NNikolai Gogol, the great 19th century Russian writer, was a Ukrainian! I didn’t know that. I read it in an article in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And I found myself smiling at the memory of my first encounter with Gogol’s story The Overcoat, when I was barely 20. I vaguely remembered the story and how it had overwhelmed me with the sad and bizarre plight of a petty government clerk.
I had then made a mental note to read more of Gogol’s works but somehow that had not happened. I knew about his The Government Inspector and vaguely remembered watching a Hollywood adaptation of it, The Inspector General, starring Danny Kaye.
There was no more Gogol in my life for a long time until he reappeared in Jhumpa Lahiri’s book The Namesake and its movie adaptation.
And now, rather too late in the day, Gogol was back in my life. I live alone; I have a laptop and Internet connectivity; nearly everything in the world is at my fingertips, and I have all the time in the world. I got The Inspector General on YouTube and watched it on my laptop. Splendid!
Suddenly, I was seized with a desire to read The Overcoat again and perhaps also those that I had meant to read but hadn’t. And I googled four Gogol works on the net — The Overcoat, Nose, Dead Souls and Taras Bulba — and they were all there in paperback. I would order them right away.
“Really?” asked a voice from within. “Do you know how many unread books are on your shelves?” Only the previous night, as I had sat up late to finish another lovely story from my ancient, voluminous, much-thumbed, copy of A Treasury of Short Stories, I had heard that mocking voice: “How many years have you had this book — 60? And you hadn’t read this story till today! How many more remain unread?’ I had counted — 21 out of 70!”
“And you want to buy more books!”
“None of your business,” I screamed. And, as had often been the case before, I was at once sad that I had done violence to that inner voice. It had a point. In my excitement, I had forgotten that I now had most things at my fingertips. Why not look for the books on Project Gutenberg, the online repository of copyright-free books?
And sure enough there they were. Not just the ones I was looking for but a lot more Gogol stories. I could read them anytime anywhere, free! “Fat chance that you do, though!” said the voice, with a chuckle. It echoed from my old bookshelves.
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