Henri Troyat's "Dostoyevsky" and "Pushkin" were sound biographies. His "Tolstoy" was quite exceptional in its intimacy. Its merit lay in the use of the lived quality of Tolstoy's writing, so that the man was assimilated through the writer and interwoven with him. Troyat had found the man in the innumerable details of his novels, autobiography, and ethical writings, had even caught the limpid surface of the prose, and his book had no overtones of pastiche. The task of dealing with Gogol ("Divided Soul: The Life of Gogol" …) is far more difficult. In him autobiography is either secretive or fantastic to the point of mania…. Gogol has the dubiousness of a swami. And the prose is no help. It loses enormously, we are told, in translation. One can see simply that he was indeed a divided soul, who proceeded from a minute vegetative realism which collected facts and then...