Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

if a word off the street has crept into a book, it isn’t the writer who’s at fault but the readers; and, first and foremost, the readers of the higher social strata: they are in the van of those from whom one will not hear a single decent Russian word, but when it comes to words in French, German, and English they will, likely as not, dish them out to you in such quantity that you’ll actually get fed up with them, and they’ll dish them out without spilling a drop of all the possible pronunciations: French they’ll snaffle through their noses and with a lisp; English they’ll chirp as well as any bird could, even to the extent of making their physiognomies birdlike, and will even mock him who is unable to assume a birdlike physiognomy. And the only thing they won’t dish out to you is any good, plain Russian thing—save that, out of patriotism, they may build a log cabin in the Russian style for a summer house. That’s the sort readers of the higher social strata are, while all the others who try to number themselves among them simply follow suit! And yet, at the same time, how very persnickety they are! They want, without fail, everything to be written in the most austere language, purified and noble; in a word, they want the Russian language to descend, suddenly and of itself, out of the clouds, all properly finished off, and to have it perch right upon their tongues, with nothing more for them to do than merely to open their mouths wide and thrust their tongues out. Of course...