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Among the longer and shorter stories in the first three
volumes of Gogol there is not one which is out and out
worthy of admiration, except “The Cloak.” It is the
simple story of a poor St. Petersburg official who
through half his life has needed a Spanish cloak, which
he finally obtains, and from whom it is stolen. De
Voguë quotes a saying of a Russian author, “We have
all grown out of Gogol’s ‘cloak.’” There is this truth
in it, that the whole of the modern emotional Russian
naturalism descends in a direct line from this little story.
Dostoyevski’s first book, “Poor Folk,” may be named as
having had its germ here.
Nevertheless, even this classical story does not give to
the Western European reader the standard of Gogol’s high
rank as a modern author. That is done only by his play,
“The Reviser,” and the first part of the romance, “Dead
Souls.” It is the stinging satire and the bold fidelity to
nature, expressed in a vigorous style, which here first
betrayed Gogol’s great superiority to the circumstances
in which he was born, and which showed that Russian
literature was ready to launch out into an entirely new
field, which demanded boldness and originality to enter,
and which this literature silently, as it were, pointed out
to that of several other countries lost in romanticism,
as the path which alone emerges from the world of
dreams.
However Aristophanic the satire is in “Dead Souls,”
the theories on which this comic epic rests are so
peculiar that they appear to the foreign reader like a story
from another part of the world or from a remote age.
Outside of Russia, even the cunning conceit about which
everything in the story revolves can hardly be
understood: the idea of the audacious speculator, of buying
up dead serfs, who were still nominally counted as
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