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Updated: May 11, 2025
The various scenes at dinner parties and at the country inns are laughable; but Gogol's laughter, like that of most great humorists, is a compound of irony, satire, pathos, tenderness, and moral indignation.
By the word 'real' many people understand 'trivial. Perhaps it sometimes is so; but I must own that the first appearance of reality before me shook me profoundly, scared me, impressed me.... What fine-sounding phrases all about love that didn't come off, to use Gogol's expression! ... I come back to my story.
People like Lyamshin and Telyatnikov, like Gogol's Tentyotnikov, drivelling home-bred editions of Radishtchev, wretched little Jews with a mournful but haughty smile, guffawing foreigners, poets of advanced tendencies from the capital, poets who made up with peasant coats and tarred boots for the lack of tendencies or talents, majors and colonels who ridiculed the senselessness of the service, and who would have been ready for an extra rouble to unbuckle their swords, and take jobs as railway clerks; generals who had abandoned their duties to become lawyers; advanced mediators, advancing merchants, innumerable divinity students, women who were the embodiment of the woman question all these suddenly gained complete sway among us and over whom?
Turgenev, most cultivated of novelists, never fails to rank simplicity of heart above the accomplishments of the mind. * I cannot doubt that Turgenev got the hint for this chapter from Gogol's tale, "Old-fashioned Farmers."
Chernichevsky's What to Do, Gogol's Dead Souls, Turgenief's Virgin Soil and Fathers and Sons, the doctrines of Pisarev and Bielinsky, and of the other writers who then had their greatest vogue, were eagerly read and frequently copied by Jewish young gymnasiasts and passed on to their Christian schoolmates. The revolutionary spirit seized on men and women alike.
Ravines, mountains, ravines, mountains, poplars stick out from the ravines, vineyards loom dark on the mountains all this is bathed in moonlight, is new and wild, and sets one's imagination working in harmony with Gogol's "Terrible Vengeance." Particularly fantastic are the alternating precipices and tunnels when you see now depths full of moonlight and now complete sinister darkness.
In "The Portrait," which is partly written in the minute manner of Balzac, and partly with the imaginative fantastic horror of Poe and Hoffmann, we have the two sides of Gogol's nature clearly reflected. Into this strange story he has also indicated two of the great guiding principles of his life: his intense democratic sympathies, and his devotion to the highest ideals in Art.
Despite Gogol's undoubted claim to be regarded as the founder of Russian fiction, it is worth remembering that of the three works on which rests his international fame, two cannot possibly be called germinal. The drama "Revizor" is the best comedy in the Russian language; but, partly for that very reason, it produced no school.
In discussing the character of Hlestakov, the hero of his great comedy, Gogol declared that this type is pretty nigh universal, because 'every Russian, he says, 'has a bit of Hlestakov in him. This not very flattering opinion has been humbly indorsed and repeated since, out of reverence to Gogol's great authority, although it is untrue on the face of it.
I've given up writing poetry, and at one time even you were amused by my verses, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch. Do you remember our reading them over a bottle? But it's all over with my pen. I've written only one poem, like Gogol's 'The Last Story. Do you remember he proclaimed to Russia that it broke spontaneously from his bosom? It's the same with me; I've sung my last and it's over."
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