Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born in 1809 in Sorochyntsi, in what is now central Ukraine, the son of a minor landowner and amateur playwright who wrote in Ukrainian. The Ukrainian countryside — its folklore, its devils, its tavern keepers and Cossacks — would supply the materials for his early fiction and remain a half-buried presence in everything he wrote afterward, even when he had become the great Russian writer of the imperial capital. He grew up in a household saturated with Orthodox piety and his mother's particular brand of apocalyptic religiosity, which is worth remembering when his own later turn toward religious mania begins to look less like a break and more like a long return.

He arrived in St. Petersburg in 1828 with a manuscript of bad romantic poetry, which he printed at his own expense and then bought up and burned when the reviews were unkind — an early instance of a habit he would never lose. He took a clerical post in one of the ministries, was miserable, and discovered that the petty civil-service world he was trapped in was also exactly the world he could write about. Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32) and Mirgorod (1835) gave him a reputation as a writer of Ukrainian local color. The Petersburg tales — The Nose, The Overcoat, Diary of a Madman — pushed him into something stranger: a comedy of bureaucratic humiliation that keeps tipping into nightmare, in which a man's nose detaches itself and rides around the city in a carriage, or a copying clerk's stolen overcoat becomes a matter of cosmic significance. Dostoevsky's remark that the Russian realists had all come out from under Gogol's Overcoat is the standard line, and it is roughly accurate.

The Government Inspector (1836), a comedy in which a provincial town mistakes a penniless traveler for a feared imperial inspector and ruins itself trying to bribe him, was performed before Tsar Nicholas I and made Gogol famous and uncomfortable. He left Russia almost immediately and spent most of the next twelve years abroad, chiefly in Rome, where he wrote Dead Souls (1842) — the novel about the swindler Chichikov, who travels the Russian provinces buying up the legal title to dead serfs ("souls" in the bureaucratic sense) in order to mortgage them as if they were alive. It was meant to be the first volume of a Dantean trilogy that would carry Russia from a kind of hell through purgatory to a redeemed condition.

The second part was never finished, or rather it was finished and then burned, twice. The first burning was in 1845. The second, in 1852, came after Gogol had fallen under the influence of an austere priest named Matvey Konstantinovsky, who appears to have convinced him that his fiction was sinful. He stopped eating, refused medical care, and died ten days after the final burning, at forty-two. What he left behind — the Petersburg tales, Dead Souls, The Government Inspector — was enough to invent a tradition.