Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol lived in the Ukrainian village of Sorochintsy with his parents, who belonged to the “petty gentry,” a class of society distinguished by self-management of its lands and farms. In 1828, Gogol traveled to St. Petersburg to acquire a civil service job and work on achieving literary fame. Unable, at first, to form the connections necessary to secure a job, he traveled to Germany and returned to St. Petersburg only when his money ran out. He then took up a low-paying bureaucratic job and published sporadically for periodicals until achieving his literary breakthrough with Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. He continued to write throughout the 1830s, releasing Mirgorod and two volumes of prose titled Arabesques. His play, The Government Inspector, was performed as a result of a direct order from the tsar, Nicholas I. Gogol traveled through Germany and Switzerland before settling in Rome, where he finished the first volume of his book Dead Souls. Dead Souls was published in 1842, the same year that his first collection of his worksfeaturing the famous short story “The Overcoat”was released. Gogol attempted to finish the next volume of Dead Souls for the next few years, but his creative output declined. He returned to Russia in 1848 and eventually turned to the aid of a priest, Matvey Konstantinovsky, who prescribed intense ascetic practices and fasting; this caused Gogol’s spirits to deteriorate further. He eventually burned the drafts of the second volume of Dead Souls, began refusing food, and died shortly thereafter.