Nikolai Gogol
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Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (April 1, 1809 — March 4, 1852) was a Russian-language writer of Ukrainian origin. Although his early works were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing, he wrote in Russian and his works belong to the tradition of Russian literature. The novel Dead Souls (1842), the play Revizor (1836, 1842), and the short story The Overcoat (1842) and The Nose count among his masterpieces.
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Influence and interpretations
Even before the publication of Dead Souls, Belinsky recognized Gogol as the first realist writer in the language and the head of the Natural School, to which he also assigned such younger or lesser authors as Goncharov, Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Vladimir Dahl, and Vladimir Sollogub. Gogol himself seemed to be skeptical about the existence of such a literary movement. Although he recognized "several young writers" who "have shown a particular desire to observe real life", he upbraided the deficient composition and style of their works. Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony".
The period of modernism saw a revival of interest in and a change of attitude towards Gogol's work. One of the pioneering works of Russian formalism was Eichenbaum's reappraisal of The Overcoat. In the 1920s, a group of Russian short story writers, known as the Serapion Brothers, placed Gogol among their precursors and consciously sought to imitate his techniques. The leading novelists of the period — notably Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov — also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. In 1926, Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Government Inspector as a "comedy of the absurd situation", revealing to his fascinated spectators a corrupt world of endless self-deception. In 1934, Andrei Bely published the most meticulous study of Gogol's literary techniques up to that date, in which he analyzed the colours prevalent in Gogol's work depending on the period, his impressionistic use of verbs, expressive discontinuity of his syntax, complicated rhythmical patterns of his sentences, and many other secrets of his craft. Based on this work, Vladimir Nabokov published a summary account of Gogol's masterpieces in 1944.
Gogol's impact on Russian literature has been enduring, yet his works have been appreciated differently by various critics. Belinsky, for instance, berated his horror stories as "moribund, monstrous works", while Andrei Bely counted them among his most stylistically daring creations. Nabokov singled out Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and The Overcoat as the works of genius and dismissed the remainder as puerile essays. The latter story has been traditionally interpreted as a masterpiece of "humanitarian realism", but Nabokov and some other attentive readers argued that "holes in the language" make the story susceptible to another interpretation, as a supernatural tale about a ghostly double of a "small man". (At least this reading of the story seems to have been on Dostoevsky's mind when he wrote The Double. The quote, often apocryphally attributed to him, that "we all [future generations of Russian novelists] emerged from Gogol's Overcoat", actually refers to those few who read The Overcoat as a double-bottom ghost story (as did Aleksey Remizov, judging by his story The Sacrifice).) Of all Gogol's stories, The Nose has stubbornly defied all abstruse interpretations: D.S. Mirsky declared it "a piece of sheer play, almost sheer nonsense".
Gogol's oeuvre has also had a large impact on Russia's non-literary culture, and his stories have been adapted numerous times into opera and film. Russian Composer Alfred Schnittke wrote the eight part Gogol Suite as incidental music to the The Government Inspector performed as a play, and composer Dmitri Shostakovich set The Nose as his first opera in 1930, despite the peculiar choice of subject for what was meant to initiate the great tradition of Soviet opera. Most recently, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Gogol's birth, Vienna's renowned Theater an der Wien commissioned music and libretto for a full length opera on the life of Gogol from Russian composer and writer Lera Auerbach.
In Marathi, P. L. Deshpande adapted his play "The Government Inspector" as "Ammaldar" (literally 'the Government Inspector') in late 1950s, skillfully cladding it with all indigenous politico-cultural robe of Maharashtra, while maintaining the comic satire of the original.
Some attention has also been given to Gogol's apparent anti-Semitism in his writings, as well as those of his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Felix Dreizin and David Guaspari, for example, in their The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Literary Ethnocentricis discuss "the significance of the Jewish characters and the negative image of the Ukrainian Jewish community in Gogol's novel "Taras Bulba," pointing out Gogol's attachment to anti-Jewish prejudices prevalent in Russian and Ukrainian culture." In Leon Poliakov's The History of Antisemitism, the author mentions that "The 'Yankel' from Taras Bulba indeed became the archetypal Jew in Russian literature. Gogol painted him as supremely exploitative, cowardly, and repulsive, albeit capable of gratitude. But it seems perfectly natural in the story that he and his cohorts be drowned in the Dniper by the Cossack lords. Above all, Yankel is ridiculous, and the image of the plucked chicken that Gogol used has made the rounds of great Russian authors."
Bibliography of Nikolai Gogol
- Ode to Italy (1829, poem)
- Hanz Küchelgarten (1829, narrative poem, published under the pseudonym "V. Alov")
- Woman (1830, short story)
- Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (Volume I, 1831, short story collection)
- Preface (collection opening)
- The Fair at Sorochintsï (short story) (the basis for Mussorgsky's opera of the same name)
- St. John's Eve (short story) (the basis for Mussorgsky's orchestral work best known under the title Night on Bald Mountain)
- May Night or the Drowned Maiden (the basis for Rimsky-Korsakov's opera of the same name and of Mykola Lysenko's opera The Drowned Maiden [Utoplena])
- The Lost Letter: A Tale Told by the Sexton of the N...Church
- Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (Volume II, 1832, short story collection)
- Preface (collection opening, Volume II)
- Christmas Eve (the basis for several operas, including Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki (the revised version of Vakula the Smith), Rimsky-Korsakov's opera of the same name, and Mykola Lysenko's like-named (in Ukrainian) Rivnaja nič)
- A Terrible Vengeance
- Ivan Fedorovic Sponka and his Aunt
- A Bewitched Place
- Mirgorod (1835, short story collection, published in two volumes)
- The Old World Landowners
- Taras Bulba (the basis for an opera of the same name by Mykola Lysenko)
- Viy
- The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich
- Arabesques (1835, short story collection)
- The Nose (1836, short story, the basis for an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich)
- The Carriage (1836, short story)
- The Government Inspector (1836, play, a.k.a. The Inspector General)
- Leaving the Theater (1842, essay)
- Rome (1842, fragment)
- The Overcoat (1842, short story)
- Zhenitba (or Zhenit'ba – The Marriage, 1842, comedy, play, the first act of which was adapted by Mussorgsky as an opera of the same name, completed by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov)
- Dead Souls (1842, novel)
- The Gamblers (1843, play)
- Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends (1847, collection of letters and essays)
Adaptations
Film
- 1913—The Night Before Christmas, a 41-minute film by Ladislas Starevich which contains some of the first combinations of stop motion animation with live action
- 1926—The Overcoat, a Soviet silent film directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg
- 1945—The Lost Letter, the Soviet Union's first feature-length traditionally-animated film
- 1949—The Inspector General, a musical comedy and very loose adaptation directed by Henry Koster and starring Danny Kaye.
- 1951—The Night Before Christmas, an animated feature film directed by the Brumberg sisters
- 1952—Il Cappotto, an Italian film directed by Alberto Lattuada
- 1959—The Overcoat, a Soviet film directed by Aleksey Batalov
- 1962—Taras Bulba, a Yugoslavian/American film directed by J. Lee Thompson
- 1963—The Nose, a short film by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker using pinscreen animation
- 1967—Viy, a horror film made on Mosfilm and based on the Nikolai Gogol story of the same name.
- 1984—Dead Souls, directed by Mikhail Shveytser
- 1997—The Night Before Christmas, a 26-minute stop-motion-animated film [1]
- 20??—The Overcoat, an upcoming film by acclaimed animator Yuriy Norshteyn, being worked on since 1981
Opera
- 1874—Vakula the Smith, an opera by Pyotr Tchaikovsky
- 1880—May Night, an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
- 1885—Cherevichki, Tchaikovsky's revision of Vakula the Smith
- 1906—Zhenitba, an unfinished opera begun in 1868 by Modest Mussorgsky
- 1917—The Fair at Sorochyntsi, an unfinished opera begun in 1874 by Modest Mussorgsky and first completed by César Cui - many different versions exist
- 1930—The Nose, a satirical opera by Dmitri Shostakovich
- 1976—Dead Souls, an opera by Russian nationalist composer Rodion Shchedrin
Other
- 2006—Dead Souls, a BBC radio adaptation
Gogol in popular culture
- Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is named after Gogol. Lead singer Eugene Hütz is Ukrainian and wrote the introduction for the Subculture Books release of Taras Bulba in 2008.
- James Bond Ally Anatol Gogol is named in celebration of Nikolai Gogol. The General appeared in all of Roger Moore's James Bond films between The Spy Who Loved Me and A View to a Kill, and in Timothy Dalton' s debut as Bond in The Living Daylights; he was portrayed by late German actor Walter Gotell, previously known as Morzeny in the second Connery Bond movie From Russia with Love.
- His novel Dead Souls gave its name to the Joy Division song.
- The main character in The Namesake is named after Gogol. The name is part of the central theme of the story.
- Jon Krakauer mentions in his book Into the Wild that Christopher McCandless carried a book by Gogol.
- In the "Charlie" episode from the first series of the British comedy series "The Mighty Boosh", character Howard Moon is seen holding Gogol's "Dead Souls" when talking about becoming a writer with Vince Noir, and later uses the book to spy on the keeper of the Reptile House, Mrs Gideon.
- On March 19, 2009 the National bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Nikolai Gogol.
