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With a happy humour reminding us of Dickens in his best moods, he has sketched all classes of society in the Dead Souls, perhaps the cleverest of all Russian novels. In the Portrait and Memoirs of a Madman, Gogol shows a weird power, which may be compared with that of the fantastic American, Edgar Allan Poe.
Gogol, the Russian Moliere, says where? well, somewhere "the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down." A wonderful saying. So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The atmosphere seems filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers, which overcomes me and gives me a headache.
Boborykin dismisses Gogol absolutely and refuses to recognize him as a forerunner of Turgenev, Gontcharov, and Tolstoy.... He puts him apart, outside the current in which the Russian novel has flowed. Well, I don't understand that.
In the pages of Gogol, Dostoievski, Tourguéneff, and Tolstoi, the majority of readers have found a world absolutely new to them; and in reading those pages, so penetrated with the dramatic spirit, they have come into the possession of a knowledge of life not formal and didactic, but deep, vital, and racial in its range and significance.
The uncompromising attitude toward fidelity in Art which Gogol emphasised in "The Portrait" set the standard for every Russian writer who has attained prominence since his day. No one can read Chekhov and Andreev without being conscious of the hovering spirit of the first master of Russian fiction. He could truthfully have adapted the words of Joseph Hall:
At this period of her life she was awakening to the glories of literature and taking a special course in that branch. He talked to her of Gogol, Turgenief, and Dostoievsky, and seated on the log piazza read in excellent French "Dead Souls," "Peres et Enfants," and "The Brothers Karamazoff."
He is not a revolutionary thinker or an opponent of existing society; his ideal, like that of his predecessor Gógol, is of honesty, kindliness, generosity, and loyalty in a broad, general way to the traditions of the past. He attacks serfdom not as an isolated leader of a forlorn hope, but as an adherent of a great party of moderate reformers.
He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types.
Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over. The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard. "Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"
In literature, Pushkin and Gogol were never weary of delineating their compatriots in every grade of Sclavonic society, whilst Glinka took his musical inspirations from his native folk-songs and dance-rhythms from the historic chronicles of his country or its legendary lore.
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