GOGOL, golg61, Nin0LAI VASSILYEVITCII ( 1809 52). One of the greatest of Russian writers. He was born in 1809 in the Government of Poltava, in a family of Cossack origin. On graduating at the Nyezhin Lyceum he went to Saint Peters burg (1828), and was a clerk in the Department of Appanages in 1830-32. During these years he published a series of sketches, Evenings at a Farmhouse Near Dikan'ka. In these he exploited his personal knowledge and his grandfather's stories of Cossack every-day life. It brought him immediate attention and the friendship of Push kin and Pletnyoff, who obtained for Gogol an instructorship in literature, and in 1834 an ad junct professorship in history. This he soon resigned for purely literary work, as well as on account of a lack of systematic preparation for the post. During 1832-34 appears a second series, Mirgorod (collected in 1835), containing among others: Taras Bul'ba, Old World Pro prietors, and How the two Ivan Quarreled. Taras,Bulba, rewritten and enlarged in 1842, is a glowing picture of the Cossack struggles with the Catholic Poles and Mohammedan Tatars in the sixteenth century. It is an epic in poetic prose. The two other sketches are minute studies of the monotonous life of small proprietors in Little Russia. With equal success the series Arabesques deals with the life of about the same class of people at Saint Petersburg. The poor and unfortunate are drawn with humor, but in a manner calculated to arouse invariably the sympathy of the reader. In 1836 appeared his comedy Revizor, which held up to ridicule the ignorance, corruption, trickery, and arbitrariness of provincial officialdom. A mighty cry of trea son went up from all who were supported by State money, and but for the will of Nicholas I., who heartily enjoyed it, it would have been im mediately withdrawn from the .stage. The in tense mortification at the general indignation it aroused undermined his . constitution, and for
twelve years Gogol lived mostly abroad, searching in vain for health. In 1842 he published the first volume of Dead Souls, describing the ad ventures of Tchitchikoff, who travels all over Russia in pursuance of a scheme of becoming an estate-holder by purchasing the dead serfs (`souls' of the dead), who are officially counted as living until the next census. It embraces types of all walks of Russian life, drawn with all his former art and with a mastery still further accen tuated. The second volume was almost ready in 1845, but he burned it in a fit of hypochondria, of which he had become a victim, and which made him a religious mystic and champion of autocracy. A rough draft and detached scraps of it found after his death were brought into shape and pub lished by his friends. It clearly reflects his dwindling intellectual powers; the personages are mostly figures of the goody-goody type, drawn not from actual life, but simply as a foil to the characters in the first volume. The Excerpts from the Correspondence with My Friends (1847) presented the painful spectacle of recantation and negation of his artistic work, in a manner anticipating Tolstoy's similar ut terances. lle (lied in Russia, after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1848. He is generally consid ered the founder of the Natural School. Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenyeff form a trio of the most popular Russian writers. The best critical edi tion of his works is that of Tikhuravoff (1889 1900). Consult: V. I. Shenrok, Materials for Gogol's Biography (Moscow, 1892-98). English translations: Hapgood, Saint John's Eve and Other Stories; Taras-Bulba; Tchitchikoff's Jour neys, or Dead Souls (New York, 1886) • Sykes, The Inspector - General, or Revizor (London, n. d.).