The great masters of Russian literature in the nineteenth century — Inside the Classic

Gogol's Debt to Oral Tradition

Dupuy traces Gogol's originality not to formal education but to the storytelling of his grandfather, a Zaporog Cossack whose tales were "so strange that I always shivered, and my hair stood on end." This fund of fantastic and diabolical legends, Dupuy argues, furnished the material for Gogol's first original work. The critic emphasizes that Gogol's rebellion against his instructors—neither dead nor living languages brought him gain—allowed him to avoid becoming a commonplace man of letters. Instead, he was imbued with the poetry of the people. Dupuy's evidence is drawn from Gogol's own recollections, not from plot summary, and he uses this biographical detail to illuminate the author's distinctive voice: one rooted in folk mystery rather than literary imitation.

Tolstoy's Moral Turn in Diction

Dupuy identifies a decisive shift in Tolstoy's third manner, when the writer renounces the inventions of romance, calling fiction "licentious," and takes up the pen to perform the work of a doctor or evangelist. Works like My Confession and My Religion illustrate this change. Dupuy does not summarize these texts but instead highlights Tolstoy's own vocabulary of renunciation. The critic also examines a short story, Recollections of a Scorer, where a young man's degradation is charted through precise, almost clinical description: the gambler's final act is rendered in stark, sensory detail—"a slight noise, like a knock with a cue"—and the scorer's terror is conveyed through fragmented observation. Dupuy uses this to show how Tolstoy's prose, even in early work, builds moral weight through concrete, unadorned reporting of action and reaction.

Pushkin's Shadow and the Path to Asia

Dupuy repeatedly positions Pushkin as a precursor, noting that his greatest originality lies in having predicted, preached, and perhaps prepared Gogol. He also observes that Pushkin pointed the road to Asia for Tolstoy, following the traces marked by Griboyédov's britchka and the ox-cart that brought him back. This geographical turn—from the club rooms of St. Petersburg to the high river bank of the Caucasus—is presented as a deliberate authorial choice: a search for new impressions to refresh a weary brain. Dupuy quotes Pushkin's description of the fortress of Herhera, where "three torrents, with roar and foam, come" (the sentence is cut off in the excerpt), to illustrate how setting becomes a character in the writers' moral landscapes. The critic's method is to show how each author's diction and descriptive focus shifts when they move from urban to frontier settings.

The Translator's Hand in Dupuy's Voice

Nathan Haskell Dole's translation, published in 1886, renders Dupuy's French criticism into an English that retains the original's analytical precision. Dole preserves Dupuy's habit of embedding quoted evidence directly into his sentences, as when he writes that Gogol's grandfather "excelled in the art of story-telling, and his narrations had a tinge of mystery about them that brought the cold chills." The translator also maintains Dupuy's occasional use of rhetorical questions and direct address to the reader, such as "He will even find that we have already said enough about 'My Confession'"—a technique that gives the criticism a conversational urgency. Readers should note that Dole's choices in vocabulary and sentence rhythm shape how Dupuy's arguments land in English, and that the excerpts available here are incomplete, so some of Dupuy's finer points on Turgenev are not represented.

Dupuy's study rewards readers who attend to the quoted passages he selects and the way he juxtaposes them. Because the excerpts are partial, his full argument about Turgenev remains unseen, but the method is consistent: he builds from specific words and images to broader claims about authorial intent. A useful approach is to read with an eye for how each author's diction—whether Gogol's folk-inflected shivers or Tolstoy's moral starkness—reflects a deliberate craft, not mere inspiration.

Dupuy's tracing of Tolstoy's patient, moral voice brought back an old evening with my grandfather, who read aloud to me from a worn edition of War and Peace, pausing to whisper, "See how he listens to his people." That same quiet attention surfaced years later in the loneliest chapters of that strange little edition, Gulliver of Mars — Background and Themes, where wonder carries the weight of waiting, not motion.