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The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol
Through careful textual readings of Gogol's most famous works, Karlinsky argues that Gogol's homosexual orientation—which Gogol himself could not accept or forgive in himself—may provide the missing key to the riddle of Gogol's personality.
"A brilliant new biography that will long be prized for its illuminating psychological insights into Gogol's actions, its informative readings of his fiction and drama, and its own stylistic grace and vivacity."—Edmund White, Washington Post Book World
"A brilliant new biography that will long be prized for its illuminating psychological insights into Gogol's actions, its informative readings of his fiction and drama, and its own stylistic grace and vivacity."—Edmund White, Washington Post Book World
333 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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April 4, 2010Best title ever, no?
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August 24, 2023“Illusion, deception, and mistaken identity were among the basic themes of Gogol's writings and of his life. They remained basic to the way his work was read, understood, and written about after his death.”
October 19, 2026
have i read anything by gogol? no! was i riveted? yes!
i love when a nonfiction writer is clearly so passionate about their topic! i really enjoyed all of karlinsky's opinions and notes on the english translations of gogol's work, and also this:
“Oh, for a time machine that would enable come to go back to Nezhin on that evening in 1827 when the seventeen-year-old Gogol had the earliest triumph of his life playing Mrs. Prostakova!” (13)
i think you're the only one who wants that!
apart from the analysis of how his sexuality impacted his work, i enjoyed learning about the way the general public totally misunderstood his intentions and style! but it seems like they had the same denial about the sexuality in his work as well:
“The Russian custom of considering ‘Nights at the Villa’ a work of imaginative fiction, and of ascribing the loves scenes between men that it contains to sensibilities peculiar to the Romantic age, has its exact parallels in the English tradition of explaining away the similar scenes and sentiments in Shakespeare’s sonnets in terms of Renaissance sensibilities rather than homosexuality. [...] For a commentator of this type, nothing short of an explicit physical seduction will ever qualify as an expression of homosexual sentiment. And yet, were it a question of a relationship between a man and a woman, no one would have dreamt of denying that an attitude that involved love, admiration, and possessiveness constitutes a bone fide heterosexual attachment.” (307)
idk gogol so i don't have much more to say! i really liked the author's writing style, and i loved that he included the names of a few of his students, who taught HIM something about gogol when he was their professor! i also found Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-41 at a bookstore the other day, which karlinsky edited, so i'm very excited to read that at some point
other quotes:
“‘Is it not thus that the playful friends of our free and stormy youth disperse one by one through the world and finally leave their former brother all alone? How dreary it is for the one who is left behind! His heart is heavy and sad and there is no way of helping him.’” (3)
“Ivan’s sudden death during the summer vacation in 1819 must have been a shattering blow to the young Gogol. He kept trying to visit his brother’s grave, talked only of him to other children, and became morose and depressed.” (10)
“Even after becoming one of the most famous writers in Russia, Gogol could never quite reconcile himself to the idea that creative writing was his life’s work. What he really seemed to want was to be in a position of power and influence from which he could direct and instruct his fellow men, aspiring to a career first as a government official, later as a university professor, and ultimately as Russia’s prophet and moral preceptor.” (21-2)
“Nor is there even a tinge of condemnation in Gogol’s depiction of his female narcissists. He finds them amusing, but also congenial and, above all, safe. In Gogol’s world, where women are often ominous and dangerous, a woman who is infatuated with her own image in the mirror is clearly the least demanding and the least manipulative, and therefore the safest choice for a man if he is foolhardy enough to wish to settle down with one.” (39-40)
“After the three initial lectures (on the Middle Ages, on the migration of peoples, and on Arab conquests), which impressed the assembled literary luminaries, among them Pushkin and Zhukovsky, and dazzled his students, among them the future novelist Ivan Turgenev, Gogol seems simply to have run out of both the energy and the interest needed to pursue the profession for which he was so ill-suited. For the rest of the school year he either canceled his lectures or resorted to the same stratagem he had used at his audition with Prince Gagarin – he would appear with a bandaged cheek and, claiming toothache as his excuse, restrict his lecture to a few incoherent remarks.” (52-3)
“Situations in which men employ women for procreative purposes and as mere vehicles for sexual release, while remaining in full control, do not particularly alarm Gogol [...]. It is when the woman is treated as an equal, when she is allowed to get the upper hand, or when the man’s love or desire for her make him lose control that things become unpleasant, unmanageable, and eventually lethal.” (70)
“The description of the embrace and kiss that seal her confession of love must have been embarrassing for Gogol to write, for it contains what is surely his single most awkward lapse: her lips are pressed against Andry’s cheek while he is kissing her mouth, which is said to respond to the kiss – a feat that clearly requires three pairs of lips to accomplish. No such awkwardness occurs in Chapter VIII, where crowds of Cossack men kiss and hold hands with each other prior to splitting their army into two units and separating for a long time.” (85)
“The essays on history, geography, and architecture, when carefully read, spell out Gogol’s political views, which remained unchanged from his adolescence to the time of his death. Victor Erlich has characterized these views as ‘tame, conformist, and officious’ and pointed out that the supreme political concept for Gogol, which took precedence over everything else, was the state, the government (and, one might add, its human embodiment, the tsar), rather than the country, the people, or mankind.” (108)
“To top off this sexual non sequitur, she calls her husband potaskushka, that is, a strumpet or a (female) streetwalker (English translations, by rendering the word as ‘gadabout,’ once again sabotage Gogol’s meaning). (This is not the only instance of an angry character in Gogol reaching or an insult that could only be applied to a person of the opposite sex. Mr. Omelet in Marriage, feeling that his bride has cheated him, asks the matchmaker to tell her she is podlets, that is, a male scoundrel.)” (125-6)
“‘The Overcoat’ is the most perfect artistic embodiment of the two constant, cardinal Gogolian themes: the lethal nature of love and the destructive potential of change – any kind of change. The happiest environments in his work are always the ones in which time stands still and each succeeding generation follows the same familiar and patriarchal mode of existence that the earlier ones did.” (142)
“…Khlestakov’s obsessive flirtations are prompted not by a real desire to seduce a woman or to win her love, but by the need to make conquests he can boast about to his male friends. The point of experiencing love for a woman is not loving a woman but being able to tell a man about it [...] But all Khlestakov wants or needs is the verbal consent of the mayor’s wife to his proposition and of the daughter to his marriage proposal. He certainly does not intend, nor would Gogol have allowed him, to actually carry out any of these amorous plans. The moment his ego is gratified by the women’s verbal acquiescence, he flies off in his troika and disappears from their lives forever.” (165)
“In the next-to-the-last draft of Marriage, Gogol provides an unexpectedly plausible motivation for Podkolyosin’s ambivalent attitude to matrimony by having Kochkaryov tell Agafya: ‘The director of his section, his superior, loves him so much that he sleeps in the very same bed with him.’ Such an open reference to physical homosexuality (offered by Kochkaryov as evidence of Podkolysin’s solvency and job security, with an understandably comic effect) could not possibly have passed the censorship of the time, as Gogol well knew. He deleted this line in the final version, but it is surely interesting that he could not resist putting it down on paper in the first place.” (174-5)
“Elsewhere in the same perceptive essay Fanger points out that ‘Gogol’s few attempts to speak frankly in his letters were all attempts to speak about frankness, and one feels in them the anguished desire of a man bewildered by his own chronic evasions and mimicry to find his “real” voice and discover what it might have to say.” (186)
“‘You into whose hands will fall – if they will fall – these incoherent, feeble lines, pallid expressions of my emotions, you will understand me. Otherwise they will not fall into your hands. You will understand how repulsive the entire heap of treasures and honors is that attracts those wooden dolls which are called people. Oh, with what joy, with what anger I could have trampled underfoot and squashed everything that is bestowed by the mighty scepter of the Tsar of the North, if I only knew that this would buy a smile that indicated the slightest relief on his face.’” (194-5)
“Gogol carried with him his most cherished possession: a bible on which his dying friend had inscribed with trembling hand ‘To my friend Nikolai. Villa Volkonskaya.’” (202)
“He was surprised in his room there one morning by Zhukovsky and Sergei Aksakov, who entered quietly and without knocking. ‘There was Gogol in front of me, wearing the following fantastical costume,’ Aksakov wrote in his memoirs. ‘Instead of boots, he wore long woolen Russian stockings, reaching higher than the knee; instead of a jacket, a velvet spencer worn over a flannel camisole; around his neck was a large multicolored scarf and on his head was a crimson velvet woman’s headdress, embroidered in gold and very similar to the headdresses of Finnish tribeswomen.’ Gogol did not seem to be particularly embarrassed at being caught in this outfit.” (205-6)
“The play [...] offers a view of friendship and companionship between men that is totally new for Gogol. The warm and rewarding camaraderie described in his earlier writings, especially in ‘Taras Bulba,’ becomes in The Gamblers a sham and a pretense, a bait that the other male characters hold out to the protagonist in order to trap and to cheat him. It can hardly have been a coincidence that Gogol conceived this play’s image of friendship between men at this particular juncture of his emotional biography.” (222)
“The next time Chichikov sees the girl is at a ball in her parents’ home. The narrator stutters, digresses, and becomes almost incoherent in his effort to describe the encounter. The reader is not told the subject of their conversation, but gets instead a long list of young women with improbable names to whom Chichikov, we are informed, had spoken of similar things at various times in the past. The girl is so bored that she keeps yawning. Nevertheless, it is implied that in some not entirely clear way Chichikov is attracted to her. This nebulous attraction is enough cause for Gogol to unleash his usual punishment: the governer’s daughter becomes the unwitting agent of Chichikov’s undoing and disgrace.” (227)
“...it was Gogol’s intention to satirize the laxness and inefficiency of these serf owners and their failure to take their obligations to their serfs and their own best economic interests seriously enough. Most of his contemporaries chose to read the book as a merciless indictment of the entire institution of serfdom. They did this, as Donald Fanger has so aptly suggested, because it would not have occurred to any Russian at that point in history to write a satirical book about serf owners and not indict the institution itself. For Gogol, however, serfdom had always been a divinely ordained fact of Russian life which he could not imagine being either abolished or changed.” (234)
“The addressee of ‘The Russian Landowner’ is urged to explain to his peasants that they are serfs because such is the will of God, as expressly stated in the Bible. The landowner requires the serfs to work for him and to support him because this is his religious duty: ‘Tell them then that you force them to labor and work not because you need the money for your own pleasure, and as proof burn some banknotes right before them, so that they may actually see that money is of no concern to you, but that you force them to labor because God has commanded that man earn his bread by toil and sweat [...]’ He ends the essay by citing the passage from Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter wherein the heroine’s mother advises a soldier sent to investigate a fight at the public baths: ‘Be sure to find out who was right and who was wrong and then punish both.’ Pushkin had intended this as an amusing comment on the remoteness from civilization of the fortress in which the action of the book takes place. Gogol, however, who had already quoted this remark in some of his earlier letters, saw in it the very essence of the native Russian sense of justice.” (253-4)
“The Gogolian social system,’ Mochulsky writes, ‘can be represented schematically as a ladder on which all ranks and social classes are deployed. The people on each rung are the fathers of those below them and the children of those above. The flame of love is passed from hand to hand by those below to those above until it finally reaches the throne. On the throne sits the Monarch, who transmits the love of his children upward to God.’” (256)
“The eradication of his inborn passions was one of Gogol’s central preoccupations during the last three years of his life. The pain and difficulty of his constant inner struggled can be seen from the two undated entires made in his notebooks shortly after his return from Jerusalem: ‘Look and admire the beauty of your soul, false witness, perjurer, the greatest violator of law and sanctity who ever lived, you who hope to be a Christian and cannot sacrifice the earthly dust for the heavenly…’” (270)
“The following revealing statement by Eric Bently seems to suggest a possible psychological motivation for Gogol’s selection of Yazykov as the object of his affections: ‘Thus when a man is attracted by a man, but fears to be considered homosexual, and therefore makes the assumption that he is heterosexual – it is ‘normal’ to be heterosexual and he considers himself to be ‘normal’ – he is forced by his own logic to believe that the attraction is not homosexual. [...] ‘Since the man who attracts me isn’t gay, it is clear that it isn’t the gay thing that interests me. He and I are special. An exception. No -ism, no -ity can define us. We just are. We just love. [...] As a stalling operation it is of course successful. The affair with a straight man is bound to fail, and this any possible coming to terms with homosexuality is shelved.’” (308)
i love when a nonfiction writer is clearly so passionate about their topic! i really enjoyed all of karlinsky's opinions and notes on the english translations of gogol's work, and also this:
“Oh, for a time machine that would enable come to go back to Nezhin on that evening in 1827 when the seventeen-year-old Gogol had the earliest triumph of his life playing Mrs. Prostakova!” (13)
i think you're the only one who wants that!
apart from the analysis of how his sexuality impacted his work, i enjoyed learning about the way the general public totally misunderstood his intentions and style! but it seems like they had the same denial about the sexuality in his work as well:
“The Russian custom of considering ‘Nights at the Villa’ a work of imaginative fiction, and of ascribing the loves scenes between men that it contains to sensibilities peculiar to the Romantic age, has its exact parallels in the English tradition of explaining away the similar scenes and sentiments in Shakespeare’s sonnets in terms of Renaissance sensibilities rather than homosexuality. [...] For a commentator of this type, nothing short of an explicit physical seduction will ever qualify as an expression of homosexual sentiment. And yet, were it a question of a relationship between a man and a woman, no one would have dreamt of denying that an attitude that involved love, admiration, and possessiveness constitutes a bone fide heterosexual attachment.” (307)
idk gogol so i don't have much more to say! i really liked the author's writing style, and i loved that he included the names of a few of his students, who taught HIM something about gogol when he was their professor! i also found Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-41 at a bookstore the other day, which karlinsky edited, so i'm very excited to read that at some point
other quotes:
“‘Is it not thus that the playful friends of our free and stormy youth disperse one by one through the world and finally leave their former brother all alone? How dreary it is for the one who is left behind! His heart is heavy and sad and there is no way of helping him.’” (3)
“Ivan’s sudden death during the summer vacation in 1819 must have been a shattering blow to the young Gogol. He kept trying to visit his brother’s grave, talked only of him to other children, and became morose and depressed.” (10)
“Even after becoming one of the most famous writers in Russia, Gogol could never quite reconcile himself to the idea that creative writing was his life’s work. What he really seemed to want was to be in a position of power and influence from which he could direct and instruct his fellow men, aspiring to a career first as a government official, later as a university professor, and ultimately as Russia’s prophet and moral preceptor.” (21-2)
“Nor is there even a tinge of condemnation in Gogol’s depiction of his female narcissists. He finds them amusing, but also congenial and, above all, safe. In Gogol’s world, where women are often ominous and dangerous, a woman who is infatuated with her own image in the mirror is clearly the least demanding and the least manipulative, and therefore the safest choice for a man if he is foolhardy enough to wish to settle down with one.” (39-40)
“After the three initial lectures (on the Middle Ages, on the migration of peoples, and on Arab conquests), which impressed the assembled literary luminaries, among them Pushkin and Zhukovsky, and dazzled his students, among them the future novelist Ivan Turgenev, Gogol seems simply to have run out of both the energy and the interest needed to pursue the profession for which he was so ill-suited. For the rest of the school year he either canceled his lectures or resorted to the same stratagem he had used at his audition with Prince Gagarin – he would appear with a bandaged cheek and, claiming toothache as his excuse, restrict his lecture to a few incoherent remarks.” (52-3)
“Situations in which men employ women for procreative purposes and as mere vehicles for sexual release, while remaining in full control, do not particularly alarm Gogol [...]. It is when the woman is treated as an equal, when she is allowed to get the upper hand, or when the man’s love or desire for her make him lose control that things become unpleasant, unmanageable, and eventually lethal.” (70)
“The description of the embrace and kiss that seal her confession of love must have been embarrassing for Gogol to write, for it contains what is surely his single most awkward lapse: her lips are pressed against Andry’s cheek while he is kissing her mouth, which is said to respond to the kiss – a feat that clearly requires three pairs of lips to accomplish. No such awkwardness occurs in Chapter VIII, where crowds of Cossack men kiss and hold hands with each other prior to splitting their army into two units and separating for a long time.” (85)
“The essays on history, geography, and architecture, when carefully read, spell out Gogol’s political views, which remained unchanged from his adolescence to the time of his death. Victor Erlich has characterized these views as ‘tame, conformist, and officious’ and pointed out that the supreme political concept for Gogol, which took precedence over everything else, was the state, the government (and, one might add, its human embodiment, the tsar), rather than the country, the people, or mankind.” (108)
“To top off this sexual non sequitur, she calls her husband potaskushka, that is, a strumpet or a (female) streetwalker (English translations, by rendering the word as ‘gadabout,’ once again sabotage Gogol’s meaning). (This is not the only instance of an angry character in Gogol reaching or an insult that could only be applied to a person of the opposite sex. Mr. Omelet in Marriage, feeling that his bride has cheated him, asks the matchmaker to tell her she is podlets, that is, a male scoundrel.)” (125-6)
“‘The Overcoat’ is the most perfect artistic embodiment of the two constant, cardinal Gogolian themes: the lethal nature of love and the destructive potential of change – any kind of change. The happiest environments in his work are always the ones in which time stands still and each succeeding generation follows the same familiar and patriarchal mode of existence that the earlier ones did.” (142)
“…Khlestakov’s obsessive flirtations are prompted not by a real desire to seduce a woman or to win her love, but by the need to make conquests he can boast about to his male friends. The point of experiencing love for a woman is not loving a woman but being able to tell a man about it [...] But all Khlestakov wants or needs is the verbal consent of the mayor’s wife to his proposition and of the daughter to his marriage proposal. He certainly does not intend, nor would Gogol have allowed him, to actually carry out any of these amorous plans. The moment his ego is gratified by the women’s verbal acquiescence, he flies off in his troika and disappears from their lives forever.” (165)
“In the next-to-the-last draft of Marriage, Gogol provides an unexpectedly plausible motivation for Podkolyosin’s ambivalent attitude to matrimony by having Kochkaryov tell Agafya: ‘The director of his section, his superior, loves him so much that he sleeps in the very same bed with him.’ Such an open reference to physical homosexuality (offered by Kochkaryov as evidence of Podkolysin’s solvency and job security, with an understandably comic effect) could not possibly have passed the censorship of the time, as Gogol well knew. He deleted this line in the final version, but it is surely interesting that he could not resist putting it down on paper in the first place.” (174-5)
“Elsewhere in the same perceptive essay Fanger points out that ‘Gogol’s few attempts to speak frankly in his letters were all attempts to speak about frankness, and one feels in them the anguished desire of a man bewildered by his own chronic evasions and mimicry to find his “real” voice and discover what it might have to say.” (186)
“‘You into whose hands will fall – if they will fall – these incoherent, feeble lines, pallid expressions of my emotions, you will understand me. Otherwise they will not fall into your hands. You will understand how repulsive the entire heap of treasures and honors is that attracts those wooden dolls which are called people. Oh, with what joy, with what anger I could have trampled underfoot and squashed everything that is bestowed by the mighty scepter of the Tsar of the North, if I only knew that this would buy a smile that indicated the slightest relief on his face.’” (194-5)
“Gogol carried with him his most cherished possession: a bible on which his dying friend had inscribed with trembling hand ‘To my friend Nikolai. Villa Volkonskaya.’” (202)
“He was surprised in his room there one morning by Zhukovsky and Sergei Aksakov, who entered quietly and without knocking. ‘There was Gogol in front of me, wearing the following fantastical costume,’ Aksakov wrote in his memoirs. ‘Instead of boots, he wore long woolen Russian stockings, reaching higher than the knee; instead of a jacket, a velvet spencer worn over a flannel camisole; around his neck was a large multicolored scarf and on his head was a crimson velvet woman’s headdress, embroidered in gold and very similar to the headdresses of Finnish tribeswomen.’ Gogol did not seem to be particularly embarrassed at being caught in this outfit.” (205-6)
“The play [...] offers a view of friendship and companionship between men that is totally new for Gogol. The warm and rewarding camaraderie described in his earlier writings, especially in ‘Taras Bulba,’ becomes in The Gamblers a sham and a pretense, a bait that the other male characters hold out to the protagonist in order to trap and to cheat him. It can hardly have been a coincidence that Gogol conceived this play’s image of friendship between men at this particular juncture of his emotional biography.” (222)
“The next time Chichikov sees the girl is at a ball in her parents’ home. The narrator stutters, digresses, and becomes almost incoherent in his effort to describe the encounter. The reader is not told the subject of their conversation, but gets instead a long list of young women with improbable names to whom Chichikov, we are informed, had spoken of similar things at various times in the past. The girl is so bored that she keeps yawning. Nevertheless, it is implied that in some not entirely clear way Chichikov is attracted to her. This nebulous attraction is enough cause for Gogol to unleash his usual punishment: the governer’s daughter becomes the unwitting agent of Chichikov’s undoing and disgrace.” (227)
“...it was Gogol’s intention to satirize the laxness and inefficiency of these serf owners and their failure to take their obligations to their serfs and their own best economic interests seriously enough. Most of his contemporaries chose to read the book as a merciless indictment of the entire institution of serfdom. They did this, as Donald Fanger has so aptly suggested, because it would not have occurred to any Russian at that point in history to write a satirical book about serf owners and not indict the institution itself. For Gogol, however, serfdom had always been a divinely ordained fact of Russian life which he could not imagine being either abolished or changed.” (234)
“The addressee of ‘The Russian Landowner’ is urged to explain to his peasants that they are serfs because such is the will of God, as expressly stated in the Bible. The landowner requires the serfs to work for him and to support him because this is his religious duty: ‘Tell them then that you force them to labor and work not because you need the money for your own pleasure, and as proof burn some banknotes right before them, so that they may actually see that money is of no concern to you, but that you force them to labor because God has commanded that man earn his bread by toil and sweat [...]’ He ends the essay by citing the passage from Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter wherein the heroine’s mother advises a soldier sent to investigate a fight at the public baths: ‘Be sure to find out who was right and who was wrong and then punish both.’ Pushkin had intended this as an amusing comment on the remoteness from civilization of the fortress in which the action of the book takes place. Gogol, however, who had already quoted this remark in some of his earlier letters, saw in it the very essence of the native Russian sense of justice.” (253-4)
“The Gogolian social system,’ Mochulsky writes, ‘can be represented schematically as a ladder on which all ranks and social classes are deployed. The people on each rung are the fathers of those below them and the children of those above. The flame of love is passed from hand to hand by those below to those above until it finally reaches the throne. On the throne sits the Monarch, who transmits the love of his children upward to God.’” (256)
“The eradication of his inborn passions was one of Gogol’s central preoccupations during the last three years of his life. The pain and difficulty of his constant inner struggled can be seen from the two undated entires made in his notebooks shortly after his return from Jerusalem: ‘Look and admire the beauty of your soul, false witness, perjurer, the greatest violator of law and sanctity who ever lived, you who hope to be a Christian and cannot sacrifice the earthly dust for the heavenly…’” (270)
“The following revealing statement by Eric Bently seems to suggest a possible psychological motivation for Gogol’s selection of Yazykov as the object of his affections: ‘Thus when a man is attracted by a man, but fears to be considered homosexual, and therefore makes the assumption that he is heterosexual – it is ‘normal’ to be heterosexual and he considers himself to be ‘normal’ – he is forced by his own logic to believe that the attraction is not homosexual. [...] ‘Since the man who attracts me isn’t gay, it is clear that it isn’t the gay thing that interests me. He and I are special. An exception. No -ism, no -ity can define us. We just are. We just love. [...] As a stalling operation it is of course successful. The affair with a straight man is bound to fail, and this any possible coming to terms with homosexuality is shelved.’” (308)
August 6, 2024
Academic review of the literature of a gay Ukrainian writer during the time of the Russian Empire. Got weirdly religious and misogynistic when he’d hang out with Tolstoy towards the end of his life. Interesting.
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January 24, 2018Fall 2003 Northampton MA
July 3, 2026
""Gogol committed suicide in 1852 at the age of forty-three," Alexei Remizov wrote in his book The Fire of Things. But his death was not only a suicide, it was also a ritual murder. The sentence was passed by an ignorant, fanatical priest in the name of God and Christianity and carried out by the medical science of the time, both parties prescribing the strongest medicine they could think of in order to cure a great writer of being what he was. That the victim collaborated in carrying out his own execution makes Gogol's case particularly harrowing, but not different in kind from other major artists victimized by Western civilization's willful ignorance of variant forms of sexuality and intolerance of sexual minorities."
May 19, 2025
I'm so glad that I finally read this. It's a mostly conversational and low-key funny dive into Gogol's life, work, and dismal death that somehow never loses momentum. Even the "Annotated Mini-Bibliography of Gogol in English" at the back, which judges which translations had so far done his works justice in English, and to what degree, is genuinely interesting. This was a pleasure to read.
August 8, 2008
A great succedent to Gogol's plays.
October 28, 2023
One of the most important things ive read
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews