Literature - St Petersburg - page 451

Petersburg and its European tendencies. His final home near Vladimirskaya pl now
houses the Dostoevsky Museum ( CLICK HERE ) and he is buried at Tikhvin Cemetery
( CLICK HERE ) within the walls of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, a suitably
Orthodox setting for such a devout believer.
Amidst the epic works of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the absurdist short-
story writer Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) sometimes gets lost. But his troubled genius
created some of Russian literature's most memorable characters, including Akaki
Akakievich, tragicomic hero of 'The Overcoat', and the brilliant social-climber Major
Kovalyev, who chases his errant nose around St Petersburg in the absurdist master-
piece 'The Nose'. Gogol came to St Petersburg from his native Ukraine in 1829, and
wrote and lived here for a decade before spending his final years abroad. He was not
impressed by the legendary capital: in a letter to his mother he described it as a place
where 'people seem more dead than alive' and complained endlessly about the air
pressure, which he believed caused illness. He was nevertheless inspired to write a
number of absurdist stories, collectively known as The Petersburg Tales, which are
generally recognised as the zenith of his creativity.
If you want to get inside the mind of Petersburg's most surreal writer, try
Simon Karlinsky's explosive The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol , which
argues that the key to understanding the writer was that he was a self-hat-
ing homosexual. Supported very strongly by textual analysis, the topic is
convincing, if rather polemical.
SYMBOLISM IN THE SILVER AGE
The late 19th century saw the rise of the symbolist movement, which emphasised in-
dividualism and creativity, purporting that artistic endeavours were exempt from the
rules that bound other parts of society. The outstanding figures of this time were the
philosopher-poet Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), novelist Andrei Bely (1880-1934)
and poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921) as well as the poets Sergei Yesenin
(1895-1925), Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921) and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). The
Stray Dog Café ( CLICK HERE ), an underground bar on pl Iskusstv (Arts Sq), was a
popular meeting place where Symbolist writers, musicians and artists exchanged ideas
and shared their work.