quattuor’s Reviews > Nikolai Gogol > Status Update
quattuor
is on page 110 of 160
Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader's own notions of life. Great literature skirts the irrational. Hamlet is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar. Gogol's The Overcoat is a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the dim pattern of life.
— Jun 08, 2017 08:49AM
Like flag
quattuor’s Previous Updates
quattuor
is on page 94 of 160
The fragments of [Tolstoy's] imaginative work posthumously published show that his art was still developing after Anna Karenina's death. But Gogol was a man of few books and the plans he had made to write the book of his life happened to coincide with the beginning of his decline as a writer — after he had reached the summits of The Government Inspector, The Overcoat and the first volume of Dead Souls.
— Jun 07, 2017 11:03AM
quattuor
is on page 40 of 160
A famous playwright has said (probably in a testy reply to a bore wishing to know the secrets of the craft) that if in the first act a shot gun hangs on the wall, it must go off in the last act. But Gogol's guns hang in midair and do not go off — in fact the charm of his allusions is exactly that nothing whatever comes of them.
— May 25, 2017 10:22AM
