Nikolai Gogol

Nikolay Vasil’yevich Gogol
Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845.
Born	31 March 1809(1809-03-31)[1] Sorochyntsi, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died	4 March 1852(1852-03-04) (aged 42) Moscow, Russian Empire (now Russian Federation)
Occupation	Playwright, short story writer and novelist
Nationality	Russian
Ethnicity	Ukrainian
Period	1840-1851
Influences Miguel de Cervantes, Aleksandr Segeyevich Pushkin
Influenced Sholem Aleichem, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov
Signature

Nikolay Vasil’yevich Gogol (Russian: Николай Васильевич Гоголь; Russian pronunciation: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈɡoɡəlʲ]; (31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1809,^[2] – 4 March [O.S. 21 February] 1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian novelist, humourist, and dramatist.^[2]

He is considered the father of modern Russian realism. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and identity.^[3][4] His more mature writing satirised the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire, leading to his exile. On his return, he immersed himself in the Orthodox Church.^[5] The novels Taras Bul'ba (1835; 1842 [revised edition]) and Dead Souls (1842), the play The Inspector-General (1836, 1842), and the short stories Diary of a Madman, The Nose and The Overcoat (1842) are among his best known works. With their scrupulous and scathing realism, ethical criticism as well as philosophical depth, they remain some of the most important works of world literature.

Provenance and early life

Gogol was born^[6] in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, present-day Ukraine. His mother was a descendant of Polish nobility. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks, belonged to the petty gentry, wrote poetry in Russian and Ukrainian, and was an amateur Ukrainian-language playwright who died when Gogol was 15 years old. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the family spoke Russian as well as Ukrainian. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncle's home theater.^[7]

In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not very popular among his schoolmates, who called him their "mysterious dwarf", but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed an extraordinary talent for mimicry which later on made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.

In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to Petersburg, full of vague but glowingly ambitious hopes. He had hoped for literary fame and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life — Ganz Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense, under the name of "V. Alov." The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.

Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story, alongside Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was in touch with the "literary aristocracy", had a story published in Anton Delvig's Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin.

Literary development

Cover of the first edition of The Government Inspector (1836).

In 1831, he brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), which met with immediate success. He followed it in 1832 with a second volume, and in 1835 by two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, as well as by two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. At this time, contemporary Russian editors and critics such as Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin saw in Gogol the emergence of a Ukrainian, rather than Russian, writer, using his works to illustrate the differences between Russian and Ukrainian national characters, a fact that has been overlooked in later Russian literary history.^[8] At this time, Gogol developed a passion for Ukrainian history and tried to obtain an appointment to the history department at Kiev University. Despite the support of Pushkin and Sergey Uvarov, the Russian minister of education, his appointment was blocked by a Kievan bureaucrat on the grounds that he was unqualified.^[9] His fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Ukrainian cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests. During this time he also developed a close and life-long friendship with another Ukrainian then living in Russia, the historian and naturalist Mykhaylo Maksymovych.^[10]

In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which "he had no qualifications. He turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. After an introductory lecture made up of brilliant generalizations which the 'historian' had prudently prepared and memorized, he gave up all pretense at erudition and teaching, missed two lectures out of three, and when he did appear, 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."^[11] This academic venture proved a failure and he resigned his chair in 1835.

Commemorative plaque in his house in Rome

Between 1832 and 1836 Gogol worked with great energy, and though almost all his work has in one way or another its sources in these four years of contact with Pushkin, he had not yet decided that his ambitions were to be fulfilled by success in literature. During this time, the Russian critics Stepan Shevyrev and Vissarion Belinsky, contradicting earlier critics, reclassified Gogol from a Ukrainian to a Russian writer.^[8] It was only after the presentation, on April 19, 1836, of his comedy The Government Inspector (Revizor) that he finally came to believe in his literary vocation. The comedy, a violent satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, was able to be staged thanks only to the personal intervention of Nicholas I.

From 1836 to 1848 he lived abroad, travelling throughout Germany and Switzerland. Gogol spent the winter of 1836-1837 in Paris, where he spent time among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, frequently meeting with the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. He eventually settled in Rome. According to Simon Karlinsky (a professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley^[12]) Gogol fell in love there with the nobleman Iosif Vielhorsky and started a romantic relationship with him; this is the only documented love affair in his life.^[13]

Pushkin's death produced a strong impression on Gogol. His principal work during years following Pushkin's death was the satirical epic Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks — recast Taras Bulba and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage (Zhenitba), wrote 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 the title, imposed by the censorship, of The Adventures of Chichikov. The book instantly established his reputation as the greatest prose writer in the language.

Creative decline and death

Church of Simeon Stylites on New Arbat in Moscow, in which the great writer was mourned before his burial.

"Golgotha"

After the triumph of Dead Souls, Gogol came to be regarded by his contemporaries as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. Little did they know that Dead Souls was but the first part of a modern-day counterpart to The Divine Comedy. The first part represented the Inferno; the second part was to depict the gradual purification and transformation of the rogue Chichikov under the influence of virtuous publicans and governors — Purgatory.^[14]

Gogol, painted in 1840.

From Palestine he returned to Russia and passed his last years in restless movement throughout the country. While visiting the capitals, he stayed with various friends such as Mikhail Pogodin and Sergei Aksakov. During this period of his life he also spent much time with his old Ukrainian friends, Maksymovych and Osyp Bodiansky. More importantly, he intensified his relationship with a church 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. His health was undermined by exaggerated ascetic practices and he fell into a state of deep depression. On the night of February 24, 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 buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931, Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery and had his remains transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Gogol's grave at the Novodevichy Convent

His body was discovered lying face down, which gave rise to the story that Gogol had been buried alive. A Soviet critic even cut a part of his jacket to use as a binding for his copy of Dead Souls. A piece of rock which used to stand on his grave at the Danilov was reused for the tomb of Gogol's admirer Mikhail Bulgakov.

The first Gogol monument in Moscow was a Symbolist statue on Arbat Square, which represented the sculptor Nikolay Andreyev's idea of Gogol, rather than the real man ^[15] Unveiled in 1909, the statue was praised by Ilya Repin and Leo Tolstoy as an outstanding projection of Gogol's tortured personality. Stalin did not like it, however; and the statue was replaced by a more orthodox Socialist Realism monument in 1952. It took enormous efforts to save Andreyev's original work from destruction; it now stands in front of the house where Gogol died.^[16]

Style

Among the illustrators of Dead Souls were Pyotr Sokolov and Marc Chagall.

D.S. Mirsky characterized Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected — in the strictest sense, original^[17] — worlds ever created by an artist of words"^[18].

The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision of the reality and of the peoples. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place. His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things. His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist — which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability — attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality — that seems to beggar the visible world itself.^[19]

The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the untranslatable Russian word poshlost', which is perhaps best rendered as "self-satisfied inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society, from rus. "poshlo"- eng. "went." Like Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and romantic illusions. It was he who undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had reigned.^[20] "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror."^[21] His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum: It is dull in this world, gentlemen!

Politics

Gogol was stunned when The Inspector-General came to be interpreted by many, despite Nicholas I's warm reception, as an indictment of Russian social institutions. Gogol himself was a political and religious conservative in the vein of Dostoyevsky.

Influence and interpretations

Statue of Gogol at the Villa Borghese, Rome

Bust of Nikolai Gogol in St. Petersburg.

Even before the publication of Dead Souls, Belinsky recognized Gogol as the first realist writer in the language and the head of the Natural School, to which he also assigned such younger or lesser authors as Goncharov, Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Vladimir Dahl, and Vladimir Sollogub. Gogol himself seemed to be skeptical about the existence of such a literary movement. Although he recognized "several young writers" who "have shown a particular desire to observe real life", he upbraided the deficient composition and style of their works.^[22] Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony."^[23]

The period of modernism saw a revival of interest in and a change of attitude towards Gogol's work. One of the pioneering works of Russian formalism was Eichenbaum's reappraisal of The Overcoat. In the 1920s, a group of Russian short story writers, known as the Serapion Brothers, placed Gogol among their precursors and consciously sought to imitate his techniques. The leading novelists of the period — notably Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov — also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. In 1926, Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Government Inspector as a "comedy of the absurd situation", revealing to his fascinated spectators a corrupt world of endless self-deception. In 1934, Andrei Bely published the most meticulous study of Gogol's literary techniques up to that date, in which he analyzed the colours prevalent in Gogol's work depending on the period, his impressionistic use of verbs, expressive discontinuity of his syntax, complicated rhythmical patterns of his sentences, and many other secrets of his craft. Based on this work, Vladimir Nabokov published a summary account of Gogol's masterpieces in 1944.

The house in Moscow Where Gogol died. The building contains the fireplace where he burned the manuscript of the second part of the Dead Souls.

Gogol's impact on Russian literature has been enduring, yet his works have been appreciated differently by various critics. Belinsky, for instance, berated his horror stories as "moribund, monstrous works", while Andrei Bely counted them among his most stylistically daring creations. Nabokov singled out Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and The Overcoat as the works of genius and dismissed the remainder as puerile essays. The latter story has been traditionally interpreted as a masterpiece of "humanitarian realism", but Nabokov and some other attentive readers argued that "holes in the language" make the story susceptible to another interpretation, as a supernatural tale about a ghostly double of a "small man."^[24] Of all Gogol's stories, The Nose has stubbornly defied all abstruse interpretations: D.S. Mirsky declared it "a piece of sheer play, almost sheer nonsense."

Gogol's oeuvre has also had a large impact on Russia's non-literary culture, and his stories have been adapted numerous times into opera and film. Russian Composer Alfred Schnittke wrote the eight part Gogol Suite as incidental music to the The Government Inspector performed as a play, and composer Dmitri Shostakovich set The Nose as his first opera in 1930, despite the peculiar choice of subject for what was meant to initiate the great tradition of Soviet opera.^[25] Most recently, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Gogol's birth, 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.^[26]

Gogol burning the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls by Repin

Some attention has also been given to Gogol's apparent anti-Semitism in his writings, as well as those of his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoevsky.^[27] Felix Dreizin and David Guaspari, for example, in their The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Literary Ethnocentricis discuss "the significance of the Jewish characters and the negative image of the Ukrainian Jewish community in Gogol's novel Taras Bulba, pointing out Gogol's attachment to anti-Jewish prejudices prevalent in Russian and Ukrainian culture."^[28] In Leon Poliakov's The History of Antisemitism, the author mentions that "The 'Yankel' from Taras Bulba indeed became the archetypal Jew in Russian literature. Gogol painted him as supremely exploitative, cowardly, and repulsive, albeit capable of gratitude. But it seems perfectly natural in the story that he and his cohorts be drowned in the Dniper by the Cossack lords. Above all, Yankel is ridiculous, and the image of the plucked chicken that Gogol used has made the rounds of great Russian authors."^[29]

Despite his problematic portrayal of Jewish characters, Gogol left a powerful impression even on Jewish writers who inherited his literary legacy. Amelia Glaser has noted the influence of Gogol's literary innovations on Sholem Aleichem, who "chose to model much of his writing, and even his appearance, on Gogol... What Sholem Aleichem was borrowing from Gogol was a rural East European landscape that may have been dangerous, but could unite readers through the power of collective memory. He also learned from Gogol to soften this danger through laughter, and he often rewrites Gogol's Jewish characters, correcting anti-Semitic stereotypes and narrating history from a Jewish perspective."^[30]

Gogol in popular culture

Postage stamp, Russia, 2009. See also: Gogol in philately, Russian Wikipedia

• Gogol has been featured many times on Russian and Soviet postage stamps; he is also well-represented on stamps worldwide^{[31][32][33][34][35]}.
• Several commemorative coins have been issued from Russia and the USSR. On March 19, 2009, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Gogol.^[36]
• Streets have been named after Gogol in Moscow, Lipetsk, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk, Riga, Bratislava and many other towns and cities.
• Gogol is referenced multiple times in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Chekhov's The Seagull.
• More than 35 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent being Taras Bulba (2008).
• BBC Radio 4 made a series of six Gogol short stories entitled Three Ivans Two Aunts and an Overcoat (2002, adaptations by Jim Poyser).
• In music, the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is named lovingly after Gogol. A song by Joy Division, "Dead Souls" (1980), is named after his novel.
• In popular fiction, James Bond's unreproachable yet unlovable competitor (and occasional ally) is lent a distinguished air by his name, Anatol Gogol. A main character is evocatively named Gogol in "The Namesake" (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri.

See also

• Nikolai Gogol bibliography
• Ukrainians in Russia
• Russian literature

Notes and references

 This article incorporates text from D.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in the public domain.

External links

• Works by Nikolai Gogol at Project Gutenberg
• Full collection of Nikolai Gogol works
• Some works by Nikolai Gogol in the original Russian
• Gogol, a genius of Ukrainian descent
• A nonmainstream, Ukrainian Perspective on Gogol's national identity and its impact on his works
• Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Gogol and his work
• Bio
• Nikolay Gogol in Encyclopædia Britannica
• Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05.
• GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH (1809—1852) in 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Works by or about Nikolai Gogol in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Film about Nikolai Gogol

Works by Nikolai Gogol Novels Dead Souls · Taras Bulba Plays The Government Inspector · Marriage · The Gamblers Short story collections Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka · Mirgorod · Arabesques Short stories Preface to Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka · "The Fair at Sorochintsï" · "St. John's Eve" · "May Night or the Drowned Maiden" · "The Lost Letter: A Tale Told by the Sexton of the N...Church" · "Christmas Eve" · "A Terrible Vengeance" · "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt" · "A Bewitched Place" · "The Old World Landowners" · "Taras Bulba" · "Viy" · "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" · "The Portrait" · "A Chapter from an Historical Novel" · "Nevsky Prospect" · "The Prisoner" · "Diary of a Madman" · "The Nose" · "The Carriage" · "The Overcoat" Poetry Ode to Italy · Hanz Küchelgarten Essays "Woman" · Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends · Meditations on the Divine Liturgy Bibliography

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