4 ideas
A fussy biographer reveals that Gogol's wife, Caracas, was an inflatable rubber doll. Gogol changed her size, figure, and hair color to suit his moods, and came to believe she had her own tastes, vices, and even a venereal disease.
A partner whose form is wholly set by one's own moods can only give back the self who shaped them. Caracas is adjustable in every way, yet Gogol comes to blame her for independent desires and corruption. The contempt aimed at the dependent other is contempt for one's own projected impulses, and destroying the object stands in for destroying the part of oneself it holds.
The narrator reports absurd, obscene, and violent facts in the measured, footnoting voice of scholarly biography. He qualifies trivia and apologizes for indelicacy while treating the central impossibility as settled. The gap between respectable form and grotesque content is where the horror and comedy come from, because procedure lends credibility to anything it touches.
The narrator insists he is serving truth and guarding Gogol's reputation from vulgar misreadings. Yet each defensive gloss and pre-emptive justification draws attention to the damning facts and to his own prurient interest. A biographer's reverence for a great man turns into complicity, recasting cruelty as the eccentricity of genius.