The Inspector-General | Page 6

himself was present at the first production in
April, 1836, and laughed and applauded, and is said to have remarked,
"Everybody gets it, and I most of all."
Naturally official Russia did not relish this innovation in dramatic art,
and indignation ran high among them and their supporters. Bulgarin led
the attack. Everything that is usually said against a new departure in
literature or art was said against the Revizor. It was not original. It was
improbable, impossible, coarse, vulgar; lacked plot. It turned on a stale
anecdote that everybody knew. It was a rank farce. The characters were
mere caricatures. "What sort of a town was it that did not hold a single
honest soul?"
Gogol's sensitive nature shrank before the tempest that burst upon him,
and he fled from his enemies all the way out of Russia. "Do what you
please about presenting the play in Moscow," he writes to Shchepkin
four days after its first production in St. Petersburg. "I am not going to
bother about it. I am sick of the play and all the fussing over it. It
produced a great noisy effect. All are against me . . . they abuse me and
go to see it. No tickets can be obtained for the fourth performance."
But the best literary talent of Russia, with Pushkin and Bielinsky, the
greatest critic Russia has produced, at the head, ranged itself on his
side.
Nicolay Vasilyevich Gogol was born in Sorochintzy, government of
Poltava, in 1809. His father was a Little Russian, or Ukrainian,
landowner, who exhibited considerable talent as a playwright and actor.
Gogol was educated at home until the age of ten, then went to Niezhin,

where he entered the gymnasium in 1821. Here he edited a students'
manuscript magazine called the Star, and later founded a students'
theatre, for which he was both manager and actor. It achieved such
success that it was patronized by the general public.
In 1829 Gogol went to St. Petersburg, where he thought of becoming
an actor, but he finally gave up the idea and took a position as a
subordinate government clerk. His real literary career began in 1830
with the publication of a series of stories of Little Russian country life
called Nights on a Farm near Dikanka. In 1831 he became acquainted
with Pushkin and Zhukovsky, who introduced the "shy Khokhol"
(nickname for "Little Russian"), as he was called, to the house of
Madame O. A. Smirnov, the centre of "an intimate circle of literary
men and the flower of intellectual society." The same year he obtained
a position as instructor of history at the Patriotic Institute, and in 1834
was made professor of history at the University of St. Petersburg.
Though his lectures were marked by originality and vivid presentation,
he seems on the whole not to have been successful as a professor, and
he resigned in 1835.
During this period he kept up his literary activity uninterruptedly, and
in 1835 published his collection of stories, Mirgorod, containing How
Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, Taras Bulba, and
others. This collection firmly established his position as a leading
author. At the same time he was at work on several plays. The Vladimir
Cross, which was to deal with the higher St. Petersburg functionaries in
the same way as the Revizor with the lesser town officials, was never
concluded, as Gogol realized the impossibility of placing them on the
Russian stage. A few strong scenes were published. The comedy
Marriage, finished in 1835, still finds a place in the Russian theatrical
repertoire. The Gamblers, his only other complete comedy, belongs to a
later period.
After a stay abroad, chiefly in Italy, lasting with some interruptions for
seven years (1836-1841), he returned to his native country, bringing
with him the first part of his greatest work, Dead Souls. The novel,
published the following year, produced a profound impression and
made Gogol's literary reputation supreme. Pushkin, who did not live to
see its publication, on hearing the first chapters read, exclaimed, "God,
how sad our Russia is!" And Alexander Hertzen characterized it as "a

wonderful book, a bitter, but not hopeless rebuke of contemporary
Russia." Aksakov went so far as to call it the Russian national epic, and
Gogol the Russian Homer.
Unfortunately the novel remained incomplete. Gogol began to suffer
from a nervous illness which induced extreme hypochondria. He
became excessively religious, fell under the influence of pietists and a
fanatical priest, sank more and more into mysticism, and went on a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship at the Holy Sepulchre. In this state
of mind he came to consider all literature, including his own, as
pernicious and sinful.
After burning the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls, he
began to rewrite it, had it completed and