III.
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.”