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The amazing mysterious world of N. Gogol surrounds many from childhood: the delightful images of "The Night Before Christmas", bright folk festivals at the "Sorochinsky Fair", terrible stories about "May Night", "Viya" and " terrible revenge”, From which the whole body is covered with small goosebumps. This is just a small list famous works 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 the biography of Gogol, 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 reflected in his psyche, when another person could withstand such a thing. The child drowned the cat because 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 the isolation in oneself that provoked a mental disorder 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. Long years Gogol successfully created in the literary field, corresponded with Pushkin and Belinsky, who were delighted with his works. Despite his fame, Gogol never became an open person 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.

Question about 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 unrequited love to Anna Mikhailovna Vielgorskaya. After that case, more women there were no men in Gogol's life, just as there were no 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 philological sciences L. S. Yakovlev calls attempts to determine sexual orientation Gogol "provocative, outrageous, funny 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 stranger in society, he left so as not to collide with him.
• IN last years generally ceased to go out and communicate with writers, 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”, explaining this by the fact 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 move the writer's grave to 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.

April 1 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. It is difficult to find a figure more mysterious in the history of Russian literature. ingenious artist words left behind dozens immortal works and the same number of secrets that are still not subject to researchers of the life and work of the writer.

Even during his lifetime, he was called a monk, a joker, and a mystic, and his work intertwined fantasy and reality, the beautiful and the ugly, the tragic and the comic.

Many myths are associated with the life and death of Gogol. For several generations of researchers of the writer's work, they cannot come up with an unambiguous answer to the questions: why Gogol was not married, why he burned the second volume of "Dead Souls" and whether he burned it at all, and, of course, what ruined the brilliant writer.

Birth

The exact date of birth of the writer for a long time remained a mystery to his contemporaries. At first it was said that Gogol was born on March 19, 1809, then on March 20, 1810. And only after his death from the publication of the metrics it was established that future writer was born on March 20, 1809, i.e. April 1, new style.

Gogol was born in a land full of legends. Near Vasilievka, where his parents' estate was, there was Dikanka, now known to the whole world. In those days, an oak tree was shown in the village, near which Mary's meetings with Mazepa took place, and the shirt of the executed Kochubey.

As a boy, Nikolai Vasilievich's father went to church in the Kharkov province, where there was a miraculous image Mother of God. Once he saw in a dream the Queen of Heaven, who pointed to a child sitting on the floor at Her feet: "...Here is your wife." Soon he recognized in the seven-month-old daughter of his neighbors the features of the child whom he had seen in a dream. For thirteen years, Vasily Afanasyevich continued to follow his betrothed. After the vision recurred, he asked for the girl's hand. A year later, the young people got married, writes hrono.info.

Mysterious Carlo

After some time, a son, Nikolai, appeared in the family, named after St. Nicholas of Myra, in front of whose miraculous icon Maria Ivanovna Gogol made a vow.

From his mother, Nikolai Vasilyevich inherited a fine mental organization, a penchant for God-fearing religiosity and an interest in foreboding. His father was inherently suspicious. It is not surprising that from childhood Gogol was fascinated by secrets, prophetic dreams, fatal signs, which later appeared on the pages of his works.

When Gogol studied at the Poltava School, his younger brother Ivan died suddenly, in poor health. For Nikolai, this shock was so strong that he had to be taken away from the school and sent to the Nizhyn gymnasium.

In the gymnasium, Gogol became famous as an actor in the gymnasium theater. According to his comrades, he tirelessly joked, played pranks on friends, noticing their funny features, and performed tricks for which he was punished. At the same time, he remained secretive - he did not tell anyone about his plans, for which he received the nickname Mysterious Carlo after one of the heroes of Walter Scott's novel "The Black Dwarf".

First burnt book

In the gymnasium, Gogol dreams of a wide social activities, which would allow him to accomplish something great "for the common good, for Russia." With these broad and vague plans, he arrived in Petersburg and experienced his first severe disappointment.

Gogol publishes his first work - a poem in the spirit of the German romantic school "Hans Küchelgarten". The pseudonym V. Alov saved Gogol's name from the heavy criticism, but the author himself took the failure so hard that he bought up all the unsold copies of the book in stores and burned them. Until the end of his life, the writer did not admit to anyone that Alov was his pseudonym.

Later, Gogol received a service in one of the departments of the Ministry of the Interior. "Rewriting the stupidities of the clerk gentlemen," the young clerk carefully looked at the life and life of his fellow officials. These observations will be useful to him later to create the famous stories "The Nose", "Notes of a Madman" and "The Overcoat".

"Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", or childhood memories

After meeting Zhukovsky and Pushkin, inspired Gogol begins to write one of his the best works- "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka". Both parts of "Evenings" were published under the pseudonym of the beekeeper Rudy Panka.

Some episodes of the book, in which real life intertwined with legends, were inspired by Gogol's childhood visions. So, in the story "May Night, or the Drowned Woman", the episode when the stepmother, who turned into a black cat, tries to strangle the centurion's daughter, but as a result loses her paw with iron claws, recalls real story from the writer's life.

Somehow, the parents left their son at home, and the rest of the household went to bed. Suddenly Nikosha - that's what they called Gogol in childhood - heard a meow, and in a moment he saw a crouching cat. The child was scared half to death, but he had the courage to grab the cat and throw it into the pond. “It seemed to me that I had drowned a man,” Gogol later wrote.

Why was Gogol not married?

Despite the success of his second book, Gogol still refused to count. literary work his main task. He taught at the Women's Patriotic Institute, where he often told young ladies entertaining and cautionary tales. The fame of a talented "teacher-storyteller" even reached St. Petersburg University, where he was invited to lecture at the Department of World History.

In the personal life of the writer, everything remained unchanged. There is an assumption that Gogol never intended to marry. Meanwhile, many of the writer's contemporaries believed that he was in love with one of the first court beauties, Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova-Rosset, and wrote to her even when she left St. Petersburg with her husband.

Later, Gogol was fascinated by Countess Anna Mikhailovna Vielgorskaya, writes gogol.lit-info.ru. The writer met the Vielgorsky family in St. Petersburg. educated and good people They warmly received Gogol and appreciated his talent. The writer especially made friends with youngest daughter Vielgorskikh Anna Mikhailovna.

In relation to the Countess, Nikolai Vasilyevich fancied himself a spiritual mentor and teacher. He gave her advice on Russian literature, tried to keep her interested in everything Russian. In turn, Anna Mikhailovna was always interested in health, literary success Gogol, which supported in him the hope of reciprocity.

According to the Vielgorsky family tradition, Gogol decided to propose to Anna Mikhailovna in the late 1840s. "However, preliminary negotiations with relatives immediately convinced him that the inequality of their social status excludes the possibility of such a marriage," the statement said. latest edition Gogol's correspondence with the Vielgorskys.

After an unsuccessful attempt to arrange family life Gogol wrote to Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky in 1848 that he should not, as it seems to him, bind himself with any ties on earth, including family life.

"Viy" - "folk legend" invented by Gogol

Passion for the history of Ukraine inspired Gogol to create the story "Taras Bulba", which was included in the 1835 collection "Mirgorod". He handed over a copy of Mirgorod to the Minister of Public Education Uvarov for presentation to Emperor Nicholas I.

The collection includes one of the most mystical works of Gogol - the story "Viy". In a note to the book, Gogol wrote that the story "is a folk tradition," which he conveyed exactly as he heard it, without changing anything. Meanwhile, researchers have not yet found a single piece of folklore that would exactly resemble "Viy".

The name of the fantastic underground spirit - Viya - was invented by the writer as a result of combining the name of the ruler of the underworld "iron Niya" (from Ukrainian mythology) And Ukrainian word"Viya" - eyelid. Hence - the long eyelids of Gogol's character.

Escape

The meeting in 1831 with Pushkin had for Gogol fateful significance. Alexander Sergeevich not only supported the novice writer in the literary environment of St. Petersburg, but also presented him with the plots of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls.

The play The Government Inspector, first staged on stage in May 1836, was favorably received by the Emperor himself, who presented Gogol with a diamond ring in exchange for a copy of the book. However, critics were not so generous with praise. The disappointment experienced was the beginning of a protracted depression of the writer, who in the same year went abroad "to open his longing."

However, the decision to leave is difficult to explain only as a reaction to criticism. Gogol was going on a trip even before the premiere of The Government Inspector. He went abroad in June 1836, traveled almost all Western Europe, having spent the longest time in Italy. In 1839, the writer returned to his homeland, but a year later he again announced his departure to his friends and promised to bring the first volume of Dead Souls next time.

One May day in 1840, Gogol was seen off by his friends Aksakov, Pogodin and Shchepkin. When the crew was out of sight, they noticed that black clouds covered half the sky. It suddenly became dark, and gloomy forebodings about Gogol's fate took possession of the friends. As it turns out, it's no coincidence...

Disease

In 1839, in Rome, Gogol caught the strongest swamp fever (malaria). He miraculously managed to avoid death, but a serious illness led to a progressive mental and physical disorder of health. As some researchers of Gogol's life write, the writer's illness. He began to experience seizures and fainting, which is characteristic of malarial encephalitis. But the most terrible for Gogol were the visions that visited him during his illness.

As Gogol's sister Anna Vasilyevna wrote, abroad the writer hoped to receive a "blessing" from someone, and when the preacher Innocent gave him the image of the Savior, the writer took it as a sign from above to go to Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulcher.

However, the stay in Jerusalem did not bring the expected result. “Never before have I been so little satisfied with the state of my heart, as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” said Gogol. and selfishness."

Only for a short time the disease receded. In the autumn of 1850, once in Odessa, Gogol felt better, he again became cheerful and cheerful as before. In Moscow, he read individual chapters of the second volume of "Dead Souls" to his friends, and, seeing universal approval and enthusiasm, began to work with redoubled energy.

However, as soon as the second volume of Dead Souls was completed, Gogol felt empty. More and more he began to take possession of the "fear of death", which his father once suffered from.

The difficult condition was aggravated by conversations with a fanatical priest - Matvey Konstantinovsky, who reproached Gogol for his imaginary sinfulness, demonstrated the horrors of the Last Judgment, thoughts about which tormented the writer from early childhood. Gogol's confessor demanded to renounce Pushkin, whose talent Nikolai Vasilievich admired.

On the night of February 12, 1852, an event occurred, the circumstances of which are still a mystery to biographers. Nikolai Gogol prayed until three o'clock, after which he took a briefcase, removed several papers from it, and ordered the rest to be thrown into the fire. Crossing himself, he returned to bed and wept uncontrollably.

It is believed that on that night he burned the second volume of Dead Souls. However, later the manuscript of the second volume was found among his books. And what was burned in the fireplace is still unclear, writes Komsomolskaya Pravda.

After that night, Gogol went deeper into own fears. He suffered from taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive. This fear was so strong that the writer repeatedly gave written instructions to bury him only when clear signs cadaveric decomposition.

At that time, doctors could not recognize his mental illness and treated him with drugs that only weakened him. If the doctors had begun to treat him for depression in a timely manner, the writer would have lived much longer, writes Sedmitsa.Ru, citing M. I. Davidov, associate professor of the Perm Medical Academy, who analyzed hundreds of documents while studying Gogol's illness.

skull mystery

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol died on February 21, 1852. He was buried in the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery, and in 1931 the monastery and the cemetery on its territory were closed. When Gogol's remains were transferred to, they discovered that a skull had been stolen from the coffin of the deceased.

According to professor Literary Institute, the writer V.G. Lidin, who was present at the opening of the grave, Gogol's skull was removed from the grave in 1909. In that year, the patron and founder of the theater museum Alexei Bakhrushin persuaded the monks to get Gogol's skull for him. “In the Bakhrushinsky Theater Museum in Moscow there are three skulls belonging to unknown persons: one of them, according to the assumption, is the skull of the artist Shchepkin, the other is the skull of Gogol, nothing is known about the third,” wrote Lidin in his memoirs “Transferring the Ashes of Gogol”.

Rumors about the stolen head of the writer could later be used by Mikhail Bulgakov, a great admirer of Gogol's talent, in his novel The Master and Margarita. In the book, he wrote about the head of the chairman of the board of MASSOLIT stolen from the coffin, cut off by tram wheels on the Patriarch's Ponds.

The material was prepared by the editors of rian.ru based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources

April 1 is the birthday of the great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. However, the question of the year of Gogol's birth is highly controversial. So, to a simple question about the date of birth, Gogol always answered evasively. What is the reason for such secrecy? The secret of the birth of the writer, perhaps, originates in the youthful years of the mother of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol.

When asked about his date of birth, Gogol answered evasively ...

Still: according to the lists of the Poltava district school, where he studied with his younger brother Ivan, it appeared that Ivan was born in 1810, and Nikolai was born in 1811. Biographers explained this as a little trick of Vasily Yanovsky, who did not want the eldest son to be an overgrown among his schoolmates. But the birth certificate issued to the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences stated that Gogol was born in 1810. And after a hundred years, he became older by another year.

In 1888, an extract from the parish register of the Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior in the town of Sorochintsy, Mirgorod Povet, Poltava province was first published in the journal "Russian Starina" for the first time: "1809. No. 25 - On March 20, the son Nikolai was born to the landowner Vasily Yanovsky and baptized. The abbot Ioan Belobolsky prayed and baptized, and Colonel Mikhail Trakhimovsky was the recipient.

The successor - the godfather of the poet - after twenty years of military service, retired and settled in Sorochintsy. The Trakhimovsky and Gogol-Yanovsky families have been friendly for a long time and were distantly related. Everything is logical, but questions remained. Because it was closer from Vasilievka to Mirgorod (where there was a church), to Kibintsy (where Gogol's mother and father served).

It was possible to drive further in the other direction, because in the legendary Dikanka, covered with ancient legends, there were two churches: Trinity and the ancestral church of Kochubeev, St. Nicholas, which was visited by Gogols as distant relatives. It was said that it was in front of him that young Maria made her vow: in the event of the birth of a long-awaited son, he would be called Nikolai, and a church would be built in Vasilievka.

In 1908, on the eve of the centennial anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, the Department of the Russian Language and Literature of the Russian Imperial Academy Sciences officially confirmed the fact of the birth of N.V. Gogol - March 20 (April 1 to the present), 1809.

theatrical romance

The genealogy of Gogol's mother is described in detail by historians. Grandfather Kosyarevsky, after military service, became the Oryol postmaster with a salary of 600 rubles a year. His son was "assigned" to the post office ... In 1794, the Kosyarovskys had a daughter, Masha, who was given to be raised by her aunt Anna, in the family of Major General A.P. Troshchinsky, since the parents themselves lived too modestly. Masha "started" early. Played in home theater Troshchinsky many roles, including the penitent Magdalene. And - played ...

At the age of 14 (I write in words - at fourteen), contrary to Russian laws that prohibited marriages in early age, married Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky (1777-1825), the owner of a small farm Kupchin, which was called Yanovshchina, and then Vasilievka. And Maria inherited the Yareska estate: only 83 acres of land (about 83 hectares), the number of "population" owned by the Kosyarovskys is 19 people. Why did the Yanovskys and Kosyarevskys intermarry so quickly? Because the "schoolgirl" Masha was pregnant. From whom?

In 1806, being in disgrace, General Dmitry Troshchinsky appeared in Kibintsy. He, an old bachelor, had illegitimate daughter and "pupil" Skobeeva, who became his favorite. In those days, the strict law of Peter I was in effect: to deprive all illegitimate children of the title of nobility, write them down as soldiers, peasants or artists. That is why so many artists, poets and writers have appeared in Russia in two generations.

By the way, isn't that why Taras Shevchenko became an artist? It is easy to figure out whose illegitimate son he is. But unlike Engelhardt, Dmitry Troshchinsky knew the laws Russian state and loopholes in these laws. It is no coincidence that he was appointed Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General. Therefore, in order to "legally" confirm the noble origin of one's illegitimate son, he gave it "for adoption" to his poor relatives.

When young Masha "became heavier" at the age of 14, then, as they would say now, an article "for the molestation of minors" shone to him. And an illegitimate child had to be given to soldiers or artists. The general insured himself twice. He instructed his manager Vasya Yanovsky to urgently marry Masha. And he gave a huge amount of dowry. (Gogol's sister points to 40 thousand, but apparently she made an adjustment for inflation, which was in Russia after the war of 1812).

And when Nikolai Gogol was born, he was made two years older. So he, by school documents Poltava, was born in 1811. Because Masha (born in 1794) by that time was already 17 years old. Everything is legal. (Troshinsky turned 59 years old. He reached the age that people say: "Gray hair in a beard - a demon in a rib").

No matter how later the competitors "dug" under the Minister of Justice, they could not prove anything. There was no DNA paternity test back then. Nevertheless, "well-wishers" regularly reported on Troshchinsky's intimate affairs. Everyone in the district knew everything: who was walking with whom ... Now, and two hundred years ago, if you sneeze on one side of the village, then on the other they will say: "Bless you!"

So I had to send Masha to give birth to an old friend - military doctor Mikhail Trakhimovsky in Bolshie Sorochintsy. The place is lively. Five roads leave the town at once: there is where to come from and where, in which case, to leave ...

There was even a "cover" legend that Gogol was born on the road, almost at the very bridge over the Psel River, which he so colorfully described in the story "Sorochinsky Fair". I checked "on the ground": there is no bridge on the road from Vasilyevka (now Gogolevo) to Sorochintsy. Here, the "security service" of the Minister of Justice, spreading these rumors, did something unfinished.

The reader has the right to ask: where did the general's money go? They have become an investment. Yareski came to life, fairs were regularly held in them. A large distillery was built there, which used Steam engine. Distilling (vodka production) was a good business. V. A. Gogol subsequently managed the Troshchinsky household, being the secretary of Dmitry Prokofievich, who in 1812 was elected marshal of the nobility of the Poltava province. And in the home theater of D. P. Troshchinsky in Kibintsy, comedies by Vasily Afanasyevich were staged. Everyone is fine.

By the way, part of the money was spent on the construction of a church in Vasilyevka, on Gogol's education in Nizhyn: 1,200 rubles a year (then Troshchinsky saved money: he transferred Kolya to the "state order"). When Gogol in St. Petersburg "grabbed Venus by the intimate place", then 1,450 silver rubles were spent on the treatment of a" bad disease "in Germany (travel, food, medicines, consultations). (For comparison: one goose then cost one ruble. A few years later, Gogol received 2,500 rubles for staging The Inspector General). It cost the poet a lot to visit a public institution.Since then, he treated women with restraint, but he started well: "We are maturing and improving; but when? When we comprehend a woman more deeply and more perfectly. (Nikolai Gogol, "Woman", "LG", 1831)

Nikolai's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol, was 14 years older than his mother, and the story of their acquaintance is truly amazing. As a teenager, Vasily saw his future wife Maria in a dream in the form of a baby. A loud voice announced: “Vasily! Yours was born future wife! Love the baby!" A few days later, a daughter was born to the neighbors Kosyarsky, and he began to nurse her, recognizing in her a baby from a dream ...

They got married when Mary was 15 years old. For many years they had no children, and only after passionate prayers to Nikolai Ugodnik, to whom the church in Dikanka was dedicated, was born the first-born, named after St. Nicholas.
Vasily Gogol died in 1825 from a very strange and rare disease - "fear of death." In those days, it was believed that the person who suffered from it was guilty before God, and the disease itself was inherited.
All the first works of Nicholas are closely connected with ancient folk beliefs and customs. In "May Night" we are talking about the holiday of Rusalia. Everything is here: demonic games, evil spirits, witches, "dancing and splashing of mermaids with pipes", werewolf. Gogol broadcasts through the mouth of his hero: “Who in his lifetime has not known evil spirits?”
There are many ways to communicate with evil spirits, and all of them are described in the works of the great esotericist Gogol, whom all acquaintances and even Pushkin himself considered a fair "contactee" with the dark devilish world. You can use evil spirits for your own purposes, Gogol assures, as in the "Sorochinsky Fair" gypsies selling fear. You can, obeying her, follow her instructions in everything, like Petro from “The Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”. But you can also outwit, leave evil spirits in the cold, as does the Cossack messenger from The Lost Letter.
When Gogol began his literary path, few educated Russians took seriously what we call today paranormal or psi-phenomena. Some contemporaries believed that Nikolai Vasilievich was endowed with a rare ability to evoke the souls of people, like the sorcerer from "Terrible Revenge", to influence them, subjugating them to his power.
Freely and at ease, Gogol felt himself only in a circle closest people. He told scary stories and fairy tales, joked wittily, and even… sang romances in a wondrous tenor voice! In an unfamiliar society, the writer became gloomy, withdrawn, hid in the corners of rooms, or climbed onto a sofa or couch, covered his head with something and fell asleep soundly. The noise of the guests was nothing to him. It took a lot of work to persuade Gogol to meet new people. If he succeeded, then his mood quickly deteriorated, and he strove to leave, referring to ill health. It is worth reminding you, readers, that it is sorcerers who try to communicate only with “their own”, perceiving it as a threat of invasion by “strangers”.
Many contemporaries pointed to special abilities, as well as characteristic details of Gogol's behavior. For example, the writer Aksakov testified that he found Gogol at work “in the following fantastic attire: instead of boots, long striped woolen stockings above the knees, instead of a frock coat, a purple velvet cloak, a long burgundy-black satin scarf wrapped around the neck; on his head is a crimson astronomer's cap embroidered with gold. Gogol looked for a long time at his friends Aksakov and Zhukovsky, who had disturbed him, obviously not recognizing them. He was in a state of trance. This and other similar testimonies (including Pushkin's) emphasize Gogol's ecstatic state, pain, incredible nervousness, the ability to fall into a trance, a rare gift to instantly abstract from others - these are all well-known properties of shamans and sorcerers.
Every sorcerer and shaman suffers the so-called "shamanic disease" - a state in which he is between life and death. It is known that Gogol, traveling through Italy, suffered from an illness - he was visited by terrible visions in reality. After this he became exceedingly devout, and spoke to his friends in no other than the tone of a prophet.

All their early works Gogol created in seven years while he lived in St. Petersburg. Then he moved from place to place and composed " Dead Souls". This took about 15 years. He worked hard, but printed almost nothing. Then he suddenly began to burn what was written: he burned the second volume of Dead Souls, wrote it again and burned it again ... From the point of view of a priest of an ancient pagan religion or a sorcerer, these actions, incomprehensible to others, have deep meaning. The gods must give the best that you have. And what burns in the fire immediately falls to the divine throne.
The death of the writer was strange, just like his life. Gogol fell ill for no apparent reason and began to refuse food. During his illness, being in a semi-conscious state, he constantly repeated the words of his insane hero from Notes of a Madman.
Incredible events accompanied the reburial of the writer's body in 1931. Then it was decided to transfer the ashes of Gogol from the cemetery of St. Danilov Monastery to Novodevichy. The ceremony was attended by almost 30 famous writers. These were the years of militant atheism, and no one thought about the sacrilege of such an action. Imagine the shock of the audience when a skeleton without a skull was found in the opened coffin, and someone's head was buried separately nearby.
The rituals of dismembering bodies during burial are known to archaeologists who have excavated mounds in Ukraine and southern Russia. But the age of these burials is 3-4 thousand years. What happened to Gogol after his death? Most likely, no one will ever be able to answer this question.
It is reliably known that after the burial, a certain writer A. Ivanov went to Leningrad, blasphemously taking the rib of Gogol's skeleton as a "souvenir". There he went to his friends, hung up his coat in the hallway (he checked that there was a rib wrapped in an old newspaper in an inside pocket). In a conversation, he hinted to his friends that he had a unique little thing. They asked to be shown. Ivanov went out into the hallway, reached into his coat pocket... and the rib was not there! Except for three friends who did not leave the hall, and he himself, there was no one in the house, the doors were bolted. A week later, the grave robber Ivanov died suddenly from an unknown attack of wild fever and loss of pulse.
Another lover of “memorial souvenirs”, the writer I. Malyshkin, who stole the foil from the decorations of the coffin, did not live even a month after this - in a state of depression, he hanged himself in the attic of the building of the Union of Writers of the USSR. The director of the cemetery, S. Arakcheev, who removed the yellow leather boots from the bones of Gogol's skeleton, was moved by his mind: every night he dreamed of these boots and Gogol, threatening him with his finger from the darkness; the boots came to life and choked the thief. The frightened party member found the grandmother-sorceress and thumped the old one at the feet, they say, what should he do with such a misfortune? “And bury these boots next to the coffin of the deceased you robbed!” the witch advised. Arakcheev did just that, he stopped having nightmares, and his overstrained psyche could no longer recover ...

It should be noted that not everyone believes in the terrible stories associated with the manifestations of clairvoyance and telepathy of N.V. Gogol during his lifetime, his communication with the forces of the other world, falling into a trance, etc., and especially - in the details of his reburial and subsequent behind this are events connected with the sudden death of people engaged in looting the grave of the great writer. Some today attribute all these superstrange things to the wild imagination of Gogol's contemporaries first, and then those who defiled his ashes by digging up and opening (and plundering!) the coffin with the remains of the author of Dead Souls. It remains for us to recall the words from the will of Nikolai Vasilyevich:
“It will be shameful and hard on those who are attracted to the disappearing flesh, which is no longer mine, and may they be punished for this ...”

Woven from contradictions, he amazed everyone with his genius in the field of literature and oddities in everyday life. The classic of Russian literature, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, was an incomprehensible person.

For example, he only slept sitting up, afraid of being mistaken for dead. He took long walks around ... the house, drinking a glass of water in each room. Periodically fell into a state of prolonged stupor. Yes, and the death of the great writer was mysterious: either he died from poisoning, or from cancer, or from mental illness.

Doctors have been unsuccessfully trying to make an accurate diagnosis for more than a century and a half.

strange child

The future author of "Dead Souls" was born in a disadvantaged family in terms of heredity. His grandfather and grandmother on his mother's side were superstitious, religious, believed in omens and predictions. One of the aunts was completely “weak in the head”: she could grease her head with a tallow candle for weeks to prevent graying of her hair, made faces while sitting at the dinner table, hid pieces of bread under the mattress.

When a baby was born in this family in 1809, everyone decided that the boy would not last long - he was so weak. But the child survived.

True, he grew up thin, frail and sickly - in a word, one of those “lucky ones” to whom all sores stick. First, scrofula became attached, then scarlet fever, followed by purulent otitis media. All this against the backdrop of persistent colds.

But Gogol's main illness, which bothered him almost all his life, was manic-depressive psychosis.

It is not surprising that the boy grew up withdrawn and uncommunicative. According to the recollections of his classmates at the Nezhinsky Lyceum, he was a gloomy, stubborn and very secretive teenager. And only a brilliant game in the lyceum theater said that this person has a remarkable acting talent.

In 1828 Gogol came to St. Petersburg with the aim of making a career. Not wanting to work as a petty official, he decides to enter the stage. But unsuccessfully. I had to get a job as a clerk. However, Gogol did not stay long in one place - he flew from department to department.

The people with whom he was in close contact at that time complained about his capriciousness, insincerity, coldness, inattention to the owners and hard-to-explain oddities.

He is young, full ambitious plans, his first book, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, is published. Gogol meets Pushkin, which he is terribly proud of. Rotates in secular circles. But already at that time in the St. Petersburg salons they began to notice some oddities in the behavior of the young man.

Where to put yourself?

Throughout his life, Gogol complained of stomach pains. However, this did not prevent him from eating dinner for four in one sitting, “polishing” it all with a jar of jam and a basket of cookies.

No wonder that from the age of 22 the writer suffered from chronic hemorrhoids with severe exacerbations. For this reason, he never worked while sitting. He wrote exclusively while standing, spending 10-12 hours a day on his feet.

As for relationships with the opposite sex, this is a secret behind seven seals.

Back in 1829, he sent his mother a letter in which he spoke of a terrible love for some lady. But already in the next message - not a word about the girl, only a boring description of a certain rash, which, according to him, is nothing more than a consequence of childhood scrofula. Having connected the girl with a sore, the mother concluded that her son had caught a shameful illness from some kind of metropolitan flirtatious.

In fact, Gogol invented both love and malaise in order to extort a certain amount of money from a parent.

Did the writer have carnal contacts with women - big question. According to the doctor who observed Gogol, there were none. The reason for this is a certain castration complex - in other words, a weak attraction. And this despite the fact that Nikolai Vasilievich loved obscene anecdotes and knew how to tell them, without omitting obscene words at all.

Whereas bouts of mental illness were undoubtedly evident.

The first clinically delineated bout of depression, which took the writer "almost a year of life", was noted in 1834.

Beginning in 1837, seizures, varying in duration and severity, began to be observed regularly. Gogol complained of anguish, "which has no description" and from which he did not know "what to do with himself." He complained that his "soul ... is languishing from a terrible blues", is "in some kind of insensible sleepy position." Because of this, Gogol could not only create, but also think. Hence the complaints about the "eclipse of memory" and "strange inactivity of the mind."

Attacks of religious enlightenment gave way to fear and despair. They encouraged Gogol to perform Christian deeds. One of them - exhaustion of the body - and led the writer to death.

Subtleties of the soul and body

Gogol died at the age of 43. The doctors who treated him in recent years were completely at a loss about his illness. A version of depression was put forward.

It began with the fact that at the beginning of 1852 the sister of one of Gogol's close friends, Ekaterina Khomyakova, died, whom the writer respected to the depths of his soul. Her death provoked a severe depression, resulting in religious ecstasy. Gogol began to fast. His daily ration were 1-2 tablespoons of cabbage brine and oatmeal broth, occasionally prunes. Considering that Nikolai Vasilyevich's body was weakened after an illness - in 1839 he had malarial encephalitis, and in 1842 he suffered from cholera and miraculously survived - starvation was mortally dangerous for him.

Gogol then lived in Moscow, on the first floor of the house of Count Tolstoy, his friend.

On the night of February 24, he burned the second volume of Dead Souls. After 4 days, Gogol was visited by a young doctor, Alexei Terentiev. He described the state of the writer as follows: “He looked like a man for whom all tasks were resolved, all feelings were silent, all words were in vain ... His whole body had become extremely thin; the eyes became dull and sunken, the face was completely haggard, the cheeks were sunken, the voice weakened ... "

The house on Nikitsky Boulevard, where the second volume of "Dead Souls" was burned. Here Gogol died. Doctors invited to the dying Gogol found severe gastrointestinal disorders in him. They talked about "gut catarrh", which turned into "typhus", about an unfavorable course of gastroenteritis. And, finally, about "indigestion", complicated by "inflammation".

As a result, the doctors diagnosed him with meningitis and prescribed bloodletting, hot baths and douches, which are deadly in this state.

The writer's pitiful withered body was immersed in a bath, his head was poured with cold water. They put leeches on him, and with a weak hand he convulsively tried to brush off the clusters of black worms that were clinging to his nostrils. But how could one think of a worse torture for a person who had felt disgust all his life in front of everything creeping and slimy? “Remove the leeches, lift the leeches from your mouth,” Gogol groaned and pleaded. In vain. He was not allowed to do so.

A few days later the writer was gone.

Gogol's ashes were buried at noon on February 24, 1852 by parish priest Alexei Sokolov and deacon John Pushkin. And after 79 years, he was secretly, thievishly removed from the grave: the Danilov Monastery was being transformed into a colony for juvenile delinquents, in connection with which its necropolis was subject to liquidation. It was decided to transfer only a few of the most dear to the Russian heart burials to the old cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. Among these lucky ones, along with Yazykov, Aksakovs and Khomyakovs, was Gogol ...

On May 31, 1931, twenty to thirty people gathered at the grave of Gogol, among whom were: historian M. Baranovskaya, writers Vs. Ivanov, V. Lugovskoy, Yu. Olesha, M. Svetlov, V. Lidin and others. It was Lidin who became almost the only source of information about the reburial of Gogol. With his light hand began to walk around Moscow scary legends about Gogol.

“The coffin was not found right away,” he told the students of the Literary Institute, “for some reason, it turned out not to be where they were digging, but somewhat at a distance, to the side. And when they pulled it out of the ground - flooded with lime, seemingly strong, from oak planks - and opened it, bewilderment was added to the heart trembling of those present. In the fobo lay a skeleton with a skull turned to one side. No one has found an explanation for this. Someone superstitious, probably, then thought: “Well, after all, the publican - during his life, as if not alive, and after death, not dead, this strange great man.”

Lidin's stories stirred up old rumors that Gogol was afraid of being buried alive in a state of lethargic sleep and, seven years before his death, bequeathed:

“Do not bury my body until there are clear signs of decomposition. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating.

What the exhumers saw in 1931 seemed to indicate that Gogol's testament had not been fulfilled, that he was buried in a lethargic state, he woke up in a coffin and experienced nightmarish minutes of a new death...

In fairness, it must be said that Lidin's version did not inspire confidence. Sculptor N. Ramazanov, who took off Gogol's death mask, recalled: "I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the prepared coffin ... finally, the incessantly arriving crowd who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased forced me and my old man, who pointed out the traces of destruction, to hurry ... "Found my own an explanation for the rotation of the skull: the side boards at the coffin were the first to rot, the lid falls under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man’s head, and it turns to its side on the so-called “Atlantean vertebra”.

Then Lidin launched a new version. In his written memoirs of the exhumation, he told a new story, even more terrible and mysterious than his oral stories. “This is what Gogol's ashes looked like,” he wrote, “there was no skull in the coffin, and Gogol's remains began with the cervical vertebrae; the entire skeleton of the skeleton was enclosed in a well-preserved tobacco-colored frock coat ... When and under what circumstances Gogol's skull disappeared remains a mystery. At the beginning of the opening of the grave at a shallow depth, much higher than the crypt with a walled coffin, a skull was found, but archaeologists recognized it as belonging to a young man.

This new invention of Lidin required new hypotheses. When could Gogol's skull disappear from the coffin? Who could need it? And what kind of fuss is raised around the remains of the great writer?

They remembered that in 1908, when a heavy stone was installed on the grave, a brick crypt had to be erected over the coffin to strengthen the foundation. It was then that the mysterious intruders could steal the writer's skull. What about stakeholders, then it was not for nothing, apparently, that rumors circulated around Moscow that in the unique collection of A. A. Bakhrushin, a passionate collector of theatrical relics, the skulls of Shchepkin and Gogol were secretly kept ...

And Lidin, inexhaustible in inventions, amazed the listeners with new sensational details: they say, when the ashes of the writer were taken from the Danilov Monastery to Novodevichy, some of those present at the reburial could not resist and grabbed some relics for themselves. One allegedly pulled off Gogol's rib, the other - the tibia, the third - the boot. Lidin himself even showed the guests a volume of a lifetime edition of Gogol's works, in the binding of which he inserted a piece of fabric, torn off by him from the coat of Gogol, who was lying in the coffin.

In his will, Gogol shamed those who "will be attracted by some kind of attention to rotting dust, which is no longer mine." But the windy descendants were not ashamed, violated the writer's testament, with unclean hands began to stir up "rotting dust" for fun. They did not respect his covenant not to erect any monument on his grave.

The Aksakovs brought to Moscow from the Black Sea coast a stone resembling Golgotha, the hill on which Jesus Christ was crucified. This stone became the basis for the cross on the grave of Gogol. Next to him, a black stone in the form of a truncated pyramid with inscriptions on the edges was installed on the grave.

The day before the opening of the Gogol burial, these stones and the cross were taken away somewhere and sunk into oblivion. It was not until the early 1950s that Mikhail Bulgakov's widow accidentally discovered Gogol's Golgotha ​​stone in a cutters' shed and managed to install it on the grave of her husband, the creator of The Master and Margarita.

No less mysterious and mystical is the fate of the Moscow monuments to Gogol. The idea of ​​the need for such a monument was born in 1880 during the celebrations for the opening of the monument to Pushkin on Tverskoy Boulevard. And 29 years later, on the centenary of the birth of Nikolai Vasilyevich on April 26, 1909, a monument created by the sculptor N. Andreev was opened on Prechistensky Boulevard. This sculpture, depicting a deeply dejected Gogol at the moment of his heavy thoughts, caused mixed ratings. Some enthusiastically praised her, others furiously condemned her. But everyone agreed: Andreev managed to create a work of the highest artistic merit.

The controversy surrounding the original author's interpretation of the image of Gogol did not continue to subside even in Soviet time, which could not stand the spirit of decline and despondency even among the great writers of the past. Socialist Moscow needed a different Gogol - clear, bright, calm. Not Gogol of Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, but Gogol of Taras Bulba, The Government Inspector, Dead Souls.

In 1935, the All-Union Committee for the Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR announces a competition for new monument Gogol in Moscow, which marked the beginning of developments interrupted by the Great Patriotic War. She slowed down, but did not stop these works, in which the largest masters of sculpture participated - M. Manizer, S. Merkurov, E. Vuchetich, N. Tomsky.

In 1952, on the centennial anniversary of Gogol's death, a new monument was erected on the site of the Andreevsky monument, created by the sculptor N. Tomsky and the architect S. Golubovsky. The Andreevsky monument was moved to the territory of the Donskoy Monastery, where it stood until 1959, when, at the request of the USSR Ministry of Culture, it was installed in front of Tolstoy's house on Nikitsky Boulevard, where Nikolai Vasilyevich lived and died. It took Andreev's creation seven years to cross the Arbat Square!

The controversy surrounding the Moscow monuments to Gogol continues even now. Some Muscovites are inclined to see the transfer of monuments as a manifestation of Soviet totalitarianism and party dictates. But everything that is done is done for the better, and Moscow today has not one, but two monuments to Gogol, equally precious for Russia in moments of both decline and enlightenment of the spirit.

IT LOOKS LIKE GOGOL WAS ACCIDENTALLY POISONED BY DOCTORS!

Although the gloomy mystical halo around Gogol's personality was largely generated by the blasphemous destruction of his grave and the absurd inventions of the irresponsible Lidin, much remains mysterious in the circumstances of his illness and death.

Indeed, from what could a relatively young 42-year-old writer die?

Khomyakov put forward the first version, according to which the root cause of death was a severe mental shock experienced by Gogol due to the fleeting death of Khomyakov's wife Ekaterina Mikhailovna. “From then on he was in some kind of nervous breakdown, which took on the character of religious insanity,” Khomyakov recalled. “He talked and began to starve himself, reproaching himself for gluttony.”

This version seems to be confirmed by the testimonies of people who saw what effect the accusatory conversations of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky had on Gogol. It was he who demanded that Nikolai Vasilievich keep a strict fast, demanded from him special zeal in fulfilling the harsh instructions of the church, reproached both Gogol himself and Pushkin, before whom Gogol revered, for their sinfulness and paganism. The denunciations of the eloquent priest shocked Nikolai Vasilievich so much that one day, interrupting Father Matthew, he literally groaned: “Enough! Leave, I can’t listen any longer, it’s too scary!” Tertiy Filippov, a witness to these conversations, was convinced that Father Matthew's sermons set Gogol in a pessimistic mood, convinced him of the inevitability of imminent death.

And yet there is no reason to believe that Gogol has gone mad. An unwitting witness to the last hours of Nikolai Vasilievich's life was the yard man of a Simbirsk landowner, paramedic Zaitsev, who in his memoirs noted that the day before his death Gogol was in a clear memory and sound mind. Having calmed down after the “therapeutic” tortures, he had a friendly conversation with Zaitsev, asked about his life, even made corrections in the poems written by Zaitsev on the death of his mother.

The version that Gogol died of starvation is not confirmed either. Adult healthy man can do without food for 30-40 days. Gogol, on the other hand, fasted for only 17 days, and even then he did not refuse food completely ...

But if not from madness and hunger, then could some infectious disease cause death? In Moscow in the winter of 1852, an epidemic of typhoid fever raged, from which, by the way, Khomyakova died. That is why Inozemtsev, at the first examination, suspected that the writer had typhus. But a week later, a council of doctors, convened by Count Tolstoy, announced that Gogol did not have typhus, but meningitis, and prescribed that strange course of treatment, which cannot be called anything other than "torture" ...

In 1902, Dr. N. Bazhenov published a small work, Gogol's Illness and Death. After carefully analyzing the symptoms described in the memoirs of the writer's acquaintances and the doctors who treated him, Bazhenov came to the conclusion that it was precisely this wrong, weakening treatment for meningitis, which actually did not exist, that killed the writer.

It seems that Bazhenov is only partly right. The treatment prescribed by the council, applied when Gogol was already hopeless, aggravated his suffering, but was not the cause of the disease itself, which began much earlier. In his notes, Dr. Tarasenkov, who first examined Gogol on February 16, described the symptoms of the disease as follows: “... the pulse was weakened, the tongue was clean, but dry; the skin had a natural warmth. For all reasons, it was clear that he did not have a feverish condition ... once he had a slight nosebleed, complained that his hands were cold, his urine was thick, dark-colored ... ".

One can only regret that Bazhenov, when writing his work, did not think of consulting a toxicologist. After all, the symptoms of Gogol's disease described by him are practically indistinguishable from the symptoms of chronic poisoning with mercury - the main component of the same calomel that everyone who started the treatment of Aesculapius stuffed Gogol with. In fact, in chronic calomel poisoning, thick dark urine and various kinds of bleeding are possible, more often gastric, but sometimes nasal. A weak pulse could be a consequence of both the weakening of the body from burnishing, and the result of the action of calomel. Many noted that throughout his illness, Gogol often asked for water: thirst is one of the characteristics of signs of chronic poisoning.

In all likelihood, the start of the fatal chain of events was an upset stomach and the "too strong effect of the medicine" about which Gogol complained to Shevyrev on February 5. Since gastric disorders were then treated with calomel, it is possible that the medicine prescribed for him was calomel and prescribed it by Inozemtsev, who after a few days fell ill himself and stopped observing the patient. The writer passed into the hands of Tarasenkov, who, not knowing that Gogol had already taken a dangerous medicine, could prescribe him calomel again. For the third time, Gogol received calomel from Klimenkov.

The peculiarity of calomel is that it does not cause harm only if it is relatively quickly excreted from the body through the intestines. If it lingers in the stomach, then after a while it begins to act as the strongest mercury poison of sublimate. This, apparently, happened to Gogol: significant doses of the calomel he took were not excreted from the stomach, since the writer was fasting at that time and there was simply no food in his stomach. The amount of calomel gradually increasing in his stomach caused chronic poisoning, and the weakening of the body from malnutrition, discouragement and Klimenkov's barbaric treatment only accelerated death ...

It would be easy to test this hypothesis by examining modern means analysis of the mercury content in the remains. But let us not become like the blasphemous exhumers of the year 1931, and for the sake of idle curiosity we will not disturb the ashes of the great writer a second time, we will not again throw off the tombstones from his grave and move his monuments from place to place. Everything connected with the memory of Gogol, let it be preserved forever and stand in one place!