THE GREAT MASTERS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY ERNEST DUPUY _TRANSLATED BY_ NATHAN HASKELL DOLE THE PROSE WRITERS NIKOLAÏ VASILYÉVITCH GOGOL, IVAN SERGÉYEVITCH TURGENIEF, COUNT LYOF NIKOLAYEVITCH TOLSTOÏ _WITH APPENDIX_ NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 13 ASTOR PLACE COPYRIGHT, 1886, BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. CONTENTS. PAGE GOGOL 5 TURGÉNIEF 117 TOLSTOÏ 215 APPENDIX 339 INDEX 441 It may be said, that the emancipation of literature in Russia dates back scarcely fifty years. All the Russian writers, whether of poetry or prose, with the exception possibly of one or two satirists, were little more than imitators. Some of the most valued authors during the first half of this century, Zhukovsky for example, owed all their fame to translations. Pushkin himself, who, on the recommendation of Merimée, has for some time been admired in France, did not venture far from the Byronic manner. He died, to be sure, just at the moment when he had found his path. He suspected the profit that could be made from national sources; he had a presentiment that a truly Russian literature was about to burst into bloom; he aided in its production. His greatest originality lies in his having predicted, preached, perhaps prepared or inspired Gogol. NIKOLAÏ GOGOL. I. Nikolaï Gogol[1] was born in 1810, in a village of the government of Poltava. His father, a small proprietor with some education, obtained for him a scholarship in the college of Niézhin. Fortunately the young Gogol was able to hold his own in rebellion against the direction of his instructors, and neither the dead nor the living languages brought him any gain. He thus failed of becoming a commonplace man of letters, and consequently had less trouble in the end with discovering his original genius.