Nikolai Gogol (1809 - 1852) was a writer, dramatist and satirist of the Russian Empire, born in what is now Ukraine. His stories, plays and the novel Dead Souls combined comedy, grotesque invention and sharp observation of official corruption, and had a decisive influence on later Russian literature. [1] A religious crisis in his final years led him to burn part of his last manuscript shortly before his death in Moscow. [2]
Early life
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born on 19 March 1809 in Velyki Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava region of present-day Ukraine, into a family of the minor Cossack gentry. His father wrote comic plays in Ukrainian for a neighbouring estate theatre, and the folklore, dialect and village life of the region became the material of Gogol's first books. [1]
Educated at a boarding school in Nizhyn, where he took part in student theatricals, he moved to St Petersburg in 1828 hoping for a career in the civil service or on the stage. [2]
Ukrainian tales and early fame
Success came with Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-32), a collection of stories drawing on Ukrainian folklore, humour and the supernatural. It brought him the attention of Alexander Pushkin, who became a friend and a source of literary ideas. [1]
The collection Mirgorod followed in 1835, containing the historical tale Taras Bulba and the horror story Viy. In 1834 Gogol was appointed to teach medieval history at St Petersburg University, a post for which he was unprepared; he resigned the following year. [2]
Petersburg tales and drama
His St Petersburg stories turned from village life to the bureaucratic capital. "Nevsky Prospekt", "Diary of a Madman", "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" present clerks and petty officials in a city where identity is unstable and the absurd intrudes without explanation. "The Overcoat", the story of a copying clerk destroyed by the loss of a new coat, became one of the most influential short stories in European literature. [1]
The comedy The Government Inspector, staged in 1836, depicts the officials of a provincial town mistaking a penniless traveller for an inspector from the capital and rushing to bribe him. Its success was accompanied by attacks from those who read it as an assault on the administration, and Gogol left Russia soon afterwards. [4]
Dead Souls and later years
Gogol spent much of the next twelve years abroad, chiefly in Rome. There he completed the first part of Dead Souls (1842), in which the swindler Chichikov travels the provinces buying the names of deceased serfs still listed as living on the tax rolls, in order to mortgage them as property. The book's gallery of landowners is one of the most celebrated in Russian fiction. [3]
Gogol intended the novel as the first part of a larger redemptive design, but struggled with the continuation. His 1847 volume of moralising essays, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, defending autocracy and serfdom, alienated liberal readers and was denounced by the critic Vissarion Belinsky. [2]
Under the influence of an austere priest, Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, and in deepening religious distress, Gogol burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls in February 1852. He then refused food and died in Moscow on 21 February 1852. [3]
Legacy
Gogol's blend of realism and the fantastic shaped Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Bulgakov and Nabokov, and his works remain staples of the Russian stage. Because of his Ukrainian birth and subject matter alongside his Russian-language career, he is claimed within both literary traditions, a question that has drawn renewed attention in recent decades. [1]
