Comment on such a poem is needless. I have done my part if I have induced you by my brief extracts to go back to the original and read the whole of it for yourselves.
V
GOGOL (1809-1852)
Nicholas Gogol was born in 1809 near Poltàva and brought up in affluence by a Cossack grandmother: at school he did but little work, but devoted himself with enthusiasm to drawing and the theatre. In 1829 he obtained a Government office in Petrograd. He then tried the stage, schoolmastering, and obtained a Professorship of History; failing in all these, he turned to literature. His first fruits brought him to the notice of the famous literary men of his day, and he became a friend of Pushkin, who proved invaluable as critic and adviser.
For seven years he lived in Petrograd, and during this period began his sketches of Little Russian—that is, of South Russian—life in Evenings on a Farm on the Dikanka and Mirgorod. Little Russia differs from Great Russia in having scattered whitewashed houses in place of the regular streets of the villages of Great Russia: separate little farms surrounded by charming little gardens. It is specially attractive in its more genial climate, warm nights, its musical language, the beauty of its people, their picturesque dress and its lyrical songs. There is, too, more freedom in the relations between young men and young girls; there is none of that seclusion of the women which we meet with in Great Russia. The Little Russians have also preserved numerous traditions and epic poems from the time when they were free Cossacks, fighting against the Poles in the north and the Turks in the south. In Gogol we see a merging of the Great and the Little, for though Little by birth and breeding, he yet wrote in the language of Pushkin and Lèrmontov. From his very first days we feel the richness of his laughter and the whimsical, Puck-like vein of wit which is characteristically Little Russian. It was only later that we feel the unseen tears behind the laughter.
In these we find that quality which we immediately associate with his name, a realism based upon meticulous observation, but merged into it and permeating his whole work is an eerie romanticism, a delight in the supernatural and a deep religious vein which afterwards dominated all the other qualities. His humour is rich and many-sided, ranging from the broad and farcical to a delicate and half melancholy, and later to an almost Swiftean irony.
Right from the beginning we plunge into an atmosphere that brings us at a bound into the very heart of Russia as no other writer has been able to do. In his first stories we hear of water-nymphs, the devil, witches, magicians; in the second, Mirgorod, we find him feeling his way towards realism. The Quarrel of the Two Ivans is simply the story of two friends who quarrel over nothing and are just on the point of reconciliation, years after, when the mere mention of the word "goose," which was the prime cause of the quarrel, sets them off again, this time irrevocably. It is in this volume that we come across Taras Bulba, now published in the Everyman Edition, a short historical novel in which Cossack life is inimitably set down.
Later in Arabesques and the Tales he leaves the supernatural altogether, and we get such a story as The Overcoat, in which a minor public servant who is always shivering dreams of the day when he can achieve his ambition of owning a warm overcoat. After years of poverty and striving he manages to save enough money to buy one, and on the first day he wears it it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his ghost haunts the streets. It sets one thinking at once of that host of failures which exercise so queer a fascination over all later Russian novelists, particularly Dostoievsky.
Interspersed between the stories came the plays. One has to remember in this connection the exceptionally severe censorship of the stage. It is a matter of no little surprise to us on reading The Inspector-General to think that such a play should ever have been licensed in such a country. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. An ordinary traveller from Petrograd—an intrepid liar—is mistaken for the Inspector and plays up to his part until the arrival of the real one, when he manages to effect his escape.