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Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Никола́й Васи́льевич Го́голь; 31 March 1809 – 4 March 1852) was a Russian dramatist, novelist and short-story writer.

Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat," "Nevsky Prospekt"). His later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls), leading to his eventual exile. The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842), along with the short stories "Diary of a Madman", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", "The Portrait" and "The Carriage", round out the tally of his best-known works.

Biography
Gogol was born in the Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, in present-day Ukraine. Russian and Ukrainian scholars disagree about whether Gogol should be considered Russian or Ukrainian—a squabble symptomatic of the political tensions between the two now-distinct states that became particularly acute when the bicentenial of the writer's birth was celebrated in 2009. His mother descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks (see Lyzohub family) and who died when Gogol was 15 years old, belonged to the 'petty gentry', wrote poetry in Ukrainian and Russian, and was an amateur Ukrainian-language playwright. The family spoke both Ukrainian and Russian. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncle's home theater. All of Gogol's literary works were written in the Russian language.

In 1820, Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn (Nizhyn Gogol State University) and remained there until 1828. He was not 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. It was during this time that he began to write. Equally early, he developed a talent for mimicry, which later made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.

On leaving school in 1828, Gogol moved to Saint Petersburg. He hoped for literary fame, bringing with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life called "Hans Küchelgarten", which he had published at his own expense under the name of "V. Alov." It was almost universally derided by the magazines to which he sent it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.

Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg in 1834, a job for which he had no formal qualifications. After an introductory lecture made up of brilliant generalizations that he had committed to memory, 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. He resigned his chair in 1835.

From 1836 to 1848, Gogol lived abroad, travelling through Germany and Switzerland. He spent the winter of 1836–37 in Paris, among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, often spending time with the poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. He eventually settled in Rome. For much of the twelve years from 1836, Gogol remained in Italy. He studied art, read Italian literature, and developed a passion for opera. In 1838, he met Count Joseph Vielhorskiy, the 23-year-old son of the official who had brought Gogol's play Government Inspector to the attention of the emperor. Gogol and Vielhorsky fell in love, though the relationship was cut short when Vielhorsky died in 1839; "if my death could restore him to health," Gogol wrote, "with what readiness I would have rushed toward it!" He left an account of this time in Nights at the Villa.

In April 1848, Gogol returned to Russia after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and passed his last years in restless movement throughout the country, staying with friends such as Mikhail Pogodin and Sergei Aksakov. During this period, he also spent much time with his old friends, Maksymovych and Osyp Bodiansky. He intensified his relationship with a starets (or spiritual elder), Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom he had known for several years. Insisting on the sinfulness of all his creative work, Konstantinovsky seems to have strengthened the fear of damnation in Gogol. Exaggerated ascetic practices undermined Gogol's health and he fell into a state of deep depression. On the night of 24 February 1852, he burned some of his manuscripts, including most of the second part of his novel Dead Souls. He later regretted it, calling it 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 mourned in the Saint Tatiana church at the Moscow University and was buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to Aleksey Khomyakov. His grave was marked by a large stone (Golgotha), topped by a Russian Orthodox cross. When the grave was opened, the body was discovered lying face down, which gave rise to a story that Gogol had been buried alive. The authorities moved the Golgotha stone to the new gravesite, but removed the cross; in 1952 the Soviets replaced the stone with a bust of Gogol. In 2009, in connection with the bicentennial of Gogol's birth, the bust was moved to the museum at Novodevichy Cemetery and the original Golgotha stone was returned, along with a copy of the original Orthodox cross.

Literary development
Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story, alongside Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, 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 Alexander Pushkin.

In 1831, his first volume of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, was published, which met with immediate success. He followed it in 1832 with a second volume and in 1835 by two further volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, as well as by two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. At this time, Gogol developed a passion for Ukrainian history. His story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Zaporozhian Host, resulted from this interest. This work has subsequently attracted charges of anti-Semitism.

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. It was only after the première on 19 April 1836 of his comedy The Government Inspector (Revizor) that Gogol finally came to believe in his literary vocation. The play, a violent satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, was allegedly performed thanks only to the intervention of the emperor, Nicholas I.

His principal work during the following years was the novel Dead Souls. He also rewrote 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 completed and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It was published in Moscow in 1842, under the title (imposed by the censor) The Adventures of Chichikov. The novel quickly established his reputation as the greatest prose writer in the Russian language. After this success, Gogol's contemporaries regarded him as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. Gogol, however, argued that its subject "has nothing to do with the description of Russian provincial life or of a few revolting landowners." Instead, he hoped that it would form the first part of a modern-day counterpart to Dante's The Divine Comedy. Dead Souls would represent the Inferno; the second part, corresponding to Dante's Purgatory, would have depicted the gradual purification and transformation of the rogue Chichikov under the influence of virtuous publicans and governors.

Influence and interpretations
Early in Gogol's career, some Russian critics, such as Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin, saw in Gogol the emergence of a Ukrainian, rather than Russian, writer, and used his works to illustrate supposed differences between Russian and Ukrainian national characters. Soon after, the critics Stepan Shevyrev and Vissarion Belinsky placed his work within the traditions of Russian literature.

Even before the publication of Dead Souls, Vissarion 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 Ivan Goncharov, Ivan 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. 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 Encyclopædia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony". It is largely as a realist that his global reputation as a playwright rests.

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 Gogol's short story "The Overcoat". His ideas about the theatre, drama, and acting served to inspire the pioneering theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski. 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 aspects of his craft. Based on this work, Vladimir Nabokov published a summary account of Gogol's masterpieces in 1944.

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 especially admired Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and "The Overcoat" as works of genius, proclaiming that "when, as in his immortal 'The Overcoat', Gogol really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced." "The Overcoat" was 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 interpretation as a supernatural tale about a ghostly double of a "small man". 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".

Mirsky characterized Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected–in the strictest sense, original–worlds ever created by an artist of words". Gogol's originality does not mean that numerous influences cannot be discerned in his work. These include the tradition of the Ukrainian folk and puppet theatre, with which the plays of Gogol's father were closely linked; the heroic poetry of the Cossack ballads (dumy), the Iliad in the Russian version by Gnedich; the numerous and mixed traditions of comic writing from Molière to the vaudevillians of the 1820s; the picaresque novel from Lesage to Narezhny; Sterne, chiefly through the medium of German romanticism; the German romanticists themselves (especially Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann); and the French tradition of Gothic romance.

The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision of reality and people. He portrayed an external world romantically metamorphosed 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, Mirsky argued–attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality–that seems to beggar the visible world itself.

The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the Russian word poshlost', which means something similar to "triviality, banality, inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society. Like Laurence Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and of romantic illusions. He undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had done so. Gogol's grotesque can be seen as a "means of estranging, a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality". 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!"

Support for tsarism, serfdom, and the Orthodox Church
Gogol was stunned when The Government Inspector came to be interpreted by many, despite Nicholas I's patronage of the play, as an indictment of tsarism. In reality, Gogol himself was an adherent of the Slavophile movement and believed in a divinely inspired mission for both the House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church. Similarly to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gogol sharply disagreed with those Russians who preached constitutional monarchy and the disestablishment of the Orthodox Church.

After defending autocracy, serfdom, and the Orthodox Church in his book Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends, Gogol was attacked by his former patron Vissarion Belinsky. The first Russian intellectual to publicly preach the economic theories of Karl Marx, Belinsky accused Gogol of betraying his readership by defending the status quo.

Charges of anti-Semitism
Some attention has also been given to the apparent anti-Semitism in Gogol's writings, as well as those of his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 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." 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."

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."

Adaptations
Gogol's works have 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 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. 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.

BBC Radio 4 made a series of six Gogol short stories, entitled Three Ivans, Two Aunts and an Overcoat (2002, adaptations by Jim Poyser) starring Griff Rhys-Jones and Stephen Moore. The stories adapted were "The Two Ivans", "The Overcoat", "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt", "The Nose", "The Mysterious Portrait" and "Diary of a Madman".

Gogol's short story "Christmas Eve" was adapted into operatic form twice by Tchaikovsky, first as Vakula the Smith in 1874, then as The Tsarina's Slippers in 1885; Rimsky-Korsakov also wrote an opera based on the same story in 1894. The story was also adapted for radio by Adam Beeson and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 24 December 2008 and subsequently rebroadcast on both Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra on Christmas Eve 2010, 2011 and 2015;

Gogol's short story "The Portrait" is being made into a feature film The Portrait by fine artists Anastasia Elena Baranoff and Elena Vladimir Baranoff

Legacy
The first Gogol monument in Moscow, a Symbolist statue on Arbat Square, represented the sculptor Nikolay Andreyev's idea of Gogol rather than the real man. Unveiled in 1909, the statue received praise from Ilya Repin and from Leo Tolstoy as an outstanding projection of Gogol's tortured personality. Joseph 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 stands in front of the house where Gogol died.

Gogol is mentioned several times in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Chekhov's The Seagull. More than 135 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent being The Girl in the White Coat (2011).

The main character in Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake and its 2006 movie is named after Nikolai Gogol, because his father survives a train crash while clutching onto a copy of one of Gogol's books in his hand. An eponymous poem "Gogol" by the poet-diplomat Abhay K refers to some of the great works of Gogol such as "The Nose", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt", Dead Souls and The Government Inspector. Gogol serves as an ideological influence for Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello because Gogol "smuggled" Ukrainian culture into Russian society, which Gogol Bordello intends to do with Gypsy/East-European music in the English-speaking world.

Gogol has been featured many times on Russian and Soviet postage stamps; he is also well represented on stamps worldwide. Several commemorative coins have been issued from Russia and the USSR. In 2009, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Gogol. Streets have been named after Gogol in various towns, including Moscow, Lipetsk, Odessa, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk, Riga, Bratislava, Belgrade, Harbin and many other towns and cities.