Gogol, Nikolai

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GOGOL, NIKOLAI

GOGOL, NIKOLAI (1809–1852), Russian short-story writer, novelist, and playwright.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born on 31 March (19March, oldstyle) 1809 in the Poltava district of Ukraine, to a minor landowning family representative of the Ukrainian gentry's cultural hybridity: their official name was Gogol-Janowski, with Janowski signaling their partly Polish heritage (which Gogol later denied); they generally spoke Russian at home but Ukrainian at times; they corresponded in Russian but read in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. They were loyal subjects of the Russian Empire; only after Gogol arrived in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1828 did he begin to perceive a tension between Ukrainian and Russian identities. Noting the St. Petersburg craze for all things "Little Russian" ("Little Russia" being a slightly patronizing "Great Russian" name for Ukraine), Gogol exploited this fad in his first major publication, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (two volumes, 1831–1832). The Dikanka tales, all set in a traditional Ukrainian milieu, are introduced by an invented narrator (a naive beekeeper) who claims to have collected them from his fellow villagers. This figure serves in part to shield the author from critical attack, evidence of Gogol's acute and persistent anxiety about his works' reception. The tales themselves reveal tensions between traditional (oral, Ukrainian, local) cultural forms and the standards (written, Russian, imperial) of high literature.

Dikanka's success established Gogol's reputation, although his provincial origins and his deeply eccentric personality kept him from full participation in the capital's sophisticated literary salons. In the story cycle Mirgorod (1835), chatty village narrators are replaced by a single and more authoritative voice. The swashbuckling tale "Taras Bulba" draws on Cossack history to imagine an epic past. The story "Old-World Landowners" evokes the old-time Ukrainian gentry in terms both warmly nostalgic and permeated by complex irony. This elusive irony, which makes it all but impossible to pin down the author's point of view, anticipates the stories known as the Petersburg tales: "Nevsky Prospect," "The Portrait," "Diary of a Madman" (published together in the 1835 collection Arabesques, which also included essays on history and art), "The Nose" (published in a journal in 1836), and "The Over-coat" (published in Gogol's 1842 Collected Works). In these tales the slightness and absurdity of the plots often serve to draw attention to the narrators' virtuoso performances: in "The Nose" when a bureaucrat's body part runs off and impersonates a government official, the narrator's commentary intensifies readers' bewilderment: "how was it that Kovaliov did not understand that he couldn't advertise for his nose in a newspaper office? Not that I would think it too expensive to advertise:…I am certainly not a mercenary person: but it's improper, awkward, not nice!"

In Gogol's comedy The Inspector General (1836), provincial town officials mistake a dimwitted young visitor for a government inspector. The townspeople's energetic lying, fawning, and bribing inspire the visitor to improvise his own fantastically comic lies about himself and life in the capital. The play was well received but Gogol felt that it was not fully appreciated. His dissatisfaction with the public's response helped convince him to leave for Rome, where he spent much of the rest of his life. Here Gogol wrote Dead Souls (1842), a novel about a confidence man pursuing a scheme that involves buying dead serfs. The title evokes not only these serfs but also the grotesque puppetlike landowners who populate the novel and the grim stasis of its provincial Russian setting. The narrative's interest derives less from plot or psychology than from linguistic and stylistic play, as well as from mysterious hints that readers should seek in it a profound hidden message about Russia. Dead Souls provoked much controversy; readers eagerly awaited the second volume, which would, the author promised, clarify all the ambiguities of the first. Gogol labored for years over this sequel, but he succumbed to a psychological and religious mania that finally led him to burn the manuscript. His last published work, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), provoked outrage with its bizarre mix of religious homily and reactionary diatribe. Gogol wrote little in his final years, dedicating himself to a regimen of spiritual purification and fasting that led to his death in Moscow on 4 March (21 February, old style) 1852.

Nineteenth-century criticism generally represented Gogol as a realist who exposed social injustice; early-twentieth-century critics began to emphasize instead his work's surreal and grotesque qualities. Soviet critics attempted to categorize Gogol as a realist, although this required them to play down his spirituality and his conservative politics. While contemporary critics have accorded new attention to Gogol's religious thought, overall the modernists' emphasis on Gogol's stylistic innovation still informs most readings of his work.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Gogol, Nikolai. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 14 vols. Moscow, 1937–1952. Authoritative Russian text.

——. Letters of Nikolai Gogol. Edited by Carl R. Proffer. Translated by Carl R. Proffer and Vera Krivoshein. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967.

——. Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Translated by Jesse Zeldin. Nashville, Tenn., 1969.

——. The Theater of Nikolay Gogol. Edited by Milton Ehre. Translated by Milton Ehre and Fruma Gottschalk. Chicago, 1980. Reprint, as Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings, Evanston, Ill., 1994.

——. Arabesques. Translated by Alexander Tulloch. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982.

——. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Edited by Leonard J. Kent. 2 vols. Chicago, 1985.

——. Dead Souls. Translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. Edited by Susanne Fusso. New Haven, Conn., 1996.

——. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, 1998.