Everything that is profound loves the mask. … I could imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green, heavily-hooped wine cask. … Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustable in evasion of communication, desires and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends.
Beyond Good and Evil
These words of Nietzsche say much about Gogol. They suggest his keg-like belly, the contradictions and evasions of his letters, his cunning and depth, and above all, those “ gaps and black holes in the texture of his style” which Nobokov describes in his study, in a chapter called, “Apotheosis of a Mask.” But he had other ways to hide his fragile gift—there is a certain dissimulation in the very generes he chose: his greatest comedy ends in “living statues” and he calls his novel a poema.