This strikingly original work presents an integral and inclusive explanatory model for the elusive narrative strategies of Gogol's Dead Souls; in the process, it draws larger conclusions about Gogol's creative methods and aesthetic concerns. Throughout his career, Gogol manifests two seemingly contradictory urges: the urge toward order, system, clarity and wholeness, and the urge toward disorder, disruption, obscurity, and fragmentation. The author seeks to make a system, an anatomy, of Gogol's impulses toward disorder and disruption in Dead Souls in all their various and distinctive aspects. In anatomizing Gogolian disorder, she explores the mythology of creativity and lying in Gogol; his (at least literary) fear of the family; the relation between the uses of obscurity in Dead Souls and the poetry of Russian Sentimentalism, especially Zhukovskii's; Dead Souls as parable; and the mutually subversive relation between (1)ction and non(1)ction in Gogol.

Book Information
ISBN 9780804720496
Author Ms. Susanne Fusso
Format Hardback
Page Count 212
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press