l. It was about this time
(1847) that Gogol published his Correspondence with Friends, and aroused
a literary controversy that is alive to this day. Tolstoi is to be found
among his apologists.

Opinions as to the actual significance of Gogol's masterpiece differ.
Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail
a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great
symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of
Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself is now generally regarded
as a universal character. We find an American professor, William Lyon
Phelps [1], of Yale, holding the opinion that "no one can travel far in
America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate
portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial
traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and
usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature
and of the persuasive power of his tongue." This is also the opinion
held by Prince Kropotkin [2], who says: "Chichikov may buy dead
souls, or railway shares, or he may collect funds for some charitable
institution, or look for a position in a bank, but he is an immortal
international type; we meet him everywhere; he is of all lands and of
all times; he but takes different forms to suit the requirements of
nationality and time."

Again, the work bears an interesting relation to Gogol himself. A
romantic, writing of realities, he was appalled at the commonplaces
of life, at finding no outlet for his love of colour derived from his
Cossack ancestry. He realised that he had drawn a host of "heroes," "one
more commonplace than another, that there was not a single palliating
circumstance, that there was not a single place where the reader might
find pause to rest and to console himself, and that when he had finished
the book it was as though he had walked out of an oppressive cellar
into the open air." He felt perhaps inward need to redeem Chichikov;
in Merejkovsky's opinion he really wanted to save his own soul, but
had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were spent morbidly;
he suffered torments and ran from place to place like one hunted; but
really always running from himself. Rome was his favourite refuge, and
he returned to it again and again. In 1848, he made a pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, but he could find no peace for his soul. Something of this
mood had r