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.
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.