Gogol on Stage

I joined my library book club mid-term (in January), when they started reading Bulgakov (see here, here, and here) but in the fall they had read Gogol, of whom Bulgakov had been a great admirer. So it was through that channel that I heard about the performance of Disappearing Acts: Stories of Nikolai Gogol at the Piven Theater Workshop.

I'd read Gogol on several occasions, though none very recently, so I prepared by re-reading the two stories to be performed, "Overcoat" and "Nose." Gogol is far more readable than I generally think of him as being. (Do you ever unconsciously retain false impressions of a book, author or genre that somehow prove impervious to repeated contrary experience? For example, I always think I enjoy southern literature far more than I ever end up actually enjoying it when I read it, and I always forget how much I like science memoir until I read another one.)

The plays turned out to be exceptionally good. The performance was held in a tiny theater in a cultural center up near Northwestern University - the house probably seats around 50, with the seats and stage at grade with one another. Definitely one of the more intimate theater experiences I've enjoyed. The stories were dramatized in-house (I think), and were performed in a storytelling style, with the ensemble taking on the functions of both narration and portrayal, which the cast worked well.

"We all come out of Gogol's 'Overcoat'," Dostoevsky is often quoted as describing his own generation of Russian writers; the modern response is usually that this is more evidently true of the generation that included Beckett and Kafka. It's not hard to see the Kafka in Gogol (or, properly, the other way around), particularly when reading Gogol with Kafka-on-the-brain, as I've been. Noses don't just vanish and assume false identities any more than traveling salesmen wake up transformed into june bugs, for example; it's also not hard to imagine that G. and K. could have related well to each others' home bureaucracies. But the resemblance was especially vivid with Gogol on the stage - with the overcoat not just emotive, but actually anthropomorphic.

I'll definitely be going back to read more Gogol now - and, I hope, back to Piven next season.

The Devil Takes Moscow

I've been trying to figure out how to write about The Master and Margarita for a while now. It was the final title we read in the library book group this spring, and quite challenging. Fairly considered Bulgakov's unfinished masterwork, it's highly critical of Soviet society and thus wasn't published until 1966, 26 years after the author's death, and even then in a censored edition. Copies were circulated underground among members of the intellectual classes long before that.

Synopsis: One unseasonably warm April, a mysterious foreign magician, Wolland, arrives in Moscow. His retinue: a ghostly Master of Ceremonies with a cracked pince-nez; a vile, fanged demon-type; a large, talking black cat with a mean vodka habit; a naked witch. Hijinks ensue; then hysteria; then terror, as the foreigner turns out to be the very Devil, and a Moscow that has lost its ability to believe in either God or Satan must cope with a visitation by actual evil.

A leading literary figure is decapitated by a streetcar; a young poet is declared insane; a theater manager finds himself mysteriously transported to Yalta; Wolland's single magic performance rains chaos (and eventually fire) on the city. Meanwhile, in an autobiographical gesture on Bulgakov's part, a writer (The Master) whose finest work is an abandoned novel about Pontious Pilate, lives in ignominy, and his lover (Margarita) sells her soul to Wolland to assuage the Master's disgrace.

I have no hope of doing this justice - it's difficult to describe, and is something of a favorite among students of Russian literature, with its many layers of social commentary and political criticism and Christology and Faustian themes. The annotation provided in this 1995 translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is exquisite and enlightening. It's a piece that will surely deserve to be revisited.