3 Review(s)

Nikolai Gogol, Russia's greatest comic writer, is a literary enigma. His masterworks have attracted contradictory labels over the years, even as the originality of his achievement continues to defy exact explanation. Fanger's superb new book begins by considering why this should be so, and goes onto survey what Gogol created, step by step: an extraordinary body of writing, a model for the writer in Russian society, a textual identity that eclipses his scanty biography, and a kind of fiction unique in its time.