Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright of Ukrainian origin. He wrote works including The Government Inspector, Dead Souls, The Overcoat, The Nose, and Taras Bulba, and is recognized for his deep influence on Russian, Ukrainian, and world literature.
Nikolai Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. His family belonged to the left-bank Ukrainian gentry and was trilingual, speaking Ukrainian and Russian and using Polish mostly for reading.
Nikolai Gogol died in great pain in 1852, nine days after taking to his bed and refusing all food. On the night of the 24th of February 1852 he had burned manuscripts containing most of the second part of Dead Souls, after exaggerated ascetic practices undermined his health and left him deeply depressed.
Nikolai Gogol's best-known works include Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and the short story The Overcoat. The first part of Dead Souls appeared in Moscow in 1842 and established him as one of the greatest prose writers in the language.
Nikolai Gogol was a Russian writer of Ukrainian origin whose early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, drew on Ukrainian culture and folklore. Scholars including George Grabowicz and Oleh Ilnytzkyj argue he should be understood as a Ukrainian writer operating within an imperial culture, while Russian critics later reclassified him as a Russian writer.
Nikolai Gogol's influence was acknowledged by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O'Connor, among others. The critic Eugene-Melchior de Vogue said, "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat."