Nikolai Gogol perceived literature as “a special kind of “serving his land””

April 1, 2020 marks the 211th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, a classic of Russian literature, author of The Government Inspector, The Overcoat, Dead Souls and other brilliant works. The extensive collection of the Presidential Library Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) features his lifetime editions, as well as research materials from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, the authors of which try to interpret the life of the writer and analyze his most famous and controversial works. In addition, the Presidential Library’s portal provides rare visual materials, such as the album Portraits of Nikolai Gogol (1909), which is preceded by two sketches by Ilya Repin, associated with the dramatic moments of the writer’s life.

Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in Poltava province, in the family of a poor landowner. “His father, Vasily Afanasevich, was a very intelligent man, unusually witty, who had seen a lot and experienced in his lifetime an inexhaustible joker and storyteller. Close and distant neighbors constantly gathered in Vasilyevka, the hospitable owner cordially treated them with works of Little Russian cuisine and entertained with stories flavored with salt of pure Little Russian humor. Here, among these neighbors, Nikolai Vasilievich found prototypes of his Afanasiev Ivanovich, Ivanov Nikiforovich, Shpanek, Holopuzey and others, and so on”, - says writer A. Annenskaya in the book “Nikolai  Gogol” (1891), presented in the Presidential Library’s electronic collections.

The child grew up in love and care. At the Nizhyn Lyceum, Nikolai Gogol wrote essays best of all, played on stage, was elected editor of the Zvezda magazine, which was published by lyceum students.

After graduating from high school in 1828, Gogol goes to the Northern capital. In 1829 "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" were published. Pushkin was the first to welcome the fiction of the young author with fresh, iridescent in all colors. Other fellow writers noticed him. The enthusiasm for Ukrainian traditions revealed in Gogol the talent of an ethnographer and historian, which is dedicated to the work of Boris Sokolov's Gogol-Ethnographer (1910), an electronic copy of which is available on the Presidential Library’s portal.

Readers expected the debutant to continue this ease and fascination with life. He wrote sometimes satirical novels The Nose, Taras Bulba, The Overcoat and others. The latter, according to the version of the literary critic Nestor Kotlyarevsky, placed in the book Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1909), was born “from a clerical joke about some official, a passionate bird hunter, who, with extraordinary savings and tireless hard work, saved up enough money beyond his position to buy a good Lapazhevsky gun of 200 rubles”. After the disappearance of the coveted weapon, he went to bed and did not get up; “he grabbed a fever. Only through a general subscription of his comrades, who learned about the incident and bought him a new gun, was he brought back to life”.

According to Nestor Kotlyarovsky, there is a special place of this story in the history of our literature.

Pushkin attracted Gogol to active collaboration in Sovremennik. Alexander Sergeevich, as you know, suggested to the young talent the plots of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. However, society was unable to accept his bold, innovative works, staged at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg.

Most of his contemporaries Gogol was perceived as a classic figure of a satirical writer. He himself was bitterly aware of this and wrote in the “Confession of Authors” (1847): “I didn’t even know then that my name was used only to reproach each other and laugh at each other”.

Contemporaries saw another Gogol — a religious thinker and publicist — when they published Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends (1847), which provoked a heated debate in the literary world. For example, Kotlyarevsky in the book Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol laments that "the artist-painter turned into a moralist-preacher". Nikolai Pobedinsky, in a rare study The religious and moral ideals of Nikolai Gogol (1900), writes that critics of that time with the greatest intolerance reacted to the fact that Gogol, their great Gogol, “the head of the natural school”, dares to believe in of some kind of God... Vissarion Belinsky even foretold: "He will inevitably fall on this way..."

Prince Peter Vyazemsky, a friend of Pushkin, defended the writer, noting that some places in the book could be on par with the best examples of Russian prose.

Over time, the writer began to show signs of mental illness, and in a state of sharp exacerbation, on the night of February 11 to 12, 1852, he burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls (only five chapters remained incomplete). Gogol died on the morning of February 21 (old style) in 1852.