The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In the end, an unexpected externai pressure forced his hand. In 1858 he received from Alfred Russel Wallace, a natu- ralist and professional museum specimen collector living in the East Indies, a paper outlining a theory of evolution by natural selection—exactly what Darwin had been struggling toward for twenty years. Darwin wrote back asking that they present joint papers to the Linnaean Society, and Wallace graciously agreed. Evolution by natural selection was now out in the open, and the debate was on—a debate that continues to rage to the pre­sent day. (Wallace had neither Darwin^ class advantages nor his scientific training; his theory of evolution came through intelligent insight, not deep scientific investigation. Still, Wallace^ contribution deserves more acknowledgment than it usually gets. And his own book of scientific travei writing, The Malay Archipelago, is a gem, well worth reading alongside The Voyage of the Beagle.)

The initial papers by Darwin and Wallace were followed in 1859 by On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Darwin^ full explication of his theory. It is not a particularly easy book to read, but it offers rewards to compensate for its difficulty. Darwin knew full well that his theory was not seam- less; there were gaps in the fуssil record, no one had ever observed the emergence of a new species through evolution (an impossible requirement, because it occurs over many gen- erations), and, most crucially, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance were a complete mystery to Darwin and most of his contemporaries. (Gregor Mendel, the discoverer of the principies of genetics, had sent Darwin a copy of his paper describing his famous experiments, but Darwin either didn't read it or didn't appreciate its significance. MendePs work, published in a very obscure journal, remained essentially unknown until the early twentieth century.) And so Darwin's strategy in Origin is to persuade by brute force, adducing a huge mass of solid evidence and overcoming objections, when the evidence does not suffice, by evoking analogies and plausi- ble guesses. It relies more on brazenness than subtlety; yet at the same time the keenness of Darwin^ insights—looking where others had looked before, and seeing what they had never seen—fills the book with intellectual excitement.

Darwin's theory did not take the world by storm; on the contrary, it was opposed immediately by many scientists as well as by the religious establishment, and it won general accep- tance only gradually. But from the moment the Origin was published, opposition to Darwin^ theory of evolution was, in a sense, a rear-guard action; it might take awhile, but Darwin had already won. To read On the Origin of Species is to observe a scientific revolution in progress, and to make the acquaintance of one of mankmd's most powerful minds.

J.S.M.

74

NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH GOGOL

1809-1852 Dead Souls

This does not seem like a particularly appealing title. Actually the term refers, as you will discover, to Russian serfs who had died but were still carried, until the next census, on the tax rolls. The book is not as morbid as it sounds.

Gogol is not a particularly appealing figure either. His fam­ily heritage was a poor one; he had an unbalanced youth; he failed at the law, as a government clerk, as an actor, as a teacher. To the end of his short life he remained a virgin, and in his latter years religious mania clouded his mind. As a writer he enjoyed a number of triumphs, but at bottom he was appalled by the electrifying reaction to his books and plays. He wandered aimlessly over Europe and made a pointless pilgrim­age to the Holy Land. During his last days he burned his man- uscripts, so that we possess only a fragment of the second part of Dead Souls, which when completed was to show good victo- rious over evil. He died in what seems to have been delirium.

Yet this queer duck, who surely cannot be said to possess a powerful mind, virtually founded Russian prose and gave Rъssia a masterpiece that became a part of world literature. Speaking of GogoPs most famous short story, Dostoyevsky [87] said, "We ali come out of The Overcoat.^,,> Compare Hemingway^ remark [119] about Huckleberry Finn [92]. GogoPs untraditional genius apparently led him to break with the formalism and rigidity that marked much previous Russian writing, just as Mark Twain did in our own country. The giants who followed him benefited from this liberation.

I once wrote an Introduction to Dead Souls that the bril- liant author of Lolita termed "ridiculous." I think Nabokov [122] must have felt queasy over my notion (shared by many) that Dead Souls is a great comic novel. He must surely have