In his introduction to The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Leonard J. Kent avers that of Gogol's tales are in these two volumes (xiii), but Rome remains conspicuously absent. Perhaps its status as fragment accounts for this otherwise inexplicable exclusion.1 The more recent excellent collections of stories translated by Christopher English and the team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, while not claiming to be complete, include all of the tales that are traditionally grouped together as the Petersburg tales the exception of Rome.2 The lack of a readily available English translation reflects the anomalous position that this tale occupies among Gogol's works. It appeared in print just a short time before the publication of the first volume of Dead Souls and was largely eclipsed by the enormous attention generated by Gogol's poema. Since its appearance, critics have continued to give it wide berth (Maguire 121). The comparative critical reticence stems largely the perception that Rome is a completely uncharacteristic Gogolian piece, artistically flawed by its turgid and humourless style. Although Gippius contends that Rome, at least in terms of its historical theme, is aligned with a whole strain of Gogol's thought and work, he nonetheless acknowledges that Rome is generally viewed as an isolated instance in Gogol's oeuvre, a departure his artistic path both in terms of material and method (152-53). Brown describes Rome as ridiculous panegyric, a piece in which Gogol was determinedly striving to be not himself, unfortunately a great deal of success (324). Baroti, who evaluates Rome very positively, nonetheless suggests that this tale differs greatly not only the other tales of the Petersburg cycle, but from the whole of Gogol's oeuvre (172). Despite its surface anomalies, I would argue that Rome is in many ways a very Gogolian work.3 In this tale Gogol grapples the seemingly contradictory tendencies within his art, namely the descent into a banal, unchanging world that is characteristic of his comic works and the idealistic striving for aesthetic wholeness and sublimity that marks the essays of