Phantastic Gogol

Last week I went to Brown, in Providence, RI, to talk to students about my experiences in the "real world" after studying Russian Language and Literature as an undergraduate. On my way to the train station, to travel back to New York, I stopped by the List Art Building where almost everyday for a semester I walked up six flights of stairs to the painting studio. The walls in the staircase were covered with images. They're different now, of course, but the smell is the same. It was a Proustian moment.

A professor who had taught me Pushkin 16 years ago gave me a hug when she saw me. After my talk, in which I had mentioned the impact on my life of the works of N.V. Gogol, the professor said, "I guess we all have our Gogolian moments," and added that she wasn't sure whether that was a good thing. Only later, walking aimlessly around campus at dusk, did I think, it's not that we have Gogolian moments, but that there is a little bit of Gogol in each of us, which is, like certain bodily odors, repulsive yet irresistible.

The newest member of the faculty is a Gogol scholar who has just had a book published on Gogol and Gombrowicz. I searched for the book on the website of an academic bookstore with the keywords "Gogol" and "Gombrowicz" and improbably found it. At the bookstore today, however, the woman at the information desk couldn't find it. I had told her I wasn't sure what the exact title was, that it was something like "Phantasmic Matter," but that it certainly had the words "Gogol" and "Gombrowicz" in it. I spelled out Gombrowicz, "G-O-M-B-R-O-W-I-C-Z." She typed something in the computer and looked at the screen, typed something again and looked again, typed again and looked again. I wondered whether I should have spelled out Gogol. I said, "I saw on your website that you have it," to which she replied, "but you don't know the title," and I said, "no, but it's something like Phantasmic Matter." She typed and looked, and typed and looked. I started to want to make a scene.

Earlier, as I was browsing, I had heard the woman tell a colleague some insolent news about the government's recent bailout plan for companies like AIG. There was something about her tone I didn't like. She seemed to want to appear smart in order to conceal deficiencies. When she finally said she couldn't find it, I said, "I found it on the website just by typing 'Gogol' and 'Gombrowicz.'" Indeed, I had said that I was sure only that those two words were in the title. She typed again and found it. Then she said, "Phantasms of Matter," emphasizing the "of," to correct me. It occurs to me only now that she might not have known how to spell "Gogol." Maybe all that time she was typing, "Gogle," "Gogel," or even "Google."

Apart from Phantasms OF Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) by Michal Oklot, I bought, Polish Memories by Witold Gombrowicz himself, My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen, 54 by Wu Ming, The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels, and Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Of these, only the Derrida and the Oklot were not discounted.