kness which
inspired him to write his Little Russian sketches--_Evenings on a Farm
on the Dikanka_,--which appeared in 1832, followed by _Mirgorod_, a
second series, in 1834.

Gogol's temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer
in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish
fancy that reminds one sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L.
Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to
dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the
Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of
imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his
imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on
minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating
observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour,
ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half
melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.

In the very first story of his first book, "The Fair of Sorochinetz,"
we are plunged into an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way that
no other Russian book has ever yet savoured of the soil. We are
plunged into the South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is
standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at the fair; and the fair,
with its noise, its smell and its colour, rises before us as vividly
as Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupassant, or Scotland from the
pages of Stevenson. And just as Andrew Lang once said that probably
only a Scotsman, and a Lowland Scotsman, could know how true to life
the characters in _Kidnapped_ were, so it is probable that only a
Russian, and indeed a Little Russian, appreciates to the full how true
to life are the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the tales of
Gogol. And then we at once get that hint of the supernatural which
runs like a scarlet thread through all these stories; the rumour that
the _Red Jacket_ has been observed in the fair; and the _Red Jacket_,
so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of
Hell as a punishment for some misdemeanour--probably a good
intention--established himself in a neighbouring barn, and from
home-sickness took to drink, and drank away all his substance; so that
he was obliged to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, who sold it
before the year was out, whereupon the buyer, recognizing its unholy
origin, cut it up into bits and threw it away,