- Gogol redirects here. For other uses, see Gogol (disambiguation)
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Russian: Никола́й Васи́льевич
Го́голь; IPA: [nʲɪkəˈlaj vʌˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈgogəlʲ]; Ukrainian: Микола
Васильович Гоголь, Mykola Vasylovych Hohol) (April 1, 1809 – March 4, 1852) was a Russian-language writer of Ukrainian origin. Although his early
works were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing, he wrote in
Russian and his works belong to the tradition of Russian literature. The novel Dead Souls (1842), the play
The Government Inspector (1836, 1842), and the short story
The Overcoat (1842) are among his masterpieces.
Provenance and early life
Gogol was born in the Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, Poltava guberniya
(now Ukraine). His father was Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a small squire and an amateur Ukrainian
playwright who died when the boy was 15 years old. Some of his ancestors culturally associated themselves with Polish szlachta. For instance, his grandfather Afanasiy Gogol wrote in census
papers that "his ancestors, of the family name Gogol, are of the Polish nation". However, his great-grandfather, Jan Gogol, after studying in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (a deeply Ukrainian and Orthodox Christian educational institution), moved to pro-Russian Left-bank Ukraine (Malorossia) and settled in Poltava region.
Gogol himself did not use the second part of his name considering it an artificial Polish addition.
In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nezhin and remained there until
1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not very popular among his school-fellows, but
with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, mingled of
painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed an extraordinary mimic talent 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 — Hanz Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own
expense of course, under the name of "V. Alov". Unfortunately it was met by the magazines with deserved derision. He bought all
the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.
Gogol was one of the first masters of short prose, alongside Pushkin,
Mérimée, Hoffmann, and Hawthorne. He was in touch with the "literary aristocracy", had a story published in
Delvig's Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily
Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin.
Literary development
In 1831, he brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), which met immediate success. It was followed in
1832 by 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, 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 the Russian minister of education Sergey Uvarov, his appointment was blocked by a Kievan bureaucrat on the grounds that he was
unqualified.[1] 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. Indeed, throughout his life Gogol maintained close contact with his fellow
countrymen. According to the poet Nikolai Berg, in his interactions with fellow Ukrainians Gogol demonstrated a joyfullness and
passion that contrasted with usual morose and quiet demeanor.[2]
In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of
St. Petersburg. This academic venture proved a failure and he resigned his chair in 1835.
Between 1832 and 1836 Gogol worked at his imaginative creations 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 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. After having chosen Rome for his
headquarters, he became enamoured with the Eternal City, which answered to his highly developed sense of the magnificent, and
where even the visions that always obsessed him of vulgar and animal humanity assumed picturesque and poetical appearances that
fitted harmoniously into the beautiful whole.
The death of Pushkin produced a strong impression on Gogol. His principal work during years following poet's death was the
great satirical epic (poema, or an epic poem, as the Russian subheading goes) — 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
greatest 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. Nobody could have expected that it
would be the last work of fiction published during his lifetime.
Creative decline and death
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 the 33-year-old author viewed himself primarily as a prophet and
preacher, for whom 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.[3]
A church on
New Arbat in Moscow, in which the great writer was mourned before his
burial.
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 black melancholy. On the night of February 24,
1852, he burnt 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, when Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery, his remains were 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 striking Symbolist statue on
Arbat Square, which represented the sculptor Nikolai
Andreyev's idea of Gogol, rather than the real man (picture). 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.[4]
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[5] — worlds ever created
by an artist of words"[6]. The enormous potency of his
imagination stands at a strange contrast (or complement) to his physical sterility. He seems to have never had a sexual contact
with a woman (or a man).[7] Woman was to him a terrible,
fascinating, but unapproachable obsession, and he is known never to have loved. This makes the women of his imagination either
strange, inhuman visions of form and color that are redeemed from melodramatic banality only by the force of the rhetoric they
are enshrined in, or entirely unsexed, even dehumanized, caricatures.
The main and most persistent characteristic of Gogol's style is its verbal expressiveness. He wrote with a view not so much to
the acoustic effect on the ears of the listener as to the sensuous effect on the vocal apparatus of the reciter. This makes his
prose ornate and agitated. It is all alive with the vibration of actual speech. This makes it hopelessly untranslatable — more
untranslatable than any other Russian prose of the 19th century.
The other main characteristic of Gogol's genius is the extraordinary intensity and vividness of impressionist vision,
sometimes skirting expressionism. 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.
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. 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.[8] "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".[9] His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while the most comic of them all begins as a merry farce and
ends with the famous dictum: It is dull in this world, gentlemen!
Influence and interpretations
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 minor or young authors as Aksakov,
Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Vladimir Dahl,
and Vladimir Sollogub. Gogol himself seemed to be skeptical about the existence of such 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.[10]
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".[11]
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.
Gogol had a huge and enduring impact on Russian literature, but his works were appreciated differently depending on the
background of the reader. 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".[12] 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. [13]
Gogol in Pop Culture
- Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is named after Gogol. Lead singer Eugene Hütz is
Ukrainian, and as he sings only in Russian
and English, he sees himself as another Ukrainian infiltrating Russian culture.
- In the book The Namesake (also adapted into a film of the same name), the protagonist's nickname, Gogol, accidentally becomes his legal name,
shaping many of the events in his life.
- In the episode 'Charlie' from the 1st series of the comedy series The Mighty Boosh,
Howard Moon uses Gogol's Dead Souls to spy on his fellow zookeeper, Mrs Gideon, through
eyeholes inside the two 'O's in the author's name, on the book's front cover.
- His satirical work The Nose inspired the song Detachable
Penis by King Missile.
See also
Notes and references
- ^ Luckyj, G. (1998). The Anguish of Mykola Hohol, a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol. Toronto: Canandian
Scholars' Press, 67.
- ^ http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20033/52
- ^ 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..."
- ^ For a full story and illustrations, see artclassics.edu.ru and www.m-mos.ru.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Gogol's much-publicized obsession with all images and items even tenuously
related to tobacco and noses, although prone to Freudian interpretations, may be
attributed to the abnormal size of his own nose.
- ^ 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". CDUniverse.com.
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
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| 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 |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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