Vladimir Nabokov
Nikolai Gogol.
Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions Books, 1944. The Makers of Modern Literature. First edition, first state (with five titles to advertisement page). 172 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5" x 7.5", is bound in gray cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book is in fine condition, with solid binding, clean pages without markings. Illustrated with frontispiece portrait of the Ukranian-born Russian author. Price-clipped dust jacket exhibits very minor loss at head of spine panel. Jacket, now preserved in mylar cover, is otherwise in fine condition. Brown dust jacket, designed by Alvin Lustig, lists four titles on the rear flap and has Edmund Wilson review on rear panel.
"This biography begins with Gogol's death and ends with his birth, an inverted structure typical of both Gogol and Nabokov. The biographer proceeds to establish the relationship between Gogol and his novels, especially with regard to "nose-consciousness", a peculiar feature of Russian life and letters, which finds its apotheosis in Gogol's own life and prose. There are more expressions and proverbs concerning the nose in Russian than in any other language in the world. Nabokov's style in this biography is comic, but as always leads to serious issues―in this case, an appreciation of the distinctive "sense of the physical" inherent in Gogol's work. Nabokov describes how Gogol's life and literature mingled, and explains the structure and style of Gogol's prose in terms of the novelist's life."