Nikolaï Gogol[1] was born in 1810, in a village of the government of
Poltava. His father, a small proprietor with some education, obtained
for him a scholarship in the college of Niézhin. Fortunately the young
Gogol was able to hold his own in rebellion against the direction of
his instructors, and neither the dead nor the living languages brought
him any gain. He thus failed of becoming a commonplace man of letters,
and consequently had less trouble in the end with discovering his
original genius.
In his father’s house, on the other hand, he received a priceless
education, such as Pushkin, in spite of all his efforts, vainly
attempted to obtain. He was imbued with the poetry of the people.
His childhood was entertained by the marvellous legends of the
Malo-Russians. Gogol’s grandfather was one of those Zaparog Cossacks
whose heroic exploits the author of “Taras Bulba” was destined to
celebrate. He excelled in the art of story-telling, and his narrations
had a tinge of mystery about them that brought the cold chills. “When
he was speaking I would not move from my place all day long, but would
listen, ... and the things were so strange that I always shivered,
and my hair stood on end. Sometimes I was so frightened by them, that
at night every thing seemed like God knows what monsters.” This fund
of mainly fantastic and diabolical legends afterwards furnished the
grandson of the Ukraïne village story-teller, with the material for his
first original work.[2]
Gogol’s first attempts were not original: he began too early. Scarcely
out of the gymnasium, he began to write in rhyme; in the morning
trying all the styles in vogue, at evening making parodies upon them.
He established a manuscript journal “The Star” (_Zvyezd_). The student
intoxicated by reading Pushkin still remained in the trammels of
uninspired verse, in the formulas of romanticism. Some characteristics
already began to reveal the precocious observer, the brilliant
satirist. Thus his prose articles, clandestinely introduced, had a
tremendous success never equalled in his ripest years, even by his
comedy of “The _Revizor_.”
After his studies were ended, Gogol was obliged to conquer the favor
of a public less complacent than the rhetoricians and philosophers
of Niézhin. He obtained (1830) an exceedingly modest office in the
Ministry of Appanages (_Udyélui_). But in the bureau, where, like
Popritshchin in the “Recollections of a Lunatic” his service was
limited to sharpening dozens of pens for the director, he worked out
a comedy on the pattern of Scribe’s, and spun a cottony idyl in the
German style. The comedy was hissed by the public, and the idyl was so
unkindly received by the critics that Gogol had this attempt withdrawn
from the market.[3]
Gogol almost simultaneously shook off the double yoke of bureaucratic
slavery and literary imitation. Instead of following, like so many
others, in the track of French, English, or German writers, he
determined to be himself. He went back over the course of his early
years to find in this way in all their freshness the impressions of
his childhood; he returned to his first, his real masters, and began
once more to get material around the Malo-Russian hearth. He appealed
to his mother for recollections; he besought the aid of his friends;
he put them like so many bloodhounds on the track of half-forgotten
legends, half-vanished traditions; he collected documents of every sort
and kind: and when he was sufficiently permeated with savagery to think
and speak, if need were, like a Cossack of the last century, he created
a work at once modern and archaic, learned and enthusiastic, mystic
and refined,--Russian, in a word,--and published it under the title
“Evenings at the Farm” (_Vetchera na Khutoryé bliz Dikanki_).
This series of fantastic tales, published in the reviews under the
pseudonyme of Rudui Panko (Sandy the little nobleman), produced a
singular effect. The Russian reader was surprised and charmed in the
same way as a French traveller, who, after having visited all the
countries and admired all the floras of the world, should discover the
banks of the Seine, and declare that he was willing to exchange the
splendors of the savannas for a tuft of turf and a bunch of violets.
No one was more struck with the value of these tales than Pushkin. He
recommended their author to Pletnef, minister of public instruction;
and Gogol was appointed professor. The servitude was still more onerous
than that of the bureaucracy. The young writer had too much originality
to bend under it very long: a second time he escaped, and took his
departure for the Ukraïna.
The Zaparog Cossack’s grandson used to say that there was material for
an Iliad in the exploits of his ancestors. He buried himself in the
study of the annals of Little Russia; he collected the traditions;
more than all, he picked up the national songs of the Ukraïna,--those
kinds of heroic cantilenas composed by the players of the bandura. A
modern _diaskenastes_, he constructed a body out of all these poetic
remains, joined them together by means of a romantic plot, and renewed
the astonishment caused by the appearance of “Evenings at the Farm,”
by publishing “Taras Bulba.” The minister was convinced that a man who
could thus revivify history could not fail to be skilled in teaching
it: he therefore offered Gogol the chair of mediæval history in the
University of Petersburg. The romancer gave only one lecture, his
opening lecture. This day he dazzled his audience. The remainder of his
course was for both students and professor only a long-continued bore,
which ended finally in his losing the place.
Gogol dreamed of a different success. In 1835 he published his comedy,
“The _Revizor_” (The Inspector General). It was applauded, and, what
was of more value, it was desperately attacked. The author gained as
many admirers and enemies as “Tartuffe” cost Molière. At Petersburg,
as at Paris, the masterpiece was produced on the stage, and kept before
the public, only by a fortunate caprice on the part of the sovereign.
Gogol’s health, which had long been failing, caused him about this
period to leave Russia. He lived many years in Italy. There he
completed his great romance, “Dead Souls” (_Mertvuia Dushi_). The work
appeared in complete form in 1841.[4] The author had reached a state of
nervous irritation and hypochondria, which was more and more manifested
in his correspondence, published in part towards 1846. The last years
of Gogol’s life were only a long torture. A sort of mystic madness took
possession of his brain, exhausted or over-excited by production: death
put an end to his nervous disease (1852).