Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared
away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a
new structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of
the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth,
the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little
Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected
his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit,
the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel
its direction to this very day.

More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless
with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian
literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic
and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this
every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense
with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian
critic's observation about Gogol: "Seldom has nature created a man so
romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic
in life." But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it
is easy to see in almost all of Gogol's work his "free Cossack soul"
trying to break through the shell of sordid to-day like some ancient
demon, essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are
to our life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever
calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And they have
all the joy and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much.
Ukrainian was to Gogol "the language of the soul," and it was in
Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a
little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people. Time and
again, in his essays and in his letters to friends, he expresses his
boundless joy in these songs: "O songs, you are my joy and my life!