Nikolai Gogol

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol

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Gogol, oil painting by F.A. Moller, 1840; in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (credit: Courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

(born March 19, 1809, Sorochintsy, near Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire — died Feb. 21, 1852, Moscow, Russia) Russian writer. Gogol tried acting and worked at minor government jobs in St. Petersburg before achieving literary success with Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831 – 32). His pessimism emerged in such stories as "Taras Bulba" (1835) and "Diary of a Madman" (1835). His farcical drama The Government Inspector (1836) lampooned a corrupt government bureaucracy. From 1836 to 1846 he lived in Italy. During this time he laid the foundations of 19th-century Russian realism with his masterpiece, the novel Dead Souls (1842), a satire about serfdom and bureaucratic inequities in which he hoped to castigate abuses and guide his countrymen through laughter, and his story "The Overcoat" (1842). His collected stories (1842) received great acclaim. Soon afterward he came under the influence of a fanatical priest who prompted him to burn the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. He died a few days later at age 42, perhaps of intentional starvation, on the verge of madness.

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Biography: Nikolai Gogol

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With the works of the Russian author Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) the period of Russian imitation of Western literature ended. He found inspiration in native materials and combined realistic detail with grotesque and otherworldly elements.

Nikolai Gogol was born on March 20, 1809, in the little Ukrainian town of Sorochincy. He was, as a child, dreamy and withdrawn and was deeply affected by the death of a younger brother. When he was 9, Gogol went away to school, where he spent 7 years. He was a mediocre student but well behaved. He left school in June 1828 and apparently intended to make a career for himself in the Russian civil service. But despite financial difficulties, he delayed entry into the civil service and attempted to make a name for himself in literature. He published the poem "Italy" on March 23, 1829, in the journal Son of the Fatherland; it was a clumsy effort, however, and received no critical attention. In 1829 he published at his own expense a more ambitious narrative poem, Gants Kiukhelgarten, which recounted the attempts of a romantic hero to escape from an idyllic but stifling environment. The poem was badly received by the critics, and Gogol attempted to retrieve and destroy all the extant copies.

Because of the failure of his first literary efforts Gogol turned to a career in the civil service and worked in several government offices. He then became a teacher in a girls' boarding school in 1831, a vocation that bored him and at which he was not very good. He persisted in his writing, and his work began to gain some attention. He attracted the interest of Vassily Zhukovsky, an important contemporary Russian poet, and in May 1831 was introduced to Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet. With the writing and publication of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka in 1831-1832, Gogol had arrived at a position of importance in literary matters. The stories in this collection are a mixture of realistic detail from Ukrainian folk life and bizarre and supernatural detail.

Shorter Works

Arabesques (1835) consists of essays, art criticism, fragments of novels, and three short fictional masterworks: "The Portrait," "Nevsky Prospect," and "The Diary of a Madman." "The Portrait," which Gogol wrote in 1833-1834, is concerned with the relationship of art and religion. Specifically, it is about the selling of one's artistic soul to the evil spirit for money. Gogol was to become increasingly concerned with the moral implications of his craft. In this respect "The Portrait" anticipates the crisis about the relationship between art and religion that he was to experience in the last decade of his life.

"Nevsky Prospect" was completed in October 1834 and is based on the contrast of two loves pursued by two young men and the contrast between an ideal and a common view of love. Both love stories end in banality, and Nevsky Prospect, the street on which the adventures begin, is the marketplace of the world's vanity. "The Diary of a Madman" was written in 1833-1834 and is a faintly sketched work about a minor civil official who is frustrated over a love and becomes possessed by delusions of grandeur. Using the visions of a madman, Gogol shows the senselessness of striving and the vanity of the world.

Despite considerable success in his writing by 1834, Gogol was still not fixed in his mind about a career and harbored notions about being a professor and a scholar. In the fall of 1834 he was appointed lecturer in history at St. Petersburg University. He obtained this position by grace of the influence of important friends, and he was supremely unqualified to hold the post, both by way of temperament and background. This career, which lasted from the fall of 1834 to December 1835, was a dismal failure.

Mirgorod (1835) is a collection of four stories. The first tale, "Old World Landowners," is a description of the vegetable existence of two old people who live in an idyll of comfort, peace, and love. Tragedy and death, however, intrude on their existence. The second tale of this cycle is the pseudohistorical narrative "Taras Bulba," an unconvincing love story set against the background of the Ukrainian-Polish wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The third tale of the cycle is "Viy," a supernatural tale about a student who kills a witch who turns out to be a young and beautiful woman. The last tale is "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarrelled," a story about an absurd argument between two honorable citizens of the town of Mirgorod.

In 1836 Gogol published "The Nose," a grotesque tale about a nose that disattaches itself from a certain major's face and insists on leading an independent existence to the major's dismay. The tale is a narrative of grotesque and bizarre incidents against a background often painted with minute and objective realism.

The Theater

Gogol wrote his dramatic masterpiece The Inspector General between October and December 1835, and it seems probable that Gogol received the idea for the play from Pushkin. The play is about an impostor who is mistaken for a true but incognito inspector general and who is showered with favors and servility so as to mask the corruption and dishonesty of the civil servants. The play was at first rejected by the censor, but upon appeal to the Czar himself it was permitted to be staged. The success of the play was immediate and overwhelming. In considering Gogol's theater, one should mention too the comedy The Marriage, which was published in 1842 after 9 years of work.

Gogol loved to travel and was convinced that travel was beneficial to his health. During the last 16 years of his life he spent more time abroad than he did in Russia. He was particularly attracted to Rome, which he loved with an abiding passion. In the summer of 1836 he stopped at Vienna for his health and there experienced an important creative outpouring. He worked on Dead Souls, revised "Taras Bulba," and wrote "The Overcoat." He also experienced a religious vision which had shattering importance for him and influenced his subsequent view of art and his religious duty.

"Dead Souls"

Gogol began to work on Dead Souls in the fall of 1835. He spent about 6 years writing it and did most of the writing abroad. He experienced difficulties with the censors, but the book was finally published on May 21, 1842. The work is of stunning originality and tells of Chichikov, a con man who travels about Russia buying serfs who have died but who are still carried on the tax rolls and then using the dead serfs as collateral for loans. On another level Chichikov's journey is a descent into the comic hell of Russian reality. General and typical failings of humanity are embodied in the types that Chichikov meets on his journey. Chichikov himself is the personification of banality and lack of character. The picture that Gogol paints of provincial Russia is one of oppressive banality, stupidity, and corruption.

"The Overcoat," published in 1842, is without doubt the masterpiece of Gogol's short pieces of fiction. It has had an enormous influence on the subsequent development of Russian fiction. The plot is about an insignificant copying clerk who saves up for an overcoat which is stolen from him on the first day of possession. Shortly after the theft the clerk falls ill and dies.

Final Period

With the publication of "The Overcoat" and Dead Souls, Gogol's great contribution to Russian letters came to an end. The bold intention to continue Dead Souls was never realized, for Gogol burned most of the second part, and what he left is markedly inferior to the first part. Gogol became progressively convinced that he had the duty to use his art for the betterment of humanity. His moralizing tendencies are seen in the volume he published on Dec. 31, 1846, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a work that was badly received by critics.

During the course of the 1840s Gogol became more and more convinced that he must purify his own soul, and he came increasingly under the influence of the clergy. He made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Spring of 1848. During the last 9 months of his life, his health deteriorated and he suffered from severe depression. The priest Matthew Konstantinovsky, a strong and intolerant person, gained considerable influence over Gogol's mind and persuaded him to fast more severely than was good for Gogol's weakened constitution. Gogol died on Feb. 21, 1852.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol Никола́й Васи́льевич Го́голь Мико́ла Васи́льович Го́голь
Nikolai Gogol by Alexander Ivanov
Born	1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1809 Sorochyntsi, Russian Empire
Died	4 March [O.S. 21 February] 1852 (aged 42) Moscow, Russian Empire (now Russian Federation)
Occupation	Playwright, short story writer and novelist
Nationality	Russian
Ethnicity	Ukrainian
Writing period	1840-1851

Influences Miguel de Cervantes, Alexander Pushkin

Influenced Sholem Aleichem, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov

Provenance and early life

Gogol was born^[5] 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.^[6]

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.^[7] 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.^[8] 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.^[9]

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."^[10] 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.^[7] 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^[11]) 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.^[12]

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

A church on New Arbat in Moscow, in which the great writer was mourned before his burial.

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.^[13]

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 Nikolai Andreyev's idea of Gogol, rather than the real man ^[14] 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.^[15]

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^[16] — worlds ever created by an artist of words"^[17].

The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision. 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.^[18]

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.^[19] "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."^[20] 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!

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.^[21] 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."^[22]

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."^[23] 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. ^[24] 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.^[25]

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.^[26] 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."^[27] 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."^[28]

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."^[29]

Gogol in popular culture

This "In popular culture" section may contain too many minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivia references. (September 2009)

Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is named after Gogol. Lead singer Eugene Hütz is Ukrainian-born and wrote the introduction for the Subculture Books release of Taras Bulba in 2008.
James Bond ally Anatol Gogol is named in celebration of Nikolai Gogol. The General appeared in all of Roger Moore's James Bond films between The Spy Who Loved Me and A View to a Kill, and in Timothy Dalton' s debut as Bond in The Living Daylights; he was portrayed by late German actor Walter Gotell, previously known as Morzeny in the second Connery Bond movie From Russia with Love.
His novel Dead Souls gave its name to the Joy Division song.
The main character in The Namesake is named after Gogol. The name is part of the central theme of the story.
Jon Krakauer mentions in his book Into the Wild that Christopher McCandless carried a book by Gogol.
In the "Charlie" episode from the first series of the British comedy series "The Mighty Boosh," character Howard Moon is seen holding Gogol's "Dead Souls" when talking about becoming a writer with Vince Noir, and later uses the book to spy on the keeper of the Reptile House, Mrs Gideon.
On March 19, 2009 the National bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Nikolai Gogol.^[30]
Gogol has featured on over 20 postage stamps, including Russia, Roumania, Germany, Ukraine^[31]^[32]^[33]^[34]^[35] see Gogol in philately entry of Russian wikipedia
More than 35 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent was Taras bulba released on April 2, 2009.
Russia and Ukraine have both issued commemorative coins.
Streets have been named after Gogol in Moscow, Lipetsk, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk and many other towns and cities.
The character Jozef Pronek in Aleksandar Hemon's novel Nowhere Man had a band named The Dead Souls
Rory Gilmore, in the WB show "Gilmore Girls" (2000-2007), reads Dead Souls.
In the 2009 film Adventureland, the character Joel attempts to give his love interest, Sue, a copy of The Overcoat.
April 1 2009 Google's logo has it's letters rearranged to spell Gogol and replaces the "e" with a nose.

Notes and references

^ ^a ^b "Nikolay Gogol". Encyclopædia Brittanica. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037198. Retrieved 2007-12-25.
^ Oleh Ilnytzkyj: "The Nationalism of Nikolai Gogol': Betwixt and Between?" in Canadian Slavonic Papers Sep-Dec 2007. Retrieved 2008-06-15.
^ Paul A. Karpuk. Gogol's Research on Ukrainian Customs for the Dikan'ka Tales. Russian Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 1997), pp. 209-232
^ Nikolai Gogol - Britannica Student Encyclopaedia
^ The Birth of Nikolai Gogol, History Today
^ Edyta Bojanowska. 2007). Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
^ ^a ^b Edyta M. Bojanowska. (2007). Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 78-88
^ Luckyj, G. (1998). The Anguish of Mykola Hohol, a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press. p. 67. ISBN 1-55130-107-5.
^ Welcome to Ukraine
^ Lindstrom, T. (1966). A Concise History of Russian Literature Volume I from the Beginnings to Checkhov. New York: New York University Press. p. 131.
^ [http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-simon-karlinsky29-2009jul29,0,7744948.story Simon Karlinsky dies at 84; expert on Slavic languages and literature], L.A. Times (July 28, 2009)
^ Karlinsky, S. (1992). The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
^ Gogol declared that "the subject of Dead Souls has nothing to do with the description of Russian provincial life or of a few revolting landowners. It is for the time being a secret which must suddenly and to the amazement of everyone (for as yet none of my readers has guessed it) be revealed in the following volumes..."
^ Российское образование. Федеральный образовательный портал: учреждения, программы, стандарты, ВУЗы, тесты ЕГЭ. (Russian)
^ For a full story and illustrations, see Российское образование. Федеральный образовательный портал: учреждения, программы, стандарты, ВУЗы, тесты ЕГЭ. (Russian) and Москва и москвичи (Russian)
^ Gogol's originality does not mean that numerous influences cannot be discerned in his work. The principle of these are: 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); the French tradition of Gothic romance — a long and yet incomplete list.
^ D.S. Mirsky. A History of Russian Literature. Northwestern University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8101-1679-0. Page 155.
^ Mirsky, pg. 149
^ According to some critics, Gogol's grotesque is a "means of estranging, a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality." See: Fusso, Susanne. Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word. Northwestern University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8101-1191-8. Page 55.
^ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2005. Article "Russian literature."
^ "The structure of the stories themselves seemed especially unskilful and clumsy to me; in one story I noted excess and verbosity, and an absence of simplicity in the style". Quoted by Vasily Gippius in his monograph Gogol (Duke University Press, 1989, page 166).
^ The latest edition of the Britannica labels Gogol "one of the finest comic authors of world literature and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer." See under "Russian literature."
^ At least this reading of the story seems to have been on Dostoevsky's mind when he wrote The Double. The quote, often apocryphally attributed to him, that "we all [future generations of Russian novelists] emerged from Gogol's Overcoat," actually refers to those few who read The Overcoat as a double-bottom ghost story (as did Aleksey Remizov, judging by his story The Sacrifice).
^ Gogol Suite, CD Universe
^ ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk) (German)
^ Vladim Joseph Rossman, Vadim Rossman, Vidal Sassoon. Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era. p. 64. University of Nebraska Press. Google.com
^ Antisemitism in Literature and in the Arts
^ Leon Poliakov. The History of Antisemitism. p. 75. University of Pennsylvania Press, Google.com
^ Amelia Glaser. "Sholem Aleichem, Gogol Show Two Views of Shtetl Jews." The Jewish Journal, 2009. Journal: Jewish News, Events, Los Angeles
^ Events by themes: NBU presented an anniversary coin «Nikolay Gogol» from series ”Personages of Ukraine”, UNIAN-photo service (March 19, 2009)
^ "2009. Апрель, 1. 200 лет со дня рождения Н. В. Гоголя (1809—1852), писателя". Каталог почтовых марок. Издательско-торговый центр «Марка». http://www.marka-art.ru/catalogs/StampSeries.jsp?id=11543339. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
^ "2009. Апрель, 1. 200 лет со дня рождения Н. В. Гоголя (1809—1852), писателя". Каталог почтовых марок. Издательско-торговый центр «Марка». http://www.marka-art.ru/catalogs/StampSeries.jsp?id=11543433. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
^ "К 200-летию со дня рождения Н. В. Гоголя выпущены почтовые блоки". Новости. Управление федеральной почтовой связи Красноярского края — филиал ФГУП «Почта России». http://www.kraspost.ru/node/1357. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
^ "Зчіпка 200-річчя від дня народження Миколи Гоголя (1809—1852)" (in uk). Марки. Дирекція розроблення знаків поштової оплати. http://www.stamp.kiev.ua/ukr/stamp/observe.php?coupl_id=104. Retrieved 2009-04-03.
^ "Украина готовится достойно отметить 200-летие Николая Гоголя". Новости. Отпуск.com. http://www.otpusk.com/news/17064.html. Retrieved 2009-04-03.

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

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v • d • e Works by Nikolai Gogol

Novels	Dead Souls · Taras Bulba

Plays	The Government Inspector · Marriage · 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

Persondata
NAME	Gogol, Nikolai
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Hohol, Mykola
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Russian-language writer of Ukrainian origin
DATE OF BIRTH	April 1, 1809
PLACE OF BIRTH	Sorochyntsi, Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH	March 4, 1852
PLACE OF DEATH	Moscow, Russia

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