鼻 — Nikolai Gogol
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : The Mantle, and Other Stories Author : Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol Contributor : Prosper Mérimée Translator : Claud Field Release date : May 27, 2011 [eBook #36238] Most recently updated: January 7, 2021 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36238 Credits : Produced by Meredith Bach, Jana Srna and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) *** START OF Some corrections of spelling have been made. They are marked like this in the text. The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. A list of amendments is at the end of the text. THE MANTLE AND OTHER STORIES Printed in Great Britain THE MANTLE AND OTHER STORIES BY NICHOLAS GOGOL AUTHOR OF “DEAD SOULS,” “TARAS BULBA,” ETC. TRANSLATED BY CLAUD FIELD AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION ON GOGOL BY PROSPER MERIMÉE New York: FREDERICK A. STOKES Co. London: T. WERNER LAURIE LIMITED “ Gogol, Nikolai Vassilievitch. Born in the government of Pultowa, March 31 (N.S.), 1809, died at Moscow, March 4 (N.S.), 1852. A Russian novelist and dramatist. He was educated in a public gymnasium at Pultowa, and subsequently in the lyceum, then newly established, at Niejinsk. In 1831 he was appointed teacher of history at the Patriotic Institution, a place which he exchanged in 1834 for the professorship of history in the University of St Petersburg. This he resigned at the end of a year and devoted himself entirely to literature. In 1836 Gogol left Russia. He lived most of the time in Rome. In 1837 he wrote ‘Dead Souls.’ In 1840 he went to Russia for a short period in order to superintend the publication of the first volume of ‘Dead Souls,’ and then returned to Italy. In 1846 he returned to Russia and fell into a state of fanatical mysticism. One of his last acts was to burn the manuscript of the concluding portion of ‘Dead Souls,’ which he considered harmful. He also wrote ‘The Mantle,’ ‘Evenings at the Farm,’ ‘St Petersburg Stories,’ ‘Taras Bulba,’ a tale of the Cossacks, ‘The Revizor,’ a comedy, etc.”—From The Century Cyclopædia of Names . CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE 7 THE MANTLE 19 THE NOSE 67 MEMOIRS OF A MADMAN 107 A MAY NIGHT 141 THE VIY 187 PREFACE As a novel-writer and a dramatist, Gogol appears to me to deserve a minute study, and if the knowledge of Russian were more widely spread, he could not fail to obtain in Europe a reputation equal to that of the best English humorists. A delicate and close observer, quick to detect the absurd, bold in exposing, but inclined to push his fun too far, Gogol is in the first place a very lively satirist. He is merciless towards fools and rascals, but he has only one weapon at his disposal—irony. This is a weapon which is too severe to use against the merely absurd, and on the other hand it is not sharp enough for the punishment of crime; and it is against crime that Gogol too often uses it. His comic vein is always too near the farcical, and his mirth is hardly contagious. If sometimes he makes his reader laugh, he still leaves in his mind a feeling of bitterness and indignation; his satires do not avenge society, they only make it angry. As a painter of manners, Gogol excels in familiar scenes. He is akin to Teniers and Callot. We feel as though we had seen and lived with his characters, for he shows us their eccentricities, their nervous habits, their slightest gestures. One lisps, another mispronounces his words, and a third hisses because he has lost a front tooth. Unfortunately Gogol is so absorbed in this minute study of details that he too often forgets to subordinate them to the main action of the story. To tell the truth, there is no ordered plan in his works, and—a strange trait in an author who sets up as a realist—he takes no care to preserve an atmosphere of probability. His most carefully painted scenes are clumsily connected—they begin and end abruptly; often the author's great carelessness in construction destroys, as though wantonly, the illusion produced by the truth of his descriptions and the naturalness of his conversations. The immortal master of this school of desultory but ingenious and attractive story-tellers, among whom Gogol is entitled to a high place, is Rabelais, who cannot be too much admired and studied, but to imitate whom nowadays would, I think, be dangerous and difficult. In spite of the indefinable grace of his obsolete language, one can hardly read twenty pages of Rabelais in succession. One soon wearies of this eloquence, so original and so eloquent, but the drift of which escapes every reader except some Œdipuses like Le Duchat or Éloi Johanneau. Just as the observation of animalculæ under the microscope fatigues the eye, so does the perusal of these brilliant pages tire the mind. Possibly not a word of them is superfluous, but possibly also they might be entirely eliminated from the work of which they form part, without sensibly detracting from its merit. The art of choosing among the innumerable details which nature offers us is, after all, much more difficult than that of observing them with attention and recording them with exactitude. The Russian language, which is, as far as I can judge, the richest of all the European family, seems admirably adapted to express the most delicate shades of thought. Possessed of a marvellous conciseness and clearness, it can with a single word call up several ideas, to express which in another tongue whole phrases would be necessary. French, assisted by Greek and Latin, calling to its aid all its northern and southern dialects—the language of Rabelais, in fact, is the only one w