Linda Presents NiKolai Gogol

Jacquie's Email

Hello Literary Ladies!
Of course, Nikolai Gogol is much more than his “Nose”, as Linda will tell us all when we meet for her presentation on Zoom but having read his astonishing short story recently in George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, I thought it would be fun to look at a few artists' interpretation of one of Gogol's most famous creations -- and they certainly did not disappoint.
Until then, keep your noses clean! x Jacquie

Christine's Minutes

On March 30, 2022, fourteen members and one associate member of the Literature Club gathered, yes, once again on little screens brought to us courtesy of Zoom*. And since we have become so intimate – adept – with zoom, I thought I would share a few facts about this phenomenon.

*ZOOM was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan and some other engineers. In 2013 they launched their software. In 2017 ZOOM’s valuation made it a unicorn. The company turned its first profit in 2019. On March 11, 2020, WHO declared that the spread of this new respiratory disease, the novel coronavirus, was now a pandemic. Millions of people started to work remotely, children had to go to school remotely, and even some Literature Clubs have had to eschew their lunches and – meet remotely.

President Connie Stewart rang the bell at 1:11p.m. She indicated that “where is spring?” should go on record as her first question of the meeting.

The minutes of the previous meeting were read and accepted. Our treasurer reported that, with a recent infusion of our annual dues, our treasury has swollen to a respectable $430.11.

As for our business: Joanna Reisman shared her screen to show us the ballot for next year. After winnowing from the cumbersome original list, we now have six choices for next year’ program: Nineteenth-century American and British Novels; Banned Books; Behind the Iron Curtain; Drama; The Harlem Renaissance; Literature from Canada. It does not bear mentioning that the last choice is new this year, and our program chair is by birth a Canadian.

Connie thanked Jacquie for compiling such a lovely collection of ‘noses’ to illustrate her email.

Today, Linda Tucker presented Vladimir Nabokov’s biography of Nikolai Gogol, originally published by New Directions in 1961. Linda suggested that as the book starts with Gogol’s death and that the word nose appears no less than thirteen times in the first three pages, we should assume that this will be no ordinary biography merely relating a life story. Nevertheless, our presenter did tell us something of Gogol’s short life.

Nicolai Gogol was born in 1809, in Sorochintsky, Ukraine. His father died when he was a teenager. After high school, Gogol left home to seek a civil service job in St Petersburg. Without connections, that turned out to be difficult. He had equally little success as an actor or a poet. He took money his mother had entrusted to him and traveled to Germany. Only when the money ran out did he return to St Petersburg and take a shabby civil servant job.

By 1830 his short stories about Ukrainian life were coming out in literary reviews. According to Nabokov, Gogol’s students at a girls’ boarding school thought he was very dull.

Meeting the revered Pushkin in 1831 meant a great deal to Gogol. By then Gogol was publishing his short stories, about “ghosts and Ukrainians”, according to Nabokov. The stories were quite popular, “The Nose” among them. When his play, The Government Inspector was produced in 1836, Gogol felt that it was misunderstood by the critics, and left the country to lick his wounds in Rome, for twelve years. There he started writing Dead Souls. In 1839 he made a quick trip back to Russia and read Dead Souls to his friends. Then, back in Italy he wrote “The Overcoat,” and kept working at Dead Souls. The first part of Dead Souls was published in 1841, with the name changed to the uninspired The Adventures of Chichikov, as Dead Souls was considered blasphemous. For the next six years Gogol traveled, looking for health and inspiration, but none. He was unable to finish Dead Souls, and actually burned all he had written of the second part. Gogol returned to Russia in 1848, and died in 1851, at the age of 42.

Following our immersion in Nabokov’s biography, members read passages from Dead Souls, “The Overcoat,” and finally, “The Nose”, a story initially rejected by the Moscow Observer as “dirty and trivial”. We also heard from George Saunders who, in his A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, explains the key scene in “The Nose” in this way: “The world is full of outrageous nonsense”.  Additionally, members learned some important vocabulary specific to Russian literature. Nabokov explained “poshlust”, and per Saunders, we discovered “a particular Russian form of unreliable narration called skaz”.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that after spending quality time with Gogol, the world can never look quite the same again.

Respectfully submitted,

Christine Lehner, Recording secretary