NIKOLAI VASILIEVITCH GOGOL
(1809-1852)
BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD
ogol has been called the "father of modern Russian realism," and he has been credited with the creation of all the types which we meet in the great novelists who followed him. This is in great measure true, especially so far as the male characters are concerned. The germs at least, if not the condensed characterization in full, are recognizable in Gogol's famous novel 'Dead Souls,' his Little-Russian stories 'Tales from a Farm-House near Dikanka' and 'Mirgorod,' and his comedy 'The Inspector,' which still holds the stage.
Nikolai Gogol
It was precisely because of his genius in seizing the national types that the poet Pushkin, one of Gogol's earliest and warmest admirers, gave to him the plans of 'Dead Souls' and 'The Inspector,' which he had intended to make use of himself. That he became the "father of Russian realism" was due not only to his own genius, but to the epoch in which he lived, though he solved the problem for himself quite independently of the Continental literatures which were undergoing the same process of transformation from romanticism to realism. For, nearly a hundred years before Gogol and his foreign contemporaries of the forties—the pioneers, in their respective countries, of the new literature—won the public, Europe had been living a sort of modern epic. In imitation of the ancient epics, writers portrayed heroes of gigantic powers in every direction, and set them in a framework of exceptional crises which aroused their powerful emotions in the cause of right, or their superhuman conflict with masterful persons or overwhelming woes. But the daily experience of those who suffered from the manifold miseries of battle and invasion in this modern epic epoch, made it impossible for them to disregard longer the claim on their sympathies of the common things and people of their world, though these can very easily be ignored when one reads the ancient epics. Thus did realism have its dawn in many lands when the era of peace gave men time to define their position, and when pseudo-classicism had at last palled on their taste, which had begun to recognize its coldness and inherent falsity.