Who is gogol

General and typical failings of humanity are embodied in the types that Chichikov meets on his journey. Chichikov himself is the personification of banality and lack of character. The picture that Gogol paints of provincial Russia is one of oppressive banality, stupidity, and corruption.

It has had an enormous influence on the subsequent development of Russian fiction. The plot is about an insignificant copying clerk who saves up for an overcoat which is stolen from him on the first day of possession. Shortly after the theft the clerk falls ill and dies.

The bold intention to continue Dead Souls was never realized, for Gogol burned most of the second part, and what he left is markedly inferior to the first part. Gogol became progressively convinced that he had the duty to use his art for the betterment of humanity. His moralizing tendencies are seen in the volume he published on Dec. During the course of the s Gogol became more and more convinced that he must purify his own soul, and he came increasingly under the influence of the clergy.

He made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Spring of During the last 9 months of his life, his health deteriorated and he suffered from severe depression. The priest Matthew Konstantinovsky, a strong and intolerant person, gained considerable influence over Gogol's mind and persuaded him to fast more severely than was good for Gogol's weakened constitution.

Gogol died on Feb. Translations of Gogol's works are available in many editions. Bernard Guilbert Guerney's translations are recommended. David Magarshack, Gogol: A Life , is a competent and interesting critical biography.

Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol , is an amusing and entertaining analysis of some aspects of Gogol's work, while Vsevolod Setchkarev, Gogol: His Life and Works, translated by Robert Kramer , is a sober and trustworthy analysis of individual works. The family spoke both Ukrainian and Russian at home, and Gogol would later make a conscious choice to pursue a literary career in Russian rather than Ukrainian.

He was educated at the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in Nezhyn, a school founded as part of Alexander I's education reforms. On leaving school in , he moved to St. Petersburg with high ambitions of becoming a famous writer. The work was rejected and derided by all, and Gogol bought up and burnt all the copies, swearing never to write poetry again.

He turned instead to prose, producing a series of tales set in the Ukrainian countryside, mostly comic, sentimental and occasionally macabre. These met with instant success, and were published in two volumes under the title Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka in and Gogol's work was strongly supported by the leading lights of the St.

Petersburg literary scene, including Vasiliy Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and even Alexander Pushkin, who he met in and formed a frienship with. His Ukrainian pastoral period continued with the two volumes of Mirgorod , published in , but in the same year he also published the collection Arabesques , which contained stories set in St. Petersburg and included the classic Nevsky Prospekt and Diary of a Madman.

These stories began to explore the themes of alienation and mental instability, set against the fripperies of fashionable life and the Byzantine inhumanity of the state's bureaucracy, that he would further develop in his most famous stories, The Nose and The Overcoat Through these romantic relationships, then, Gogol tests out different identities, different ways of relating to himself and his family, over time.

SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. Important Quotes Explained. Blood drenched his chest and the left arm of his shirt. He had been thrust partway out the window. He remembers the acrid odor of flames, the buzzing of flies, children crying, the taste of dust and blood on his tongue. They were nowhere, somewhere in a field. Milling about them were villagers, police inspectors, a few doctors. He remembers believing that he was dying, that perhaps he was already dead.

He could not feel the lower half of his body, and so was unaware that the mangled limbs of Ghosh were draped over his legs. Eventually he saw the cold, unfriendly blue of earliest morning, the moon and a few stars still lingering in the sky. The pages of his book, which had been tossed from his hand, fluttered in two sections a few feet away from the train.

The glare from a search lantern briefly caught the pages, momentarily distracting one of the rescuers. I saw him move. He was pulled from the wreckage, placed on a stretcher, transported on another train to a hospital in Tatanagar.

He had broken his pelvis, his right femur, and three of his ribs on the right side. For the next year of his life he lay flat on his back, ordered to keep as still as possible while the bones of his body healed. There was a risk that his right leg might be permanently paralyzed. He was transferred to Calcutta Medical College, where two screws were put into his hips.

Three times a day he was spoon-fed. He urinated and defecated into a tin pan. Doctors and visitors came and went. Even his blind grandfather from Jamshedpur paid a visit.

His family had saved the newspaper accounts. In a photograph, Ashoke observed the train smashed to shards, piled jaggedly against the sky, security guards sitting on the unclaimed belongings. He learned that fishplates and bolts had been found several feet from the main track, giving rise to the suspicion, never subsequently confirmed, of sabotage. During the day he was groggy from painkillers. At night he dreamed either that he was still trapped inside the train or, worse, that the accident had never happened, that he was walking down a street, taking a bath, sitting cross-legged on the floor and eating a plate of food.

And then he would wake up, coated in sweat, tears streaming down his face, convinced that he would never live to do such things again. Eventually, in an attempt to avoid his nightmares, he began to read, late at night, which was when his motionless body felt most restless, his mind agile and clear. Yet he refused to read the Russians his grandfather had brought to his bedside, or any novels, for that matter.

Those books, set in countries he had never seen, reminded him only of his confinement. Instead he read his engineering books, trying his best to keep up with his courses, solving equations by flashlight. In those silent hours, he thought often of Ghosh. He remembered the address Ghosh had written, somewhere behind the tram depot in Tollygunge.

Now it was the home of a widow, a fatherless son. Each day, to bolster his spirits, his family reminded him of the future, the day he would stand unassisted, walk across the room. It was for this, each day, that his father and mother prayed. But, as the months passed, Ashoke began to envision another sort of future. He imagined not only walking, but walking away, as far as he could, from the place where he was born and where he had nearly died. The following year, walking with a cane, he returned to college and graduated, and without telling his parents he applied to continue his engineering studies abroad.

His siblings had pleaded and wept. His mother, speechless, had refused food for three days. Seven years later, there are still certain images that wipe him flat. They lurk around a corner as he rushes through the engineering department at M. At every turning point in his life—at his wedding, in Calcutta, when he stood behind Ashima, encircling her waist and peering over her shoulder as they poured puffed rice into a fire, or during his first hours in America, seeing a small gray city caked with snow—he has tried but failed to push these images away: the twisted, battered, capsized bogies of the train, his body twisted below it, the terrible crunching sound he had heard but not comprehended, his bones crushed as fine as flour.

It is not the memory of pain that haunts him; he has no memory of that. It is the memory of waiting before he was rescued, and the persistent fear, rising up in his throat, that he might not have been rescued at all.

At times he still presses his ribs to make sure they are solid. He presses them now, in the hospital, shaking his head in relief, disbelief. Although it is Ashima who carries the child, he, too, feels heavy, with the thought of life, of his life and the life about to come from it.

He was raised without running water, nearly killed at twenty-two. He was born twice in India, and then a third time, in America. Three lives by thirty. For this he thanks his parents, and their parents, and the parents of their parents. He does not thank God; he openly reveres Marx and quietly refuses religion.

Instead of thanking God he thanks Gogol, the Russian writer who had saved his life, when the nurse enters the waiting room. The baby, a boy, is born at half past five in the morning. He measures twenty inches long, weighs seven pounds nine ounces. Her skin is faintly yellow, the color missing from her lips.

She has circles beneath her eyes, and her hair, spilling from its braid, looks as though it had not been combed for days. In the process, the child pierces the silence in the room with a short-lived cry. His parents react with mutual alarm, but the nurse laughs approvingly. At first Ashoke is more perplexed than moved, by the pointiness of the head, the puffiness of the lids, the small white spots on the cheeks, the fleshy upper lip that droops prominently over the lower one.

The scalp is covered by a mass of wispy black hair. He attempts to count the eyelashes. He feels gently through the flannel for the hands and feet. They sit in silence, the three of them as still as stones. Was it all right? When he looks back to the child, the eyes are open, staring up at him, unblinking, as dark as the hair on its head.

The face is transformed; Ashoke has never seen a more perfect thing. He imagines himself as a dark, grainy, blurry presence. As a father to his son. Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second. The letter contains one name for a girl, one for a boy.

Though the letter was sent a month ago, in July, it has yet to arrive. Ashima and Ashoke are not terribly concerned. He needs to be fed and blessed, to be given some gold and silver, to be patted on the back after feedings and held carefully behind the neck.

Names can wait. In India parents take their time. Ashima and Ashoke can both cite examples of cousins who were not officially named until they were registered, at six or seven, in school. Besides, there are always pet names to tide one over: a practice of Bengali nomenclature grants, to every single person, two names.

Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. Consequently, good names appear on envelopes, on diplomas, in telephone directories, and in all other public places. Good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened qualities. They are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered.

Three days come and go. Ashima is shown by the nursing staff how to change diapers and how to clean the umbilical stub. She is given hot saltwater baths to soothe her bruises and stitches. She is given a list of pediatricians, and countless brochures on breast-feeding and bonding and immunizing, and samples of baby shampoos and Q-Tips and creams. The fourth day there is good news and bad news.

The good news is that Ashima and the baby are to be discharged the following morning. The bad news is that they are told by Mr. Wilcox, compiler of hospital birth certificates, that they must choose a name for their son. For they learn that in America a baby cannot be released from the hospital without a birth certificate.

And that a birth certificate needs a name. Wilcox, slight, bald, unamused, glances at the couple, both visibly distressed, then glances at the nameless child. Wilcox says again. Wilcox says. The red tape is endless. Wilcox nods, and silence ensues. Ashima and Ashoke shake their heads. This sign of respect in America and Europe, this symbol of heritage and lineage, would be ridiculed in India. Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred, inviolable.

They are not meant to be inherited or shared. Someone you greatly admire? Wilcox says, his eyebrows raised hopefully. He sighs. The baby turns his head with an expression of extreme consternation and yawns. But the thought of it now makes her blood go cold. She has never read any Gogol herself, but she is willing to place him on a shelf in her mind, along with Tennyson and Wordsworth. When Mr.

Wilcox returns with his typewriter, Ashoke spells out the name.