lamentable conflagration. Then he vainly tried various means of
subsistence. Suddenly he decided to seek his fortune in America, but
he was both homesick and seasick before the ship emerged from the
Baltic, and from Lubeck he fled incontinently back to Petersburg. Then
he tried to become an actor, but lacked the necessary strength of
voice. For a short time he held a minor official position, and a
little later was professor of history, an occupation he did not enjoy,
saying after his resignation, "Now I am a free Cossack again."
Meanwhile his pen was steadily busy, and his sketches of farm life in
the Ukraine attracted considerable attention among literary circles in
the capital.

Gogol suffered from nostalgia all the time he lived at St. Petersburg;
he did not care for that form of society, and the people, he said, did
not seem like real Russians. He was thoroughly homesick for his
beloved Ukraine; and it is significant that his short stories of life
in Little Russia, truthfully depicting the country customs, were
written far off in a strange and uncongenial environment.

In 1831 he had the good fortune to meet the poet Pushkin, and a few
months later in the same year he was presented to Madame Smirnova;
these friends gave him the entree to the literary salons, and the
young author, lonesome as he was, found the intellectual stimulation
he needed. It was Pushkin who suggested to him the subjects for two of
his most famous works, "Revizor" and "Dead Souls." Another friend,
Jukovski, exercised a powerful influence, and gave invaluable aid at
several crises of his career. Jukovski had translated the "Iliad" and
the "Odyssey;" his enthusiasm for Hellenic poetry was contagious; and
under this inspiration Gogol proceeded to write the most Homeric
romance in Russian literature, "Taras Bulba." This story gave the