Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol[b] (1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1809[a] – 4 March [O.S. 21 February] 1852) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright of Ukrainian origin.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
"Gogol" redirects here. Not to be confused with Googol. For other uses, see Gogol (disambiguation).
Nikolai Vasilyevich Yanovsky
20 March 1809[a] (OS)/1 April 1809 (NS)
Sorochyntsi, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire
21 February 1852 (aged 42)
Moscow, Russian Empire
Playwright, short story writer, novelist
Russian
1840–51
- Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832)
- Mirgorod (1835)
- The Government Inspector (1836)
Petersburg Tales (1833–1842)
- Dead Souls (1842)
Gogol used the grotesque in his writings, for example in his works "The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat", and "Nevsky Prospekt". These stories, and others such as "Diary of a Madman", have also been noted for their proto-surrealist qualities. According to Viktor Shklovsky, Gogol used the technique of defamiliarization when a writer presents common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so that the reader can gain new perspectives and see the world differently.[10] His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore.[11][12] His later writing satirised political corruption in contemporary Russia (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls), although Gogol also enjoyed the patronage of Tsar Nicholas I who liked his work.[13] The novel Taras Bulba (1835), the play Marriage (1842), and the short stories "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", "The Portrait" and "The Carriage", are also among his best-known works.
Many writers and critics have recognized Gogol's huge influence on Russian, Ukrainian and world literature. Gogol's influence was acknowledged by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor and others.[14][15] Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé said: "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat."
Early life
Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi,[16] in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. His mother was descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, who died when Gogol was 15 years old, was supposedly a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks (see Lyzohub family) and belonged to the 'petty gentry'. Gogol knew that his paternal ancestor Ostap Hohol, a Cossack hetman in Polish service, received nobility from the Polish king.[17] The family used the Polish surname "Janowski" (Ianovskii) and the family estate in Vasilevka was known as Ianovshchyna.[17]
His father wrote poetry in Ukrainian as well as Russian, and was an amateur playwright in his own theatre. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the family was trilingual, speaking Ukrainian as well as Russian, and using Polish mostly for reading.[17] Mother was calling his son Nikola, which is a mixture of the Russian Nikolai and the Ukrainian Mykola.[17] As a child, Gogol helped stage plays in his uncle's home theater.[18]
In 1820, Nikolai Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nezhin (Nizhyn) (now Nizhyn Gogol State University) and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not popular among his schoolmates, who called him their "mysterious dwarf", but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed a talent for mimicry, which later made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.
On leaving school in 1828, Gogol went to Saint Petersburg, full of vague but ambitious hopes. He desired literary fame, and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life – Hans Küchelgarten, and had it published at his own expense, under the pseudonym "V. Alov." The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.
Ukrainian cultural connections
Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi. According to Edyta Bojanowska, Gogol's images of Ukraine are in-depth, distinguished by description of folklore and history. In his Evenings on a Farm, Gogol pictures Ukraine as a "nation ... united by organic culture, historical memory, and language". His image of Russia lacks this depth and is always based in the present, particularly focused on Russia's bureaucracy and corruption. Dead Souls, according to Bojanowska, "presents Russian uniqueness as a catalog of faults and vices."[46] The duality of Gogol’s national identity is frequently expressed as a view that "in the aesthetic, psychological, and existential senses Gogol is inscribed ... into Ukrainian culture", while "in historical and cultural terms he is part of Russian literature and culture".[47] Slavicist Edyta Bojanowska writes that Gogol, after arriving in St. Peterburg, was surprised to find that he was perceived as a Ukrainian, and even as a khokhol (hick). Bojanowska argues that it was this experience that "made him into a self-conscious Ukrainian". According to Ilchuk, dual national identities were typical at that time as a "compromise with the empire's demand for national homogenization".[48]
Professor of Russian literature Kathleen Scollins notes the tendency to politicize Gogol's identity, and comments on the erasure of Gogol's Ukrainianness by the Russian literary establishment, which she argues "reveals the insecurity of many Russians about their own imperial identity". According to Scollins, Gogol's narrative double-voicedness in both Evenings and Taras Bulba and "pidginized Russian" of the Zaporizhian Cossacks in "The Night before Christmas represents a "strateg[y] of resistance, self-assertion, and divergence"".[49] Linguist Daniel Green notes "the complexities of an imperial culture in which Russian and Ukrainian literatures and identities informed and shaped each other, with Gogol´ playing a key role in these processes".[50]
Gogol's appreciation of Ukraine grew during his discovery of Ukrainian history, and he concluded that "Ukraine possessed exactly the kind of cultural wholeness, proud tradition, and self-awareness that Russia lacked." He rejected or was critical of many of the postulates of official Russian history about Ukrainian nationhood. His unpublished "Mazepa’s Meditations" presents Ukrainian history in a manner that justifies Ukraine’s "historic right to independence". Before 1836, Gogol had planned to move to Kyiv to study Ukrainian ethnography and history, and it was after these plans failed that he decided to become a Russian writer.[46]
Legacy
Gogol has been featured many times on Russian and Soviet postage stamps; he is also well represented on stamps worldwide.[63][64][65][66] Several commemorative coins have been issued in the USSR and Russia. In 2009, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Gogol.[67] Streets have been named after Gogol in various cities, including Moscow, Sofia, Lipetsk, Odesa, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk, Riga, Bratislava, Belgrade, Harbin and many other towns and cities.
Gogol is mentioned several times in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment and Chekhov's The Seagull.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa considered Gogol along with Edgar Allan Poe his favorite writers.
Adaptations
BBC Radio 4 made a series of six Gogol short stories, entitled Three Ivans, Two Aunts and an Overcoat (2002, adaptations by Jim Poyser) starring Griff Rhys-Jones and Stephen Moore. The stories adapted were "The Two Ivans", "The Overcoat", "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt", "The Nose", "The Mysterious Portrait" and "Diary of a Madman".
Gogol's short story "Christmas Eve" (literally the Russian title «Ночь перед Рождеством» translates as "The Night before Christmas") was adapted into operatic form by at least three East Slavic composers. Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko wrote his Christmas Eve («Різдвяна ніч», with libretto in Ukrainian by Mykhailo Starytsky) in 1872. Just two years later, in 1874, Tchaikovsky composed his version under the title Vakula the Smith (with Russian libretto by Yakov Polonsky) and revised it in 1885 as Cherevichki (The Tsarina's Slippers). In 1894 (i.e., just after Tchaikovsky's death), Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the libretto and music for his own opera based on the same story. "Christmas Eve" was also adapted into a film in 1961 entitled The Night Before Christmas. It was adapted also for radio by Adam Beeson and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 24 December 2008[68] and subsequently rebroadcast on both Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra on Christmas Eve 2010, 2011 and 2015.[69]
Gogol's story "Viy" was adapted into film by Russian filmmakers four times: the original Viy in 1967; the horror film Vedma (aka The Power of Fear) in 2006; the action-horror film Viy in 2014; and the horror film Gogol Viy released in 2018. It was also adapted into the Russian FMV video game Viy: The Story Retold (2004). Outside of Russia, the film loosely served as the inspiration for Mario Bava's film Black Sunday (1960) and the South Korean horror film Evil Spirit: Viy (2008).
In 2016, Gogol's short story "The Portrait" was announced to be adapted into a feature film of the same name, by Anastasia Elena Baranoff and Elena Vladimir Baranoff.[70][71][72][73][74][75]
The Russian TV-3 television series Gogol features Nikolai Gogol as a lead character and presents a fictionalized version of his life that mixes his history with elements from his various stories.[76] The episodes were also released theatrically starting with Gogol. The Beginning in August 2017. A sequel entitled Gogol: Viy was released in April 2018 and the third film Gogol: Terrible Revenge debuted in August 2018.
In 1963, an animated version of Gogol's classic surrealist story "The Nose" was made by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, using the pinscreen animation technique, for the National Film Board of Canada.[77]
A definitive animated movie adaptation of Gogol's The Nose released in January 2020. The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks has been in production for about fifty years.[78]
This article incorporates text from 's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in the public domain.
