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Poet Katia Kapovich Lectures at Franklin Pierce

by Nicole Buchholz
Exchange Staff Reporter

     On a two day trip through FPC earlier this week, Katia Kapovich read students a selection of her poems on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and lectured on Russian author Nikolai Gogol.

     On Monday, February 27, Kapovich lectured in Marcucella Hall to a room full of mostly freshmen students who are enrolled in College Writing II and their professors. Kapovich spoke in her Russian accent to a crowd of students on the life that Gogol had in Russia. All students enrolled in the course are required to read Gogol’s The Overcoat as a supplemental reading to the course. Kapovich had written her dissertation on Gogol and spoke to the students on many of the different ways to interpret his writings.

     Kapovich said, “People have stated that you need to spend 12 years studying Homer’s The Odyssey because that is how long it took him to write it. I say you need to spend as many years studying as the author spent writing before you can truly understand their message. Gogol wrote for 25 years.”

     Kapovich shared with students that in her opinion, Gogol was capable of finding beauty in misery. As a poorer citizen of Russia, Gogol wrote on what we all had in common. He found pleasure in simple things and showed the world through his writing that people can be happy in poverty. She gave Gogol’s The Overcoat as a perfect example of what Gogol wrote about.  

     Freshmen Karissa Hookstadt said, “After listening to her lecture, I understood better what it was that Gogol was talking about. Gogol writes the truth in that not every story ends with a happy ending. You read all those fantasy stories like Cinderella, and not all those things happen to us, they are dreams and fantasies. Gogol’s message in The Overcoat, according to Mrs. Kapovich, was to stop looking around for other things, to accept what you have and deal with it. The lecture helped bring more meaning to Gogol’s writing.”

     After Kapovich’s lecture on The Overcoat, College Writing Professor Nancy Lloyd said, “my outlook changed on his writing. I’ll teach it now so that students understand how close he was to his work.”

      “When we read The Overcoat, we, as Americans, are always looking for a message,” said Lloyd. “Gogol wasn’t doing that. He was writing about an outsider, a person not accepted by society. He slips in the humanity by reinforcing the individual’s life. Maybe the character had a valuable life even though it was simple.”

     Later on Monday night and at the Tuesday Briefing in the Fitzwater Center, Kapovich read poems that she had written herself from her new book, Gogol in Rome, which is a collection of her English verse writings. She read poems about her life in Russia, as a child, an adult, and a prisoner of an insane asylum. In her poem, A Paper Plane to No Where, she spoke of her time in the asylum. It was her first poem written in English.

     Kapovich said that poetry is, “the link between obscurity, beauty, and detail. It is used to discover your own types of beauty. It is an escape, medicinal. It’s a great thing to have as a possibility of escape to a place that is not here and all your own. All people have a great place that they can escape to that they can build with their own words. Poets speak the most beautiful language.”

     Students can purchase Kapovich’s book, Gogol in Rome, at the school book store.