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It would seem that under such conditions no kind of literature, and certainly no satire, could exist. Nevertheless, it was at this period that Gogol produced his best works.
The literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy, Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin, Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen.
Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian fiction Leo Wiener's admirable anthology surprises with its specimens of earlier men we see the novel strained through the rich, mystic imagination of Dostoïevsky; viewed through the more equable, artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own didactic purposes.
The "Evenings on a Farm" indicates the possession of great power rather than consummate skill in the use of it. Full of charm as it is, it cannot by any stretch of language be called a masterpiece. Two years later, however, Gogol produced one of the great prose romances of the world, "Taras Bulba."
On one side of this lawn, alive with dancers, was a sort of green bank, like the terrace in such old-fashioned gardens. Along this, in a kind of crescent, stood seven great chairs, the thrones of the seven days. Gogol and Dr. Bull were already in their seats; the Professor was just mounting to his.
Since the death of Pushkin, Lermontov alone has appeared to dispute the poetical crown with him. Many of his lyrics are exquisite, and have become standard poems in Russia, such as the Gifts of Terek and The Cradle Song of the Cossack Mother. In Gogol, who died in 1852, the Russians had to lament the loss of a keen and vigorous satirist.
When he read aloud from the manuscript, Pushkin, who had listened with growing seriousness, cried, "God! what a sad country is Russia!" and later be added, "Gogol invents nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible truth." The first part of his work, containing the first eleven chapters, or "songs," was published in May 1842.
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 fat man in spectacles appeared again; in spite of his serious exterior, he fancied himself a comic actor, and recited a scene from Gogol, this time without eliciting a single token of approbation. There was another glimpse of the flute-player; another thunder-clap from the pianist; a boy of twelve, frizzed and pomaded, but with tear-stains on his cheeks, thrummed some variations on a fiddle.
In a splendid apartment, the Counsellor, his iron-grey frock-coat torn to pieces, his neatly dressed hair in horrible disorder, lay dead, strangled, on the sofa. “Since that time no traces of Barighi have been found, neither in Stuttgart nor elsewhere.” From St. John’s Eve and Other Stories, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood from the Russian of N. V. Gógol.
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