GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH (18o9-052), Rus sian novelist and dramatist, was born at Sorochintsky, province of Poltava, on March 31, 1809, of a family of Ukrainian Cossack gentry. Educated at the Niezhin gymnasium, he there started a manuscript periodical, The Star, and wrote several pieces includ ing a tragedy, The Brigands. In 182o he went to St. Petersburg, where he tried the stage but failed. In 1821 he obtained a clerkship in the department of appanages, but soon resigned it.
In 1829 he published anonymously a poem called Italy, and, under the pseudonym of V. Alof, an idyll, Han Kiichelgarten, which was so ridiculed that Gogol bought up all the copies he could and burnt them. He was terribly disheartened, and thought of emi grating to America. Indeed, he got as far as Lubeck, but then returned to St. Petersburg, and entered the civil service. He made his way in literary circles, and was well received by Pushkin, whom he met in 1831.
In 1831 appeared Evenings in a Farm near Dikanka: by Rudy Panko, a volume of stories of Ukrainian life, which was enthusi astically received. Gogol then planned a history of Little-Russia of the middle ages, to be completed in eight or nine volumes. This remained a plan only, but served to win for him a chair of history in the university of St. Petersburg. His lectures were a failure, and he resigned in 1835. Meanwhile he had published his Arabesques, a collection of essays and stories; his Taras Bulba, the best known of the Cossack Tales translated into English by George Tolstoi (186o) and by J. Cournos (Everyman Edition, 1906), and a number of other short stories, including Old World Gentlefolks, a sketch of the tranquil life led in a quiet country house, also The Cloak, a description of the petty miseries en dured by an ill-paid clerk in a government office, the great object of whose life is to secure the "cloak" from which his story takes its name. On April 19, 1836, his famous comedy, the Revizor (Eng. trans.. by C. Garnett, The Government Inspector, 1926,) was pro duced. The Revizor is the greatest of Russian comedies; it is a brilliant satire on bureaucracy, which was received with enthu siasm by the intelligentsia and with horror by the official classes. But it is an error to look on its historical and political significance as its principal claim to rank among the great European comedies. Even when played in another language (and Gogol more than any other Russian author loses in translation), it is recognised as pure and universal comedy. The plot is very simple. A traveller who arrives with an empty purse at a provincial town is taken for an inspector whose arrival is awaited with fear, and he receives all the attentions and bribes which are meant to propitiate the dreaded investigator of abuses.
After the production of the Revizor, Gogol went abroad, and for twelve years (I836-48) lived mainly in Rome, while paying oc casional short visits to Russia. Rome left a deep impression on his mind, but during his residence there he was occupied with purely Russian subjects. There he wrote the classic novel, Mertvuiya Dushi, or "Dead Souls," the first part of which appeared in 1842. The hero of the story is an adventurer who goes about Russia making fictitious purchases of "dead souls," i.e., serfs who have died since the last census, with the object of pledging his imag inary property to the government. His adventures provide the occasion for a series of unforgettable pictures of Russian provin cial life, and of types of Russian society. These amazingly vivid pictures are a fundamental part of the experience of all Russian students of their own language. Gogol had an individual vision which presented his types with a force and truth of the kind attained by Dickens at his best. No one can fully appreciate Gogol's merits as a humorist who is not intimate with the lan guage in which he wrote, but there are good English versions by C. Garnett (19 2 2) and by D. J. Hogarth (Everyman Edition, 1906) . To the period of his residence in Rome belong also the recasting of Taras Bulba and his second comedy, Marriage.
Dead Souls was published in 1842 ; Gogol lived ten years longer. He was still a young man, only 43, and it was reasonable to expect that the creator of the Revizor and of Dead Souls would produce other great imaginative works. He was a great artist and though both the comedy and the novel were "events" in the history of Russia, they are what they are because of the imaginative genius of the author. Gogol the man found himself the hero of those who would regenerate Russia, and he seems at this point to have stifled his natural genius because of his con viction that he had a mission. However that may be, he began to work on the second part of his epic of Dead Souls, with the idea of showing the redemption of Chichikov and his kind. He failed, and destroyed the draft, but he wrote what he conceived to be his message to Russia in his Selected Passages from a Cor respondence with Friends (1847). It called forth some bitter replies, especially from Belinsky, who accused him of "falsifying Christianity for the profit of those in power" (see D. Mirsky, Hist. of Russ. Lit.) . Gogol felt the rebuff deeply, and sought compensation in a religious experience that was denied to him. In vain he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land . On his return he fell under the influence of a fanatic, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, who persuaded him that his imaginative work was sinful. He fell into melancholy and destroyed some of his mss.
He died on Feb. 21, 1852.
The works of Gogol, translated by C. Garnett, have been published by Chatto and Windus (1922, etc.,). See Materials for the Biography of Gogol (in Russian) (1897) by Shenrok: "Illness and Death of Gogol," by N. Bazhenov, Russkaya Moist, January 1902; J. Lavrin, Gogol (1926) ; M. Theiss, Nikolaus W. Gogol and seine B ihnenwerke