GOGOL', NIKOLÁJ VASÍL'EVIĆ. – Russian writer, born in Soročiney on 20 March 1809, died in Moscow on 21 February 1852. His drama rested on a conflict between ethical nature and poetic nature, between the ambition to invest art with a content and a stylist’s temperament unsuited to sustaining II. From his youth he nourished the conviction that he was predestined to bring “a good” to humanity, and believed he had identified it in “justice.” He first dreamed of becoming a great legislator, but a brief experience of the bureaucratic world sufficed to disillusion him.
While waiting to discover his “true mission,” he began to write and publish stories: Evenings on a Farm near Dikon'ba (1831–32) marked his first success, confirmed in 1835 by Mirgorod and Arabesques. His literary success convinced him that he had finally found his path, and he began to regard art as the natural means of realizing his ideal. In that same year, 1835, he in fact began work on a piece, The Inspector General, in which he wished to strike at “all the injustices” committed wherever “justice is needed above all else.” But the performance of the comedy (1836) turned into a catastrophe. G. was accused of being a writer incapable of human feeling. He was embittered by this; he fled Russia so that nothing would any longer remind him of the comedy: he wished to submit himself to a spiritual education that would preserve him from further errors, and to purify himself in solitude in order to attain a maturity that would condition a work he had conceived as the “poem” of his redemption: Dead Souls, in which he would portray ideal characters. In Rome (1837–39) he regained his peace, but in 1842, when, after the first part of the novel had been printed, he felt the same accusations renewed, the crisis became tragic. His “education” now took on a mystical direction; but he was by then almost entirely incapable of continuing his work. In 1846 he realized that he had already developed in theoretical form, in several letters to friends, that ideal content which he was unable to translate poetically into the novel. He disavowed himself as a writer, abjured all his artistic work, and printed the “first useful book”: Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). This time he was accused of bigotry, obscurantism, and proud humility. And Belinskij, at the forefront, began the battle against him in the name of rationalism. It was the coup de grâce. He sought salvation and peace in pilgrimages (Palestine, 1848), fasts, and prayers, but in vain. His final years were a slow dragging of himself from one physical and moral suffering to another. At the beginning of February 1852, in a fit of despair, he burned the manuscript of Dead Souls
and on the 21st, exhausted by excessively harsh and prolonged fasting, he died. G.’s art proceeds from style; style from a discerning and complex play of contrasts. The deformation of reality through stylistic texture, the grotesque, and hyperbole give it a highly relative “realistic” character. Rich in imagination but poor in inventiveness, G. sustains the narrative beyond the limits of plot: in the portrait, which becomes a mirror of profound, cordial humanity in The Overcoat. With the figure of Akakij in The Overcoat, G. revolutionized the traditional, classical and Shakespearean concept of the hero, assigning the function of the latter, and elevating to equal greatness, the petty and laughable “brother.” Dostojevskij, in his youthful works, is directly connected with this particular aspect of G.’s art.