The Sexual Labyrinth Of Nikolai Gogol's Writings

Nikolai Gogol, one of Russia’s most renowned writers, is notoriously known for his extensive imagination of the fictive worlds that are found within his satirical stories. Born in Ukraine, the writer often drew upon the folklore of his childhood while living in the countryside in addition to his personal experiences in Russia for these fictive worlds. Akaky Akakievich in “The Overcoat” spends much of his time in isolation rewriting government papers, similar to Gogol’s job as a clerk in St. Petersburg (Figes, 113). Due to the semi-biographical nature of his work, the characters and events featured in Gogol’s stories have left historians and scholars to question some aspects of his life, particularly his love life. Currently, there is little …show more content…
(Karlinsky viii) However, Alexei Lalo, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Texas at Austin argues that this viewpoint can only serve as a hypothesis since there is no discussion of how “Gogol’s eroticism [relates] to his patriotism,” or how for Gogol, “sex and marriage are [strictly] social acts” (Lalo 67-68). This paper aims to expand on the ideas of brought forth in the conclusions of both Karlinsky and Lalo by analyzing how women are portrayed in three of Gogol’s St. Petersburg stories: “The Nose”, “The Overcoat”, and “Diary of a Madman”. I argue that through his characters and their interactions with women, Nikolai Gogol not only reveals his own sexual anxiety but additionally provides social commentary on the concepts of romantic relationships and …show more content…
In contrast to “The Nose” and “Diary of A Madman”, Gogol uses the feminine gender object of an overcoat to depict his attitude towards romantic relationships: “Gogol had to reject the usual Russian word for overcoat […] and name his story after a special model […] that is feminine in gender” (Karlinsky 139). He is able to continue his social commentary by using the overcoat as a substitution for a female