He destroyed what he had written of the second part of "Dead Souls," in the attacks of ecstatic remorse at such profane work which followed.

(By some authorities it is believed that he did this unintentionally, meaning to destroy an entirely different set of papers.) In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and went thence to Moscow, where he resided until his death, becoming more and more extreme in his mysticism and asceticism.

He spent sleepless nights in prayer; he tried to carry fasting to the extent of living for a week on one of the tiny double loaves which are used for the Holy Communion in the Eastern Catholic Church, a feat which it is affirmed can be performed with success, and even to more exaggerated extent, by practiced ascetics.

Gogol died.

His observation was acute; his humor was genuine, natural, infectious; his realism was of the most vivid description; his power of limning types was unsurpassed, and it is these types which have entered, as to their essential ingredients, into the works of his successors, that have rendered the Russian realistic literary school famous.