Word: gogol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
VLADIMIR VOINOVICH'S deadpan style in this collection of stories echoes Gogol and other ironists you might remember from quick tours of Russia's endless literaly steppes. But the sympathetic eye the author casts over his creations--as though their follies somehow remind him of his own--has just as few antecedents in Russian literature as anywhere else...
...symptom of mental illness is hard to imagine except as an obscenity. Bukovsky is properly outraged, both as victim and witness. But he is also bitterly amusing. For unlike most children of the Gulag, the au thor manages to combine the traditions of Dostoyevsky's brooding victims with Gogol's antic farceurs. The more benign psychiatrists, he notes, diagnosed opposition as a mild form of paranoia that did not require special treatment. The hardliners called it "creeping schizophrenia" and prescribed agonizing sulfur injections...
...Nikolai Gogol had a mind like a trap door. Anyone venturing on the deceptive surfaces of his works must be prepared to lose his footing at unexpected moments and be sent plummeting into radical alterations of consciousness. Realism shifts to fantasy; the prosaic turns mystical; solid citizens stumble unwittingly into topsy-turvy land...
...Onstage, Gogol's characters look naturalistic enough, even transparently accessible, but it is the unseen company they keep-God, the devil and Russia-that lends them the strange dimensions of figures in fables. At one point in Marriage, a key character breaks into a paroxysm of laughter about the absurdity of just about everything. Then his face takes on an ashen look of desolation, and he says, "God have mercy on our sinning souls." Gogol uses such juxtapositions to go beyond tragedy or comedy into a realm that might be called cosmic farce...
...Gogol produced the play in 1842, and the plot has been a staple in many lands: the comic trials and tribulations of marriage brokers and their clients. Fiokla (Barbara Bryne) is an accomplished matchmaker, but she has something of a problem bride-to-be in Agafya (Cara Duff-MacCormick). Agafya is a mer chant's daughter and a bit of a ninny. The three suitors Fiokla lines up are chauvinist piglets. Ivan Pavlovich Poach'tegg (Jon Cranney) is a blustery, pompous bureaucrat. Poach'tegg (sometimes translated Omelet) is only after Agafya's property, a two-story...