![]() ![]() ![]() Kafkaesque? Gogol’s is less a proto-surrealist fable of identity, Saunders argues, than an exercise in blunt realism, that scrutinizes the topsy-turvy world of Tsarist officialdom. Tolstoy, a moral-ethical giant, towered above his predecessor Gogol, whose satirical short story ‘The Nose’, written in around 1836, relates how a nose detaches itself from the face of a St Petersburg petty official and develops a life of its own. Tolstoy’s is the “kind of story I want to write”, Saunders says, “the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.” A wealthy merchant-landowner sets out with his serf across a frozen immensity of tundra, only to get fatally lost. ‘Master and Man’, Tolstoy’s great 1895 parable of social inequality and sacrifice, unfolds in a December snowstorm. If Chekhov is tantalizingly elusive, Tolstoy conjures an atmosphere of impassive Christian grandeur. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT. ![]()
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