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Nikolai Gogol: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Nikolai Gogol
In the bustling streets of Saint Petersburg, a man's nose detaches from his face and begins a life of its own, donning a higher uniform and driving a carriage, all while the original owner frantically searches for it. This is not a dream sequence from a modern surrealist film, but the opening of a story written by Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian-born writer who would come to define the grotesque in Russian literature. Born on the 19th of March 1809 in the Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, Gogol possessed a mind that saw the world not as it was, but as a distorted reflection of its deepest anxieties. He was a master of defamiliarization, a technique that forced readers to see the familiar world through a strange, unsettling lens, turning the mundane into the metaphysical. His early life was steeped in the folklore of his native Ukraine, yet his literary voice would eventually become the cornerstone of Russian culture, creating a duality that has puzzled historians and critics for nearly two centuries. He was a man who could make a reader laugh until they cried, only to leave them shivering in the dark, wondering if the devil was watching from the shadows.
The Mysterious Dwarf
At the school of higher art in Nezhin, where Gogol studied from 1820 to 1828, he was known to his peers as the mysterious dwarf, a nickname that reflected both his small stature and his dark, secretive disposition. He was a child of the petty gentry, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks who had once served as officers in the Lubny Regiment, and his family was trilingual, speaking Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. His father, Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, was an amateur playwright who wrote poetry in Ukrainian, and young Nikolai helped stage plays in his uncle's home theater, developing a talent for mimicry that would later make him a matchless reader of his own works. Despite his early promise, he was not popular among his schoolmates, who found him painfully self-conscious and boundless in his ambition. When he left school in 1828, he moved to Saint Petersburg with a Romantic poem titled Hans Küchelgarten, which he published at his own expense under the pseudonym V. Alov. The magazines he sent it to universally derided it, and in a fit of rage, he bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again. This failure marked the beginning of a lifelong struggle with self-doubt and a desperate need for validation that would drive him to the brink of madness.
The Ukrainian Cossack
Gogol's identity was a complex tapestry woven from the threads of Ukrainian heritage and Russian imperial expectations. He was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, and his early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were deeply influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and folklore. He developed a passion for Ukrainian Cossack history and tried to obtain an appointment to the history department at Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev, but the appointment was blocked by a bureaucrat on the grounds that he was unqualified. His fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Zaporozhian Cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests. During this time, he also developed a close and lifelong friendship with the historian and naturalist Mykhaylo Maksymovych. In 1831, the first volume of his Ukrainian stories was published under the pen name Rudy Panko, and it met with immediate success. However, Russian editors and critics of that time saw Gogol as a regional Ukrainian writer, and used his works to illustrate the specific of Ukrainian national characters. Gogol himself was surprised to find that he was perceived as a Ukrainian, and even as a khokhol, a term that carried derogatory connotations. This experience made him into a self-conscious Ukrainian, and he struggled with the demands placed on him by Russian imperial expectations. He rejected or was critical of many of the postulates of official Russian history about Ukrainian nationhood, and his unpublished Mazepa's Meditations presents Ukrainian history in a manner that justifies Ukraine's historic right to independence.
When was Nikolai Gogol born and where was he born?
Nikolai Gogol was born on the 19th of March 1809 in the Cossack town of Sorochyntsi. He was a Ukrainian-born writer who would come to define the grotesque in Russian literature.
What happened to Nikolai Gogol's academic career at the University of St. Petersburg?
Nikolai Gogol resigned his chair as Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg in 1835 after a disastrous tenure. He missed two lectures out of three and sat in utter silence during the final examination while simulating a toothache.
When did Nikolai Gogol die and what caused his death?
Nikolai Gogol died on the 5th of March 1852 after refusing all food for nine days following the burning of his manuscripts on the 24th of February 1852. He died in great pain and was buried at the Danilov Monastery before his remains were moved to the Novodevichy Cemetery in 1931.
Which works by Nikolai Gogol are considered his most famous?
Nikolai Gogol is best known for his satirical epic Dead Souls, his comedy The Government Inspector, and his short story The Overcoat. He also wrote the famous story The Nose and the historical novel Taras Bulba.
How has Nikolai Gogol influenced modern Russian culture and media?
Nikolai Gogol has influenced modern Russian culture through over 135 film adaptations and numerous operas including Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose. Streets in cities like Moscow and Odesa bear his name, and he appears as a lead character in the TV series Gogol which debuted in 2017.
In 1834, Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which he had no qualifications. The academic venture proved a disaster, and he turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. He missed two lectures out of three, and when he did appear, he muttered unintelligibly through his teeth. At the final examination, he sat in utter silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache, while another professor interrogated the students. Gogol resigned his chair in 1835, and the experience left him with a deep sense of failure. He had hoped to use his position to study Ukrainian ethnography and history, but the failure of his academic career forced him to turn to literature as his primary vocation. He worked with great energy between 1832 and 1836, and had extensive contact with Pushkin, but he still had not yet decided that his ambitions were to be fulfilled by success in literature. It was only after the premiere of his comedy The Government Inspector at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, on the 19th of April 1836, that he finally came to believe in his literary vocation. The comedy, a satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, was staged thanks only to the intervention of the emperor, Nicholas I. The Tsar was personally present at the play's premiere, concluding that there was nothing sinister in the comedy, as it was only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials.
The Pilgrim's Journey
From 1836 to 1848, Gogol lived abroad, traveling through Germany and Switzerland, and eventually settling in Rome. He spent the winter of 1836 to 1837 in Paris, among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, frequently meeting the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. He developed an adoration for Rome, where he studied art, read Italian literature, and developed a passion for opera. Pushkin's death produced a strong impression on Gogol, and his principal work during the years following Pushkin's death was the satirical epic Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks, recasting Taras Bulba in 1842, completing his second comedy Marriage, writing the fragment Rome, and his most famous short story, The Overcoat. In 1841, the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under a new title imposed by the censorship, The Adventures of Chichikov. The book established his reputation as one of the greatest prose writers in the language. However, the triumph of Dead Souls was followed by a period of intense spiritual crisis. Gogol returned to Russia from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in April 1848, and passed his last years in restless movement throughout the country. He intensified his relationship with a starets or spiritual elder, Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom he had known for several years. Konstantinovsky seems to have strengthened in Gogol the fear of perdition by insisting on the sinfulness of all his imaginative work.
The Burning Manuscript
Exaggerated ascetic practices undermined Gogol's health, and he became deeply depressed. On the night of the 24th of February 1852, he burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of Dead Souls. He explained this as a mistake, a practical joke played on him by the Devil. Soon thereafter, he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later. Gogol was mourned in the Saint Tatiana church at the Moscow University before his burial, and then buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. His grave was marked by a large stone, Golgotha, topped by a Russian Orthodox cross. In 1931, with Russia now ruled by communists, Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery and had Gogol's remains transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery. His body was discovered lying face down, which gave rise to the conspiracy theory that Gogol had been buried alive. The authorities moved the Golgotha stone to the new gravesite, but removed the cross. In 1952, the Soviets replaced the stone with a bust of Gogol. The stone was later reused for the tomb of Gogol's admirer Mikhail Bulgakov. In 2009, in connection with the bicentennial of Gogol's birth, the bust was moved to the museum at the Novodevichy Cemetery, and the original Golgotha stone was returned, along with a copy of the original Orthodox cross.
The Shadow of the Overcoat
Gogol's influence on Russian literature has endured, yet various critics have appreciated his works differently. Belinsky, for instance, berated his horror stories as moribund, monstrous works, while Andrei Bely counted them among his most stylistically daring creations. Vladimir Nabokov especially admired Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and The Overcoat as works of genius, proclaiming that when, as in his immortal The Overcoat, Gogol really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced. Critics traditionally interpreted The Overcoat as a masterpiece of humanitarian realism, but Nabokov and some other attentive readers argued that holes in the language make the story susceptible to interpretation as a supernatural tale about a ghostly double of a small man. Dostoevsky appears to have had such a reading of the story in mind when he wrote The Double. The quote, often apocryphally attributed to Dostoevsky, that we all emerged from Gogol's Overcoat, actually refers to those few who read The Overcoat as a ghost story. Of all Gogol's stories, The Nose has stubbornly defied all abstruse interpretations, but in recent years, it has become the subject of several postmodernist and postcolonial interpretations. The portrayals of Jewish characters in his work have led to Gogol developing a reputation for antisemitism, and later critics have also pointed to the apparent antisemitism in his writings, as well as in those of his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Despite his portrayal of Jewish characters, Gogol left a powerful impression even on Jewish writers who inherited his literary legacy, such as Sholem Aleichem, who chose to model much of his writing, and even his appearance, on Gogol.
The Legacy of Laughter
Gogol's oeuvre has also had an impact on Russia's non-literary culture, and his stories have been adapted numerous times into opera and film. The Russian composer Alfred Schnittke wrote the eight-part Gogol Suite as incidental music to The Government Inspector performed as a play, and Dmitri Shostakovich set The Nose as his first opera in 1928. More recently, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Gogol's birth in 1809, Vienna's renowned Theater an der Wien commissioned music and libretto for a full-length opera on the life of Gogol from Russian composer and writer Lera Auerbach. More than 135 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent being The Girl in the White Coat in 2011. Gogol has been featured many times on Russian and Soviet postage stamps, and he is also well represented on stamps worldwide. Several commemorative coins have been issued in the USSR and Russia. In 2009, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Gogol. Streets have been named after Gogol in various cities, including Moscow, Sofia, Lipetsk, Odesa, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk, Riga, Bratislava, Belgrade, Harbin and many other towns and cities. Gogol is mentioned several times in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment and Chekhov's The Seagull. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa considered Gogol along with Edgar Allan Poe his favorite writers. The Russian TV-3 television series Gogol features him as a lead character and presents a fictionalized version of his life that mixes his history with elements from his various stories. The episodes were also released theatrically starting with Gogol. The Beginning in August 2017. A sequel entitled Gogol. Viy was released in April 2018, and the third film, Gogol. Terrible Revenge, debuted in August 2018.