[55] The Russians, after the retreat of the French, conferred the epaulets on Jack Frost: it was said that General Morozof won the victory for them.—N. H. D.
[56] The word podspórye might be rendered by the much less expressive periphrasis “the succedanea of bread.”—Author’s note.
[57] At last accounts, the reports about Count Tolstoï’s vagaries were found to be idle exaggerations: he is living on his estate, like a reasonable man, studying Greek and Hebrew, and writing short stories.—N. H. D.
[58] In 1882 a Russian writer, Mr. Abramof, published, in The Annals of the Country, a very curious study of the Shalaputui. Turgénief was greatly struck by it. He said in regard to it: “There is the peasant getting up steam; before long he will make a general up-turning.”—Author’s Note.
APPENDIX.
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.”