Word: gogol
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...like a play by Anton Chekhov. The decors of both are mainly Russian provincial. The characters are an engaging assortment of dreamers and bored intellectuals. The atmospheres are tumid with unreleased passion, and there are ample supplies of tea and sympathy. Unlike the lives and works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, subjects of other Henri Troyat biographies, Chekhov's belong to the 20th century, an age of fretful spirits and melancholy skepticism. These impulses guide his hundreds of stories, his theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard) and especially his letters. "You ask me what...
...Nikolai Gogol and Alexander A. Ivanov: Vahan Barooshian, Coolidge Hall, Room 4, Harvard...
...headquarters of a good novel. Such crossbreeding of genres is not mythical or even uncommon in 20th century literature--take Nabokov's career, for example, which includes a novel in the guise of an annotated poem. Pale Fire, and a literary biography that's also a comic masterpiece. Nikolai Gogol. What makes Julian Barnes's achievement so remarkable, however, is the sheer lack of artifice and pyrotechnics involved...
...Event might have come from a pocket in Gogol's Overcoat. In a provincial village of czarist Russia, a portrait painter and his unfaithful wife fearfully await an ex-convict who once threatened them with violence. Again an ambiguous reality intrudes: a character remembers being told, "I and my brother were played by one and the same actor, only in the part of my brother he was good, and in mine he was bad." In a central scene the principals remain themselves, but some of the supporting cast become painted representations...
...biographer has painted the tumult and suffering of Russia's past more vividly than Henri Troyat, whose previous subjects include Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Catherine the Great. A master of the purposeful anecdote, the graceful accretion of detail that helps explain motive and madness, Troyat finds the key to Ivan's character in the ruler's early life. The heir to the throne of Muscovy was orphaned at seven, and he grew up amid endless scheming by Russia's landed aristocracy, the boyars. "Observing the brutal treatment that grown men inflicted on their fellows...