Gogol is Great (7/8/2000)
Nikolai Gogol is one of the most delightful, sophisticated, and ironic authors I've read, and yet, he is surprisingly little known among American readers. Perhaps this is because his masterful short stories are so entertaining and readable, and there's a belief that great literature has to be "hard." Regardless, Gogol's neglect is is surprising, as readers so revere Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, authors who owe their greatest debt to Gogol, for his short stories and novels founded the very school of Russian literature the entire world, from Bahktin to Billy Bob, recognizes as some of the greatest fiction of all time. Some of Dostoevsky's early works were even direct adaptations based on the plots of Gogol stories, like "The Overcoat".
My personal favorite story is "The Nose", in which a low-level St. Petersberg bureaucrat (all of Gogol's characters seem to be St. Petersberg civil servants) wakes up one morning to find that his nose is missing. It's not that it's been cut off, it's just plain missing, a flat space where a nose should be. Very perturbed, the pathetic bureaucrat goes in search of his nose. At the newspaper, he's not allowed to place an ad to see if his nose has been found, because they "just don't print that sort of thing." Things get even worse when he does run into his nose, who, oddly enough, turns out to be a bureacrat of a higher rank than the protagonist. The nose shoos him away as it heads to church to pray, with a look of extreme piety on its face.
Many of Gogol's stories juxtapose the fantastic with the practicality of the rationalized, modern world. The people he writes about are petty and pathetic, and we laugh at them at the same time as we empathize with them, for we know they represent ourselves. Gogol's work remains both entertaining and incisive in translation, and nearly everything about it is quintessentially modern. A lot of critics like to say that Dostoevsky invented the "modern novel", but he learned a lot of his tricks from Nikolai Gogol. Although Gogol's short stories and books have an undeniable "twentieth century" feel, they were written, quite remarkably, in the 1820s and 1830s.
Diary of A Madman
(and other short stories)
Dead Souls
The Collected Tales
of Nicolai Gogol
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