Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PLAYS LIKE THE INSPECTOR GENERAL have made mistaken identity and its ramifications a classic comic theme. The dichotomy between appearances and realities usually opens all sorts of possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle irony, and Nikolai Gogol's mid-nineteenth century comedy is no exception...
...Inspector General. George Hamlin directs the Harvard Drama Club's production of Nicolai Gogol's 19th Century satire. A postal Inspector General travels incognito to investigate a provincial office where service has been shoddy. Gogol lashes the Tsarist beaurocracy--a good way to celebrate "four more years...
Claire's Knee is, essentially, an opalescent homage to M. Marcel Proust. As 19th century Russian fiction is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's Overcoat, modern French films have risen from Proust's Remembrance. Proust's work is clustered with optical allusions, accounts of the distortions of love in the fourth dimension of time. In its way it was the end of a line that could not be continued on the page-that needed the liberation of the camera. Directors such as Karel Reisz (Isadora) and Alain Renais (La Guerre Est Finie) acknowledge their debt...
Life was full of grotesque jokes straight out of Gogol. The author tells of the commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
Puppets who make soup of chocolate and spinach; creatures who ask for a ukulele to be mended and then eat the Instrument; a nose, like the one in Gogol's short story, that assumes a personality and speech when detached from a facethese are the touchstones of enchantment that reach far beyond ghettos...