Style
D.S. Mirsky characterized Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected — in the strictest sense, original — worlds ever created by an artist of words".
The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision of reality and people. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place. His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things. His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist — which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability — attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality — that seems to beggar the visible world itself.
The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the untranslatable Russian word poshlost', which is perhaps best rendered as "self-satisfied inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society (from Russian, poshlo, meaning "went"). Like Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and romantic illusions. It was he who undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had reigned. "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror." His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum, "It is dull in this world, gentlemen!"
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Gogol
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“As the style of Faulkner grew out of his rage—out of the impotence of his rage—the style of Hemingway grew out of the depth and nuance of his disenchantment.”
—Wright Morris (b. 1910)
“One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)