Russian up to speed
WE are often told that such and such a prestigious writer of yesteryear is, by virtue of their farseeing work, our ‘contemporary’. This conceit often ignores the quite radical differences of epoch that inevitably sever most historical figures from our own time. Yet, in the case of Nikolai Gogol, it’s not too much of an indulgence to say that the Ukrainian-Russian writer is indeed a resonant voice for our era.
With the exception of Dickens, no other author of the mid-19th century so incisively documented the alienating effects of an emergent modernity. Yet Gogol’s response to it — while couched in realism — was a literature spiked with supreme playfulness and ambiguity, fantasy and absurdity. Given that those qualities have marked literary fiction for the past 40 years, Gogol’s relevance today is thus beyond question.
