“The Great Mystic,” “the last Romanticist,” “the pioneer of Realism,” “the artist of the Absurd”; all these epithets (among others) were applied to the Russian 19^th century writer N.V. Gogol. Gogol’s work presented a revolutionary moment in the history of Russian literature; it did not arise out of an ongoing tradition but rather it marked the essential moment of the birth of Russian modern literature which, according to Dostoyevsky, came out of Gogol’s overcoat. This moment of literary birth paralleled the historical rise of an elusive yet all-powerful figure of the modern state in literature. Russia’s modernization process differed from that in France, Germany, or England; it took place later, mostly during the nineteenth century, it was run from above by the Tsarist regime and its central locus was the mysterious, ever growing city, the heroine of Gogol’s plots, St. Petersburg.

This course will suggest that the fantastic, the fragmentation and the absurd essential to Gogol’s style appear as symptoms of the economic machine of the modern state. Centering on four key works by Gogol – “The Nose,” “The Government Inspector,” “The Overcoat” and “Dead Souls” – we will address the structure of the economical subject of the modern state through the analysis of Gogol’s style and literary form. We will become familiar with the myriad economic disorders of the Gogolian subject – including compulsive thrift, commodity fetishism and more – in order to extract from the grotesque the meticulous portrait of the state economic machine. The course will integrate the reading of Gogol’s works into the study of key concepts (and treatises) of early Marxist theory, including Karl Marx’s “Fetish,” Georg Simmel’s “Philosophy of Money,” and Georg Lukac’s “Reification” theory.

The students are expected to prepare for the class, to attend regularly, to participate actively, to give a short oral presentation during the semester and to submit a final paper.