Customer Reviews

The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol

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When this book first appeared, the New York Review of Books issued a long review in which the whole point of the book was dismissed as some sort of wishful thinking on the part of an author with an agenda. But the evidence is overwhelming that Karlinsky is correct in his opinion, and that Gogol can never be understood except from this standpoint. Imagine a major reviewing organ dismissing "theories" as to somebody like Wilde, Gide, Verlaine, etc., and one can see the magnitude of the absurdity of the dismissive review.

Since the age of ten when I first read some works by Nikolai Gogol I was mesmerized by the mystery of his obscure and secluded life and tragic end (he burned the second part of his biggest work just several days before his death). At that time I knew nothing about the homosexuality. Karlinsky's book is not only an account of the past, a life story of a person who lived a long time ago, it is a story of struggle with the inner self, the unability to accept one's own sexuality 'as is' which played the tragic role in the fate of that famed Russian writer from a small Ukrainian village.