and heroically, he has drawn a picture of his romantic ideal, which if
far from perfect at any rate seemed to him preferable to the grey
tedium of a city peopled with government officials. Gogol has written
in "Taras Bulba" his own reproach to the nineteenth century. It is
sad and joyous like one of those Ukrainian songs which have helped to
inspire him to write it. And then, as he cut himself off more and more
from the world of the past, life became a sadder and still sadder
thing to him; modern life, with all its gigantic pettiness, closed in
around him, he began to write of petty officials and of petty
scoundrels, "commonplace heroes" he called them. But nothing is ever
lost in this world. Gogol's romanticism, shut in within himself,
finding no outlet, became a flame. It was a flame of pity. He was like
a man walking in hell, pitying. And that was the miracle, the
transfiguration. Out of that flame of pity the Russian novel was born.

JOHN COURNOS



Evenings on the Farm near the Dikanka, 1829-31; Mirgorod, 1831-33;
Taras Bulba, 1834; Arabesques (includes tales, The Portrait and A
Madman's Diary), 1831-35; The Cloak, 1835; The Revizor (The Inspector-
General), 1836; Dead Souls, 1842; Correspondence with Friends, 1847;
Letters, 1847, 1895, 4 vols. 1902.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS: Cossack Tales (The Night of Christmas Eve,
Tarass Boolba), trans. by G. Tolstoy, 1860; St. John's Eve and Other
Stories, trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, New York, Crowell, 1886; Taras
Bulba: Also St. John's Eve and Other Stories, London, Vizetelly, 1887;
Taras Bulba, trans. by B. C. Baskerville, London, Scott, 1907; The