ABSTRACT
Nikolai Gogol’s (1809–1852) bizarre tales of St. Petersburg bureaucracy are frequently described as Kafkaesque, while the philosophical rebels of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821–1881) novels earned him the moniker of a Nietzschean. The parallels should be reversed, of course, since it was Kafka who read Gogol and Nietzsche – Dostoevsky. But their persistence alone testifies to the centrality and importance of Gogol and Dostoevsky as precursors to absurdist literature and existentialism, respectively. This chapter highlights the elements in their texts that have earned them this international reputation, while also contextualizing them within the specific historical and literary developments that shaped them. Gogol’s short stories, such as “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” activate a multiplicity of potential explanatory modes: the fantastic, the mundane, the spiritual. But in never allowing one of these modes to dominate, they leave readers without the comfort of a unitary cosmology. In doing so, they capture both the wider experience of modernity and Russia’s ontological uncertainty in the wake of Peter the Great’s Westernizing reforms, which contributed to an enduring crisis of identity. Dostoevsky’s characters inherit this world of radical uncertainty. Their agonizing struggle to find their place in it, poignantly captured in texts such as “The Double” and Notes from the Underground, as well as in his late novels, has given rise to the recognition voiced by Camus that “probably no one so much as Dostoevsky has managed to give the absurd world such familiar and tormenting charms.”
