Gogol’’s Head: The Misadventures of a Purloined Skull

Replete with Gogolian absurdity and high comedy, GOGOL'S HEAD features Nikolai Gogol himself in semi-fictional scenes; the book is written in a parody of Gogol's own style. In June, 1931, the body of Nikolai Gogol, great writer of the Russian land, was exhumed at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, where Gogol's remains had rested since his death in 1852. When the coffin was opened the head was missing. Or was it? What about other myths? Was the body turned on its side, or upside down; were there scratch marks on the underside of the coffin lid? In his lifetime Gogol's contemporaries sought incessantly to figure out this inscrutable man. They never could, so they made up stories about him. GOGOL'S HEAD examines the implications of one such story. It tells the tale of the missing head's fate. Mixing in details from the life of the writer to create a hybrid work-a blend of biography and fiction-the book introduces one Adrian Lee Nule: a graduate student in Russian literature and a Gogolian character in his own right. Researcher Nule pursues the head in its new life, as pawn in the evil machinations of Joseph Stalin, then strives to consummate the mystical third finding of the great master's head.

U.R. Bowie, Ph.D., taught Russian language, literature, culture, folklore for thirty years at Miami University. GOGOL’S HEAD is his seventh published work of creative literary fiction.