the night before christmas by nikolai gogol

The novella is unlike most Christmas stories. This is particularly true of his whimsical and unpredictable The Night Before Christmas, which has been reprinted by New Directions in stand-alone paperback for the holidays. He burnt the draft of what was to be the second volume of Dead Souls a few days before his death.Īt times, Gogol’s humor-which is, perhaps, his most distinguishing characteristic-can be off-putting, but he is rarely merely funny. He became ill in early 1852, and died in March of that same year after he had stopped eating. Dead Souls, which was to be the first of three volumes in what Gogol hoped would be a modern Paradise Lost (the subtitle of the novel is “A Poem”), was published in 1842. And while he was a member of the Orthodox Church, he humorously combined the sacred and the profane in his early tales.įollowing the production of The Inspector General, Gogol left Russia, living mostly in Switzerland and Italy for the next twelve years. “Gogol was a strange creature,” Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in his idiosyncratic biography of the writer, “but genius is always strange.”Ī Tsarist who supported Nicholas I, Gogol nevertheless wrote the farcical The Inspector General, lambasting the greed and corruption of government officials.

He was even baffling to his own countrymen. Chekhov’s uncanniness captures modern man’s bewilderment, and Tolstoy’s complex realism, life’s uncanny and often tragic consistencies.īut perhaps no Russian writer is as foreign as Nikolai Gogol. The nearly inscrutable evil of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment finds its counterpart in the absurd innocence of the Prince in The Idiot. The dark, snow-encrusted landscapes of Pasternak somehow both reflect and drown the human heart. All Russian writers, it has often seemed to me, are at once wonderfully and disturbingly foreign.

The night before christmas by nikolai gogol