Subject
Browning's door (fwd)
Date
Body
From: John Lavagnino <lav@blazar.bill.conncoll.edu>
I have used the fine library at Wellesley and must say that I have
never noticed this door there, so it must be kept well away from
serious business, or else it just looks like all the other doors in
the place. I do think I've heard this tale before, though it may just
have been in reading *Nikolai Gogol*.
As to what it means, here is my interpretation: you will have noticed
in this Chronology a rather playful attitude towards the idea of
giving a useful account of Gogol's life in this form. Generally we
know that Nabokov had his doubts about biography (see particularly his
lecture on "le vrai et le vraisemblable"), though he was also drawn to
it (as in *The Gift*, and indeed at various points in the main text of
this book). There is a tendency to paint little scenes but also point
up their literary rather than factual basis, or otherwise make clear
the distance between a life and our ability to reconstruct it in
writing; the Chronology sometimes plays the game of depicting Gogol's
life, and sometimes it makes fun of that game or seeks to remind us of
its rules.
The particular entry in the Chronology which tells us about Browning's
door is the third in a sequence that details some of Gogol's European
wanderings, and it starts out by telling us that in Paris Gogol lived
on the corner of the Place de la Bourse and rue Vivienne. Well, if
it's important to know the geographical location at which much of the
first part of *Dead Souls* was written, wouldn't it be still more
instructive to have before you the very door of the house where it all
happened? We have that for Browning. Alas, this important resource
for the scholar has apparently been lost in Gogol's case.
John Lavagnino
Department of English and American Literature, Brandeis University
I have used the fine library at Wellesley and must say that I have
never noticed this door there, so it must be kept well away from
serious business, or else it just looks like all the other doors in
the place. I do think I've heard this tale before, though it may just
have been in reading *Nikolai Gogol*.
As to what it means, here is my interpretation: you will have noticed
in this Chronology a rather playful attitude towards the idea of
giving a useful account of Gogol's life in this form. Generally we
know that Nabokov had his doubts about biography (see particularly his
lecture on "le vrai et le vraisemblable"), though he was also drawn to
it (as in *The Gift*, and indeed at various points in the main text of
this book). There is a tendency to paint little scenes but also point
up their literary rather than factual basis, or otherwise make clear
the distance between a life and our ability to reconstruct it in
writing; the Chronology sometimes plays the game of depicting Gogol's
life, and sometimes it makes fun of that game or seeks to remind us of
its rules.
The particular entry in the Chronology which tells us about Browning's
door is the third in a sequence that details some of Gogol's European
wanderings, and it starts out by telling us that in Paris Gogol lived
on the corner of the Place de la Bourse and rue Vivienne. Well, if
it's important to know the geographical location at which much of the
first part of *Dead Souls* was written, wouldn't it be still more
instructive to have before you the very door of the house where it all
happened? We have that for Browning. Alas, this important resource
for the scholar has apparently been lost in Gogol's case.
John Lavagnino
Department of English and American Literature, Brandeis University