Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was a Russian-language writer born in what is now Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, into a family of minor gentry with Cossack roots. He worked as a novelist, short-story writer and playwright, and is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern Russian prose. His mix of comedy, the fantastic and sharp social observation shaped writers far beyond Russia.

He grew up in a household where Ukrainian, Russian and Polish were all spoken, and that linguistic mix stayed with him. At the school in Nizhyn he began to write, and in 1828 he moved to St Petersburg with literary ambitions. His first published poem, issued at his own expense under a pseudonym, was mocked by the critics, and he is said to have bought up the copies and destroyed them. He took a modest clerical post and then a teaching job at the university, which ended badly.

His breakthrough came with Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, two volumes of tales from 1831 and 1832 drawing on Ukrainian folklore, with supernatural events and lively humour. Stories set in St Petersburg followed, among them Nevsky Prospekt, The Nose and The Overcoat, in which the ordinary becomes strange and grotesque. Later critics linked these works to a proto-surrealist sensibility, and the formalist Viktor Shklovsky admired his way of making familiar things look unfamiliar.

The Government Inspector, staged in 1836, made him famous. Tsar Nicholas I reportedly attended the premiere and took the play as a cheerful mockery of provincial officials, yet its satire unsettled others, and Gogol left Russia. He spent most of the following twelve years abroad, mainly in Italy, where he studied art and grew attached to Rome.

Dead Souls, whose first part appeared in 1842, follows Chichikov, a man who buys up serfs who have died but still appear on the official registers. Behind the comic plot lies a broad picture of corruption and a wish to reform Russia. Gogol also wrote the comedy Marriage and the historical tale Taras Bulba, and he is said to have taken the plot of Dead Souls from a suggestion by Pushkin, his friend and early champion.

In his last years Gogol turned towards religion and grew anxious about the moral effect of his writing. After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1848 he largely gave up literature under the influence of an Orthodox priest. Shortly before his death in Moscow in 1852 he burned what he had written of the second part of Dead Souls. Some fragments survived and were published later. Accounts of his final illness remain uncertain, including a theory that he had fallen into a lethargic sleep.

His legacy is considerable. Contemporaries first read him as a satirist and then as a conservative, and the critic Belinsky wrote a famous letter rebuking him. Later generations saw his imprint on Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Nabokov and many others, and his name is still commemorated in streets, stamps and coins across the former Soviet world and beyond.