GOGOL’, NIKOLAJ VASÍL’EVIČ. — Russian writer, b. at Soróčiny on 20 March 1809, d. at Moscow on 21 Feb. 1852. His drama rested upon a contrast between ethical nature and poetic nature, between the ambition to invest art with a content and a temperament of a stylist unsuited to sustain II. From his youth he nurtured the conviction that he was predestined to bring « a good » to humanity and believed he had identified it in « justice ». At first he dreamed of becoming a great legislator, but a brief experience of the bureaucratic world was enough to disillusion him.
While awaiting the discovery of his « true mission », he began to write and publish stories: the Veglie a una fattoria presso Dikan’ka (1831–32) mark his first success, confirmed in 1835 by Mirgorod and Arabeschi. Literary fortune convinced him that he had finally found his path and he began to regard art as the natural means of realizing his ideal. In the same year, 1835, he set to work on a play, Il revisore, in which he intended to strike at « all injustices » committed where « justice is most needed ». But the performance of the comedy (1836) turned into a catastrophe. G. was accused of being a writer devoid of human feeling. He was embittered; he fled from Russia so that nothing might remind him of the comedy: he wished to undergo a spiritual education that would preserve him from further errors and purify himself in solitude to attain a maturity that would condition a work he had conceived as a « poem » of his redemption: Le anime morte, in which he would depict ideal characters. In Rome (1837–39) he found peace, but in 1842, when the first part of the novel was printed and he felt the same accusations renewed, the crisis became tragic. His « education » now took a mystical turn; yet he was by now almost entirely incapable of continuing his work. In 1846 he realized that he had already expounded in theoretical form, in some letters to friends, that ideal content which he was incapable of translating poetically into the novel. He disowned his calling as a writer, abjured his entire artistic œuvre and published the « first useful book »: I passi scelti dalla corrispondenza con gli amici (1847). This time he was accused of bigotry, obscurantism, and proud humility. And, in the forefront, Belinskij began his campaign against him in the name of rationalism. It was the death blow. He sought salvation and peace in vain through pilgrimages (Palestine 1848), fasts, and prayers. His last years were a slow dragging from sorrow to sorrow, physical and moral. In early Feb. 1852, in an access of despondency, he burned the manuscript of Le anime morte and on the 21st, exhausted by too harsh and prolonged fasting, he died.
G.’s art springs from style; style from a shrewd and complex interplay of contrasts. The deformation of reality through stylistic texture, the grotesque, the hyperbole, confer upon it a « realistic » character that is highly relative. Rich in fantasy 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 Il mantello. With the figure of Akakij in Il mantello, G. revolutionized the traditional, classical, and Shakespearean concept of the hero, elevating to the same grandeur the « wretched » and laughable « brother ». Dostoevskij, in his early works, is directly connected to this particular aspect of G.’s art.