The Russian Comic Writer Who’s an Antidote to Mad Times

"The brilliance of Gogol’s humor is the way it seizes not on excess but on emptiness." Yes, yes, yes! Through that device he performs a spiritual function, something like a zen teacher wielding koans, liberating us from the human world's nonsense that often has an almost death grip on us. I've wondered why I've always been attracted to Gogol and haiku, seemingly totally opposites! But maybe its because the first helps me let go of what has no value/reality, the second points to what has them. Thank you Julian Lucas!

Gogol belongs in everybody’s top 10. A “mysterious dwarf” for the ages!

The essay is an interesting reading written with an excellent language and a broad vocabulary, but from my point of view it misses many points on Gogol and nature of his works. I would never call him a comic writer, his major works Govt.Insp and Dead Souls having rather satirical humour, while many pieces are truely dramatical and others being quite Kafkian indeed as you noted. He was born in Little Russia now dubbed Ukraine. His early works were his fantasy only inspired by Ukr.folklore, not folklore itseld. Khlestakov in Gov.Ins. was a poor gentleman, not an aristocrat. He went abroad in 1836 not being spooked but to take a rest and got new impressions, as many Russian artists did at that time. The emperor himself sponsored his travel. You present Dead Souls as infernal satire revealing deadly sins among the society and then you project Chichikov into modern days politics. Unfortunately, you totally missed the poetical side of the book which is titled as a poem by Gogol himself. The book puts you in a dream, that's why the city of unknown location has no name and the protagonist has no definite feature. Many chapters have unique sets of alliterations and consonances. The book's heroes became archetypes found in our everyday life and easily recognizable by any Russian. And it is "briCHka". FYI, Gogol looking at self as a kind of a prophet proclaimed himself as Russia's writer No.1 after death of Pushkin, a move impossible in Western literature and short of comic laughter.

Excellent essay! Thank you for writing about Gogol. Chichikov mirrors the success driven animal of our 21st century dystopia. A beast of unctuous fluidity—a chameleon in for "the big win." In my field (the art world), excessive money and mangled Post Modernism has created the ultimate playground for the disingenuous. Chichikovs run amok in its permissive sandbox of multifarious, unchallengeable, "label-free" aesthetics. Gogol might find our world a little too mad and despair of writing about anything.

A wonderful reminder that we are inescapably part of the human condition, often unable to reach the better angels of our nature.

Gogol makes Mark Twain and his quip that "God created man because he was disappointed in the monkey" look like nothing. He is, indeed, the perfect reminder for our times of the sheer pathetic idiocy of the human race, never on clearer display than in the actions of Trump and the adoration of his moronic mass fans.

Beautiful, fantastic piece, and so, so right!

If you tackle "Dead Souls" read the Bernard Guilbert Guerney translation which has the imprimatur of no less than Vladimir Nabokov, no fan of Russian translations other than his own. Yes, that statement is contradictory; Nabokov was desperate to expose readers to one of his favorite writers and many could not follow his first advice -- learn Russian.

I wonder what Gogol would've thought of societies whose ratio of spending on the Arts vs. the Military is over 1:1500 (National Endowment for the Arts gets $0.5 billion vs. $750 billion (at least) that the Military receives.) 1 to 1500 in terms of federal spending. I don't think any advanced civilization ever had such stark rations. And that 1:1500 ratio does not match the inscriptions on the outside walls at The Kennedy Center, where JFK tells us: "This country cannot be materially rich and spiritually poor." JFK addressed the necessity in funding art and culture for an advanced nation. Again, wonder if what Gogol would've said...

Julian Lucas, how right you are. Gogol, master of language and clever manipulator of emotions, encapsulates the horror and the humor of our current national disaster. Alas.

Your transliteration of бричка (carriage) is non-standard, although I did find one online dictionary that transliterated it that way. Usually the letter «ч» is transliterated as “Ch”, so the word is usually seen in English as “brichka”, not “britzka”.