Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage

Nikolai Gogol occupies an unassailable position in Russian and world literature as one of the nineteenth-century's greatest writers. Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage considers Gogol's entire oeuvre, including his letters, notebooks, and drawings, as well as all relevant secondary literature, and exhaustively examines sources of Baroque influence on him, tracing them back to the oeuvre itself. This study draws on the most recent achievements of interdisciplinary scholarship, paying special attention to the interaction of the visual and the verbal and of high and popular cultural strata, so characteristic of the Baroque and at the same time so important to the understanding of Gogol's poetics.

In spite of an enormous corpus of already existing Gogol scholarship, this book sheds new light on our understanding of this writer's poetics and opens new vistas in the study of cultural continuity.

“This is a major new contribution to Gogol studies. It is valid scholarship on a high level which offers both new knowledge and a previously unconsidered, undeniably true understanding of a major writer.”—Lauren G. Leighton, University of Illinois at Chicago

“This book brings to life a whole cultural world—survivals into the early nineteenth century of ideas, attitudes, images, symbols, myths inherited from the past—and does this with immense thoroughness and skill.”—Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley

Gavriel Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University.

Biography & Memoir

History

           European

           Russian & East European

Literary Studies

           Literary Theory & Criticism