Gogol and the poignancy behind the belly laugh

This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gogol and is proclaimed by the UNESCO as the Gogol' year. 200 years ago yesterday was exactly the day Nikolai Gogol was born, the Apirl Fools' Day 1809. He was the greatest master of the 19th century gothic and his lagacy was the adopted by great Russian writers such as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Gogol himself also points ahead to the comic side of Dostoevsky and the absurdism of Franz Kafka. The Nose partly adopted Metamorphosis of Kafka.

When I was studying literature in high school years, I remembered the most that Dostoevsky had demonstrated "Все мы вышли из “Шинели” Гоголя" ("We all come out from Gogol's "Overcoat"). The short story Overcoat (you can download it here), together with the novel Dead Douls was Gogol's two most famous masterpieces, which are supposed to be foundations of the 19th century realism. The deepest pathos of Gogol's comedy is not breezy hilarity but is terribly the woebegone melancholy without the readers' realizing a poignancy behind their belly laugh. So it is what Peter Craven said: "the inimitability of Gogol's droll melancholy".

Another aspect is Gogol's contribution to the words of exile, a situation of being either forced away from home or refused to recognised by the homeland, among a group of exile writers that includes Cioran, Joyce, Conrad, Nibokov and so on (read this article). The reason is that Ukraina-born Gogol wrote his works by Russian, which was unacceptable to most Ukranian at that time. However, as what have been contributed to French by Cioran or to English vocabulary by Joyce and Nibokov, Gogol was a great contributor to Russian literature and language.

On these days there are also anniversaries of Gogol's birth in Vietnam organised by Vietnam Institute of Literature and Institute of Russian culture in Hanoi. In Vietnam, students attending Russian literature degree are taught two masterpieces of Gogol that are Dead Souls and Taras Bulba.