zapiski one of Gogol’s tales, entitled “Bassavriuk; or, Ivan Kupala’s Eve.” In 1831, in “Northern Flowers,” appeared a chapter of his historical novel “Hetman,” signed with four zeros. In the first number of the “Literary Gazette” he published a sketch from his Malo-Russian story, Strashnui Kaban (The Terrible Boar). He also wrote serious articles and translations.

In March, 1831, he was made teacher of Russian in the Patriotic Institute. Here, instead of teaching Russian, he taught history, geography, and international history; and when he was called to account for his vagaries, and was asked when he was going to teach the Russian language, he smiled, and said, “What do you want it for, gentlemen? The main thing in Russian is to know the difference between yé and yat [two similarly sounding, but differently written, letters], and that I perceive you know already, as is seen by your copy-books. No one can teach you to write smoothly and gracefully. This power is granted by nature, but not by instruction.”

Indeed, Gogol himself, to his dying day, was not able to spell correctly. He cared more for the spirit than the form. The publication of “Evenings on the Farm,” especially the second series, which are marked by the purest humor, without a shade of melancholy, immediately placed him in the front rank of the authors of his day; and this was the happiest epoch of his life. Soon afterwards he began to feel a re-action. In 1833 he wrote to Pogódin: “Let my stories be doomed to oblivion till something really solid, great, artistic, shall come out of me. But I stand idle, motionless. I don’t want to do any thing trivial, and I can’t think of any thing great.” He then betook himself to historical investigation, and determined to write the history of Malo-Russia and of the Middle Ages. He laid out the work on a colossal scale. He wrote to Maksímof, “I am writing the history of the Middle Ages, and I think it will fill eight volumes, if not nine.” He never finished these histories, but his study of Malo-Russia led him to the composition of his great epos “Taras Bulba.”

There happened to be a vacancy in the university of St. Vladímer in Kief. Some one suggested Gogol, and he was invited to apply. He came, he saw, and he conquered the man in whose hands the appointment lay, by his wonderful flow of brilliant conversation; but he brought no documents. He was requested to come again, with his documents and application. Again he appeared, and again he dazzled by his wit; but when he was asked for his documents he pulled from his inside pocket his certificate of graduation from the gymnasium, which gave him the right to a tchin of the fourteenth class, and an application for the chair of Ordinary Professor. He was told that it was impossible, with such credentials, for him to be given any thing more than the chair of adjunct. Gogol was obstinate, and absolutely refused to take that position. Shortly after, he was appointed professor at Petersburg, where he gave the one lecture which was so beautiful. “We awaited the next lecture with impatience,” says Ivanitsky, who was a pupil at that time; “Gogol came in very late, and began with the phrase: ‘Asia was a volcano belching forth people.’ Then he spoke a few words about the emigration of nations; but it was so dull, lifeless, and desultory that it was tedious to listen to him, and we could not believe that it was the same Gogol who had spoken so beautifully the week before. Finally he mentioned a few books where we could read up the subject, and bowed and left. The whole lecture lasted twenty minutes. The following lectures were of the same stamp; so that we became entirely cool to him, and the classes became smaller and smaller. But once,—it was October,—while walking up and down the hall of assembly, and waiting for him, suddenly Pushkin and Zhukovsky came in. They knew, of course, through the Swiss, that Gogol had not yet come; and so they only asked us in which room he would read. We showed them the auditorium. Pushkin and Zhukovsky looked in, but did not enter. They waited in the hall of assembly. In quarter of an hour the lecturer came; and we, following the three poets, entered the auditorium and sat down. Gogol took his chair, and suddenly, without any warning, began to read the history of the Arabians. The lecture was brilliant, exactly in the manner of the first. Word for word it was published in the ‘Arabesques.’ It was evident that he knew beforehand the intention of the poets to come to his lecture, and therefore he prepared himself to treat them like poets. After the lecture Pushkin said something to Gogol, but the only word I heard was ‘fascinating’ (uvlekátelno). The rest of his lectures were very dry and tedious. Not one historical personage caused any lively and enthusiastic discussion.... He looked upon the dead nations of the past with dreary eyes, as it were; and it was doubtless true that it was tedious to him, and he saw that it was tedious to his hearers. He used to come and speak half an hour from his platform, and then leave for a whole week and sometimes for two. Then he would come again and repeat the same proceeding. Thus went the time till May.”

He gave up his thoughts of the nine-volume history of the Middle Ages; and of this year of disappointment there remained only a few articles in the “Arabesques,” and the sketches of a tragedy entitled “Alfred,” which show that he had not a trace of talent for tragedy. In 1835 he resigned, and devoted himself entirely to literature.

About this time he began to develop a great passion for the supernatural, which is best illustrated in his sketch “Vii.” It is an interesting fact that the poet Pushkin, whose influence over Gogol was considerable, suggested to him the subject of “Dead Souls.” He also told him the story which he afterwards worked up into the “Revizor.” Pushkin himself at one time intended to use both of these subjects. Gogol attended the first production of the “Revizor” on the stage, and was greatly disgusted. He trained the actors, however, giving them the meaning of every inflection, and showing what gesticulation was needed. “All are against me,” he wrote to M. S. Shchepkin in 1836, “all the decent tchinovniks are shouting that I hold nothing sacred, since I dared to speak so about people who are in the service. The police are against me, merchants are against me, literary men are against me: they berate me, yet they go to see the play. At the fourth act it is impossible to get tickets. Had it not been for the mighty protection of the emperor, my play would never have been put on the stage; and people even now are doing their best to have it suppressed. Now I see what it means to be a comic writer. The least spark of truth, and all are against you,—not one man, but all classes. I imagine what it would have been if I had taken something from Petersburg life, with which I am even more acquainted than provincial life. It is very unpleasant for a man to see people against him whom he loves with brotherly affection.”

Gogol wrote another comedy, entitled “The Leaving of the Theatre after the Production of a New Comedy.” It was founded on the various criticisms of his “Revizor,” but it was not very successful. In 1836 Gogol went abroad. He lived most of the time in Rome, though he wandered all over Europe, and occasionally returned for short visits, renewing his acquaintance with his old friends. Like Turgénief, while he was in Russia he was disgusted with the state of affairs, but when he left there his soul began to turn with intense yearning for his native land. In 1837 Gogol wrote “Dead Souls.” He said in his “Confessions of an Author,” “I began to write ‘Dead Souls’ without laying out any circumstantial plan, without deciding what the hero should be. I simply thought that the bold project, with the fulfilment of which Tchitchikof was occupied, would of itself lead me to various persons and characters, that the natural impulse in me to laugh would create many scenes which I intended to mingle with pathetic ones. But I was stopped with questions at every step, why and wherefore? What must express such and such a character? What must express such and such a phenomenon? Now I had to ask: What must be done when such questions arise? Drive them off? I tried, but the stern question confronted me. As I felt no special love for this character or that, I could not feel any love for the work to bring it out. On the contrary, I felt something like contempt: every thing seemed strained, forced; and even that which made me laugh became pitiable.”

Charles Edward Turner, English lector in the University of St. Petersburg, says in his “Studies in Russian Literature:” “In the year 1840 Gogol came to Russia for a short period, in order to superintend the publication of the first volume of the “Dead Souls”, and then returned to Italy. With the appearance of this volume we may date the close of his literary career; for though in 1846, at which period he again settled in Russia, he published his “Correspondence with my Friends,” the work can only be regarded as the production of a disordered and enfeebled intellect.... Describing his final illness and death in 1852, he says, “One of his last acts was to burn the manuscript of the concluding portion of ‘The Dead Souls,’ and to write a few sad lines in which he prays that all his works may be forgotten as the products of a pitiable vanity, composed at a time when he was still ignorant of the true interests and duties of man.” At the end of his article on Gogol he says, “What ultimately became of Tchitchikof, we do not know; for, as has been already stated, the concluding portion of his adventures was destroyed by Gogol in a fit of religious enthusiasm.” A certain Dr. Zahartchenko of Kief thought fit to publish, in 1857, a continuation of Gogol’s inimitable work. The stolid complacency which alone could encourage an obscure and talent-less novelist to undertake such a task is in itself a sufficient standard of the success he could achieve; and his book must be regarded with the same mingled feeling of astonishment and pity an Englishman would experience on having put before him a continuation of Thackeray’s “Denis Duval” or Dickens’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

In 1848 Gogol made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and returned to Russia by way of Odessa. The last years of his life were passed in Moscow in an ever-deepening state of fanatical mysticism. His death, in March, 1852, was probably due to his insane attempt to keep the strict fast. His last days were troubled by strange hallucinations. His life-long disorder was an acute derangement of the nerves caused by self-abuse.

As an example of Gogol’s early style, the opening scene of “Taras Bulba,” which has been mentioned by M. Dupuy, may be read with interest:—

“‘Ah! turn around, little son. How funny you look! What kind of a parson’s garment have you got on? Is that the way you go in your academy?’ With such words the old Bulba met his two sons, who had been studying in the theological school in Kief, and who just came home to their father.

“His sons have only just dismounted from their horses. They were a couple of hearty fellows, who looked from under their brows like just graduated seminarists. Their strong, healthy faces were covered with the first downy hair, as yet untouched by a razor. They were very much confused at such a reception by their father, and stood motionless, with their eyes fixed on the ground.

“‘Hold on, hold on, children!’ he continued, turning them around and around. ‘What a long svitkas you’ve got on! Those are fine svitkas. Nu, nu, nu, such svitkas as these were never yet seen! Well, now, both of you try to run; I’ll see if you don’t trip up.’

“‘Don’t you make fun of us, don’t you make fun of us, father!’ at last said the eldest of them.

“‘Fu, what a dandy you are! Why not laugh?’

“‘Simply because [Da tak]; I suppose, you are my father; yet, if you keep on making sport of us, by Heaven, I’ll give to you!’

“‘Akh! a fine kind of a son you are. What’s that you say to your father?’ said Taras Bulba, falling back a little in surprise.

“‘Yes, though you are my father. I don’t regard anybody, or have any respect for anybody, who insults me.’

“‘How do you want to fight with me,—with fists?’

“‘It makes no difference to me.’

“‘Nu! let us fight with fists,’ said Bulba, rolling up his sleeves.

“And the father and son, instead of saluting each other after their long separation, began to beat each other angrily.

“‘The old man must be crazy,’ said the pale, thin, and kindly mother, who was standing on the threshold, and who has not yet had a chance to embrace her beloved children. ‘By Heaven, he is crazy! Here the children have come home. For more than a year he has not seen them, and now he is doing, God knows what! To fight with fists!’

“‘Yes, he fights gloriously,’ said Bulba, stopping. [Éï Bogu!] ‘Capital!... So, so!’ he continued, adjusting himself a little. ‘There won’t be any need of trying. He will make a good Kazak.—Nu, how are you, little son? Give us a kiss.’ And the father and son began to kiss each other.

“‘Excellent, little son; pound everybody just as you have thrashed me; don’t give in to anybody. Yet you have on a funny rig. What kind of a rope is that hanging down?—And, you dog, what are you there for with your hands by your sides?’ said he, addressing the younger one. ‘Why don’t you thrash me, you son of a dog?’

“‘Now he is talking nonsense again,’ cried the mother, at the same time throwing her arms around the younger one. ‘And what nonsense gets into his head! How can a child beat his own father? As though that was all he had to tend to now. He is a little child; he has travelled such a long way, he must be tired’ (this child was more than twenty years old, and exactly a Sazhen, almost seven feet high). ‘He must need to rest now, and have something to eat; and yet he compels him to fight!’

“‘Ey! you are a little dandy [mazuntchik] I see,’ said Bulba. ‘Don’t listen, little son, to your mother: she is a baba [woman], she doesn’t know any thing. What kind of petting do you want? Your petting is the clear field and a good horse; that is your petting. And do you see this sabre? That is your mother. All they are stuffing your heads with is nonsense: the academy and all those little books—primers and philosophies—are the Devil knows what. I spit at it all. I am going to send you away next week to the Zaporozhe. That is the school for you. It is there only where you will learn reason.’

“‘Won’t they stay at home with us but one week?’ asked the thin old mother pitifully, with tears in her eyes. ‘Poor fellows, they won’t have time to enjoy themselves. They won’t get any good out of their own home, and I sha’n’t look at them half enough.’

“That’ll do, that’ll do, old woman! A Kazak’s got something better to do than spend his time with women [babas]. Hurry up, and put on the table every thing you’ve got,—poppy-seed cake [pampuskek], gingerbread, and such like; puddings we can get along without. But fetch us a whole ram for dinner, and then whiskey; and let’s have more whiskey than any thing else: not the kind with different kinds of stuff in it,—raisins, and other such things,—but straight whiskey, the unadulterated, such as’ll hiss like the devil!’

“Bulba took his sons into the small room. Every thing in the room was arranged according to the taste of that time; and that time was about the sixteenth century, when the idea of the union had just begun to be discussed. Every thing was clean and whitewashed. The whole wall was adorned with sabres and guns. The windows in the room were small, with round panes of ground glass, such as can be found at the present time only in old churches. On the shelves, which occupied the corners of the room, and which were made triangular in shape, were standing earthen pitchers, blue and green bottles, silver cups, gilded wine-glasses, of Venetian, Turkish, and Circassian workmanship, which had found their way into Bulba’s room in different ways,—third and fourth hand, a very ordinary thing in those bold days. The linden benches around the whole room, the huge table in the middle of it, the stove occupying half of the room, like a fat Russian merchant’s wife, and adorned with tiles with designs of cockerels,—all these things were very familiar to our two young fellows, who used to walk home almost every year to spend their vacation; they used to walk because they had no horses, and because it was not customary to allow scholars to go on horseback. They had only the long forelocks which every Kazak who carries weapons felt that he had a right to pull. Bulba, just as they were about to leave school, sent them from his stud a pair of good horses.

“‘Well [nu], little sons, before all let us have some whiskey. God bless you! to your health, my little sons; yours, Ostap, and yours, Andriï! May God grant you be always successful in battle, that you may beat the Busurmans (Mahometans), beat the Turks, beat the Tatars, and when the Poles begin to do any thing against our religion, beat the Poles too! Nu! hold up your glass. Is the whiskey good? And what is whiskey in Latin? That’s it [to-to] little son. The Latuintsui [Latins] were fools; they did not know there was such a thing as whiskey in existence. What was the name of that fellow who wrote Latin verses? I don’t know much of reading and writing, and therefore I do not remember. Wasn’t it Horatsii?’

“‘That’s a fine father,’ said the older son, Ostap, to himself. ‘The dog knows every thing, but he makes believe that he doesn’t.’

“‘I don’t believe the arkhimandrit allowed you even to smell whiskey,’ continued Bulba. ‘Well, now, little sons, tell the truth: did they lash you with cherry and maple sticks over the back, and everywhere else? Or maybe, being as you are so mighty smart, they used straps on you! I reckon that; besides Saturdays, they used to thrash you on Wednesdays and Thursdays too.’

“‘Father, there’s no need of bringing up all that,’ said Ostap, in his usual phlegmatic voice. ‘What’s past is gone.’

“‘Now we shall pay everybody off,’ said Andriï, ‘with sabres and bayonets. Just let the Tatars come in our way!’

“‘That is good, little son. By Heavens, that’s good! If that’s the case, I shall go along with you. By Heavens, I’ll go! What the devil is the good of staying here! What! must I look after the grain and swine-herds, or to fool with my wife? I stay at home for her sake? I am a Kazak. I do not want it! Well, even supposing there is no war, I am going with you to the Zaporozhe. We’ll have a good time. By Heavens, I’m going!” And the old Bulba, little by little, grew excited, and finally became entirely fierce. He got up from the table, and, trying to look dignified, stamped his foot upon the ground. ‘To-morrow we’ll go! Why put it off? What in the devil should we sit here for? What good does this hut do us? What do we want all these things for? What’s the good of these pots?’ And, while saying this, Bulba began to smash and throw about the pots and the bottles.

“The poor old wife, who was long wonted to such tricks of her husband, looked on sorrowfully as she sat on the bench. She did not dare to say a word; but after hearing this resolution, so terrible to her, she could not refrain from tears. She looked up at her children, from whom such a quick separation threatened her; and no one could describe the whole speechless force of her sorrow, which seemed to quiver in her eyes and in the tremblingly compressed lips.

“Bulba was terribly stubborn. He was one of those characters which could spring up only in the rough sixteenth century, and especially in the half-nomadic Eastern Europe, when ideas were both right and wrong as to the possession of lands which were a disputed and undecided property. At that time, the Ukraïna was in this state. The everlasting necessity of defending the border against three different nations,—all this added a sort of free and broad character to the actions of its sons, and it trained in them a stubborn spirit. This stubbornness of spirit was imprinted with full strength in Taras Bulba. When Batori raised regiments in Malo-Russia, and roused in them that warlike spirit which at first marked only the inhabitants of the Rapids, Taras was one of the first colonels; but at the first opportunity he quarrelled with all the others, because the booty obtained from the Tatars by the united forces of the Polish and Cossack armies was not equally divided between them, and because the Polish army received a greater share. He, in the presence of all, resigned his rank, and said, ‘When you colonels don’t know your own rights, then let the Devil lead you by the nose. And I am going to recruit my own regiment; and whoever will attempt to take away what belongs to me, I shall know how to wipe off his lips.’ And, in fact, in a short time he collected from his father’s estate quite a good number of men, made up of both farm-laborers and warriors, who gave themselves up entirely to his wish. He was generally a great hand for taking part in invasions and raids; he heard with his nose, as it were, where and in what place an uprising was taking place. Like snow upon the head, he would appear on his horse. ‘Nu, children, what is it? How is it? Who is to be beaten? What is the reason?’ was what he generally asked, and then took a hand in the affair. First of all, he would sternly analyze the circumstances, and he would take a hand only in cases when he saw that those who seized the weapons had really a right to do so; and this right, according to his opinion, was only in the following cases. If the nation in the neighborhood had been carrying off cattle, or cutting off a portion of land; or if the commissioners had been putting on heavy taxes, or had not respected their elders, and had spoken in their presence with their hats on; or if they had left the Christian religion,—in such cases it was inevitably necessary to take up the sabre; but against the Busurmans, Tatars, and Turks, he considered it just to use the weapon any time, in the name of God, Christianity, and Kazatchestvo (Cossackdom). The position of Malo-Russia at that time, having no system whatever, and being in perfect uncertainty, brought into existence many entirely separate partisans. Bulba led a very simple life; and it would have been impossible to distinguish him from any ordinary Kazak in the service, if his face had not preserved a certain expression of command, and even grandeur, particularly when he used to make up his mind to defend something.

“Bulba comforted himself beforehand with the thought of how he should appear now with his two sons, and say, ‘Just look what nice fellows I have brought to you.’ He thought about how he should take them to the Zaporozhe, to that school of war of the Ukraïna of that day, how he should introduce them to his comrades, and superintend their advance in the science of war and making raids, which he considered at that time one of the first qualities of a knight. At first he intended to send them off alone, because he deemed it necessary to give himself up to the enlistment of a new regiment which demanded his presence; but at the sight of his sons, who were well built and hearty, all his warrior-spirit suddenly awoke in him, and he made up his mind to go along with them on the following day, though the necessity of this was only his stubborn will.

“Without losing a minute, he began to give orders to his esaul, whom he called Tovkatch, because he was really like some kind of a cold-blooded machine: during battle he would pass indifferently along the enemy’s ranks, sweeping them down with his sabre as though he was mixing dough, like a boxer clearing his way. The orders were to the effect that he should stay on the farm till orders came for him to set out to the war. After this, he went around the village, giving orders to some of his people to accompany him, to water the horses, to feed them with wheat, and to saddle his own horse, which he used to call Tchort, or the Devil. ‘Nu, children, now we must go to sleep, and to-morrow we shall do what God may instruct us to do. Don’t give us any bedding! We don’t need any bedding: we shall sleep in the dvor!’

“The night had just embraced the heaven; but Bulba always retired early. He made himself comfortable on the carpet, covered himself up with a sheep-skin tulup, because the night air was rather fresh, and because Bulba was fond of covering himself warmly when at home. He was soon snoring, and his example was followed by the whole court. Every thing that was lying in its various corners was snoring and singing. Before anybody else the watchman fell asleep, because he drank more than anybody else, in honor of the arrival of the young lords.

“The poor mother only was not sleeping. She leaned towards the heads of her dear sons, who were lying side by side; with a comb she straightened their young, carelessly disordered locks, and moistened them with her tears. She gazed at them with her whole soul, with all her feelings; she metamorphosed herself into one gaze, and she could not satisfy herself in looking at them. She had nursed them with her own breast; she had brought them up, caressed them,—and now only for one moment does she see them before her. ‘My sons, my precious sons! what will become of you? what fate awaits you there? If only for one week more, I might look upon you both,’ said she; and her tears stood in the wrinkles, which had changed her once beautiful face. And indeed she was pitiful, like any other woman of that bold age. She saw her husband two or three days a year, and then for several years there would be no tidings of him. And if she did see him, when they lived together, what kind of a life was hers? She suffered insults, even blows. Only out of mercy at times she felt his caresses. She was like a strange creature in this assemblage of wifeless knights, upon whom the dissolute Zaparog life threw its stern shadow. The joyless days of her youth flashed before her, and her cheeks were covered with premature wrinkles. All her love, all her feelings, all that is tender and passionate in a woman, all turned with her into one motherly feeling. She, with heat, with passion, with tears, like the gull of the steppe [step-tchaïka], looked upon her children. Her sons, her dear sons, are taken away from her: they are taken away, never to be seen again. Who knows? Maybe at the first battle the Tatarin will chop off their heads, and she would not even know where their bodies lie: the ravening birds may pick them up; and for every little piece of their flesh, for every drop of blood, she would have given up her all! As she wept, she looked straight into their eyes, which all compelling sleep began to close, and she thought to herself, ‘Maybe Bulba, after having a good sleep, will postpone the journey for a couple of days. Maybe he decided to go so soon because he drank too much.’ The moon from the height of the heaven was already shining over the whole dvor, filled with sleeping people, with the thick mass of willows and tall steppe grass, in which the fence around the yard was drowned. She was still sitting at the heads of her dear sons, without for a moment taking off her eyes from them, and not thinking of sleep.

“The horses, anticipating the dawn of day, lay down on the grass, and ceased eating. The upper leaves of the willows began to rustle, and little by little the rustling stream descended down over them to the very bottom. She sat till the very morning: she was not at all tired, and she inwardly wished that the night might last as long as possible. From the steppe was heard the loud neighing of a young colt.

“Ruddy stripes brightly gleamed in the heaven. Bulba suddenly awoke and jumped up. He remembered very well every thing that he had ordered the day before. ‘Nu, fellows, you’ve slept long enough: it is time. Water the horses. And where is the old woman? [Thus he generally called his wife]. Be lively, old woman, have something for us to eat, because there is a long journey before us.’

“The poor old woman, who was deprived of her last hope, gloomily dragged herself to the hut. While with tears in her eyes she was preparing every thing for breakfast, Bulba gave his orders, busied himself in the stable, and he himself selected for his sons his best adornments. The seminarists were suddenly transformed: instead of their old soiled boots, they wore red leather ones with silver rings on the heels; pantaloons as wide as the Black Sea, with a thousand folds and pleats, were fastened tight around the waist with a golden belt; to the belt were attached long straps, with tassels and other little ornaments for the pipe. The kazakin (a little Russian garment), of gay color, of cloth as bright as fire, was tightened with an embroidered belt. Silver-mounted Turkish pistols were stuck behind the belt; the sabre clattered under their feet. Their faces, which were a little burned by the sun, it seemed, became handsomer and whiter; their young black mustaches brought out now in somewhat more striking contrast their whiteness and the healthy, robust color of youth. They looked well under their sheepskin hats with golden tips.

“The poor mother! As soon as she looked up at them, she could not utter a word, and the tears were checked in her eyes.

“‘Nu, little sons, every thing is ready! There is no need of wasting time,’ cried Bulba at last. ‘Now, according to the Christian style, all of us must sit down before setting out.’

“All of them sat down, not excepting even the serfs, who were standing respectfully at the door. ‘Now, mother, bless your children,’ said Bulba. ‘Pray to God that they may fight with courage, that they may always keep the honor of knights, that they may always stand up for the Christian faith; else rather may they sink, so that their spirits perish from the world.—Go over, children, to your mother. A mother’s prayer saves in fire and water.’ The mother, weak as a mother, embraced them, took out two small holy images, put them on their necks, all the time weeping bitterly. ‘May the Mother of God—preserve you.—Don’t forget, little sons, your mother.—Send me some little word about you.’ Further she could not speak.

“‘Nu, let us start, children,’ said Bulba.

“At the steps their horses were standing. Bulba mounted his devil, who wickedly began to back on feeling a weight of twenty puds (nearly eight hundred pounds), for Bulba was exceedingly heavy and fat.

“When the mother saw that her sons were already on the horses, she hurried after the younger one, whose face expressed more of tenderness. She caught the stirrup, clung to his saddle, and, with desperation in all her features, would not let it out of her hands. Two strong Kazaks took her gently and carried her into the hut. But as soon as they left her, she, with all the rapidity of a wild goat, though it was not in accordance with her age, ran out of the gate, and with an incomprehensible strength stopped the horse, and threw her arms around one of them in a sort of a mad and senseless excitement.

“They took her away again.

“The young Kazaks rode on gloomily, but kept their tears, fearing their father, who, however, on his part, was also somewhat melancholy, though he tried not to show it. It was a gray day; the green fields gleamed brightly, the birds were singing somehow in discord. After going some distance, they looked back. Their farm seemed as though it was swallowed up by the earth; only two chimneys of their humble house stood on the earth; only the tops of the trees, on the branches of which they used to climb like squirrels. Only the distant prairie remained before them, that prairie which reminded them of the whole history of their life, since the days when they used to ride over its dewy grass. And now there is only the sweep over the well, with a telyega wheel attached to its top, standing out by itself against the sky; already the level over which they have passed looks, in a distance, like a mountain, and it has covered every thing. Farewell, childhood, and games, and all, and all, farewell.”

Among the historical characters belonging to Turgénief’s family were Piotr, who exposed the character of the False Dmitri, and who in consequence was executed on the Lobno Place in Moscow; and Yakof Turgénief, the well-known jester of Peter the Great, who, in the year 1700, had to shear off the boyars’ beards. Still more worthy of mention among those who bore the name of Turgénief was his cousin Nikolaï Ivanovitch, who was implicated in the celebrated Dekabrist conspiracy of 1825, and was exiled by Nicholas. He wrote a large work entitled “Russia and the Russians.” He was a passionate advocate of the emancipation of the serfs.

Ivan Turgénief’s father served in a regiment of cuirassiers stationed at Orel, and there he married Várvara Petrovna Lutovinova. His father resigned with the rank of colonel, and died in 1835. Ivan’s mother lived till she reached the age of seventy. In 1820 the whole Turgénief family went abroad and visited Switzerland. At Berne the little four-year-old Ivan Sergéyevitch narrowly escaped falling a prey to the bears. His father caught him by the leg just as he was pitching headlong into the pit. When the family returned to Russia, they lived in the Government of Orlof; and Ivan Sergéyevitch had tutors of every nationality except his own. His first acquaintance with Russian literature came from a serf named Kheraskof, belonging to his mother. The first Russian book that he ever read was the “Rossiada.” In 1828 the family moved to Moscow, and six years later Ivan Sergéyevitch entered the University of Moscow; but the year following he left for Petersburg, where he graduated as kandidat in philology. His first attempts at writing were made before he graduated; and his teacher, Pletnef, was able to discover in him signs of future greatness. Turgénief says, in his “Reminiscences,” “At the beginning of 1827, while I was a student in the third course of the University of St. Petersburg, I handed the professor of literature, P. A. Pletnef, one of the first ‘fruits of my muse,’ as they used to say in those days. It was a fantastic drama, in iambic pentameters, entitled ‘Stenio.’ In one of the following lectures, Pletnef, without mentioning any names, analyzed, with his usual kindness, this absolutely stupid piece of work, in which, with childish incapability, was shown a slavish imitation of Byron’s ‘Manfred.’ After leaving the university building, and finding me on the street, he called me to him, and caressed me like a father, remarking at the same time that there was something [tchto-to] in me. These two words gave me sufficient assurance to take to him some more of my poetical productions. He picked out two of them, and a year later published them in ‘The Sovremennik,’ which he inherited from Pushkin. I don’t remember the title of one; but “The Old Oak” was the subject of the other, and it began thus:—

In 1838 Turgénief went to Berlin. On his way the ship took fire, and he narrowly escaped with his life. He afterwards embodied the recollection in his story, or sketch, “A Fire at Sea.” “I was then nineteen years old,” he says, in his “Reminiscences,” “and I had been dreaming about this trip. I was convinced that it was possible to acquire in Russia only elementary knowledge, but that the source of real knowledge was abroad. Among the number of the professors in the St. Petersburg University at that time, there was not one who could have shaken that conviction in me. Moreover, they themselves felt the same way. Even the ministry itself, including its chief, Count Uvarof, was convinced of this same thing; and the latter used to send at his own expense young men to the universities of Germany. I was at Berlin (at two different times) for about two years. I studied philosophy, the ancient languages, history, and with special eagerness I devoted myself to Hegel under the guidance of Professor Werder. As proof of the insufficiency of the knowledge to be gained at our own colleges, I am going to quote this fact: I studied Latin antiquity with Zumpt, the history of Greek literature with Beck; but at my own home I was compelled to learn by heart Latin and Greek grammar, of which I had a very slim acquaintance, and I was not one of the worst candidates.”

In his “Reminiscences” he throws further light on the causes which induced him to live abroad. He says that there was nothing to keep him in Russia. Every thing around him was calculated to fill him with indignation, contempt, and scorn. “I could not hesitate long. It was necessary either to submit to humiliation, and calmly make up my mind to follow the general rut over the beaten road, or boldly to push away ‘every thing and all,’ even at the risk of losing much that was dear and near to my heart. And so I did. I threw myself head first into the ‘German sea,’ which should purify and regenerate me; and, when at last I emerged from its billows, I became a Zapadnik,—a Western man, and such I remained for all my life.”

In 1841 Turgénief returned to Russia, going directly to Moscow, where his mother was living. Here he became acquainted with the Slavophiles Aksákof, Khomiakof, and the Kiriyevskys, who at this time were just beginning to promulgate their ideas. But Turgénief found them hopelessly in the “general rut.”

He tells in his “Reminiscences” how he first thought of “Fathers and Sons.” “I was taking baths at Ventnor, a little town on the Isle of Wight, in August, 1860, when the first thought of ‘Fathers and Sons’ entered my mind,—that narrative which checked, as it seems to me, forever the kindly disposition of the Russian younger generation. More than once I read in journals, and heard that ‘I was off the track,’ or was ‘bringing in new ideas.’ Some praised me; others, on the contrary, blamed me. On my part, I must confess that I never attempted to ‘create a figure.’ I always had for my starting-point, not an idea, but a living person, to whom I would gradually add and join suitable elements. The same thing happened in ‘Fathers and Sons.’ As the foundation of the main figure, Bazarof, the person of a young provincial doctor, who surprised me very much at the time, was chosen. He died just before 1860. This remarkable man appeared to me to contain all the elements of what has since received the name of Nihilism, but which at that time was just beginning to rise, and had not yet been formulated. The impression made upon me by this person was very strong, and at the same time not very clear. At first I could not account for him very well; and I used my utmost endeavors to hear and see every thing about me, with a view of vivifying the truthfulness of my own impressions. This fact confused me. In no book of our literature could I find a single hint of what seemed to me to be everywhere. Reluctantly the doubt arose in me whether I was not hunting for a shadow.”

What he found at last was Bazarof, in which type he predicted the spirit of a new epoch, and showed “the new man” at the very moment of his appearance. No one understood it, and hence arose the storm which assailed the author.

“I experienced impressions,” says Turgénief, “of different kinds, but all equally disagreeable to me. I noticed coolness, even going so far as indignation, in many who had been near and dear to me. I received almost fulsome congratulations from people who belonged to the camp of my enemies. This confused me: ... it grieved me. But my conscience did not reproach me. I knew well that I had been true to the type which I had described.”

M. le Vicomte E. Melchior de Vogüé, in a capital study of Turgénief’s life and works, thus speaks of the reason for the novelist’s popularity and influence in Russia: “We read books as the passer-by glances at a painting in a shop-window, for an instant, from the corner of the eye, as he goes to his business. If you knew how differently they read their poets there [in Russia]! What for us is only a feast for enjoyment is for them the daily bread of the soul. It is the golden age of lofty literature, which all very youthful peoples in Asia, in Greece, in the Middle Ages have seen flourishing. The writer is the guide for his race, the master of a multitude of commingling thoughts; still in a measure the creator of his language, poet in the ancient and complete meaning of the word vates, poet, prophet. Simple-hearted and serious readers, new-comers into the world of ideas, eager for direction, full of illusions about the power of human genius, ask their intellectual guide for a doctrine, for a reason for life, for a perfect revelation of the ideal. In Russia the few members of the aristocratic élite long ago reached, and perhaps went beyond, our dilettanteism; but the lower classes are beginning to read: they read passionately, with faith and hope, as we read ‘Robinson’ at twelve.... For the Moscow merchant, the son of the village priest, the small country proprietor, to whom a few volumes of Pushkin, of Gogol, of Nekrásof represent the encyclopædia of the human mind, this novel [“Virgin Soil,” or “Fathers and Sons,” or “A Nest of Noblemen”] is one of the books of the national Bible: it assumes the importance and the epic significance which the story of Esther had for the people of Judæa, the story of Ulysses for the people of Athens, the romance of ‘The Rose’ or of ‘Renart’ for our ancestors.

“Three years ago, in dedicating the statue of Pushkin at Moscow, Turgénief quoted a characteristic remark made by a peasant standing near the monument. In reply to a comrade who asked the name of this gentleman in bronze, the muzhik said, ‘He was a schoolmaster.’ The orator appropriated the remark, and developed it, saying rightly that the peasant in his ignorance had hit upon the true name of the hero of the celebration. The first Russian poet had been the schoolmaster of his countrymen, he had given new life to their language and their thought. The day, not far distant, doubtless, when Turgénief’s statue will be erected at Moscow, the muzhik will be able to repeat his saying: he also was a schoolmaster.

“His generation listened to him more willingly than to any other. It would be a mistake to seek solely in what we call talent for the reasons of this popular adoption. How many among his primitive and passionate readers troubled themselves about the question of talent, of devices of form, delicacies of thought? In literature, as in politics, a people follow instinctively the men whom they feel belong to themselves, made of their flesh and their genius, marked by their virtues and their failings. Ivan Sergeyévitch personified the master qualities of the Russian people,—their simple-hearted goodness, simplicity, and resignation. He was, as it is said popularly, une âme du bon Dieu: that mighty brain was ruled by a child’s heart. Never did I approach him without better comprehending the magnificent meaning of the gospel saying about the “simple in spirit,” and how this state of soul can be allied to the artist’s exquisite gifts and knowledge. Devotion, generosity of heart and of hand, brotherly kindness—all were as natural to him as an organic function. In our cautious, complicated society, where every one is armed for the rough struggle of life, he seemed like a person from another sphere, from some pastoral and fraternal tribe of the Ural;—some grand, self-forgetful child, following his thoughts under the sky, as a shepherd follows his flocks in the steppe.

“Physically, likewise, this tall, calm old man, with his somewhat coarse features, his sculpturesque head, and his thoughtful gaze, brought to mind certain Russian peasants,—the elder who sits at the head of the table in patriarchal families,—but ennobled and transfigured by the labor of thought, like those peasants of old who became monks, were worshipped as saints, and are seen represented on the ikonostas with the aureole and the majesty of prayer. The first time that I met this good giant, the symbolical statue of his country, I had great difficulty in making my impression clear: it seemed to me that I saw and heard a muzhik upon whom had descended the fire of genius, who had been raised to the pinnacles of mind without losing any of his native candor. He would assuredly not have been offended by the comparison, he who so loved his people.”

M. de Vogüé goes on to speak of Turgénief’s work. “The public,” he says, referring to the “Annals of a Sportsman,” “did not at first perceive their hidden significance: the watchful censor was deceived. All that was seen in them was a literary manifestation of the first order, a new note in Russia. Doubtless Gogol’s influence was apparent in the young writer’s style, in his comprehension of nature: the ‘Evenings at the Farm’ set the model for the class. It was always the grand and melancholy symphony of the Russian land; but this time the interpretation by the artist was quite different. No longer were seen Gogol’s sharp humor, the frankly popular character of his paintings, his warm outbursts of enthusiasm suddenly checked by touches of irony: in Turgénief, no jests or enthusiasm; a soberer note, a more subdued emotion; landscapes and men are seen in the pale twilight, through an idealizing mistiness, yet clearly outlined and focussed, as it were, under the eyes of the ever watchful observer.

“The language, also, is richer, more flexible, more graceful; no Russian writer had ever carried it to such a degree of expression. It is not the clear and limpid prose of Pushkin, who had read much of Voltaire, and did not forget it. Turgénief’s periods run slow and voluptuous, like the surface of the mighty Russian rivers, without haste, harmonious, amid the reeds, bearing water-lilies, floating nests, wandering perfumes, showing luminous vistas, and long mirages of sky and land, and suddenly reappearing in shady depths. His discourse stops to gather up any thing,—the humming of a bee, the call of a night-bird, a passing, caressing, dying breeze. The most elusive accords of the grand register of nature it translates with the infinite resources of the Russian keys, flexible epithets, words welded together with poetic fancy, popular joinings of sound to sense.

“I dwell on that which makes the power of this book: it is only a song of the earth, and a murmur of a few poor souls directly heard by us. The writer takes us to the heart of his native land; he leaves us face to face with this country; he disappears, it seems: yet, if not he, who then has drawn from things, and condensed on their surface, that mysterious poetry which they hide within them, but which so few can see, and which we clearly see here? The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ have charmed many French readers; yet how much they lose in color across the double veil of the translation and the common ignorance of the country!...

“When these fragments were brought together into a volume, the public, till then uncertain, saw the significance of the work. Some one had appeared with courage to develop the meaning concealed in Gogol’s sinister jest about “Dead Souls.” What other name can be given to that gallery of portraits gathered by the sportsman,—small country proprietors, selfish and hard; sneaking overseers, idle and rapacious functionaries; beneath this cruel society, wretched helots, fallen, as it were, from the state of humanity, touching by force of misery and submission? The process—however well disguised it be, there is always a process—was invariably the same. The author causes a ludicrous being to pass again and again in his lantern, showing all its phases, laughable and pitiable, in turn, without wants, without resources, condemned to crepuscular life. By the side of the serf appeared the master, a half-civilized marionette, a good devil, after all, unconscious of the harm he was doing, led astray by the fatality of his environment. This painting, which would otherwise be ugly, repulsive, the writer clothed with grace and charm, in some sort contrary to his desire by the inborn virtue of his poetry. Why were all the mainsprings of life broken in all the heroes of the book? Whence came this malaria over the Russian land? What was the name of this pest? The reader was left the trouble of answering.

“It is not very exact to say that Turgénief attacked serfage. Russian writers, in consequence of the conditions under which they work, as well as by the peculiar turn of their genius, never attack openly; they neither argue nor declaim: they paint without drawing conclusions, and they appeal to pity rather than wrath. Twenty years later, when Dostoyevsky will publish his “Recollections of a Dead House” (Zapiski Mertvava Doma), his terrible memoirs of ten years in Siberia, he will proceed in the same way, without a word of mutiny, without a drop of gall, seeming to find what he describes as quite natural, only a trifle sad. It is the national trait in all things.... The public understands by a hint.

“It understood this time. The Russia of serfage looked at itself with horror in the mirror which was held before its eyes: a long shudder shook the country; between night and morning the author was famous, and his cause was half gained. The censorship was the last to comprehend, but finally it also comprehended. Possibly its sensitiveness will be wondered at: I have said that serfage was condemned even in the Emperor Nicholas’s heart. You must know that the wishes of the censorship do not always coincide with the emperor’s wishes; at least, it is backward, it is sometimes a reign behindhand. It gave up launching its thunder against the book, but it kept its eye on the author. Gogol being dead in the interim, Turgénief dedicated a warmly eulogistic article to the dead author. This article would seem inoffensive enough, as it appears in Turgénief’s complete works,[59] and we should have difficulty in discovering the crime if the criminal had not revealed the secret in a very gay note: ‘Apropos of that article, I remember that one day at Petersburg, a lady of very high rank criticised the punishment inflicted upon me, judging it to have been undeserved, or at least too severe. As she was warmly speaking in my defence, some one said to her, “Is it possible that you don’t know that in this article he called Gogol a great man?”—“It is impossible.”—“I assure you that it is so.”—“Ah! in that case, I have nothing more to say. I am sorry, but I see that they had to be severe upon him.”’

“This impertinent epithet, given to a simple writer, cost Turgénief a month of arrest; then he was advised to go and meditate in his domain. I imagine that he found that society was very ill arranged, so unfair are we to the power that wills our best good. It must be confessed, however, that this power sometimes serves our interest better than we ourselves, and lettres de cachet are generally in accordance with the views of Providence. Thirty years earlier an order of exile saved Pushkin by tearing the poet from the dissipations of Petersburg, where he was wasting his genius, and by sending him to the sun of the East, where his genius was to ripen. If Turgénief had remained at the capital, the warmth of youth and compromising friendships, perchance, might have brought him into some barren political quarrel: sent into the solitude of the woods, he lived there laborious years, studying the humble provincial life of Russia, and gathering materials for his first great novels.”

An anonymous writer, who knew Turgénief intimately, contributed, shortly after his death, to “The London Daily News,” an article, some of the details of which are worthy of preservation: “Turgénief hated luxury. The more he advanced in life, the more he prized simplicity in all things. His bedroom at Les Fresnes[60] had an almost austere aspect. The bed and toilet-stand were in iron; and the desk, drawers, and a large bookcase, in mahogany, of a plain design. Some photographs and engraved likenesses of literary and other friends broke the monotony of the wall. Portrait-cartes, many of which had autographs of those whom they represented, were stuck into the frame of the chimney glass.

“Turgénief was the youngest of three very distinguished brothers. Were the eldest of the trio now living, he would be almost a centenarian. He remembered Buonaparte, Bernardin, St. Pierre, Talleyrand, Sir Walter Scott,—of whom he was for some weeks a guest at Abbotsford,—Miss Edgeworth when she was in the zenith of her fame; visited Mme. de Staël at Coppet, and fell in with Byron as he was making a tour on the Rhine. The eldest Turgénief was a many-sided man. Though not a professional author, he had great literary qualities. His political insight and sagacity were no less remarkable, and he had a wider experience of human nature than perhaps any other European of his time. Though he belonged to a family which stood well with the Court and high in the administration, he enjoyed close intercourse with his ‘unmasked countrymen.’ He thus designated the serfs, who had learned to be patient and resigned, but were unable to dissimulate. Nevertheless, he was accomplished in every polite art, and, if he had chosen, might have risen to the highest diplomatic position. His education was French on Russian soil. Voltaire and Diderot were his early schoolmasters. When he grew up, he made wide incursions into English literature, and came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the material that she thought would be interesting to write about in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turgénief himself who told me this, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of knowing English;[61] but, as a youth, he used to hear his brother translate to visitors, at his country house in the Uralian, passages from ‘Irish Tales and Sketches,’ which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. Turgénief also said to me, ‘It is possible, nay, probable, if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of the County Longford, and the squires and squireens, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity, and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth.’

“Turgéniefs stature was far above the average. He was admirably proportioned, and, when young, could walk as far in a day as a tough horse would amble, and that without any oppressive sense of fatigue. The big bones supported tremendous muscles, which at no time of his life were clogged with adipose tissue. When I knew him, his thick, long hair and flowing beard were white as snow; but as the complexion was fresh, the eye bright, the carriage upright, the voice resonant, I never thought of him as an old man. This giant wrote a neat and almost delicate hand. I have before me a book of his with an autograph inscription which he sent me last winter.... This autograph, though almost ladylike in its delicacy, is very free and unconventional. Turgénief felt what was beautiful in minute and lowly things. He was one of those who are happy in admiring flowers in the valley of humiliation. In some respects he was a big child. Nobody was more easy to amuse. He used to say that Providence was so kind in throwing in his way the kind of persons who exactly suited him. Liking fine arts and music, and disliking fashion and worldly frivolity, he deemed it a piece of rare good luck to fall in with Louis Viardot and his gifted wife (née Garcia), and to be allowed to enter their family circle....

“Turgénief’s conversation was analogous to his handwriting. It was light, delicate, of a free and quite original style, and abounded in picturesque traits. Nothing was forced or far-fetched. His ideas came in the bright, easy flow of a quick-running and well-fed streamlet. It was all the same to him whether he was brought forward or unnoticed in society, for he was neither shy nor vain. He rarely, in talking, broached a subject; but there was no subject on which he could not talk with ease. The politician, philosopher, artist, poet, novelist, intelligent or simple, woman or child, found him good company. Whatever interested mankind appeared to concern him, and to be a thing to study. At the Universal Exhibition of 1878 I found Turgénief in the United States Agricultural Department studying horse-shoes and horse-shoe nails with as much zest as he afterwards showed in comparing the works of the English, Russian, and German schools of pictorial art. The person who explained to him the peculiar merits of the horse-shoe nails was a character; and his peculiarities, which were racy of the soil of Texas, acted as a stimulant on the Russian novelist.”

“Theoretically, there was no depth of human degradation with which the Russian novelist was not acquainted; but it was said that personally no vice ever touched him. ‘Gros innocent’ was a term which M. Viardot often applied to him in their intimate conversation. The giant was ‘naïf.’ He preserved until old age the impressionable eyes of childhood, and a freshness of nature which to those who did not know him must seem incompatible with his extensive knowledge of human nature, which he studied as a student at Moscow and Berlin, as a functionary at St. Petersburg and in other parts of Russia, and as an exile in Paris. Although an old bachelor, he was free from crotchets and angles. He was glad to oblige, often obliged, sometimes was heartily thanked; and, when he met with ingratitude, he did not think about it. Flaubert was the French novelist whom he best liked as a man and a writer. But he was of opinion that he travelled too far south when he went to Carthage[62] to look for a heroine. His eyes were not used to the glaring landscape of North Africa. They discerned better the cool tints of the Normandy landscape. Plots, he thought, spoiled novels, which were peintures de mœurs; and he was glad to see that the taste for them was dying out. Dickens, in his opinion, was at his best in the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ because he had not to be thinking about a plot, instead of letting his pen run on according to the humor of the moment. The plot was necessary for a drama, but in the way of a novelist, who should, above every thing else, keep truth in view....

“Turgénief was of opinion that a splendidly picturesque country was a bad soil for literary or artistic production. Strong emotions or sensations tended to dethrone the faculty of exact observation upon which we are dependent for æsthetic enjoyment in flat districts. We console ourselves for the prose of a landscape in looking with an almost microscopic eye at the plants and insects, and come to see a world replete with beauty and animation in a tangle of gorse, brambles, and humble field-flowers. In expressing to me this theory, he asked, ‘Did you ever see a mountaineer who was sensible to the beauty and song of a small bird? He watches the flight of game and birds of prey. But, for my part, I have found him indifferent to the lark and swallow. My first acquaintance with the skylark was precisely in looking about for compensation for the ugliness of a flat near Berlin. I shall never forget the broadening out of the æsthetic faculty on this occasion. The little creature rose almost from under my feet, and went up singing her joyful song, which I heard long after she was invisible. I then remarked the beauty of the sky and of many other things which I should not otherwise have noticed.’”

---

A few sentences from the “noble discourse” spoken by M. Renan at Turgénief’s tomb, on Oct. 1, 1883, will fittingly bring this note to a close.

“Turgénief was an eminent writer. He was, above all, a great man. I shall speak to you only of his soul as it always appeared to me in the pleasant retreat which an illustrious friendship had provided for him among us.

“Turgénief received, by that mysterious decree which makes human avocations, the noblest gift of all: he was born essentially impersonal. His consciousness was not that of an individual more or less finely endowed by nature: he was in some sort the consciousness of a people. Before his birth he had lived thousands of years; infinite series of visions were concentrated in the depths of his heart. No man has been to such a degree the incarnation of an entire race. A world lived in him, spoke by his lips; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of ages, without voices, through him came to life and to speech.

“The silent genius of collective masses is the source of all great things. But the masses have no voice. They can only feel and stammer. They need an interpreter, a prophet, to speak for them. Who shall be this prophet? Who shall tell their sufferings, denied by those who are interested in not seeing them, their secret aspirations which upset the sanctimonious optimism of the contented? The great man, gentlemen, when he is at once a man of genius and a man of heart. That is why the great man is least free of all men. He does not do, he does not say, what he wishes. A God speaks in him; ten centuries of suffering and of hope possess him and rule him. Sometimes it happens to him, as to the seer in the ancient stories of the Bible, that, when called upon to curse, he blesses; according to the spirit which moves, his tongue refuses to obey.

“It is to the honor of the great Slav race, whose appearance in the world’s foreground is the most unexpected phenomenon of our century, that it was first expressed by a master so accomplished. Never were the mysteries of an obscure and still contradictory consciousness revealed with such marvellous insight. It was because Turgénief at once felt, and perceived that he felt: he was the people, and he was of the elect. He was as sensitive as a woman and as impassive as a surgeon, as free from illusions as a philosopher and as tender as a child. Happy the race, which, at its beginning a life of reflection, can be represented by such images, simple-hearted as well as learned, at once real and mystical.

“When the future shall have brought to their real proportions the surprises kept in reserve for us by this wonderful Slav genius, with its ardent faith, its depth of intuition, its individual idea of life and death, its martyr spirit, its thirst for the ideal, Turgénief’s paintings will be priceless documents, something, as it were, like the portrait of a man of genius, if it were possible to be had, taken in his infancy. The perilous solemnity of his duty as interpreter of one of the great families of humanity, Turgénief clearly saw. He felt that he had souls in his charge; and, as he was a man of honor, he weighed each of his words. He trembled for what he said, and what he did not say.

“His mission was thus wholly that of the peacemaker. He was like the God of the Book of Job, who ‘makes peace upon the heights.’ What everywhere else caused discord became with him a principle of harmony. In his great bosom, contradictions united. Cursing and hatred were disarmed by the magic enchantments of his art.

“That is why he is the common glory of schools, between which so many disagreements exist. This great race, divided because it is great, finds in him its unity. Hostile brethren separated by different ways of interpreting the ideal, come all of you to his tomb. All of you have the right to love him; for he belonged to all of you, he held you all in his heart. Admirable privilege of genius! The repellent sides of things do not exist for him. In him all finds reconciliation. Parties most opposed unite to praise him and admire. In the region whither he carries us, words which stir irritation in the vulgar lose their sting. Genius accomplishes in a day what it takes centuries to do. It creates an atmosphere of higher peace when those who were foes find that in reality they have been co-laborers; it opens the era of the grand amnesty when those who have been battling in the arena of progress sleep side by side and hand in hand.

“Above the race, in fact, stands humanity; or, if you prefer, reason. Turgénief was of a race by his manner of feeling and painting. He belonged to all humanity by his lofty philosophy, facing with calm eyes the conditions of human existence, and seeking without prejudice to know the reality. This philosophy brought him sweetness, joy in life, pity for creatures, for victims above all. Ardently he loved this poor humanity, often blind, in sooth, but so often betrayed by its leaders. He applauded its spontaneous effort towards well being and truth. He did not reprove its illusions; he was not angry because it complained. The iron policy which mocked at those who suffer was not for him. No disappointment arrested him. Like the universe, he would have begun a thousand times the ruined work: he knew that justice can wait; the end will always be success. He had truly the words of eternal life, the words of peace, of justice, of love, and of liberty.”

Count Tolstoï traces his ancestry back to Count Piotr Andreyévitch Tolstoï, a friend and companion of Peter the Great. In all probability the unnamed atavus who lurks in the patronymic Andreyévitch was merely distinguished by his size,—Andrew the Stout. Many Russian family names, just as is the case with our own English appellations, are derived from characteristics or resemblances. The great Speransky was a hopeful foundling; Soloviéf recalls our nightingales; Pobyedonovtsof means “of the victorious;” the name of Katkof may refer to the proverbial rolling stone; Gogol is a species of duck called the golden eye; the report of cannon may be heard in Pushkin’s name; the ancestor of Griboyédof was probably an eater of mushrooms.

Tolstoï’s father was a retired lieutenant-colonel, who died in 1839. His mother, the Princess Marya Nikolayevna Volkonskaïa, died when Count Lyof was only two years old, and he was brought up by a distant relative, Mme. Yergolskaïa. At Yasnaïa Polyana his education was desultory. In 1840 the five children were taken in charge by a relative of their mother, Pelagia Ilinishna Yushkovaïa, who lived at Kazan. It was thus that Lyof Tolstoï happened to enter the university of that city in 1843. After a few years of study, he suddenly determined to leave the university without graduation. The rektor and the professors argued with him, but in vain; and he went back to his ancestral estate, where he lived till 1851, very rarely visiting the capital. A visit from his beloved brother Nikolaï, who was an officer in the army of the Caucasus, inspired him to see “cities of men and manners, climates, councils,” though least of all the cities of men. Especially strong was his desire to be with his brother in the Kavkaz, where Russia’s greatest poets had won their proudest laurels. The impressions made on him by the splendid scenery of the ‘white mountains,’ and by the rough, half-savage life, were so strong that in 1851 he entered the service, like Olénin, as a yunker, or ensign-bearer in the Fourth Battery of the Twentieth Artillery, the same in which his brother was an officer.

Here in the Caucasus Count Tolstoï first began to write fiction. He planned to weave his recollections of family life and old traditions into a great novel. Fragments of this work were written and afterwards published in the “Sovremennik.” “Infancy” (Dyetstvo) came out in 1852. “Adolescence” (Otrotchestvo) was also written then, and several of his brilliant sketches of wild life,—“The Invasion,” “The Felling of the Forest,” and, as has been said, “The Cossacks.” “The Cossacks” is translated into English by Mr. Eugene Schuyler. A very little polishing would make it a brilliant piece of literary work: in its present form it is crude and rough.

Count Tolstoï lived two years in the Caucasus, taking part in various guerilla expeditions, and enduring in common with the soldiers all the hardships of frontier warfare. Here on the spot he made his powerful and life-like studies of the Russian soldier, which are seen in his “War Sketches” (Voyennuié Razskazui). At the breaking out of the Crimean War, Count Tolstoï was transferred to the army of the Danube, and served on Prince M. D. Gortchakof’s staff. At Sevastópol, whither he went after the Russian army was driven from the principalities, he was attached to the artillery. His literary work had attracted attention in high quarters, and orders were sent to the front to see that he was not exposed to danger. In May, 1855, he was appointed division commander: he took part in the battle of the Tchernaïa, was in the celebrated storming of Sevastópol, and after the battle was sent as special courier to Petersburg. At the end of the campaign Count Tolstoï retired, and the next winter he spent at Moscow and Petersburg. This was a period of great literary activity. Besides his stories, “Sevastópol in December,” and “Sevastópol in May,” there appeared in the magazines “Youth” (Yunost), “Sevastópol in August,” “Two Hussars” (Dva Gusári), and “Three Deaths” (Tri Smerti).

After the liberation of the serfs, Count Tolstoï, like many conscientious Russian proprietors, felt it his duty to live on his estate. He was profoundly interested in agronomic questions, and in the application to the Slavic commune of Occidental methods, which he studied abroad for himself. He was still more interested in popular education; and a school journal, called “Yasnaïa Polyana,” which he established, discussed all pedagogical questions. He also published a series of primers, readers, spellers, in paper covers and large type. It was about this time that a Russian journalist met Count Tolstoï; and his account of the interview is interesting, as showing the novelist’s views a quarter of a century ago. He says,—

“In 1862 I became acquainted with him in Moscow. I saw before me a tall, wide-shouldered, thin-waisted man, about thirty-five years old, with a mustache, but without a beard, with a serious, even gloomy expression of face, which, however, was softened by a gleam of kindliness whenever he laughed. Our conversation turned on the occurrences which at that time were exciting Russian life. Count Tolstoï immediately showed that he lived outside of this life, that the interests of the class which regards itself as cultured were foreign to him. He seemed to be opposed to progress, which, in his opinion, was only advantageous for the smaller portion of society, having plenty of time to spend, and which was absolutely injurious for the majority, for the people; and for them it was just as disadvantageous as it was profitable for the minority.... Those present argued angrily with him: he himself sometimes was drawn away, sometimes he spoke ironically. I listened more than I spoke. At the time when all were infatuated with progress, such original boldness of thought was remarkable; and I felt an involuntary sympathy for this Rousseau, who began to contrast the products of nature with the products of civilization,—forests, wild creatures, rivers, physical development, purity of morals, and other such things. It seemed that this man was living the life of the peasantry, sharing their views, that he was devoted to the welfare of the people with all the strength of his soul, though he understood the people in different way from others. The proof was his school,—those maltchiks, of whom he spoke with evident love, praising their talents, their powers of comprehension, their artistic sense, their moral virginity, which was so far from being the case with children of other nationalities.”

The latter years of Count Tolstoï’s life, since the publication of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina,” are somewhat wrapped in mystery. Various wild stories, founded on the evident bias of “My Confession” and “My Religion,” have assumed almost the proportions of myth. It may be that at the present day, that we of the calm, rational, sceptical, Western world are granted the privilege of seeing the actual evolution of a myth, as a boy may see a chrysalis unfold.

The Russian race, standing with its Janus face towards the sunset and the more mystical sunrise, a link, as it were, between Occidental fact and Oriental fancy, might well allow us the spectacle. “My Religion” declares that titles, emoluments, dignities, and all such things, are vain. Next we hear that Count Tolstoï is only a muzhik. No man has a right to wealth. We hear that the opulent aristocrat has stripped himself to give to the poor. All must earn their bread by the sweat of the brow. The young sons of the count are next heard of as crossing-sweepers. The truth probably is, that Count Tolstoï has in reality changed little from the Olénin of “The Cossacks,” praying for occasion of self-sacrifice, for chance of renunciation, changed little from the threefold manifestation of himself in “War and Peace,” working for the same end, or from the twofold and simpler manifestation of himself, morally in Levin, socially in Vronsky, of “Anna Karénina.” The little picture of him given by the Russian journalist casts a flood of light on the man; and therefore it was but a fulfilment of prophecy to read that Count Tolstoï, instead of beggaring his children, instead of deserting the pen of the writer for the awl of the cobbler, was brave and cheerful and healthy in body and mind, superintending his schools, cultivating his ancestral desyatins, and writing stories when the mood was on him.

This brief sketch of Count Tolstoï’s life may fitly come to a conclusion with an acute bit of criticism from a Russian writer. It is very possible that his marriage to Sofia Andreyevna Beers, the daughter of a Muscovite professor, which took place in 1862, may have cast a back gleam, and inspired the thought of creating the gracious forms that move through Count Tolstoï’s later novels. At all events, this is what the critic said when “War and Peace” appeared, at the end of 1860, “It is remarkable, that in all Tolstoï’s works, until the appearance of “Voïna i Mir,” there is not a single female figure brought out in strong relief; but here were seen a whole pleiad, wonderfully clear, psychologically true, and beautifully described. The richness and variety in the figures of the men, the splendid description of the battles, a perfect mass of marvellously described scenery, in which persons of all classes appear, beginning with emperors, and ending with muzhiks and babas, make this work one of the greatest ornaments of our literature.”

It is commonly reported in Russia, that Tchernuishevsky wrote yet another novel besides Tchto Dyélat, entitled Prolog Prologof (a Prologue of Prologues), which may possibly be still in existence in manuscript.

Feódor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoyevsky’s father was a doctor. The boy, who was one of a large family, grew up pale and thin. He had a nervous and impressionable nature, with some tendency to hallucination. He was very fond of the woods. He tells in his recollections of his childhood, that his “special delight was the forest, with its mushrooms and wild cherries, with its beetles and birds, its porcupines and squirrels, with its delicious damp of the flying leaves.” He had all the books that he desired. By the time that he was twelve, he had read all of Sir Walter Scott’s and Cooper’s novels, besides some Russian authors, including Karamzin’s great history. At fifteen, Dostoyevsky was sent to Petersburg, where he entered the main engineering school. Notwithstanding his passion for literature, which was shared by many of his school-mates, he distinguished himself in mathematics, and graduated number three in a class of thirty. About this time he was deprived of both father and mother.

“While he was living in Petersburg,” says Mr. S. S. Skidelsky, “he visited all the slums and haunts of poverty, for the sake of collecting materials for his future literary work.” Dostoyevsky tells in his recollections, quoted by Polevoï, that in the winter of 1845 he began his first story, “Poor People” (Byédnuié Liudi). “When I finished the tale, I did not know what to do with it, or where to place it. I had no literary acquaintances, except possibly Grigoróvitch, who at that time had written nothing except ‘Petersburg Organ-grinders,’ in a magazine.... He came to me one day in May, and said, ‘Show me the manuscript: Nekrásof is going to publish a magazine next year, and I want to show it to him.’ I took it over to Nekrásof. We shook hands; I became confused at the thought that I had come with my writing, and I quickly beat a retreat without saying another word. I had very little hope of success; for I stood in awe of the party of ‘the Country Annals,’ as the literary men of that day were called. I read Byélinsky’s criticisms eagerly, but he seemed to me too severe and cruel; and ‘he will make sport of my “Poor People,”’ I used to think at times, but only at times. ‘I wrote it with passion, almost with tears. Is it really possible that all these minutes spent with pen in hand over this story, that all this is falsehood, mirage, untrue feeling?’ But I had these thoughts only now and then, and immediately the doubts returned again.

“On the evening of the very day that I handed him the manuscript, I went a long way to see one of my former classmates. We talked all night about ‘Dead Souls,’ and we read it again,—I don’t know how many times it made. At that time it was fashionable, when two or three young men met, to say, ‘Hadn’t we better read some Gogol, gentlemen?’ and then to sit down and read late into the night.... I returned home at four o’clock, in the white Petersburg night, bright as day. It was a beautiful warm time; and when I reached my room I could not go to sleep, but opened the window, and sat down by it. Suddenly the bell rang: it surprised me greatly; and in an instant Grigoróvitch and Nekrásof were hugging me in a glory of enthusiasm, and both of them were almost in tears. The evening before they had returned home early, took up my manuscript, and began to read it for a trial: ‘By ten pages we shall be able to judge.’ But after they had finished ten pages they decided to read ten more. And afterwards, without budging, they sat the whole night through till early morning, taking turns in reading aloud when one got tired. ‘He read about the death of the student,’ said Grigoróvitch, after we were alone; ‘and suddenly I noticed, that, when he reached the place where the father runs after his son’s coffin, Nekrásof’s voice broke once, and a second time, and all at once it failed entirely. He pounded with his fist on the manuscript: “Akh, what a man!” That was said about you; and so we spent the whole night.’

“When they finished the manuscript, they exclaimed, simultaneously, ‘Let us go and find him right away. Suppose he is asleep, this is more important than sleep.’... They staid half an hour. For half an hour we talked about, God knows what, understanding each other by half words, by exclamations, so eager were we. We talked about poetry, about prose, about the ‘situation of affairs,’ and of course about Gogol, quoting from the ‘Revizor’ and ‘Dead Souls,’ but chiefly about Byélinsky.... Nekrásof took the manuscript to Byélinsky that very day. ‘A new Gogol has appeared,’ shouted Nekrásof, entering with ‘Poor People.’ ‘Gogols with you spring up like mushrooms,’ remarked Byélinsky severely; but he took the manuscript. When Nekrásof returned that same evening, Byélinsky met him in perfect enthusiasm. ‘Bring him, bring him as soon as you can!’”

On the next day an interview took place between Dostoyevsky and the great Russian critic. Dostoyevsky thus describes it: “He began to speak with me ardently, with flashing eyes. ‘Do you understand yourself what you have written?’ he shouted at me several times, in his own peculiar way. ‘Only by your own unassisted genius as an artist, could you have written this. But have you realized all the terrible truth which you have presented before us? It is impossible that you, at the age of twenty, could understand it.... You have touched the very essence of the matter, you have reached the most vital inwardness. We journalists and critics only argue; we try to explain it with words: but you are an artist, and with a single stroke put the very truth into shape so that it is tangible, so that the simplest reader can understand instantly. Here lies the secret of the artistic, the truth of art. Here is the service that the artist performs for truth. The truth is revealed and imparted to you; it is your gift as an artist. Value your talent, and be true to it, and you will be a great writer.’

“I went from him in a state of rapture. I stopped at the corner of his house, looked up at the sky, at the bright sun, on the passing people, and all; and with my whole body I felt that a glorious moment had come into my life,—a most important crisis; that a new life had begun, such as I had never anticipated in my most passionate dreams (and at that time I was a great dreamer). ‘Is it really true that I am so great?’ I asked myself, full of shame, full of timid glory.—Oh, do not laugh!—Never again did I have an idea that I was great. But at that time was it possible to bear it calmly? Oh! I will be worthy of this praise.”

His name from this time began to stand with Turgénief’s, Byélinsky’s, Iskander’s (Herzen’s), and others, in the pages of the Russian magazines. This period, which began so auspiciously, was clouded by a catastrophy which greatly affected his whole life. In 1849 he was arrested and imprisoned on the charge of being engaged in a secret political society. His older brother, a married man, the father of three children, was also arrested on the same charge. Dostoyevsky knew that his brother’s family was almost penniless, that his brother had taken no active part in the Petrashevsky Society, and had only borrowed books from the general library. The brother, however, was soon released by the interposition of the Emperor Nicholas. While he was in prison, Feódor Mikhaïlovitch wrote his beautiful story, “The Little Hero.” He was condemned to death; but the sentence, without his knowledge, was commuted to transportation to the mines. He wrote his brother on the 3d of January, 1850: “To-day we were taken to the Semyónovsky Place. Here the sentence of death was read to us, we were given the cross to kiss, the sabres were broken over our heads, and our death-toilet was prepared,—white shirts. Then three of our number were placed at the ‘disgraceful post,’ ready for execution. I was the sixth. Three were summoned at a time: consequently my turn came next, and I had only a second to live. I remembered thee, my brother, and all of thy household; at the last moment thou alone wert in my mind; here, only, I learned how I loved thee, my dear brother!... At last the drums sounded a retreat. Those who were fastened to the ‘disgraceful post’ were taken down, and it was announced that his Imperial Majesty had granted us our lives.”

“Dostoyevsky, as a thoroughly religious and highly moral man,” says Polevoï, “endured all the deprivations of his life in the mines with remarkable firmness and undisturbed equanimity. His faith was strengthened, not by the Bible alone, which was the only book allowed him in prison, but by his love for ‘Poor People,’ to whom he had sworn to be true till he died.”

After he spent a number of years in the mines, he entered the military service, and was quickly promoted to be an officer. He says, “I remember that soon after leaving the Siberian prison, in 1854, I began to read all the literature written during the five years since my imprisonment. The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ had just begun to be published; and Turgénief’s first stories I read at one draught. The sun of the steppe shone upon me, spring began, and with it an entirely new life, an end to prison,—freedom!”

His passion for literature, so long restrained, broke out with energy and strength; and even before he quitted military service and returned to Petersburg, he wrote a few little trifles. In Petersburg he took part in the journal, “The Times” (Vremya), edited by his brother Mikhaïl Mikhaïlovitch. In 1860 appeared the first collection of his works, and shortly after appeared his great novel, “The Degraded and Insulted” (Unizhónnuie i Oskorblonnuie). At this time Turgénief, Gontcharóf (author of “Oblómof”), Grigoróvitch, and Count Lyof Tolstoï were in the full bloom of production, and Dostoyevsky’s book was not warmly received. But the most antagonistic critics were silenced when “The Recollections of a Dead House” appeared. It immediately gave him the reputation as one of the greatest lights of Russian literature.

In 1863 Dostoyevsky’s wife died; and in the following year he lost his beloved brother, whose journal, “The Times,” passed into his hands. But he was entirely unused to business, and was placed in a very embarrassing situation, which was intensified by a strange public impression that it was the novelist who was dead. Consequently its circulation was greatly reduced, and Feódor Mikhaïlovitch had to give it up. As a distraction for all these tribulations, Dostoyevsky devoted himself to literary work, and wrote his great story, “Crime and Punishment,” which established his reputation as a psychological analyst. In 1867 he married again, and lived abroad for four years. He also, looking from the “beautiful distance” upon the pitiful side of Russian social life, wrote his two stories, “Idiot” and “Devils.” After he came back he wanted to analyze the abnormal relationship between the rising generation and the older writers; and he founded a new journal, and wrote a novel entitled “Podrostok” (The Adult). The journal was given up at the end of 1877; but Dostoyevsky, who had new novels in view, promised ultimately to continue the journal at some future time. He died on the 9th of February, 1881; and on the day of his funeral the first number of the long-looked-for journal, which he did not live to see, was issued. All Petersburg escorted the beloved remains to the tomb; tens of thousands of people were counted in the procession. Dostoyevsky’s faith in humanity is summed up in his own words: “I never could understand the reason why one-tenth part of our people should be cultured, and the other nine-tenths must serve as the material support of the minority and themselves remain in ignorance. I do not want to think or to live with any other belief than that our ninety millions of people (and those who shall be born after us) will all be some day cultured, humanized, and happy. I know and I firmly believe that universal enlightenment will harm none of us. I also believe that the kingdom of thought and light is possible of being realized in our Russia, even sooner than elsewhere maybe, because with us, even now, no one defends the idea of one part of the population being enlisted against the other, as is found everywhere in the civilized countries of Europe.’

The Banya (from “The Recollections of a Dead-House”).

“In the whole city, there were only two public baths. The first, which was kept by a Hebrew, was numbered, with an entrance-fee of fifty kopeks for each number, and was designed for high-toned people. The other banya was pre-eminently common, old, filthy, small; and to this banya our prisoners were going. It was cold and sunny. The men were already rejoicing because they were going to get out of prison, and have a glimpse of the city. Jests, laughter, did not cease during the walk. A whole squad of soldiers escorted us with loaded guns, to the wonder of the whole city. At the banya they immediately divided us into two detachments. The second had to wait in the cold ante-room while the first detachment soaped themselves, and this was necessary on account of the smallness of the banya; but, notwithstanding this fact, the banya was so small, that it was hard to imagine how our half could find accommodation in it. But Petrof did not leave me: he himself, without my asking him, hurried to help me, and even offered to wash me. Bakliushin, as well as Petrof, offered me his services. He was a prisoner from a special cell, and was known among us as the pioneer, and him I remembered as the gayest and liveliest of the arestants, as indeed he was. We had already become somewhat well acquainted. Petrof helped me undress myself, because, as I was not used to it, it took me long; and the dressing-room was cold, almost as cold as the street. By the way, it is very hard for a prisoner to undress if he has not had some practice. In the first place, it is necessary to know how to unfasten quickly the shin-protectors.[63] These shin-protectors are made of leather, about seven inches long; and they are fastened to the underclothes directly under the iron anklet which encircles the leg. A pair of shin-protectors are worth not less than sixty kopeks; but, nevertheless, every prisoner gets himself a pair, at his own expense of course, because without them it is impossible to walk. The iron ring does not encircle the leg tightly, and it is easy to thrust a finger between the ring and the leg. Thus the iron strikes the leg, chafes it; and a prisoner without shin-protectors would in a single day have bad wounds. But to take off the shin-protectors is not the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to learn to get off the clothes when one wears the rings (kandalui). This is the whole trick: Suppose you are taking off the drawers from the left leg, it is necessary first to let the garment slip through between the leg and the ring. Afterwards you have to put it on again the same way. The same process must be gone through with when you put on clean clothes. For a newcomer it is even hard to guess how it is accomplished. The first one who ever taught us how to do it was the prisoner Kóryenef in Tobolsk, who had once been atamán of a gang of cut-throats, and had been fastened to a chain five years. But the prisoners get used to it, and do it without any difficulty. I gave several kopeks to Petrof to get soap and scrubbers. To be sure, the authorities furnished the prisoners with soap. Every one would get a little piece about the size of a two-kopek coin, and as thick as the slice of cheese served at evening lunch by middle-class people. Soap was sold here in the dressing-room, together with sbiten [a kind of mead], twists, and hot water. Every prisoner would get, according to the agreement made with the proprietor of the banya, a single pail of hot water. Whoever wanted to wash himself cleaner could get for a grosh, or half kopek, an extra pail, which was handed into the banya itself through a window made for that purpose from the dressing-room. After helping me to undress, Petrof led me by the hand, observing that it was very hard for me to walk in the rings. “Pull them up a little higher over the calf,” he added, supporting me as though he were my uncle (dyadka). “Be a little careful here, there is a door-sill.” I even felt a little ashamed. I wanted to assure Petrof that I could get along by myself, but he would not have believed me. He treated me just like a young and incapable child, whom everybody was obliged to help. Petrof was far from being a servant, by no means was he a servant. Had I insulted him, he would have understood how to behave to me. I did not offer him any money for his services, and he did not ask for any. What, then, prompted him to take such care of me?

“When we opened the door of the banya, I thought that we were going into Gehenna. Imagine a room about twelve feet long, and as wide, stuffed with probably a hundred men at once, and, at the very least, surely eighty, because the prisoners were divided into two detachments, and the whole number of us who went to the banya were two hundred men; the steam blinding our eyes, the sweat, the filth, such a crowd that there was no room to get a leg in. I was alarmed, and wanted to go back, but Petrof immediately encouraged me. Somehow, with the greatest difficulty, we squeezed ourselves through to the benches, over the heads of those who were sitting on the floor, asking them to bend down so that we could pass. But all the places on the benches were occupied. Petrof told me that it was necessary to buy a place, and immediately entered into transactions with a prisoner who had taken a place near the window. For a kopek the prisoner surrendered his place, immediately took the money from Petrof, who had it tight in his fist, having foreseen that it would be necessary to bring it with him into the banya. The man threw himself under the bench, directly under my place, where it was dark, filthy, and where the slimy dampness was almost half a finger in thickness. But the places under the benches were also taken; even there, the crowd clustered. On the whole floor, there was not a free place as large as the palm of the hand where the prisoners would not be sitting doubled up, washing themselves in their pails. Others stood upright among these, and, holding their pails in their hands, washed themselves as best they could. The dirty water ran down directly on the shaven heads of those who sat beneath them. On the platform, and on all the steps leading to it, were men washing themselves, bent down and doubled up. But precious little washing they got. Plebeians wash themselves very little with hot water and soap: they only steam themselves tremendously, and then pour cold water over them, and that’s their whole bath. Fifty brooms or so on the platform were rising and falling in concert: they all broomed themselves into a state of intoxication. Every instant steam was let in. It was not merely heat, it was hell let loose. It was all one uproar and hullaballoo (gogotalo), with the rattling of a hundred chains dragging over the floor.... Some, trying to pass, entangled themselves with the chains of others, and they themselves bumped against the heads of those sitting below, and they tumbled over, and scolded, and dragged into the quarrel those whom they hit. The filth was streaming on every side. All were in an excited, and as it were intoxicated, state of mind. Shrieks and cries were heard. At the dressing-room window, where the water was handed through, there was a tumult, a pushing, even fighting. The hot water ordered was spilt on the heads of those sitting on the floor, before it reached its destination. Now and then, at the window or in the half-opened door, a soldier with mustachioed face would show himself, with gun in hand, ready to quell any disorder. The shaven heads and red, parboiled bodies of the prisoners seemed uglier than ever. On their parboiled shoulders clearly appeared, oftentimes, the welts caused by the strokes and lashes which they may have received in days gone by; so that now all these backs seem to be freshly wounded. Horrid welts! A chill went through my skin at seeing them. “Give us more steam;” and the steam would spread in a thick hot cloud over the whole banya. From under the cloud of steam gleamed scarred backs, shaven heads, disfigured arms and legs. And as a fit climax Isaï Fomitch (the Jew) would roar with all his throat, from the top of the platform. He steams himself into insanity, but it seems as if no heat could satisfy him. For a kopek he hires a washer (parilshchik); but at last it gets too warm for him, and he throws down the broom, and runs to pour cold water on him. Isaï Fomitch does not give up hope, but hires a second, a third: he makes up his mind, on such occasions, not to grudge any expense, and he has as many as half a dozen washers. “You are tough, Isaï Fomitch, you are a fine fellow,” shout the prisoners from below. And Isaï Fomitch himself feels that at this moment he stands above them all, and could thrust them all under his belt; he is in a glory; and with a sharp, crazy voice he shouts out his aria lya-lya-lya-lya, drowning all other voices.[64] The thought entered my mind, that, if we were ever to be all in hell, then it would look very much like this place. I could not refrain from imparting this thought to Petrof: he only looked around, but said nothing.”

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• Aksákof, 142, 144.
• Alexander II., Emperor, 148, 151, 152, 326.
• Alexander III., Emperor, 151, 152, 156.
• “Anna Karénina,” 206, 218, 230, 232;
• analysis, 297-323;
• quoted, 304-305, 306-307, 309-322;
• meaning, 322.
• “Annals of a Sportsman,” 121, 129, 158, 190, 394.
• Aristophanes, 70.
• Arria, 188.
• Balzac, 105.
• “Banya (bath), The,” 203;
• quoted, 433-440.
• Bázarof, 145, 173, 174, 186, 388.
• Biélinsky, 120, 121 note, 424, 426.
• “Bulba.” See “Taras Bulba.”
• Censorship, The Russian, 122 note, 217, 398.
• “Childhood and Youth,” 205, 217.
• “Confession.” See “My Confession.”
• Corneille, 13.
• “Cossacks, The” (“Kazaki”), 216, 229, 231;
• analysis, 239-267.
• “Commentary on the Gospels,” Tolstoï’s, 234.
• Daudet, Alphonse, 199 note.
• “Dead Souls,” 11, 28, 61, 159, 360, 396, 426;
• analysis, 86-115.
• Devil, The, in Gogol, 30.
• Dissenters, 181, 330, 337.
• Divorce, according to Tolstoï, 271, 299, 302.
• “Dmitri Rudin,” 167, 168.
• Dniépr, 15-18, 36.
• “Don Quixote,” 133, 158, 170.
• Dostoyevsky, 141, 202 note, 203, 204 note;
• biography, 423-432;
• faith, 432.
• Edgeworth, Maria, 401, 402, 403.
• “Evenings at the Farm,” 9, 10, 28, 29, 60.
• “Fathers and Sons,” 130, 173, 388;
• quoted, 193-198.
• Fénelon, 70.
• Flaubert, 127, 134, 207, 209, 406.
• French novelists, 190, 191.
• German education, 172, 386.
• Goethe, 343;
• quoted by Turgénief, 137.
• Gogol, biography, 5-11, 339-362;
• professorship, 9, 10, 353, 355-358;
• works enumerated, 29, 30, 346, 353;
• humor, 80, 346;
• as a poet, 6, 13, 47, 114, 191;
• as a scholar, 343, 344, 354;
• as a painter of women, 186;
• influence on Turgénief, 394.
• Gontcharóf, 430.
• Griboyédof, 238 note, 414.
• Grigoróvitch, 425, 430.
• Hamlet, 126, 158, 170, 179.
• Hegel, 120, 168, 172, 386.
• Herzen, 428.
• Hugo, Victor, 209, 210.
• Iskander. See Herzen.
• Ivanitsky on Gogol, quoted, 356.
• James, Henry, quoted, 403 note.
• Karakózof, 151.
• Katkof, 145, 148, 149, 152, 174, 414.
• “Kazaki.” See “The Cossacks.”
• Khor and Kalinuitch, 121, 159.
• Kulzhinsky on Gogol, quoted, 343.
• La Bruyère, 70.
• La Rochefoucauld, 220.
• Lermontof, 202 and note.
• “May Night, The,” quoted, 21, 32.
• Marvellous, The, in Gogol, 30-34.
• Merimée, 4, 48, 192.
• Molière, 11, 68, 70, 80.
• Muzhik. See Russian Peasantry.
• Murillo, comparison with Gogol, 31.
• “My Confession” (Tolstoï), 219-228.
• “My Religion” (Tolstoï), 228, 322, 420;
• quoted, 278, 296;
• analysis, 324-338.
• Napoleon, Tolstoï’s judgment of, 285.
• Nekrásof, 181, 202 note, 210 note, 391, 426.
• “Nest of Noblemen,” 169.
• Nicholas, Emperor, 84, 113, 399, 426, 429.
• Niézhin, 5, 7, 342.
• Nihilism, 148, 173, 176, 179, 180, 329, 389.
• Occidentalism, Turgénief’s, 120, 142, 387.
• “Old-time Proprietors,” 51-58;
• quoted, 24.
• “Parasha,” 120.
• Pathetic, The, in Turgénief, 199.
• Písemsky, 167 note.
• Pletnef, 9, 385.
• Pobyedonovtsof, 152, 414.
• Poetry, Nature of, 13.
• Pogodin, 142.
• Polevoï, 339;
• quoted, 424, 429.
• Polonsky, 126, 136.
• Pushkin, 4, 6, 7, 9, 73, 112, 134, 202, 210, 238, 345, 385, 400, 414;
• on Griboyédof’s death, 238;
• judgment of Gogol, 58;
• as inspiration to Gogol, 345;
• festival, 135, 391.
• Raskolniks. See Dissenters.
• Realism, French and Russian, 25, 189, 193, 199, 286.
• “Recollections of a Scorer” (Tolstoï), quoted, 235-237.
• “Recollections” (Reminiscences), Turgénief’s, quoted, 120 note, 122 note, 384, 388.
• Renan, funeral discourse on Turgénief, 408.
• Resurrection, The, according to Tolstoï, 278.
• Revizor, The, 7, 10, 61, 358, 426;
• analysis, 63-83.
• Rousseau, 70.
• Rudin. See Dmitri Rudin.
• Russian ideal, 182;
• language, 98, 110, 192, 395, 414;
• mind, 12;
• nature, 14, 18, 23, 114;
• nobility, 159, 164;
• peasantry, 150, 159, 181, 325.
• Sand, George, 127, 211.
• Sasuluitch, Viéra, 171.
• Satirical, The, in Gogol, 7, 12, 60, 347.
• Shchedrin. See Soltuikof.
• Schiller, 212, 343;
• quoted by Turgénief, 154.
• Schopenhauer, 172, 228.
• Schuyler, Eugene, translation of “The Cossacks,” 416.
• Serfage, 166, 326, 397.
• Shakspeare, 69, 126, 225.
• Skidelsky, quoted, 424.
• Slavophilism, 143, 144, 206.
• “Smoke,” 175.
• Soltuikof, 204, 211.
• Swinburne, Turgénief’s opinion of, 210.
• “Taras Bulba,” 6, 10, 18, 29, 355;
• analysis, 36-49;
• Turgénief’s judgment on, 50;
• quoted, 19, 23, 363-382.
• Tchernuishevsky, 145, 201, 210 note, 423.
• “Terrible Vengeance, A,” quoted, 15-18.
• Tolstoï, Count Lyof N., biography, 215, 222-230, 236 note, 414-422;
• works enumerated, 216, 416, 417;
• talent, 218;
• mental and moral transformation, 222-230, 278;
• literary life, 224, 231;
• marriage, 224, 421;
• mysticism, 234;
• character revealed in “The Cossacks,” 256-258;
• in “War and Peace,” 267, 275, 293, 295;
• in “Anna Karénina,” 295, 421;
• his ideal of strength, 248;
• ideal of life, 227, 275, 299;
• as a historian, 283;
• as a non-combatant, 293, 299;
• as a prophet, 219, 329;
• as a communist, 335;
• his creed, 332;
• appearance in 1862, 418;
• criticised by Turgénief, 205.
• Turgénief, Ivan, biography, 117-140, 383-408;
• works enumerated, 129-139;
• method of work, 130, 135, 183, 407;
• progress, 157;
• talent, 182, 409;
• character, 139, 141;
• generosity, 139 note, 155, 205;
• conversation, 140, 149, 405;
• as a political prophet, 153, 157;
• as a dramatist, 189;
• as a poet, 191, 385, 399 note;
• as a critic on his epoch, 146, 150, 200;
• judgment on Alexander III., 152, 156;
• on Hugo, 209, 210;
• on George Sand, 212;
• Flaubert, 209;
• Zola, 208;
• Swinburne, 210;
• Dickens, 407;
• Dostoyevsky, 203;
• Nekrásof, 201, 202;
• Gogol, 50;
• Soltuikof, 204;
• Tchernuishevsky, 201;
• Tolstoï, 205, 231, 284;
• letters to Tolstoï, 127, 138;
• letter to Mr. King, 183;
• homesickness and love of Russia, 123, 127;
• personal appearance, 139, 393, 404;
• disease, 136.
• Turgénief, Nikolaï, 383.
• Turner, C. E., on Gogol, quoted, 361.
• Ukraïna, 10, 15, 23, 32.
• Viardot, 401, 406.
• “Vii,” quoted, 30, 358.
• “Virgin Soil” (Nov), 131, 132, 176, 179, 187.
• Vogüé, Count E. Melchior, on Turgénief, quoted, 390-400.
• “War and Peace,” 206, 218, 230, 232, 233;
• analysis, 267-294.
• Woman in Gogol, 109, 187;
• in Turgénief, 186, 187;
• in Tolstoï, 247, 288, 422.
• Zhukovsky, 4, 345.
• Zola, 135, 208, 211, 286.

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