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Portrait of Nikolai Gogol

Literature · Novelists

Nikolai Gogol

1809–1852 · Russian (born in Ukraine)

Russian Romanticism and the grotesque

Nikolai Gogol was the great comic and grotesque writer of Russian literature, moving from Ukrainian folk tales to savage satires of the imperial bureaucracy. His play The Government Inspector and his novel Dead Souls turned provincial corruption into farce, while the Petersburg tales invented a strain of absurdity that runs through Dostoevsky and Kafka. Falling under the influence of a fanatical priest at the end of his life, he burned the sequel to Dead Souls and starved himself to death at forty-two.

How to spot them

  • ▸Born at Sorochyntsi in the Poltava region of Ukraine; Ukrainian village settings and devils
  • ▸St Petersburg clerks, overcoats, noses and ranks; the Table of Ranks as comedy
  • ▸Dead Souls is subtitled a "poem"; its hero buys dead serfs
  • ▸He burned the manuscript of the second part days before his death
  • ▸The line attributed to Dostoevsky: "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat"

Key works

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831)

Ukrainian folk stories told by the beekeeper Rudy Panko, including the Christmas Eve tale of the blacksmith Vakula riding a devil to St Petersburg

Taras Bulba (1835)

Cossack tale from the Mirgorod collection, in which the old warrior kills his own son for loving a Polish girl

Viy (1835)

Horror story of a seminarian reading three nights over a witch's coffin, ending with a demon whose eyelids must be lifted

The Government Inspector (1836)

Revizor — a penniless clerk is mistaken for an inspector by the officials of a provincial town; Nicholas I attended the premiere

The Nose (1836)

Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes without his nose, which is seen about St Petersburg in the uniform of a State Councillor

The Overcoat (1842)

Akaky Akakievich saves for a new coat, is robbed of it and returns as a ghost stripping coats on the Kalinkin Bridge

Dead Souls (1842)

Chichikov tours the provinces buying up serfs who have died since the last census, so as to mortgage them

Diary of a Madman (1835)

A clerk's journal disintegrates into dated entries from the reign of Ferdinand VIII of Spain

Key ideas

  • Poshlost: the untranslatable Russian word for smug, self-satisfied banality, which Nabokov made central to reading him
  • The little man crushed by rank and paperwork, a type that shaped later Russian fiction
  • Laughter as moral instrument: "What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves"

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 1 April 1809 (New Style) at Sorochyntsi, in what is now Ukraine
  • •His first work, a verse idyll called Hanz Kuchelgarten, was so badly reviewed that he bought up and burned the copies
  • •Pushkin is said to have given him the plots of both The Government Inspector and Dead Souls
  • •Nicholas I attended the 1836 premiere of The Government Inspector and reportedly said everyone had got his due, himself most of all
  • •He spent much of 1836–1848 abroad, above all in Rome, where much of Dead Souls was written
  • •Dead Souls is subtitled "a poem" and was published under the censor's title The Adventures of Chichikov
  • •Under the influence of the priest Matvey Konstantinovsky he burned the second part of Dead Souls in February 1852
  • •He died on 4 March 1852 after refusing food; he was buried at the Danilov Monastery and later reinterred at Novodevichy
  • •Dmitri Shostakovich made an opera of The Nose in 1928, and left an opera on The Gamblers unfinished

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources