Too much a visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is
hardly astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work,
during that same year, 1834: "My history of Little Russia's past is an
extraordinarily made thing, and it could not be otherwise." The deeper
he goes into Little Russia's past the more fanatically he dreams of
Little Russia's future. St. Petersburg wearies him, Moscow awakens no
emotion in him, he yearns for Kieff, the mother of Russian cities,
which in his vision he sees becoming "the Russian Athens." Russian
history gives him no pleasure, and he separates it definitely from
Ukrainian history. He is "ready to cast everything aside rather than
read Russian history," he writes to Pushkin. During his seven-year
stay in St. Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously gathered historical
material and, in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky, "lived in the
dream of becoming the Thucydides of Little Russia." How completely he
disassociated Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by the
conspectus of his lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of
the conquest of Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince
Guedimin at the head of his Lithuanian host, still dressed in the
skins of wild beasts, still worshipping the ancient fire and
practising pagan rites: "Then Southern Russia, under the mighty
protection of Lithuanian princes, completely separated itself from the
North. Every bond between them was broken; two kingdoms were
established under a single name--Russia--one under the Tatar yoke, the
other under the same rule with Lithuanians. But actually they had no
relation with one another; different laws, different customs,
different aims, different bonds, and different activities gave them
wholly different characters."

This same Prince Guedimin freed Kieff from the Tatar yoke. This city
had been laid waste by the golden hordes of Ghengis Khan and hidden