Literary Birthday – 31 March – Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol Quotes

1. The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.
2. You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.
3. A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.
4. However stupid a fool’s words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.
5. It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.
6. What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.
7. Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.
8. There are certain words which are nearer and dearer to a man than any others.
9. Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.

Nikolai Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian humourist, dramatist, and novelist. Gogol used the grotesque in his writings. Gogol used the slipstream technique of defamiliarization, whereby a writer presents common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so that the reader can gain new perspectives and see the world differently. Gogol saw the outer world strangely metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, “A Terrible Vengeance” and “A Bewitched Place”. His novel, Dead Souls, and his short story, The Overcoat are considered the foundations of the 19th-century tradition of Russian realism. Click her for his bibliography.

by Amanda Patterson

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