This power of resurrection which makes the poet a god, Gogol applies
equally to facts and to ideas, to men and to things, to legends and to
history. His whole work shows it, but nothing in his work shows it more
clearly than his early writings. Here imagination plays the leading
part. In the works of his riper years, it is observation which comes to
get the mastery, forcing itself everywhere. The part played by poetry,
by fancy, grows less and less. The author of “The _Revizor_,” of “Dead
Souls,” no longer takes pains, except rarely, to distinguish by his
characteristic touch his models of coarseness, platitude, or ugliness.
The writer of the “Evenings at the Farm” is still content to vivify
or revivify in his half-imaginary, half-biographical tales, artless
lovers, full of passion and pathos, heroes of epic grandeur, good old
folks of the vanished past, of odd exteriors, of ridiculous aspect,
but charming by their glances, stirring by their smiles, as in the
pale, faded pastels of a bygone age. Such are the figures which Gogol
afterwards ceases to depict for us: it is these which we are going to
endeavor to take out from his first collection, so as to examine them
entirely at our ease.
This collection of “Evenings at the Farm” is divided into two parts,
bearing, by way of sub-title, the town names, _Didanka_ and _Mirgorod_.
Each part contains two groups of novels. In the “Evenings near
Didanka,”[10] the first group contains “The Fair at Sorotchintsui,”
“St. John’s Eve,” “The May Night, or the Drowned Girl,” and “The
Missing Paper.” The second group includes “Christmas Eve,” “A Terrible
Vengeance,” “Ivan Feodorovitch Shponka and his Aunt,” and “An Enchanted
Spot.”
The “Evenings near Mirgorod” contain four novels in two groups: in the
one, “Old-time Proprietors”[11] and “Taras Bulba” (in its first form;
shortly afterwards the author recast it and developed it); in the
other, “Vii,” which has been translated into French under the title
“The King of the Gnomes,” and “The Story of how Ivan Ivanovitch and
Ivan Nikiforovitch quarrelled.”[12]
The novels of the first part have especially a fantastic character. The
Devil, who holds such a place in the imagination of the Malo-Russian
peasants, is the principal hero of some of the stories, “The Fair at
Sorotchintsui” for example. Witches also play a preponderating part
in his mysterious tales. But here the witch is not that wrinkled,
toothless, unclean being, hiding herself like an abominable beast in
some, ill-omened hovel. She is generally a beautiful girl, with eyes
green as an Undine’s, with skin of lily and rose, with long hair yellow
as gold or black as ebony, with delicate level, haughty eye-brows.
Sometimes, as in “Vii,” it is the proprietor’s daughter, and those who
are impudent enough to stare at her are lost: witness the groom Mikita.
This groom had no equal in the world. Enchanted by the maiden, he
becomes a little woman, a rag, the deuce knows what. Did she look at
him? The reins fell from his hand. He forgot the names of his dogs, and
called one instead of the other. One day, while he was grooming a horse
at the stable, the maiden came and asked him to let her rest her little
foot upon him. He accepted with joy, foolish fellow! but she compelled
him to gallop like a horse, and struck him redoubled blows with her
witch’s stick. He came back half dead, and from that day he vanished
from mortal sight. “Once when they went to the stable, they found
instead of him only a handful of ashes by an empty pail. He had burned
up,--entirely burned up by his own fire. Yet he had been a groom such
as no more can be found in the world.”
Artless but not silly sorcery. It is the timid homage, pathetic from
its very timidity, which is offered by these barbarous souls to the
eternal power of beauty and love.
These witches of Gogol, so bold and novel in their conception, put me
in mind of a painting of the Spanish school, attributed to Murillo.
This canvas, which I saw several years ago in a private gallery, is a
Temptation of St. Anthony, interpreted in an unlooked-for way. A young
man of thirty years, whose features are those of the painter himself,
with sunburned face and passionate eyes, bends towards his mistress,
a lovely girl with piquant charm, _sal y pimienta_, who is leaning on
his shoulder, while her mouth is arched at the corners of the lips in a
smile of irresistible seduction.
In these tales of Gogol, the marvellous abounds. But it abounds equally
in the life of these Malo-Russians whom the author has wished to depict
for us. The supernatural affrights and charms them. If the legends of
the Ukraïna are lugubrious, yet they never weary of hearing them told.
The young girl who at the first sound of the serenade lifts the latch,
steals out from the door, and joins the love-stricken _bandura_-player,
desires no other entertainment on the border of the pond which in the
uncanny lights of the night reflects in its waters the willows and the
maples:[13] “Tell me it, my handsome Cossack,” she says, laying her
cheek to his face and kissing him: “No? Then it is plain that thou
dost not love me, that thou hast some other young girl. Speak! I shall
not be afraid. My sleep will not be broken by it. On the contrary, I
shall not be able to go to sleep at all if thou dost not tell me this
story. I shall be thinking of something else. I shall believe--come,
Lyévko, tell it.” They are right who say that the Devil haunts the
brain of young girls to keep their curiosity awake.
Lyévko, however, yields, and unfolds the old legend. It is the story
of the daughter of the _sotnik_ (captain of a hundred Cossacks). The
_sotnik_ had a daughter white as snow. He was old, and one day he
brought home a second wife, young and handsome, white and rose; but she
looked at her stepdaughter in such a strange way that she cried out
under her gaze. The young wife was a witch, as was seen immediately.
The very night of the wedding, a black cat enters the young girl’s
room, and tries to choke her with his iron claws. She snatches a sabre
down from the wall, she strikes at the animal, and cuts off his paw.
He disappears with a yell. When the stepmother was seen again, her
hand was covered with bandages. Five days later the father drove his
daughter from the house, and in grief she drowned herself in the pond.
Since then the drowned girl has been waiting for the sorceress, to beat
her with the green rushes of the pond; but up to the present time the
stepmother has succeeded in escaping from all her traps. ‘She is very
wily,’ says the poor Undine. ‘I feel that she is here. I suffer from
her presence. Because of her, I cannot swim freely like a fish. I go to
the bottom like a key. Find her for me.’
Lyévko the singer hears the drowned girl thus speaking to him in a
dream. But this dream is a reality; for when he wakes, Lyévko, who has
tracked and caught the stepmother in the circle of the young shadows,
finds in his hand the reward of the Queen of the Lake. It is a letter
containing an order for the marriage between Lyévko and Hanna, his
_fiancée_. The order is given by the district commissioner, to Hanna’s
father, who has hitherto shown himself recalcitrant. “I shall not tell
any one the miracle which has been performed this night,” murmurs the
happy bridegroom. “To thee alone will I confide it, Hanna; thou alone
wilt believe me, and together we will pray for the soul of the poor
drowned girl.”