describes with the utmost detail a country fair at the place of his
birth, Sorotchinetz. His descriptions of the simple folk, the beasts,
and the bargainings seem as true as those in "Madame Bovary"--the
difference is in the attitude of the author toward his work. Gogol has
nothing of the aloofness, nothing of the scorn of Flaubert; he himself
loves the revelry and the superstitions he pictures, loves above all
the people. Superstition plays a prominent role in these sketches; the
unseen world of ghosts and apparitions has an enormous influence on
the daily life of the peasants. The love of fun is everywhere in
evidence; these people cannot live without practical jokes, violent
dances, and horse-play. Shadowy forms of amorous couples move silent
in the warm summer night, and the stillness is broken by silver
laughter. Far away, in his room at St. Petersburg, shut in by the long
winter darkness, the homesick man dreamed of the vast landscape he
loved, in the warm embrace of the sky at noon, or asleep in the pale
moonlight. The first sentence of the book is a cry of longing. "What
ecstasy; what splendour has a summer day in Little Russia!" Pushkin
used to say that the Northern summer was a caricature of the Southern
winter.

The "Evenings on a Farm" indicates the possession of great power
rather than consummate skill in the use of it. Full of charm as it is,
it cannot by any stretch of language be called a masterpiece. Two
years later, however, Gogol produced one of the great prose romances
of the world, "Taras Bulba." He had intended to write a history of
Little Russia and a history of the Middle Ages, in eight or nine
volumes. In order to gather material, he read annals diligently, and
collected folk-lore, national songs, and local traditions. Fortunately
out of this welter of matter emerged not a big history, but a short
novel. Short as it is, it has been called an epical poem in the manner