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Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried
Pushkin's work--the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and
adumbrated in prose--much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and
by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a
hero, he created Russian realism. He described what he saw without
flattery and without exaggeration, but with the masterly touch, the
instinctive economy, the sense of selection of a great artist.

This, at the time it was done, was a revolution. Nobody then would
have dreamed it possible to write a play or a novel without a
love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed to Russia that there was
such a thing as Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one better,
revealed the fascination, the secret and incomprehensible power that
lay in the flat monotony of the Russian country, and the inexhaustible
source of humour, absurdity, irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the
everyday life of the ordinary people. So that, however much his
contemporaries might differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm or
the beneficence, of his work, he left his nation with permanent and
classic models of prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin had
bequeathed to them permanent models of verse.

Gogol wrote no more fiction after _Dead Souls_. In 1847 _Passages from
a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published, which created a
sensation, because in the book Gogol preached submission to the
Government, both spiritual and temporal. The Western enthusiasts and
the Liberals in general were highly disgusted. One can understand
their disgust; it is less easy to understand their surprise; for Gogol
had never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed up the evils of
Bureaucracy and the follies and weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because
they were there, just as he showed up the stinginess of misers and the
obstinacy of old women. But it is quite as easy for a Conservative to
do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as easy for an orthodox
believer as for an atheist. But Gogol's contemporaries had not
realized the tempest that had been raging for a long time in Gogol's
soul, and which he kept to himself. He had always been religious, and
now he became exclusively religious; he made a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land; he spent his substance in charity, especially to poor students;
and he lived in asceticism until he died, at the age of forty-three.
What a waste, one is tempted to say--and