Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word

Works Cited in Introduction

Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer audience. The result is a rereading of Akakii Akakievich's role in "The Overcoat." Criticism has continually wrestled with the problem of Gogolian nonsense, whether that refers to the absurd surrealism of the tales or to the incomprehensibility of his more publicistic work, and the definition of the genre of the latter is itself problematic. Gary Saul Morson 's essay contends that GogoI's "nonsense" is devised precisely to reject systematization. Showing how Gogol establishes categories only to deny their validity, Morson goes against the current of "semiotic totalitarianism" that would establish a system of meaning for all of culture and proposes instead the accumulation of detail for each text, each life, as a method of interpretation, a method he calls "prosaics." He reads Dead Souls as a hermeneutic parable whose hero is the process of explanation itself, and "The Nose" as designed to resist any interpretation whatsoever. Two other theoretical essays also examine GogoI's "nonsense": both take as their text the Selected Passages. Alexander Zholkovsky proposes using Susan Sontag's idea of"camp" to analyze GogoI's collection , which he calls a miswritten book, a failed piece of journalism that should best be read as a form of popular fiction; Stanley Rabinowitz and Frederick Griffiths, using Bakhtin's concept of polyphony, accuse Gogol of resorting to the monologic discourse of Bakhtin's "totalitarian epic" as a means of justifying himself as a writer and spiritual teacher while blaming his audience for his failure. Rabinowitz and Griffiths and Zholkovsky agree with GogoI's idea, voiced in a letter to Zhukovskii, that he has become one of his own characters; in Selected Passages, he is seen as suffering the delusions of grandeur of Poprishchin. Cathy Popkin also identifies Gogol with his characters, as endless word gluttons filling the page and derailing the argument with digressions that frustrate the reader in the manner of Jean Paul. The critical essays dwell on the nonsensicality of GogoI's work, while the close readings examine the relationship of GogoI's religious philosophy to his literary creation. The portrait of the artist that emerges is of a much more conscious thinker than scholars, dazzled by GogoI's nonsense, have typically taken him to be. In touching up GogoI's rather unflattering portrait, the present collection may uncover hitherto hidden features of the author's thought and suggest rewarding new lines of investigation. WORKS CITED IN INTRODUCTION Altshuller, Mark. "The Walter Scott Motifs in Nikolay Gogol's Story The Lost Letter." Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s., 22 (1989): 81-88. 8 Introduction Bernheimer, Charles C. "Cloaking the Self: The Literary Space of GogoI's 'Overcoat.'" PMLA 90 (1975): 53-61. Bibikhin, B. B., R. A. Gal'tseva, and I. B. Rodnianskaia. "Literaturnaia mysI' zapada pered 'zagadkoi Gogolia.' " In Gogol': Istoriia i sovremennost' (k 175-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia), edited by V. V. Kozhinov et aI., pp. 390-433. Moscow, 1985. (Reprinted from Voprosy literatury, 1984, no. 3: 126-61.) Bocharov, S. G. "0 stile Gogolia." In Teoriia literaturnykh stilei: Tipologiia stilevogo razvitiia novogo vremeni: Klassicheskii stil', edited by N. K. Gei et aI., pp. 409-45. Moscow, 1976. ___ . "Perekhod ot Gogolia k Dostoevskomu." In his 0 khudozhestvennykh mirakh, pp. 161-209. Moscow, 1985. ___ . "Zagadka 'Nosa' i taina litsa." In his 0 khudozhestvennykh mirakh, pp. 124-60. Moscow, 1985. (Reprinted in Gogol': Istoriia i sovremennost' [k 175-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia], edited by v. V. Kozhinov et aI., pp. 180-212. Moscow, 1985.) Bowie, Robert. "Nabokov's Influence on GogoI." Journal ofModern Literature 13 (1986): 251-66. Chebotareva, V. A. "0 gogolevskikh traditsiiakh v proze M. Bulgakova ." Russkaia literatura, 1984, no. 1: 166-76. Chudakova, M. O. "GogoI' i Bulgakov." In Gogol': Istoriia i sovremennost' (k 175-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia), edited by V. V. Kozhinov et aI., pp. 360-88. Moscow, 1985. Cox, Gary. "Geographic, Sociological, and Sexual Tensions in GogoI's Dikan'ka Stories." Slavic and East European Journal 24 (1980): 219-32. ___ . "The Writer as a Stand-up Comic: A Note on Gogol and Dickens." Ulbandus Review, no. 2 (1979): 45-61. Debeaux, Anne. "Les ames mortes ou Ie roman inacheve." Europe 648 (1983): 170-76. Deutsch, Judith. "The Zaporozian Cossacks of Nikolay GogoI': An Approach to God and Man." Russian Literature 22 (1987): 359-77. Eremina, L. I. 0 iazyke khudozhestvennoi prozy N. V Gogolia. Moscow , 1987. Fanger, Donald. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. ___ . Review of William Mills...