The Reader Travels

Russian writers aren’t always known for their comedy, what with all that cold and bleary bleakness, oppressed masses and Communist revolt. But Nikolai Gogol’s short stories are truly fun and kooky, especially the stories set in Ukraine.

I was speaking with a friend of a friend from one of those former Soviet countries, and I was asking her which Gogol stories were her favorite. She liked the crazy Ukrainian stories too. She tried to tell me the name of her favorite, but she didn’t know how to translate it into English. Apparently, no one else does either, so they don’t even try. It’s simply “Viy,” and it has shape-shifting witches and young seminary students getting drunk and forgetting what mischief they got themselves into the night before.

Gogol’s Ukranian tales are stories of devils and witches and sorcerers, trickery and tom-foolery. The devil can steal the moon and put it in his pocket to make the night so dark, a man doesn’t know which house is his. He can shrink another man and put him in his pocket and fly him from the country to the capitol for a meeting with the czarina, and get him back before sunrise.

With a world like this, anything can happen.

It’s running. If you hurry, you can catch it.

My allergies have been so bad all my life, I didn’t even realize I had inherited my mother’s intense sense of smell until I was in my twenties. I started going to an allergy doctor because I thought I might be allergic to my fiance’, and like that gray cat that went so well with my mauve carpet, I didn’t want to give him up, despite the infernal itch.

The steroid nose sprays are like magic potion. Suddenly there’s this incredibly vibrant and colorful world around me. I don’t know if I’m reading minds or just smelling the messages in the air. No more anosmatic Annie. The nose is alive.

Sigmund Freud had a lot of theories, one of which was that a person’s sense of smell plays a part in sexual orientation. And Nikolai Gogol shared with us the tale of a runaway nose that left a man’s face of its own volition, making a nuissance of itself all over St. Petersburg. It dressed in a trench coat and disguised itself as a high level official. It’s a very powerful thing this nose.

The Namesake took me on a journey from India to New England and back to India, and when I put the book down, it guided me forward to Russia.

Gogol’s parents moved from India to the United States, landing in the Boston area, where Gogol’s father taught school. Their early adventures include a small drama around the naming of their son, exploring the Bengali traditions and failing at them in this foreign place.

Because Gogol’s father is a huge fan of Russian literature, he names his son after his favorite author, Nikolai Gogol. The novel makes several references to the Russian’s famous short story, “The Overcoat.” So, of course, that was the next stop for my journey.

I read “The Overcoat” looking for a connection between the two stories. What I found was a brief exploration of Russian child naming traditions with the hero’s mother also failing to follow them. Like Gogol Ganguli, Akaky Akakievich had a hard time fitting in too.

So be careful what you name your child, my friends. You could end up like Sonny and Cher, naming their child Chastity, as if they never wanted her to ever have sex with men. They got what they asked for, right?