Word: gogol
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Claire's Knee is, essentially, an opalescent homage to M. Marcel Proust. As 19th century Russian fiction is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's Overcoat, modern French films have risen from Proust's Remembrance. Proust's work is clustered with optical allusions, accounts of the distortions of love in the fourth dimension of time. In its way it was the end of a line that could not be continued on the page-that needed the liberation of the camera. Directors such as Karel Reisz (Isadora) and Alain Renais (La Guerre Est Finie) acknowledge their debt...
Life was full of grotesque jokes straight out of Gogol. The author tells of the commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
Puppets who make soup of chocolate and spinach; creatures who ask for a ukulele to be mended and then eat the Instrument; a nose, like the one in Gogol's short story, that assumes a personality and speech when detached from a facethese are the touchstones of enchantment that reach far beyond ghettos...
...week to elect representatives to the People's Assembly, local councils and the courts. Every single voter chose the Communist Party's slate of candidates. Actually, it was a cliff-hanger compared to the Soviet election in which Joseph Stalin, possibly with the help of some of Gogol's dead souls, is said to have collected 130% of the vote in his home district...
...Singer's view, absurdity, chaos, the irrational, all the fashionable preoccupations of contemporary life, are at best apocrypha, not canon. In a world of prose experiment and cool media, Singer, virtually alone, works in the metaphysical tradition. Behind him are the contiguous works of Kafka, Chekhov -and Gogol, with whom the reader of A Friend of Kafka must agree: "Say what you like, but such things do happen -not often, but they do happen." These 21 miraculous creations are, in the highest artistic tradition, true stories. · Stefan Kanfer