Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...realm of letters, Pushkin and Lermontov were giants in poetry. The novel reached lofty heights with Goncharov, Gogol, Turgenev, and others--and a level unsurpassed in any other country or time with Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Some of these wrote for the theatre too, but the chief dramatists were Griboyedov, Ostrovsky, Gorky, and -- above all -- Anton Chekhov...
This individuality, which was both Babel's genius and his death warrant, comes through best in his tales of old Odessa. In them, Chekhov's melancholy, Maupassant's detachment and Gogol's grotesque wit seem to fuse into the unmistakable Babel voice. It is a voice that can be heard most simply and clearly in You Must Know Everything, the title story of the collection. Considered to be his earliest known fiction, the story was discovered in manuscript and published in the Soviet Union...
...cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name," Vladimir Nabokov has observed. The point, originally made about Nikolai Gogol (pronounced Gaw-gol), applies to Nabokov himself. Over the years he has repeatedly complained about the damage inflicted on the Nabokov name in its passage through foreign ports of articulation. Nabokov, Nabokov, Nah-bo-kov, are frequent errors. Rare mutations, he reports, include Nahba-cocoa and Na-bob-kopf. The correct sound, says the man who made the name famous, is Nahboakoff. Slipping on the mask of a straight face for an instant, he continues: "Vladeemir...
...cloaked itself affectedly in secondhand French elegance. In such superb tales as The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin fashioned a new native style-spare, exact, free of rhetorical flourish-which set the tone for the epic prose era that was to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. In rich, full-blooded dramas like Boris Gudunov, he helped to free the Russian stage from its prim, Racine-engendered formalities. Poems like Ruslan and Liudmila, Memory and The Bronze Horseman grandly exploded the prevailing notion of the day that poetry should be either didactic or sentimental. "Good lord...
Wildly improbable as these goings-on may be, Novelist Stephen Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum...