However this may be, what strikes the casual student most when he has read _Dead Souls_, is that Gogol is the only Russian author who has given us in literature the universal type of Russian; the Russian “man in the street.” Tolstoy has depicted the upper classes. Dostoievsky has reached the innermost depths of the Russian soul in its extremest anguish and at its highest pitch. Tourgeniev has fixed on the canvas several striking portraits, which suffer from the defect either of being caricatures, or of being too deeply dyed in the writer’s pessimism and self-consciousness. Gorky has painted in lurid colours one side of the common people. Andreev has given us the nightmares of the younger generation. Chekov has depicted the pessimism and the ineffectiveness of the “intelligenzia.”[6] But nobody except Gogol has given us the ordinary cheerful Russian man in the street, with his crying faults, his attractive good qualities, and his overflowing human nature. In fact, it is the work of Gogol that explains the attraction which the Russian character and the Russian country exercise over people who have come beneath their influence. At first sight the thing seems inexplicable. The country seems ugly, dreary and monotonous, without art, without beauty and without brilliance; the climate is either fiercely cold and damp, or excruciatingly dry and hot; the people are slow and heavy; there is a vast amount of dirt, dust, disorder, untidiness, slovenliness, squalor, and sordidness everywhere; and yet in spite of all this, even a foreigner who has lived in Russia (not to speak of the Russians themselves), and who has once come in contact with its people, can never be quite free from its over-mastering charm, and the secret fascination of the country. In another passage towards the end of _Dead Souls_, Gogol writes about this very thing as follows: