Word: gogol
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Comedy or Truth? Gogol was a weedy little fellow with a tapir-like nose who was known at school as the "mysterious dwarf." His "spoilt and corrupt character" emerges like a combination of half a dozen case histories in abnormal psychology. He disliked making love to women, avoided his mother to the point of forging foreign stamps to make her believe he was living abroad. He was morbidly dependent on his friends' company. "Forget your wretched teeth." he wrote to a friend who wanted to go to see a dentist. "The soul is better than teeth...
...great jokester, with a neurotic's ability to charm a world he could not master. In 1835 he wrote what brilliant Novelist-Critic Vladimir Nabokov calls the greatest play in Russian. The Government Inspector. The conception, suggested to Gogol by Pushkin, was ingenious: a character is mistaken in a provincial town for an important government official, and the whole corrupt, incoherent Russian officialdom is exposed in apparently hilarious farce. Czar Nicholas I himself saw the play and is said to have remarked (roughly translated): "Everyone gets the business here. Me most of all." Gogol and his adored Czar thought...
...immediately he set about making his villains into heroes. Gogol tried to explain away the real significance of his comedies. It was almost as if the authors of Oklahoma had inadvertently turned out Hamlet and had written to the New York Times to explain there was nothing rotten whatsoever in the state of Denmark...
...Gogol published the first part of his greatest work. Dead Souls, a novel that brilliantly exposed a brutal anachronism of Russian life: serfdom. Serfs, like any other property, could be mortgaged. Gogol introduced a sort of Russian spiv who speculated in "dead souls,'' i.e., defunct but still financially negotiable persons...
...madness in all this mad comedy was that Gogol himself thought he was defending the system he undermined. One critic got the point that Gogol had been trying to make. "Preacher of the lash," he called the muddled genius. After his first success. Gogol left Russia in a huff, spent twelve nostalgic years in self-imposed exile. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, slowly developed a religious mania and fell into the hands of a fanatic Russian Orthodox priest who persuaded Gogol that art was sinful. Thus an artist who all his life had been dissatisfied with...