As my class was discussing “The Portrait,” a short story by Nikolai Gogol, we touched briefly on the topic of perception and the ways in which the artist in Gogol’s story loses control of the portrait he paints. I had been having trouble determining what to write about in my second paper, and I decided to pursue that subject because the gap between a writer’s intentions and the way his work is interpreted interests me.
After I explored that theme in my second paper, I decided to return to it for my fourth paper and bring Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk into the discussion, as well as “The Overcoat,” another short story by Gogol. While it had been relatively easy to see the theme of the artist losing control of his work in “The Portrait,” I had a little more trouble connecting the other two stories to the topic in a meaningful way. Through studying critical essays on Poor Folk and analyzing the relevant sections of the text closely, I developed a position on Dostoevsky’s relevance to the subject, noting that he creates one of his characters, Makar Devushkin, as an amateur literary critic who misinterprets Gogol’s work. Once I began to find the connections the three stories shared, my interest in the concept helped me put together a strong argument.
ANNIE MAROON is a COM freshman from Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She is majoring in journalism. This essay was written for Vlada Brofman’s course, WR 100: Russian Prose Classics.