redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky's opinion he really wanted to save
his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were
spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like
one hunted; but really always running from himself. Rome was his
favourite refuge, and he returned to it again and again. In 1848, he
made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but he could find no peace for his
soul. Something of this mood had reflected itself even much earlier in
the Memoirs of a Madman: "Oh, little mother, save your poor son!
Look how they are tormenting him. . . . There's no place for him on
earth! He's being driven! . . . Oh, little mother, take pity on thy
poor child."

All the contradictions of Gogol's character are not to be disposed of
in a brief essay. Such a strange combination of the tragic and the
comic was truly seldom seen in one man. He, for one, realised that "it
is dangerous to jest with laughter." "Everything that I laughed at
became sad." "And terrible," adds Merejkovsky. But earlier his humour
was lighter, less tinged with the tragic; in those days Pushkin never
failed to be amused by what Gogol had brought to read to him. Even
Revizor (1835), with its tragic undercurrent, was a trifle compared
to Dead Souls, so that one is not astonished to hear that not only
did the Tsar, Nicholas I, give permission to have it acted, in spite
of its being a criticism of official rottenness, but laughed
uproariously, and led the applause. Moreover, he gave Gogol a grant of
money, and asked that its source should not be revealed to the author
lest "he might feel obliged to write from the official point of view."

Gogol was born at Sorotchinetz, Little Russia, in March 1809. He left
college at nineteen and went to St. Petersburg, where he secured a
position as copying clerk in a government department. He did not keep