The great masters of Russian literature in the nineteenth century

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
BY ERNEST DUPUY
TRANSLATED BY NATHAN HASKELL DOLE
THE PROSE WRITERS
Nikolaï Vasilyévitch Gogol, Ivan Sergéyevitch Turgenief, Count Lyof Nikolayevitch Tolstoï
WITH APPENDIX
NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 13 Astor Place
Copyright, 1886, By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, BOSTON.
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.
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 .”
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 ).