Content area
Full text
Gogol in Rome by Katia Kapovich, Salt, 2004, $15.95 paper, ISBN 1844710467.
Few non-native writers have mastered the mongrel English tongue. Conrad immediately jumps to mind, as does Nabokov. While Katia Kapovich, who emigrated to the United States from Moldova in 1990 and writes in both English and her native Russian, lacks Conrad's and Nabokov's pure control-she alludes to the latter's work frequently and with palpable admiration in her poems-her eerie, frosty first collection of English-language verse is nonetheless arresting, commanding, and fluid.
Some unnatural phrases inevitably surface. Not abrasive, they instead disorient subtly, like flavored cigarettes. For instance, in the titular "Gogol in Rome," a crisp sketch of the Russian author's shuddersome descent into a madness and death, she labels the painter Alexander Ge as Gogol's "bosom friend." The phrase is rather musty and expired; it belongs to different century. (Melville uses it to head the tenth chapter of Moby Dick.)
Referring to Russian writers, Dostoevsky supposedly once said, "We all crawled out from under Gogol's Overcoat.'" If the statement is hyperbolic, Gogol is nevertheless an obvious and admitted guiding spirit in Kapovich's...