Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...little on which to hone his wit-an effective weapon for getting at realities beneath the appearances. He notes, for example, that Adam Smith, the legendary theoretician of capitalism and unrestricted trade, ended his days as the commissioner of customs in Edinburgh. Galbraith also draws a marvelous parallel between Gogol's Dead Souls and the Equity Funding scandal. In 19th century Russia it was the names of dead serfs that were bought to be palmed off as collateral for loans. In the 1960s Los Angeles executives of Equity Funding Corp. wrote life insurance policies on nonexistent people that were...
...Sleep. None of this detracts from Chandler's ability to separate the amateur from the prose. Modern Russian literature is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's overcoat; the American detective - from Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer to Gordon Parks' Shaft - enters in Philip Marlowe's trench coat. Even Dashiell Hammett's earlier fictions have not been so pervasive - largely, as Chandler noted, because "his writing has no echo and no tone." Chandler's does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding...
Diary of a Madman. Gogol may have been the only writer to really understand the importance of noses in human interaction. In fact, one of the saddest stories I know is connected--rather painfully--to Gogol's own probiscus. He always had a feeling that noses were symbolic, and extremely influential in the development of one's personality. At the same time, however, he was fairly neurotic. Near the end of his life he began to believe that a spirit in his stomach was keeping him from eating, and he got thinner and thinner until finally his archaic doctors decided...
Cockroach Milk. When Russia burst triumphantly into literary history in the 19th century, it was hardly surprising that most of her great writers were steeped in folklore. "Each one is a poem!" said Pushkin, who, like Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, used folk tales as vital elements in his work. The selection of folk tales in this English volume was made from Alexander Afanasev's classic mid-19th century collection. First published in the U.S. 30 years ago, the book has now been reprinted under the somewhat misleading rubric Russian Fairy Tales. Actually, the stories include animal fables and laconic...
...first great master of the new art of the uncanny. In The Telltale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, he made the horror story a respectable literary form. But only a handful of literary terrorists (Hawthorne, James, Chekhov, Gogol) wrote tales as eerily disturbing as Poe's. Only one (Franz Kafka) found the ladder to a deeper gallery of madness...