Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright of Ukrainian origin, born on 1 April 1809, Old Style 20 March, in Sorochyntsi, a Ukrainian Cossack town in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. He died on 4 March 1852, Old Style 21 February. His work belongs to a nineteenth-century world of empire, nationalism, literary ambition, and sharp social observation.

Gogol is best known for fiction and drama that made the ordinary appear strange. His stories “The Nose,” “Viy,” “The Overcoat,” and “Nevsky Prospekt” use the grotesque, while “Diary of a Madman” and other works have been noted for proto-surrealist qualities. Viktor Shklovsky later described Gogol’s method as defamiliarization, a way of presenting familiar things in unfamiliar forms so readers see them differently. His later writing satirised political corruption in contemporary Russia, especially in The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. Other major works include Taras Bulba (1835), Marriage (1842), “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” “The Portrait,” and “The Carriage.”

His imagination was formed early by family, language, and theater. Gogol’s father, Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, wrote poetry in Ukrainian and Russian and was an amateur playwright in his own theatre. The family spoke Ukrainian and Russian and used Polish mostly for reading, as was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century. As a child, Gogol helped stage plays in his uncle’s home theater. At school in Nezhin, where he studied from 1820 to 1828, he began writing, formed a few lasting friendships, developed a talent for mimicry, and even considered becoming an actor.

After leaving school, Gogol went to Saint Petersburg with hopes of literary fame. His Romantic poem Hans Küchelgarten, published at his own expense under the name “V. Alov,” was derided by magazines; he bought up the copies, destroyed them, and swore never to write poetry again. In St. Petersburg, amid political tension after the November Uprising and rising Russian nationalism, he also changed how he presented his name, eventually dropping the Polish part of Gogol-Ianovskii and asking his mother to address him only as “Gogol.”

Gogol’s early success came with the Ukrainian stories of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, published in 1831 under the pen name “Rudy Panko,” followed by a second volume in 1832, Mirgorod in 1835, and Arabesques. His early works were shaped by Ukrainian upbringing, culture, folklore, and Cossack history. Critics of his time saw him as a regional Ukrainian writer, though he wrote in Russian, and later scholarship has described him as both a Russian and Ukrainian writer, especially in his early writing. Many writers and critics have recognized his influence, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, and others. Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s famous line, “We all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat,” captures how strongly later literature has felt his presence.