It is almost universally believed that he died from the effects of his excessive fastings and mortification of the flesh; but I have learned from reliable sources that an aggravation of his disease, with typhoid symptoms, caused his death. But little is known of his latter years. He aged rapidly, as Russians do, and ended his work at the time of life when others begin theirs. A mysterious fatality has attended nearly all the writers of his time, who have all died at about the age of forty. The children of Russia develop as her vegetation does. It grows quickly and matures young, but its magnificent growth is soon cut off, benumbed while still in perfection. At the age of thirty-three, after the publication of “Dead Souls,” the productive brain-power of Nikolai Vasilievitch was wellnigh ruined. At forty-three he died, on the 21st of February, 1852. The event of his death made but little sensation. The imperial favor had quite forgotten this writer. Even the governor of Moscow was criticized for putting on the regalia of his order to attend the funeral. Turgenef was exiled to his own distant estates as a punishment for having written a letter in which he called the deceased author “a great man.” Posterity, however, has ratified this title. Gogol may now be ranked, according to some critics, with the best English humorists; but I should place him rather between Cervantes and Le Sage. Perhaps it may be too soon to judge him. Should we appreciate “Don Quixote” now if Spanish literature had not been known for three hundred years? When we were children we laughed whenever an alguazil or an alcalde was mentioned.
Gogol introduces us to an untried world. I must warn the reader that he will at first find difficulties—the strangest customs; an array of characters not in any way connected; names as strange as the people who bear them. He must not expect the attractive style or class of subjects of Tolstoï and Dostoyevski. They show us results, not principles; they tell of what we can better apprehend; for what they have studied is more common to all Europe. Gogol wrote of more remote times, and, besides, he and his work are thoroughly and exclusively Russian. To be appreciated by men of letters, then, his works must be admirably translated; which, unfortunately, has never yet been done. We must leave him, therefore, in Russia, where all the new authors of any distinction recognize in him their father and master. They owe to him their very language. Although Turgenef’s is more subtile and harmonious, its originator has more life, variety, and energy.
One of the last sentences that fell from his pen, in his “Confessions of an Author,” was this:—
“I have studied life as it really is—not in dreams of the imagination; and thus have I come to a conception of Him who is the source of all life.”
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Zaporovian commonwealth, so-called from “Zaporozhtsi,” meaning those who live beyond the rapids.
[C] “Veillées dans un hameau près de Dikanka.”
[D] About $4000.
[E] The quotation of this paragraph in full should be given here, in order to obtain a clear understanding of Gogol’s thought; but the French translator has omitted too much.