Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/71

 he burned all that he had written of the second volume. But he soon began to rewrite it, though he made slow and painful progress, having too much of improductivé slave either to complete it or to be satisfied with it. At Moscow, a short time before his death, in a night of wakeful misery, he burned a whole mass of his manuscripts. Among them was unfortunately the larger portion of the rewritten second part of Dead Souls. Various reasons have been assigned as the cause of the destruction of his book—some have said, it was religious remorse for having written the novel at all; others, rage at adverse criticism; others, his own despair at not having reached ideal perfection. But it seems probable that its burning was simply a mistake. Looking among his papers, a short time after the conflagration, he cried out, "My God! what have I done! that isn't what I meant to burn!" But whatever the reason, the precious manuscript was forever lost; and the second part of the work remains sadly incomplete, partly written up from rough notes left by the author, partly supplied by another hand.

Dead Souls is surely a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of life rather than of art. Even apart from its unfinished shape, it is characterised by that formlessness so distinctive of the great Russian novelists—the sole exception being Turgenev. The