Some Thoughts on Gogol's "Kolyaska"

Although singled out for special praise by such fellow practitioners of the craft as Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Gogol's story "Kolyaska" has been ignored by the adherents of both major schools of Gogol criticism: those seeking to demonstrate that Gogol was primarily a social satirist and those who consider him a master of the grotesque. Yet an analysis of "Kolyaska" shows that it is in fact paradigmatic, presenting in quintessential form both Gogol's central theme of man's futile search for identity and his favorite narrative strategies of blurring the contours of the visible world by alogism and creating comic incongruity by a "worm's-eye view" of reality. The point at which the thematic and narrative lines meet is best defined as irony, a concept that enables us to reconcile both satire and the grotesque, both the laughter and the tears so often said to be evoked by his works.