Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nikolai Gogol...
...Nikolai Gogol...
Bureaucracy, corruption, greed, sycophancy and fear lend themselves to comedy of universal scope, and that is why Gogol's The Inspector General, written 143 years ago, was born deathless...
...Gogol promised Pushkin, who gave him the idea for the plot, that his play would be "funnier than hell." It is fair to assume that Gogol meant the stress to fall equally on the first and last words. Greatly gifted though he is, Rumanian Director Liviu Ciulei has ignored the balance and projected the work as knockabout farce with an infusion of German impressionism. The result is that the characters become animated puppets and imbecilic caricatures of venality. They are robbed of the quality of vulnerable humanity that lies at the heart of the play, the play wright...
When David despairingly realizes his love for Claire is already withering and that he is only a victim of his own faults, he curses himself. He tells himself he is not one of those sympathetic lost characters out of Chekhov but the insane amputee in a story by Gogol who places an ad for the return of his lost nose. What Roth succeeds in portraying, though, with all the delicacy and poignancy of the Russian dramatist, is that Kepesh is in fact a figure from a Chekhov novel. Not a warped, disfigured monster but a man whose constant pursuit...