![]() ![]() Like New Yorkers, Russians are so deeply embedded in their milieu that the existence of other places becomes thin, hypothetical, dubious. In addition to being an odd fellow, Gogol was also thoroughly Russian. Not beauty in the conventional sense - Gogol's world is utterly grotesque but beautiful because so perfectly imagined. Gogol was a lucky sexual hysteric: Through the alchemy of art he could transform terror into beauty. Only Gogol could have written the short story "The Nose," a mixture of Freud and Alice in Wonderland, in which a man loses his nose, advertises for it in the paper, and then is astonished to see it dressed in a general's uniform, entering a splendid carriage. And this also meant that - apart from the imitativeness that is part of writer's early development - Gogol was a natural, unique without effort. It was what went on inside his mind that made Gogol so infinitely peculiar. It wasn't Gogol's life that made him so odd - except for some flittery travel, he wasn't much of a doer and is even said to have perished still a virgin. Even his last name sounds odd and comical to Russians, meaning as it does "male duck." Nikolai Maleduck. Gogol (1809-1852) was a very odd bird indeed. And America's literature never had anything quite like Nikolai Gogol. But America's history never had an Ivan the Terrible, a Stalin, or even a Rasputin. DURING the Cold War, and after, some people were wont to remark on the essential similarity of Russians and Americans. ![]()
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