The life and creative work of N. V. Gogol in the rarities of the Presidential Library

April 1, 2017, marks 208 years from the birth of the classic of Russian literature Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. The Presidential Library features rare materials from its stock dated the late XIX and the early XX centuries that tell about the writer's life, the history of the creation of the famous works, and analyze his legacy; in addition, there are plenty of rare visual materials here. So, the album of 1909 Portraits of N. V. Gogol includes numerous images of a writer that, according to the authors of the collection, “can really serve as a material for acquaintance with Gogol’s personality.”

N. V. Gogol was born in 1809 in the family of a poor landowner in the Poltava province. “His father, Vasily Afanasyevich, was a very clever man, unusually witty, who had seen and experienced a lot in his lifetime, an inexhaustible kidder and a story teller. Close and distant neighbors were incessantly getting together in Vasilievka, a welcoming host was cordially treating them with the masterpieces of Little Russian cuisine and making fun of flavored with salt of purely Little Russian humor stories. Here, among these neighbors, Nikolai Vasilievich found prototypes of his Afanasiy Ivanovichs, Ivan Nikiforovichs, Shpankas, Golopuzes and many others,” – that is how A. N. Annenskaya describes the early years of life of the future writer’s life in her published in St. Petersburg in 1891 book “N. V. Gogol,” the electronic copy of which is available in the Presidential Library stock.

A. N. Annenskaya explains in detail the lyceum period of Nikolai Vasilievich's life, showing it through the eyes of his classmates: “Gogol never had real friends. From the very childhood, he did not express simple-hearted frankness and sociability, he was always somehow strangely reserved, some kind of corners, where anyone's eyes did not dare to look at, were always remaining in his soul. He often speak casually even about the most ordinary things, clothing them with a mystery or concealing his true thought under the guise of fun, joking. With a peculiar to children keenness, his lyceum classmates soon noticed this trait in the character of Gogol, and for a long time he wore a nickname of the “Mysterious Carlo.”

It was during his studies at the lyceum that Gogol took his first steps in the writers' field and was even elected editor of the Zvezda (star) magazine, the independent publishers of which the students decided to be. A future classic treated an appointment to that post with all responsibility. “The boys wanted to give their publication the form of printed books, and Gogol was spending entire nights drawing the title pages, A. N. Annenkova says. As for his early literary steps, she writes: “Unfortunately, none of these half-children's works of Gogol survived, and only a vague recollection of former lyceum students remained about the “Zvezda” itself, which was issuing not for long. They only remember that all the articles of their magazine were written in the most pompous style and full of a rhetoric; just such a kind of writing they considered as a matter of serious, real literature.”

The “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” novella came as Gogol's first major, engrained with love for the native land and national Ukrainian types of characters; a narrative in it is filled with folklore storylines. The fascination with Ukrainian traditions revealed in him a talent of an ethnographer and a historian, which is the subject of the 1910-year’s book Gogol as an ethnographer, an electronic copy of which is available on the Presidential Library website. Boris Sokolov, its author, cites in it from N. V. Gogol himself: “Ah, if this was indeed so: then I would devote my entire life to my beloved home, describing its nature, the humor of its inhabitants with customs, beliefs, spoken stories and legends. You know what I mean: the source is abundant, inexhaustible, the mine is rich and yet untouched.”

Over time, the style of Gogol's works has changed a lot: “The artist - the portrayer of ordinary life – has turned into a moralist-preacher,” – N. A. Kotlyarevsky mentions in the “N. V. Gogol” publication, which can be found in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library. The author continues: “This transformation was prepared long ago, almost from the first steps of Gogol in the literary field: his creative work did not go nether through a sudden change, nor through a crisis, but its main character has imperceptibly and gradually changed. There was a moment when the embodiment of life into art became for Gogol less important than the general religious and moral meaning of real life and its recognition in the practice of social phenomenon.”

Gogol intended to create an image of a spiritually beautiful person in an openly positive image in the continuation of the “Dead Souls” writing and for this purpose he even particularly traveled to the Holy Land. He wanted to “beg for himself a moral clarification to creation the second volume of his cherished work,” – as we can learn from the speech of A. I. Voskresensky, given in memory of the writer in 1902.

However, Gogol did not give readers any opportunity to find out whether he succeeded in drawing the ideal of a perfect person. In the same speech, it is told about the fate of a completely finished work: “he was terribly depressed, he was seized by fear that the duty imposed on him by the Creator was fulfilled, but not as the Creator had intended, gifted him with a talent, that his writing instead of good, Instead of preparing people for eternal life will have a bad influence on them. He prayed with tears for a long time, then, at three o'clock in the morning, woke up his servant-boy, ordered him to open the chimney in the fireplace, selected certain papers from his bag, tied it up in a tube and put it into open fire… The corners of the notebooks were burnt and the fire began to go out. Gogol ordered to untie a string and tossed the papers with his own hands, crossing and praying until they turned into ashes… Then he returned to the bedroom, laid on the bed and continued to cry bitterly.”

The literary gift of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was recognized only after the death of the writer, when he was unanimously inscribed on the list of geniuses of mankind, and his pieces “The Government Inspector” and “Marriage” - in the category of classical comedies. Literary artists and critics highly appreciated his novel “Dead Souls,” in which they saw historical value. “And if Gogol lived another dozen years, if he brought to the end the grand building of the “Dead Souls” - who knows, we might have, at hand, a kind of art cartogram of typical varieties of the Russian man, complete qualification by the genera and species of indigenous historically formed our national characteristics?!” – according to the book by I. L. Shcheglov Adept of word: new materials on N. V. Gogol (1909), also presented on the Presidential Library website.