BY NIKOLÁI VASILÉVICH GÓGOL[Story]
This story, taken from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, a series of sketches of the life of the Ukrainian peasants, offers a good illustration of the author’s art, which was a combination of the romantic and realistic elements. In these pages Gógol wished to record the myths and legends still current among the plain folk of his beloved Ukrainia. The devil naturally enough peeps out here and there through the pages of this book. Gógol’s devil is a product of the Russian soil, “the spirit of mischief and cunning, whom Russian literature is always trying to outplay and overcome” (Mme. Jarintzow, Russian Poets and Poems).
According to European superstition St. John’s Eve is the only evening in the year when his Satanic Majesty reveals himself in his proper shape to the eyes of men. If you wish to behold his Highness face to face, stand on St. John’s Eve at midnight near a mustard-plant. It is suggested by Sir James Frazer in his Golden Bough that, in the chilly air of the upper world, this prince from a warmer clime may be attracted by the warmth of the mustard.
It is believed in many parts of Europe that treasures can be found on St. John’s Eve by means of the fern-seed. Even without the use of this plant treasures are sometimes said to bloom or burn in the earth, or to reveal their presence by a bluish flame on Midsummer Eve. As guardian of treasures the devil is the successor of the gnome.
THE DEVIL’S WAGER
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY[Story]
The Devil’s Wager is Thackeray’s earliest attempt at story-writing, was contributed to a weekly literary paper with the imposing title The National Standard, and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, of which he was proprietor and editor, and was reprinted in the Paris Sketch Book (1840). The story first ended with the very Thackerayesque touch: “The moral of this story will be given in several successive numbers.” In the Paris Sketch Book the last three words are changed into “the second edition.” This comical tale was illustrated by an excellent wood-cut, representing the devil as sailing through the air, dragging after him the fat Sir Roger de Rollo by means of his tail, which is wound round Sir Roger’s neck.
In the “Advertisement to the First Edition” of his Paris Sketch Book, Thackeray admits the French origin of this as well as of his other devil-story, The Painter’s Bargain, to be found in the same volume. It was Thackeray’s good fortune to live in Paris during the wildest and most brilliant years of Romanticism; and while his attitude towards this movement and its leaders, as presented in the Paris Sketch Book, is not wholly sympathetic, he is indebted to it for his interest in supernatural subjects. The Romanticism of Thackeray has been denied with great obstinacy and almost passion, for like Heinrich Heine, the chief of German Romantic ironists, he poked fun at this movement. But “to laugh at what you love,” as Mr. George Saintsbury has pointed out in his History of the French Novel, “is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself.”
Mercurius makes a pun on the familiar quotation “rara avis” from Horace (Sat. 2, 2. 26), where it means a rare bird. This expression is commonly applied to a singular person. It is also found in the Satires of Juvenal (VI, 165).