Word: gogol
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...CHARACTERS in this Inspector General huddle together onstage, shoulders hunched and arms poised as if to ward off some painful blow that could fall anytime, anywhere. Director Peter Sellars deploys Gogol's gallery of human grotesques under black bumbershoots--protection not from rain but from the details of daily life that intrude on their passivity. They seem to be fighting a desperately comical rearguard action against nasty, brutish human nature, and losing...
...Gogol had no particular town, government or country in mind when he concocted his play; his target was the pathetic mendacity of everyone, everywhere. The rural officials who mistake a visiting landowner's son for an inspector general from Petersburg show off every human failing, but in shriveled, impoverished versions. They cower from their own defects like they cower from the rest of the world. Their sins, they protest, are "sinlets...
Viewers will recognize many of the photographs from their reading of Russian literature. One magnificent, sprawling landscape of the Dikanka estate in the Ukraine, complete with manor house, onion-domed church and clusters of khaty, or peasant huts, is a breathtaking evocation of Gogol's stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. So many Russians of genius spent their childhoods in such manor houses, with their colonnaded porticoes and vast, cool rooms teeming with relatives, family retainers and hangers-on. Nearly all of Russia's 19th century writers were members of the much maligned gentry, and their fiction...
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...