Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories) - Softcover

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852), although Russian, was born in the village of Sorochyntsi in the Poltava Oblast province of central Ukraine. He was never accepted by the Russian public as being completely Russian in his thinking and political ideology, and indeed he was not. Gogol's Ukrainian upbringing is most evident in his early works which draw heavily from Ukrainian culture and folk history. His later writing was more subversive, openly satirizing the corruption he saw rampant throughout Russia's empire. Gogol was homosexual. At age seventeen he wrote passionate letters to a friend who, being two years older, had graduated before Gogol, leaving him bereft. Gogol eventually exiled himself from Russia, living in Rome. It was here that he enjoyed at least one mutual love affair with a man, but his lover died within a year of their meeting. Two years later Gogol fell in love with the poet Nikolai Yazykov and penned love letters to him, but his efforts came to nothing. Gogol died in Moscow and was buried at Davilov Monastery. His last words were placed on his tombstone: "And I shall laugh my bitter laugh." When Soviet authorities decided to demolish the monastery in 1931 and transfer Gogol's remains, it was discovered his body had been buried lying face down, leading some to wonder if he had been buried alive.

The title loony, an obsessive petty bureaucrat, first saw the literary light of day in 1835, when his creator, Russia's first great fiction writer, was gaining his initial renown. Backed up by percussion instruments, Stephen Ouimette impersonates him here in a Stratford Festival staged reading, which was recorded by the CBC in Toronto. By and large, the story satirizes the officialdom of the time and place, but Ouimette, while doing his best with humor that has gotten a bit stale, chillingly plays his character's descent into madness. A fine performance. Y.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine