On the Square Today

In today’s On the Square feature, Micah Mattix discusses  Nikolai Gogol’s  The Night Before Christmas :

[P]erhaps no Russian writer is as foreign as Nikolai Gogol. He was even baffling to his own countrymen. “Gogol was a strange creature,” Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in his idiosyncratic biography of the writer, “but genius is always strange.”

A Tsarist who supported Nicholas I, Gogol nevertheless wrote the farcical  The Inspector General , lambasting the greed and corruption of government officials. And while he was a member of the Orthodox Church, he humorously combined the sacred and the profane in his early tales.