World Building
One of Belyi’s most striking illustrations [from a book called Gogol's Craftsmanship], in fact, is a picture of a typical Gogolian sentence, which is transformed into an architectural structure, a temple. The flow of words through time here becomes a building constructed from the building blocks of Gogol’s language: columns representing repetition; “rupture” as a sagging block between columns; decoration above the central portal provided by “parenthesis” and “exclamation,” a scalloped roof spelling out the devices that keep the Gogolian period moving: “when…when…then…then…”–all topped off by a spire of “hyperbole.”
The lacework of arabesques that holds Gogol’s stories together is a kind of exoskeleton, perhaps, but a remarkably flexible, “plasmatic” one. In Eisenstein’s nod to sea anemones, coral, and pike perch, one senses again the appearance of the “underwater circus,” the organic saltwater arena, the womb. In the underwater circus, the “lacework of Gothic walls” pulses with life.
from “Gogol, Belyi, Eisenstein, and the Architecture of the Future,” Anne Nesbet, The Russian Review, 65:3
