Word: gogol
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...Nikolai Gogol...
Bureaucracy, corruption, greed, sycophancy and fear lend themselves to comedy of universal scope, and that is why Gogol's The Inspector General, written 143 years ago, was born deathless...
When David despairingly realizes his love for Claire is already withering and that he is only a victim of his own faults, he curses himself. He tells himself he is not one of those sympathetic lost characters out of Chekhov but the insane amputee in a story by Gogol who places an ad for the return of his lost nose. What Roth succeeds in portraying, though, with all the delicacy and poignancy of the Russian dramatist, is that Kepesh is in fact a figure from a Chekhov novel. Not a warped, disfigured monster but a man whose constant pursuit...
...little on which to hone his wit-an effective weapon for getting at realities beneath the appearances. He notes, for example, that Adam Smith, the legendary theoretician of capitalism and unrestricted trade, ended his days as the commissioner of customs in Edinburgh. Galbraith also draws a marvelous parallel between Gogol's Dead Souls and the Equity Funding scandal. In 19th century Russia it was the names of dead serfs that were bought to be palmed off as collateral for loans. In the 1960s Los Angeles executives of Equity Funding Corp. wrote life insurance policies on nonexistent people that were...
...Sleep. None of this detracts from Chandler's ability to separate the amateur from the prose. Modern Russian literature is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's overcoat; the American detective - from Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer to Gordon Parks' Shaft - enters in Philip Marlowe's trench coat. Even Dashiell Hammett's earlier fictions have not been so pervasive - largely, as Chandler noted, because "his writing has no echo and no tone." Chandler's does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding...