To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don’t know what to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol’s story became a revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written, and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the “Russian soul,” and makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from Oriental barbarism to modern individualism. CHAPTER LXXXIII THE RUSSIAN HAMLET The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia. There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his country to the outside world, and at the same time to interpret the outside world to Russia. He came of a family of wealthy landowners, and received the best education available; but he ventured at the funeral of Gogol to praise the work of this great master--which so incensed the government that he was sentenced to exile upon his own estate. Three years later he succeeded in getting permission to go abroad, and lived the rest of his life in Germany and France, where he was free to write as he pleased. The first work of Ivan Turgenev was called “A Sportsman’s Sketches”; pictures of the peasant types he met while on shooting trips. It was a safe, aristocratic occupation, that of killing birds for pleasure, and surely no government could object to a gentleman’s describing the peasants who went along to carry his guns and his lunch. The government did not object; and so the reading public in Russia had brought vividly before it the fact that human beings, of their own blood and their own faith, were serfs at the mercy of landlords, to be sold like other chattels. So the tsar was forced to free the serfs. Turgenev settled in Paris; a great, handsome giant, a wealthy bachelor, amiable and simple, a charming literary lion. His friends were Gautier, Flaubert, and other novelists, from whom he learned the perfections of artistry, the pictorial charm, the “enamels and cameos” ideal. He had no need to learn from them the bitter and corroding despair, because that was his Russian heritage.