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Nikolay Gogol
Nikolay Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature.

Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol was born March 20, 1809, in Sorochintsy, Mirgorod, Poltava Province, of Cossack parents. In 1828 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he eventually secured employment in the civil service and became known in literary circles. Enthusiastic praise greeted his volume of short stories of Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831). Then followed another collection, Mirgorod (1835), containing “Taras Bulba,” which was expanded in 1842 into a full-length novel; this work, dealing with 16th-century Cossack life, revealed the writer's great ability for accurate and sympathetic character portrayal and his sparkling humor.

In 1836 Gogol's play The Inspector General appeared. A rollicking satire on the cupidity and stupidity of bureaucratic officials, it is a comedy of errors regarded by many critics as one of the most significant plays in Russian literature. It concerns the local officials of a small town who mistake a young traveler for an expected government inspector and offer him propitiatory bribes to induce him to overlook their misconduct in office.

From 1826 to 1848 Gogol lived mostly in Rome, where he worked on a novel that is considered his greatest creative effort and one of the finest novels in world literature, Dead Souls (1842). It has also been published in English under the alternative title Chichikov's Journey. In structure, Dead Souls is akin to Don Quixote by the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Its extraordinary humor, however, is derived from a unique and sardonic conception: Collegiate Councillor Pável Ivanovich Chichikov, an ambitious, shrewd, and unscrupulous adventurer, goes from place to place, buying, stealing, and wheedling from their owners the titles to serfs whose names appeared on the preceding census lists but who had since died and were, accordingly, called “dead souls.” With this “property” as security he plans to raise loans with which to buy an estate with “live souls.”

Chichikov's travels provide the occasion for profound reflections on the degrading and stultifying influence of serfdom on both owner and serf. The work also contains a large number of brilliantly depicted Russian provincial types. Dead Souls exerted an enormous influence on succeeding generations of Russian writers. Many of the witty sayings expressed in its pages have become Russian maxims.

As published, Dead Souls was intended to constitute the first part of a larger work; Gogol began the sequel but in a fit of hypochondriacal melancholy burned the manuscript. In 1842 Gogol published another famous work, “The Overcoat,” a short story about an overworked clerk who falls victim to Russian social injustice. In the following year Gogol made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and on his return a priest persuaded him that his fictional work was sinful. Gogol thereupon destroyed a number of his unpublished manuscripts. He died March 4, 1852, in Moscow. Gogol is ranked with such literary giants as the novelists Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the poet Aleksandr Pushkin.

See also Russian Literature.


Contributed By:
Marc Slonim
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