"Seldom has nature created a man so
romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic
in life." But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is
easy to see in almost all of Gogol's work his "free Cossack soul" trying
to break through the shell of sordid to-day like some ancient demon,
essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are to our
life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling
for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And they have all the joy
and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much. Ukrainian was to
Gogol "the language of the soul," and it was in Ukrainian songs rather
than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that
he read the history of his people. Time and again, in his essays and in
his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy in these songs:
"O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you. What are the
bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live chronicles!
I cannot live without songs; they... reveal everything more and more
clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men.... The songs
of Little Russia are her everything, her poetry, her history, and her
ancestral grave. He who has not penetrated them deeply knows nothing of
the past of this blooming region of Russia."

Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after
collecting material for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on
a history of "poor Ukraine," a work planned to take up six volumes; and
writing to a friend at this time he promises to say much in it that has
not been said before him. Furthermore, he intended to follow this work
with a universal history in eight volumes with a view to establishing,
as far as may be gathered, Little Russia and the world in proper
relation, connecting the two; a quixotic task, surely. A poet,
passionate, religious, loving the heroic, we find him constantly
impatient and fuming at the lifeless chronicles, which leave him cold as
he seeks in vain for what he cannot find. "Nowhere," he writes in 1834,
"can I find anything of the time which ought to be richer than any
other in events. Here was a people whose whole existence was passed in
activity, and which, even if nature had made it inactive, was compelled
to go forward to great affairs and deeds because of its neighbours, its
geographic situation, the constant danger to its existence.... If th