ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY,
BOSTON.
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
|---|---|
| GOGOL | [5] |
| TURGÉNIEF | [117] |
| TOLSTOÏ | [215] |
| APPENDIX | [339] |
| INDEX | [441] |
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.
I.
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]