And yet, can one doubt of the existence of embryonic forces, when one sees from the depths of the nation a voice rise up like that of Koltsov?
For a century, even a century and a half, the people had only sung the old songs, or some made-up monstrosities from the middle of Catherine II's reign. There were a few fairly successful imitations from the beginning of our century, but these artificial pieces lack truthfulness; they were capricious efforts. It was from these same depths of village Russia that new songs came. A herdsman driving his animals across the steppe was inspired to compose them. Koltsov was a genuine son of the people. Born in Voronezh, he studied in a parish school until he was ten, learning only to read and to write without spelling rules. His father, a cattle dealer, made him take up the trade. Koltsov took herds of cattle over hundreds of versts, and became used to a nomadic life, which is reflected in the majority of his lyrics. The young cattle dealer loved to read, and he continually reread one or another poet whom he took as his model, and his attempts at imitation warped his poetic instinct. His true talent finally broke through and he wrote popular songs, which, though few in number, were masterpieces. These were genuine songs of the Russian people. One found in them a melancholy that was their characteristic trait, a heartrending sadness, and an overflowing of life. Koltsov had shown how much poetry was hidden in the soul of the Russian people, and, that after a long and deep sleep, there was something stirring in its chest. We have other poets, statesmen, and artists who have come from the people, but they have emerged in the literal sense of the word, breaking all ties with them. Lomonosov was the son of a White Sea fisherman. He fled the paternal home to study, entered a church school, and then went to Germany, where he ceased to be a man of the people. He had nothing in common with agricultural Russia, except for that which unites all people of the same race. Koltsov remained in the midst of the herds and the business of a father who detested him, and who, along with other relatives, made his life so hard that he died in 1842. Koltsov and Lermontov made their debut and died in the midst of the same era. After them, Russian poetry went silent.
But in prose, activity accelerated and took a different direction.
Gogol, without being by origin a man of the people like Koltsov, was one by his tastes and his turn of mind. Gogol is completely independent of any foreign influence. He did not become familiar with any literature until he had already made his name. He was more in sympathy with the life of the people than with that of the court, which is natural on the part of a Little Russian.
The Little Russian, even when ennobled, does not break so thoroughly with the people as does a Russian. He loves his country, his dialect, the Cossack traditions and the hetmen. The independence of Ukraine, savage and warlike, but republican and democratic, was maintained through the centuries until Peter I. The Little Russians, pestered by the Poles, the Turks, and the Muscovites, and involved in an eternal war against the Crimean Tartars, had never succumbed. Little Russia, in a voluntary union with Great Russia, negotiated significant rights for itself. Tsar Alexey cursed the need to observe them. Peter I, using as a reason Mazeppa's betrayal, kept only a mere shadow of these privileges;19 Elizabeth and Catherine introduced serfdom. The poor country protested, but could it oppose this fatal avalanche that came down from the North to the Black Sea, and covered all that bore the Russian name with the same shroud of uniform and icy slavery? Ukraine suffered the fate of Novgorod and Pskov, but much later, and a single century of servitude has not been able to efface all that was independent and poetic in this brave people. There is more individual development and more local color than with us; among us, the same miserable garment covers all folk life. People are born to bow down before an unjust fate and die without a trace, leaving their children to begin the same desperate life. Our people do not know their own history, while every village in Little Russia has its own legend. The Russian people know only Pugachev and 1812.
The stories with which Gogol made his debut formed a series of genuinely beautiful tableaux of the customs and landscapes of Little Russia, full of gaiety, grace, liveliness, and love. Stories like this are impossible in Great Russia for lack of a plot and a character. With us, popular scenes take on a somber and tragic appearance, which oppresses the reader; I say tragic, only in the meaning of Laocoon. It is the tragic of a fate to which man succumbs without a fight. Suffering changes into rage and grief, laughter into bitter and spiteful irony. Who can read without shaking in indignation and shame the magnificent novel Anton Goremyka,20 and Turgenev's masterpiece Notes of a Hunter?
As Gogol left Little Russia and approached central Russia, the naive and gracious images disappeared. There is no further half-wild hero of the type in Taras Bulba, no debonair and patriarchal old man like the one he portrayed in Old-World Landowners. Under the Moscow sky, everything in him turned gloomy, somber, and hostile. He still laughed, he laughed more than he had done before, but it was a different laughter, and only people who were very hard-hearted or very simple could allow themselves to be taken in by this laughter. Passing from Little Russians and Cossacks to Russians, he left the side of his people and gave himself over to his two most implacable enemies: the official and the nobleman. Before him no one had ever given such a complete course of lectures on the anatomy and pathology of the Russian bureaucrat. With laughter on his lips, he penetrated indiscreetly into the deepest recesses of this impure and malicious soul. Gogol's comedy The Inspector General and his novel Dead Souls are a terrible confession of contemporary Russia, on the scale of Koshikhin's revelations in the 17th century.21
The emperor Nicholas split his sides with laughter when he attended a production of The Inspector General!!!
The poet, in despair from having produced only this majestic hilarity and the conceited laughter of bureaucrats who exactly resembled those he had depicted, though they were better protected by the censorship, felt obliged to explain in an introduction that his comedy was not only very funny, but also very sad, and that "there are warm tears under its smile."
After The Inspector General, Gogol turned to the provincial gentry and brought into the light this unknown population which had remained behind the scenes, far from roads and large cities, buried deep in the countryside, this Russia of petty squires, who in quietly taking care of their lands bred a corruption deeper than that of the West. Thanks to Gogol, we finally saw them leave their manor houses, their lordly homes, and parade before us without mask or makeup, forever drunk and greedy, slaves of power with no dignity, and tyrants without compassion toward their serfs, draining the life and blood of the people with the lack of constraint and the naivete of a child who nurses at his mother's breast.
Dead Souls roused all Russia.
Such an accusation was necessary for contemporary Russia. It is the story of an illness, written by the hand of a master. Gogol's poetry is a cry of terror and shame, uttered by a man degraded by the vulgarity of life, who suddenly sees in the mirror his own brutalized features. But for such a cry to break loose from a chest there must be healthy parts and the strength for recovery. A person who frankly confesses his weaknesses and faults senses that they do not form the main part of his being, that they do not absorb him entirely, and that there is in him something that escapes and resists the fall; that he can redeem the past, not simply to raise his head again, but to be transformed, as in Byron's tragedy, from Sardanapal the womanish to Sardanapal the hero.