The Wedding of Philip Dermon
(Zhenitba Philipa
Philipovicha Dermona)
Editor’s Note: On a recent trip to Egypt, where in the
course of conducting interviews for a docudrama; “Democracy in the Making,” I
encountered several members of the older generation, some of whom took a great
interest in Western culture and its origins––indeed, to the point of studying
Greek antiquity as deeply as they did the world of ancient Egypt, thereby
becoming, at least in sentiment, pro-Western, even to the point of confessing––off
the record of course––that the great cultural achievement of the Greeks was
confirmed by their having constituted,
as they say, the “Cradle of Democracy,”
and as, during the filming of the docudrama––or rather, in the informal,
amicable intervals of the filming, topics such as democratization through
cultural transmission became a frequent source of conversation, well! one thing
led to another, and before you knew it, I found myself at a congenial gathering
of elderly scholars, so that when, after a fine meal, the wife of my host
brought around a pot of thick black coffee, the conversation round the dinner
table, greased, as it were by a plate of Egyptian sweets that appeared in
tandem with the coffee, the conversation,
as I say, inevitably turned to the matter of the Greek papyri which, preserved
by the incredible dryness of Egypt’s desert air, continued to be, as it were,
disgorged from every rubbish tip in Cairo. These myriad papyri the Egyptians
duly passed on to the classicists and papyrological investigators of Hellenic
literature, thus performing their role as stewards of the civilization of the
West as well as of the East.
However laudable I may have found this stewardship of
antique relics though, I had to admit to my host that my real interest lay in
modernity, and in the hope that “something in the Egyptian air”––namely a true
regard for the values of the West ––would act to preserve democracy there just
as the dry air had preserved those papyri. Whereupon the conversation
unaccountably turned from democracy back to papyri, and to related topics of a
literary nature, and remained there to such a degree that all manner of stories
of the lucky preservation of this or that manuscript were trotted out, until
finally I found myself listening to a most improbable account by some old
fellow whose great grandfather, a Russian, claimed to have rescued one not
especially fine short story from the flames to which its author, Nikolai Gogol,
would, in his Christian mania, have utterly consigned it.
The great grandfather, you see, was a humble servant who had
waited upon Gogol and kindled his fire and swept out his grate. Sensing the
value of a story by the Russian master, the servant was prompted to whisk a
sheaf of papers from the flames and conceal them beneath his tunic, all behind
the back of Gogol’s crazy spiritual guide, who kept exhorting the writer in
God’s name to commit his literary work to the fire.
Unfortunately, being himself illiterate, the Russian great
grandfather of this Egyptian gentleman who had been so quiet at dinner, and was
now suddenly so talkative––the great grandfather, illiterate and very soon to
be distracted by the fact that his wayward daughter, who had fallen in love
with a Copt, was about to be carried off by the man––the great grandfather, not
knowing what to do with his precious treasure, arranged to sell the story to a
book dealer (intending as he did to provide his daughter with a dowry, before
she left Mother Russia for the Copts of Cairo), and the book dealer arranged in
turn, heaven knows why, to have the story translated into French and English.
When, in a matter of days, it became clear that the book
dealer was going to come up short regarding the rubles he had promised the great
grandfather in exchange for the story, the great grandfather naturally demanded
the story back. But Oh! it was already too late! The translator had absconded
with the original story, leaving the book dealer with a none-too-accurate
English translation. And so it was that the Russian daughter, in other words
our gentleman’s grandmother, took as her dowry to the incredulous Copts, not an
apron full of rubles, but a translation into English of a strange story by a
Russian genius.
I know that it is a strange story, because the Egyptian gentleman
into whose family the questionable treasure had been deposited, and had
remained for four generations now, without, let it be said, bringing the family
either luck or profit––that old fellow saw in me either an educated American
with an interest in Russian literature, or an easy mark, and he sold me the
English translation along with a sworn testimony by his grandmother that she
had once seen the original manuscript in Gogol’s own writing (for unlike her
father, she could read), and indeed, what he sold me was a mere handful of thin
pages copied out in English, and he sold it for rather a lot of American
dollars.
So here I end my editorial remarks, for that is how I came
into possession of this unusual manuscript, and why I am here today, to present
it to you. Whether we have before us a bona
fide Gogol story, of the same artistic weave as Viy or the Saint Petersburg
Tales, is difficult to say. Not that I doubt the Egyptian gentleman’s
truthfulness––certainly he told the tale of his family heirloom convincingly
enough. And the pages, handwritten in English, were copied as carefully as though by some bilingual Akaky Akakievich. Yet I couldn’t help wondering,
when he let slip that his grandmother had learned the English as well as
Egyptian language, if she might not have written the story herself, a kind of
exercise in fan fiction.
But I am merely the story’s publisher: I leave the
assessment of its authenticity up to you.
On second thought however, as the designated–––even if
self-designated–––editor of this story, as welI as its publisher, I feel it
incumbent upon me to point out but a few minor discrepancies between my extant
text and the Oeuvre of Nikolai Gogol
(etymologically Hohol), before handing the story over to you, the reader and,
in effect, final arbiter of questions of provenance. But first, before I detail
those discrepancies mentioned above, a brief nota bene, as we scholars like to say.
NB The Egyptian gentleman – that is the old fellow who sold
me the manuscript – was, in fact, one of twenty-seven grandchildren, all of
them descended from his Russian grandmother, who brought the story, or rather
the English translation of it, as her dowry to the Copts. One of those grandchildren,
as fate or luck would have it––a much younger sibling of the Egyptian who
disclosed the purported history of the manuscript over sweets and thick black
coffee, having been raised in a different climate, politically
speaking––almost, that is, in a more liberal society than that of his elder
siblings (for he was born in the year of Suez, when Egypt’s national pride was
at its height), this young man, whose name was Naguib, was as literary as his Russian
grandmother. Naguib’s grandmother, called Bella –who died at the age of 100, the
same year the talkative gentleman, my dinner companion, was born – had turned
over the care of the household to her daughter Amina Bella: mother to both our
storytelling gentleman and to his brother Naguib – Amina Bella who resembled
her mother Bella to a remarkable degree, in the extent of her fertility as well
as in the extent of her knowledge of languages. Naguib now, being a young man, was
able to avail himself of certain special opportunities for the study of the English language and literature –
opportunities not open to Bella or to Amina Bella. For two years during his
early twenties, then, Naguib left Cairo to be a foreign student at a university
in Sydney, Australia. When he returned, to be sure with a head full of crazy
western ideas, he stumbled across the Gogol manuscript, which, of course, was
by now a famous family relic, and feeling, as young people are so very apt to
do, that he and his generation had all the answers, he did not hesitate to show
his mother that he could produce a better translation than the one her mother had carried to Egypt so many years
ago.
Not only did young Naguib update the original translation
with modern locutions, or turns of phrase, and even some American English
slang, he also rewrote the story as though it took place in the American Middle
West. Thus when Philip Philipovich, the hero of our story, rides into town,
instead of riding in a carriage like some latterday Chichikov, he drives a car
with the windows rolled up! and there are many more changes of that sort.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from the point of view
of one such as myself, whose literary interests are primarily related to
modernity, young Naguib was rather arrogant regarding his abilities as a
translator, so much so that when he produced the improved version – as he
thought of it – of the translation into English, he failed to preserve the translation
from which he had worked, that is, the one his grandmother had brought with her
from Russia so many, many years ago.
Therefore what I have to present to you today, with its
young man driving a car, and its Tony the barber and Earl the dry cleaner, and
its bridesmaids in red dresses, may not seem, as a story, very much like it
once flowed from the pen of Nikolai Gogol. Indeed, it may not seem Gogolian at
all. However, I have it on the authority of the Egyptian gentleman who sold me,
along with little brother Naguib’s translation, his grandmother’s sworn
testimony, that this facsimile of a story––this transmogrification, this
translation of a translation–– this linguistic update, is in some way related,
indeed, perhaps not as closely as a direct descendant, but at the very least as
a poor second cousin, nevertheless then! effectively related to that
beleaguered, endangered Russian short story, penned by a great storyteller in
the last throes madness, a story which was whisked from the flames by a provident
man-servant in the time of the tsars.
So now perhaps I have no need to detail the discrepancies in
the text after all. For having heard the entire story-of-the-story, you are
most assuredly ready to read the story itself:
Herewith:
The
Wedding of Philip Dermon
By Nikolai
Gogol
Translated from the Russian by * Pavel Mikhailovich Manilov * and
* Naguib Fyodor Soueif *
The
Wedding of Philip Dermon
Philip Dermon
could not wake up. Or rather, to be accurate, he could not get up, for he had
really been awake since sunrise. It was extremely cold outside the covers, as
Philip discovered while rearranging the pillows, and if the sun had indeed
risen, it was hovering behind such a thick curtain of grey wool, that only the
hardiest of fellows could find reason for getting up at six o’ clock. By seven
a few others had no doubt ventured forth, but probably none of them had a wood
plank floor as cold as Philip’s, and similarly, let it be said that our hero
possessed one of the warmest, softest old brass beds in the entire countryside.
The coldness of the floor on a winter’s morning and the indubitable warmth of
the bed: these are two very good reasons for not getting up at all, let alone
at the crack of dawn. So Philip tried for nearly half an hour to return to the
events of his dream, a really beautiful dream! By submerging his entire face
under the silk quilt, he actually succeeded in recreating the image of a
bluish-white waterfall, as white as ice, through which he had been falling and
falling, but gracefully and, in a manner of speaking, at dead center of the
thing, so that he wasn’t touched by a single drop of water. It was a lovely
moment of recollection, but the rather heavy footsteps of Philip’s mother as
she passed his room crumbled the entire picture and turned it to dust.
The thought
of his mother up and walking about made our young man quite vexed, probably
because, being awake and in motion, she really ought to have thought to turn up
the heat. Philip protruded his head from the silk quilt and briefly considered
the possibility of himself traversing the length of the bedroom floor, cold
planks and all, and, having given the heating mechanism a slight nudge, of
returning to his bed for a morning of comfortable repose. But the walk across
his room was really much too long.
Philip
Dermon was not a lazy man. In fact, he was barely a man at all, as his mother
was fond–––a little too fond!–––of saying, and as all the aunts and uncles and
dentists and barbers who had known him from infancy were likely to say as well.
But that is not the point. The real point is that Philip was not lazy, that he
had done well in school and made certain favorable impressions on the very
influential Mr. Simonson, a man who was really the only luminary throughout the
entire district where Philip lived, and, in short, this young fellow lying so
ignominiously in his pillows and down was full to the brim with great
ambitions. And thinking of these many ambitions, and remembering the necessity
of polishing his good black shoes and picking up his Sunday best at the
cleaner’s––not to mention approving some very expensive floral arrangements!––Philip
suddenly discovered that he was out of bed and dressed and on the way to town.
Driving into
town on what turned out to be––for this latitude––a temperate winter’s day,
Philip nonetheless kept the windows of his car rolled all the way up, so as not
to muss (or mess) his freshly cut (and coifed) hair. Despite the uninspiring aspect of the
morning, Philip had managed well: combing and even “feathering” his hair to
fine effect, and dressing with a certain panache,
that is to say, with as much panache as
may be mustered in a district like ours, for today was the day: the Day of
Days, on which he would most certainly meet and speak with Mr. Simonson.
A small
inaccuracy above, just now apprehended, should be corrected for the reader’s
edification: in his brief lifetime, Philip mostly, or at least as yet, had not
been known by aunts and uncles and dentists and barbers as such, for as a
matter of fact he had just two aunts on the distaff side and no uncles, and he
had had only one dentist and one barber in all his years, but what matter? For
our young man was admired, esteemed, and beloved by everyone who dwelt in the
town and by all those whose country houses were dotted about the district,
visible or perhaps not visible, standing alone or behind screens of trees, just
a stone’s throw, or maybe a cow’s meander, from the highway, their decorative
weathervanes whirling in the breeze, and Philip was admired, esteemed, and
beloved even by the farmers, whose freshly painted red barns punctuated rolling
fields of corn and, nowadays, soy, and whose stainless steel silos––full to brimming
with grain that might or might not be eaten, according to the government’s
whims––dazzled and winked in the bright winter sun. And today, especially, was
our young man admired, etc., because, as he had just recalled, today was the
day of his wedding.
And what a
bride he would have to greet him at the altar! Felice was her name. And though
she was neither wealthy, nor celebrated (in the way that a celebrity is
celebrated, for, to be sure, her family and friends always celebrated her
birthday) nor particularly adept at anything in particular, Felice was without
a doubt the most beautiful girl in the countryside, if not in the entire
district, county, and beyond. Indeed, her beauty was of such a rare and, so to
say, distinctly indistinct quality, that it is really most difficult to
describe; and to tell the truth, Philip was having some difficulty himself in
forming a picture of her–-not an impressionistic sketch––that he could do––but
a rendering in the realist mode, a portrait in fact, a cameo, such as one might
wear next to one’s heart, or more likely in a locket around one’s neck,
assuming one had a portrait of that sort (not that a young man would wear a
locket, but he might put a cameo of his beloved on the fob of his watch chain); in any event, Philip was able to
summon only the merest ghost of an image as he tried to remember just what she
looked like at this exact moment in time.
Her hair of
course, hair that Philip had seen ripple in the autumn breeze like a mountain
stream coursing from the mountain tops to the foothills to the shaded valley
floor, was, if not blond, then soft and fleecy; and her eyes, if not the pure
ice-blue of the cloudless winter sky, were certainly clear and bright and
brimming with gaiety, or stormy and pondering and of a deeply-colored, romantic
hue, depending on the lighting and the circumstances. Her figure was the figure
of a fine specimen of healthy female youth, neither boyish nor too girlish nor
childish nor too matronly. Her form was somewhat long and willowy, of that he
was sure, or if short, well-proportioned and compact, and her womanly parts,
while of unquestionable womanliness, were of uncertain dimensions that yet
sparked the admiring glances of all who beheld her.
In any case,
Philip was certain he would recognize her today, his childhood sweetheart,
because she would be wearing a white dress and a long veil, and recalling this
fact, Philip was able to content himself with a pleasant if vague image,
perhaps akin to the forms and faces we see in the clouds, of his intended, and
to let her drift from his attention.
Editor’s Note. At the time this story was written, of
course, Asperger’s[1]
had not yet been added as a syndrome to the DSM V, and in fact there was no
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders at all, not even a DSM I or
II, with its Kingdoms and Classes and Orders and Genera and Species of mental afflictions
and aberrations, stratified and arranged and rated as though by some grand psychiatric
Linnaeus, no, there was no such handbook to which to add a new disorder: rather,
there was a lachrymose labyrinth twisting its way through the highways and
by-ways of madness and civilization, a labyrinth of women in the attic, village
idiots, and addled survivors of Christian and medical exorcisms; for the
severely afflicted there was the eerie specter of the madhouse, and there was
eccentric bachelorhood or idiosyncratic spinsterhood for the mildly afflicted.
Did Philip have Asperger’s? I am not qualified to say. More
likely he had some rare psycho-neurological disorder along the lines of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, which
sounds like the title of a story by Kafka I know, or come to think of it, it’s
rather farcical, so maybe it could be the title of a play by Feydeau, but in fact
it’s a book of case histories, and there really was a man who mistook his wife
for a hat, because you see there are some people who have trouble recognizing
faces, and something of the sort may have been afflicting Philip as he
contemplated the attributes of his bride (Philip, or rather the individual on
whom Philip’s character was based, for, unless he was entirely a figment of
Gogol’s imagination, Philip’s character must have owed a great deal to Gogol’s various
and sundry acquaintances, many of them clearly strange people, and the idea of
Philip must have owed a great deal, too, to the storyteller’s art of
observation, which would have enabled Gogol to observe and record strange
phenomena that he could not possibly understand).
Story Continued.
By this time our young man was strolling through the center of town (it
was a very small town and
its name slips my mind), and was being flattered and congratulated by one
citizen after another. While running various errands related to the importance
of the day, Philip ran into Tony the barber, a robust fellow of slender
education, and so proud was Tony of the success of this hometown boy that he
embraced him again and again, and, in the manner of his Italian ancestors, kissed
him on one cheek and
then the other, laughing until tears came into his eyes.
And when
Philip came across Earl the dry cleaner, Earl may have greeted him less
demonstratively than Tony had done, not being––as the name Earl might
suggest––descended from a Mediterranean race, but nevertheless, after a firm
but warm handshake, Earl promised Philip that the wedding suit would be pressed
as carefully as anything to come out of Earl’s in the past thirty years, “And
that includes my own wedding garb,” the old man chuckled, exceedingly pleased
with himself for having succeed in using the word “garb” in a sentence.
Even the
mayor of the town gave Philip a few sage words of advice, winking and hinting
at the same time that ‘advice would not be necessary’ if a certain mover and
shaker came through, as everyone expected he would. Hints of
this nature were in no way limited to the mayor, however, and some of the
people who had crowded around Philip as he stood on the sidewalk outside the
dry cleaner’s, and then followed him around from place to place, hither and yon,
even went so far as to whisper, “Simonson” in Philip’s ear as they slapped his
back and pinched him laughingly.
A possible “offer” was openly mentioned by Lev the florist, whose shop at the end of the row of shops Philip finally had reached, and in honor of this “offer,” which Lev certainly expected to be made that very day, the florist passed around champagne flutes to a surprised gathering of customers and lookers– and hangers-on, and pouring out a properly chilled champagne from a bottle that had been as though ripening discretely among the hothouse roses and chrysanthemums and irises, hidden by armloads of red and yellow tulips, rare for the time of year, and continuing to pour until everyone’s flute was filled, Lev the florist proposed a toast “To Philip Dermon and his brilliant career,” and champagne glasses were clinked, and the bubbly was sipped, all around the florist’s shop.
For Philip,
the glory of his reception in town was only to be surpassed by the heady
atmosphere surrounding the wedding itself. All day and perhaps all year, he had
dreamed of the crowds of people, the banks of flowers (many of them tulips),
the pink champagne, and the buffet with its seven-tiered wedding cake and its
pyramids of little frosted multi-colored petit
fours. It seemed as though his whole life had been spent in preparation for
this moment. The wedding and, in particular the wedding spread (that is, the
buffet) was even extraordinary by more cosmopolitan standards than the
townspeople and the dwellers in country houses and certainly the farmers of
Philip’s district, frankly, knew of or knew how to apply to what was so
generously laid out before them. For Philip’s mother, who could be miserly in
the matter of laying carpet on top of a perfectly good wood floor, or for that
matter, who was known to stint when it came to turning on the heat, even
as late as early winter, had been as spendthrift on this grand occasion as she
was miserly in the small moments of running her household.
Some girls
from the town had set up the customary tables of food in the church basement,
and, since the day had turned out to be so unseasonably warm, they had set up
additional tables on the (again unseasonably) green church lawn. But in what
way were these tables customary? Surely not in the sense that the group
insurance contract writers, who dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of the main
non-farm product of the region, used the word in the phrase “customary and
usual” when designating the conceptual framework of their binding contracts. Indeed,
these tables were customary only in the
sense that they are laid out for every wedding, but they were not at all
customary in the sense that they resembled the buffet tables of any other
wedding.
For Philip’s
tables were laid out with cream-colored tablecloths and white lace runners and
pink and white twist candles, and the food that was on them, and threatened by
its very weight to turn the card tables into those ‘groaning boards’ of
old––the food was of the very best. Oxtail soup in large ceramic tureens:
white, and decorated with lions’ heads, was kept astonishingly hot and ready for
pouring into white ceramic dishes on stems, decorated with tiny but
recognizable lions’ heads and supplied with silver soupspoons in the Princess
Diana pattern; shrimp cocktails as crisp and chilled as the oxtail soup was
flaccid and hot, every crystal cocktail dish supplied with a little silver fork
(also in the Princess Diana pattern, deeply discounted when Philip’s mother
purchased them in the 1990s); also there was fried shrimp with an Asian sauce
(very avant-garde for the district), more traditional, if pricey, lobster, as
well as every kind of fish that can be caught in our local streams, and some
types of fish––strange and exotic creatures, iridescent shape shifters or grave
fellows with long moustaches that trailed alongside them in the depths of the
sea, which obviously had to be flown in from the coast, or beyond. Then too
there were tables of beef: sliced and pan-seared, cooked in cubes with lard, broiled in
steaks, and cooked with wine and carrots and tiny white onions, as boeuf
bourguignon. There were tables of ham and tables of lamb, and mixed
meat dishes, such as an elegantly embellished dish of chicken and dried beef
baked in sour cream.
But that is,
of course, not all. For although it was winter, there were tables on the green
church lawn covered with platters bearing every possible fruit, in or out of
season, fruit of exquisite ripeness. There were fruits so rare and exotic, that
many of the people of Philip’s district had never beheld, let alone tasted,
them before. There were vegetables fresh, organic, and lightly blanched, or
braised in double virgin olive oil. There were breads and bread rolls and
condiments and cheeses and individual cheese soufflés. And best of all, on a
row of tables behind all the others, not quite hidden but not obvious either,
like a pink cottage standing behind a gently spaced row of stately eucalyptus trees,
erect but yielding slightly to the breeze, there were what seemed to be
thousands upon thousands of tiny pink-white petit
fours piled carefully on platters, big and little plates, and plates in
tiers. What a subtle climax to a magnificent feast!
And though, as
the hungry crowds, when the time came, were to make for the rows upon rows of
buffet tables, and though some among them were to utter ecstatic cries of
“Pig-out!” and “Greed-feed!” and though even some snorting and guffawing might
then be heard, I swear to you, as my name is Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, that
every element of Philip Dermon’ s wedding reception, down to the last, to the
finest detail, was conceived and planned and executed in the very best of
taste.
Editor’s Note. An explanatory note and brief commentary on
Poshlost.[2]
Gogol is, of course, as well-known an authority on the Russian (but,
let us be clear, not exclusively Russian) phenomenon of poshlost as he is known for his loving descriptions of food, and of
his descriptions generally. Poshlost means,
in effect, ‘vulgarity’ and my friends, one can find vulgarity anywhere: it is
not for nothing that Emma (“c’est moi”) Bovary despaired of dinner chez elle. Madame Bovary knew a thing or
two about good taste, and she found it sorely lacking in rural France. Alas,
she could not escape hoi polloi, and that is her tragedy: Flaubert’s heroine was
crushed by vulgarity. In Gogol’s day, French vulgarity was the vulgarity of the
peasant, while the quintessential Russian vulgarity was that of the parvenu. Unfortunately, vulgarity in
America has often been associated with the extending of the charter, as it
were, of democracy. In America, our collective memory of the inauguration of
our first truly democratic president, Andrew Jackson, has been indelibly
imprinted with images of throngs besieging the food tables, of drunken mobs
with bad manners. But most of all, the triumph of Jacksonian democracy has been
besmirched in memory by innumerable instagrams, so to say, of muddy boots. The
way historians have fixated upon those muddy boots, you would think their mud
still stained the Whitehouse carpets. My Egyptian friends, curious, all of
them, to learn the truth about America, evinced great interest in these boots.
Alas! How to explain the manners of the West to the East (technically the
Middle East) in the matter of foot ware? For how can the people of a culture
that takes its shoes off before entering the room begin to understand us and
our muddy boots? It is perhaps as difficult for them to understand the place of muddy boots in American history, as
it is for us to comprehend throwing
shoes at public speakers as a political gesture. Or, for that matter, pounding
one’s shoe on the table at the UN, as a certain Russian Premier is known
to have done in a Soviet era display, certainly of pique, but also of a
shocking unsuitability which made it the more remarkable for its vulgarity. Say
what you like about our muddy boots, at least we keep them on our feet in
polite society. And I can assure you that, though their manners may indeed have
been countrified, and they, where food and drink were concerned, a bit
overeager, the guests at Philip Dermon’s wedding wore, not only no muddy boots,
but no boots at all, for it was, as previously mentioned, a temperate winter’s
day.
But we have wandered rather far from the purport of our
little editorial note, which has been to point out that vulgarity is as
universal as footwear. Nor did Gogol mean any harm when he described Philip’s
guests in such a way that they can well be imagined, if not brawling, then
jostling the buffet tables. Nor, I think, has Naguib done any injury to the
text by setting the story in a Middle Western American locale, for these “folks” – as our current American President
likes to call us – are every bit as human – as all too human – as their 19th century Russian counterparts.
Indeed, I can find, thus far, no fault with Naguib for, as
it were, keeping the spirit of Gogol alive, poshlost
and all, by transporting Russia’s Philip Dermon and any petty demons he may
have – for we all have our demons – to a
modern American locale, one which seems surprisingly apropos. However I can,
and do, find fault with Sinuhe, the gentleman who sold me the story – Naguib’s
older brother – named, perhaps, when their mother Amina, a woman fertile in
mind as well as in body, was more engrossed in the literature of antiquity than
in that contemporary Palace Walk
penned (or perhaps typed) by her younger son’s namesake. For Sinuhe clearly
omitted to give me one page, at least, of the Gogol story.
To publish or not to publish: that is the decision I am
faced with. Whether to withhold the entire MS until the missing page is
restored to me, or to publish the story thus far? For a quick text message to
my Cairo host has revealed that Sinuhe, like his ancient Egyptian prototype,
has been compelled for unknown reasons to flee Egypt, and as he is presently
incommunicado, who knows when I may
retrieve that missing page? Therefore, and taking into account the more than a century
that the story has lain dormant, unknown and unread, I hereby present you with a portion of a text
certifiably the work of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.
– Robert Trey Hollingsworth, Editor
*
* *
To Be Continued
Link to Part II: copy and paste:
http://wordpixelsblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/gogol-in-egypt-and-america.html
Link to Part II: copy and paste:
http://wordpixelsblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/gogol-in-egypt-and-america.html
[1]
Asperger syndrome, also
known as Asperger disorder or simply Asperger's, is an autism spectrum disorder
that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and
nonverbal communication, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of
behavior and interests…
[2] Poshlost or Poshlost'
(Russian: пошлость, IPA: [ˈpoʂləsʲtʲ]) is a Russian word that carries much
cultural baggage in Russia and which has been
discussed at length by various writers. There is no single English translation.
It has been defined as "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity" (Alexandrov
1991, p. 106), while Svetlana Boym (2001, p. 279) defines it briefly
as "obscenity and bad taste".
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