His response was worthy of a great Russian satirist -- a Gogol or a Bulgakov perhaps.
Gogol's scenes light up their surroundings, his characters flame into life, his tragicomic vision touches the reader's heart.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
The exploitation of dead people for personal profit is the theme of Dead Souls, a 19th-Century Russian classic by Nikolai Gogol.
Late in his short life, Gogol found religion and promptly lost art.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
In the graphic work he did between the wars for his dealer-friend, Ambroise Vollard illustrations to Gogol, La Fontaine and the Bible grace intermittently returns.
One of life's "acquirers" for Gogol, a major sin Chichikov turns out to be an inept acquirer, which makes him quite as interesting as he is detestable.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
Although Gogol writes that "we have not taken a virtuous man as our hero, " he has made Chichikov, though vile and petty in so many ways, oddly sympathetic.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
Chichikov, the character at the heart of Gogol's masterpiece, is a lower-echelon civil servant with a corrupt past who specializes in what Gogol calls "blandiloquence, " or elaborately empty compliments.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
In his brief, brilliant study "Nikolai Gogol, " Vladimir Nabokov accounts for Gogol's artistry through this and what he calls Gogol's "four dimensional" prose, a sinuous style that captures characters in their inner being.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
Keldysh recited a poem in Russian, Mstislav made a joke about Gogol, then we sealed up this weird stew with cheesecloth mesh, as we do the rest of the topsoil, to keep it from absconding in the zero-G.
"Dead Souls, " meanwhile, is among that small number of uncompleted masterpieces that includes Tchaikovsky's Unfinished Symphony, and Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities, " but with the important qualification that Nikolai Gogol's great work is all the better for remaining unfinished.
WSJ: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | By Joseph Epstein
The members of the group, which includes an urbane young doctor, a vain and verbose prosecutor, a Gogol-esque clerk with a laptop computer, and a punctilious military officer standing guard, grow increasingly irritable as they slog through lonely and uninviting terrain.
The hero of her tale, Andriy, is played by Eugene Hutz, the explosively hairy front man of a band called Gogol Bordello. (That name itself has more rough poetry than anything in the movie.) Andriy shares an apartment in London with Holly (Holly Weston), a dancer, and Juliette (Vicky McClure), an ordinary kleptomaniac pharmaceutical assistant.
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