It isn’t uncommon for one writer to praise another, but it is rare for someone to write about a fellow writer with such depth that a full book could emerge from admiration. This happened with Vladimir Nabokov and Nikolai Gogol, the master behind Dead Souls, a work both unfinished and endlessly influential. Gogol, a towering figure of Russian literature who fled much of the fame he created, died at 42 in 1852, leaving behind a legend of wit, invention, and literary risk.
Nabokov’s passion for translation shines in Nikolai Gogol (The Anagram). He highlights the unforgivable slips that creep into many translations and bravely reworks his favorite passages so they resonate in English and other languages. The book explores languages in action—what they truly convey—and is filled with anecdotes that feel ripped from a novel about a writer who seems to live inside his own creations. The character of Maria Gogol appears not just as a mother but as a presence who insists every novel she encounters is the author’s child and, somehow, always a masterpiece. She even jokes that she invented locomotives and steamships.
enthusiastic mother
Maria Gogol is depicted as exuberant to a fault, so aligned with her son that she imagines the same kind of hell she imagines creating. She embodies a vivid, almost mythical type of mother who shares a kinship with her writer-father. Turners, the painter who believed in his son and saved every canvas, faced a similar sense of artistic dependence and loss when he passed away, leaving behind a complex legacy. On the other end of the spectrum is the mother of John Kennedy Toole, who treated her son as a toy, and the mother of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose affection seemed to vanish when she believed she was not being watched.
Pioneering feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born in 1860, played a crucial role in the early struggles for women’s civil rights and helped shape an imaginative future in fiction. She is linked to visions that differ from the usual Gothic thrive, contributing to a fiction that moves toward possibilities rather than mere dread. Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper centers on a woman isolated during postpartum depression, revealing a mind and a voice that challenge the norms of its era. The story unfolds in a confined space, its walls pressing in and the protagonist’s perception bending under pressure.
In a style reminiscent of Lovecraft’s hypnotic, intimate storytelling, the narrative becomes a portrait of confinement and a commentary on medical control. The imagined prison, a doctor’s verdict, forms a claustrophobic path through the protagonist’s psyche. The text also echoes earlier critiques of gendered illness and the limits placed on creative women, a thread that continues through contemporary discussions about mental health and artistic expression.
gripping story
Author Maggie O’Farrell, known for Hamnet and The Married Portrait, described how reading The Yellow Wallpaper at a young age left a lasting impression. The tale’s opening can feel like a gravitational pull, drawing readers into a moment where the ordinary becomes uncanny. The experience of reading Gilman’s work often carries a similar charge: a sense of being pulled forward, wondering what happens next, and whether escape is possible from the story’s ominous yellow paper.