Gogol biography personal life children. Unknown facts about famous writers. Gogol

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (surname at birth Yanovsky, since 1821 - Gogol-Yanovsky). Born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in Sorochintsy, Poltava province - died on February 21 (March 4), 1852 in Moscow. Russian prose writer, playwright, poet, critic, publicist, recognized as one of the classics of Russian literature. He came from an old noble family of the Gogol-Yanovskys.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in Sorochintsy near the Psel River, on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts (Poltava province). Nikolai was named after him miraculous icon Saint Nicholas.

According to family legend, he came from an old Cossack family and was supposedly a descendant of Ostap Gogol, the hetman of the Right Bank Army of the Zaporozhye Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some of his ancestors also pestered the nobility, and Gogol’s grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich Gogol-Yanovsky (1738-1805), wrote in an official document that “his ancestors, with the surname Gogol, Polish nation“, although most biographers are inclined to believe that he was still a “Little Russian”.

A number of researchers, whose opinion was formulated by V.V. Veresaev, believe that the descent from Ostap Gogol could have been falsified by Afanasy Demyanovich to obtain the nobility, since the priestly pedigree was an insurmountable obstacle to acquiring a noble title.

Great-great-grandfather Yan (Ivan) Yakovlevich, a graduate of the Kyiv Theological Academy, “went to the Russian side”, settled in the Poltava region, and from him the nickname “Yanovsky” came. (According to another version, they were Yanovskys, since they lived in the area of Yanov). Having received a charter of nobility in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname “Yanovsky” to “Gogol-Yanovsky”. Gogol himself, being baptized “Yanovsky,” apparently did not know about the real origin of the surname and subsequently discarded it, saying that the Poles had invented it.

Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky (1777-1825), died when his son was 15 years old. It is believed that the stage activities 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 theater.

Gogol's mother, Maria Ivanovna (1791-1868), born. Kosyarovskaya, was married at the age of fourteen in 1805. According to contemporaries, she was exceptionally pretty. The groom was twice her age.

In addition to Nikolai, there were eleven more children in the family. There were six boys and six girls in total. The first two boys were stillborn. 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 born were daughters Anna (1821-1893), Elizaveta (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the complete atmosphere of Little Russian life, both lordly and peasant. Subsequently, these impressions formed the basis of Gogol’s Little Russian stories and 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 inclinations of religiosity and mysticism, which by the end of his life took possession of Gogol’s entire being, are attributed to the influence of his mother.

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 had an excellent memory, 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.

Apparently, the gymnasium itself, which was not very well organized in the first years of its existence, was partly to blame for the poor teaching; for example, history was taught by rote learning; literature teacher Nikolsky extolled the importance of Russian literature XVIII century and did not approve of the contemporary poetry of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, which, however, only increased the interest of schoolchildren in romantic literature. Lessons moral education supplemented with a rod. Gogol got it too.

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 considerable influence on him at that time; Alexander Danilevsky, who remained his friend for life, as did Nikolai Prokopovich; Nestor Kukolnik, with whom, however, Gogol never agreed).

Comrades contributed magazines; They started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in poetry. At that time, he wrote elegiac poems, tragedies, historical poems and stories, as well as the satire “Something about Nezhin, or There is no law for fools.” Along with literary interests, a love for the theater also developed, where Gogol, already distinguished by his unusual comedy, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). Gogol's youthful experiences were formed 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 for the whole family. Concerns about business also fall on Gogol; he gives advice, reassures his mother, and must think about the future arrangement of his own affairs. The mother idolizes her son Nikolai, considers him a genius, she gives him the last of her meager funds to provide for his life in Nezhin, and subsequently 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 would renounce his share of the common family inheritance in favor of his sisters in order to devote himself entirely to literature.

By the end of his time at the gymnasium, he dreams of a wide social activities, which, however, he sees not at all in the literary field; no doubt under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to advance and benefit society in a service for which in reality he was not capable. Thus, plans for the future were unclear; but Gogol was sure that he had a wide career ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what ordinary people are content with, as he put it, which were the majority of his Nizhyn comrades.

In December 1828, Gogol moved to St. Petersburg. Here, for the first time, severe disappointment awaited him: his modest means turned out to be completely insignificant in the big city, and his brilliant hopes were not realized as quickly as he expected. His letters home at that time were a mixture of this disappointment and a vague hope for a better future. He had a lot of character and practical enterprise in reserve: he tried to enter the stage, become an official, and devote himself to literature.

He was not accepted as an actor; the service was so meaningless that he began to feel burdened by it; the more attracted he was to the literary field. In St. Petersburg, at first he kept to a society of fellow countrymen, which consisted partly of former comrades. He found that Little Russia aroused keen interest in St. Petersburg society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native land, and from here arose the first plans for work, which was supposed to give an outcome to the need artistic creativity, and also bring practical benefits: these were the plans for “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

But before that, under the pseudonym V. Alov, he published the romantic idyll “Hanz Küchelgarten” (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it with the year 1827) and the hero of which was given the ideal dreams and aspirations with which he was fulfilled in last years Nizhyn life. Soon after the book was published, he himself destroyed its circulation when the critics reacted unfavorably to his work.

In a restless search for life's work, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lubeck, but a month later he returned again to St. Petersburg (September 1829) - and then explained his action by the fact that God showed him the way to a foreign land, or referred to hopeless love . In reality, he was running from himself, from the discord of his lofty and also arrogant dreams with practical life. “He was drawn to some fantastic land of happiness and reasonable productive work,” says his biographer; America seemed like such a country to him. In fact, instead of America, he ended up serving in the III Division thanks to the patronage of Thaddeus Bulgarin. However, his stay there was short-lived. Ahead of him was 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, a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin took place, which had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity.

The failure of Hanz Küchelgarten was a tangible indication of the need for a different 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, legends, costumes, as well as to send “notes kept by the ancestors of some old 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, “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” was published in Svinin’s “Notes of the Fatherland” (with editorial corrections); at the same time (1829) “Sorochinskaya Fair” and “May Night” were started or written.

Gogol then published other works in the publications of Baron Delvig “Literary Newspaper” and “Northern Flowers”, where a chapter from historical novel"Hetman". Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received Gogol with great cordiality: apparently, from the first time the mutual sympathy of people related by love of art, by religiosity inclined to mysticism was felt between them - after that they became very close friends.

Zhukovsky handed over the young man to Pletnev with a request to place him, and indeed, in February 1831, Pletnev recommended Gogol for the position of teacher at the Patriotic Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Having gotten to know Gogol better, Pletnev waited for the opportunity to “bring him under Pushkin’s blessing”: this happened in May of the same year. Gogol's entry into this circle, which soon recognized his great emerging talent, had a huge impact on Gogol's fate. Finally, the prospect of the broad activity that he had dreamed of opened before him, but not in the official field, but in the literary field.

In material terms, Gogol could have been helped by the fact that, in addition to a place at the institute, Pletnev provided him with the opportunity to conduct private classes with the Longinovs, Balabins, and 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 their breadth, his 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. Serving art became for him a high and strict moral duty, the requirements of which he tried to fulfill religiously.

At Zhukovsky, Gogol met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic; in the latter, he soon began a relationship that would play a significant role in his life in the future, for example, with the Vielgorskys; At the Balabins he met the brilliant maid of honor 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 utmost 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, some of which were mentioned above, his first major literary work, which marked the beginning of his fame, was “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.” Stories published by the pasichnik Rudy Panko”, published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first contained “Sorochinskaya Fair”, “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, “The Missing Letter”; in the second - “The Night Before Christmas”, “Terrible Revenge, Ancient True Story”, “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt”, “Enchanted Place”).

These stories, depicting pictures of Ukrainian life in an unprecedented way, shining with gaiety and subtle humor, made a great impression on. The next collections were first “Arabesques”, then “Mirgorod”, both published in 1835 and composed partly from articles published in 1830-1834, and partly from new works published for the first time. That's when Gogol's literary fame became undeniable.

He grew up in the eyes of both his inner circle and the younger literary generation in general. Meanwhile, events took place in Gogol’s personal life, in various ways influencing the internal makeup of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was in his homeland 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.

Staying at home initially surrounded him with impressions of his native, beloved environment, memories of the past, but then also with severe disappointments. Household affairs were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic young man he had been when 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 like a superficial youthful experience, the fruit of that “youth during which no questions come to mind.”

Ukrainian life and at that time she 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 his most active time. creative activity; At the same time, he continued to make life plans.

From the end of 1833, he was carried away by a thought as unrealizable as his previous plans for service were: it seemed to him that he could enter the scientific field. At that time, the opening of Kyiv University was being prepared, and he dreamed of occupying the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriotic Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; Gogol dreamed of starting classes in Kyiv with him, and wanted to invite Pogodin there too; in Kyiv, Russian Athens appeared to his imagination, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in universal history.

However, it turned out that the department of history was given to another person; but soon, thanks to the influence of his high literary friends, he was offered the same chair at St. Petersburg University. He actually occupied this pulpit; Several times he managed to give an effective lecture, but then the task turned out to be beyond his strength, and he himself refused the professorship in 1835. In 1834 he wrote several articles on the history of the Western and Eastern Middle Ages.

In 1832, his work was somewhat suspended due to domestic and personal troubles. But already in 1833 he worked hard again, and the result of these years were the two mentioned collections. First, Arabesques came out (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835), which contained several articles of popular scientific content on history and art (“Sculpture, painting and music”; “A few words about Pushkin”; “On architecture”; “ On teaching general history”; “A look at the composition of Little Russia”; “On Little Russian songs”, etc.), but at the same time the new stories “Portrait”, “Nevsky Prospect” and “Notes of a Madman”.

Then in the same year “Mirgorod” was released. Stories that serve as a continuation of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835). Was placed here whole line works in which new striking features of Gogol’s talent were revealed. In the first part of “Mirgorod” “Old World Landowners” and “Taras Bulba” appeared; in the second - “Viy” and “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.”

Subsequently (1842) “Taras Bulba” was completely reworked by Gogol. Being a professional historian, Gogol used factual materials to construct 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.

The plans for some other works of Gogol date back to the early thirties, such as the famous “The Overcoat”, “The Stroller”, perhaps “Portrait” in its revised version; these works appeared in the “Contemporary” of Pushkin (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); a later stay in Italy includes “Rome” in Pogodin’s “Moskvityanin” (1842).

The first idea of “The Inspector General” dates back to 1834. The surviving manuscripts of Gogol indicate that he worked on his works extremely carefully: from what has survived from these manuscripts, it is clear how the work in its completed form known to us grew gradually from the initial outline, becoming more and more complicated with details and finally reaching that amazing artistic completeness and vitality with which we know them at the end of a process that sometimes lasted for years.

The main plot of The Inspector General, as well as the plot of Dead Souls later, 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 Inspector” caused endless work of determining the plan and details of execution; 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 extreme degree: comedy did not leave his head; he was languidly fascinated by the idea of coming face to face with society; he took the greatest care to ensure that the play was performed in accordance with his own ideas of characters and action; The production encountered various obstacles, including censorship, and finally could only be carried out by the will 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 a matter of a whole principle, a whole order life, in which it itself resides.

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 favorite writer, a whole revelation, a new, the emerging period of Russian art and Russian public. 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 fans of Gogol it was a definite manifesto.

Gogol himself was interested, first of all, in the literary aspect; in social terms, he stood completely in line with the point of view of his friends in the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in this order of things, and that is why he was especially struck by the discordant noise of misunderstanding that arose around his play. Subsequently, in " Theater crossing after the presentation of the new comedy,” he, on the one hand, conveyed the impression that “The Inspector General” made in various strata of society, and on the other, he expressed his own thoughts about the great importance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans appeared to Gogol even before The Inspector General. In 1833, he was absorbed in the comedy “Vladimir of the 3rd Degree”; it was not completed by him, but its material served for several dramatic episodes, such as “The Morning of a Business Man,” “Litigation,” “The Lackey” and “Excerpt.” The first of these plays appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836), the rest - in the first collection of his works (1842).

In the same meeting, “Marriage”, sketches of which date back to the same 1833, and “Players”, conceived in the mid-1830s, appeared for the first time. Tired of the creative tension of recent years and the moral anxieties that The Government Inspector cost him, Gogol decided to take a break from work by going on a trip abroad.

In June 1836, Nikolai Vasilyevich went abroad, where he stayed, intermittently, for about ten years. At first, life abroad seemed to strengthen and calm him, giving him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, “Dead Souls,” but it also became the embryo of deeply fatal phenomena. The experience of working with this book, the contradictory reaction of his 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 thought gradually began to take shape in the idea of one’s prophetic destiny, and, accordingly, of using one’s prophetic gift by the power of one’s talent for the benefit of society, and not to its detriment.

He lived abroad in Germany and Switzerland, spent the winter with A. Danilevsky in Paris, where he met and became especially close to Smirnova and where he was caught by the news of Pushkin’s death, which shocked him terribly.

In March 1837, he was in Rome, which he fell in love with greatly and became like a second homeland for him. European political and public life 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 ancient monuments, art galleries, visited artists’ workshops, admired folk life and loved to show Rome and “treat” it to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends.

But in Rome he worked hard: the main subject of this work was “Dead Souls,” conceived 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, after several alterations he destroyed.

In the fall of 1839, he and Pogodin went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was met by the Aksakovs, who were enthusiastic about the writer’s talent. Then he went to St. Petersburg, where he had to take his 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.

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 endure the severe anxieties that he had once experienced during the production of “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 submitted to the St. Petersburg censorship and, thanks to the participation of Gogol’s influential friends, was, with some exceptions, allowed. It was published in Moscow (“The Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls, 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 now in Rome, now in Germany, in Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, now in Nice, now in Paris, now in Ostend, often in the circle of his closest friends - Zhukovsky, Smirnova, Vielgorsky, Tolstoy, and a religious -the prophetic direction mentioned above.

A high idea of his talent and the responsibility that lay upon him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and take a broad look at life, one must strive for internal improvement, which is given only by thinking of God. He had to reschedule several times serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood; in his circle he found favorable soil for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently gave instructions to his friends and eventually came to the conviction that what he had done so far was unworthy of the high goal to which he considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem was nothing more than a porch to the palace that was being built in it, then at that time he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission.

Nikolai Gogol was not in good health since childhood. The death of his younger brother Ivan in adolescence and the untimely death of his father left their mark on him. state of mind. Work on the continuation of “Dead Souls” was not going well, and the writer experienced painful doubts that he would be able to bring his planned work to the end.

In the summer of 1845, he was overtaken by a painful mental crisis. He writes a will and burns the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls.

To commemorate his deliverance from death, Gogol decides to go to a monastery and become a monk, but monasticism did not take place. But his mind was presented with 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. New work began, and in the meantime he was occupied by another thought: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful for him, and he decides to collect in one book everything he wrote in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood and orders the publication of this Pletnev's book. These were “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” (St. Petersburg, 1847).

Gogol with his tone of prophecy and edification, preaching humility, because of which, however, one could see his own conceit; condemnations of previous works, complete approval of the existing social order was clearly dissonant with those ideologists who hoped only for the social reorganization of society. Gogol, without rejecting the expediency of social reorganization, saw the main goal in spiritual self-improvement. Therefore on long years The subject of his study is the works of the Church Fathers. But, not joining either the Westerners or the Slavophiles, Gogol stopped halfway, not completely joining spiritual literature - Seraphim of Sarov, Ignatius (Brianchaninov), etc.

The book’s impression on Gogol’s literary fans, who want to see him only as a leader “ natural school", was depressing. The highest degree of indignation aroused by Selected Places was expressed in a famous letter from Salzbrunn.

Gogol was painfully worried about the failure of his book. Only A. O. Smirnova and P. A. Pletnev were able to support him at that moment, but these were only private epistolary opinions. He explained the attacks on her partly by his mistake, by the exaggeration of the edifying tone, and by the fact that the censor did not miss several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by calculations of parties and pride. Social meaning this polemic was alien to him.

In a similar sense, he then wrote the “Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls”; "The Inspector's Denouement", where the free artistic creation he wanted to give the character of a moralizing allegory, and the “Pre-Notification”, which announced that the fourth and fifth editions of “The Inspector General” would be sold for the benefit of the poor... The failure of the book had an overwhelming effect on Gogol. He had to admit that a mistake had been made; even friends, like S. T. Aksakov, told him that the mistake was gross and pathetic; he himself confessed to Zhukovsky: “I swung such Khlestakov in my book that I don’t have the courage to look into it.”

In his letters since 1847, there is no longer the former arrogant 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. His refuge remained a religious feeling: he decided that he could not continue work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to venerate 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 through Constantinople and Odessa.

His stay in Jerusalem did not have the effect he expected. “I have never been so little pleased with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. “It was as if I was at the Holy Sepulcher so that I could feel there on the spot how much coldness of heart I had, how much selfishness and pride.”

He continued to work on the second volume of Dead Souls and read excerpts from it from the Aksakovs, but the same painful struggle between artist and Christian that had been going on in him since the early forties continued. As was his custom, he revised what he had written many times, probably succumbing to one mood or another. Meanwhile, his health became increasingly 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 overcome by the fear of death; he gave up his literary studies and began to fast at Maslenitsa; One day, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die.

From the end of January 1852, Rzhev Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, whom Gogol met in 1849, and before that was acquaintance by correspondence, stayed in the house of Count Alexander Tolstoy. Complex, sometimes harsh conversations took place between them, the main content of which was Gogol’s insufficient humility and piety, for example, the demand for Fr. Matthew: “Renounce 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 own 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 (previously, he also gave a negative review of “Selected Passages ...", calling the book “harmful”).

The death of Khomyakova, the conviction of Konstantinovsky and, perhaps, other reasons convinced Gogol to abandon his creativity and begin fasting a week before Lent. On February 5, he saw off Konstantinovsky and since that day he has eaten almost nothing. On February 10, he handed Count A. Tolstoy a briefcase with manuscripts to be handed over to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, but the Count refused this order so as not to deepen Gogol’s dark thoughts.

Gogol stops leaving the house. At 3 a.m. from Monday to Tuesday 11-12 (23-24) February 1852, that is, on Great Compline on the Monday of the first week of Lent, Gogol woke up his servant Semyon, ordered him to open the stove 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, but he burned everything under the influence of evil spirit. Gogol, despite the admonitions of his friends, continued to strictly observe fasting; On February 18, I went to bed and stopped eating completely. 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 council (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 to compulsorily treat Gogol, the result of which was final exhaustion and loss of strength, in the evening he fell into unconsciousness, and on the morning of February 21, Thursday, he died.

An inventory of Gogol's property showed that he left behind 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. Shevyrev still 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 Shevyrev did not return it to the writer’s heirs.

On the initiative of Moscow State University professor Timofey Granovsky, the funeral was held as a public one; Contrary to the initial wishes of Gogol's friends, at the insistence of his superiors, the writer was buried in the university church of the martyr Tatiana. The funeral took place on Sunday afternoon on February 24 (March 7), 1852 at the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. A bronze cross was installed on the grave, standing on a black tombstone (“Golgotha”), and on it was carved the inscription: “I will laugh at my bitter word” (quote from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, 20, 8). According to legend, I. S. Aksakov himself chose the stone for Gogol’s grave somewhere in the Crimea (cutters called it “Black Sea granite”).

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 examination report, drawn up by NKVD officers and now stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature (form. 139, no. 61), disputes the unreliable and mutually exclusive memories of a participant and witness to 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 memories, transmitted in the form of oral stories to students at the Literary Institute when Lidin was a professor at this institute in the 1970s, Gogol’s skull was turned on its side. This, in particular, is evidenced by former student V. G. Lidina, and later senior researcher at the State Literary Museum Yu. V. Alekhin. Both of these versions are apocryphal in nature, they gave rise to many legends, including the burial of Gogol in a state of lethargic sleep and the theft of Gogol’s skull for the collection of the famous Moscow collector of theatrical antiquities A. A. Bakhrushin. Same controversial nature bear numerous memories of the desecration of Gogol’s grave Soviet writers(and Lidin himself) during the exhumation of Gogol’s burial, published by the media from the words of V. G. Lidin.

In 1952, instead of Golgotha, a new monument was installed on the grave in the form of a pedestal with a bust of Gogol by the sculptor Tomsky, on which is inscribed: “To the great Russian wordsmith Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol from the government of the Soviet Union.”

Calvary, being unnecessary, was for some time in the workshops of the Novodevichy cemetery, where it was discovered with the inscription already scraped off by E. S. Bulgakova, who was looking for a suitable tombstone for the grave of her late husband. 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.”

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

Co school days We know the work of N.V. Gogol, his main works. But here we will focus on only one aspect: how life circumstances influenced the writer’s personality. Researchers note that the classic of Russian literature consistently experienced different periods: naturalistic, passion Ukrainian folklore and mysticism, religious-journalistic and so on. What influenced the formation and formation of such a complex genius?

N.V. Gogol. Biography: short pedigree

Everyone knows that this mysterious Russian of origin was born in 1809 in the village of Velikie Sorochintsy (Poltava province, Mirgorod district). It is also no secret that his parents were landowners. But few researchers delved into the writer’s genealogy. But she is very interesting. Gogol's biography indicates that the child's worldview was formed under the influence of his father and mother. Their stories also left a lasting impression on him. Maria Ivanovna Kosyarovskaya was from a noble family. But my father was from a hereditary line of priests. True, the writer’s grandfather, whose name was Afanasy Demyanovich, left the spiritual field and signed up for service in the hetman’s office. He, in fact, added the prefix Gogol to his surname - Yanovsky, which “related” him to the glorious 17th century colonel Eustachius.

Childhood

His father's stories about his Cossack ancestors instilled in young Nikolai a love of Ukrainian history. But even more than the memories of Vasily Afanasyevich, the very area where he lived influenced the writer. Gogol's biography tells that he spent his childhood years on the family estate Vasilievka, which is located in close proximity to Dikanka. There are villages in Ukraine where local residents say that sorcerers and witches live there. In the Carpathian region they are called malfars, in the Poltava region they were simply passed on from mouth to mouth. horror stories, in which the inhabitants of Dikanka appeared. All this left an indelible imprint on the boy’s soul.

Parallel reality

Having completed his studies at the gymnasium in 1828, Nikolai left for the capital, St. Petersburg, in the hope that a bright future would now open before him. But severe disappointment awaited him there. He failed to get a job; his first attempts at writing caused derogatory criticism. Gogol's biography defines this period in the writer's life as realistic. He works as a minor official in the allotments department. Gray, routine life proceeds, as it were, in parallel with the creative search of the writer. He attends classes at the Academy of Arts, and after the success of the story “Basavryuk” he meets Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and Delvig.

Biography of Gogol and emigration

Subject " little man”, criticism of the Russian bureaucracy, grotesque and satire - all this was embodied in the cycle of St. Petersburg stories, the comedy “The Inspector General”, as well as the world-famous poem “Dead Souls”. However, Ukraine did not leave the writer’s heart. In addition to “Evenings on the Farm,” he writes historical story"Taras Bulba" and the horror film "Viy". After the reactionary persecution of “The Inspector General,” the writer leaves Russia and goes first to Switzerland, then to France and Italy. Gogol's biography makes us understand that somewhere in the second half of the 1840s, the writer's work took an unexpected turn towards fanaticism, mysticism and praise of autocracy. The writer returns to Russia and writes a series of publications that alienate his former friends. In 1852, on the verge of a mental breakdown, the writer burned the second volume of Dead Souls. A few days later, on February 21, Gogol died.

surname at birth Yanovsky

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

Nikolay Gogol

short biography

- the greatest Russian writer, playwright, publicist, critic, classic of Russian literature - was born on April 1 (March 20, old style) 1809. His homeland was the Poltava province, the village of Bolshie Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district. He was the son of a middle-class landowner. Nikolai began receiving his education at the age of ten, entering the Poltava district school, then through private lessons, and in 1821 he left for the Chernihiv region to join the ranks of students at the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences.

He did not excel in his studies, which was partly due to the poor quality of teaching in the newly created educational institution. Defects in education were compensated by the desire for knowledge of Nikolai himself and his comrades. They organized the publication of a handwritten magazine, in which the first literary samples of the future classic appeared - both poetic and prose. Young Gogol was passionately interested in the theater, having established himself as 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 becoming a professional writer.

Full of great hopes, aspirations and still unclear plans, in December 1828 Gogol arrived in St. Petersburg. Harsh reality and the inability to find himself brought a bitter tinge of disappointment into his mood. An unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, the hardships of serving in the Department of State Economy and Public Buildings and later in the Department of Appanages made the idea of devoting oneself to literary creativity more and more attractive. However, there were also advantages to the clerical service: it allowed Gogol to get an inside look at the life and work of officials, and this awareness subsequently served him well when writing his works.

In 1829, Gogol published his first work intended for the general public, a romantic idyll called “Ganz Küchelgarten,” which he signed with the pseudonym V. Alova. His debut work, written back in Nizhyn, drew fire from criticism, so Gogol personally destroyed the circulation. Failure did not turn him away from thoughts of literary fame, but forced him to look for other paths. Back in the winter of 1829, Gogol constantly asked his mother in letters to send him a description of national Ukrainian traditions and customs. Having discovered that life in Little Russia was interesting to many, Gogol harbored thoughts about a work that, on the one hand, could come to the court, and on the other, satisfy his needs for literary creativity. Already in 1829, the “May Night” and the “Sorochinskaya” fair were written or at least begun, and at the beginning of 1830, “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” was published in the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski.

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 became truly fateful in Gogol’s biography, having a huge influence on him as a person and on a writer. In 1834, young Gogol became an adjunct in the department of history at St. Petersburg University and entered the circle of people at the forefront of Russian fiction. He perceived his service to the Word as the highest moral duty which must be fulfilled religiously. This period became the most intense in his literary activity. In 1830-1832 “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” are published, which bring their author great fame.

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 “the head of literature, the head of poets.” Literary creativity became the main and only occupation of the writer from the summer of 1834. In the same year, “The Inspector General” was conceived, and the plot of the work was suggested by Pushkin (the same story was then repeated with “Dead Souls”). In 1836, the Alexandria Theater staged The Inspector General, but the decrease in social urgency when transferring it to the stage brought disappointment to the author.

The enormous tension of physical and moral strength accumulated over several years led the writer to the idea of taking a trip abroad to relax. He spent almost a dozen years, not counting short breaks, in various cities in Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic. Staying outside his homeland, on the one hand, calmed him down, filled him with new impressions and strength, but on the other hand, changes were brewing in his soul, which later acquired a fatal, fatal character.

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

In the summer, the author of the poem went abroad again, moving from country to country, from city to city. The main changes took place, meanwhile, in his inner world. Gogol considered himself the creator of something providential, saw in himself 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 serious illnesses contributed to the strengthening of his religiosity and prophetic sentiments. He considered everything that came from his pen to be unworthy of his high destiny and sinful.

A severe mental 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 become 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 understand how it is necessary to write so that the whole society “strives towards the beautiful.”

The idea of collecting 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. Due to the mentoring, arrogant tone, the vagueness of the ideological position, the reluctance to join the Westerners and Slavophiles, who in the 1840s. actively challenged each other's right to truth, “Selected Passages” remained misunderstood and condemned. Having a hard time experiencing failure, Gogol sought solace in religion and considered it necessary to continue working only after a trip to holy places. Once again, the writer’s biography begins a period of stay abroad. 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, N.V.’s final return took place. Gogol to Russia. Work on the second volume of Dead Souls continued against the backdrop of intense internal struggle. The writer's health, meanwhile, deteriorated every day. The death of his good friend Khomyakova made an extremely painful impression on him and exacerbated 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) towards the manuscript of the second part of the poem, his call to destroy some chapters.

Having spent Konstantinovsky on February 5, Gogol stops leaving the house and begins to pray and fast with special zeal, although the time of Great Lent has not yet arrived. On the night of February 11–12 (Old Style), 1852, the writer burned 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 the new style) in the morning he died.

He was buried in Moscow, in the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery, which was closed in 1930. On May 1, 1931, Gogol’s grave was opened, followed by the transfer of the remains to the Novodevichy cemetery. There is information not officially confirmed that Gogol was buried in a lethargic sleep, i.e. he was overtaken by the fate he had always feared. The death of the great writer is surrounded by a trail of mysticism, as is his life, and the aspirations of his restless soul, which are not understood by many.

Biography from Wikipedia

Childhood and youth

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 St. Nicholas. According to family legend, he came from an old Cossack family and was supposedly a descendant of Ostap Gogol, the hetman of the Right Bank Army of the Zaporozhye Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some of his ancestors also pestered the nobility, and 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 are inclined to believe that he after all, 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 have been falsified by Afanasy Demyanovich to obtain the nobility, since the priestly pedigree was an insurmountable obstacle to acquiring a noble title.

Great-great-grandfather Yan (Ivan) Yakovlevich, a graduate of the Kyiv Theological Academy, “went to the Russian side,” settled in the Poltava region, and from him came the nickname “Yanovskys” (according to another version, they were Yanovskys, since they lived in the area of Yanov). Having received a charter of nobility in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname “Yanovsky” to “Gogol-Yanovsky”. According to church statistics, the future writer was still named Nikolai Yanovsky at birth. 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 part, “Gogol,” for themselves. The writer's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky (1777-1825), died when his son was 15 years old. It is believed that the stage activities 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 theater.

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

Gogol's mother, Maria Ivanovna (1791-1868), born. Kosyarovskaya, was married at the age of fourteen in 1805. According to contemporaries, she was exceptionally pretty. The groom was twice her age.

In addition to Nikolai, there were eleven more children in the family. There were six boys and six girls in total. The first two boys were stillborn. 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 born daughters were Anna (1821-1893), Elizaveta (married Bykov) (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

Old country house in the village of Vasilyevka, 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 complete atmosphere of Little Russian life, both lordly and peasant. Subsequently, these impressions formed the basis of Gogol’s Little Russian stories and 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 inclinations of that religiosity and that mysticism, which by the end of his life took possession of Gogol’s entire being, are attributed to the influence of his mother.

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

Apparently, the gymnasium itself, which was not very well organized in the first years of its existence, was partly to blame for the poor teaching; for example, history was taught by rote learning; 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 schoolchildren in romantic literature. Moral education lessons were supplemented with the rod. Gogol got it too.

Towards the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of broad social activity, which, however, he sees not at all in the literary field; no doubt under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to advance and benefit society in a service for which in reality he was not capable. Thus, plans for the future were unclear; but Gogol was sure that he had a wide career ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what ordinary people are content with, as he put it, which were the majority of his Nizhyn comrades.

Saint Petersburg

In December 1828, Gogol moved to St. Petersburg. Here, for the first time, severe disappointment awaited him: his modest means in the big city turned out to be completely insufficient, and his brilliant hopes were not realized as quickly as he expected. His letters home at that time were a mixture of this disappointment and a vague hope for a better future. He had strength of character and practical enterprise in reserve: he tried to enter the stage, become an official, and devote himself to literature.

Despite his numerous attempts, he was never accepted as an actor. His service was so meaningless and monotonous that it became unbearable for him. The literary field became the only opportunity for his self-expression. In St. Petersburg, at first he kept to a society of fellow countrymen, which consisted partly of former comrades. He found that Little Russia aroused keen interest in St. Petersburg society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native land, and from here the first plans for work arose, which was supposed to give rise to the need for artistic creativity, as well as bring practical benefits: these were plans for “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka.”

But before that he published under a pseudonym V. Alova the romantic idyll “Hanz Küchelgarten” (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it with the year 1827) and whose hero was given the 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 the critics reacted unfavorably to his work.

In a restless search for life's work, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lubeck, but a month later he returned again to St. Petersburg (September 1829) - and then explained his action by the fact that God showed him the way to a foreign land, or referred to hopeless love . In reality, he was running from himself, from the discord between his lofty and arrogant dreams and practical life. “He was drawn to some fantastic land of happiness and reasonable productive work,” says his biographer; America seemed like such a country to him. In fact, instead of America, he ended up serving in the III Division thanks to the patronage of Thaddeus Bulgarin. However, his stay there was short-lived. Ahead of him was 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, a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin took place, which had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity.

Gogol then published other works in the publications of Baron Delvig “Literary Newspaper” and “Northern Flowers”, which included a chapter from the historical novel “Hetman”. Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received Gogol with great cordiality: apparently, from the first time the mutual sympathy of people related by love of art, by religiosity inclined to mysticism was felt between them - after that they became very close friends.

Hence, by the way, his slow manner of work, the long definition and development of the plan and all the details. The society of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with meager knowledge learned from school: his powers of observation become deeper, and with each new work his creative level reaches new heights. At Zhukovsky, Gogol met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic; in the latter, he soon began a relationship that would play a significant role in his life in the future, for example, with the Vielgorskys; At the Balabins he met the brilliant maid of honor 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 utmost 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, some of which were mentioned above, his first major literary work, which marked the beginning of his fame, was “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.” Stories published by the pasichnik Rudy Panko", published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first contained "Sorochinskaya Fair", "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala", "May Night, or the Drowned Woman", "The Missing Letter"; in the second - “The Night Before Christmas”, “Terrible Revenge, Ancient True Story”, “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt”, “Enchanted Place”).

These stories, depicting scenes of Ukrainian life in an unprecedented way, shining with gaiety and subtle humor, made a great impression on Pushkin. The next collections were first “Arabesques”, then “Mirgorod”, both published in 1835 and composed partly from articles published in 1830-1834, and partly from new works published for the first time. That's when Gogol's literary fame became undeniable.

He grew up in the eyes of both his inner circle and the younger literary generation in general. Meanwhile, events took place in Gogol's personal life that in various ways influenced the internal structure of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was in his homeland 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.

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; At the same time, he continued to make life plans.

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

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

Then in the same year “Mirgorod” was published - stories that serve as a continuation of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835). A whole series of works were placed here, in which new striking features of Gogol’s talent were revealed. In the first part of “Mirgorod” “Old World Landowners” and “Taras Bulba” appeared; in the second - “Viy” and “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.”

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 favorite writer, a whole revelation, a new, the emerging period of Russian art and Russian public. 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 fans of Gogol it was a definite manifesto.

Gogol himself was interested, first of all, in the literary aspect; in social terms, he stood completely in line with the point of view of his friends in the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in this order of things, and that is why he was especially struck by the discordant noise of misunderstanding that arose around his play. Subsequently, in “Theatrical Tour after the Presentation of a New Comedy,” he, on the one hand, conveyed the impression that “The Inspector General” made in various strata of society, and on the other, he expressed his own thoughts about the great importance of theater and artistic truth.

Honorary member of Moscow University since 1844 “Moscow University, having respected the excellent merits and literary works in the field of Russian literature of Mr. collegiate adviser N.V. Gogol in the scientific world, recognizes its Honorary Member, with full confidence in his assistance to Moscow University in everything that can contribute to the success of science.”

Abroad

In March 1837, he was in Rome, which he fell in love with greatly and became like a second homeland for him. European political and social life 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 ancient monuments, art galleries, visited artists’ workshops, admired folk life and loved to show Rome and “treat” it to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends.

Memorial plaque installed on via Sistina in Rome on the house in which 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 wrote his masterpiece. The board was installed by the writer P. D. Boborykin

A high idea of his talent and the responsibility that lay upon him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and take a broad look at life, one must strive for internal improvement, which is given only by thinking of God. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood; in his circle he found favorable soil for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently gave instructions to his friends and eventually came to the conviction that what he had done so far was unworthy of the high 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 was not in good health since childhood. The death of his younger brother Ivan in adolescence and the untimely death of his father left their mark on his state of mind. Work on the continuation of “Dead Souls” was not going well, and the writer experienced painful doubts that he would be able to bring his planned work to the end. In the summer of 1845, he was overtaken by a painful mental crisis. He writes a will and burns the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. To commemorate his deliverance from death, Gogol decides to go to a monastery and become a monk, but monasticism did not take place. But his mind was presented with 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. New work began, and in the meantime he was occupied by another thought: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful for him, and he decides to collect in one book everything he wrote in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood and orders the publication of 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 back to 1845 and 1846, the time when Gogol's religious mood reached its highest development. The 1840s were the time of formation and demarcation of two different ideologies in contemporary Russian educated society. Gogol remained alien to this demarcation, despite the fact that each of the two warring parties - Westerners and Slavophiles - laid their legal rights on Gogol. The book made a grave impression on both of them, since Gogol thought in completely different categories. Even his Aksakov friends turned away from him. Gogol with his tone of prophecy and edification, preaching humility, because of which, however, one could see his own conceit; condemnations of previous works, complete approval of the existing social order was clearly dissonant with those ideologists who hoped only for the social reorganization of society. Gogol, without rejecting the expediency of social reorganization, saw the main goal in spiritual self-improvement. Therefore, for many years the subject of his study became the works of the Church Fathers. But, not joining either the Westerners or the Slavophiles, Gogol stopped halfway, not completely joining the spiritual literature - Seraphim of Sarov, Ignatius (Brianchaninov), etc.

The book’s impression on Gogol’s literary fans, who wanted 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 was painfully worried about the failure of his book. Only A. O. Smirnova and P. A. Pletnev were able to support him at that moment, but these were only private epistolary opinions. He explained the attacks on her partly by his mistake, by the exaggeration of the edifying tone, and by the fact that the censor did not miss several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by calculations of political movements and pride. The social meaning of this polemic was alien to him.

In a similar sense, he then wrote the “Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls”; “The Inspector's Denouement,” where he wanted to give the free artistic creation the character of a moralizing allegory, and “Pre-Notification,” where it was announced that the fourth and fifth editions of “The Inspector General” would be sold for the benefit of the poor... The failure of the book had an overwhelming effect on Gogol. He had to admit that a mistake had been made; even friends such as S. T. Aksakov told him that the mistake was gross and pathetic; he himself confessed to Zhukovsky: “I swung such Khlestakov in my book that I don’t have the courage to look into it.”

In his letters since 1847, there is no longer the former arrogant 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. His refuge remained a religious feeling: he decided that he could not continue work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to venerate 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 through Constantinople and Odessa.

Gogol calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; Once caught in the rain in Nazareth, he thought he was just sitting at a station in Russia. 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 village and in Kaluga, where Smirnova’s husband was governor; spent the summer of 1850 again with his family; then he lived for some time in Odessa, was at home again, and in the fall of 1851 he settled in Moscow, where he lived in the house of his friend Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy (No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard).

Death

From the end of January 1852, Rzhev Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, whom Gogol met in 1849, and before that was acquaintance by correspondence, stayed in the house of Count Alexander Tolstoy. Complex, sometimes harsh conversations took place between them, the main content of which was Gogol’s lack of humility and piety, for example, Father Matthew’s demand: “Renounce 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 own 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 (previously, he also gave a negative review of “Selected Passages ...", calling the book “harmful”).

Gogol stops leaving the house. At 3 a.m. from Monday to Tuesday 11-12 (23-24) February 1852, that is, on Great Compline on the Monday of the first week of Lent, Gogol woke up his servant Semyon, ordered him to open the stove 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, but he burned everything under the influence of an evil spirit. Gogol, despite the admonitions of his friends, continued to strictly observe fasting; On February 18, I went to bed and stopped eating completely. 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 council (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 to compulsorily treat Gogol. The result was final exhaustion and loss of strength; in the evening the writer fell into unconsciousness.

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

Addresses in St. Petersburg

End of 1828 - Trut apartment building - embankment of the Catherine Canal, 72;
beginning of 1829 - Galibin apartment building - Gorokhovaya Street, 48;
April - July 1829 - house of I.-A. Jochima - Bolshaya Meshchanskaya Street, 39;
end of 1829 - May 1831 - Zverkov apartment building - embankment of the Catherine Canal, 69;
August 1831 - May 1832 - Brunst apartment building - Ofitserskaya Street (until 1918, now - Dekabristov Street), 4;
summer 1833 - June 6, 1836 - courtyard wing of the Lepen house - Malaya Morskaya Street, 17, apt. 10. Historical monument of Federal significance; An object cultural heritage No. 7810075000 // Register of objects of cultural heritage of the Russian Federation. Verified

October 30 - November 2, 1839 - P. A. Pletnev’s apartment in Stroganov’s 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” went out from Talyzina’s house to the police station about Gogol’s death, and that after his death “... here in Moscow there is cash, a safe treasury of tickets, debt documents, gold, silver, diamonds and other precious things except for minor personal items.” There’s nothing left of the dress...” The information provided to the police by Count Tolstoy's butler Rudakov about Gogol's estate, heirs and servants is completely accurate and striking in its laconic poverty.

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

The protocol, drawn up by the quarterly overseer 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 insignificant in the eyes of official appraisers that each book in droves sold for a penny apiece.

It must be noted with deep sorrow that the Moscow University professor Shevyrev, who signed the inventory, did not show enough interest in Gogol’s dying library to compile Gogol’s books the same list as his socks and underpants. 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.

The quarterly supervisor, in a report to the bailiff of the Arbat part, rewrote the text of the protocol, with a significant addition: “No decree on resignation was found among the papers in his possession, and on the occasion of his temporary stay here in Moscow, his written form was not shown in the quarter entrusted to me, and also the spiritual there is no will left." The report spoke for the first time about Gogol’s “papers,” which were not mentioned in the “explanation” and protocol, and about the absence of a “will.”

Earlier, the police - no later than an hour and a half after Gogol's death - Doctor A. T. Tarasenkov visited the rooms of the deceased writer. “When I arrived,” he recalled, “they had already examined his closets, where they found neither the notebooks he had written nor the money.” The same Tarasenkov told where Gogol’s money went: after February 12, Gogol “sent out his last pocket money to the poor and for candles, so that after his death he didn’t have a penny left. Shevyrev has about 2000 rubles left. from the proceeds from the writings." Gogol did not consider this amount his own and therefore did not keep it, entrusting its management to Shevyrev.

Indeed, on May 7, 1852, Shevyrev wrote in the “Note on the printing of the works of the late N.V. Gogol and the amount of money he left for that”: “After N.V. Gogol, what remained in my hands was his charitable amount, which he used to help poor young people engaged in science and art - 2533 rubles. 87 kop. His pocket money is the remainder of the proceeds for the 2nd edition of “Dead Souls” - 170 rubles. 10 k. Total 2,703 rub. 97 k.”

Thus, in Gogol’s room, even in the very “closet” that is mentioned in the police report, those same papers were kept - the “will” and “written notebooks” - which were not in place just an hour and a half after his death Gogol, neither with Doctor Tarasenkov, nor with the “conscientious witness”.

Obviously, Count Tolstoy's butler Rudakov and Gogol's servant Semyon Grigoriev, in advance, immediately after Gogol's death, removed them from his room in order to more accurately 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, Count Tolstoy’s butler is sending you all Nikolai Vasilyevich’s belongings and books with the transport of the Kharkov commission agency, and Semyon will go with them. I will bring all the remaining papers to you... if anything slowed down my proposed trip, 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 fall of 1852, Shevyrev visited the orphaned Vasilyevka, fulfilling his own desire to see Gogol’s family and fulfilling an order 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 an order from Gogol’s heirs to work on the publication of Gogol’s true legacy - his works.

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 rough 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 have a funeral service for 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 gendarmes, Count A. F. Orlov, dated February 29, 1852, wrote that the decision in which church to bury Gogol was discussed by Slavophile friends A. Khomyakov, K., who had gathered in the house of Count Tolstoy . and S. Aksakov, A. Efremov, P. Kireevsky, A. Koshelev and Popov. Timofey Granovsky, a professor at Moscow University who was also there, said that it would be more decent to hold his funeral service in university church- as a person who belongs, in some way, to the university. Slavophiles objected that he did not belong to the university, but belonged to to the people, and therefore, as a people’s man, he should be buried in parish church, which can include a footman, a coachman, and in general anyone who wishes to pay his last debt; and such people will not be allowed into the university church - that is, the funeral will be held as a public one. Zakrevsky ordered “Gogol, as an honorary member of the local university, will certainly have a funeral service in the university church. (...) I was ordered to be present by the police and some of my officials both when transferring Gogol’s body to the church and until the burial.”. But at the same time, I agreed with my friends: “And so that there would be no grumbling, I ordered everyone, without exception, to be allowed into the university church. On the day of the burial there were a lot of people of all classes and of both sexes, and so that everything would be quiet at that time, I came to the church myself.”.

Later, in 1881, Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov wrote about this dispute to bibliographer Stepan Ivanovich Ponomarev: “At first, his closest friends began to manage the funeral, but then the university, which treated Gogol in Lately like half crazy, he came to his senses, presented his rights and pushed us away from the orders. It turned out better because the funeral took on a more public and solemn character, and we recognized all this and gave the university complete freedom to make decisions, taking a backseat ourselves.”.

The writer was buried in the university church of the martyr Tatiana. The funeral took place on Sunday afternoon on February 24 (March 7), 1852 at the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. A monument was erected at the grave, consisting of two parts: 1) a bronze cross standing on a black tombstone (“Golgotha”), on which was carved the inscription in Slavic letters “Come to her, Lord Jesus!” Apocalypse. Ch. KV, Art. K"; 2) 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 slab facing the viewer: “They will laugh at my bitter word. Jeremiah chapters. 20, Art. 8.” On the large side of the slab towards the viewer: “The rational man is the throne of feeling. Prtichei ch. 12, Art. 23", "Truth elevates language. Proverbs ch. 14, art. 34.” On the large side of the slab, hidden from the viewer (towards the lattice): “But the lips of the true will be filled with laughter, but their lips will be filled with confession. 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 examination report, drawn up by NKVD officers and now stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature (form. 139, no. 61), disputes the unreliable and mutually exclusive memories of a participant and witness to 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 memories, transmitted in the form of oral stories to students at 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 former student V. G. Lidina, and later 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 numerous memoirs about the desecration of Gogol’s grave by Soviet writers (and Lidin himself) during the exhumation of Gogol’s burial, published by the media from the words of the same V. G. Lidin.

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

“Golgotha”, being unnecessary, was for some time in the workshops of the Novodevichy cemetery, where it was discovered with the inscription already scraped off by E. S. Bulgakova, 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”.

Creation

Early researchers of Gogol’s literary activity imagined, 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, an analysis of his correspondence, which revealed his inner life, allowed researchers to come to the conclusion that, no matter how contradictory the motives of his stories, “The Inspector General” and “Dead Souls” may be, with on the one hand, and “Selected Places” - on the other, in the writer’s personality itself there was not the turning point that was supposed to be in it, one direction was not abandoned and another, opposite one was adopted; on the contrary, it was one whole inner life, where already in the early days there were the makings of later phenomena, where the main feature of this life - service to art - did not cease; 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: “I only succeeded in what I took from reality, from the data known to me.” At the same time, the faces he depicted were not simply a repetition of reality: they were entire artistic types in which human nature was deeply understood. His heroes more often than any other Russian writer became household names.

Another personal feature of Gogol was that from his earliest years, from the first glimpses of his young consciousness, he was excited by sublime aspirations, the desire to serve society in something high and beneficial; from an early age he hated limited self-satisfaction, devoid of internal content, and this trait was later reflected, in the 1830s, by a conscious desire to expose social ills and depravity, and it also developed into a high idea of the importance of art, standing above the crowd as the highest enlightenment of the ideal ...

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

All of Gogol's fundamental ideas about life and literature were ideas of the Pushkin circle. His artistic feeling was strong, and, appreciating Gogol’s unique talent, the circle also took care of his personal affairs. 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 as Gogol himself was ready to distance himself from him.

Gogol distanced himself from the understanding of the social significance of his works, which was invested in them by the literary criticism of V. G. Belinsky and his circle, social-utopian criticism. But at the same time, Gogol himself was no stranger 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 showing the path to goodness 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, literary work was loaded with the applied task of correcting human vices. The history of literature before Gogol did not know such a grandiose plan. And at the same time, the writer intended to write his poem not just conventionally 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 alien to the theoretical content of Slavophilism, and it had no influence on the composition of his work. In addition to personal affection, he found here warm sympathy for his works, as well as for his religious and dreamily conservative ideas. Gogol did not see Russia without monarchy and Orthodoxy; he was convinced that the church should not exist separately from the state. However, later in the elder Aksakov he encountered resistance to his views expressed in “Selected Places.”

The most acute moment of the clash between Gogol’s worldview and the aspirations of the revolutionary part of society was Belinsky’s letter from Salzbrunn, the very tone of which painfully wounded the writer (Belinsky, with his authority, established Gogol as the head of Russian literature during Pushkin’s lifetime), but Belinsky’s criticism could no longer change anything in the spiritual makeup Gogol, and the last years of his life passed, as they say, 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, increased the level of possible artistic perfection among writers, its 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 younger generations, or the hatred with which they were met among the conservative masses of society. By the will of fate, Gogol became the banner of a new social movement, which was formed outside the sphere of the writer’s creative activity, but strangely intersected with his biography, since this role At that moment, this social movement did not have any other figures of similar magnitude. In turn, Gogol misinterpreted the hopes of readers placed on the ending of Dead Souls. The hastily published summary equivalent of the poem in the form of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” resulted in a feeling of annoyance and irritation among the deceived readers, since Gogol as a humorist had developed a strong reputation among readers. The public was not yet ready for a different perception of the writer.

The spirit of humanity, which 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”, “Dead Souls”. The first work of Dostoevsky is adjacent to Gogol to the point of obviousness. Exactly the same image negative aspects landowner life, adopted by the writers of the “natural school,” is usually traced back to Gogol. In their further work, new writers made independent contributions to the content of literature, as life posed and developed new questions, but the first thoughts were given by Gogol.

Gogol's works coincided with the birth 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 complex than the formation of a “natural school.” Gogol himself had little overlap with the “Gogolian trend” in literature. It is curious that in 1852 for not big article In memory of Gogol, I. S. Turgenev was arrested in the unit and sent to a month-long exile in the village. For a long time, the explanation for this was found in the dislike of the Nikolaev government towards Gogol the satirist. It was later found that true motive The ban was the government’s desire to punish the author of “Notes of a Hunter,” and the prohibition of the obituary due to the author’s violation of the censorship regulations (printing in Moscow an article prohibited by censorship in St. Petersburg) was only a reason to stop the activities of a socially dangerous writer from the point of view of Nikolaev censorship. 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 be published in 1855-1856. But Gogol’s connection with subsequent literature is beyond doubt.

This connection 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, sense of words, “new religious consciousness” - F. K. Sologub, Andrei Bely, D. S. Merezhkovsky, etc. Later, M. A. Bulgakov established their continuity with Gogol , V.V. Nabokov.

Gogol and Orthodoxy

Gogol's personality has always been particularly mysterious. On the one hand, he was a classic type of satirist writer, an exposer of vices, social and human, a brilliant humorist, on the other, a pioneer in Russian literature of the patristic tradition, a religious thinker and publicist, and even an author of prayers. Its last quality has not yet been sufficiently studied and is reflected in the works of 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 beginnings of faith in his family. 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, as a child, told me so well, so clearly, so touchingly about the benefits that await people for a virtuous life, and they described the eternal torment of sinners so strikingly, so horribly, that it shocked and awakened all sensitivity in me. This sown and subsequently produced in me the highest thoughts.”

From a spiritual point of view, early work Gogol contains not just a collection 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. Gogol’s main work, the poem “Dead Souls,” also contains deep subtext, the spiritual meaning of which is revealed in the writer’s suicide note: “Be not dead, but living souls. There is no other door except 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 \u200b\u200b“The Inspector General” in a play called “The Denouement of “The Inspector General””, where there are the following words: “... the auditor who is waiting for us at the door of the coffin is terrible.” This, according to Voropaev, is the main idea of the work: we need to fear not Khlestakov or the auditor from St. Petersburg, but “He 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 Christian believer in the bosom of the Church, 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 is often a parodic, comic figure (as, for example, in “Evenings on the Farm”). And in the second volume of “Dead Souls” a modern devil is introduced - a legal adviser, a rather civilized person in appearance, but in essence more terrible than any devilry. With the help of circulating anonymous papers, he created great confusion in the province and turned the existing relative order into complete chaos.

Gogol repeatedly visited Optina Pustyn, having the closest spiritual communication with Elder Macarius.

Gogol completed his writing journey with “Selected Passages 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 a book is a mistake, a writer going astray from his path. But perhaps it is his path, 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 pinnacle of the ideal.

In July 2009, Patriarch Kirill blessed the release during 2009 full meeting works of Nikolai Gogol in the Publishing House of the Moscow Patriarchate. The new edition has been prepared at an academic level. IN working group 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 connections

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, leaning towards a synthesis of two cultures.

In 1844, he responded to a request from Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova: “ I’ll tell you one word about what kind of soul I have, Khokhlatsky or Russian, because this, as I see from your letter, at one time served as the subject of your reasoning and disputes with others. To this I will tell you that I myself don’t know what kind of soul I have, Khokhlatsky or Russian. I only know that I would not 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 individually contains something that is not in the other - a clear sign that they must replenish one another. For this purpose, the very stories of their past life were given to them, unlike one another, so that the various forces of their character could be nurtured separately, so that later, merging together, they would form something most perfect in humanity..»

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

There is no doubt that Ukrainian features were reflected in the writer’s work. These are considered the features of his humor, which remains 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 why he preferred Dikanka over St. Petersburg - for its archaic nature and opposition to Europeanized civilization (“the Little Russian element was also partly active here,” P. V. Annenkov will write about Gogol’s attachment to Italy). The writer’s dispute with O. M. Bodyansky about the Russian language and the works of Taras Shevchenko, conveyed from the words of G. P. Danilevsky, reflected the late Gogol’s supposed understanding of the peculiarities of Russian-Ukrainian relations. " We, Osip Maksimovich, need to write in Russian, we need to strive to support and strengthen one, master language for all our native tribes. The dominant 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 Herrnhuters... 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 each other, relatives and equally strong. It is impossible to give preference to one over the other" It follows from this dispute that towards the end of his life Gogol was concerned not so much with the national question as with the antagonism of faith and unbelief. And the writer himself was inclined 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 theater with youth Gogol was passionate about painting. His high school letters to his parents speak about this. In the gymnasium, Gogol tries himself as a painter, book chart(manuscript magazines “Meteor of Literature”, “Dung of Parnassus”) and theater decorator. After leaving the gymnasium in St. Petersburg, Gogol continued his painting classes in evening classes at the Academy of Arts. Communication with Pushkin's circle, with K. P. Bryullov, makes him a passionate admirer of art. The latter’s painting “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 aesthetic and moral principles, will become central to his Petersburg stories“Nevsky Prospekt” and “Portrait”, written in the same years of 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, sculpture, and paintings by old masters. A. O. Smirnova recalls how in the Strasbourg Cathedral “he drew with a pencil on a piece of paper the ornaments above the Gothic columns, marveling at the selectivity of the ancient masters, who made decorations above each column that were excellent from others. I looked at his work and was surprised at how clearly and beautifully he sketched. “You draw so well!” I said. “But you didn’t know that?” answered Gogol.” Gogol’s romantic elation is replaced by a well-known sobriety (A. O. Smirnova) in his assessment of art: “Slimness in everything, that’s what’s beautiful.” Raphael 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, was a decent painter himself). Once he said to me: “If I were an artist, I would invent a special kind of landscape.” What kind of trees and landscapes they paint now!.. I would link tree to tree, mix up the branches, throw out light where no one expects it, that’s the kind of landscapes that should be painted!” In this sense, in the poetic depiction of Plyushkin’s garden in “Dead Souls,” the view, method and composition of Gogol the painter are clearly felt.

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 improve 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. The writer has a long-term friendship with Alexander Ivanov. The artist becomes the prototype of the hero of the updated version of the story “Portrait”. At the height of his relationship with A. O. Smirnova, Gogol gave her Ivanov’s watercolor “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 valued 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), and lobbied with whomever he could to extend the artist’s opportunity to work calmly and slowly above the painting, dedicated a large article to Ivanov in “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” “The Historical Painter Ivanov”. Gogol contributed to Ivanov’s turn to writing genre watercolors and to the study of iconography. The painter reconsidered the relationship between the sublime and the comical in his paintings; in his new works, features of humor appeared that were previously completely alien to the artist. Ivanovo’s watercolors, in turn, are close in genre to the story “Rome”. On the other hand, Gogol was several years ahead of the initiatives of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in the field of studying ancient Russian Orthodox icon. 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 did on his painting, both were equally hurried from all sides to finish their work, both were equally in need, unable to tear themselves away from what you love for extra income. And Gogol had both himself and Ivanov in mind equally when he wrote in his article: “Now everyone feels the absurdity of reproaching such an artist for slowness and laziness, who, like a worker, sat all his life at work and forgot even whether there was any kind of art in the world.” any pleasure other than work. The artist’s own spiritual work was connected with the production of this painting, a phenomenon that is too rare in the world.” On the other hand, A. A. Ivanov’s brother, architect Sergei Ivanov, testifies that A. A. Ivanov “never had the same thoughts as Gogol, he internally never agreed with him, but at the same time he never argued with him.” . Gogol’s article weighed heavily on the artist; the advance praise and premature fame fettered him and placed him in an ambiguous position. Despite personal sympathy and a common religious attitude towards art, the once inseparable friends, Gogol and Ivanov, towards the end of their lives become somewhat internally distant, despite the fact that correspondence between them does not stop until their 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 came to Rome and met with Russian artists and Gogol. Taking advantage of the visit to Rome of the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Arts, Count Fyodor Tolstoy, Levitsky persuaded Gogol to appear in a daguerreotype together with a colony of Russian artists. The idea was connected with the arrival of Nicholas I to Rome from St. Petersburg. The Emperor personally visited the boarders 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 bow of his head and instantly looked at those gathered with his quick, brilliant gaze. “Your Majesty’s artists,” Count Tolstoy pointed out. “They say they are partying a lot,” the sovereign remarked. “But they also work,” answered the count.”

Among those depicted are architects Fyodor Eppinger, Karl Beine, Pavel Notbeck, Ippolit Monighetti, sculptors Peter Stawasser, Nikolai Ramazanov, Mikhail Shurupov, painters Pimen Orlov, Apollo Mokritsky, Mikhail Mikhailov, Vasily Sternberg. The daguerreotype was first published by critic V.V. Stasov in the magazine “Ancient and New Russia” for 1879, No. 12, who described those depicted as follows: “Look at these hats of the theatrical “brigants”, at the cloaks, as if unusually picturesque and majestic - what an unwitty and untalented masquerade! And yet, 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, lives, and delusions.” From this article we know the names of those photographed and who is where. Thus, 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 portraitist, Karl Fischer, his image was cropped from this group photograph, retaken and enlarged.

Sergei Levitsky himself is present in the group of those photographed - second from 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 writer’s lifetime, there were contradictory rumors about him, aggravated by his isolation and tendency to mythologize own biography and a mysterious death, which gave rise to many legends and hypotheses. Among the most famous are the hypothesis about his homosexuality, as well as the hypothesis about Gogol's death.

Bibliography

Major works

Dead Souls
Auditor
Marriage
Theater crossing
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. He began preparing the second in 1851; it was already completed by his heirs: here the second part of “Dead Souls” appeared for the first time.
In Kulish's publication in six volumes (1857), an extensive collection of Gogol's letters (the last two volumes) appeared for the first time.
In the edition prepared by Chizhov (1867), “Selected passages from correspondence with friends” are printed in full, including what was not missed by the censor 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: it is a scientific publication with text corrected from manuscripts and Gogol’s own editions, and with extensive comments, which detail the history of each of Gogol's works based on surviving manuscripts, his correspondence and other historical data.
The material of letters collected by Kulish and the text of Gogol’s works began to be replenished, especially since the 1860s: “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” based on a manuscript found in Rome (“Russian Archives”, 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).
Research of Gogol’s texts and his letters: articles by V. I. Shenrok in “Bulletin of Europe”, “Artist”, “Russian Antiquity”; Mrs. E. S. Nekrasova in “Russian Antiquity” and especially the comments of Mr. Tikhonravov in the 10th edition and in the special edition of “The Inspector General” (M., 1886).
There is information about the letters in the book “Index to Gogol’s Letters” by Mr. Shenrok (2nd ed. - M., 1888), which is necessary when reading them in Kulish’s edition, where they are interspersed with blank, arbitrarily taken letters instead of names and other censorship omissions .
“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; more complete than Kulish, V, 174); “Note to S. T. Aksakov” (“Russian Antiquity”, 1871, IV); letter to actor Sosnitsky about “The Inspector General” of 1846 (ibid., 1872, VI); Letters from Gogol to Maksimovich, published by S. I. Ponomarev, etc.

Influence on modern 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 production by A. Rowe based on the story “The Night Before Christmas”;
series "N. V. Gogol. Dead Souls. Poem" (1984). Scriptwriter and production 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 Again (2004).

An annual multidisciplinary festival is held in Ukraine contemporary art Gogolfest, named after the writer.

The writer's surname is reflected in the name of the musical group Gogol Bordello, whose leader, Evgeniy Gudz, is a native of 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 have been erected in various cities around the world. Several documentaries and feature films are also dedicated to him.

“Born on March 20 (1.IV) 1809 in the town of Velikie Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district, Poltava province. He came from a landowner family: the Gogols had about 400 serfs and over 1000 acres of land.

He spent his childhood years on the Vasilyevka estate (another name for Yanovshchina), visiting Dikanka with his parents, which belonged to the Minister of Internal Affairs V.P. Kochubey, and to Obukhovka, where the writer V.V. lived. Kapnist, but most often he visited the Kibintsy estate, where he distant relative Gogol on the side of D.P.’s mother. Troshchinsky had an extensive library and home theater.

He almost never used his real surname - Gogol-Yanovsky, leaving only (as they sometimes say) the lesser half of it. “When he was five years old, Gogol decided to write poetry,” recalled publicist G.P. Danilevsky from the words of the mother of the future writer. - Nobody understood what kind of poetry he wrote. Famous writer V.V. Kapnist, visiting Gogol’s father one day, found his five-year-old son writing. Little Gogol was sitting at the table, thoughtfully thinking about some scripture. . Kapnist managed to persuade the child writer to read his work with requests and affection. Gogol took Kapnist to another room and there he read his poems to him. Kapnist did not tell anyone the contents of what he heard. Returning to Gogol’s family, he, caressing and hugging the little writer, said: “He will be a great talent, only fate will give him the leadership of a Christian teacher.”

Gogol was admired since childhood native nature and people were scared. Even twenty years later, he wrote to one of his friends: “What would this region seem to be missing? Full, luxurious summer. Bread, fruits, everything vegetable - death. But the people are poor, their estates are ruined and their arrears are unpaid... They are beginning to understand that it is time to get down to business with manufactories and factories; but there is no capital, the happy thought slumbers, finally dies, and they (the landowners) hunt for hares out of grief.” In 1821 he entered the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences.

The comrades were not very fond of the new student. Shy, secretive, he was extremely tormented by the poorly concealed ambition given to him by nature.

But in the gymnasium he developed a talent for imitating - a talent for strange, sometimes simply ridiculous exaggerations, which later spoiled a lot of blood for his friends. HELL. Galakhov, a writer and teacher who knew the writer well, later recalled: “Gogol lived with Pogodin, studying, as he said, the second volume of Dead Souls.” Shchepkin I went to talk with him almost every day. “Once,” he says, “I come to him and see him sitting at his desk so cheerful.” - “How is your health? It’s obvious that you are in a good mood.” - “You guessed it right: congratulate me: you finished your work.” Shchepkin almost started dancing with pleasure and began to congratulate the author in every possible way... When they met in the house Aksakova, Shchepkin, before lunch, addressing those present, said: “Congratulate Nikolai Vasilyevich. He finished the second part of Dead Souls. Gogol suddenly jumps up - “What nonsense? Who did you hear this from? - Shchepkin I was amazed. - “Yes, from yourself; You told me this morning.” - “Why, my dear, cross yourself: you probably ate too much henbane or saw it in a dream.” - The question arises: why did the person lie? Why did you deny your own words?”

In 1828 he came to St. Petersburg. I dreamed of becoming an actor, but I didn’t have the right voice.

Make a career in public service too Not succeeded: in the offices he had to rewrite countless business papers, and this was not Gogol’s nature. He brought the poem “Hanz Küchelgarten” to St. Petersburg, which he published with his own money under the pseudonym V. Alov. Too open imitation of Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and the German poet Voss did not, and could not, cause anything but ridicule among St. Petersburg writers.

A terribly annoyed Gogol decided to go to America, but only got as far as Lubeck. From here I returned back to St. Petersburg. The writer P. V. Annenkov described Gogol’s first visit to Pushkin: “He returned again to attack, boldly called and in response to his question: is the master at home?”, he heard the servant’s answer: “They are resting!” It was already late outside. Gogol asked with great sympathy: “Is it true that you worked all night?” “Well, I worked,” the servant answered, “I played cards.” Gogol admitted that this was the first blow dealt to the school’s idealization of him. He could not imagine Pushkin any other way until he was constantly surrounded by a cloud of inspiration.”

Prashkevich G.M., Red Sphinx. History of Russian science fiction from V.F. Odoevsky to Boris Stern, Novosibirsk, “Svinin and Sons”, 2009, p. 39-40.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born in difficult family. The writer's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, also had the ability to literary work, wrote short plays for home theater and was an excellent storyteller. It was he who instilled in his son a love of literature and theater. But Vasily Afanasyevich was a very sick person. He died when the future great Russian writer was only 15. This left a certain mark on Gogol’s worldview.

Mother, Maria Ivanovna (before marriage - Kosyarovskaya), came from large family potchmaster. She was distinguished by an extremely complex character, increased anxiety, impressionability and mystical exaltation. There were several mentally ill people in Maria Ivanovna’s family. There is a possibility that she may have inherited certain personality traits from them.

Maria Ivanovna instilled her belief in everything mystical in her offspring, of whom she had 12. The writer’s mother lost many children while they were still alive. early age, which did not have the best effect on the woman’s mental state. Not only was she extremely superstitious and believed in everything otherworldly, but she also sometimes behaved strangely. For example, I told my friends that Nikolai Vasilyevich is the author of most modern inventions.

Writer's personal life

It is not surprising that Nikolai Vasilyevich was deeply imbued with faith in everything mystical and was also obsessed with the fear of death. In recent years, these personality traits have become dominant. In his youth, the writer, like his anxious mother, was strikingly different from the general mass of his peers with some character quirks. He was very reserved and secretive. He was prone to unexpected and dangerous tricks. The students of the Nizhyn gymnasium, where he studied, called Nikolai Vasilyevich “beech.”

Gogol grew up vulnerable and terribly impractical, not adapted to ordinary life person. Being a brilliant writer, Nikolai Vasilyevich did not have his own home all his life. And he died in someone else’s - in the mansion of Count Tolstoy in Moscow. As required by law, after the writer’s death an inventory of his property was made. Of all the “wealth” the deceased had only books, badly worn clothes, a stack of manuscripts and a gold watch donated by Zhukovsky (in memory of Pushkin). The total cost of the property is 43.88 rubles.

Gogol not only died in poverty. He lived as an ascetic, remaining alone all his life. At the same time, he often helped young writers in need. Nikolai Vasilyevich’s ordinary human affection was directed towards his selflessly beloved sisters and mother. Gogol never married and had no children. And yet there were 2 women in his life who awakened feelings of love.

Favorite women of Nikolai Vasilyevich

Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset

Gogol was not a charming man. Short and rather awkward, with a long nose, he could hardly claim to be popular with the ladies. And because of his views and habit of living in poverty, he simply could not afford to start a family. And yet the writer loved. One of his favorite women was the imperial maid of honor, the beauty and cleverness of Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset.

Dark-skinned, black-eyed Sashenka was friends with many writers and prominent personalities of that time. She even inspired many: she was a real muse of Lermontov and Vyazemsky, Pushkin and, of course, Gogol himself. The latter was introduced to the maid of honor by Zhukovsky. The pretty beauty immediately won Gogol's heart.

A touching and tender relationship began between them. Nikolai Vasilyevich corresponded with Alexandra, shared with her his writing ideas, plans, and discussed works that had just come out of his pen. But he did not even dare to talk to the girl about his love. She intuitively felt that she was loved by Gogol, and responded to the writer with the most tender affection. But he was not a worthy match for such a high-ranking person, so there was no talk of any reciprocity or physical love.

Sashenka married a rich and influential official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nikolai Smirnov. The husband was not only a high-ranking person, but also owned a huge Spasskoye estate near Moscow. According to the world, the maid of honor made a brilliant part.

Maria Sinelnikova

The second woman who touched the writer’s heart was his cousin Maria Sinelnikova. She was married off early, but the couple's family life did not work out. Maria left her husband and moved to her Kharkov estate, Vlasovka. Left alone, she began to go out into the world. Once, during an illness, she was visited by relatives - her aunt and her adult children, one of whom was Nikolai Vasilyevich.