e satirist had had
their wings clipped. But it was no longer possible to check this
tendency, for, by force of circumstances, it had been planted in the
very soul of every Russian who compared the conditions of life in
his country with what European civilization had done for the
neighboring countries.

Excluded from journalism, this satiric tendency took refuge in
literature, where the novel and the story trace the incidents of
daily life. Since the writers could not touch the evil at its
source, they showed its consequences for social life. They
represented with eloquence the empty and deplorable banality of the
existence forced upon most of them. By expressing in various ways
general aspirations towards something better, they let literature
continue its teaching, even in times particularly hostile to
freedom of thought, like the reign of Nicholas I, the most typical
and decided adversary of the freedom of the pen that Europe has ever
seen. Literature was, then, considered as an inevitable evil, but
one from which the world wanted to free itself; and every man of
letters seemed to be under suspicion. During this reign, not only
criticisms of the government, but also praises of it, were
considered offensive and out of place. Thus, the chief of the secret
police, when he found that a writer of that time, Bulgarine, whose
name was synonymous with accuser and like evils, had taken the
liberty to praise the government for some insignificant improvements
made on a certain street, told him with severity: "You are not asked
to praise the government, you must only praise men of letters."

Nothing went to print without the authorization of the general
censor, an authorization that had to be confirmed by the various
parts of the complex machine, and, finally, by a superior committee
which censored the censors. The latter were themselves so terrorized
that they scented subversive ideas even in cook-books, in technical
musical terms, and in punctuation marks. It would seem that under
such conditions no kind of literature, and certainly no satire,
could exist. Nevertheless, it was at this period that Gogol produced
his best works. The two most important are, his comedy "The
Revizor," where he stigmatizes the abuses of administration, and
"Dead Souls," that classic work which de Voguee judges worthy of
being given a place in universal literature, between "Don Quixote"
and "Gil Blas," and which, in a series of immortal types,
flag