the last sparks of
genius. The Russian mind is peculiarly inclined to mysticism, and
Russian writers of eminence seem to be even more susceptible in that
direction than ordinary men. Of the noted writers in this century,
Pushkin and Lermontoff had leaned decidedly in that direction towards
the end of their careers, brief as their lives were. Gogol was their
intimate friend in Russia, and after he went abroad he was the intimate
friend of the aged poet Zhukovsky, who became a mystic in his declining
years.

Even in his school days Gogol had shown, in his letters to his mother, a
marked tendency to religious exaltation. Now, under the combined
pressure of his personal inclinations, friendships, and the clerical
atmosphere of Rome, he developed into a mystic and ascetic of the most
pronounced type. In this frame of mind, he looked upon all his earlier
writings as sins which must be atoned for; and yet his immense
self-esteem was so flattered by the tremendous success of 'The
Inspector' and of the first part of 'Dead Souls,' that he began to
regard himself as a kind of divinely commissioned prophet, whose duty it
was to exhort his fellow-men. The extract from these hortatory letters
to his friends which he published convinced his countrymen that nothing
more was to be expected from him. The failure of this volume only helped
to plunge him into deeper depths of self-torture. In the few remaining
lucid moments of his genius he worked at the second part of 'Dead
Souls,' but destroyed what he had written in the moments of ecstatic
remorse which followed. Thus the greatest work of his mature genius
remains uncompleted. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and
returned through Odessa to Moscow, where he lived until his death,
growing constantly more mystical, more ascetic. Sleepless nights spent
in prayer, fasting to the extent of trying to nourish himself (as it is
affirmed that practiced ascetics successfully can) for a week on one of
the tiny double loaves which are used in the Holy Communion, completed
the ravages of his long-endured maladies.

It was for publishing in a Moscow paper an enthusiastic obituary of the
dead genius, which he had been forbidden to publish in St. Petersburg,
that Turgenieff was sent into residence on his estate, and enriched the
world with the first work of the rising genius, 'The Diary of a
Sportsman.' Acuteness of observation; natural, infectious, genuine
humor; vivid realism; and an inimi