Word: gogol
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...GOGOL (329 pp.)-David Magarshack -Grove Press...
...Nikolai Gogol was one of those truly bizarre characters who appeared in. and occasionally wrote, the great Russian novels of the 19th century. He was born of Ukrainian Cossack stock into that great shambling mess of splendor and squalor, the Russian Empire. The society must have had something in it of Elizabethan England (with its preoccupation with theology, place and power, and its spiritual ferment). To this was added a fantastic, ramshackle bureaucracy with bewhiskered officials dedicated to the ledgers of obscurantism. Gogol's own parents typified that society. His mother was a pious, eccentric ninny; his father...
...Gogol lived and worked in the illusion that he was defending his time, place and class, while actually he helped to destroy them. In a full dress study that will probably be the definitive work on Gogol in English, Russian-born Biographer David Magarshack (Chekhov,'TIME, Sept. 28, 1953; Turgenev, TIME, Sept. 27, 1954) makes clear that it was Gogol's genius, in spite of himself, to open windows in the sealed winter cabin of the Russian soul...
...German Composer Werner Egk (rhymes with peck), who at 56 has five other operas behind him (including The Magic Violin, Columbus, Irish Legend), was casting about last year for the makings of a comic opera ("I didn't want to see them leave unhappy") when he reread Gogol's The Inspector General. Egk decided it was just the kind of thing he needed. He hacked down Gogol's sprawling list of characters to a manageable 13, set to work composing a score to match the author's farcical tale of a provincial town paralyzed...
...Wilder sketch, starring Mimi Bowen, is a character study of a mother who is completely devoted to her family. Maeterlinck's play is a satire which features Steve Mandel as Achilles. Gogol's "Gambler," oddly enough, is about a tale spun by a master card shark...