The Nose and The Overcoat turned out to be my favorite tales. I can see in them why the revolutionaries confused Gogol for one of themselves.

This is a mind tingling book. I find I have to be in a highly caffinated state to get into it. I love it when I am… into it. Glenn loaned it to me and he wants it back pretty bad. So I guess I’ll have to hit the coffee.

I wrecked Gogol by reading the introduction. A task that has never done me any good. That kind of dry, mystery wrecking, critical work should be saved for an apendix rather than put upfront in books.

One of the things that resonates with me in the Russian authors is thier quixotic libralism. I unavoidably lost respect for Gogol when I found out that he was a conservative. He saw the roll of nobility and serfdom as being the God-created order of things. It was hard not to read these feelings into the first couple stories I read.

I just read The Fish. I have never read a more disturbing story in my life. What is most disturbing isn’t the slightly dark humor of the one that got away, but the really dark humor that the fish was an Eel-pout. Who would fish for that?! In my extensive experience with Eel-pout, as they are the fish I have caught most, I know them to be the Anti-Chris.

Traveling with Ernesto Guevara through his America, seeing the injustice of the human experience through his eyes is enough to make a revolutionary out of any of us. I long to change… the world? Is that too pretentious? I ache to make the kingdom of God real on earth. Perhaps that is where Che and I depart. I hope that a change can be made without guns.

I’ve been compelled to take a break from the dark comedy of Chekhov inticed away by the ingenious irony of Russell. We borrowed this book via inter-library loan because the forward was called “The Symbiote of Hooton, Alan Dean Foster.” I still don’t know why. But the si-fi is delightful and the irony satisfying.

I just read “Metamorphosite” and found the ending a feast for my longing soul. It echoed my feelings as I wrote the end to Anaximander’s Goggles Ah the Boundless! Ah eternity!

Maxim Torchakov meets a sick Cossack on the road from church Easter Morning. He and his wife have between them a cake blessed and consecrated at that eveinings vigil. Maxim is completly wrapped in the Easter spirit, the Spirit of the risen Lord. He would give a bit of that consecrated cake to a sick soldier trying to make it home. But is wife would not. She would not break the holy cake “uselessly”.

I think it is telling that Tochakov’s life enters a spiral after wronging that man. Surely the risen Christ was there before him asking for a piece of the Kulich, and Torchakov had to choose was he to obey the voice of Christ speaking through his heart and the lips of the poor cossack? or was he to obey the unkind religion of his wife? What a story!

Ah, Madness. The black monk is an agreeable fellow to me. There is something in quixotic madness that is pure and holy. Perhaps in all of us there is a longing to be quite mad, and thereby creative, joyful and at peace. May the black monk sweep into my life and leave me with mystical thoughts and a smile frozen to my chillng lips.

Levin grabbed me at his first appearance. To me his character is as important as Anna and creates a wonderful contrast to her. Go Kostya!

Here I stand mourning the death of Don Quixote of la Mancha. His madness in committing himself to his profession gave me strength to commit myself to mine. Now I bid farewell to Alonso Quixano the sane. Thank you for the joy and sweetness your delightful madness has brought me. May my own peculiar madness be as sweet to me, and sanity find me praising God!