lowing river. And it
is not without humour, a calm, detached humour, which, as the critic
Bolinsky puts it, is not there merely "because Gogol has a tendency to
see the comic in everything, but because it is true to life."

Yet "Taras Bulba" was in a sense an accident, just as many other works
of great men are accidents. It often requires a happy combination
of circumstances to produce a masterpiece. I have already told in my
introduction to "Dead Souls" (1) how Gogol created his great realistic
masterpiece, which was to influence Russian literature for generations
to come, under the influence of models so remote in time or place
as "Don Quixote" or "Pickwick Papers"; and how this combination of
influences joined to his own genius produced a work quite new and
original in effect and only remotely reminiscent of the models which
have inspired it. And just as "Dead Souls" might never have been written
if "Don Quixote" had not existed, so there is every reason to believe
that "Taras Bulba" could not have been written without the "Odyssey."
Once more ancient fire gave life to new beauty. And yet at the time
Gogol could not have had more than a smattering of the "Odyssey."
The magnificent translation made by his friend Zhukovsky had not yet
appeared and Gogol, in spite of his ambition to become a historian, was
not equipped as a scholar. But it is evident from his dithyrambic letter
on the appearance of Zhukovsky's version, forming one of the famous
series of letters known as "Correspondence with Friends," that he was
better acquainted with the spirit of Homer than any mere scholar could
be. That letter, unfortunately unknown to the English reader, would make
every lover of the classics in this day of their disparagement dance
with joy. He describes the "Odyssey" as the forgotten source of all that
is beautiful and harmonious in life, and he greets its appearance in
Russian dress at a time when life is sordid and discordant as a thing
inevitable, "cooling" in effect upon a too hectic world. He sees in its
perfect grace, its calm and almost childlike simplicity, a power for
individual and general good. "It combines all the fascination of a fairy
tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the
same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a
merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey,
children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love
a fair