Still More Gogol

Still More Gogol

It is early in the 18th century. Cartographer Jonathan Green is traveling east through Europe when he stumbles into a remote village surrounded by impenetrable forests and inexplicable evil. The action plays out over three terrifying nights in this, director Oleg Stepchenko’s new film based on Gogol’s horror classic Viy. The film (left) is set for release to Russian theaters in early March. Could this be part of a Gogolian cinematic wave? A film based on Gogol’s Cossack novel,Taras Bulba, was released last year by director Vladimir Bortko.

Google “Gogol” and the first page of results will be split between references  to the nineteenth century author and the popular band Gogol Bordello. Founded by Eugene Hutz in 1998 after a fortuitous meeting at a Russian wedding in Burlington, Vermont (nota bene!), the “gypsy punk” band has skyrocketed to national and international fame (spurred as well by Hutz’s role in the 2005 film, Everything is Illuminated). In 2008, Gogol Bordello took its tour to Moscow.

gogolbordello.com

There are not many Gogol addresses in Moscow, a city that the writer called his “homeland” in 1841. One of them is Nikitsky boulevard 7A, where Gogol lived from 1848 to 1852, after coming back from abroad, and where he perished (above, the 1909 Moscow monument to Gogol by Nikolai Andreyev that stands in the courtyard). He was invited there by the owner, Count Alexander Tolstoy, a former cavalier and governor of Odessa and Tver. The two met abroad in the 1930s. The Tolstoys gave Gogol two rooms on the first floor. This is where Gogol’s Moscow friends, like Khomyakov, Aksakov, and Pogodin, visited him, amazed by the asceticism of his household.

“Based on various accounts, Gogol was cared for like a child at the Tolstoys’. He was free to do anything he wanted,” said Vera Vikulova, director of Dom Gogolya (“Gogol’s House”), the library-museum center that currently occupies the address. Dom Gogolya combines the functions of a memorial space, archives, lecture hall and library. It has held annual, international Gogol Readings at the end of March since 2001, with paper topics ranging from “Gogol and Napoleon” to the writer’s effect on Vysotsky.

Gogol burned the second volume of Dead Souls in one of the two rooms of his quarters, ignoring his servant boy, who was begging the writer to spare the notebooks (see painting, page 39). The writer withered away in this house, surrounded by priests, helpless friends, and doctors who could not diagnose him. Dom Gogolya is planning to recreate the room where the writer died as a memorial space, complete with period furniture and items. 

domgogolya.ru