"The Apotheosis of a Mask," in Nikolai Gogol, New Directions, 1944, 139-50.

A Russian-born American man of letters perhaps best known for the novels Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), Nabokov was a prolific contributor to many literary fields. He was fascinated with all aspects of the creative life: in his works, he explored the origins of creativity, the relationships of artists to their work, and the nature of invented reality. In the following essay Nabokov extols Gogol's abstract and highly stylized technique and concludes that "The Overcoat" "is a phenomenon of language and not one of ideas."

Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader's own notions of life. Great literature skirts the irrational. Hamlet is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar. Gogol's "The Overcoat...