Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gogol's two one-actors are as littleknown as almost any plays produced at Harvard this year: there is only one copy of them in English at Widener, and the card catalogue at Lamont never heard of them. They are not bad plays, exactly, but we have sources of mild, spasmodically funny comedy nearer home, and it is no wonder that only the diligence of Eric Bentley has brought them to American attention...
Given better material to work with, the Leverett House actors might have created a very pleasant evening; done with high virtuosity, the plays might have been high entertainment. As it is, except for a long stretch of good comic writing at the beginning of The Marriage, Gogol provides only occasional wisps of straw for these actors to make bricks with...
...GOGOL, by David Magarshack. A sound, readable biography of the little 19th century Russian neurotic who became one of his country's great novelists. Incredibly, he exposed corrupt Russian bureaucracy and the horrors of serfdom in books of genius while obsessed with the notion that he was really helping to preserve the Russia he loved...
...madness in all this mad comedy was that Gogol himself thought he was defending the system he undermined. One critic got the point that Gogol had been trying to make. "Preacher of the lash," he called the muddled genius. After his first success. Gogol left Russia in a huff, spent twelve nostalgic years in self-imposed exile. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, slowly developed a religious mania and fell into the hands of a fanatic Russian Orthodox priest who persuaded Gogol that art was sinful. Thus an artist who all his life had been dissatisfied with...
...Gogol had once said it was his duty to "die with a song on his lips." In fact he died at 42 in a barbarous nightmare of half-savage Russian medicine, with leeches on his famous nose and mad medics trying to thump the devil out of him. Gogol had a strange power over the Russian mind. Says Biographer Magarshack in a just summary: "This conviction . . . that it was his transcendental mission to save Russia, an idea that was completely divorced from reality . . . was the tragedy of his life." Yet, in a sense, though Gogol could not save...