bioGogol

In 1829 he published anonymously a poem called Italy, and, under the pseudonym of V. Alof, an idyll, Hans Kuchel Garten, which he had written while still at Niezhin. The idyll was so ridiculed by a reviewer that its author bought up all the copies he could secure, and burnt them in a room which he hired for the purpose at an inn.

Gogol then fell back upon South Russian popular literature, and especially the tales of Cossackdom on which his boyish fancy had been nursed, his father having occupied the post of "regimental secretary", one of the honorary officials in the Zaporogian Cossack forces.

In 1830 he published in a periodical the first of the stories which appeared next year under the title of Evenings in a Farm near Dikanka: by Rudy Panko. This work, containing a series of attractive pictures of that Little-Russian life which lends itself to romance more readily than does the monotony of "Great-Russian" existence, immediately obtained a great success -- its light and color, its freshness and originality being hailed with enthusiasm by the principal writers of the day in Russia. Whereupon Gogol planned, not only a history of Little-Russia, but also one of the middle ages, to be completed in eight or nine volumes. This plan he did not carry out, though it led to his being appointed to a professorship in the university of St. Petersburg, a post in which he met with small success and which he resigned in 1835. Meanwhile he had published his Arabesques, a collection of essays and stories; his Taras Bulba, the chief of the Cossack Tales translated into English by George Tolstoy; and a number of novelettes, which mark his transition from the romantic to the realistic school of fiction, such as the admirable sketch of the tranquil life led in a quiet country house by two kindly specimens of Old-world Gentlefolks, or the description of the petty miseries endured by an ill-paid clerk in a government office, the great object of whose life is to secure the "cloak" from which his story takes its name. To the same period belongs his celebrated comedy, the Revizor, or government inspector. His aim in writing it was to drag into light "all that was bad in Russia", and to hold it up to contempt. And he succeeded in rendering contemptible and ludicrous the official life of Russia, the corruption universally prevailing throughout the civil service, the alternate arrogance and servility of men in office. The plot of the comedy is very simple.

A traveller who arrives with an empty purse at a provincial town is taken for an inspector whose arrival is awaited with fear, and he receives all the attentions and bribes which are meant to propitiate the dreaded investigator of abuses. The play appeared on the stage in the spring of 1836, and achieved a full success, in spite of the opposition attempted by the official classes whose malpractices it exposed. The aim which Gogol had in view when writing the Revisor he afterwards fully attained in his great novel, Mertvuiya Dushi, or Dead Souls, the first part of which appeared in 1842.

In 1836 Gogol for the first time went abroad. Subsequently he spent a considerable amount of time out of Russia, chiefly in Italy, where much of his Dead Souls was written. His residence there, especiailv at Rome, made a deep impression on his mind, which, during his later years, turned towards mysticism. The last works which he published, his Confession and Correspondence with Friends, offer a painful contrast to the light, bright, vigorous, realistic, humorous writings which had gained and have retained for him his immense popularity in his native land. Asceticism and mystical exaltation had told upon his nervous system, and its feeble condition showed itself in his literary compositions. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and on his return settled down at Moscow, where he died on the 3rd of March 1852.

In 1836, Gogol's most celebrated play, The Inspector General, was staged for the first time. This comic masterpiece was, according to the author, universally misunderstood; he was not pleased by the praise of the liberal critics of the day, and he was distraught at the harsh criticism of the conservatives. As he had done after the failure of his first work, Gogol fled the country. He spent most of the next six years abroad. During this period his major achievement was the first part of a proposed three-part novel, Dead Souls.

During the 1840s Gogol became more and more conservative in his outlook, or perhaps it is only that the ideas he had held all along now took on a more definite and emphatic shape in his intellectual world. It is certain that he underwent a religious awakening in this period, which drew him ever more firmly into the teachings of conservative Orthodox theology. He became convinced that the writing of fiction was an inherently sinful enterprise, and he feared for the safety of his immortal soul. He tried to turn his efforts to less "dangerous" literary work. He wrote some essays in which he tried to emphasize the religious dimension of such works as The Inspector General. His efforts to complete Dead Souls met with repeated failure; in fact, he burned a nearly completed version of the second part just before his death.

Gogol's major work of the 1840s was Selected Passages from a Correspondence with My Friends. This work, which purports to be a collection of letters from Gogol's correspondents together with his replies, is in fact entirely the work of Gogol. It reads like a lengthy and discursive catechism, in which the questions are supplied by the letters of the "correspondents" and the answers by Gogol's replies. The main point of the world view revealed in this book is that a creator God has made everything in a certain way, assigned all beings to a certain station, and that the creation of God is just and good. Any attempt by an individual to leave the station into which he or she was born, then, is tantamount to opposing God's will. Such rebellion carries with it its own punishment in the form of personal and social misfortune. (It is possible to read some of Gogol's other works--for example, "The Overcoat"--in light of these ideas.)