Nikolay Gogol

Nikolay Gogol (born March 19 [March 31, New Style], 1809, Sorochintsy, near Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—died February 21 [March 4], 1852, Moscow, Russia) was a Ukrainian-born humorist, dramatist, and novelist whose works, written in Russian, significantly influenced the direction of Russian literature. His novel Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead Souls) and his short story “Shinel” (1842; “The Overcoat”) are considered the foundations of the great 19th-century tradition of Russian realism.

Youth and early fame

The Ukrainian countryside, with its colorful peasantry, its Cossack traditions, and its rich folklore, constituted the background of Gogol’s boyhood. A member of the petty Ukrainian gentry and a subject of the Russian Empire, Gogol was sent at the age of 12 to the high school at Nezhin. There he distinguished himself by his biting tongue, his contributions of prose and poetry to a magazine, and his portrayal of comic old men and women in school theatricals. In 1828 he went to St. Petersburg, hoping to enter the civil service, but soon discovered that without money and connections he would have to fight hard for a living. He even tried to become an actor, but his audition was unsuccessful. In this predicament he remembered a mediocre sentimental-idyllic poem he had written in the high school. Anxious to achieve fame as a poet, he published it at his own expense, but its failure was so disastrous that he burned all the copies and thought of emigrating to the United States. He embezzled the money his mother had sent him for payment of the mortgage on her farm and took a boat to the German port of Lübeck. He did not sail but briefly toured Germany. Whatever his reasons for undertaking such an irresponsible trip, he soon ran out of money and returned to St. Petersburg, where he got an ill-paid government post.

In the meantime Gogol wrote occasionally for periodicals, finding an escape in childhood memories of Ukraine. He committed to paper what he remembered of the sunny landscapes, peasants, and boisterous village lads, and he also related tales about devils, witches, and other demonic or fantastic agents that enliven Ukrainian folklore. Romantic stories of the past were thus intermingled with realistic incidents of the present. Such was the origin of his eight narratives, published in two volumes in 1831–32 under the title Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka). Written in a lively and at times colloquial prose, these works contributed something fresh and new to Russian literature. In addition to the author’s whimsical inflection, they abounded in genuine folk flavor, including numerous Ukrainian words and phrases, all of which captivated the Russian literary world.

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Mature career

The young author became famous overnight. Among his first admirers were the poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky, both of whom he had met before. This esteem was soon shared by the writer Sergey Aksakov and the critic Vissarion Belinsky, among others. Having given up his second government post, Gogol was now teaching history in a boarding school for girls. In 1834 he was appointed assistant professor of medieval history at St. Petersburg University, but he felt inadequately equipped for the position and left it after a year. Meanwhile, he prepared energetically for the publication of his next two books, Mirgorod and Arabeski (Arabesques), which appeared in 1835. The four stories constituting Mirgorod were a continuation of the Evenings, but they revealed a strong gap between Gogol’s romantic escapism and his otherwise pessimistic attitude toward life. Such a splendid narrative of the Cossack past as “Taras Bulba” certainly provided an escape from the present. But “Povest o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem” (“Story of the Quarrel Between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich”) was, for all its humor, full of bitterness about the meanness and vulgarity of existence. Even the idyllic motif of Gogol’s “Starosvetskiye pomeshchiki” (“Old-World Landowners”) is undermined with satire, for the mutual affection of the aged couple is marred by gluttony, their ceaseless eating for eating’s sake.

The aggressive realism of a romantic who can neither adapt himself to the world nor escape from it, and is therefore all the more anxious to expose its vulgarity and evil, predominates in Gogol’s Petersburg stories printed (together with some essays) in the second work, Arabesques. In one of these stories, “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (“Diary of a Madman”), the hero is an utterly frustrated office drudge who finds compensation in megalomania and ends in a lunatic asylum. In another, “Nevsky prospekt” (“Nevsky Prospect”), a tragic romantic dreamer is contrasted to an adventurous vulgarian, while in the revised finale of “Portret” (“The Portrait”) the author stresses his conviction that evil is ineradicable in this world. In 1836 Gogol published in Pushkin’s Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) one of his gayest satirical stories, “Kolyaska” (“The Coach”). In the same periodical also appeared his amusingly caustic surrealist tale, “Nos” (“The Nose”). Gogol’s association with Pushkin was of great value because he always trusted his friend’s taste and criticism; moreover, he received from Pushkin the themes for his two principal works, the play Revizor (The Government Inspector, sometimes titled The Inspector General) and Dead Souls, which were important not only to Russian literature but also to Gogol’s further destiny.

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A great comedy, The Government Inspector mercilessly lampoons the corrupt bureaucracy under Nicholas I. Having mistaken a well-dressed windbag for the dreaded incognito inspector, the officials of a provincial town bribe and banquet him in order to turn his attention away from the crying evils of their administration. But during the triumph, after the bogus inspector’s departure, the arrival of the real inspector is announced—to the horror of those concerned. It was only by a special order of the tsar that the first performance of this comedy of indictment and “laughter through tears” took place on April 19, 1836. Yet the hue and cry raised by the reactionary press and officialdom was such that Gogol left Russia for Rome, where he remained, with some interruptions, until 1842. The atmosphere he found in Italy appealed to his taste and to his somewhat patriarchal religious propensity. The religious painter Aleksandr Ivanov, who worked in Rome, became his close friend. He also met a number of traveling Russian aristocrats and often saw the émigrée princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a convert to Roman Catholicism, in whose circle religious themes were much discussed. It was in Rome, too, that Gogol wrote most of his masterpiece, Dead Souls.

This comic novel, or “epic,” as the author labeled it, reflects feudal Russia, with its serfdom and bureaucratic iniquities. Chichikov, the hero of the novel, is a polished swindler who, after several reverses of fortune, wants to get rich quick. His bright but criminal idea is to buy from various landowners a number of their recently deceased serfs (or “souls,” as they were called in Russia) whose deaths have not yet been registered by the official census and are therefore regarded as still being alive. The landowners are only too happy to rid themselves of the fictitious property on which they continue to pay taxes until the next census. Chichikov intends to pawn the “souls” in a bank and, with the money thus raised, settle down in a distant region as a respectable gentleman. The provincial townsmen of his first stop are charmed by his polite manners; he approaches several owners in the district who are all willing to sell the “souls” in question, knowing full well the fraudulent nature of the deal. The sad conditions of Russia, in which serfs used to be bought and sold like cattle, are evident throughout the grotesquely humorous transactions. The landowners, one more queer and repellent than the last, have become nicknames known to every Russian reader. When the secret of Chichikov’s errands begins to leak out, he hurriedly leaves the town.

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Dead Souls was published in 1842, the same year in which the first edition of Gogol’s collected works was published. The edition included, among his other writings, a sprightly comedy titled Zhenitba (Marriage) and the story “The Overcoat.” The latter concerns a humble scribe who, with untold sacrifices, has acquired a smart overcoat; when robbed of it, he dies of a broken heart. The tragedy of this insignificant man was worked out with so many significant trifles that, years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was to exclaim that all Russian realists had come “from under Gogol’s greatcoat.” The apex of Gogol’s fame was, however, Dead Souls. The democratic intellectuals of Belinsky’s brand saw in this novel a work permeated with the spirit of their own liberal aspirations. Its author was all the more popular because after Pushkin’s tragic death Gogol was now looked upon as the head of Russian literature. Gogol, however, began to see his leading role in a perspective of his own. Having witnessed the beneficent results of the laughter caused by his indictments, he was sure that God had given him a great literary talent in order to make him not only castigate abuses through laughter but also to reveal to Russia the righteous way of living in an evil world. He therefore decided to continue Dead Souls as a kind of Divine Comedy in prose; the already published part would represent the Inferno of Russian life, and the second and third parts (with Chichikov’s moral regeneration) would be its Purgatorio and Paradiso.