Yet "Taras Bulba" was in a sense an accident, just as many other works
of great men are accidents. It often requires a happy combination of
circumstances to produce a masterpiece. I have already told in my
introduction to "Dead Souls"[1] how Gogol created his great realistic
masterpiece, which was to influence Russian literature for generations
to come, under the influence of models so remote in time or place as
"Don Quixote" or "Pickwick Papers"; and how this combination of
influences joined to his own genius produced a work quite new and
original in effect and only remotely reminiscent of the models which
have inspired it. And just as "Dead Souls" might never have been
written if "Don Quixote" had not existed, so there is every reason to
believe that "Taras Bulba" could not have been written without the
"Odyssey." Once more ancient fire gave life to new beauty. And yet at
the time Gogol could not have had more than a smattering of the
"Odyssey." The magnificent translation made by his friend Zhukovsky
had not yet appeared and Gogol, in spite of his ambition to become a
historian, was not equipped as a scholar. But it is evident from his
dithyrambic letter on the appearance of Zhukovsky's version, forming
one of the famous series of letters known as "Correspondence with
Friends," that he was better acquainted with the spirit of Homer than
any mere scholar could be. That letter, unfortunately unknown to the
English reader, would make every lover of the classics in this day of
their disparagement dance with joy. He describes the "Odyssey" as the
forgotten source of all that is beautiful and harmonious in life, and
he greets its appearance in Russian dress at a time when life is
sordid and discordant as a thing inevitable, "cooling" in effect upon
a too hectic world. He sees in its perfect grace, its calm and almost
childlike simplicity, a power for individual and general good. "It
combines all the fascination of a fairy tale and all the simple truth