Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/75

 his soul to ask in all sincerity this question? 'Might there not be in me something of Chichikov?'"

This whole epilogue is a programme--the programme of the self-conscious founder of Russian Realism. It came from a man who had deliberately turned his back on Romanticism, even on the romanticism of his friend and teacher, Pushkin, and who had decided to venture all alone on a new and untried path in Russian literature. He fully realised the difficulties of his task, and the opposition he was bound to encounter. He asks and answers the two familiar questions invariably put to the native realist. The first is, "I have enough trouble in my own life: I see enough misery and stupidity in the world: what is the use of reading about it in novels?" The second is, "Why should a man who loves his country uncover her nakedness?"

Gogol's realism differs in two important aspects from the realism of the French school, whether represented by Balzac, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, or Zola. He had all the French love of veracity, and could have honestly said with the author of "Une Vie" that he painted 'humble verite. But there are two ground qualities in his realistic method absent in the four Frenchmen: humour and moral force. Gogol could not repress the fun that is so