In 1834 two short stories appeared, _The Queen of Spades_, by Pushkin,
and _The Cloak_, by Gogol. The first was a finishing-off of the old,
outgoing style of romanticism, the other was the beginning of the new,
the characteristically Russian style. We read Pushkin's _Queen of
Spades_, the first story in the volume, and the likelihood is we shall
enjoy it greatly. "But why is it Russian?" we ask. The answer is, "It
is not Russian." It might have been printed in an American magazine
over the name of John Brown. But, now, take the very next story in the
volume, _The Cloak_. "Ah," you exclaim, "a genuine Russian story,
Surely. You cannot palm it off on me over the name of Jones or Smith."
Why? Because _The Cloak_ for the first time strikes that truly Russian
note of deep sympathy with the disinherited. It is not yet wholly free
from artificiality, and so is not yet typical of the purely realistic
fiction that reached its perfected development in Turgenev and
Tolstoy.
Though Pushkin heads the list of those writers who made the literature
of their country world-famous, he was still a romanticist, in the
universal literary fashion of his day.
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