Free Republic

Nikolai Gogol was born on March 31, 1809. Gogol wrote mostly short stories and plays. He is generally thought of as the first great Russian realist, but his stories often contain elements of the surreal and the bizarre, occasionally leaning into horror. Gogol was born in what is now Ukraine, and was raised speaking both Russian and Ukrainian. He was exposed to the theatrical world from a young age; his father was a Ukrainian-langage playwright whose plays were often staged by Gogol's uncle, who ran a theater. He spent most of his twenties as a student at one of Ukraine's...

Mass murder at a sunny college campus in a beach town would normally be considered "newsy," but Elliot Rodger's massacre at the University of California-Santa Barbara last Friday is getting surprisingly little press. This is not a good case for liberals: The killer was an immigrant, a person of color, and the majority of his casualties resulted from attacks with a car or knife. It makes as much sense to rant about the NRA as to blame the Auto Club of America or the National Knife Collectors Association. Rather, what we have is yet another mass murder committed by a...

Russia's keenness to keep the writer out of Ukrainian hands has been ridiculed – but such chauvinism is hardly uniqueNews that the Ukrainians are claiming the great 19th century writer Nikolai Gogol as their own because he was born and bred in their territory has been reported with evident amusement – not least because it has so irritated Russian spokespersons. Yet is it so foolish? Nations care very much about the esteem in which they are held by other nations, and a literary pantheon confers more prestige than any Olympic medal table. "The chief glory of every people arises from...

statue of a giant nose in St Petersburg, inspired by Gogol's story of a man's pursuit of his escaped nose, has also vanished. Police in Russia's second city are hunting the thieves responsible for the removal of the 100kg marble piece. It was erected eight years ago to honour Nikolai Gogol for his popular but surreal 19th Century short story. In it a civil servant's nose detaches itself and he has to pursue it all over the city as it conducts a bizarre walkabout. "The nose seems to have gone for a walk," said its sculptor Vyacheslav Bukhayev. "It could...