Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born on 1 April 1809 in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, part of the Poltava Governorate in the Russian Empire, and died on 4 March 1852. He wrote novels, short stories, and plays, and is considered a Russian author of Ukrainian background. His work often employed the grotesque, as seen in stories like "The Nose," "Viy," "The Overcoat," and "Nevsky Prospekt," which also display proto-surrealist tendencies. The critic Viktor Shklovsky noted that Gogol used defamiliarization—presenting ordinary things in strange ways to shift the reader’s perspective. His early collection *Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka* was shaped by his Ukrainian upbringing, culture, and folklore. Later, he turned to satire, mocking political corruption in Russia with works such as *The Government Inspector* and *Dead Souls*, even as Tsar Nicholas I supported him. Other well-known pieces include the novel *Taras Bulba* (1835), the play *Marriage* (1842), and short stories like "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," "The Portrait," and "The Carriage."

Gogol’s influence on Russian, Ukrainian, and world literature has been widely recognized. Writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor all acknowledged his impact. Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé famously said, "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat."

Gogol’s mother was descended from an officer of the Lubny Regiment, and his father, Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, who died when Gogol was 15, owned the village of Vasylivka (now Hoholeve) and was likely descended from Ukrainian Cossacks. Gogol knew his paternal ancestor Ostap Hohol had been a Cossack hetman in Polish service and received nobility from the Polish king. The family used the Polish surname "Janowski" and called their estate Ianovshchyna. His father wrote poetry in both Ukrainian and Russian and was an amateur playwright. Like many left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early 1800s, the family was trilingual, speaking Ukrainian and Russian and reading mostly Polish. Gogol’s mother called him Nikola, a blend of the Russian Nikolai and the Ukrainian Mykola. As a child, he helped stage plays at his uncle’s home theater.

In 1820, Gogol entered a school of higher art in Nezhin (now Nizhyn Gogol State University), staying until 1828. There he began writing. His classmates called him their "mysterious dwarf," but he formed close bonds with a few. Early on, he developed a dark, secretive personality, marked by painful self-consciousness and vast ambition, along with a talent for mimicry that later made him an excellent reader of his own works and led him to consider acting. After leaving school in 1828, he moved to Saint Petersburg with vague hopes for literary fame, bringing a Romantic poem about German idyllic life, *Hans Küchelgarten*, which he published at his own expense under the pseudonym "V. Alov." Magazines universally mocked it, so he bought and destroyed all copies, vowing never to write poetry again.

Living in St. Petersburg forced Gogol to reconsider his identity. The November Uprising in former Polish-Lithuanian lands stirred Russian nationalism, making the Polish part of his surname inconvenient. He first tried shortening it to "Ianov," but by late 1830 he dropped the Polish portion entirely, telling his mother in a letter to address him only as "Gogol," since Poles were now "suspect." Tsarist authorities encouraged Ukrainian intellectuals to distance themselves from Poles, promoting a limited, folkloric Ukrainian identity within the Russian empire. In 1831, the first volume of his Ukrainian stories, *Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka*, appeared under the pen name "Rudy Panko," fitting this trend and achieving immediate success. A second volume came out in 1832, followed by *Mirgorod* (1835) and *Arabesques* (1835). Though Gogol wrote in Russian, contemporary editors and critics like Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin viewed him as a regional Ukrainian writer, using his work to illustrate Ukrainian national character. Literary scholar George Grabowicz argued in 1981 that Ukrainian literature of that era was multilingual, with writers using Polish and Russian alongside Ukrainian, so Gogol should be seen as both a Russian and Ukrainian writer, especially in his early work.

The themes and style of Gogol’s early prose and drama resembled those of Ukrainian-language writers and dramatists he knew, such as Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, but his satire was more sophisticated and unconventional. Although written in Russian, these works were filled with Ukrainianisms, prompting a glossary of Ukrainian words at the end of the volumes. Around this time, Gogol developed a strong interest in Ukrainian Cossack history.