, made way
for ordinary mortals in their everyday surroundings. Lyrical exaltation
was superseded by calm observation, or disintegrating analysis of the
different elements of life; pathetic misery made way for cold irony, or
jeeringly melancholy humor; and at last poetry was succeeded by prose,
and the ruling poetical forms of the new epoch became the romance and
the novel. This change took place almost simultaneously in all the
literatures of Europe.

We have seen that Pushkin, towards the end of his career, entered upon
this new path, with his prose tales, "The Captain's Daughter,"
"Dubrovsky," and so forth, and throughout the '30's of the nineteenth
century, the romance and novel came, more and more, to occupy the most
prominent place in Russian literature. We may pass over the rather long
list of second-class writers who adventured in this field (of whom
Zagoskin and Marlinsky are most frequently referred to), and devote our
attention to the man who has been repeatedly called "the father of
modern Russian realism," Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol (1809-1852). He is
credited with having created all the types which we encounter in the
works of the great novelists who followed him, and this is almost
literally true, at least so far as the male characters are concerned. In
particular, this applies to his famous "Dead Souls," which contains if
not the condensed characterization in full of these types, at least the
readily recognized germs of them. But in this respect, his early Little
Russian Stories, "Tales from a Farm-house Near Dikanka," and the
companion volume, "Mirgorod," as well as his famous comedy, "The
Inspector," must not be forgotten, for they contributed their full
quota. Pushkin was one of Gogol's earliest and most ardent admirers, and
it was because he recognized the latter's phenomenal talent in seizing
the national types that he gave to him the idea for "Dead Souls," which
he had intended to use himself. Thanks to his own genius (as well as to
the atmosphere of the epoch in which he lived), he solved for himself,
quite independently of any foreign influence, the problem of bringing
Russian literature down from the clouds to everyday real life. He
realized that the world was no longer living in a sort of modern epic,
as it had been during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
campaigns, and that literature must conform to the altered conditions.
Naturally, in his new quest after truth, Gogol-Yanovsky (to gi