Nikolai Gogol, the strangest prose-poet Russia ever produced, died Thursday morning, a little before eight, on the fourth of March, eighteen fifty-two, in Moscow. He was almost forty-three years old - a reasonably ripe age for him, considering the ridiculously short span of life generally allotted to other great Russian writers of his miraculous generation. Absolute bodily exhaustion in result of a private hunger strike (by means of which his morbid melancholy had tried to counter the Devil) culminated in acute anemia of the brain (together, probably, with gastro-enteritis through inanition)- and the treatment he was subjected to, a vigorous purging and blood-letting, hastened the death of an organism already gravely impaired by the after effects of malaria and malnutrition. The couple of diabolically energetic physicians who insisted on treating him as if he were an average Bedlamite, much to the alarm of their more intelligent but less active colleagues, intended to break the back of their patient's insanity before attempting to patch up whatever bodily health he still had left. Some fifteen years before, Pushkin, with a bullet in his entrails, had been given medical assistance good for a constipated child. Second rate German and French general practitioners still dominated the scene, for the splendid school of great Russian physicians was yet in the making.
The learned doctors crowding around the Malade Imaginaire with their dog-Latin and gigantic belly pumps cease to be funny when Moliere suddenly coughs out his life-blood on the turbulent stage. It is horrible to read of the grotesquely rough handling that Gogol's poor limp body underwent when all he asked for was to be left in peace. With as fine a misjudgment of symptoms, as a clear anticipation of the methods of Charcot, Dr. Auvers (or Hovert) had his patient plunged into a warm bath where his head was soused with cold water after which he was put to bed with half-a-dozen plump leeches affixed to his nose. He had groaned and cried and weakly struggled while his wretched body (you could feel the spine through the stomach) was carried to the deep wooden bath; he shivered as he lay naked in bed and kept pleading to have the leeches removed: they were dangling from his nose and getting into his mouth (Lift them, keep them away, - he pleaded) and he tried to sweep them off so that his hands had to be held by stout Auvert's (or Hauvers's) hefty assistant.
The Devil he's countering, of course, is his homosexuality, though Nabokov was too polite to say and this wasn't openly discussed by scholars in the English speaking world until the time of Simon Karlinsky's The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (originally panned in the New York Review of Books in 1977 as wishful thinking on Karlinsky's part).
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