Soon after the appearance of the book which raised his fame to its highest point, the author, whose health was bad, obtained permission to travel abroad, and was still abroad at the time of the publication of ' Select Passages from N. Gogol's Correspondence with his Friends' Vuibrannuiya 3liesta iz Perepiski s Druziami '), St.
Petersburg, ]S47, 8vo. From the height of popularity this publication sunk him at once to the lowest depths of contempt. His liberal friends found with surprise that the satirist of Russia, when at home, had become the panegyrist of Russia, autocracy and all, when beyond the frontier. Beilinsky, who was one of the principal, attacked him fiercely in the 'Sovremennik,' one of the leading reviews in St. Petersburg, in an article which could hardly have been expected to pass the censor ship. Gogol addressed to him a letter of remonstrance, protesting that the change which had taken place in his opinions was the result of conviction produced by reflection and experience. Bielinsky, who, dying of consumption, had himself obtained permission to leave Russia, addressed to him from his sick bed at Salzbrunn one of the most terribly crushing letters to be found iu the whole annals of literature, and which was first printed, with the rest of the corre spondence, in the 'Polyarnaya Zviezda,' or Polar Star,' a Russian periodical issued in London in 1855. "Yes," exclaims Bielinsky, "I loved you with all the passion with which a man warmly attached to his country, can love its hope, its honour, its glory, one of its great leaders in the path of self-consciousness, developement, and progress. You had good cause indeed to be shaken out of your repose of soul, for a minute at least, when you lost the right to such love as this. I do not speak thus because 1 consider any feelings of mice an adequate recompense for such genius as yours, but because in this respect I do not stand alone, but represent a multitude of whom neither you nor I have ever seen the majority, and who have never seen you." " You," he afterwards bursts out, "you, the author of the Revisor and the Dead Souls,—can you, sincerely and from your soul, raise a hymn of praise to the disgusting Russian clergy, placing it immeasurably above the clergy of the Roman Catholics. Let us suppose you do not know that the latter was sometimes something, while the former was never nothing but the lackey and slave of the secular power; but is it possible you do not know that our clergy stands in the lowest degree of contempt with Russian society and the Russian people. Is not a
pope' throughout Russia for every Russian the representative of gluttony, meanness, servility, impudence?" ... "I will not dilate on your dithyrambic about the bond of affection between the Russian nation and its rulers. I will only say that this dithyrambic has met with no sympathy, and has lowered you even in the eyes of persons who in other respects are very close to you in the direction you are taking. I leave it to your conscience to intoxicate itself with the divine beauty of Autocracy ; only continue to have the good sense to con template it from a reasonable distance,—when near, it is not so beautiful, and is apt to be dangerous." ... "You placed yourself too high in the opinion of the Russian public, for it to be able to believe in the sincerity of such convictions as this. What may seem natural enough in fools cannot seem natural in a man of genius." Bielinsky goes on to accuse him of views of personal emolumeut, and touches with bitterness on a passage in the 'Perepiski,' in which Gogol had appeared to speak with humility of his own works, and to intimate that he did not share the opinion of their admirers. "These persons," says Bielineky, "may in their admiration of you have made more noise with their applause than the case required ; but all, their enthu siasm sprung from so pure and noble a source that it was altogether unbecoming in you to surrender them up in the face of their enemies and yours, and to accuse them into the bargain of attributing a wrong meaning to your productions." The reply of Gegol to this bitter diatribe is singular. "God knows," he writes, "there may be some truth in what you say,—One thing appears to me an established truth —that I do not know Russia—that much has been changed in it since I left, and that I must almost begin to study it anew to know it now.
The inference I draw from this for myself is that it behoves me not only not to print new sketches of life, but not even two lines on the subject till I have returned to Russia, have seen it with my own elm and touched it with my own hands." Neither Bielinsky nor Gogol ever returned. Bielineky died in France soon after the Paris revolution of February 1848, which he hailed as the dawn of an era of liberty ; and Gogol, whose last letter is dated from Ostend, in August 1847, soon followed him. His death is repeatedly alluded to in recent Russian publications, but we have not seen its real date stated.