Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
Under the Overcoat
By John Bayley
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
translated by Richard Pevear, by Larissa Volokhonsky
Pantheon, 435 pp., $30.00
'Gogol was made uneasy by his works,' notes Richard Pevear in his introduction to his and Larissa Volokhonsky's admirable new translation of the collected tales. It is an understatement that would have appealed to Gogol himself. He came to regard his extraordinary gift for writing prose as something sent from the devil, something that only prayer, fasting, and slavish obedience to his father confessor might exorcise and expiate. He fasted so fanatically that he died at forty-three. The story of his last years and months makes harrowing reading, more particularly for readers who are themselves fascinated and seduced by the power of words, and by their capacity in the hands of a great artist to exist marvelously and uncannily on their own, like the nose which, to the consternation of its respectable owner, seems to have escaped, even from the tale of which it is the title, to lead a phantom life of its own in the streets of St. Petersburg.
Review, 3222 words
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