Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lines hardly accommodate a summary. Donny Ribkin, the reptilian agent, longs for his ex-wife, who has taken up with a female novelist--his love for her continues "to grow, like nails on a corpse"; Zev Turtletaub, a brutalizing, gay producer, fantastically successful, is developing a modern adaptation of Gogol's Dead Souls to star Alec Baldwin; casting director Sara Radisson-Stein gives birth to a son who is blind, and she writes moving letters to him ("I'm sitting beside you as I write; the faintest light falls upon your marzipan cheek. You're the sweetest plum..."), while...
Such moments of interest occur at the expected points. Ben Artzi-Pelossof's trip to Auschwitz with Rabin, for example, allows her to relate some gripping stories of Holocaust survivors, such as Samuel Gogol, a harmonica player who was forced by the Nazis to play in a band in front of Jews being walked to the gas chambers--to this day, he instinctively closes his eyes whenever he plays the harmonica. And some of her domestic anecdotes about Rabin are simple and touching, like the time she and her grandfather were sharing a bed with an electric blanket...
Unfortunately, the book is studded with the author's attempts to make the things she is describing even more touching, a forcing of emotion that can be frankly embarrassing. Her recollection of Samuel Gogol's story, for example, is preceded by this observation: "Fifty years later, birds still do not sing in Auschwitz. Was it just my impression? No, other people noticed the same thing: there are no birds in Auschwitz." And while it would be churlish to fault her expression of her grief for her grandfather, it is just those most powerful and universal emotions that are hardest...
Students described their theses to an audience of professors and other academics at Boylston Auditorium between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and then watched a group of Russian language students perform excerpts from Gogol's play "The Inspector General...
Harvard students were joined by students from Wellesley and Wheaton Colleges to explain and describe their senior theses, which ranged from "Time and Narrative in Gogol" by Yvonne Saenger '96 to "Political Risk and Foreign Investment in Russia" by Sara Su Jones...