And in the same volume, two _nouvelles_, _Tarass Bulba_ and _Viy_, sum up between them the whole of the other side of Gogol's genius. _Tarass Bulba_, a short historical novel, with its incomparably vivid picture of Cossack life, is Gogol's masterpiece in the epic vein. It is as strong and as direct as a Border ballad. _Viy_, which tells of a witch, is the most creepy and imaginative of his supernatural stories. Later, he published two more collections of stories: _Arabesques_ (1834) and _Tales_ (1836). In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs, magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all left behind. The element of the fantastic still subsists, as in the "Portrait," and of the grotesque, as in the story of the major who loses his nose, which becomes a separate personality, and wanders about the town. But his blend of realism and humour comes out strongly in the story of "The Carriage," and his blend of realism and pathos still more strongly in the story of "The Overcoat," the story of a minor public servant who is always shivering and whose dream it is to have a warm overcoat. After years of privation he saves enough money to buy one, and on the first day he wears it, it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his ghost haunts the streets. This story is the only begetter of the large army of pathetic figures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian literature. While Gogol had been writing and publishing these tales, he had also been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and obstacle was the Censorship, which was almost as severe as it was in England at the end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a curious paradox, the play, which you would have expected the Censorship to forbid before all other plays, _The Revisor_, or _Inspector-General_, was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the Emperor. _The Revisor_ is the second comic masterpiece of the Russian stage. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. A traveller from St. Petersburg--a fine natural liar--is taken for the Inspector, plays up to the part, and gets away just before the arrival of the real Inspector, which is the end of the play. The play is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy. Almost every single character in it is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and irrelevant hero, with his magnificent talent for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play at once became a classic, and retains all its vitality and comic force to-day. There is no play which draws a larger audience on holidays in St. Petersburg and Moscow.