Word: magarshack
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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GOGOL, by David Magarshack. A sound, readable biography of the little 19th century Russian neurotic who became one of his country's great novelists. Incredibly, he exposed corrupt Russian bureaucracy and the horrors of serfdom in books of genius while obsessed with the notion that he was really helping to preserve the Russia he loved...
GOGOL (329 pp.)-David Magarshack -Grove Press...
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...
Biographer Magarshack. brought about "what amounted to a revolution in the minds of his countrymen...
...with a song on his lips." In fact he died at 42 in a barbarous nightmare of half-savage Russian medicine, with leeches on his famous nose and mad medics trying to thump the devil out of him. Gogol had a strange power over the Russian mind. Says Biographer Magarshack in a just summary: "This conviction . . . that it was his transcendental mission to save Russia, an idea that was completely divorced from reality . . . was the tragedy of his life." Yet, in a sense, though Gogol could not save his own reason, he came close to saving Russia's. Hoping...