(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
In September, Gogol returned to school to begin his junior year : honors biology, honors U.S. history, advanced trigonometry, Spanish, honors English. In his English he read Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, The Good earth, The Red Badge of Courage. He took his turn at the podium and recited the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth, the only lines of poetry he would know by heart for the rest of his life. His teacher, Mr. Lawson, was a slight, wiry, shamelessly preppy man with a surprisingly deep voice, reddish blond hair, smallish but penetrating green eyes, horn-rimmed glasses. He was the subject of school-wide speculation, and slight scandal, having once been married to Ms. Sagan, who teaches French. He used to wear khakis and Shetland sweaters in bright solid colors, kelly green and yellow and red, sips black coffee continually from the same chipped blue mug, cannot survive the fifty-minute class without excusing himself to go to the teachers' lounge for a cigarette. In spite of his diminutive stature he had a commanding, captivating presence in the room. His handwriting was famously illegible ; student compositions were regularly returned stamped with tan rings of coffee, sometimes golden rings of scotch. Every year gave everyone either a D or an F on the first assignment, an analysis of Blake's "The Tiger." A number of girls in the class insist that Mr. Lawson was indescribably sexy and had raging crushes on him.
Mr. Lawson was the first of Gogol's teachers to know and to care about Gogol the author. The first day of class ha had looked up from the podium when he came to Gogol's name on the roster, an expression of benign amazement on his face. Unlike other teachers he did not ask, Was that really his name, was that he last name, was it short for something else ? He did not ask, as many foolishly did, "Wasn't he a writer ?" Instead he called out the name in a perfectly reasonable way, without pause, without doubt, without a suppressed smile, just as he had called out Brian and Erica and Tom. And then : "Well, we are going to have to read 'The Overcoat.' Either that or 'The Nose.' "
One day, Mr. Lawson wrote on the board, "Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol" in capital letters, drew a box around it, then wrote the dates of the author's birth and death in parentheses. Gogol opened the binder on his desk, reluctantly copied the information down. Mr. Lawson started with a brief history of the author he intended to make the class learn : Born 1809 in a province of Poltava to a family of Ukrainian Cossack gentry. Father a small landowner who also wrote plays, died when Gogol was sixteen. Studied at the Lyceum of Nezhin, went to St. Petersburg in 1828 where he entered, in 1829, the civil service, in the department Public Works for the Ministry of the Interior. From 1830 to 1831, transferred to the Court Ministry in the Department of Royal Estates, after which time he became a teacher, lecturing on history at the Young Ladies' Institute, and later at the University of St. Petersburg. At the age of twenty-two, established a close friendship with Alexander Pushkin. In 1830, published his first short story. In 1836, a comic play, The Government Inspector, was produced in St. Petersburg. Dismayed by the play's mixed reception, left Russia. For the next twelve years lived abroad, in Paris, Rome,and elsewhere, composing the first volume of Dead Souls, the novel considered to be his finest work.
"Not your ordinary guy, Nikolai Gogol," Mr. Lawson said. "He was celebrated today as one of Russia's most brilliant writers. But during his life he was understood by no one, least of all himself. One might say he typified the phrase 'eccentric genius.' Gogol's life, in a nutshell, was a steady decline into madness. The writer Ivan Turgenev described him as an intelligent, queer,, and sickly creature. He was reputed to be a hypochondriac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man. He was, in addition, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression. He had trouble making friends. He never married, fathered no children. It's commonly believed he died a virgin."
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