an icy detour

Braving the snow-choked streets my wife and I went for a lengthy stroll through a the city, cadaverously mute, it was an interesting perspective on the dormant polis. Upon return I elected to take a break from the Foote, picking up a volume by Gogol and rereading The Overcoat for the fifith time, I believe. this summer i read a Cultural History of St Petersburg by Solomon Volkov with some firends and it was the positioning of Gogol as the incarnate of the Petersburg mythos which was so captivating. The 30 page story is both nightmarish and yet riddled with humor. It remains an encapsulation of bureaucrats everywhere, though its wanderign glances along the breadth of Mother Rus is singular in its bile. The story was completed with the abrupt pallor that concludes the life the maligned copyist and i was pleased with the opportunity to revisit such mastery.