Nikolai Gogol

Reading notes

• Reading (A Tale of an Old Sparrow) §8 Gogolian types

  Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), whose satirical portraits of petty officials in works like \emph{Dead Souls} and \emph{The Government Inspector} had become a byword for the absurd, small-minded civil servant -- the very figure Semipalatov claims to have found in Merdyaev.

• Ivan Matveich §53 Gogol

  Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), by the 1880s a canonical fixture of the Russian school curriculum; the scholar's shock that Ivan Matveich has never read him marks just how far outside genteel, educated society the young copyist stands.

• From the Notebook of Ivan Ivanych (Thoughts and Notes) §8 Gogol

  Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), whose satires of Russian officialdom made bribe-taking bureaucrats a familiar target. He is credited here, dubiously, with blaming officials' wives for their husbands' bribes.

• A Goat, or a Scoundrel? §2 Gogol's

  Nikolai Gogol, whose comic prose Chekhov invokes here for its stock type of the elderly philandering minor gentleman ('mousy young stud').

• Before the Wedding §6 Gogol's

  Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), Russian writer whose story "The Overcoat" gave Russian literature its archetype of the humiliated petty clerk -- the same rank borne by the bride's father here.

• To the Chekhovs, 11 May 1887. Taganrog. §4 Gogol's Mirgorod

  Mirgorod, the small Ukrainian provincial town that gives its name to Gogol's 1835 story collection, was a byword in Russian letters for backwater provincial life; Chekhov invokes it to place Slavyansk on the same comic map of sleepy, self-satisfied small towns.

• To N. A. Leikin, 15 November 1887. Moscow. §3 how furious Gogol used to get

  Nikolai Gogol, invoked as the classic precedent for a playwright's stormy involvement in the staging of his own work -- Chekhov's closing rhetorical proof that authorial interference is neither new nor improper.

• To D. V. Grigorovich, 5 February 1888. Moscow. §4 Gogol, in the next world, will be angry with me

  Nikolai Gogol, whose own steppe writing (notably in "Taras Bulba") made the subject feel like his literary territory; Chekhov's half-joking fear of trespass plays on Gogol's towering reputation as, in his words, "the tsar of the steppe."

• To M. P. Chekhova, 14 July 1888. Feodosia. §3 Gogol's "A Terrible Vengeance"

  Gogol's 1832 tale of dark Ukrainian folklore and sorcery, collected in \textit{Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka}; Chekhov invokes its brooding, uncanny atmosphere to describe the moonlit ravines and tunnels above Simferopol.

• To A. S. Suvorin, May 1889. Sumy. §5 how spontaneous, how powerful Gogol is

  Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, praised here in direct contrast to the preceding demolition of Goncharov; called "the greatest Russian writer."

• To A. S. Suvorin, 30 November 1891. Moscow. §6 Boborykin waves both hands at Gogol and refuses to consider him the forefather of Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy

  The specific point of literary-historical dispute recounted here: Boborykin's theory of a "physiology of the Russian novel" apparently excluded Gogol from the genetic line running through Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy, treating him instead as a figure standing apart, outside the channel (\textit{вне русла}) of the novel's natural development -- a classificatory move Chekhov finds simply incoherent given his own naturalistic view that everything in nature, and by extension in literary history, influences everything else.

• Talent §17 he had once meant to read Gogol, but fell asleep on the second page

  Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was one of the most celebrated writers in the Russian canon; Yegor Savvich's failure to get past page two of him -- while still fantasizing about his own future fame -- is the story's sharpest, quietest joke about the gap between his ambition and his actual culture.

• Three Sisters §429 Gogol says it

  Masha quotes (loosely) a line associated with Nikolai Gogol -- "it's dull to live in this world, gentlemen," the closing line of his story "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" -- as an offhand expression of her own boredom.

• The Vaudeville §91 the Gogols and the Krylovs

  Zamazurin's put-down of Klochkov's literary pretensions, naming two towering, thoroughly canonical figures of Russian letters -- Nikolai Gogol and the fabulist Ivan Krylov -- to measure how absurdly far above his amateur station Klochkov is reaching.

• A Living Chronology §2 a la "Ukrainian night"

  An allusion to the famous opening of Gogol's story "A May Night, or the Drowned Maiden" ("Do you know a Ukrainian night?"), invoked here to mock-elevate the room's cheap green lamplight into a literary tableau.