On Nikolai Gogol

For some peculiar reason - and it can only be the forbidding title of his best-known work, I guess - Nikolai Gogol appears to intimidate people. Hell, he intimidated me for long enough, and I read Beckett for a laugh.

Which is an enormous shame. Because it doesn't take more than a brief acquaintance for you to realise that he's not like that at all. Not even slightly. "Dead Souls" isn't a grave, dismal account of poverty-stricken Russian peasantry, nor is it a deathly-dull exercise in philosphical chin-scratching; it isn't even much of a forerunner for Fyodor Dostoyevsky's work, despite being widely trailed as such. It's just a ludicrous riot of florid, flamboyant prose, impossibly wayward asides and, very occasionally, when it really can't be avoided, a bit of a story; it is emphatically not what you expect it to be. It made me laugh out loud on trains, for pity's sake.

His short stories, as I've been discovering, are equally erratic and, sometimes, equally inspired. "Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich", for example, features a memorable insult - "I sneeze on your head!" - that I plan to try out myself when the opportunity next arises, along with a chapter entitled "From Which The Reader May Easily Learn Everything Contained In It". And a fat bloke stuck in a courtroom doorway. You're starting to get the idea.

But let's not dismiss Nikolai Gogol as a mere eccentric. Use that as a reason to read him, by all means; you won't be disappointed. There's substance too, though: in particular, there are astonishing hints of writing that would be revolutionary decades, many decades, after his death. There's Dostoyevsky, sure; you'd expect that, I suppose. But the resemblance of certain passages - especially "The Overcoat", with its central character's futile pursuit of authority - to Kafka is quite extraordinary; at other times, there are suggestions of Nabokov, even of Beckett. These, from a Russian novelist who died in 1852.

The point is not that Gogol was ahead of his time, not at all. Rather, it's that his best writing stretches every furthest point of his imagination, conjuring up fresh invention with virtually every paragraph. It never settles, it has none of the stillness, the insight or the control of other masters. Its beauty is in the very act of creation, in which it can leap forward centuries, not by anticipating the future but by happening upon and then casually discarding inspiration, forgetting where it buried the bone. It is indeed erratic...but then, that's genius for you. And "genius" is precisely the right word.