Unusual in the life of N. Gogol - about childhood, phobias, homosexuality and lethargic sleep

On March 20 (April 1), 1809, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in the Poltava province of the Mirgorod district. The boy was named after Saint Nicholas. His family had an old Ukrainian Cossack family.

Childhood

Nikolai spent his childhood in the village, on the estate of his parents, not far from the village of Dikanka. This land is full of legends and legends, which left many impressions in his soul.

He loved to listen to his grandmother's stories about the exploits of the Cossacks of the Zaporizhzhya Sich. He was distinguished by deep religiosity, believed in God, and then he would embody his beliefs in his work.

At the age of 10, Nikolai was taken to Poltava to a teacher who was supposed to prepare the boy for the gymnasium. In 1821 he entered the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in the city of Nizhyn, where he studied until 1828.

He was shy but proud. Well versed in people, loved to play them. He had an excellent memory, he knew Russian literature well, drew well, but foreign languages ​​were given weakly. The boy learned and fell in love with the theater, began to read a lot.

Biography. Creation

In December 1828, Nikolai Gogol arrived in St. Petersburg. It was not easy for him in the big city. He tried to enter the theater as an actor, but they didn’t take him, he didn’t like serving in officials, but literature attracted more and more.

Having released under the pseudonym V. Alov the book "Hanz Kühelgarten" (1829), he received a tub of negative criticism. Having bought the circulation, Gogol destroyed them. In 1830, he met P. Pletnev. And in 1831, he was already talking in the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin.

He made a huge impression on N. Gogol, he literally idolized the poet, listened to and admired his word. Gogol's name became widely known after the publication of his book Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1832). Ordinary life becomes fabulous and fantastic, wonderful adventures take place in the huts. In this work, Nikolai Vasilyevich described the strength of the people, humanity and the richness of the language.

While working at the University of St. Petersburg at the Department of History, he decided to write. The author had the opportunity to read historical documents, and children's knowledge from his grandmother and wandering kobzars contributed to writing the story. The Cossacks in the book are epic heroes who heroically fight for their freedom.

Gogol wrote the play at the prompt of A. Pushkin (1835). And already on April 19, 1836, the premiere of The Inspector General took place at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which was a huge success. But the officials did not like her, and the reviews were not the most flattering. Maybe that's why the author went abroad, where he continued to work on Dead Souls.

In the spring of 1838 he was in Rome. Polish priests tried to convert Gogol to Catholicism, but the writer was faithful to Christianity, while recognizing other faiths. Arriving in 1842, he published the first volume of "Dead Souls" and completely went to work on the second part. It was hard to write, the author was too self-critical about his work, it seemed to him that he was moving away from the topic.

Experiencing a difficult state of mind, Gogol burned the almost finished manuscript. For a while, he put aside work, and wrote several articles in the form of pen pals with friends. In 1848, Gogol decided to fulfill his dream - a trip to Russia. He was in his native places, traveled to the suburbs, St. Petersburg.

I visited Optina Hermitage three times, where I talked with high clergy and asked their blessing to continue working on Dead Souls. This work went on for a long time, because the author's idea was not simple. He wanted to restore the soul and make this idea effective and indisputable. To affirm the height of the ideal, but at the same time reject idealization, avoid obsession and moralizing.

Writer's death

In 1852, Nikolai Gogol falls into depression, foreseeing his imminent death. After a meeting at the end of January with Archpriest Matvey Konstantinovsky and a conversation with him, he destroyed the second volume of Dead Souls. Gogol stopped eating, on February 7 he took communion. And on February 21 he died. Russian society was shocked by the death of the writer. Many people came to say goodbye to Nikolai Gogol. He was buried in the St. Danilov Monastery, and in 1931 the remains of the writer were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery.

Books by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol are sad and funny, serious and very deep - they are relevant today and always.

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Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809 - 1852) was born in Ukraine, in the village of Sorochintsy in the Poltava region. His father was from the landowners of the Bogdan Khmelnitsky family. In total, 12 children were brought up in the family.

Childhood and youth

Neighbors and friends constantly gathered at the Gogol family estate: the father of the future writer was known as a great admirer of the theater. It is known that he even tried to write his own plays. So Nikolai inherited his talent for creativity from his father's side. While studying at the Nizhyn Gymnasium, he became famous for the fact that he loved to write bright and funny epigrams for his classmates and teachers.

Since the teaching staff of the educational institution was not distinguished by high professionalism, the gymnasium students had to devote a lot of time to self-education: they wrote out almanacs, prepared theatrical performances, and published their own handwritten journal. At that time, Gogol had not yet thought about a writing career. He dreamed of entering the civil service, which was then considered prestigious.

Petersburg period

Moving to St. Petersburg in 1828 and the much-desired civil service did not bring moral satisfaction to Nikolai Gogol. It turned out that the work in the office is boring.

At the same time, Gogol's first printed poem, Hans Küchelgarten, appeared. But the writer is also disappointed in her. And so much so that he personally takes the published materials from the store and burns them.

Life in St. Petersburg has a depressing effect on the writer: an uninteresting job, a dull climate, material problems ... He increasingly thinks about returning to his picturesque native village in Ukraine. It was the memories of the homeland that were embodied in a well-transmitted national flavor in one of the most famous works of the writer, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. This masterpiece was warmly received by critics. And after Zhukovsky and Pushkin left positive reviews about Evenings, the doors to the world of true luminaries of writing art opened for Gogol.

Inspired by the success of his first successful work, Gogol, after a short time, wrote Notes of a Madman, Taras Bulba, The Nose, and Old World Landowners. They further reveal the talent of the writer. After all, no one before in his works so accurately and vividly touched upon the psychology of "small" people. No wonder the well-known critic of that time Belinsky spoke so enthusiastically about Gogol's talent. Everything could be found in his works: humor, tragedy, humanity, poetism. But with all this, the writer continued to be not completely satisfied with himself and his work. He believed that his civic position was expressed too passively.

Having failed in public service, Nikolai Gogol decides to try his hand at teaching history at St. Petersburg University. But even here another fiasco awaited him. Therefore, he makes another decision: to devote himself entirely to creativity. But not as a contemplative writer, but as an active participant, a judge of heroes. In 1836, the bright satire "Inspector General" comes out from the author's pen. The society accepted this work ambiguously. Perhaps because Gogol was able to very sensitively "hurt a nerve", showing all the imperfections of the then society. Once again, the writer, disappointed in his abilities, decides to leave Russia.

Roman holiday

From St. Petersburg, Nikolai Gogol emigrates to Italy. A quiet life in Rome has a beneficial effect on the writer. It was here that he began to write a large-scale work - "Dead Souls". Once again, society did not accept a real masterpiece. Gogol was accused of slandering his homeland, because the society could not take a blow to the serfdom. Even the critic Belinsky took up arms against the writer.

Rejection by society did not have the best effect on the health of the writer. He made an attempt and wrote the second volume of Dead Souls, but he personally burned the manuscript.

The writer died in Moscow in February 1852. The official cause of death was "nervous fever".

• Gogol was fond of knitting and sewing. He made the famous neckerchiefs for himself.
• The writer had a habit of walking the streets only on the left side, which constantly interfered with passers-by.
• Nikolai Gogol was very fond of sweets. In his pockets you could always find sweets or a piece of sugar.
• The writer's favorite drink was goat's milk brewed with rum.
• The whole life of the writer was associated with mysticism and legends about his life, which gave rise to the most incredible, sometimes ridiculous rumors.

The unusual and completely incomprehensible personality of this amazing Great Russian writer at all times has been of interest to numerous researchers, historians, cultural figures and simply lovers and admirers of his work. However, the attitude towards him was never unambiguous. Neither during his lifetime nor after his death did he receive absolute recognition. Numerous contemporaries, even among his close friends, considered the writer crazy or on the verge of mental illness. So who is Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, how did his life go, and what surprises did fate bring, which was not favorable to this truly great man?

All about Gogol: a brief description of the legacy and biography of the writer

Interest in the person of Gogol did not subside from the very beginning of his creative path to the present day, and the role of creative activity in literature in general and Russian literature in particular is invaluable. In one of his letters to his close friend Alexander Tolstoy, he wrote that one should be grateful to fate and God, that they were destined to be born Russians. This shows how patriotic he was, how he loved his homeland. In view of this, he also tried to expose the darkest sides of her life, trying to present them in a comically sarcastic light, which he succeeded very well. All life's questions and problems had a religious-moral or, if you like, moral meaning for him.

At the end of his short life, and he managed to live only forty-three years, Gogol suddenly became imbued with Orthodoxy and the meaning of spirituality. Therefore, I began to write about a responsible and conscious attitude to life. In 1850, shortly before his death, he wrote to his friend, Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, that modern man had lost his meaning, lost his understanding of purpose and supreme goal. He wanted to show his "dark brethren living in the world" that one should not play with fate, because this is not a toy at all.

The life and work of Gogol was always filled not only with deep thoughts about the meaning of life, he turned out to be no stranger to a brilliant lyricist, with the subtle soul of a poet. His folklore plots and images were often drawn from folk legends and tales. They are quite combined with the life realism of his works, creating an unsurpassed symbiosis, it would seem, of two perfect opposites. At the end of his life, Nikolai Vasilievich decided that the highest purpose of any creativity is to lead a person to Christianity and understand God.

However, during Gogol's lifetime, in most cases, he was perceived as a skilled humorist and satirist, and much of his creative heritage was rethought after his death. Any literary movement that arose later could rightfully attribute him as its own forerunner. Therefore, the significance of his creations, as a contribution to Russian and world literature, is simply colossal. This man went down in history as consciously responsible for the work he did.

Childhood and youth of the Little Russian writer

Everyone who has ever delved into the biographies of famous writers knows for sure that Gogol's real name is Yanovsky. On March 20, 1809, in the parish book of the village of Sorochintsy (now Velikie Sorochintsy), near the river with the strange name Psel, on the very border of the Mirgorod and Poltava districts, a record was made that a boy was born in the family of the landowner Vasily Afanasyevich Yanovsky, who was named Nikolai , in honor of the famous saint. His father came from an ancient noble Polish family, which was recognized at his request in 1820.

An interesting legend is connected with the mother of Nikolai Vasilyevich, Maria Ivanovna, nee Kosyarovskaya. As his father said, he saw his future wife in a dream, and then found her, at the age of one year. Thirteen years after that, he waited until the bride grew up and at fourteen she would be given to him as his wife. Eleven children were born in the family, but many of them died in infancy. Many believe that the writer's childhood passed in the traditional Little Russian way of life, but this is not entirely true.

Nikoshi's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, was a man of special culture. He simply adored creativity and art, he wrote plays, stories, poems and poems himself, and then he read them with pleasure in his own improvised theater from the stage. Perhaps it was his father's stage efforts that made Gogol exactly the person he was. He died in 1825, when the boy was barely sixteen years old. At that time, he had only three sisters, Elizabeth, Anna and Mary.

Education and work: Gogol's life outside his native walls

When the boy Nikosha turned ten, his parents had to think about education. Therefore, he was taken to Poltava and given into the hands of Gavriil Sorochinsky, so that he would prepare him for the gymnasium. At the age of sixteen, on a dark May day on the 21st of 1821, Nikolai Vasilievich entered the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in Nizhyn, which he repeatedly regretted later, since such a science did not suit him for the future. He was never a good “studio”, therefore he was often beaten with rods, but his natural abilities allowed him to prepare for testing overnight and move from one class to the next.

However, Gogol was definitely lucky with fellow students, he managed to get along with the boys who would become his friends for life. Among them were Nestor Kukolnik, Alexander Danilevsky, Nikolai Prokopovich and others. They jointly subscribed to magazines and literary messengers in a pool, together staged performances, for which Nikolai himself often wrote poems and plays. Already at that time, he began to think about his own destiny, and even in letters to his beloved mother, he writes that his interests extend far beyond the understanding of ordinary inhabitants and even of his schoolboy friends.

City where little people disappear without a trace: Petersburg G

Already after the completion of the gymnasium and the funeral of his father, in 1828 Nikolai Vasilievich decides to move to St. Petersburg, which his mother warmly supports and even allocates him a monthly allowance. However, among the narrow streets and bridges hanging right in the air, a monstrous, cruel disappointment awaited the writer - no one was waiting for him here, and no one needed him here. He tried to enter the service and the stage, but to no avail. The daily routine discouraged him, and he left the service, the actor never left him. It remained to surrender completely to literature, which he did.

During this period, Gogol discovered that the public was interested in the details of Ukrainian petty-bourgeois and common people's life, so he began to think about writing such stories and even sketched out a plan for the future collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. But before that, he published a book under the pseudonym Alov and with the title "Hanz Kühelgarten" in the twenty-ninth year of the nineteenth century. However, critics crushed it, leaving no stone unturned. Then he went to German Lübeck, hoping to find new inspiration, but returned in the same year in the fall.

In 1831, Gogol converges with his main friends, who help him break through. For example, it is Zhukovsky who brings him together with such a person as the famous critic and poet of the Pushkin era Pyotr Pletnev. He is also introduced to the master Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, who treated the works of the young talent with understanding.

Pletnev got Nikolai a job at the Patriot Institute, where he himself served as an inspector, but they paid little there. Therefore, the critic taught Gogol how to earn extra money by giving private lessons in noble aristocratic families. The appointment of Nikolai Vasilievich as an adjunct (deputy or head) at the Department of History of St. Petersburg University can be considered the peak period of Petersburg life. The powerful figure of Pushkin made a huge impression on the young writer, it was practically everything that he could only dream of.

Main works of Gogol

The Petersburg period can be considered the most active in the life of the writer Gogol. This is where most of his writings come from. "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" came out in two parts in the thirty-first and thirty-second years. The first included "The Missing Letter", "May Night", "Sorochinsky Fair", as well as the "Evenings ..." themselves, and the second included "Terrible Revenge", "The Night Before Christmas", "The Enchanted Place" and "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka" . Already by 1835, two more collections saw the light, already more mature and serious, with a lesser touch of mysticism and fabulousness. These were "Arabesques", as well as "Mirgorod".

• In 1832, Nikolai Gogol, for the first time after completing his studies at the Nizhyn gymnasium, decides to visit his father's house, visit his sisters and mother. He went through Moscow, where he managed to make acquaintances in literary circles with such people as Sergei Aksakov, Mikhail Pogodin, Mikhail Shchepkin and others. But home comfort did not bring him peace, moreover, it drove the poet's vulnerable soul into anguish. Surrounded by wild nature, he suddenly felt the worthlessness of his "Evenings" and "Mirgorod", unable to plunge the reader into this majestic atmosphere.
• In 1833, Gogol, against all odds, returned to St. Petersburg and decided to open himself in the scientific field. At first, he is overwhelmed by the idea of ​​heading the department of history in Kyiv, at the newly opened Kiev University, but he is not taken there. Therefore, he moves back to Petersburg and sits on the pulpit there.
• By 1834, many researchers and historians attribute the time of writing a crushing blow to embezzlement, hoarding and corruption, in the form of the play "The Inspector General", which had the effect of a bomb.
• In 1835, new stories were published, "Old World Landowners", the rather terrible and really scandalous "Viy", which still frightens its readers, the famous "Taras Bulba" and the funny, instructive "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" .
• Not much time later, just two years later, in 1836, Pushkin's Sovremennik also published Portrait, Carriage, and the sentimental Overcoat. At the same time, "The Marriage" came out, as well as a somewhat strange story "Players", which is relevant, like most of Gogol's works, to this day.
• In 1836, Nikolai went abroad, where he began to write his imperishable Dead Souls, which were not half understood by his contemporaries. However, the West, which at first calmed him, again leads to rampant thoughts and feelings. In the summer of 1941, he went to print the first volume to his homeland.

By 1844, Gogol Nikolai Vasilievich was overtaken by unexpected joy, for his colossal merits in terms of Russian literature, he was recognized as an honorary life member of Moscow University. However, he is no longer happy with anything, his work is not going well, the thought of the higher purpose of his talent, divinely presented, leaves an imprint of underestimation of his deeds. In a spiritual crisis and torment, Gogol writes a will and burns the second volume of "dead souls", which he will never restore.

The influence of travel abroad on the worldview of the writer

In 1847, Nikolai Vasilyevich, already in a complete disorder of feelings and thoughts, compiled another book, which his friend critic Pletnev helped to publish. It was "Selected places from correspondence with friends." It is in this book that one can trace the peak religious mood of the Little Russian writer, who is more and more plunging into a spiritual fever. Then the Slavophiles and Westernizers just appeared on the arena of Russian literature and history, but Gogol did not join any of the currents, considering it undivine.

The last book failed, by and large, because of the mentoring and didactic tone. This was well understood by Gogol himself, about which he repeatedly wrote to Pletnev. After a while, he calms down, and then decides to visit Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher, which he does in 1847-1849. However, this did not bring him the expected reassurance. He returned home to the village to his mother, then spent some time in Moscow, Kaluga and Odessa.

Personal life and death of Nikolai Vasilyevich: the memory of people for centuries

Never looking for wealth or luxury, not even having his own house, Gogol was never married. He was devoted only to the only woman of his life - literature, and she was able to answer him the same and make him a classic during her lifetime. However, there were still two women in the life of this handsome and even very interesting man.

Favorite women

You can’t call Gogol handsome, but he was still a dandy. Contrary to popular misconceptions, he did not wear his dark caped cloak at all times. He could put on purple pants and a yellow vest, and complement the look with a turquoise camisole. In general, he was a real eccentric. His first love was the royal maid of honor Alexandra Rosset, in the marriage of Smirnov, with the face of a real angel and the same manners.

He loved her tenderly and devotedly, like a dog a good mistress, but he could not confess his feelings, especially since she was insanely far from him in the rankings. The second time, Nikolai Vasilyevich fell in love much later, almost before his death, with his own cousin Maria Sinelnikova. Visiting with her mother during her illness, he ended up in her Vlasovka estate, but these relations never developed, since Gogol was occupied with more spiritual issues than carnal and worldly ones.

The death of a brilliant writer and the memory of him

Beginning in the winter of the 52nd year of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Vasilyevich settled in the house of his close friend Alexander Tolstoy, who received many guests, including Matthew Konstantinovsky, the Rzhev archpriest, was there. It was this man who was the only one who read the second volume of Dead Souls. He demanded to destroy several chapters from there, as well as "Selected places ...", due to the special "harmfulness" of the book.

All this had such an impact on Gogol that he decided to completely stop writing and began to fast from February 5, a week before Lent began. On February 12, at night, he woke up the servants, ordered to heat the stove and bring his briefcase. He burned all the sketches and notebooks, and in the morning he lamented to Tolstoy that he was going to burn only unnecessary, prepared in advance, but the demon urged him to burn everything together. On February 18, he is no longer able to move and walks, he just lies in bed, and on February 21, 1852, the great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol passed away.

The genius creator was buried on February 24 in the university church, and buried in the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, where a two-part tombstone was installed: a black marble slab and a massive bronze cross. On three sides of the plate there are passages from the gospel, and on the fourth side there is an indication of the name, date of birth and death. In the early thirties, this monastery was closed and the necropolis was dismantled. A year later, on May 31, Gogol's grave was opened, and the remains were reburied at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where they are to this day.

Numerous streets, squares, avenues and other geographical features of cities and villages of our vast Motherland, as well as far beyond its borders, are named after Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Several stamps and commemorative commemorative coins were dedicated to him, and there are at least fifteen monuments to him around the world. There are several feature and documentary films that also tell about the fate of the writer, covering it from different angles.

Interesting facts about the writer's life

Many strange, sometimes mystical and frightening stories are connected with this amazing man, whose secrets of personality no one has been able to unravel, despite the passage of more than two hundred years since his death. Many look like outright nonsense, but some suggest some thought.

• It seems to many that a figure in a raincoat, as Gogol is most often portrayed, must necessarily be thin and tall. He was thin, it is true, but his height reached one meter and sixty-two centimeters. He had narrow shoulders, crooked legs and thin dark hair.
• Gogol's character is described by a contemporary with such "zealous diversity" that it immediately becomes clear that he was a secretive person, hardly opening his soul to anyone he met. However, he had a good heart, and therefore he always helped those who were more in need, even when it turned out to be to the detriment of himself.
• Like his late father, Nikolai Vasilievich often heard voices and saw incomprehensible phenomena, which he rarely told others about, he was afraid of being recognized as crazy. He suffered from nervous attacks, after which he had prolonged depressions, which may indicate manic psychosis, if not early schizophrenia.

The Creator was haunted all his life by the panic fear of being buried alive. It was rumored that it was precisely for this reason that he slept half-sitting, so that by chance he would not be considered dead. After the funeral, during the exhumation of the body, it turned out that there was no skull in the grave, at least, this was claimed by the Soviet poet and writer Vladimir Ledin. This gave rise to many legends that he was buried in a lethargic sleep. However, most likely, this was evidence of ordinary looting. A boot, a rib, a piece of coat were missing, which were probably simply taken away for some kind of creepy souvenirs.

Nikolay Gogol

surname at birth Yanovsky

Russian prose writer, playwright, poet, critic, publicist, recognized as one of the classics of Russian literature

short biography

- the greatest Russian writer, playwright, publicist, critic, classic of Russian literature - was born on April 1 (March 20, O.S.), 1809. His homeland was the Poltava province, the village of Bolshiye Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district. He was the son of a middle class landowner. Nikolai began to receive education at the age of ten, enrolling in the Poltava district school, then in the course of private lessons, and in 1821 he left for the Chernihiv region to join the ranks of the students of the Nizhyn High School of Higher Sciences.

He did not shine with academic success, which was partly due to the not very high-quality level of organization of teaching in the newly created educational institution. The flaws in education were compensated by the desire for knowledge of Nicholas himself and his comrades. They organized the issue of a handwritten journal, in which the first literary - both poetic and prose - tests of the pen of the future classic appeared. Hotly interested in the young Gogol and the theater, proving himself a good actor and decorator. By the time he graduated from high school, Gogol dreamed of great service to society, believing that he had every reason for brilliant success in this field, but did not even think about the role of a professional writer.

Full of great hopes, aspirations and still unclear plans, in December 1828 Gogol arrived in St. Petersburg. The harsh reality, the impossibility of finding oneself brought a bitter shade of disappointment into his mood. An unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, the hardships of service in the Department of State Economy and Public Buildings and later - the Department of Destinies made the idea of ​​devoting oneself to literary creativity more and more attractive. However, there were pluses in the clerical service: it allowed Gogol to get to know the life and work of officials from the inside, and this awareness later served him well when writing works.

In 1829, Gogol published his first work, intended for the general public, a romantic idyll called "Hanz Küchelgarten", which he signed with the pseudonym V. Alova. His debut composition, written back in Nizhyn, provoked criticism, so Gogol personally destroyed the circulation. The failure did not turn away from thoughts of literary glory, but made me look for other ways. Back in the winter of 1829, Gogol constantly asked his mother in his letters to send him a description of national Ukrainian traditions and customs. Having discovered that life in Little Russia was interesting to many, Gogol nurtured thoughts about a work that, on the one hand, could come to the court, and on the other, satisfy his needs in literary creativity. Already in 1829, “May Night” and “Sorochinsky” Fair were written or at least started, at the beginning of 1830, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” was published in the journal “Domestic Notes”.

In the winter of 1831, the inspector of the Patriotic Institute, Pletnev, recommended Gogol for a teaching position, and in May introduced him to Pushkin. This event was truly fateful in Gogol's biography, having a huge impact on him as a person and a writer. In 1834, the young Gogol became an adjunct in the history department of St. Petersburg University and entered the circle of people who were at the forefront of Russian fiction. He perceived his service to the Word as the highest moral duty, which must be sacredly fulfilled. This period became the most intense in his literary activity. In 1830-1832. “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” are published, which bring great fame to their author.

The collections "Arabesques" and "Mirgorod", published in 1835, strengthened Gogol's reputation as a brilliant writer. Acquaintance with them allowed V. Belinsky to assign Gogol the status of "head of literature, head of poets." Literary creativity has become the main and only occupation of the writer since the summer of 1834. In the same year, The Inspector General was conceived, and the plot of the work was prompted by Pushkin (the same story was then repeated with Dead Souls). In 1836, the Alexandrinsky Theater staged The Inspector General, but the decrease in social severity when it was transferred to the stage brought disappointment to the author.

The enormous strain of physical and moral strength accumulated over several years led the writer to the idea of ​​taking a trip abroad to rest. For almost ten years, not counting short breaks, he spent in various cities in Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic. Staying outside the homeland, on the one hand, reassured him, nourished him with new impressions and strength, but on the other hand, changes ripened in his soul, which later acquired a fatal, fatal character.

Finding himself in the spring of 1837 in Rome, the city that he fell in love with as his second homeland, Nikolai Vasilyevich began to work on Dead Souls, which were conceived in 1835. In 1841, work on the first volume was completed, and in the autumn Gogol returned to Russia to publish his works. With difficulty, not without the help of influential acquaintances, having passed the crucible of St. Petersburg censorship, which excluded certain passages, the author receives the go-ahead for Dead Souls and publishes them in Moscow in 1842.

In the summer, the author of the poem again departed abroad, moving from country to country, from city to city. The main changes were taking place, meanwhile, in his inner world. Gogol considered himself the creator of something providential, saw himself as a messiah, called to expose the vices of people and at the same time improve himself, and for him this path lay through religion. Repeated severe illnesses contributed to the strengthening of his religiosity and prophetic moods. He considered everything that came out from under his pen unworthy of his high destiny and sinful.

A severe spiritual crisis that broke out in 1845 prompted Gogol to write a will and burn the manuscript of the second volume of the poem Dead Souls. Having survived this terrible state, the writer, as a sign of deliverance from death, decides to take the veil as a monk, but he fails to realize this idea. And then he comes to the idea of ​​serving God in the literary field, he comes to an understanding of how it is necessary to write so that the whole society "rushes towards the beautiful."

The idea to collect everything written in recent years was realized in the form of the book "Selected passages from correspondence with friends", published in 1847 in St. Petersburg. Because of the mentoring, arrogant tone, the vagueness of the ideological position, the unwillingness to join the Westernizers and Slavophiles, who in the 1840s. actively challenged each other's right to the truth, "Selected Places" remained misunderstood and condemned. Hardly experiencing failure, Gogol sought solace in religion, considered it necessary to continue working only after a trip to holy places. Once again, the period of stay abroad begins in the writer's biography. At the end of 1747, Naples became his place of residence, and from there, at the beginning of 1848, he made a pilgrimage to Palestine.

In the spring of 1848, the final return of N.V. Gogol in Russia. Work on the second volume of Dead Souls continued amid intense internal struggles. The health of the writer, meanwhile, was deteriorating every day. The death of his good friend Khomyakova made an extremely painful impression on him and aggravated the fear of his own imminent death. The situation was aggravated by the negative attitude of Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky (he was a guest in the house of Count Tolstoy, where Gogol lived at that time) to the manuscript of the second part of the poem, his call to destroy some chapters.

After seeing off Konstantinovsky on February 5, Gogol stops leaving the house, begins to pray and fast with special zeal, although the time of Great Lent has not yet come. On the night of February 11-12 (O.S.), 1852, the writer burns his works, among which were the manuscripts of Dead Souls. On February 18, he finally fell ill and stopped eating, refused the offered help of doctors and friends who tried in vain to correct the situation. On February 20, the doctors who gathered for a consultation decided to treat Gogol forcibly, but this only deprived him of his last strength - by the evening he was unconscious, and on February 21 (March 4, according to New Style) he died in the morning.

He was buried in Moscow, at the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery, which was closed in 1930. On May 1, 1931, Gogol's grave was opened with the subsequent transfer of the remains to the Novodevichy cemetery. There is no officially confirmed information that Gogol was buried in a sleeping lethargic sleep, i.e. he was met with the fate he had always feared. The death of the great writer is surrounded by a trail of mysticism, as well as his life, and the aspirations of the restless soul, not understood by many.

Biography from Wikipedia

Childhood and youth

He was born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in Sorochintsy near the Psel River, on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts (Poltava province). Nicholas was named after Saint Nicholas. According to family tradition, he came from an old Cossack family and was supposedly a descendant of Ostap Gogol, the hetman of the Right-Bank Army of the Zaporozhian Commonwealth. Some of his ancestors also 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 yet he was a "Little Russian". A number of researchers, whose opinion was formulated by V.V. Veresaev, believe that the descent from Ostap Gogol could be falsified by Afanasy Demyanovich in order to obtain 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 Kiev Theological Academy, “having gone to the Russian side”, settled in the Poltava region, and from him came the nickname “Yanovskiye” (according to another version, they were Yanovskiye, as they lived in the area of ​​​​Yanovo). Having received a letter of nobility in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname "Yanovsky" to "Gogol-Yanovsky". According to church metrics, the future writer at birth was nevertheless named Nikolai Yanovsky. At the request of his father Vasily Afanasyevich, in 1820 Nikolai Yanovsky was recognized as a nobleman, and in 1821 the surname Gogol-Yanovsky was assigned to him. Apparently, Nikolai Vasilyevich did not know about the real origin of the surname and subsequently discarded its second part "Yanovsky", saying that the Poles invented it, leaving only the first one - "Gogol". The writer'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, determined the interests of the future writer - Gogol showed an early interest in the theater.

Maria Ivanovna Gogol-Yanovskaya (b. Kosyarovskaya), mother of the writer

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), Elizaveta (in the marriage of Bykova) (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

An old village house in the village of Vasilievka, Poltava province, in which N.V. Gogol spent his childhood.

Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of the Little Russian 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 that religiosity and that mysticism, which by the end of his life took possession of Gogol's entire being.

A new village house in the village of Vasilievka, Poltava province, in which N.V. Gogol visited his mother in the last years of his life.

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 his 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.

Saint Petersburg

In December 1828 Gogol moved to St. Petersburg. Here, for the first time, a cruel disappointment awaited him: modest means in the big city turned out to be completely insufficient, 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 the strength of character and practical enterprise: he tried to enter the stage, become an official, surrender to literature.

Despite his many attempts, he was never accepted as an actor. His service was so empty and monotonous that it became unbearable for him. The literary field became the only opportunity for his self-expression. 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 arouses keen interest in St. Petersburg society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native land, 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 Little Russian 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 Little Russian 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 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 lady-in-waiting 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". Stories published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank", published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first included "Sorochinsky 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: 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.

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.

Portrait of Gogol, drawn from life by the actor P. A. Karatygin in 1835

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, “Arabesques” (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835) were published, where several articles of popular scientific content on history and art were published (“Sculpture, Painting and Music”; “A Few Words about Pushkin”; “On Architecture”; “ On the Teaching of World History"; "A Look at the Compilation of Little Russia"; "On Little Russian Songs", etc.), but at the same time also new stories "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Notes of a Madman".

N. V. Gogol at the Monument "1000th Anniversary of Russia" in Veliky Novgorod

Then, in the same year, "Mirgorod" came out - stories 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 ideas 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 of 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 "Excerpt". 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.

Honorary Member of Moscow University since 1844 “Moscow University, having respected the outstanding scientific achievements and literary works in Russian literature of Mr. collegiate adviser N. V. Gogol, recognizes it as an Honorary Member, with full confidence in his assistance to Moscow University in everything that can contribute to the success of the sciences.

Abroad

In June 1836, Nikolai Vasilyevich went abroad, where he stayed intermittently for about ten years. At first, life abroad seemed to strengthen and reassure him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work - Dead Souls, but became the embryo 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.

Memorial plaque installed on via Sistina in Rome on the house where Gogol lived. The inscription in Italian reads: The great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol lived in this house from 1838 to 1842, where he composed and painted his masterpiece. The board was installed by the writer P. D. Boborykin

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 go through severe anxieties, which he 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 lies with 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 "Dead Souls" 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 destiny.

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 spiritual 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 delimitation 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 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 political movements and vanities. 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 such friends as 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 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 he 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 (13) 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 in Moscow, where he lived in the house of his friend Count Alexander Petrovich 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 A. S. Khomyakov's wife, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, who was the sister of his friend N. M. 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 Gogol's insufficient humility and piety, for example, the demand of Father Matthew: "Repudiate 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 from that day on he has hardly eaten anything. 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 on 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 in advance for that, 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, a medical consultation (Professor A.E. Evenius, Professor S.I. Klimenkov, Doctor K.I. Sokologorsky, Doctor A.T. Tarasenkov, Professor I.V. Varvinsky, Professor A.A. Alfonsky, Professor A. I. Over) decides on compulsory treatment of Gogol. The result of it was the final exhaustion and loss of strength; in the evening the writer fell into unconsciousness.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol died on the morning of Thursday, February 21, 1852, a month before his 43rd birthday.

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, 48;
• April - July 1829 - the house of I.-A. Jochima - Bolshaya Meshchanskaya street, 39;
• late 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; Object of cultural heritage No. 7810075000 // Register of objects of cultural heritage 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.

Property case

On February 21, 1852, an “announcement” about Gogol’s death was sent from Talyzina’s house to the police station, and that after his death “... here in Moscow there is cash, a safe treasury of tickets, debt documents, gold, silver, diamond and other precious things, except for an insignificant wearable there is nothing left of the dress ... ". The information reported to the police by the butler of Count Tolstoy Rudakov about the estate, heirs and Gogol's servant is completely accurate and is striking in its laconic poverty.

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.

The only valuable thing in the property left after Gogol was a gold pocket watch, previously owned by Zhukovsky as a memory of the deceased Pushkin: it was stopped at 2 o'clock and ¾ in the afternoon - the time of Pushkin's death.

The protocol, drawn up by the quarter warden Protopopov and the "conscientious witness" Strakhov, discovered another type of Gogol's property, omitted by the butler: books - and noted a curious circumstance: Gogol's servant, the teenager Semyon Grigoriev, as can be seen from his signature, was literate.

At the hour of his death, Gogol had 150 books in Russian (of which 87 were bound) and 84 in foreign languages ​​(of which 57 were bound). This type of property was so worthless in the eyes of official appraisers that each book went by a herd at a penny apiece.

It should be noted with deep sadness that Shevyrev, professor at Moscow University, who signed the inventory, did not show enough interest in Gogol's dying library to compile the same list of Gogol's books as his socks and underpants were awarded. What books Gogol kept with him in the last months of his life, what he read, we will never know: we only know that he had a library of 234 volumes.

In a report to the bailiff of the Arbat part, the quarterly overseer rewrote the text of the protocol, with a significant addition: “The decree on resignation was not found among the papers he has, and on the occasion of his temporary stay here in Moscow, his written form was not shown in the quarter entrusted to me, as well as the spiritual there is no will left." The report spoke for the first time about Gogol's "papers" that were not mentioned in the "explanation" and protocol, and about the absence of a "testament".

Earlier, the police - no later than an hour and a half after Gogol's death - visited the rooms of the deceased writer, Dr. A. T. Tarasenkov. “When I arrived,” he recalled, “they had already managed to inspect his cabinets, where they did not find any written notebooks or money.” Where did Gogol's money go, the same Tarasenkov said: after February 12, Gogol "sent the last pocket money to the poor and for candles, so that after his death he did not have a penny left. Shevyrev has about 2000 rubles left. from the money earned for writing. Gogol did not consider this amount his own and therefore did not keep it with him, entrusting the disposal of it to Shevyrev.

Indeed, on May 7, 1852, Shevyrev wrote in his “Note on the publication of the works of the late N.V. Gogol and on the amount of money he left for this”: “After N.V. used to help poor young people involved in science and art - 2533 rubles. 87 kop. His pocket money is the remainder of the proceeds from the 2nd edition of "Dead Souls" - 170 rubles. 10 k. Total 2,703 rubles. 97 k."

Thus, in Gogol's room, even in the very "cabinet" mentioned in the police report, the same papers - the "testament" and "written notebooks" - were kept, which were not in place within an hour and a half after his death. Gogol, neither under Dr. Tarasenkov, nor under a "conscientious witness."

Obviously, the butler of Count Tolstoy Rudakov and Gogol's servant Semyon Grigoriev, in advance, immediately after Gogol's death, removed them from his room in order to better preserve them for his family and for posterity. Later, Rudakov handed them over to Count Tolstoy, who already informed Shevyrev and Kapnist.

On June 20, 1852, Shevyrev wrote to Gogol's mother: “The other day, the butler of Count Tolstoy is sending you all the things and books of Nikolai Vasilyevich with the transport of the Kharkov commission, and Semyon will go with them. I will bring all the remaining papers to you ... if something slows down the trip I have proposed, then I will send the wills by mail, but with an insurance letter. These wills do not have the form of an act, but can only have family force.

In the autumn of 1852, Shevyrev visited the orphaned Vasilievka, fulfilling his own desire to see Gogol's family and fulfilling an assignment from the Academy of Sciences - to collect materials for the biography of the deceased writer. Shevyrev brought Gogol's papers to Vasilyevka and there he received instructions from Gogol's heirs to work on publishing Gogol's true heritage - his writings.

About the "remaining papers" - the most precious part of Gogol's property, his mother wrote to O. S. Aksakova on April 24, 1855: "It was hard for me to read the continuation of Dead Souls from those found in draft form in his closet." These five chapters from the second volume of "Dead Souls", published in 1855 by Gogol's nephew N. P. Trushkovsky (Moscow, University Printing House), were in those "written notebooks" that Tarasenkov mentioned as not found.

Funeral and grave

Friends wanted to bury the deceased in the church of St. Simeon the Stylite, which he loved and attended.
The Moscow governor, Count A. A. Zakrevsky, in his letter to the chief of the gendarmes, Count A. F. Orlov, dated February 29, 1852, wrote that the decision in which church to bury Gogol was discussed by friends gathered in the house of Count Tolstoy - Slavophiles A. Khomyakov, K and S. Aksakov, A. Efremov, P. Kireevsky, A. Koshelev and Popov. Timofei Granovsky, a Moscow University professor who was also there, said that it would be more appropriate to bury him at university church- as a person belonging, in some way, to the university. The Slavophils objected that it did not belong to the university, but people, and therefore, as a people's person, and should be buried in parish church, which, in order to pay the last debt to him, can include a footman, a coachman, and in general anyone who wishes; and such people will not be allowed into the university church - that is, funerals will be held as public. Zakrevsky ordered “Gogol, as an honorary member of the local university, will certainly be buried in the university church. (...) It was ordered from me to be the police and some of my officials, both when transferring Gogol's body to the church, and also until the burial itself ”. But at the same time, he agreed with his friends: “And so that there would be no grumbling, I ordered that everyone, without exception, be allowed into the university church. On the day of the burial, there were a lot of people of all classes and both sexes, and so that everything was quiet at that time, I came to the church myself ”.

Later, in 1881, Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov wrote about this feud to the bibliographer Stepan Ivanovich Ponomarev: “At first, his closest friends began to dispose of the funeral, but then the university, which had recently treated Gogol as half crazy, came to its senses, asserted its rights and pushed us aside from the orders. It turned out better, because the funeral took on a more public and solemn character, and we all recognized this and gave the university complete freedom to dispose, becoming ourselves in the shadows..

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 monument was erected on the grave, consisting of two parts: 1) a bronze cross standing on a black tombstone (“Golgotha”), on which an inscription was carved in Slavic letters “Come, Lord Jesus! Apocalypse. ch. KV, Art. K"; 2) a black marble slab lying on a gray granite base. The following inscriptions were carved on it in civil letters: On the upper front side: “The body of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is buried here. Born March 19, 1809. He died on February 21, 1852.” On the small side of the plate facing the viewer: “They will laugh at my bitter word. Jeremiah chapters. 20, art. 8. On the large side of the plate to the viewer: “A man of understanding is the throne of feeling. Prtich ch. 12, art. 23”, “Truth exalts the tongue. Proverbs ch. 14, Art. 34. On the large side of the slab, hidden from the viewer (towards the grate): Job ch. 8, art. 21"..

According to legend, I. S. Aksakov himself chose the stone for Gogol's grave somewhere in the Crimea (cutters called it "Black Sea granite").

Drawing of the grave of N. V. Gogol, made by the artist V. A. Evdokimov-Rozantsov. 1886

In 1930, the Danilov Monastery was finally closed, and 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.

The official report of the examination, drawn up by the NKVD and now stored in the RGALI (f. 139, No. 61), disputes the unreliable and mutually exclusive recollections 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 his professor 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. They gave rise to many legends, including the burial of Gogol in a state of lethargic sleep and the theft of the writer's skull for the collection of the famous Moscow collector of theatrical antiquities A. A. Bakhrushin. Of the same contradictory nature are the 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 the same V. G. Lidin.

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

“Golgotha” as unnecessary for some time was in the workshops of the Novodevichy cemetery, where it was discovered by E. S. Bulgakov with an already scraped inscription, who was looking for a suitable tombstone for the grave of her late husband, M. A. Bulgakov. Elena Sergeevna bought the tombstone, after which it was installed over the grave of Mikhail Afanasyevich. Thus, the writer's dream came true: "Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron overcoat".

By the 200th anniversary of the birth of the writer, at the initiative of the members of the organizing committee of the anniversary, the grave was given almost its original appearance: a bronze cross on a black stone.

Creation

It seemed to early researchers of Gogol's literary activity, 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 trait 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 complacency, devoid of inner content, and this trait later, in the 1830s, showed itself with a conscious desire to denounce 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 …

Monument to N. V. Gogol by the sculptor N. A. Andreev (1909)

All of Gogol's fundamental ideas about life and literature were those of the Pushkin circle. His artistic sense was strong, and, appreciating Gogol's unique talent, the circle took care of his personal affairs as well. 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 not 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, after Pushkin himself, raised the level of possible artistic perfection among writers, his deep psychological analysis had no equal in previous literature and expanded the range of topics and possibilities of literary writing.

However, artistic merit 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 their subsequent work, the new writers already 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 short article in memory of Gogol, I.S. 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. It was later 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 banned 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 effective, 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 Last 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 "Decoupling of the Inspector General", where there are such 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 has been generally accepted that the book is a mistake, a departure of the writer from 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 gave his blessing for 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 both secular 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. The writer himself could not give an unambiguous answer to this question, tending to a synthesis of two cultures.

In 1844, he answered the request of Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova in this way: “ I will tell you one word about what kind of soul I have, Khokhlatsky or Russian, because, as I see from your letter, this was at one time the subject of your reasoning and disputes with others. To this I will tell you that I myself do not know what kind of soul I have, Khokhlatskaya or Russian. I only know that I would in no way give an advantage to either a Little Russian over a Russian, or a Russian over a Little Russian. Both natures are too generously endowed by God, and as if on purpose each of them separately contains in itself what is not in the other - a clear sign that they must complete one another. For this, the very stories of their past life are given to them, unlike one another, so that the various forces of their character are brought up separately, so that later, merging together, they constitute something most perfect in humanity..»

Until now, not a single work of a writer written in Ukrainian is known, and few writers of Russian origin have made a commensurate contribution to the development of the Russian language with Gogol's. But because of the peculiarities of the nature of his work, repeated 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 Little Russian homeland was very strong, especially in the early years of his literary activity and up to the completion of the second edition of Taras Bulba, and the satirical attitude to Russian life, presumably, is explained not only by his national properties, but also by the nature of his internal development. .

Undoubtedly, Ukrainian features have affected the writer's work. These are considered the features of his humor, which remained the only example of its kind in Russian literature. As A. N. Pypin wrote, “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; at the same time, he loved Italy for the same reason that he preferred Dikanka over St. Petersburg - for its archaism and opposition to Europeanized civilization (“the Little Russian element also partly acted here,” P. V. Annenkov would write about Gogol’s attachment to Italy). In the dispute between the writer and O. M. Bodyansky about the Russian language and the work of Taras Shevchenko, transmitted from the words of G. P. Danilevsky, the supposed understanding by the late Gogol of the peculiarities of Russian-Ukrainian relations was reflected. " 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 follows that by the end of his life Gogol was worried not so much by the national question as by the antagonism of faith and unbelief. And the writer himself leaned towards moderate pan-Slavism and the synthesis of Slavic cultures.

Gogol and painters

Title page of the second edition of Dead Souls. Sketch by N. V. Gogol

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 between the aesthetic and moral principles, will become central in his St. Petersburg stories "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Portrait", written in the same years 1833-1834 as his journalistic articles. Gogol's article "On the Architecture of the Present Time" was an expression of the writer's architectural predilections.

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 paper, marveling at the selectivity of ancient masters, who made decorations excellent from others over each column. I looked at his work and was surprised at how clearly and beautifully he sketched. “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." Rafael 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 painting, 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 end 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 the reproach of 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 towards 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.

In a group of Russian artists in Rome

Group daguerreotype of Russian artists. Author Sergey Levitsky. Rome, 1845, atelier Perrot

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 together with a colony of Russian artists. The idea was connected with the arrival in Rome from St. Petersburg of 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 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. Among the most famous are the hypothesis of his homosexuality, as well as the hypothesis of Gogol's death.

Bibliography

Major works

• Dead Souls
• Auditor
• Marriage
• Theatrical tour
• Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
• Mirgorod
  • Viy
  • 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

First editions

• The first collected works were prepared by the author 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 from 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. Shenrock (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.

Influence on contemporary culture

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

The most famous:

• film "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" (1961, restored in 1970). Screenplay and staging by A. Rowe based on the story "The Night Before Christmas";
• series N. V. Gogol. Dead Souls. Poem" (1984). Scriptwriter and director M. Schweitzer.

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.

Memory

Streets and educational institutions in many cities of Russia, Ukraine and other countries are named after Nikolai Gogol. Several stamps and commemorative coins have been issued in honor of Gogol. More than 15 monuments to the writer are installed in various cities of the world. Several documentaries and feature films are also dedicated to him.

Let's start our acquaintance with Nikolai Gogol and his brief biography from the very beginning, namely, from his birth. Born, then still an ordinary baby, in the family of a landowner on April 1, 1809. It happened in the Poltava province.

Brief biography of Gogol's childhood

If we touch upon a brief biography of Gogol's childhood, then it is worth saying that he spent his childhood in the Yanovshchina estate. The upbringing was done by a mother who wanted to instill a love for religion, and, in principle, Gogol liked her, but it was not religion itself that attracted her, but acquaintance with otherworldly forces, stories about the Last Judgment. Already in childhood, Nikolai began to try his hand at writing poetry. He studied at the Poltava School, after which private lessons were organized for him, and after Nikolai Gogol entered the Nizhyn gymnasium. Here he tries to write, but in the future he does not see himself as a writer and dreams of a career as a lawyer.

In order to realize his goals, after completing his studies, he goes to St. Petersburg in 1828 and gets a job as an official, but only after looking at the system from the inside, seeing the bureaucracy, Gogol could not continue to work in this direction and leaves the post. He tries different professions and even tries to teach history, but still his literary vocation won.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol literature and theater

The first work "Basavryuk", which was later published under the title "Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala" brought fame. We talked about Gogol. The appearance of Gogol in the literary circle gave new acquaintances. There he meets and gets acquainted with Pushkin. The writer continues his work. So there are "Sorochinsky Fair", "May Night". The first glory came after the release of "". Many of Gogol's works introduce us in detail to the life of the Ukrainian people.

In 1835, Gogol tried his hand at dramaturgy and wrote The Inspector General, the idea of ​​which was suggested to him by Pushkin. The very next year, The Inspector General was played in the theater, but the public received this masterpiece with criticism and a negative reaction. All critics fell upon the writer and, unable to withstand such a reaction, Gogol leaves the country.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol the last years of his life

Now the life of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol continues abroad. On his way Germany, Switzerland, Italy, there was also France, then again Italy. Here he began his work with the work Dead Souls. The idea of ​​this work was also prompted by Pushkin. By the way, Pushkin played an important role in Gogol's life, so the news of his death was painfully perceived by Gogol. And he decided that "Dead Souls" should be completed and published in print. Which is what was done. Returning to Russia, the author in 1842 gives the first volume to print, and begins work on the second volume. But then the writer is overtaken by a literary crisis, from which he could not get out.