DEAD SOULS
https://www.facebook.com/hanching.chung/videos/938506336831563
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Mykola Gogol | World Changers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kna1-H4ssOM
When vladimir putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine he was not alone in thinking victory would be swift. Many Western analysts also expected Kyiv, the capital, to fall within 72 hours. Ukrainian valour and ingenuity confounded those assumptions. As the war enters its sixth week, the side that is contemplating victory is not Russia but Ukraine—and it would be a victory that redraws the map of European security.
Speaking to The Economist in Kyiv on March 25th, President Volodymyr Zelensky explained how people power is the secret to Ukraine’s resistance and why the war is shifting in his nation’s favour. “We believe in victory,” he declared. “This is our home, our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.”
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a novelist and political satirist. The author of Dead Souls and The Overcoat, he was one of Russia's greatest writers.果戈里對俄羅斯文學有著很大的影響，正如陀思妥耶夫斯基曾經說的：「我們（指後來一代的俄羅斯作家）都是從他的《外套》中走出來的。」
Velyki Sorochyntsi
Location of Velyki Sorochyntsi within Poltava
| ヴェルィーキ・ソローチンツィ Великі Сорочинці | |
|---|---|
 ソローチンツィの市の広場 |
大索羅欽齊
Tales of good and evil
GOGOL, Nicolai V.
Published by John Lehmann, London, 1949
The Overcoat: And Other Tales of Good and Evil. byNikolai Gogol
2017年5月3日在美國評論
果戈里全集 有，河北教育出版社的七卷本，
安徽文艺出版社(九卷本 1999)
周啟超先生主編的漢譯九卷本《果戈理全集》以其高質量的譯文和精美的裝幀設計，成為一套極具珍藏價值的外 國文學家作品集。《全集》的前五卷為文學作品。其中第1—4卷為散文（小說）卷，第5卷為戲劇卷，均按作品的寫作年代編排，清晰地顯示出果戈理創作的發展 軌跡和他作為小說家的文學成就。從某種意義上說，后四卷更為珍貴。如第6卷《與友人書簡選》，本是了解果戈理的思想與創作、甚至是認識俄羅斯思想史的不可 或缺的重要資料。過去由于種種原因，人們并不了解它豐富的實際內容。現在，它以完整的面貌出現在我國讀者面前，無疑有助于人們全面認識果戈理。參與翻譯這 套《果戈理全集》的譯者，彭克巽、白春仁、白嗣宏、田大畏、李毓榛、任光宣等人的名字大都是我國讀者所熟悉的。強大的譯者陣容是譯文質量的基本保證。除了 為國內廣大讀者提供了完備的果戈理作品之外，《果戈理全集》的學術價值還體現在它的序文、題解和“附卷”的內容上。其中，“總序一”由著名學者錢中文先生 執筆。錢先生的治學領域寬廣，果戈理研究也是其中的一塊收獲頗豐的園地。錢先生為《全集》撰寫的長篇序言，是對果戈理的生平、思想發展、創作道路、藝術成 就以及作家在文學史上的地位所作的生動描述。文中就《與友人書簡選》而展開的對果戈理的宗教、哲學、道德、文學思想的分析，對作家獨特的“怪誕現實主義” 風格的概括，都極有見地，顯然是深入研究的結果。同樣顯示出對果戈理作品進行了深入研究的，是編者為各篇作品所寫的“題解”（包括《文論卷》、《書信卷》 的“總題解”）。這不是一般的浮泛之論，而是在細讀原著的基礎上所作出的精當概括，它們不僅為普通讀者解讀一篇篇作品提供了必備的鑰匙，而且在研究者眼中 也是評價果戈理創作的、值得重視的一家之言。無庸贅言，《果戈理全集》的寶貴價值更在于果戈理作品自身的久遠藝術生命力。作家去世已近一個半世紀了，然而 他所創造的藝術形象卻還活著。至今，我們還可以在我們身邊的日常生活中看到作家以其天才的手筆描寫過的一幕幕“幾乎無事的悲劇”，還可以看到赫列斯達科 夫、乞乞科夫、羅士特萊夫們的活動身影。現實還在呼喚著果戈理式的藝術家。優秀的文學作品都具有超越具體時空的意義，果戈理的創作無疑屬于這一行列。
【本書目錄】
狄康卡近郊夜話
總序一
總序二
第一卷 狄康卡近郊夜話
第二卷 米爾戈羅德
第三卷 彼得堡故事及其他
第四卷 死魂靈
第五卷 戲劇卷
第六卷 與友人書簡選
第七卷 文論卷
第八卷 書信卷
附卷 生活中的理戈理
米爾戈羅德
第一部
舊式地主
塔拉斯·布利巴
第二部
維
伊萬·伊萬諾維奇與伊萬·尼基福羅維奇吵架的故事
彼得堡故事及其他
死魂靈
戲劇卷
與友人書簡選
文論卷
書信卷
附卷 生活中的果戈理
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845 by Sergei Lvovich Levitsky (1819-1898)
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Russian: Николай Васильевич Гоголь, Nikoláy Vasíl’yevich Gógol’; Russian pronunciation: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈɡoɡəlʲ]; Ukrainian: Микола Васильович Гоголь, Mykóla Vasýl’ovych Hóhol’) (31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1809,[2] – 4 March [O.S. 21 February] 1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian novelist, humourist, and dramatist.[2]
He is considered the father of modern Russian realism, but at the same time, his work is very much in the genre of romanticism. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and identity.[3][4] His more mature writing satirised the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire, leading to his exile. On his return, he immersed himself in the Orthodox Church.[5] The novels Taras Bul'ba (1835; 1842 [revised edition]) and Dead Souls (1842), the play The Inspector-General (1836, 1842), and the short stories Diary of a Madman, The Nose and The Overcoat (1842) are among his best known works. With their scrupulous and scathing realism, ethical criticism as well as philosophical depth, they remain some of the most important works of world literature.
In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not very popular among his schoolmates, who called him their "mysterious dwarf", but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed an extraordinary talent for mimicry which later on made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.
In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to Petersburg, full of vague but glowingly ambitious hopes. He had hoped for literary fame and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life — Ganz Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense, under the name of "V. Alov." The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.
Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story, alongside Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was in touch with the "literary aristocracy", had a story published in Anton Delvig's Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin.
In 1831, he brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), which met with immediate success. He followed it in 1832 with a second volume, and in 1835 by two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, as well as by two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. At this time, contemporary Russian editors and critics such as Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin saw in Gogol the emergence of a Ukrainian, rather than Russian, writer, using his works to illustrate the differences between Russian and Ukrainian national characters, a fact that has been overlooked in later Russian literary history.[8] At this time, Gogol developed a passion for Ukrainian history and tried to obtain an appointment to the history department at Kiev University. Despite the support of Pushkin and Sergey Uvarov, the Russian minister of education, his appointment was blocked by a Kievan bureaucrat on the grounds that he was unqualified.[9] His fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Ukrainian cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests. During this time he also developed a close and life-long friendship with another Ukrainian then living in Russia, the historian and naturalist Mykhaylo Maksymovych.[10]
In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which "he had no qualifications. He turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. After an introductory lecture made up of brilliant generalizations which the 'historian' had prudently prepared and memorized, he gave up all pretense at erudition and teaching, missed two lectures out of three, and when he did appear, muttered unintelligibly through his teeth. At the final examination, he sat in utter silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache, while another professor interrogated the students."[11] This academic venture proved a failure and he resigned his chair in 1835.
Commemorative plaque in his house in Rome
Between 1832 and 1836 Gogol worked with great energy, and though almost all his work has in one way or another its sources in these four years of contact with Pushkin, he had not yet decided that his ambitions were to be fulfilled by success in literature. During this time, the Russian critics Stepan Shevyrev and Vissarion Belinsky, contradicting earlier critics, reclassified Gogol from a Ukrainian to a Russian writer.[8] It was only after the presentation, on April 19, 1836, of his comedy The Government Inspector (Revizor) that he finally came to believe in his literary vocation. The comedy, a violent satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, was able to be staged thanks only to the personal intervention of Nicholas I.
From 1836 to 1848 he lived abroad, travelling throughout Germany and Switzerland. Gogol spent the winter of 1836-1837 in Paris, where he spent time among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, frequently meeting with the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. He eventually settled in Rome. According to Simon Karlinsky (a professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley[12]) Gogol fell in love there with the nobleman Iosif Vielhorsky and started a romantic relationship with him; this is the only documented love affair in his life.[13]
Pushkin's death produced a strong impression on Gogol. His principal work during years following Pushkin's death was the satirical epic Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks — recast Taras Bulba and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage (Zhenitba), wrote the fragment Rome and his most famous short story, The Overcoat.
In 1841 the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under the title, imposed by the censorship, of The Adventures of Chichikov. The book instantly established his reputation as the greatest prose writer in the language.
Church of Simeon Stylites on New Arbat in Moscow, in which the great writer was mourned before his burial.
"Golgotha"
After the triumph of Dead Souls, Gogol came to be regarded by his contemporaries as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. Little did they know that Dead Souls was but the first part of a modern-day counterpart to The Divine Comedy. The first part represented the Inferno; the second part was to depict the gradual purification and transformation of the rogue Chichikov under the influence of virtuous publicans and governors — Purgatory.[14]
Gogol, painted in 1840.
From Palestine he returned to Russia and passed his last years in restless movement throughout the country. While visiting the capitals, he stayed with various friends such as Mikhail Pogodin and Sergei Aksakov. During this period of his life he also spent much time with his old Ukrainian friends, Maksymovych and Osyp Bodiansky. More importantly, he intensified his relationship with a church elder, Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom he had known for several years. Konstantinovsky seems to have strengthened in Gogol the fear of perdition by insisting on the sinfulness of all his imaginative work. His health was undermined by exaggerated ascetic practices and he fell into a state of deep depression. On the night of February 24, 1852, he burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of Dead Souls. He explained this as a mistake, a practical joke played on him by the Devil. Soon thereafter he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later.
Gogol was buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931, Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery and had his remains transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery.
His body was discovered lying face down, which gave rise to the story that Gogol had been buried alive. A Soviet critic even cut a part of his jacket to use as a binding for his copy of Dead Souls. A piece of rock which used to stand on his grave at the Danilov was reused for the tomb of Gogol's admirer Mikhail Bulgakov.
The first Gogol monument in Moscow was a Symbolist statue on Arbat Square, which represented the sculptor Nikolay Andreyev's idea of Gogol, rather than the real man [15] Unveiled in 1909, the statue was praised by Ilya Repin and Leo Tolstoy as an outstanding projection of Gogol's tortured personality. Stalin did not like it, however; and the statue was replaced by a more orthodox Socialist Realism monument in 1952. It took enormous efforts to save Andreyev's original work from destruction; it now stands in front of the house where Gogol died.[16]
D.S. Mirsky characterized Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected — in the strictest sense, original[17] — worlds ever created by an artist of words".[18]
The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision of reality and people. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place. His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things. His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist — which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability — attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality — that seems to beggar the visible world itself.[19]
The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the untranslatable Russian word poshlost', which is perhaps best rendered as "self-satisfied inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society, from rus. "poshlo"- eng. "went." Like Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and romantic illusions. It was he who undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had reigned.[20] "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror."[21] His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum: It is dull in this world, gentlemen!
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.[22] 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."[23]
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.
The house in Moscow where Gogol died. The building contains the fireplace where he burned the manuscript of the second part of the Dead Souls.
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."[24] 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 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.[25] 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.[26]
Some attention has also been given to the apparent anti-Semitism in Gogol's writings, as well as those of his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoevsky.[27] 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."[28] 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."[29]
Despite his problematic portrayal of Jewish characters, Gogol left a powerful impression even on Jewish writers who inherited his literary legacy. Amelia Glaser has noted the influence of Gogol's literary innovations on Sholem Aleichem, who "chose to model much of his writing, and even his appearance, on Gogol... What Sholem Aleichem was borrowing from Gogol was a rural East European landscape that may have been dangerous, but could unite readers through the power of collective memory. He also learned from Gogol to soften this danger through laughter, and he often rewrites Gogol's Jewish characters, correcting anti-Semitic stereotypes and narrating history from a Jewish perspective."[30]
This article incorporates text from D.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in the public domain.
This short story, the Nose, by Nikolai Gogol was an interesting absurdist, satirical genre, representing the arrogance in the Russian upper class during the 19th century. In the introduction in Tales of Good and Evil, a compilation of short stories written by Gogol, the author mentions the themes of snobbery and pride. I thought that this would be a good pick because these themes can be applied to life through all time periods. The structure of the short story is broken down into three parts.
The first part of the story begins with Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, finding a nose in his morning bread. He tries to get rid of it by throwing it into a river, but he comes in contact with an officer that does not allow him to throw the nose in. Part two begins with Major Kovalyov waking up without his nose and becomes very insecure without it. He finds his nose impersonating a high status official and chases it to try and get it back but gets distracted by a beautiful young girl. Eventually Ivan returns the nose to Kovalyov but he cannot get it re-attached to his face. The next day, part three, Kovalyov wakes up with his nose miraculously re-attached and goes about his day like nothing happened.
Gogol’s purpose in his narrative appears to have underlying Marxist thoughts even though he wrote before Marx was really published. Both Gogol and Karl Marx pay special attention to class struggle and the role of materialism. We see this in the very beginning of the novel, where the author sets the stage of how the upper class belittles the poor in society. When Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, reports having found a nose in his bread in the morning, his wife yells at him saying, “Three gentlemen have told me already that when you are shaving them you pull so violently at their noses that it is a wonder they still remain on their faces!”(204). I feel what his wife was saying implies that even when the rich spend time around the poor, it slowly tugs down at their high status and arrogance, displaying the stark class differences. I also found that at the point where Kovalyov, a man from the Russian upper class, runs into the Kazan Cathedral to find his nose, the author describes him forcing himself past beggars that are injured and unfortunate. Kovalyov’s indifference to these beggars are definitely a representation of how the rich often turn their heads and ignore those that are suffering, which is contradicting in a nation’s culture that is embedded with Orthodox Christianity. This coincides directly with materialism, which Karl Marx uses to analyze class stratification, because Gogol implies that for Kovalyov, his comfort in materials is of higher value than spirituality. Also, in the original, the Cathedral was originally censored to a “shopping arcade”, implying the image protection for the upper class in publications that this short story was published.
Gogol’s short story also gives a lot of insight about the portrayal of masculinity in 19th Russia. There is a point in the story where Kovalyov finds a woman near him in a Cathedral, but is embarrassed because he is seen without his nose. This raises a lot of questions such as, was boasting and arrogance seen as attractive in men? Was social status the largest factor when picking a partner? Was it acceptable for women to act the same way? What caught my attention especially is the fact that when Gogol refers to any male characters in the story, he mentions their status or occupation as their identity. The identity of the women in the story mostly correlates with their appearance, which suggests that women were mostly valued for their looks. By writing this short story, Gogol creates a window for readers to look through and see Russia in the past.
His very last paragraph gave me the sense that Gogol was trying to cover up his agenda of displaying the exhausting superficiality and arrogance of the Russian upper class. It is very amusing to read, especially lines like, “Firstly, it’s no use to the country whatsoever; secondly, it’s no use… I simply don’t know what one can make of it…however when all is said and done, one can concede this point or the other and perhaps you can even find… well then you won’t find much that isn’t on the absurd side, will you?” Gogol sounds like he’s testing his luck with authority, but is also playing with it.
Gogol’s personal views, such as belief in an overwhelming presence of superficiality among the rich, are very apparent in this short story, which I really enjoy reading. He loves representing the absurdity of the superficial culture in upper class Russia. I feel that he also reveals the most prominent, universal underlying fear in the upper class, which is the fear of losing social position and having too much control in the hands of the poor, as well as a fear of revolution. We see this when the barber, a lower class man, finds the nose of Kolaylov in his bread, where Kolaylov desperately tries to get it back. Here the nose is the symbol for arrogance. I really love this idea and I thought it was interesting in the way Nikolai Gogol portrayed it through absurdist literature. These ideas are also portrayed in other art forms throughout Europe during the mid 19th century, like French impressionism. Honoré Daumier, Jean-Francois Millet and Gustav Courbet displayed similar themes in their paintings that mirror this short story throughout the mid-eighteen hundreds. The author also portrays similar morbid themes in other short stories he has written.
I see a connection between The Nose and Overcoat, two short stories written by Gogol, about how cruel and indifferent that people are to each other. In the Overcoat, many people repeatedly tease the main character Akaky for the way he dresses. In The Nose Gogol writes about how Kolaylov is so obsessed with regaining his status (through finding his nose), that he pushes through suffering and injured women outside of a Cathedral to find it. Both of these instances reveal the cruelty that occurs within society.
Overall there are many themes that are displayed in The Nose, and I really enjoyed how they were all represented and symbolized.
The first part of the story begins with Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, finding a nose in his morning bread. He tries to get rid of it by throwing it into a river, but he comes in contact with an officer that does not allow him to throw the nose in. Part two begins with Major Kovalyov waking up without his nose and becomes very insecure without it. He finds his nose impersonating a high status official and chases it to try and get it back but gets distracted by a beautiful young girl. Eventually Ivan returns the nose to Kovalyov but he cannot get it re-attached to his face. The next day, part three, Kovalyov wakes up with his nose miraculously re-attached and goes about his day like nothing happened.
Gogol’s purpose in his narrative appears to have underlying Marxist thoughts even though he wrote before Marx was really published. Both Gogol and Karl Marx pay special attention to class struggle and the role of materialism. We see this in the very beginning of the novel, where the author sets the stage of how the upper class belittles the poor in society. When Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, reports having found a nose in his bread in the morning, his wife yells at him saying, “Three gentlemen have told me already that when you are shaving them you pull so violently at their noses that it is a wonder they still remain on their faces!”(204). I feel what his wife was saying implies that even when the rich spend time around the poor, it slowly tugs down at their high status and arrogance, displaying the stark class differences. I also found that at the point where Kovalyov, a man from the Russian upper class, runs into the Kazan Cathedral to find his nose, the author describes him forcing himself past beggars that are injured and unfortunate. Kovalyov’s indifference to these beggars are definitely a representation of how the rich often turn their heads and ignore those that are suffering, which is contradicting in a nation’s culture that is embedded with Orthodox Christianity. This coincides directly with materialism, which Karl Marx uses to analyze class stratification, because Gogol implies that for Kovalyov, his comfort in materials is of higher value than spirituality. Also, in the original, the Cathedral was originally censored to a “shopping arcade”, implying the image protection for the upper class in publications that this short story was published.
Gogol’s short story also gives a lot of insight about the portrayal of masculinity in 19th Russia. There is a point in the story where Kovalyov finds a woman near him in a Cathedral, but is embarrassed because he is seen without his nose. This raises a lot of questions such as, was boasting and arrogance seen as attractive in men? Was social status the largest factor when picking a partner? Was it acceptable for women to act the same way? What caught my attention especially is the fact that when Gogol refers to any male characters in the story, he mentions their status or occupation as their identity. The identity of the women in the story mostly correlates with their appearance, which suggests that women were mostly valued for their looks. By writing this short story, Gogol creates a window for readers to look through and see Russia in the past.
His very last paragraph gave me the sense that Gogol was trying to cover up his agenda of displaying the exhausting superficiality and arrogance of the Russian upper class. It is very amusing to read, especially lines like, “Firstly, it’s no use to the country whatsoever; secondly, it’s no use… I simply don’t know what one can make of it…however when all is said and done, one can concede this point or the other and perhaps you can even find… well then you won’t find much that isn’t on the absurd side, will you?” Gogol sounds like he’s testing his luck with authority, but is also playing with it.
Gogol’s personal views, such as belief in an overwhelming presence of superficiality among the rich, are very apparent in this short story, which I really enjoy reading. He loves representing the absurdity of the superficial culture in upper class Russia. I feel that he also reveals the most prominent, universal underlying fear in the upper class, which is the fear of losing social position and having too much control in the hands of the poor, as well as a fear of revolution. We see this when the barber, a lower class man, finds the nose of Kolaylov in his bread, where Kolaylov desperately tries to get it back. Here the nose is the symbol for arrogance. I really love this idea and I thought it was interesting in the way Nikolai Gogol portrayed it through absurdist literature. These ideas are also portrayed in other art forms throughout Europe during the mid 19th century, like French impressionism. Honoré Daumier, Jean-Francois Millet and Gustav Courbet displayed similar themes in their paintings that mirror this short story throughout the mid-eighteen hundreds. The author also portrays similar morbid themes in other short stories he has written.
I see a connection between The Nose and Overcoat, two short stories written by Gogol, about how cruel and indifferent that people are to each other. In the Overcoat, many people repeatedly tease the main character Akaky for the way he dresses. In The Nose Gogol writes about how Kolaylov is so obsessed with regaining his status (through finding his nose), that he pushes through suffering and injured women outside of a Cathedral to find it. Both of these instances reveal the cruelty that occurs within society.
Overall there are many themes that are displayed in The Nose, and I really enjoyed how they were all represented and symbolized.
Homage to Gogol. Design for curtain for Gogol festival., 1917
2017/12/05 - The author's observations on the great nineteenth-century Russian writers—
果戈里全集 有，河北教育出版社的七卷本，
安徽文艺出版社(九卷本 1999)
【本書目錄】狄康卡近郊夜話
總序一
總序二
第一卷 狄康卡近郊夜話
第二卷 米爾戈羅德
第三卷 彼得堡故事及其他
第四卷 死魂靈
第五卷 戲劇卷
第六卷 與友人書簡選
第七卷 文論卷
第八卷 書信卷
附卷 生活中的理戈理
米爾戈羅德
第一部
舊式地主
塔拉斯·布利巴
第二部
維
伊萬·伊萬諾維奇與伊萬·尼基福羅維奇吵架的故事
彼得堡故事及其他
死魂靈
戲劇卷
與友人書簡選
文論卷
書信卷
附卷 生活中的果戈理
For the Soviet sprint canoer, see Nikolay Gogol (canoer).
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845 by Sergei Lvovich Levitsky (1819-1898)
| Born | 31 March 1809[1] Sorochyntsi, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) |
|---|---|
| Died | 4 March 1852 (aged 42) Moscow, Russian Empire (now Russian Federation) |
| Occupation | Playwright, short story writer and novelist |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Ethnicity | Ukrainian |
| Period | 1840-1851 |
Influences
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Influenced
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| Signature |  |
He is considered the father of modern Russian realism, but at the same time, his work is very much in the genre of romanticism. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and identity.[3][4] His more mature writing satirised the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire, leading to his exile. On his return, he immersed himself in the Orthodox Church.[5] The novels Taras Bul'ba (1835; 1842 [revised edition]) and Dead Souls (1842), the play The Inspector-General (1836, 1842), and the short stories Diary of a Madman, The Nose and The Overcoat (1842) are among his best known works. With their scrupulous and scathing realism, ethical criticism as well as philosophical depth, they remain some of the most important works of world literature.
Contents [hide]
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Provenance and early life
Gogol was born[6] in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, present-day Ukraine. His mother was a descendant of Polish nobility. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks, belonged to the petty gentry, wrote poetry in Russian and Ukrainian, and was an amateur Ukrainian-language playwright who died when Gogol was 15 years old. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the family spoke Russian as well as Ukrainian. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncle's home theater.[7]In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not very popular among his schoolmates, who called him their "mysterious dwarf", but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed an extraordinary talent for mimicry which later on made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.
In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to Petersburg, full of vague but glowingly ambitious hopes. He had hoped for literary fame and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life — Ganz Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense, under the name of "V. Alov." The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.
Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story, alongside Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was in touch with the "literary aristocracy", had a story published in Anton Delvig's Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin.
Literary development
In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which "he had no qualifications. He turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. After an introductory lecture made up of brilliant generalizations which the 'historian' had prudently prepared and memorized, he gave up all pretense at erudition and teaching, missed two lectures out of three, and when he did appear, muttered unintelligibly through his teeth. At the final examination, he sat in utter silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache, while another professor interrogated the students."[11] This academic venture proved a failure and he resigned his chair in 1835.
From 1836 to 1848 he lived abroad, travelling throughout Germany and Switzerland. Gogol spent the winter of 1836-1837 in Paris, where he spent time among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, frequently meeting with the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. He eventually settled in Rome. According to Simon Karlinsky (a professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley[12]) Gogol fell in love there with the nobleman Iosif Vielhorsky and started a romantic relationship with him; this is the only documented love affair in his life.[13]
Pushkin's death produced a strong impression on Gogol. His principal work during years following Pushkin's death was the satirical epic Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks — recast Taras Bulba and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage (Zhenitba), wrote the fragment Rome and his most famous short story, The Overcoat.
In 1841 the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under the title, imposed by the censorship, of The Adventures of Chichikov. The book instantly established his reputation as the greatest prose writer in the language.
Creative decline and death
Gogol was buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931, Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery and had his remains transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery.
The first Gogol monument in Moscow was a Symbolist statue on Arbat Square, which represented the sculptor Nikolay Andreyev's idea of Gogol, rather than the real man [15] Unveiled in 1909, the statue was praised by Ilya Repin and Leo Tolstoy as an outstanding projection of Gogol's tortured personality. Stalin did not like it, however; and the statue was replaced by a more orthodox Socialist Realism monument in 1952. It took enormous efforts to save Andreyev's original work from destruction; it now stands in front of the house where Gogol died.[16]
Style
The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision of reality and people. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place. His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things. His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist — which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability — attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality — that seems to beggar the visible world itself.[19]
The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the untranslatable Russian word poshlost', which is perhaps best rendered as "self-satisfied inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society, from rus. "poshlo"- eng. "went." Like Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and romantic illusions. It was he who undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had reigned.[20] "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror."[21] His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum: It is dull in this world, gentlemen!
Politics
Gogol was stunned when The Inspector-General came to be interpreted by many, despite Nicholas I's warm reception, as an indictment of Russian social institutions. Gogol himself was a political and religious conservative in the vein of Dostoyevsky.Influence and interpretations
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 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 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.[25] 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.[26]
Despite his problematic portrayal of Jewish characters, Gogol left a powerful impression even on Jewish writers who inherited his literary legacy. Amelia Glaser has noted the influence of Gogol's literary innovations on Sholem Aleichem, who "chose to model much of his writing, and even his appearance, on Gogol... What Sholem Aleichem was borrowing from Gogol was a rural East European landscape that may have been dangerous, but could unite readers through the power of collective memory. He also learned from Gogol to soften this danger through laughter, and he often rewrites Gogol's Jewish characters, correcting anti-Semitic stereotypes and narrating history from a Jewish perspective."[30]
Gogol in popular culture
- Gogol has been featured many times on Russian and Soviet postage stamps; he is also well-represented on stamps worldwide.[31][32][33][34][35]
- Several commemorative coins have been issued from Russia and the USSR. On March 19, 2009, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Gogol.[36]
- Streets have been named after Gogol in Moscow, Lipetsk, Odessa, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk, Riga, Bratislava and many other towns and cities.
- Gogol is referenced multiple times in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Chekhov's The Seagull.
- More than 35 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent being Taras Bulba (2008).
- BBC Radio 4 made a series of six Gogol short stories entitled Three Ivans Two Aunts and an Overcoat (2002, adaptations by Jim Poyser).
- In music, the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is named lovingly after Gogol. A song by Joy Division, "Dead Souls" (1980), is named after his novel.
- In popular fiction, James Bond's unreproachable yet unlovable competitor (and occasional ally) is lent a distinguished air by his name, Anatol Gogol.
- A main character is evocatively named Gogol in "The Namesake" (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri.
- Gogolfest is the annual multidisciplinary international festival of contemporary art held in Kiev, Ukraine.
- Gogol is mentioned in Adventureland_(film) as one character's favorite novelist.
See also
Notes and references
- ^ Some sources indicate he was born 20 March/1 April 1809.
- ^ a b "Nikolay Gogol". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037198. Retrieved 2007-12-25.
- ^ Oleh Ilnytzkyj: "The Nationalism of Nikolai Gogol': Betwixt and Between?" in Canadian Slavonic Papers Sep-Dec 2007. Retrieved 2008-06-15.
- ^ Paul A. Karpuk. Gogol's Research on Ukrainian Customs for the Dikan'ka Tales. Russian Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 1997), pp. 209-232
- ^ Nikolai Gogol - Britannica Student Encyclopaedia
- ^ The Birth of Nikolai Gogol, History Today
- ^ Edyta Bojanowska. 2007). Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
- ^ a b Edyta M. Bojanowska. (2007). Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 78-88
- ^ Luckyj, G. (1998). The Anguish of Mykola Hohol, a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press. p. 67. ISBN 1-55130-107-5.
- ^ Welcome to Ukraine
- ^ Lindstrom, T. (1966). A Concise History of Russian Literature Volume I from the Beginnings to Checkhov. New York: New York University Press. p. 131.
- ^ [http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-simon-karlinsky29-2009jul29,0,7744948.story Simon Karlinsky dies at 84; expert on Slavic languages and literature], L.A. Times (July 28, 2009)
- ^ Karlinsky, S. (1992). The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- ^ Gogol declared that "the subject of Dead Souls has nothing to do with the description of Russian provincial life or of a few revolting landowners. It is for the time being a secret which must suddenly and to the amazement of everyone (for as yet none of my readers has guessed it) be revealed in the following volumes..."
- ^ Российское образование. Федеральный образовательный портал: учреждения, программы, стандарты, ВУЗы, тесты ЕГЭ. (Russian)
- ^ For a full story and illustrations, see Российское образование. Федеральный образовательный портал: учреждения, программы, стандарты, ВУЗы, тесты ЕГЭ. (Russian) and Москва и москвичи (Russian)
- ^ Gogol's originality does not mean that numerous influences cannot be discerned in his work. The principle of these are: the tradition of the Ukrainian folk and puppet theatre, with which the plays of Gogol's father were closely linked; the heroic poetry of the Cossack ballads (dumy), the Iliad in the Russian version by Gnedich; the numerous and mixed traditions of comic writing from Molière to the vaudevillians of the 1820s; the picaresque novel from Lesage to Narezhny; Sterne, chiefly through the medium of German romanticism; the German romanticists themselves (especially Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann); the French tradition of Gothic romance — a long and yet incomplete list.
- ^ D.S. Mirsky. A History of Russian Literature. Northwestern University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8101-1679-0. Page 155.
- ^ Mirsky, pg. 149
- ^ According to some critics, Gogol's grotesque is a "means of estranging, a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality." See: Fusso, Susanne. Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word. Northwestern University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8101-1191-8. Page 55.
- ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2005. Article "Russian literature."
- ^ "The structure of the stories themselves seemed especially unskilful and clumsy to me; in one story I noted excess and verbosity, and an absence of simplicity in the style". Quoted by Vasily Gippius in his monograph Gogol (Duke University Press, 1989, page 166).
- ^ The latest edition of the Britannica labels Gogol "one of the finest comic authors of world literature and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer." See under "Russian literature."
- ^ 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).
- ^ Gogol Suite, CD Universe
- ^ ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk) (German)
- ^ Vladim Joseph Rossman, Vadim Rossman, Vidal Sassoon. Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era. p. 64. University of Nebraska Press. Google.com
- ^ Antisemitism in Literature and in the Arts
- ^ Leon Poliakov. The History of Antisemitism. p. 75. University of Pennsylvania Press, Google.com
- ^ Amelia Glaser. "Sholem Aleichem, Gogol Show Two Views of Shtetl Jews." The Jewish Journal, 2009. Journal: Jewish News, Events, Los Angeles
- ^ "2009. Апрель, 1. 200 лет со дня рождения Н. В. Гоголя (1809—1852), писателя". Каталог почтовых марок. Издательско-торговый центр «Марка». http://www.marka-art.ru/catalogs/StampSeries.jsp?id=11543339. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
- ^ "2009. Апрель, 1. 200 лет со дня рождения Н. В. Гоголя (1809—1852), писателя". Каталог почтовых марок. Издательско-торговый центр «Марка». http://www.marka-art.ru/catalogs/StampSeries.jsp?id=11543433. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
- ^ "К 200-летию со дня рождения Н. В. Гоголя выпущены почтовые блоки". Новости. Управление федеральной почтовой связи Красноярского края — филиал ФГУП «Почта России». http://www.kraspost.ru/node/1357. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
- ^ "Зчіпка 200-річчя від дня народження Миколи Гоголя (1809—1852)" (in uk). Марки. Дирекція розроблення знаків поштової оплати. http://www.stamp.kiev.ua/ukr/stamp/observe.php?coupl_id=104. Retrieved 2009-04-03.[dead link]
- ^ "Украина готовится достойно отметить 200-летие Николая Гоголя". Новости. Отпуск.com. 2006-08-28. http://www.otpusk.com/news/17064.html. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
- ^ Events by themes: NBU presented an anniversary coin «Nikolay Gogol» from series "Personages of Ukraine", UNIAN-photo service (March 19, 2009)
External links
 | Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nikolai Gogol |
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nikolai Gogol |
 | Wikisource has original works written by or about: Nikolai Gogol |
- Works by Nikolai Gogol at Project Gutenberg
- Full collection of Nikolai Gogol works
- Some works by Nikolai Gogol in the original Russian
- Gogol, a genius of Ukrainian descent
- A nonmainstream, Ukrainian Perspective on Gogol's national identity and its impact on his works
- Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Gogol and his work
- Bio
- Nikolay Gogol in Encyclopædia Britannica
- Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05.
- GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH (1809—1852) in 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
- Works by or about Nikolai Gogol in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Film about Nikolai Gogol
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