Word: gogol
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...cloaked itself affectedly in secondhand French elegance. In such superb tales as The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin fashioned a new native style-spare, exact, free of rhetorical flourish-which set the tone for the epic prose era that was to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. In rich, full-blooded dramas like Boris Gudunov, he helped to free the Russian stage from its prim, Racine-engendered formalities. Poems like Ruslan and Liudmila, Memory and The Bronze Horseman grandly exploded the prevailing notion of the day that poetry should be either didactic or sentimental. "Good lord...
Wildly improbable as these goings-on may be, Novelist Stephen Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum...
Some of Kosinski's treatment of Communism is pure Gogol. Says one freedom-starved university student: "I've discovered more than thirty public buildings in different parts of the city, all with temples like this, all waiting for me." He is referring not to clandestine churches but to the freest places in the country-the stalls in public toilets. Elsewhere the narrator attends a party reception and observes a disaffected scientist pinning foil-wrapped condoms to the chests of unsuspecting apparatchiks...
...bloody days in the North African desert 25 years ago. Among other specials in debut last week: CBS's "Flanders and Swann," a wryly amusing hour, but too familiar to anyone who had seen the British song-and-patter team on Broadway; and CBS's dramatization of Gogol's Diary of a Madman, which, while a triumph for French Actor Roger Cog-gio, who learned the English dialogue phonetically, was too lacking in action to satisfy the visual demands...
DIARY OF A MADMAN (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Nicolai Gogol's story of the mental disintegration of a government clerk, as performed by French Actor Roger Coggio...