Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern (Volume 16) (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...She is kind. I praise her with all her works. She is wise and still. No one can force her to explain herself, or frighten her into a gift that she does not give willingly. She is crafty, but for a good end; and it is best not to notice her cunning. Pg 6455 NIKOLAI VASILIEVITCH GOGOL (1809-1852) BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD ogol has been called the "father of modern Russian realism," and he has been credited with the creation of all the types which we meet in the great novelists who followed him. This is in great measure true, especially so far as the male characters are concerned. The germs at least, if not the condensed characterization in full, are recognizable in Gogol's famous novel 'Dead Souls, ' his Little-Russian stories 'Tales from a Farm-House near Dikanka' and 'Mirgorod, ' and his comedy 'The Inspector, ' which still holds the stage. Nikolai Gogol It was precisely because of his genius in seizing the national types that the poet Pushkin, one of Gogol's earliest and warmest admirers, gave to him the plans of 'Dead Souls' and 'The Inspector, ' which he had intended to make use of himself. That he became the "father of Russian realism" was due not only to his own genius, but to the epoch in which he lived, though he solved the problem for himself quite independently of the Continental literatures which were undergoing the same process of transformation from romanticism to realism. For, nearly a hundred years before Gogol and his foreign contemporaries of the forties