In today’s On the Square feature, Micah Mattix discusses Nikolai Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas :
[P]erhaps no Russian writer is as foreign as Nikolai Gogol. He was even baffling to his own countrymen. “Gogol was a strange creature,” Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in his idiosyncratic biography of the writer, “but genius is always strange.”A Tsarist who supported Nicholas I, Gogol nevertheless wrote the farcical The Inspector General , lambasting the greed and corruption of government officials. And while he was a member of the Orthodox Church, he humorously combined the sacred and the profane in his early tales.
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