It hardly need be added that the Government of Nicholas I. considered Gógol’s writings extremely dangerous. The author had the utmost difficulties in getting permission for _The Inspector-General_ to be played at all on the stage, and the permission was only obtained by Zhukóvskiy, at the express will of the Tsar himself. Before the authorisation was given to print the first volume of _Dead Souls_, Gógol had to undergo most incredible trouble; and when the volume was out of print a second edition was never permitted in Nicholas I.’s reign. When Gógol died, and Turguéneff published in a Moscow paper a short obituary notice, which really contained absolutely nothing (“any tradesman might have had a better one,” as Turguéneff himself said), the young novelist was arrested, and it was only because of the influence of his friends in high position that the punishment which Nicholas I. inflicted upon him was limited to exile from Moscow and a forced residence on his estate in the country. Were it not for these influences, Turguéneff very probably would have been exiled, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff, either to the Caucasus or to Siberia. The police of Nicholas I. were not wrong when they attributed to Gógol a great influence upon the minds of Russians. His works circulated immensely in manuscript copies. In my childhood we used to copy the second volume of _Dead Souls_--the whole book from beginning to end, as well as parts from the first volume. Everyone considered then this work as a formidable indictment against serfdom; and so it was. In this respect Gógol was the forerunner of the literary movement against serfdom which began in Russia with such force, a very few years later, during and especially after the Crimean War. Gógol never expressed his personal ideas about this subject, but the life-pictures of serf-owners which he gave and their relations to their serfs--especially the waste of the labour of the serfs--were a stronger indictment that if Gógol had related facts of brutal behaviour of landlords towards their men. In fact, it is impossible to read _Dead Souls_ without being impressed by the fact that serfdom was an institution which had produced its own doom. Drinking, gluttony, waste of the serf’s labour in order to keep hundreds of retainers, or for things as useless as the sentimentalist Maníloff’s bridges, were characteristic of the landlords; and when Gógol wanted to represent one landlord who, at least, obtained some pecuniary advantage from the forced labour of his serfs and enriched himself, he had to produce a landlord who was not a Russian: in fact, among the Russian landlords such a man would have been a most extraordinary occurrence.