Before I’d ever heard of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), Russia was just a big country on the other side of the world known for its uncanny ability to produce vodka and hockey players with impossibly long surnames. As soon as I read a story or two of Gogol’s, I wanted to find out as much as I could about Russia, the setting for most of Gogol’s short stories and his masterpiece, a novel called Dead Souls.
I first read Gogol about five years ago, and I’ve had a bad case of Russophilia ever since.
So why do I think all you travelers out there in Gadlingland will fall in love with this old Russian geezer from the early 19th Century? Quite simply, because of his novel Dead Souls, a hilarious account of a swindler’s journey through provincial Russia. In between humorous yet scathing criticisms of the Russian ruling class and meditations on the essence of the Russian character, Gogol discusses the healing, restorative power of travel. When one character, suffering from malaise and stagnation, seeks the advice of a friend, his friend responds:
“I am beginning to think that a journey might shake you up. Your trouble is a sleepy soul. You have quite simply fallen asleep– and you have fallen asleep not out of any satiety or weariness, but from the lack of any vivid impressions or sensations.”
In other words, seeing somewhere new wakes you up to the joys of life. Isn’t that why we all travel?
Gogol wrote mostly short stories, and one of his most well-known is “The Nose,” in which a Russian official’s nose disappears from his face and reappears in a neighbor’s loaf of bread. Eventually, the nose is seen walking around the streets of St. Petersburg, and finally, for no apparent reason, the nose reappears back on the man’s face.
Gogol ends the story by chiding the narrator for telling such an absurd tale: “But what is stranger, what is more incomprehensible than anything is that authors can choose such subjects. I confess that it is quite beyond my grasp, it really is… It is absolutely without profit to our country.” Finally, Gogol admits that maybe the story had a point after all: “And yet, in spite of it all… are there not absurd things everywhere? When you think it over, there really is something in it. Despite what anyone may say, such things do happen– not often, but they do happen.”
Some of Gogol’s other well-known works are a play called The Government Inspector, and “The Overcoat,” a short story. In fact, Dostoyevsky once famously praised Gogol, saying that later Russian writers “all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat.”
Gogol, in my opinion, is a criminally underrated author, and I strongly recommend him to Russophiles such as myself, and to all those interested in Russia. His writing is always perceptive, often hilarious, and never dull.