Word: russianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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 his own work and had often burned manuscripts in the interests of perfection now burned his manuscripts in the interests...
Gogol had once said it was his duty to "die 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...