have the humility of the true Christian, who among you, being alone,
in the silence of the evening, at the time when one communes with
oneself, will look into the depths of his soul to ask in all sincerity
this question? 'Might there not be in me something of Chichikov?'"

This whole epilogue is a programme--the programme of the
self-conscious founder of Russian Realism. It came from a man who had
deliberately turned his back on Romanticism, even on the romanticism
of his friend and teacher, Pushkin, and who had decided to venture all
alone on a new and untried path in Russian literature. He fully
realised the difficulties of his task, and the opposition he was bound
to encounter. He asks and answers the two familiar questions
invariably put to the native realist. The first is, "I have enough
trouble in my own life: I see enough misery and stupidity in the
world: what is the use of reading about it in novels?" The second is,
"Why should a man who loves his country uncover her nakedness?"

Gogol's realism differs in two important aspects from the realism of
the French school, whether represented by Balzac, Flaubert, Guy de
Maupassant, or Zola. He had all the French love of veracity, and could
have honestly said with the author of "Une Vie" that he painted
'humble verite. But there are two ground qualities in his realistic
method absent in the four Frenchmen: humour and moral force. Gogol
could not repress the fun that is so essential an element in human
life, any more than he could stop the beating of his heart; he saw men
and women with the eyes of a natural born humorist, to whom the utter
absurdity of humanity and human relations was enormously salient. And
he could not help preaching, because he had boundless sympathy with
the weakness and suffering of his fellow-creatures, and because he
believed with all the tremendous force of his character in the