Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/59

 in some respects the most attractive town on earth. The parallel holds good in Russia, where the Little Russians, the men of the Ukraine, have ever shown characteristics that separate them from the people of the North. The fiery passion, the boundless aspiration of the Cossack, animates the stories of Gogol with a veritable flame.

His first book, Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka (Veillees de l'Ukraine), appeared early in the thirties, and, with all its crudity and excrescences, was a literary sunrise. It attracted immediate and wide-spread attention, and the wits of Petersburg knew that Russia had an original novelist. The work is a collection of short stories or sketches, introduced with a rollicking humorous preface, in which the author announces himself as Rudii Panko, raiser of bees. Into this book the exile in the city of the North poured out all his love for the country and the village customs of his own Little Russia. He gives us great pictures of Nature, and little pictures of social life. He describes with the utmost detail a country fair at the place of his birth, Sorotchinetz. His descriptions of the simple folk, the beasts, and the bargainings seem as true as those in Madame Bovary — the difference is in the attitude of the author toward his work. Gogol has nothing of the aloofness, nothing of the scorn of Flaubert; he himself