I have read only fifty pages of Gogol in Russian, enough to know how hilarious he is, and to regret his conversion and attempt to destroy this great book. "Sobakavich" alone rewards the reader with the Russian patronymic, "Son of" applied to "Sobaka," a bitch. Yet Sobakavich is the most genial of men, who refuses to sell even those of his employ who have died. His sentimentality is a triumph over materialism. Lovely stuff. Viva Gogol!
I once wrote an essay comparing 19C Russian and American novels; I argued they have much more in common than American and English. They both have a vast continent for a stage; they often feature preachers, religious nuts of various stripes; and, they share a sense of the comic deriving from character, not from social position. Both Russian and American literature derive from a "foreign" language--in Russia's case, France, and in ours, England. Our literatures both grew in revolt against
their parent literatures.
And the great novelists of both countries mirror each: Dostoevsky and Hawthorne, Tolstoy and Melville, Gogol and Twain.
Well, my essay intrigued the premier weekly critical review in the US, but it was not published, or I would not need to recreate it here. ( )