Upon this framework, the author has produced a series of remarkable descriptions--not pure realism, indeed, in our modern acceptation of the term, but rather akin to the realism of Dickens. Its truthful picture of Russian life, its repellent yet attractive qualities, its penetratingly keen analysis of character, caused Pushkin to exclaim when Gogol read him the first chapters of his book, “God, how miserable life is in Russia!” Rarely do power and delicacy unite in a stylist as they do in Gogol. For the one, we may find an origin in his love for the sun-steeped and snow-blown plains of his native Cossack country--a love which constantly manifested itself in a real nostalgia, yet never brought him back for long from his wanderings, especially in Italy. But for the other, that delicate power of evocation--that compound of Loti’s subtlety of nature-sense, Hoffmann’s light fantasy, and Daudet’s airy narrative manner, half-humorous, half-pathetic--for this we must look to some inborn faculty. In any other writer we might trace this gossamer lightness to much commerce with the thoughts of women. But no woman ever entered largely into Gogol’s life, and when he died, on March 4, 1852, being not yet forty-three years of age, his mother--always his mother--was still his only love. His last days were shadowed by a growing ineptitude. His frail body weakened by religious fastings, his resources scattered by prodigal gifts, his mind enfeebled and depressed--his passing was sad, lonely, and almost unnoticed. Gogol was the first great prose artist in Russian literature. In the tale and the sketch, in comedy, in romance, and in realism, he not only blazed new trails but penetrated so far into the unknown that others for a long time followed only at a distance. But follow they did, for, as one of his compatriot wits has observed, “We have all hidden under ‘The Cloak.’” The masterpiece of fantastic narration and character delineation which follows in translation was published, under the title “Shinel,” in 1839, when Gogol was thirty. It is overlong, according to our modern standards, yet not as a piece of artistic workmanship. Its humor, its suggestiveness, its pathos, its whimsicality, all rank it with the world’s great short fictions. THE CLOAK _By Nikolai Gogol_