Mr. Nabokov is himself a poet who has developed a complicated imagery and a novelist of the non-realistic sort, and he has written the kind of book which can only be written by one artist about another—an essay which takes its place with the very small body of first-rate criticism of Russian literature in English. Nobokov’s Gogol must be henceforth read by anybody who has any serious interest in finding out about Russian culture. Not only has he shifted the lighting on the conventional picture of Gogol in such a way as to bring out his real genius as no other writer in English has done, but he has labored to give the reader some accurate impression of Gogol’s style—a feature of his art which has come off badly in most of the English translations...

The effort to apply to Gogol the usual methods of the Nabokov portraiture has resulted in a certain amount of violence to the subject’s career and work; large areas of both are skipped over, and the aspects that have been treated at length seem sometimes rather capriciously chosen. The reader is also annoyed by the frequent selfindulgence of the author in poses, perversities and vanities that sound as if he had brought them away from the St. Petersburg of the early nineteen-hundreds and piously preserved them in exile; and, along with them, a kind of snapping and snarling on principle at everything connected with the Russian Revolution that sometimes throws the baby out with the blood bath—to be guilty of a species of witticism to which Mr. Nabokov is much addicted and which tends, also, a little to disfigure his book. His puns are particularly awful.