Nikolai Gogol’s plays, short stories and novels have a secure place amongst the great masterpieces of Russian realist literature, regularly illustrated by stamps.
The most often commemorated work is the 1836 satirical drama Revizor, a tale apparently outlined to Gogol by Pushkin himself. It is known in the west as The Government Inspector, and depicts what happened when the incompetent officials of a small town believe that an inspector of administration has arrived secretly in their small town. They are of course misguided and lavish their praise and resources on the wrong man, a passing and impecunious clerk called Hlestakov, who milks his good fortune for as long as he can. Then the real inspector arrives!
Gogol had previously published two collections of short stories one of which contained a very long tale called Taras Bulba, about Cossack life in the Sixteenth Century and he went on to develop this into a novel, published in 1842 and shown on USSR 1952 and Russia 2009.
However Gogol is better known for his picaresque novel Dead Souls (1842) about an ambitious, unscrupulous and shrewd adventurer called Chichikov who goes around buying up entitlement to serfs, who have in fact passed on. From this dishonest practice he hopes to raise loans to buy property with “live souls”! The novel permits Gogol to comment at length on the degrading influence of serfdom and contains many witty sayings which are still in use today. USSR 1952 shows Gogol himself lending a sympathetic ear to a group of Ukrainian peasants.
A scene from Dead Souls appears within the 2009 Russian souvenir sheet, which is completed with a scene from The Overcoat or The Cloak, also 1842, a short story about an overworked clerk who is the victim of social injustice, so influential that Dostoyevsky acknowledged the power it had over his writing by saying, “We all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat”.
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.