Nikolai Gogol
1809–1852
Biography
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852) was a Russian writer of Ukrainian birth who worked as a novelist, short-story writer, playwright and critic. He was born in Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava region of what is now Ukraine, into an old landed family with Cossack ancestry. Both Russian and Ukrainian literary traditions claim him. His early collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, from the early 1830s, draws on Ukrainian folklore and village life and brought him fame. He spent much of his later life abroad and died in Moscow in 1852.
Gogol's stories are full of the grotesque: a nose that goes about the city on its own in The Nose, a clerk's prized new coat in The Overcoat, a seminarian's night watching over a dead witch in Viy. The critic Viktor Shklovsky read his method as a way of making the familiar look strange. His comedy and satire turned on officialdom: The Government Inspector (1836) tells how a town mistakes a penniless young traveller for a government inspector from the capital. The novel Dead Souls (1842) follows a man who buys up the names of dead serfs so that he can claim them as property, a satire on landowners and officials. Gogol never completed the planned second part. Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and Kafka were among the writers who acknowledged their debt to him.
Two of his works are on this site under their Russian titles: Мёртвые души (Dead Souls) and Шинель (The Overcoat). Dead Souls is his most ambitious book, a picture of provincial Russia in which sharp satire and real feeling sit side by side. The Overcoat is a short story about a humble copyist whose hard-won new coat is stolen, and later critics saw in it the start of a whole line of Russian fiction about the small man.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Dead Souls
by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (translated by D. J. Hogarth)
Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian…
Summary from Wikipedia: Dead Souls (CC BY-SA 4.0)Вий
by Николай Васильевич Гоголь
A seminarian, Khoma Brut, is made to read prayers over the body of a dead girl for three nights in a lonely church, and learns she was a witch. Gogol drew this tale of the monster Viy from Ukrainian folklore, and it remains one of the most frightening in Russian. This book uses…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Мёртвые души
by Николай Васильевич Гоголь (1809—1852)
The smooth, ingratiating Chichikov travels from landowner to landowner buying the names of dead serfs who still count on the tax rolls, a scheme he hopes will make him rich. Gogol's comic epic of provincial Russia, here its complete first volume, is a gallery of grotesque…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Тарас Бульба
by Николай Васильевич Гоголь
The old Zaporozhian Cossack Taras Bulba brings his two sons to the Sich, the warrior brotherhood of the steppe, and rides with them against the Polish gentry. One son's love for a Polish girl and the other's loyalty to the cause end in a famous reckoning between father and sons.…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Шинель
by Николай Васильевич Гоголь
Akaky Akakievich, a poor copying clerk, saves for years to have a new overcoat made, and it transforms him for a single evening before thieves take it. Gogol's tale of the little man crushed by the great city ends with a ghost who goes looking for coats.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.