Additional information about gogol. Interesting facts from the life and biography of Gogol

Childhood and youth

St. Petersburg

Abroad

Funeral and grave of Gogol

Addresses in St. Petersburg

Creation

Gogol and painters

Hypotheses about Gogol's personality

Some of Gogol's works

monuments

Bibliography

First editions

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol(surname at birth Yanovsky, since 1821 - Gogol-Yanovsky; March 20, 1809, Sorochintsy, Poltava province - February 21, 1852, Moscow) - Russian prose writer, playwright, poet, critic, publicist, recognized as one of the classics of Russian literature. He came from an old noble family Gogol-Yanovsky.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in Sorochintsy near the Psel River, on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod counties (Poltava province). Nicholas was named in honor of the miraculous icon of St. Nicholas. According to family tradition, he came from an old Ukrainian Cossack family and was a descendant of Ostap Gogol, the hetman of the Right-Bank Army of the Zaporozhian Commonwealth. In the troubled times of Ukrainian history, some of his ancestors molested the nobility, and even Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich Gogol-Yanovsky (1738-1805), wrote in an official paper that "his ancestors, with the surname Gogol, of the Polish nation", although most biographers tend to believe that he was still a "Little Russian". A number of researchers, whose opinion was formulated by V.V. Veresaev, believe that the origin from Ostap Gogol could be falsified by Afanasy Demyanovich in order to receive the nobility, since the priestly pedigree was an insurmountable obstacle to acquiring a noble title.

Great-great-grandfather Jan (Ivan) Yakovlevich, a graduate of the Kyiv Theological Academy, “having gone to the Russian side”, settled in the Poltava region (now the Poltava region of Ukraine), and the nickname “Yanovsky” came from him. (According to another version, they were Yanovskaya, as they lived in the area of ​​Yanov). Having received a letter of nobility in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname "Yanovsky" to "Gogol-Yanovsky". Gogol himself, being baptized "Yanovsky", apparently did not know about the real origin of the surname and subsequently discarded it, saying that the Poles invented it. Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky (1777-1825), died when his son was 15 years old. It is believed that the stage activity of his father, who was a wonderful storyteller and wrote plays for the home theater in Ukrainian, determined the interests of the future writer - Gogol showed an early interest in the theater.

Gogol's mother Maria Ivanovna (1791-1868), born. Kosyarovskaya, was married off at the age of fourteen in 1805. According to contemporaries, she was exceptionally pretty. The groom was twice her age. In addition to Nicholas, the family had eleven more children. There were six boys and six girls in total. The first two boys were born dead. Gogol was the third child. The fourth son was Ivan (1810-1819), who died early. Then a daughter, Maria (1811-1844), was born. All middle children also died in infancy. The last daughters born were Anna (1821-1893), Elizabeth (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of Ukrainian life, both pan and peasant. Subsequently, these impressions formed the basis of Gogol's Little Russian stories, served as the reason for his historical and ethnographic interests; later, from St. Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his stories. The influence of the mother is attributed to the inclinations of religiosity and mysticism, which by the end of his life took possession of Gogol's entire being.

At the age of ten, Gogol was taken to Poltava to one of the local teachers to prepare for the gymnasium; then he entered the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in Nizhyn (from May 1821 to June 1828). Gogol was not a diligent student, but he had an excellent memory, he prepared for exams in a few days and moved from class to class; he was very weak in languages ​​and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature.

The high school of higher sciences itself, in the first years of its existence, was not very well organized, apparently, was partly to blame for the poor teaching; for example, history was taught by cramming, the literature teacher Nikolsky extolled the importance of Russian literature of the 18th century and did not approve of the contemporary poetry of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, which, however, only increased the interest of high school students in romantic literature. The lessons of moral education were supplemented by a rod. Got it and Gogol.

The shortcomings of the school were made up for by self-education in a circle of comrades, where there were people who shared literary interests with Gogol (Gerasim Vysotsky, who apparently had a considerable influence on him then; Alexander Danilevsky, who remained his friend for life, like Nikolai Prokopovich; Nestor Kukolnik, with whom, however, Gogol never got along).

The comrades subscribed to magazines; started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in verse. At that time, he wrote elegiac poems, tragedies, a historical poem and a story, as well as a satire "Something about Nizhyn, or the law is not written for fools." With literary interests, a love for the theater also developed, where Gogol, already distinguished by unusual comedy, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). Gogol's youthful experiences developed in the style of romantic rhetoric - not in the taste of Pushkin, whom Gogol already admired then, but rather in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

The death of his father was a heavy blow to the entire family. Worries about affairs also fall on Gogol; he gives advice, reassures the mother, must think about the future organization of his own affairs. The mother idolizes her son Nikolai, considers him a genius, she gives him the last of her meager means to ensure his life in Nizhyn, and later in St. Petersburg. Nikolai also paid her all his life with ardent filial love, but there was no complete understanding and trusting relationship between them. Later, he will give up his share in the common family inheritance in favor of the sisters in order to devote himself entirely to literature.

By the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of a wide social activity, which, however, he does not see at all in the literary field; no doubt under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to come forward and benefit society in a service for which he was in fact incapable. Thus plans for the future were unclear; but Gogol was sure that a wide field lay ahead of him; he is already talking about the indications of providence and cannot be satisfied with what simple townsfolk are content with, as he puts it, as most of his Nizhyn comrades were.

St. Petersburg

In December 1828 Gogol moved to St. Petersburg. Here, for the first time, a cruel disappointment awaited him: modest means turned out to be quite insignificant in a big city, and brilliant hopes were not realized as soon as he expected. His letters home from that time are a mixture of this disappointment and a hazy hope for a better future. In reserve he had a lot of character and practical enterprise: he tried to enter the stage, become an official, surrender to literature.

He was not accepted as an actor; the service was so empty of content that he became weary of it; the more attracted his literary field. In Petersburg, for the first time, he kept to the society of fellow countrymen, which consisted partly of former comrades. He found that Little Russia aroused keen interest not only among Ukrainians, but also among Russians; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native Ukraine, and from here arose the first plans for a work that was supposed to give an outcome to the need for artistic creativity, as well as bring practical benefits: these were the plans for Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

But before that, he published under a pseudonym V. Alova romantic idyll "Hanz Kühelgarten" (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and the hero of which is given those ideal dreams and aspirations that he was fulfilled in the last years of Nizhyn's life. Soon after the book was published, he himself destroyed its circulation, when criticism was unfavorable to his work.

In a restless search for life's work, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lübeck, but a month later he returned again to St. Petersburg (September 1829) - and after that he explained his act by the fact that God showed him the way to a foreign land, or referred to hopeless love . In reality, he fled from himself, from the discord of his lofty and arrogant dreams with practical life. "He was drawn to some fantastic land of happiness and reasonable productive labor," says his biographer; America seemed to him to be such a country. In fact, instead of America, he ended up in the service of the III Division thanks to the patronage of Faddey Bulgarin. However, his stay there was short-lived. Ahead of him was a service in the department of appanages (April 1830), where he remained until 1832. In 1830, the first literary acquaintances were made: Orest Somov, Baron Delvig, Pyotr Pletnev. In 1831, there was a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin, which had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity.

The failure of the Hanz Küchelgarten was a tangible indication of the need for another literary path; but even earlier, from the first months of 1829, Gogol besieged his mother with requests to send him information about Ukrainian customs, traditions, costumes, as well as to send “notes kept by the ancestors of some ancient family, ancient manuscripts”, etc. All this was material for future stories from Ukrainian life and legends, which became the beginning of his literary fame. He already took some part in the publications of that time: at the beginning of 1830, Svinin’s “Notes of the Fatherland” published (with editorial changes) “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”; at the same time (1829) "Sorochinsky Fair" and "May Night" were started or written.

Gogol published other works then in the publications of Baron Delvig "Literary Gazette" and "Northern Flowers", where a chapter from the historical novel "Hetman" was placed. Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received Gogol with great cordiality: apparently, the mutual sympathy of people who were kindred in love for art, in religiosity, prone to mysticism, affected from the first time - after they became very close.

Zhukovsky handed over the young man to Pletnev with a request to attach him, and indeed, in February 1831, Pletnev recommended Gogol to the post of teacher at the Patriotic Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Having got to know Gogol better, Pletnev was waiting for an opportunity to “bring him under the blessing of Pushkin”: this happened in May of that year. Gogol's entry into this circle, which soon appreciated the great nascent talent in him, had a huge impact on Gogol's fate. Before him opened, finally, the prospect of broad activities, which he dreamed of - but in the field not official, but literary.

In material terms, Gogol could be helped by the fact that, in addition to a place at the institute, Pletnev gave him the opportunity to conduct private classes with the Longinovs, Balabins, Vasilchikovs; but the main thing was the moral influence that this new environment had on Gogol. In 1834 he was appointed to the post of adjunct in the department of history at St. Petersburg University. He entered the circle of people who stood at the head of Russian fiction: his long-standing poetic aspirations could develop in all their breadth, an instinctive understanding of art could become a deep consciousness; Pushkin's personality made an extraordinary impression on him and forever remained an object of worship for him. Service to art became for him a high and strict moral duty, the requirements of which he tried to fulfill sacredly.

Hence, by the way, his slow manner of work, the long definition and development of the plan and all the details. The company of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with meager knowledge taken out of school: his observation becomes deeper, and with each new work his creative level reaches new heights. At Zhukovsky's, Gogol met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic; in the latter, he soon began a relationship that played a significant role in his future life, for example, with the Vielgorskys; at the Balabins, he met the brilliant maid of honor Alexandra Rosetti (later Smirnova). The horizon of his life observations expanded, long-standing aspirations gained ground, and Gogol's high concept of his destiny became the ultimate conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublimely idealistic, on the other, the prerequisites for religious quests arose, which marked the last years of his life.

This time was the most active era of his work. After small works, partly named above, his first major literary work, which laid the foundation for his fame, was “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka. The stories published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank, published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first included Sorochinskaya Fair, Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala, May Night, or the Drowned Woman, The Missing Letter; in the second - "The Night Before Christmas", "A Terrible Revenge, an Old True Story", "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt", "The Enchanted Place").

These stories, depicting pictures of Ukrainian life in an unprecedented way, shining with cheerfulness and subtle humor, made a great impression on Pushkin. The next collections were first "Arabesques", then "Mirgorod", both published in 1835 and compiled partly from articles published in 1830-1834, and partly from new works published for the first time. That's when Gogol's literary glory became indisputable.

He grew up in the eyes of both his inner circle and the younger literary generation in general. In the meantime, events were taking place in Gogol's personal life that influenced in various ways the internal warehouse of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was at home for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The path lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: with Mikhail Pogodin, Mikhail Maksimovich, Mikhail Shchepkin, Sergei Aksakov.

At first, staying at home surrounded him with impressions of his beloved environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household affairs were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic young man he left his homeland: life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and see its often sad, even tragic basis behind its outer shell. Soon his "Evenings" began to seem to him a superficial youthful experience, the fruit of that "youth during which no questions come to mind."

Ukrainian life even at that time provided material for his imagination, but the mood was different: in the stories of Mirgorod this sad note constantly sounds, reaching high pathos. Returning to St. Petersburg, Gogol worked hard on his works: this was generally the most active time of his creative activity; he continued, at the same time, to build life plans.

From the end of 1833, he was carried away by an idea as unrealizable as his previous plans for service were unrealizable: it seemed to him that he could act in the academic field. At that time, the opening of Kyiv University was being prepared, and he dreamed of taking the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriot Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; Gogol dreamed of starting studies in Kyiv with him, he wanted to invite Pogodin there as well; in Kyiv, Russian Athens appeared to his imagination, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in world history, and at the same time studying Ukrainian antiquity.

However, it turned out that the chair of history was given to another person; but soon, thanks to the influence of his high literary friends, he was offered the same department at St. Petersburg University. He really took this pulpit; several times he managed to give a spectacular lecture, but then the task proved beyond his strength, and he himself abandoned the professorship in 1835. In 1834 he wrote several articles on the history of the Western and Eastern Middle Ages.

In 1832, his work was somewhat suspended due to domestic and personal troubles. But already in 1833 he again worked hard, and the result of these years were the two collections mentioned. First came "Arabesques" (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835), which contained several articles of popular scientific content on history and art ("Sculpture, Painting and Music"; a few words about Pushkin; about architecture; about teaching world history; a look at the state of Ukraine; about Ukrainian songs, etc.), but at the same time, new stories "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Notes of a Madman".

Then in the same year “Mirgorod. Tales that serve as a continuation of Evenings on a farm near Dikanka ”(two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835). A number of works were placed here, in which new striking features of Gogol's talent were revealed. In the first part of "Mirgorod" appeared "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba"; in the second - "Viy" and "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich."

Subsequently (1842) "Taras Bulba" was completely revised by Gogol. Being a professional historian, Gogol used factual materials to build the plot and develop the characteristic characters of the novel. The events that formed the basis of the novel are the peasant-Cossack uprisings of 1637-1638, led by Gunya and Ostryanin. Apparently, the writer used the diaries of a Polish eyewitness to these events - military chaplain Simon Okolsky.

By the beginning of the thirties, the plans of some other works of Gogol, such as the famous "Overcoat", "Carriage", perhaps "Portrait" in its reworked version, date back; these works appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); a later sojourn in Italy includes "Rome" in Pogodin's "Moskvityanin" (1842).

By 1834, the first concept of the "Inspector General" is attributed. The surviving manuscripts of Gogol indicate that he worked extremely carefully on his works: from what has survived from these manuscripts, it is clear how the work in its finished form known to us grew gradually from the original sketch, becoming more and more complicated with details and finally reaching that amazing artistic fullness and vitality, with which we know them at the end of a process that sometimes dragged on for years.

The main plot of The Inspector General, as well as the plot of Dead Souls, was communicated to Gogol by Pushkin. The entire creation, from the plan to the last details, was the fruit of Gogol's own creativity: an anecdote that could be told in a few lines turned into a rich work of art.

The "Auditor" caused an endless work of determining the plan and execution details; there are a number of sketches, in whole and in parts, and the first printed form of the comedy appeared in 1836. The old passion for the theater took possession of Gogol to an extraordinary degree: the comedy never left his head; he was tormented by the thought of being face to face with society; he took care with the greatest care that the play be performed in accordance with his own idea of ​​character and action; the production met various obstacles, including censorship, and finally could be realized only at the behest of Emperor Nicholas.

The Inspector General had an extraordinary effect: the Russian stage had never seen anything like it; the reality of Russian life was conveyed with such force and truth that although, as Gogol himself said, it was only about six provincial officials who turned out to be rogues, the whole society rebelled against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole order life, in which it itself abides.

But, on the other hand, the comedy was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by those elements of society who were aware of the existence of these shortcomings and the need to overcome them, and especially by the young literary generation, who saw here once again, as in the previous works of their beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new, emerging period of Russian art and Russian society. Thus, The Inspector General split public opinion. If for the conservative-bureaucratic part of society the play seemed like a demarche, then for the seeking and free-thinking admirers of Gogol it was a definite manifesto.

Gogol himself was interested, first of all, in the literary aspect; in public terms, he was completely on the point of view of his friends in the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in the given order of things, and therefore he was especially struck by the discordant noise of misunderstanding that arose around his play. Subsequently, in the “Theatrical tour after the presentation of a new comedy”, on the one hand, he conveyed the impression that the “Inspector General” made in various sectors of society, and on the other hand, he expressed his own thoughts about the great significance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans appeared to Gogol even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833 he was absorbed by the comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree"; she was not finished by him, but her material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "Morning of a Businessman", "Litigation", "Lakey's" and "Fragment". The first of these plays appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836), the rest in his first collected works (1842).

In the same meeting appeared for the first time "Marriage", the outlines of which date back to the same year 1833, and "Players", conceived in the mid-1830s. Tired of the creative tension of recent years and the moral anxieties that The Inspector General cost him, Gogol decided to take a break from work, having gone on a trip abroad.

Abroad

In June 1836, Nikolai Vasilyevich went abroad, where he stayed intermittently for about ten years. At first, life abroad seemed to strengthen and calm him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, "Dead Souls" - but it became the germ of deeply fatal phenomena. The experience of working with this book, the contradictory reaction of contemporaries to it, just as in the case of The Inspector General, convinced him of the enormous influence and ambiguous power of his talent over the minds of his contemporaries. This idea gradually began to take shape in the idea of ​​his prophetic destiny, and, accordingly, about the use of his prophetic gift by the power of his talent for the benefit of society, and not to its detriment.

Abroad, he lived in Germany, Switzerland, spent the winter with A. Danilevsky in Paris, where he met and especially became close to Smirnova and where he was caught by the news of Pushkin's death, which struck him terribly.

In March 1837, he was in Rome, which he fell extremely fond of and became for him, as it were, a second home. European political and social life has always remained alien and completely unfamiliar to Gogol; he was attracted by nature and works of art, and Rome at that time represented precisely these interests. Gogol studied antiquities, art galleries, visited the workshops of artists, admired the life of the people and liked to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends.

But in Rome he worked hard: the main subject of this work was "Dead Souls", conceived back in St. Petersburg in 1835; here, in Rome, he finished The Overcoat, wrote the story Anunziata, later remade into Rome, wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, however, he destroyed after several alterations.

In the autumn of 1839, together with Pogodin, he went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was met by the Aksakovs, who were enthusiastic about the writer's talent. Then he went to Petersburg, where he had to take the sisters from the institute; then he returned to Moscow again; in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he read the completed chapters of Dead Souls to his closest friends.

Having arranged his affairs, Gogol again went abroad, to his beloved Rome; he promised his friends to return in a year and bring the finished first volume of Dead Souls. By the summer of 1841, the first volume was ready. In September of this year, Gogol went to Russia to print his book.

He again had to endure severe anxieties, which he had once experienced when staging The Inspector General on stage. The book was first submitted to the Moscow censorship, which was going to completely ban it; then the book was given to the censorship of St. Petersburg and, thanks to the participation of influential friends of Gogol, was, with some exceptions, allowed. She was published in Moscow (“The Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls, a poem by N. Gogol”, M., 1842).

In June Gogol went abroad again. This last stay abroad was the final turning point in Gogol's state of mind. He lived first in Rome, then in Germany, in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, then in Nice, then in Paris, then in Ostend, often in the circle of his closest friends - Zhukovsky, Smirnova, Vielgorsky, Tolstoy, and in him religious - the prophetic direction mentioned above.

A high idea of ​​​​his talent and the duty that lay on him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to denounce human vices and take a broad look at life, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by contemplation of God. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood; in his circle he found a favorable ground for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently instructed his friends, and in the end came to the conclusion that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem is nothing more than a porch to the palace that is being built in it, then at that time he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission.

Nikolai Gogol from childhood did not differ in good health. The death in adolescence of his younger brother Ivan, the untimely death of his father left an imprint on his state of mind. Work on the continuation of "Dead Souls" did not stick, and the writer experienced painful doubts that he would be able to bring the planned work to the end. In the summer of 1845, he was overtaken by a painful mental crisis. He writes a will, burns the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. To commemorate the deliverance from death, Gogol decides to enter a monastery and become a monk, but monasticism did not take place. But his mind presented the new content of the book, enlightened and purified; it seemed to him that he understood how to write in order to "direct the whole society towards the beautiful." He decides to serve God in the field of literature. A new work began, and in the meantime another thought occupied him: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful to him, and he decides to collect in one book everything he had written in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood and instructed to publish this Pletnev's book. These were "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (St. Petersburg, 1847).

Most of the letters that make up this book date from 1845 and 1846, the time when Gogol's religious mood reached its highest development. The 1840s is the time of the formation and demarcation of two different ideologies in the contemporary Russian educated society. Gogol remained a stranger to this demarcation, despite the fact that each of the two warring parties - the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, laid claim to Gogol's legal rights. The book made a heavy impression on both of them, since Gogol thought in completely different categories. Even his Aksakov friends turned their backs on him. Gogol with his tone of prophecy and edification, his preaching of humility, which, however, showed his own conceit; condemnation of previous works, the complete approval of the existing social order, clearly dissonant with those ideologists who relied only on the social reorganization of society. Gogol, without rejecting the expediency of social restructuring, saw the main goal in spiritual self-improvement. Therefore, for many years, the works of the Fathers of the Church became the subject of his study. But, without joining either the Westernizers or the Slavophiles, Gogol stopped halfway, without fully joining the spiritual literature - Seraphim of Sarov, Ignatius (Bryanchaninov), and others.

The impression of the book on Gogol's literary admirers, who wished to see in him only the leader of the "natural school", was depressing. The highest degree of indignation aroused by Selected Places was expressed in Belinsky's famous letter from Salzbrunn.

Gogol painfully experienced the failure of his book. Only A. O. Smirnova and P. A. Pletnev were able to support him at that moment, but those were only private epistolary opinions. He explained the attacks on her in part both by his own mistake, by exaggerating the didactic tone, and by the fact that the censors did not miss several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by the calculations of parties and self-esteem. The public meaning of this controversy was alien to him.

In a similar sense, he then wrote the "Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls"; “Decoupling of the Inspector”, where he wanted to give a free artistic creation the character of a moralizing allegory, and “Forewarning”, where it was announced that the fourth and fifth editions of the “Inspector” would be sold in favor of the poor ... The failure of the book had an overwhelming effect on Gogol. He had to confess that a mistake had been made; even friends, like S. T. Aksakov, told him that the mistake was gross and pitiful; he himself confessed to Zhukovsky: “I swung in my book with such Khlestakov that I don’t have the spirit to look into it.”

In his letters from 1847 there is no longer the former haughty tone of preaching and edification; he saw that it is possible to describe Russian life only in the midst of it and by studying it. Religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue his work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to bow to the Holy Sepulcher. At the end of 1847 he moved to Naples and at the beginning of 1848 sailed to Palestine, from where he finally returned to Russia via Constantinople and Odessa.

The stay in Jerusalem did not produce the effect he expected. “Never before have I been so little satisfied with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. “It was as if I was at the Holy Sepulcher in order to feel there on the spot how much coldness of the heart is in me, how much selfishness and pride.”

Gogol calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; caught in the rain one day in Nazareth, he thought he was just sitting in Russia at the station. He spent the end of spring and summer in the village with his mother, and on September 1 he moved to Moscow; spent the summer of 1849 with Smirnova in the countryside and in Kaluga, where Smirnova's husband was governor; in the summer of 1850 he lived again with his family; then he lived for some time in Odessa, was once again at home, and in the autumn of 1851 he settled again in Moscow, where he lived in the house of his friend Count Alexander Tolstoy (No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard).

He continued to work on the second volume of "Dead Souls" and read excerpts from it from the Aksakovs, but it continued the same painful struggle between the artist and the Christian that had been going on in him since the early forties. As was his wont, he redid what he had written many times, probably succumbing to one or another mood. Meanwhile, his health was getting weaker and weaker; in January 1852, he was struck by the death of Khomyakov's wife, who was the sister of his friend Yazykov; he was seized by the fear of death; he gave up literary studies, began to fast at Shrove Tuesday; One day, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die.

Death

From the end of January 1852, the Rzhev archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, whom Gogol met in 1849, and before that he had known by correspondence, visited the house of Count Alexander Tolstoy. Between them there were complex, sometimes sharp conversations, the main content of which was the lack of humility and piety of Gogol, for example, the demand of Fr. Matthew: "Renounce Pushkin." Gogol invited him to read the white version of the second part of "Dead Souls" for review, in order to listen to his opinion, but was refused by the priest. Gogol insisted on his point until he took the notebooks with the manuscript to read. Archpriest Matthew became the only lifetime reader of the manuscript of the 2nd part. Returning it to the author, he spoke out against the publication of a number of chapters, "even asked to destroy" them (earlier, he also gave a negative review to "Selected places ...", calling the book "harmful").

The death of Khomyakova, the condemnation of Konstantinovsky, and, perhaps, other reasons convinced Gogol to abandon creativity and start fasting a week before Lent. On February 5, he sees off Konstantinovsky and has hardly eaten anything since that day. On February 10, he handed over to Count A. Tolstoy a briefcase with manuscripts for transfer to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, but the count refused this order so as not to aggravate Gogol in gloomy thoughts.

Gogol stops leaving the house. At 3 o'clock in the morning from Monday to Tuesday 11-12 (23-24) February 1852, that is, on Great Compline Monday of the first week of Great Lent, Gogol woke Semyon's servant, ordered him to open the oven valves and bring a briefcase from the closet. Taking a bunch of notebooks out of it, Gogol put them in the fireplace and burned them. The next morning, he told Count Tolstoy that he wanted to burn only some things that had been prepared for it in advance, but he burned everything under the influence of an evil spirit. Gogol, despite the exhortations of his friends, continued to strictly observe the fast; On February 18, he went to bed and stopped eating altogether. All this time, friends and doctors are trying to help the writer, but he refuses help, internally preparing for death.

On February 20, the medical council decides on compulsory treatment of Gogol, the result of which was final exhaustion and loss of strength, in the evening he fell into unconsciousness, and died on the morning of February 21 on Thursday.

The inventory of Gogol's property showed that after him there were personal belongings worth 43 rubles 88 kopecks. The items included in the inventory were complete cast-offs and spoke of the writer's complete indifference to his appearance in the last months of his life. At the same time, S.P. Shevyryov had more than two thousand rubles in his hands, donated by Gogol for charitable purposes to needy students of Moscow University. Gogol did not consider this money his own, and Shevyryov did not return it to the writer's heirs.

Funeral and grave of Gogol

At the initiative of Moscow State University Professor Timofey Granovsky, the funeral was held as a public one; contrary to the initial desire of Gogol's friends, at the insistence of his superiors, the writer was buried in the university church of the martyr Tatiana. The funeral took place on Sunday afternoon February 24 (March 7), 1852 at the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. A bronze cross was installed on the grave, which stood on a black tombstone (“Golgotha”), and the inscription was carved on it: “I will laugh at my bitter word” (quote from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, 20, 8).

In 1930, the Danilov Monastery was finally closed, the necropolis was soon liquidated. On May 31, 1931, Gogol's grave was opened and his remains were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery. Golgotha ​​was also moved there, however, the official report of the examination, drawn up by the NKVD, now stored in the TsGALI (f. 139, No. 61), disputes the unreliable and mutually exclusive memories of the participant and witness of the exhumation of the writer Vladimir Lidin. According to one of his memoirs (“Transferring the Ashes of N. V. Gogol”), written fifteen years after the event and published posthumously in 1991 in the Russian Archive, the writer’s skull was missing from Gogol’s grave.

According to his other memoirs, transmitted in the form of oral stories to students of the Literary Institute when Lidin was a professor at this institute in the 1970s, Gogol's skull was turned on its side. This, in particular, is evidenced by a former student V. G. Lidina, and later a senior researcher at the State Literary Museum Yu. V. Alekhin. Both of these versions are apocryphal in nature, and they gave rise to many legends, including the burial of Gogol in a state of lethargic sleep and the theft of Gogol's skull for the collection of the famous Moscow collector of theatrical antiquities A. A. Bakhrushin. Of the same contradictory nature are numerous memories of the desecration of Gogol's grave by Soviet writers (and Lidin himself) during the exhumation of Gogol's burial, published by the media according to V. G. Lidin.

In 1952, instead of Calvary, a new monument was erected on the grave in the form of a pedestal with a bust of Gogol by the sculptor Tomsky, on which is inscribed: "To the great Russian artist, words to Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol from the government of the Soviet Union."

Calvary, as unnecessary, was for some time in the workshops of the Novodevichy cemetery, where it was discovered by the widow of M. A. Bulgakov, E. S. Bulgakov, with an already scraped off inscription. She was looking for a suitable headstone for the grave of her late husband. According to legend, I. S. Aksakov himself chose the stone for Gogol's grave somewhere in the Crimea (cutters called the stone "Black Sea granite"). Elena Sergeevna bought the tombstone, after which it was installed over the grave of Mikhail Afanasyevich. Thus, the dream of M. A. Bulgakov came true: “Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron overcoat”

At present, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth, at the initiative of the members of the organizing committee of the anniversary, the grave has been given almost its original appearance: a bronze cross on a black stone.

Addresses in St. Petersburg

• The end of 1828 - Trut's apartment building - Embankment of the Catherine's Canal, 72;
• the beginning of 1829 - Galibin's profitable house - Gorokhovaya street, 46;
• April - July 1829 - the house of I.-A. Jochima - Bolshaya Meshchanskaya street, 39;
• end of 1829 - May 1831 - Zverkov's apartment building - embankment of the Catherine Canal, 69;
• August 1831 - May 1832 - Brunst's apartment building - Officer Street (until 1918, now - Decembrist Street), 4;
• summer 1833 - June 6, 1836 - courtyard wing of Lepen's house - Malaya Morskaya street, 17, apt. 10. Monument of history of Federal importance; Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. No. 7810075000 // Site "Objects of cultural heritage (monuments of history and culture) of the peoples of the Russian Federation". Checked
• October 30 - November 2, 1839 - P. A. Pletnev's apartment in the Stroganov house - Nevsky Prospekt, 38;
• May - July 1842 - P. A. Pletnev's apartment in the rector's wing of the St. Petersburg Imperial University - Universitetskaya embankment, 9.

Creation

Early researchers of Gogol's literary activity seemed, wrote A. N. Pypin, that his work was divided into two periods: the first, when he served the "progressive aspirations" of society, and the second, when he became religiously conservative.

Another approach to the study of Gogol's biography, which included, among other things, the analysis of his correspondence, which revealed his inner life, allowed researchers to come to the conclusion that, apparently, no matter how opposite the motives of his stories, The Inspector General and Dead Souls, with on the one hand, and "Selected Places" - on the other, in the very personality of the writer there was not that turning point that was supposed to be in it, one direction was not abandoned and another, opposite, was adopted; on the contrary, it was one whole inner life, where already at an early time there were the makings of later phenomena, where the main feature of this life did not stop - service to art; but this personal life was complicated by the internal mutual contestation of the idealist poet, the citizen writer, and the consistent Christian.

Gogol himself said about the properties of his talent: “The only thing that came out well for me was what I took from reality, from the data known to me.” At the same time, the faces depicted by him were not just a repetition of reality: they were whole artistic types in which human nature was deeply understood. His heroes more often than any other of the Russian writers became common nouns.

Another personal feature of Gogol was that from the earliest years, from the first glimpses of his young consciousness, he was excited by lofty aspirations, a desire to serve society with something lofty and beneficial; from an early age he was hatefully limited self-satisfaction, devoid of inner content, and this trait later, in the 1830s, showed itself as a conscious desire to expose social ulcers and corruption, and it also developed into a lofty idea of ​​the significance of art, standing above the crowd as the highest enlightenment of the ideal …

All of Gogol's fundamental ideas about life and literature were those of the Pushkin circle. His artistic sense was strong and appreciated the peculiar talent of Gogol, the circle also took care of his personal affairs. As A. N. Pypin believed, Pushkin expected great artistic merit from Gogol's works, but he hardly expected their social significance, as Pushkin's friends later did not fully appreciate him and how Gogol himself was ready to distance himself from him.

Gogol distanced himself from the understanding of the social significance of his works, which was put into them by the literary criticism of V. G. Belinsky and his circle, socio-utopian criticism. But at the same time, Gogol himself was not alien to utopianism in the sphere of social reconstruction, only his utopia was not socialist, but Orthodox.

The idea of ​​"Dead Souls" in its final form is nothing more than an indication of the path to good for absolutely any person. The three parts of the poem are a kind of repetition of "Hell", "Purgatory" and "Paradise". The fallen heroes of the first part rethink their existence in the second part and are spiritually reborn in the third. Thus, a literary work was loaded with the applied task of correcting human vices. The history of literature before Gogol did not know such a grandiose idea. And at the same time, the writer intended to write his poem not just conditionally schematic, but lively and convincing.

After the death of Pushkin, Gogol became close to the circle of Slavophiles, or actually with Pogodin and Shevyrev, S. T. Aksakov and Yazykov; but he remained a stranger to the theoretical content of Slavophilism, and it did not affect the form of his work in any way. In addition to personal affection, he found here an ardent sympathy for his works, as well as for his religious and dreamy-conservative ideas. Gogol did not see Russia without a monarchy and Orthodoxy, he was convinced that the church should not exist separately from the state. However, later in the elder Aksakov, he also met with a rebuff to his views expressed in Selected Places.

The most acute moment of the collision of Gogol's worldview ideas with the aspirations of the revolutionary part of society was Belinsky's letter from Salzbrunn, the very tone of which hurt the writer painfully (Belinsky, with his authority, approved Gogol as the head of Russian literature during Pushkin's lifetime), but Belinsky's criticism could no longer change anything in the spiritual warehouse Gogol, and the last years of his life passed, as it was said, in a painful struggle between the artist and the Orthodox thinker.

For Gogol himself, this struggle remained unresolved; he was broken by this internal discord, but, nevertheless, the significance of Gogol's main works for literature was extremely deep. Not to mention the purely artistic merits of performance, which already after Pushkin himself raised the level of possible artistic perfection in writers, his deep psychological analysis had no equal in previous literature and expanded the range of topics and possibilities of literary writing.

However, artistic merits alone cannot explain either the enthusiasm with which his works were received by the younger generations, or the hatred with which they were met in the conservative masses of society. By the will of fate, Gogol was the banner of a new social movement, which was formed outside the sphere of the writer's creative activity, but in a strange way intersected with his biography, since this social movement had no other figures of this magnitude at that moment. In turn, Gogol misinterpreted the readers' hopes for the end of Dead Souls. The hastily published summary equivalent of the poem in the form of "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" turned into a feeling of annoyance and irritation of deceived readers, since Gogol's reputation as a humorist has developed among readers. The public was not yet ready for a different perception of the writer.

The spirit of humanity that distinguishes the works of Dostoevsky and other writers after Gogol is already clearly revealed in Gogol's prose, for example, in The Overcoat, Notes of a Madman, and Dead Souls. The first work of Dostoevsky is adjacent to Gogol to the point of obviousness. In the same way, the image of the negative aspects of landowner life, adopted by the writers of the "natural school", is usually erected to Gogol. In later work, the new writers made an independent contribution to the content of literature, since life posed and developed new questions, but the first thoughts were given by Gogol.

Gogol's works coincided with the emergence of a social interest, which they greatly served and from which literature did not emerge until the end of the 19th century. But the evolution of the writer himself was much more complicated than the formation of the "natural school". Gogol himself little coincided with the "Gogol trend" in literature. It is curious that in 1852, for a small article in memory of Gogol, Turgenev was arrested in the unit and sent to the village for a month. The explanation for this was found for a long time in the hostility of the Nikolaev government to Gogol the satirist. Later it was established that the real motive for the ban was the government’s desire to punish the author of the Hunter’s Notes, and the prohibition of the obituary due to the author’s violation of the censorship charter (printing in Moscow an article prohibited by censorship in St. Nikolaev censorship of a writer. There was no single assessment of Gogol's personality as a pro-government or anti-government writer among the officials of Nicholas I. One way or another, the second edition of the Works, begun in 1851 by Gogol himself and not completed due to his premature death, could only come out in 1855-1856. But Gogol's connection with subsequent literature is beyond doubt.

This relationship was not limited to the 19th century. In the next century, the development of Gogol's work took place at a new stage. Symbolist writers found a lot for themselves in Gogol: imagery, a sense of the word, a “new religious consciousness” - F.K. Sologub, Andrei Bely, D.S. Merezhkovsky, etc. Later, M.A. Bulgakov established his continuity with Gogol , V. V. Nabokov.

Gogol and Orthodoxy

Gogol's personality has always stood out for its special mystery. On the one hand, he was a classic type of satirist writer, debunker of vices, social and human, a brilliant humorist, on the other hand, a pioneer in Russian literature of the patristic tradition, a religious thinker and publicist, and even an author of prayers. His last quality has not been sufficiently studied to date and is reflected in the works of the Doctor of Philology, Professor of Moscow State University. Lomonosov V. A. Voropaev, who is convinced that

Gogol was an Orthodox Christian, and his Orthodoxy was not nominal, but active, believing that without this it is impossible to understand anything from his life and work.

Gogol received the rudiments of faith in the family circle. In a letter to his mother dated October 2, 1833 from St. Petersburg, Nikolai Gogol recalled the following: “I asked you to tell me about the terrible judgment, and you told me so well, so clearly, so touchingly about the blessings that await people for a virtuous life, and they described the eternal torments of sinners so strikingly, so terribly, that it shocked and awakened all sensitivity in me. This planted and subsequently produced in me the highest thoughts.

From a spiritual point of view, Gogol's early work contains not just a collection of humorous stories, but an extensive religious teaching, in which there is a struggle between good and evil, and good invariably wins, and sinners are punished. Deep subtext also contains Gogol's main work - the poem "Dead Souls", the spiritual meaning of the intention of which is revealed in the writer's dying note: "Be not dead, but living souls. There is no other door than that indicated by Jesus Christ…”

According to V. A. Voropaev, satire in such works as "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" is only their upper and shallow layer. Gogol conveyed the main idea of ​​The Inspector General in a play called The Denouement of the Inspector General, where there are the following words: "... terrible is the auditor who is waiting for us at the door of the coffin." This, according to Voropaev, is the main idea of ​​the work: it is not Khlestakov and not the auditor from St. Petersburg that should be feared, but “The One who is waiting for us at the door of the coffin”; this is the idea of ​​spiritual retribution, and the real auditor is our conscience.

Literary critic and writer I.P. Zolotussky believes that the now fashionable debate about whether Gogol was a mystic or not is unfounded. A person who believes in God cannot be a mystic: for him, God knows everything in the world; God is not a mystic, but a source of grace, and the divine is incompatible with the mystical. According to I.P. Zolotussky, Gogol was “a believer in the bosom of the Church, a Christian, and the concept of the mystical is not applicable either to himself or to his writings.” Although among his characters there are sorcerers and the devil, they are just heroes of a fairy tale, and the devil often has a parodic, comic figure (as, for example, in Evenings on a Farm). And in the second volume of "Dead Souls" a modern devil is bred - a legal adviser, a rather civil-looking person, but in fact more terrible than any evil spirit. With the help of the rotation of anonymous papers, he created a great confusion in the province and turned the existing relative order into complete chaos.

Gogol repeatedly visited Optina Hermitage, having the closest spiritual communion with Elder Macarius.

Gogol completed his writing career with Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, a Christian book. However, it has not yet been truly read, according to Zolotussky. Since the 19th century it is generally accepted that the book is a mistake, the departure of the writer to the side of his path. But perhaps it is his way, and even more so than other books. According to Zolotussky, these are two different things: the concept of the road (“Dead Souls” at first glance is a road novel) and the concept of the path, that is, the exit of the soul to the top of the ideal.

In July 2009, Patriarch Kirill blessed the release during 2009 of the complete works of Nikolai Gogol by the publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate. The new edition is prepared at the academic level. The working group for the preparation of the complete works of N.V. Gogol included scientists and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Gogol and Russian-Ukrainian Relations

The complex interweaving of two cultures in one person has always made the figure of Gogol the center of interethnic disputes, but Gogol himself did not need to find out whether he was Ukrainian or Russian - his friends dragged him into disputes about this. Until now, not a single work of a writer written in Ukrainian is known, and few writers of Russian origin have had a chance to make a contribution commensurate with Gogol's to the development of the Russian language.

Attempts were made to understand Gogol from the point of view of his Ukrainian origin: the latter, to a certain extent, explained his attitude towards Russian life. Gogol's attachment to his homeland was very strong, especially in the first years of his literary activity and up to the completion of the second edition of Taras Bulba, but the satirical attitude to Russian life, no doubt, is explained not by his national properties, but by the whole character of his internal development.

There is no doubt, however, that Ukrainian features also affected the writer's work. These are considered the features of his humor, which remained the only example of its kind in Russian literature. Ukrainian and Russian beginnings happily merged in this talent into one, extremely remarkable phenomenon.

A long stay abroad balanced the Ukrainian and Russian components of Gogol's worldview, he now called Italy the homeland of his soul. The late Gogol's understanding of the peculiarities of Russian-Ukrainian relations was reflected in the dispute between the writer and O. M. Bodyansky about the Russian language and the work of Taras Shevchenko, transmitted by G. P. Danilevsky. " We, Osip Maksimovich, must write in Russian, we must strive to support and strengthen one, sovereign language for all our native tribes. The dominant feature for Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians and Serbs should be a single sacred thing - the language of Pushkin, which is the Gospel for all Christians, Catholics, Lutherans and Hernguters ... We, Little Russians and Russians, need one poetry, calm and strong, imperishable poetry of truth, goodness and beauty. Russian and Little Russian are the souls of twins, replenishing one another, native and equally strong. It is not possible to favor one over the other". From this dispute it becomes clear that by the end of the writer's life he was worried not so much by national antagonism, but by the antagonism of faith and unbelief.

At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries, when relations between the two states - Ukraine and Russia - were going through hard times, the attitude towards Gogol in Ukraine was ambiguous. For some politicians, he was inconvenient precisely because he was born in Ukraine, and wrote in Russian, although at the time of Gogol there was no Ukrainian statehood, the Ukrainian people were considered part of the Russian, and the Ukrainian language was considered a Little Russian dialect.

Gogol and painters

Along with writing and interest in the theater from a young age, Gogol was fascinated by painting. This is evidenced by his high school letters to his parents. In the gymnasium, Gogol tries himself as a painter, book graphic artist (handwritten magazines Meteor of Literature, Dung Parnassus) and a theater decorator. Already after leaving the gymnasium in St. Petersburg, Gogol continued painting in the evening classes of the Academy of Arts. Communication with Pushkin's circle, with K. P. Bryullov, makes him a passionate admirer of art. The painting of the last "The Last Day of Pompeii" is the subject of an article in the collection "Arabesques". In this article, as well as in other articles in the collection, Gogol defends a romantic view of the nature of art. The image of the artist, as well as the conflict of aesthetic and moral principles, will become central in his St. Petersburg stories "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Portrait", written in the same 1833-1834 as his journalistic articles. Gogol's article "On the architecture of the present time" was an expression of the writer's architectural passions.

In Europe, Gogol enthusiastically indulges in the study of architectural monuments and sculpture, painting by old masters. A. O. Smirnova recalls how in the Strasbourg Cathedral “he sketched ornaments over Gothic columns with a pencil on a piece of paper, marveling at the selectivity of the old masters, who made decorations excellent from others over each column. I looked at his work and was surprised how clearly and beautifully he drew. “How well you draw!” I said. “But you didn’t know that?” Gogol answered. The romantic elation of Gogol is replaced by the well-known sobriety (A. O. Smirnova) in assessing art: "Slimness in everything, that's what is beautiful." Raphael becomes the most valued artist for Gogol. P. V. Annenkov: “Under these masses of greenery of Italian oak, plane tree, pina, etc., Gogol happened to be inspired as a painter (he, as you know, he painted decently). Once he said to me: “If I were an artist, I would invent a special kind of landscape. What trees and landscapes are being painted now! .. I would have linked a tree with a tree, mixed up the branches, thrown out the light where no one expects it, these are the landscapes you need to paint! In this sense, in the poetic depiction of Plyushkin's garden in Dead Souls, one can clearly feel the look, method and composition of Gogol the painter.

In 1837, in Rome, Gogol met Russian artists, boarders of the Imperial Academy of Arts: the engraver Fyodor Jordan, the author of a large engraving from Raphael's painting "Transfiguration", Alexander Ivanov, who was then working on the painting "The Appearance of the Messiah to the People", F. A. Moller and others sent to Italy to perfect their art. Especially close in a foreign land were A. A. Ivanov and F. I. Jordan, who together with Gogol represented a kind of triumvirate. A long-term friendship will connect the writer with Alexander Ivanov. The artist becomes the prototype of the hero of the updated version of the story "Portrait". In the heyday of his relationship with A. O. Smirnova, Gogol presented her with Ivanov's watercolor "The Groom Choosing a Ring for the Bride." He jokingly called Jordan "Raphael of the first manner" and recommended his work to all his friends. Fyodor Moller painted a portrait of Gogol in Rome in 1840. In addition, seven more portraits of Gogol, painted by Moller, are known.

But most of all, Gogol appreciated Ivanov and his painting “The Appearance of the Messiah to the People”, he participated in the creation of the concept of the picture, took part as a sitter (the figure closest to Christ), fussed with whom he could about extending the opportunity for the artist to work calmly and slowly above the picture, devoted a large article to Ivanov in Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, “The Historical Painter Ivanov.” Gogol contributed to Ivanov's appeal to writing genre watercolors and to the study of iconography. The painter revised the ratio of the high and the comic in his paintings, in his new works features of humor appeared that were previously completely alien to the artist. Ivanovo watercolors, in turn, are similar in genre to the story "Rome". On the other hand, Gogol was several years ahead of the beginnings of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in the field of studying ancient Russian Orthodox icons. Along with A. A. Agin and P. M. Boklevsky, Alexander Ivanov was one of the first illustrators of Gogol's works.

The fate of Ivanov had much in common with the fate of Gogol himself: on the second part of Dead Souls, Gogol worked as slowly as Ivanov on his painting, both were equally rushed from all sides with the completion of their work, both were equally in need, not being able to break away from your favorite business for extraneous earnings. And Gogol had in mind both himself and Ivanov when he wrote in his article: “Now everyone feels the absurdity of reproach for slowness and laziness to such an artist who, like a hard worker, has been sitting at work all his life and has even forgotten whether there is any kind of any pleasure other than work. The production of this picture was associated with the artist’s own spiritual work, a phenomenon that is too rare in the world.” On the other hand, the brother of A. A. Ivanov, architect Sergei Ivanov, testifies that A. A. Ivanov “never had the same thoughts with Gogol, he never internally agreed with him, but at the same time he never argued with him” . Gogol's article weighed on the artist, anticipatory praise, premature fame fettered him and put him in an ambiguous position. Despite their personal sympathy and common religious attitude to art, the once inseparable friends, Gogol and Ivanov, by the end of their lives somewhat internally move away despite the fact that the correspondence between them does not stop until the last days.

Gogol in a group of Russian artists in Rome

In 1845, Sergei Levitsky arrived in Rome and met with Russian artists and with Gogol. Taking advantage of the arrival in Rome of the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Arts, Count Fyodor Tolstoy, Levitsky persuaded Gogol to take part in a daguerreotype along with a colony of Russian artists. The idea was connected with the arrival in Rome from St. Petersburg Nicholas I. The emperor personally visited the pensioners of the Academy of Arts. More than twenty boarders were summoned to St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, where, after Russian-Italian negotiations, Nicholas I arrived, accompanied by the vice-president of the Academy, Count F. P. Tolstoy. “Walking from the altar, Nicholas I turned around, greeted with a slight inclination of his head, and instantly looked around the audience with his quick, brilliant look. “Artists of Your Majesty,” pointed out Count Tolstoy. “They say they walk very fast,” the sovereign remarked. “But they also work,” the count replied.

Among those depicted are architects Fyodor Eppinger, Karl Beine, Pavel Notbek, Ippolit Monighetti, sculptors Pyotr Stavasser, Nikolai Ramazanov, Mikhail Shurupov, painters Pimen Orlov, Apollon Mokritsky, Mikhail Mikhailov, Vasily Shternberg. The daguerreotype was first published by the critic V.V. Stasov in the journal Ancient and New Russia for 1879, No. 12, who described the images as follows: “Look at these hats of the theatrical“ brigantes ”, on raincoats, as if unusually picturesque and majestic - what a stupid and untalented masquerade! And meanwhile, this is still a truly historical picture, because it sincerely and faithfully conveys a whole corner of the era, a whole chapter from Russian life, a whole strip of people, and lives, and delusions. From this article, the names of those photographed and who is where is known. So, through the efforts of S. L. Levitsky, the only photographic portrait of the great writer was created. Later, in 1902, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Gogol's death, in the studio of another outstanding portrait painter, Karl Fischer, his image was cropped from this group photograph, re-shot and enlarged.

Sergey Levitsky himself is also present in the group of those photographed - second from the left in the second row - without a frock coat.

Hypotheses about Gogol's personality

Gogol's personality attracted the attention of many cultural figures and scientists. Even during the life of the writer, conflicting rumors circulated about him, aggravated by his isolation, a tendency to mythologize his own biography and a mysterious death that gave rise to many legends and hypotheses.

Some of Gogol's works

• Dead Souls
• see also: Which Russian doesn't like to drive fast
• Auditor
• Marriage
• Theatrical tour
• Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
• Mirgorod
• The story of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich
• old world landowners
• Taras Bulba
• Petersburg stories
• Nevsky Avenue
• overcoat
• Diary of a Madman
• Portrait
• Stroller
• Selected places from correspondence with friends

Influence on contemporary culture

Gogol's works have been filmed many times. Composers composed operas and ballets for his works. In addition, Gogol himself became the hero of films and other works of art.

Based on the novel Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Step Creative Group released two quests: Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (2005) and Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala (2006). The first game based on Gogol's story was "Viy: A story told anew" (2004).

In Ukraine, the annual multidisciplinary festival of contemporary art Gogolfest, named after the writer, is held.

The writer's surname is reflected in the name of the musical group Gogol Bordello, whose leader, Evgeniy Hudz, comes from Ukraine.

Images of Gogol can be found on postage stamps and coins.

Memory

• Streets in a number of cities of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other republics of the post-Soviet space, as well as in Harbin (China) are named after Gogol.
• A crater on Mercury and a steamer are named after Gogol.
• In Ukraine, the birthday of N. V. Gogol is celebrated by many citizens as a holiday of the Russian language and an occasion to remember the unity of the Slavic peoples

monuments

• The first monument to Gogol in the empire by Parmen Zabila was erected in Nizhyn in 1881. Today there are two monuments to the writer in the city.
• In 1909, a monument to Gogol by the sculptor N. A. Andreev was erected in Moscow, on Prechistensky Boulevard (now Gogolevsky). In 1951, the monument was moved to the Donskoy Monastery (currently located on Nikitsky Boulevard), and a new one, created by N.V. Tomsky, was erected in its place.
• In 1910, a bronze bust of Gogol by I.F. Tavbiy was installed on Elizavetinskaya Tsaritsyna Street. Today it is the oldest monument in the city. The street was also renamed and became Gogolevskaya.
• In Dnepropetrovsk, on the corner of Gogol Street and Karl Marx Avenue, on May 17, 1959, a monument to Nikolai Gogol was erected. Sculptors A. V. Sytnik, E. P. Kalishenko, A. A. Shrubshtok, architect V. A. Zuev.
• In Kyiv, on the house number 34 of Andreevsky Descent, a monument to the “Nose” was erected, the prototype of which was the writer’s nose. Sculptor: Oleg Dergachev.
• There is a monument to Gogol in Poltava, a bust of the writer is installed in Zaporozhye, Mirgorod, Kharkov, Brest
• On March 4, 1952, on the centenary of Gogol's death, a foundation stone was installed in the square on Manezhnaya Square in St. Petersburg, the inscription on which read: "A monument to the great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol will be erected here." The foundation stone existed in this form until 1999, when a fountain was installed in its place. As a result, another place was chosen for this monument, on the street. Malaya Konyushennaya.
• In Veliky Novgorod, on the Monument "1000th Anniversary of Russia" among the 129 figures of the most prominent personalities in Russian history (as of 1862), there is the figure of N.V. Gogol.
• On August 13, 1982, a monument to the writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was unveiled in Kyiv. In honor of the 1500th anniversary of the capital, a monument to the writer was erected on the Rusanovskaya embankment in Kyiv.

Bibliography

Anthologies

• N. V. Gogol in Russian criticism: Sat. Art. / Prep. text by A. K. Kotov and M. Ya. Polyakov; Intro. Art. and note. M. Ya. Polyakova .. - M .: State. publishing house artistic lit., 1953. - LXIV, 651 p.
• Gogol in Russian Criticism: An Anthology / Comp. S. G. Bocharov. - M.: Fortuna EL, 2008. - 720 p. - ISBN 978-5-9582-0042-9

First editions

• The first collected works were prepared by him in 1842. The second he began to prepare in 1851; it was already completed by his heirs: here for the first time the second part of "Dead Souls" appeared.
• In the edition of Kulish in six volumes (1857), an extensive collection of Gogol's letters appeared for the first time (the last two volumes).
• In the edition prepared by Chizhov (1867), “Selected passages from correspondence with friends” are printed in full, with the inclusion of what was not allowed by the censors in 1847.
• The tenth edition, published in 1889 under the editorship of N. S. Tikhonravov, is the best of all published in the 19th century: this is a scientific edition with a text corrected according to manuscripts and Gogol's own editions, and with extensive comments, which details the history of each of Gogol's works according to surviving manuscripts, according to his correspondence and other historical data.
• The material of the letters collected by Kulish and the text of Gogol's writings began to grow, especially from the 1860s: The Tale of Captain Kopeikin, based on a manuscript found in Rome (Russian Archive, 1865); unpublished from Selected Places, first in the Russian Archive (1866), then in Chizhov's edition; about Gogol's comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree" - Rodislavsky, in "Conversations in the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature" (M., 1871).
• Studies of Gogol's texts and his letters: articles by V. I. Shenrok in Vestnik Evropy, Artist, Russkaya Starina; Ms. E. S. Nekrasova in Russian Antiquities, and especially Mr. Tikhonravov’s comments in the 10th edition and in a special edition of The Government Inspector (Moscow, 1886).
• There is information about the letters in the book "Index to Gogol's Letters" by Mr. Shenrok (2nd ed. - M., 1888), which is necessary when reading them in the Kulish edition, where they are interspersed with deaf, arbitrarily taken letters instead of names and other censorship defaults .
• “Letters from Gogol to Prince V. F. Odoevsky” (in the “Russian Archive”, 1864); "to Malinovsky" (ibid., 1865); "to the book. P. A. Vyazemsky” (ibid., 1865, 1866, 1872); “to I. I. Dmitriev and P. A. Pletnev” (ibid., 1866); "to Zhukovsky" (ibid., 1871); “to M.P. Pogodin” from 1833 (not 1834; ibid., 1872; fuller than Kulish, V, 174); “Note to S. T. Aksakov” (“Russian Antiquity”, 1871, IV); a letter to the actor Sosnitsky about The Government Inspector in 1846 (ibid., 1872, VI); Gogol's letters to Maksimovich, published by S. I. Ponomarev, etc.

Square

The amazing mysterious world of N. Gogol has been surrounding many since childhood: delightful images of The Night Before Christmas, bright folk festivals at the Sorochinskaya Fair, terrible stories about May Night, Viy and Terrible Revenge, from which the whole body is covered small ants. This is only a small list of the famous works of N.V. Gogol, who is considered the most mystical Russian writer, and abroad his stories are equated with the gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In this article, you will learn interesting facts from Gogol's biography, which are considered mysterious and mystical. Get ready to get goosebumps!

Gogol was born into a rural Ukrainian family with many children, he was the third child out of twelve. His mother is a woman of rare beauty - she was 14 years old when she became the wife of a man twice her age. They say that it was the mother who developed the religious and mystical worldview in her son. Maria Ivanovna was distinguished by her natural view of religion, she told her son about ancient Russian pagan traditions, Slavic mythology. Gogol's letters to his mother dating back to 1833 have been preserved. In one of them, Gogol writes that a mother in childhood told her child in colors what the Last Judgment is, what will await a person for virtuous deeds, and what fate will overtake sinners.

Childhood, adolescence and youth

Nikolai Gogol from an early age was a closed and uncommunicative person, even close relatives could not imagine what was going on in his head and soul. The boy lived apart, had little contact with his brothers and sisters, but spent a lot of time with his beloved mother.

Gogol later said that at the age of five he first experienced panic fear.

“I was 5 years old. I was sitting alone in Vasilievka. Father and mother left ... Twilight descended. I clung to the corner of the sofa and, in the midst of complete silence, listened to the sound of the long pendulum of the old wall clock. There was a buzzing in my ears, something approaching and leaving somewhere. Believe me, it already seemed to me then that the knock of the pendulum was the knock of time passing into eternity. Suddenly, the faint meow of a cat broke the peace that weighed on me. I saw her, meowing, cautiously creeping towards me. I will never forget how she walked, stretching, and her soft paws weakly tapped her claws on the floorboards, and her green eyes sparkled with an unkind light. I got scared. I climbed onto the couch and leaned against the wall. “Kitty, kitty,” I muttered, and, wanting to encourage myself, I jumped off and, grabbing the cat, which easily surrendered to my hands, ran into the garden, where I threw it into the pond and several times, when it tried to swim out and go ashore, pushed her sixth. I was scared, I was trembling, but at the same time I felt some satisfaction, maybe revenge for the fact that she scared me. But when she drowned, and the last circles on the water fled, complete peace and silence settled in, I suddenly felt terribly sorry for the “kitty”. I felt remorse. I felt like I drowned a man. I cried terribly and calmed down only when my father, to whom I confessed my deed, whipped me.

Nikolai Gogol from childhood was a sensitive person, succumbing to fears, experiences, life's troubles. Any negative situation was reflected in his psyche, when another person could withstand such a thing. The child drowned the cat out of fear, he seemed to have overcome his fear through cruelty and violence, but he realized that panic cannot be overcome in this way. It can be assumed that the writer was left alone with his fears, since his conscience did not allow him to use violence again.

This situation is very reminiscent of the moment in the work “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, when the stepmother turned into a black cat, and the lady hit her in fear and cut her paw.

It is known that Gogol drew as a child, but his drawings seemed mediocre, incomprehensible to others. Such an attitude towards his art, again, could have a negative impact on self-esteem.

From the age of 10, Nikolai Gogol was sent to the Poltava gymnasium, where the boy became a member of a literary circle. It is not known why Gogol developed such low self-esteem, but it was precisely this self-isolation that provoked a mental breakdown in maturity.

The first attempt to bring his work to the people's court

Nikolai Gogol began to create, he wrote a lot, but he ventured to show his work "Hanz Küchelgarten". It was a failure, criticism was unfavorable to the story, then Gogol destroyed the entire circulation. Before becoming a writer, Gogol tried to become an actor and enter the official service. But the love of literature still captured the young man, who was able to find a new approach to this type of art. It was Gogol who touched on the other side of life and showed how they live in Little Russia! The collection "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" made a splash! His mother Maria Ivanovna helped to collect material and develop plots for the writer. For many years Gogol successfully worked in the literary field, corresponded with Pushkin and Belinsky, who were delighted with his works. Despite his fame, Gogol never became an open person, but on the contrary, over the years he led an increasingly reclusive lifestyle.

By the way, Pushkin gave Gogol the pug Josie, after the death of the dog Gogol was attacked by longing, because the writer definitely had no one closer to Josie.

The Question of the Writer's Homosexuality

Gogol's personal life is surrounded by conjectures and assumptions. The writer has never been married to a woman, perhaps even had no intimacy with them. There are references in a letter to his mother that Gogol wrote about a beautiful divine person whom he did not want to correlate with an ordinary woman. Contemporaries say that it was an unrequited love for Anna Mikhailovna Vielgorskaya. After this incident, there were no more women in Gogol's life, as well as men. But researchers believe that letters to men are highly emotional. In the unfinished work "Nights at the Villa" there is a motif of love for a young man suffering from tuberculosis. The work is autobiographical, hence the researchers had a hunch that, perhaps, Gogol had feelings for men.

Semyon Karlinsky argued that Gogol is a very religious person, God-fearing, therefore he could not include any intimate relationships in his life.

But Igor Kon believes that it was God-fearing that prevented Gogol from accepting himself as he is. Therefore, depression developed, fears of being incomprehensible appeared, as a result, the writer completely fell into religion and brought himself to death, the sea of ​​hunger - these were attempts to cleanse himself of sinfulness.

Candidate of Philological Sciences L. S. Yakovlev calls attempts to determine Gogol's sexual orientation "provocative, outrageous, curious publications."

Eggnog

Nikolai Gogol was madly in love with goat's milk combined with rum. The writer jokingly called his amazing drink “mogul-mogul”. In fact, the mogul-mogul dessert appeared in ancient times in Europe, was first made by the German confectioner Keukenbauer. So the famous beaten egg yolk with sugar has nothing to do with the famous writer!

Writer's phobias

• Gogol was terribly afraid of thunderstorms.
• When a stranger appeared in society, he left so as not to run into him.
• In recent years, he stopped going out and communicating with writers altogether, led an ascetic lifestyle.
• I was afraid to look ugly. Gogol terribly disliked his long nose, so he asked the artists to depict a nose close to the ideal in portraits. On the basis of his complexes, the writer wrote the work "The Nose".

Lethargy or death?

Gogol constantly thought about being buried alive and was terribly afraid of such a fate. Therefore, 7 years before his death, he made a will, where he indicated that he should be buried only when visible signs of decomposition appeared. Gogol died at the age of 42, after fasting before Lent for 15 days. On the night of February 11-12, a week before his death, the writer burns the second volume of Dead Souls in the oven, explaining that he was beguiled by an evil spirit. The writer was buried on the third day after his death. In 1931, the necropolis where Gogol was buried was liquidated and a decision was made to transfer the writer's grave to the Novodevichy cemetery. After opening the grave, they discovered the absence of Gogol's skull (according to Vladimir Lidin), later there is a rumor that the skull was in the grave, but turned on its side. This information was not made public for many years, and only in the 90s they again started talking about whether Gogol was accidentally buried in a state of lethargic sleep?

There are some facts confirming that Gogol could have been buried alive. I am posting what I have been able to find.

After suffering from malarial encephalitis in 1839, Gogol often fainted, which led to many hours of sleep. Based on this, the writer developed a phobia that he could be buried alive while he was unconscious.

But there is no official evidence that in 1931, during the opening of the grave, a skull turned on its side was found. Witnesses to the exhumation give different testimonies: some say that everything was in order, others claim that the skull was turned to the side, and Lidin did not see the skull at all in its proper place. The presence of a death mask completely debunks these myths. It cannot be done on a living person, even if he is in a lethargic sleep, because the person will still react to the high temperature during the procedure and begin to suffocate from filling the external respiratory organs with plaster. But this was not the case, Gogol was buried after a natural death.

Among the biographies of great writers, biography of Gogol is on a separate line. After reading this article, you will understand why this is so.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is a universally recognized literary classic. He masterfully worked in a variety of genres. Both contemporaries and writers of subsequent generations spoke positively about his works.

When Alexander Sergeevich read "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" and "The Night Before Christmas", full of humor and mysticism, he highly appreciated Gogol's talent.

At this time, Nikolai Vasilyevich became seriously interested in the history of Little Russia, as a result of which several works were written by him. Among them was the famous "Taras Bulba", which gained worldwide fame.

Gogol even wrote letters to his mother asking her to tell in as much detail as possible about the life of ordinary people living in remote villages.

In 1835, the well-known story "Viy" was published from his pen. It contains ghouls, ghouls, witches and other mystical characters that are regularly found in his creative biography. Later, based on this work, a film was made. In fact, it can be called the first Soviet horror film.

In 1841, Nikolai Vasilyevich wrote another famous story, The Overcoat. It tells about a hero who becomes poorer to such an extent that he is forced to rejoice at the most ordinary things.

Gogol's personal life

From his youth until the end of his life, Gogol had disorders. So, for example, he was very afraid of an early death.

Some biographers claim that the writer generally suffered from manic-depressive psychosis. His mood often changed, which could not but excite the writer himself.

In his letters, he admitted that he periodically hears some voices calling him somewhere. Due to constant emotional stress and fear of death, Gogol was seriously interested in religion and led a secluded life.

His attitude towards women was also peculiar. Rather, he loved them from a distance, fascinated by them more spiritually than physically.

Nikolai Vasilyevich corresponded with girls of different social status, doing it romantically and timidly. He did not really like to flaunt his personal life and, in general, any details related to this side of the biography.

Due to the fact that Gogol did not have children, there is a version that he was a homosexual. To date, this assumption has absolutely no evidence, although discussions on this topic are periodically conducted.

Death

The early death of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol still causes a lot of heated debate among his biographers and historians. In the last years of his life, Gogol experienced a creative crisis.

This was largely due to the death of Khomyakov's wife, as well as criticism of his works by Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovich.

All these events and mental anguish led to the fact that on February 5 he decided to refuse food. After 5 days, Gogol burned all his manuscripts with his own hand, explaining this by the fact that some “evil force” commanded him to do so.

On February 18, while observing Great Lent, Gogol began to feel physically weak, which is why he went to bed. He avoided any treatment, preferring to him the calm expectation of his own death.

Because of the inflammation of the intestines, the doctors suggested that he had meningitis. It was decided to perform bloodletting, which not only caused irreparable harm to the writer's health, but also worsened his state of mind.

On February 21, 1852, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol died at the estate of Count Tolstoy in Moscow. Before his 43rd birthday, he did not live only one month.

There are so many interesting facts in the biography of the Russian writer Gogol that one can make a whole book out of them. Let's give just a few.

• Gogol was afraid of thunderstorms, as this natural phenomenon had a negative effect on his psyche.
• The writer lived in poverty, walked in old clothes. The only expensive item in his wardrobe was a gold watch donated by Zhukovsky in memory of Pushkin.
• Gogol's mother was considered a strange woman. She was superstitious, believed in supernatural things, and constantly told cryptic, embellished fictions.
• According to rumors, Gogol's last words were: "How sweet it is to die."
• often received inspiration through the work of Gogol.
• Nikolai Vasilyevich adored sweets, so sweets and pieces of sugar were constantly in his pocket. He also liked to roll bread crumbs in his hands - it helped him to concentrate on thoughts.
• Gogol was sensitive to his appearance. He was very irritated by his own nose.
• Nikolai Vasilievich was afraid that he would be buried, being in a lethargic dream. Therefore, he asked that his body be buried only after the appearance of cadaveric spots.
• According to legend, Gogol woke up in a coffin. And this rumor has a basis. The fact is that when they intended to rebury his body, those present were horrified to find that the head of the deceased was turned to one side.

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Even remembering all the writers who contributed to the development of Russian literature, it is difficult to find a more mysterious figure than Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The biography summarized in this article will help to get some idea of ​​​​the personality of a genius. So, what curious details are known about the life path traveled by the creator, his family, and written works?

Gogol's father and mother

Of course, all fans of the writer's work would like to have an idea about the family in which he was born. Gogol's mother's name was Maria, the girl came from a little-known family of landowners. According to the legend, there was no more beautiful young lady in the Poltava region. She entered into marriage with the father of the famous writer at the age of 14, gave birth to 12 children, some of them died in infancy. Nikolai became her third child and the first survivor. The memoirs of contemporaries say that Mary was a religious woman, diligently trying to instill love for God in her children.

It is also interesting who became the father of such an amazing person as Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The biography summarized in this material cannot fail to mention him. Vasily Yanovsky-Gogol for many years was an employee of the post office, rose to the rank of collegiate assessor. It is known that he was fond of the magical world of art, even composed poems, which, unfortunately, have practically not been preserved. It is possible that the son's talent for writing was inherited from his father.

Biography of the writer

Fans of the genius are also interested in where and when Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born. The biography, briefly given in this article, says that his homeland is the Poltava province. The childhood of the boy, born in 1809, passed in the village of Sorochintsy. His education began at the Poltava School, then continued at the Nizhyn Gymnasium. It is curious that the writer could not be called a diligent student. Gogol showed interest mainly in Russian literature, achieved some success in drawing.

Nikolai began to write as a teenager, but his first creations could not be called successful. The situation changed when he moved to St. Petersburg, already an adult boy. For some time Gogol tried to achieve recognition as an actor, he performed on the stage of one of the St. Petersburg theaters. However, having failed, he completely concentrated on writing. By the way, a few years later he managed to become famous in the theatrical field, acting as a playwright.

What work allowed such a person as Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol to declare himself as a writer? The biography summarized in this material claims that it was the story "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala." Initially, the story had a different title, but the publishers, before publication, for unknown reasons, asked to change it.

Notable works

"Dead Souls" is a poem without which it is difficult to imagine Russian literature, the work is included in the school curriculum. The writer in it considers his native state as a country suffering from bribery, mired in vices, impoverished spiritually. Of course, it predicts the mystical revival of the Russian Empire. Interestingly, it was after the writing of this poem that N.V. Gogol died.

"Taras Bulba" is a historical story, the creation of which was inspired by the real events of the 15th-17th centuries that took place on the territory of Ukraine. The work is interesting not only for the moral issues that it raises, but also for a detailed description of the life of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks.

"Viy" invites readers to plunge into the legends of the ancient Slavs, to get to know the world inhabited by mystical creatures, allows them to get scared and overcome their fear. The Inspector General ridicules the way of life of the provincial bureaucracy, the vices inherent in its representatives. "The Nose" is a fantastic story about excessive pride and retribution for it.

Writer's death

There is hardly a famous person whose death is surrounded by such a large number of mysteries and assumptions. It is with death that many interesting facts about Gogol are connected, which haunt biographers.

Some researchers insist that Nikolai Vasilievich killed himself using poison. Others argue that his early death was the result of the exhaustion of the body associated with numerous fasts. Still others insist on what the wrong treatment of meningitis entailed. There are also those who assure that the writer was buried alive, staying in Prove failed to any of the theories.

It is only known for certain that during the last 20 years of his life the writer suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, but avoided going to doctors. Gogol died in 1852.

Curious facts

Nikolai Vasilievich was distinguished by extreme shyness. It got to the point that the genius left the room, the threshold of which was crossed by a stranger. It is believed that the creator left this world without losing his innocence, he never had a romantic relationship with a woman. Gogol was also very dissatisfied with his own appearance, his nose caused particular irritation. Apparently, this part of the body really worried him, since he even named the story in her honor. It is also known that when posing for portraits, he forced artists to change the appearance of his nose.

Interesting facts about Gogol are connected not only with his appearance and behavior, but also with his work. Biographers believe that there was a second volume of "Dead Souls", which the writer personally destroyed shortly before his death. It is also curious that the plot of The Inspector General was suggested to him by Pushkin himself, sharing an interesting story from his life.

The great Russian prose writer, playwright, critic, poet and publicist Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol made a huge contribution to Russian literature and journalism, enriching it with many immortal works, some of which are incredibly relevant today. However, as you know, we all come from childhood, therefore, in order to understand the origins of his work, first of all, you need to find out where Gogol was born, who his parents were and what early impressions influenced the formation of his worldview.

Where were the Yanovskys from?

Gogol's biographers report that the writer's ancestors were hereditary priests and had nothing to do with the nobility. It is also known that his great-grandfather - Afanasy Demyanovich - settled near Poltava and took the surname Yanovsky, after the name of the area where he built the house. A few years later, when receiving a letter of nobility, he added another one to his surname - Gogol, in order to confirm (or, as some researchers believe, fabricate) his relationship with a famous person - Colonel Evstafiy Gogol, who was in the service of King Jan the Third Sobessky. Thus, the writer's ancestors moved to Little Russia from Poland somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century. In fairness, it must be said that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol himself mistakenly believed that the Poles invented the name Yanovsky. That is why in 1821 he simply discarded it. At that time, his father was no longer alive, so there was no one to prevent such a free treatment with a generic name.

Where was N.V. Gogol born?

The future great Russian writer was born on March 20, 1809 in the village of Sorochintsy, which at that time was in Poltava. Today, this settlement is called Velikie Sorochintsy and is part of the Mirgorod region of Ukraine. At the time of Gogol's birth, it was known for its famous fair, which was attended by almost all corners of Little Russia and even from Poland and the central provinces of Russia. Thus, the small homeland of the future great writer was a fairly well-known shopping center, where life was in full swing.

The house where Gogol was born

During the Great Patriotic War, many buildings in Velikie Sorochintsy, as well as throughout the entire territory, were destroyed. Unfortunately, such a fate befell the very place where Gogol was born - the house of Dr. M. Trokhimovsky, in which in 1929 a museum dedicated to his childhood years was organized. In the post-war period, a lot of work was done to search for things and documents related to the childhood of the great writer. It was crowned with success, and six years later, on the site of the destroyed house where Gogol was born, a new building was built, which housed the literary and memorial museum. Today it is considered one of the main attractions of Velikie Sorochintsy, and there visitors can see the personal belongings of the writer, his portrait by Repin, and some rare first editions of books. Having visited the village where Gogol was born (photo below), you can also see the magnificent Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior. This majestic temple, built in the early eighteenth century in the Ukrainian baroque style, is notable for the fact that it was there that the writer was baptized in 1809.

early years

Gogol's parents at the time of his birth lived in their own estate, Vasilievka, or Yanovshchina, located near the village of Dikanka. In total, collegiate assessor Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky and noblewoman Maria Kosyarovskaya had twelve children, most of whom died in infancy. The future great writer himself was the third child and the eldest of those who survived to adulthood. The children of the Gogol-Yanovskys grew up in an atmosphere of rural life on a par with their peers from peasant families. However, at the same time, the writer's parents were frequent guests on neighboring estates, and Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky even for some time directed the home theater of his distant relative D. P. Troshchinsky, a retired member of the State Council. Thus, his children were not deprived of cultural entertainment and were introduced to art and literature from a young age.

Where did Gogol's adolescence go?

When the boy was ten years old, he was sent to Poltava to one of the local teachers, who began preparing the future writer for admission to the Nizhyn gymnasium. If Velikie Sorochintsy is the village where Gogol was born, the city of Nizhyn is the place where he spent his teenage years. At the same time, he never forgot about the Great Sorochintsy, as he spent all his holidays there, carelessly indulging in fun in the company of sisters and children of peasants.

Studying at the gymnasium

The institution where Gogol's parents assigned him for further education was opened in 1820. Its full name sounded like the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences. Education there lasted nine years, and only children of Little Russian nobles could become students. Graduates of the Nizhyn gymnasium, depending on the results of the exams, received the rank of the twelfth or thirteenth grade according to the “Table of Ranks”. This meant that the certificates issued by this educational institution were quoted on a par with university diplomas, and their holders were exempted from the need to pass additional exams for promotion to higher ranks.

Judging by the surviving documents, the schoolboy Nikolai Gogol-Yanovsky was not a diligent schoolboy, and he managed to pass exams only thanks to his excellent memory, which became. languages, as well as Latin and Greek, but Russian literature and drawing were his favorite disciplines.

while studying at the high school

The question of who influenced the formation of views on the life and character of the future writer is no less important than information about where Gogol was born. In particular, already in adulthood, he recalled how, while studying at the Nizhyn Gymnasium, he enthusiastically engaged in self-education with a group of comrades. Among the writer's classmates, one can note Gerasim Vysotsky, Alexander Danilevsky, with whom Gogol was friends until the end of his life, as well as Nestor Kukolnik. Friends got into the habit of writing out literary almanacs in a clubbing, as well as once a month publishing their own handwritten gymnasium journal. Moreover, Gogol himself often published his first poems in it and even wrote a historical story and a poem for him. In addition, a satire written by him about Nizhyn was very popular with high school students.

The last years of study at the gymnasium

When Gogol was only fifteen years old, he lost his father, which was an irreparable loss for him. Thus, already at such a young age, he remained the only man in the family (four brothers died in infancy, and one more, Ivan, in 1819). Despite this, the writer's mother continued to give her meager funds so that her beloved son could graduate from the gymnasium, as she considered him a genius and believed in his success. In fairness, it must be said that Nikolai took care of her and the sisters until the end of his life and even refused the inheritance in order to give them a worthy dowry.

As for the aspirations that the young man had in the last years of his studies at the gymnasium, he dreamed of public service, and considered literature rather as a kind of hobby. Meanwhile, the place in which Gogol was born played a very important role in his future career and contributed to a high-profile debut in the Northern capital.

Trip to Petersburg

Leaving the place where he was born, Gogol went to conquer St. Petersburg. He was received there with open arms. At first, Nikolai wanted to try his hand at acting, but the artistic environment rejected the self-confident provincial. As for the public service, it seemed to him boring and meaningless. However, very soon the young man noticed that Little Russia and everything connected with it were extremely interested in the St. Petersburg beau monde, and there they listened to the works of Little Russian folklore with pleasure. Thus, everything that came from the places where Gogol was born, the city on the Neva received, as they say, with a bang! Therefore, it is not surprising that in almost every letter the novice writer asked her to tell about some details of local life or send him old legends that the mother could hear from her peasants or wanderers making pilgrimages to holy places.

Now you know what to say if you are asked: "Name a place where you can also give some details of his biography regarding childhood and adolescence. And in order to plunge into the atmosphere of Little Russia, you should visit the village of Velikie Sorochintsy and the city of Mirgorod. Then you will see with my own eyes the famous fair and puddle, which the writer admired, calling it the only one of its kind.It still exists and even got its own embankment!