Posted Sunday night, December 6, 2020.
“The banquet degenerates into a brawl”: Detail from an illustration by Marc Chagall for Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls”, via WikiArt.
"Poshlust"?
Socially minded Russian critics saw in Dead Souls...a condemnation of the social poshlust emanating from serf-owning bureaucratic provincial Russia and thus missed the true point. Gogol’s heroes merely happen to be Russian squires and officials; their imagined surrounding and social conditions are perfectly unimportant factors…Moreover, their surroundings and conditions, whatever they may have been in “real life,’ underwent such a thorough permutation and reconstruction in the laboratory of Gogol’s peculiar genius that...it is as useless to look in Dead Souls for an authentic Russian background as it would be to try to form a conception of Denmark on the basis of that little affair in cloudy Elsinore.
---from “Nikolai Gogol” by Vladimir Nabokov, in “Lectures on Russian Literature”.
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