Nikolai Gogol

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once described a planned masterpiece as a Russian answer to Dante's Divine Comedy. He never finished it. On the night of the 24th of February 1852, he burned the manuscript that held most of the second part of Dead Souls, then blamed the act on a practical joke played by the Devil. He took to his bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later. This was the man whose stories let a nose roam the streets of the Russian capital, and whose works gave the world The Overcoat, The Nose, Viy, and The Government Inspector. He was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright of Ukrainian origin, and his admirers stretch from Dostoevsky to Kafka to Nabokov. The French critic Eugene-Melchior de Vogue summed up the debt of those who followed him with one line: "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat." Who was this secretive figure, called a "mysterious dwarf" by his schoolmates? Why did Russian and Ukrainian writers both claim him? And how did a man who enjoyed a Tsar's patronage end his life convinced his imagination was a sin?

• 2. A Trilingual Cossack Childhood

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  The Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, was where Gogol was born. His mother descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. His father, Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, was supposedly a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks and belonged to the class of pomeshchiks, owning the village of Vasylivka. Gogol's father died when the boy was fifteen years old. Vasily wrote poetry in both Ukrainian and Russian and was an amateur playwright in his own theatre. The family carried the Polish surname Janowski, and their estate at Vasilevka was known as Ianovshchyna. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the household was trilingual. They spoke Ukrainian and Russian and used Polish mostly for reading. Gogol's mother called him Nikola, a blend of the Russian Nikolai and the Ukrainian Mykola. As a child, he helped stage plays in his uncle's home theatre. In 1820, he went to a school of higher art in Nezhin and stayed there until 1828. There he began writing, formed a few lasting friendships, and showed a gift for mimicry that later made him a matchless reader of his own work.

• 3. The Burned First Book

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  On leaving school in 1828, Gogol went to Saint Petersburg full of vague but ambitious hopes. He carried with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life called Hans Kuchelgarten, and paid out of his own pocket to publish it under the pseudonym V. Alov. The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought up all the copies, destroyed them, and swore never to write poetry again. His arrival in the capital forced a harder question of identity. The November Uprising in the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had stirred a rise of Russian nationalism. At first Gogol used the surname Gogol-Ianovskii, then tried the Russian-sounding Ianov, and in the second half of 1830 dropped the Polish part of his name entirely. He even told his mother by letter to address him only as Gogol, since Poles had become suspect in St. Petersburg. His first true success came in 1831, when the first volume of his Ukrainian stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, appeared under the pen name Rudy Panko.

• 4. Ukrainian Or Russian

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  Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka was so steeped in Ukrainianisms that a glossary of Ukrainian words was printed at the end of the volumes. A second volume followed in 1832, then two volumes called Mirgorod in 1835 and two volumes of miscellaneous prose titled Arabesques. Russian editors and critics of the day, such as Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin, saw Gogol as a regional Ukrainian writer. Later, the critics Stepan Shevyrev and Vissarion Belinsky reclassified him as a Russian writer instead. Scholars have argued over this label ever since. In 1981, George Grabowicz held that the Ukrainian literature of Gogol's time was multilingual, so Gogol should be understood as both a Russian and a Ukrainian writer. Slavicist Edyta Bojanowska notes that his images of Ukraine are deep and rich in folklore, while his image of Russia stays fixed on the present, on bureaucracy and corruption. She writes that Gogol, surprised on reaching St. Petersburg to be seen as a Ukrainian and even a khokhol, was made by that experience into a self-conscious Ukrainian. Oleh Ilnytzkyj argues that Gogol should be viewed as a Ukrainian writer working within an imperial culture, with Russian serving as a literary lingua franca rather than a marker of nationality. Gogol concluded that Ukraine possessed exactly the cultural wholeness, proud tradition, and self-awareness that Russia lacked.

• 5. The Failed Professor

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  A passion for Ukrainian Cossack history drove Gogol to seek a post in the history department at Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev. Despite the support of Alexander Pushkin and the education minister Sergey Uvarov, a bureaucrat blocked the appointment on the grounds that Gogol was unqualified. His historical interests still bore fruit in the story Taras Bulba, drawn from the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and in a close lifelong friendship with the historian and naturalist Mykhaylo Maksymovych. In 1834, Gogol was nonetheless made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which he had no qualifications. The venture was a disaster. After an opening lecture of brilliant generalizations he had prudently memorized, he gave up all pretence of teaching, missed two lectures out of three, and muttered unintelligibly when he did appear. At the final examination he sat in silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, faking a toothache, while another professor questioned the students. Gogol resigned the chair in 1835.

• 6. Satire And The Tsar

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  On the 19th of April 1836, The Government Inspector premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and only then did Gogol finally believe in his literary vocation. The comedy, a satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, reached the stage solely through the intervention of Nicholas I. The Tsar attended the premiere himself and judged that there was nothing sinister in it, calling it only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials. From 1836 to 1848, Gogol lived abroad, travelling through Germany and Switzerland and eventually settling in Rome, where he studied art, read Italian literature, and grew passionate about opera. He spent the winter of 1836 to 1837 in Paris among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, often meeting the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. Pushkin's death left a strong mark on him. His principal labour in the years that followed was the satirical epic Dead Souls. In 1841 the first part was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to oversee its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842 under a title imposed by the censorship, The Adventures of Chichikov, and it established him as one of the greatest prose writers in the language.

• 7. Grotesque And Poshlost

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  D. S. Mirsky called Gogol's universe one of the most marvellous, unexpected, and original worlds ever created by an artist of words. Gogol leaned on the grotesque, visible in The Nose, Viy, The Overcoat, and Nevsky Prospekt, and in the proto-surrealist strangeness of Diary of a Madman. Viktor Shklovsky credited him with defamiliarization, a technique that presents common things in a strange way so the reader sees the world anew. His characters are caricatures, drawn by exaggerating salient features, yet given a convincingness through slight strokes of unexpected reality. The mature Gogol saw reality through the Russian word poshlost, meaning a moral and spiritual triviality and banality spread across a society. Like Sterne before him, he was a great destroyer of romantic illusions, making vulgarity reign where only the sublime had stood. Andrei Bely held that Gogol's work helped the emergence of Gothic romance and acted as a forerunner of absurdism and impressionism. His tales weave pathos and mockery, and "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" begins as a merry farce and ends with the dictum "It is dull in this world, gentlemen!"

• 8. The Final Reckoning

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  After the triumph of Dead Souls, Gogol's contemporaries hailed him as a great satirist of Imperial Russia's unseemly sides. They did not know it was only the first part of a planned counterpart to Dante's Divine Comedy. That first part stood for the Inferno, and the second would have shown the gradual purification of the rogue Chichikov, a Purgatory. In April 1848, Gogol returned to Russia from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and spent his last years in restless movement, staying with friends such as Mikhail Pogodin and Sergey Aksakov. He deepened his bond with a spiritual elder, Matvey Konstantinovsky, who seems to have strengthened in him the fear of damnation by insisting that all his imaginative work was sinful. Exaggerated ascetic practices wrecked his health and left him deeply depressed. After his death he was mourned in the Saint Tatiana church at Moscow University and buried at the Danilov Monastery, beside his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931, Soviet authorities demolished the monastery and moved his remains to the Novodevichy Cemetery, where his body was found lying face down, sparking a theory that he had been buried alive. The Golgotha stone that once marked his grave was later reused for the tomb of his admirer Mikhail Bulgakov, the very writer who, with Yevgeny Zamyatin, carried Gogol's footsteps into a new century.