Woe to the Chambers and Herricks and Pooles and Dreisers and McCutcheons and other best sellers! The enemy is raining in torrents, in avalanches. What if the good, good public will be forced to taste the new food. What if after having tasted it they will rebel and demand real meat thereafter, rejecting as indigestible the canned affairs and the oleomargarine surrogates. What if.... No danger, I am assured by my friend who has great faith in the uncorruptible taste of the American public. Surely no one will accuse the American publishers of being pure idealists or Ford-like fanatics who are ready to squander their hard dollars for propaganda purposes. Surely those gentlemen know their market and adjust the supply to the demand. The extraordinary deluge of Russian literature is evidently a paying proposition. It is gratifying. We need the injection of new blood into our anemic literature. New blood. Not even Gogol is too old for us. No matter that he died in 1852. His _Dead Souls_, _Tarass Bulba_, and just published stories[2] belong to the category of works that do not age in spite of their technical flaws. If you use this perspective, _The Mantle_ will loom up as the peak of Russian realism. “We have all come out of _The Mantle_”, admitted Gogol’s disciple, Dostoevsky. If in that tale we recognize the forerunner of the relentless soul-vivisectionists of the later days, we get in the other stories a glimpse of the mystic Gogol, the poet of Goyaesque witches and devils. Do not read _Viy_ before bed-time lest you go through a heavy nightmare.