Ukrainian was to Gogol "the language of the soul," and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people.

Time and again, in his essays and in his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy in these songs: "O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you.

What are the bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live chronicles! I cannot live without songs; they...

reveal everything more and more clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men....

The songs of Little Russia are her everything, her poetry, her history, and her ancestral grave.