Gogol Nikolai Vasilievich personal life children. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich

(1809-1852) - one of the greatest writers of Russian literature, whose influence determines its newest character and reaches to the present moment. He was born on March 19, 1809 in the town of Sorochintsy (on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts) and came from an old Little Russian family (see below); in the troubled times of Little Russia, some of his ancestors molested the Polish gentry, and even Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich, wrote in an official paper that "his ancestors, with the surname G., of the Polish nation", although he himself was a real Little Russian and others considered him prototype of the hero of "Old World Landowners". Great-grandfather, Jan G., a pupil of the Kyiv Academy, "went out to the Russian side", settled in the Poltava region, and the nickname "Gogol-Yanovsky" came from him. G. himself, apparently, did not know about the origin of this increase and subsequently rejected it, saying that the Poles invented it. Father G., Vas. Afanasyevich (see above), died when his son was 15 years old; but it is believed that the stage activity of the father, who was a man of a cheerful nature and a wonderful storyteller, did not remain without influence on the tastes of the future writer, who showed an early penchant for the theater. Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of Little Russian life, pan and peasant. In these impressions was the root of Gogol's later Little Russian stories, his historical and ethnographic interests; subsequently, from St. Petersburg, G. constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his Little Russian stories. The influence of the mother is attributed to the inclinations of religiosity, which subsequently took possession of the whole being of G., as well as the shortcomings of education: the mother surrounded him with real adoration, and this could be one of the sources of his conceit, which, on the other hand, was early generated by the instinctive consciousness of the genius power lurking in him . At the age of ten, G. was taken to Poltava for preparation at the gymnasium, to one of the local teachers; then he entered the gymnasium of higher sciences in Nizhyn (from May 1821 to June 1828), where he was first a private student, then a boarder at the gymnasium. G. was not a diligent student, but had an excellent memory, in a few days he prepared for exams and moved from class to class; he was very weak in languages ​​and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature. Apparently, the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences, which at first was badly organized, was also to blame for the poor teaching; for example, the teacher of literature was an admirer of Kheraskov and Derzhavin and an enemy of the latest poetry, especially Pushkin. The shortcomings of the school were made up for by self-education in a friendly circle, where there were people who shared with G. literary interests (Vysotsky, who apparently had a considerable influence on him then; A. S. Danilevsky, who remained his friend for life, like N. Prokopovich; Nestor Kukolnik, with whom, however, G. never got along). The comrades subscribed to magazines; started their own handwritten magazine, where G. wrote a lot in verse. With literary interests, a love for the theater also developed, where G., already distinguished by unusual comedy, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). G.'s youthful experiences evolved in the style of romantic rhetoric - not in the style of Pushkin, whom G. already admired then, but rather in the style of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. The death of his father was a heavy blow to the entire family. Worries about affairs also fall on G.; he gives advice, reassures the mother, must think about the future organization of his own affairs. By the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of a wide social activity, which, however, he does not see at all in the literary field; no doubt under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to come forward and benefit society in a service for which in fact he was completely incapable. Thus plans for the future were unclear; but it is curious that G. had a deep confidence that he would have a wide field; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what simple "existents" are content with, as he puts it, as most of his Nizhyn comrades were. In December 1828 G. went to St. Petersburg. Here, for the first time, a cruel disappointment awaited him: his modest means ended up in big city very scarce; brilliant hopes were not realized as soon as he expected. His letters home during that time are a mixture of this disappointment and broad expectations for the future, albeit vague. In reserve he had a lot of character and practical enterprise: he tried to enter the stage, become an official, surrender to literature. He was not accepted as an actor; the service was so empty of content that he immediately became weary of it; the more attracted his literary field. In Petersburg, for the first time, he found himself in a Little Russian circle, partly from his former comrades. He found that Little Russia arouses interest in society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native Little Russia, and from here arose the first plans for a work that was supposed to give an outcome to the need for artistic creativity, and at the same time bring practical benefits: these were the plans for Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. But before that, under the pseudonym of V. Alov, he published that romantic idyll "Hanz Kühelgarten" (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and the hero of which was given those ideal dreams and aspirations, which he himself was fulfilled in last years of Nizhyn life. Soon after the publication of the book, he himself destroyed it when the critics reacted unfavorably to his work. In a restless search for the business of life, G. at that time went abroad, by sea to Lübeck, but a month later he returned again to St. to some kind of hopeless love: in reality, he fled from himself, from the discord of his lofty and arrogant dreams with practical life. "He was drawn to some fantastic country of happiness and reasonable productive labor," says his biographer; America seemed to him to be such a country. In fact, instead of America, he got into the service of the department of appanages (April, 1830) and remained there until 1832. Even earlier, one circumstance had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity: it was a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin. The failure of the Hanz Küchelgarten was already some indication of the need for another literary path; but even earlier, from the first months of 1828, G. besieged his mother with requests to send him information about Little Russian customs, traditions, costumes, as well as to send "notes kept by the ancestors of some old family, ancient manuscripts," etc. All this was material for future stories from Little Russian life and legends, which became the first beginning of his literary glory. He already took some part in the publications of that time: at the beginning of 1830, in the old "Notes of the Fatherland" by Svinin, "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" was printed with re-editing; at the same time (1829) "Sorochinsky Fair" and "May Night" were started or written. G. published other works then in the publications of Baron Delvig, Literary Gazette and Northern Flowers, where, for example, a chapter from the historical novel Hetman was placed. Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received G. with great cordiality: apparently, the mutual sympathy of people related by love for art, by religiosity, inclined towards mysticism, showed up between them from the first time - after that they became very close. Zhukovsky handed over the young man to Pletnev with a request to attach him, and indeed, already in February 1831, Pletnev recommended G. to the post of teacher at the Patriot Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Having learned closer G., Pletnev waited for the opportunity to "bring him under the blessing of Pushkin": this happened in May of the same year. The entry of G. into this circle, who soon appreciated in him a great novice talent, had a great influence on his entire fate. Before him finally opened up the prospect of broad activities, which he dreamed of - but in the field not official, but literary. In material terms, G. could be helped by the fact that, in addition to a place at the institute, Pletnev gave him private classes with the Longinovs, Balabins, Vasilchikovs; but the main thing was the moral influence that G. met in the new environment. He entered the circle of people who stood at the head of Russian fiction: his long-standing poetic aspirations could now develop in all their breadth, an instinctive understanding of art could become a deep consciousness; Pushkin's personality made an extraordinary impression on him and forever remained an object of worship for him. Service to art became for him a high and strict moral duty, the requirements of which he tried to fulfill sacredly. Hence, among other things, 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 very meager knowledge taken out of school: his observation becomes deeper, and artistic creativity increased with each new work. Zhukovsky G. met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic; in the latter, he began a relationship that later played a significant role in his life, for example. with the Vielgorskys; at the Balabins, he met with the brilliant maid of honor A. O. Rosetti, later Smirnova. The horizon of his life observations expanded, long-standing aspirations received soil, and G.'s high concept of his destiny already now fell into extreme conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublime idealism, on the other, there was already the possibility of those deep mistakes that marked recent years his life.

This time was the most active era of his work. After small works, partly named above, his first major literary work, which marked the beginning of his fame, was "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka. Stories published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank", published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (in the first were placed "Sorochinsky Fair", "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala", "May Night, or a Drowned Woman", "The Missing Letter"; in the second - "The Night Before Christmas", "A Terrible Revenge, an Old True Story", "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His aunt", "The Enchanted Place"). It is known what impression these stories made on Pushkin, depicting pictures of Little Russian life in an unprecedented way, shining with gaiety and subtle humor; for the first time, the full depth of this talent, capable of great creations, was not understood. The next collections were first "Arabesques", then "Mirgorod", both published in 1835 and compiled partly from articles published in 1830-1834, partly from new works that appeared here for the first time. G.'s literary fame is now firmly established. He grew up in the eyes of his inner circle, and especially in the sympathy of the younger literary generation; it already discerned in him a great force which was to make a revolution in the course of our literature. Meanwhile, in the personal life of G., events were taking place that in various ways influenced the internal warehouse of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was at home for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The path lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: Pogodin, Maksimovich, Shchepkin, S. T. Aksakov. At first, his stay at home surrounded him with impressions of his beloved environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household affairs were upset; G. himself was no longer the enthusiastic young man he had left his homeland: life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and to see behind its outer shell its often sad, even tragic basis. Soon his "Evenings" began to seem to him a superficial youthful experience, the fruit of that "youth during which no questions come to mind." Little Russian life even now provided material for his imagination, but the mood was already different: in the stories of Mirgorod this sad note constantly sounds, reaching high pathos. Returning to St. Petersburg, G. worked hard on his works: it was generally the most active time of his creative activity; he continued, at the same time, to make plans for life. From the end of 1833, he was carried away by an idea as unrealizable as his previous plans for the service were: it seemed to him that he could enter the scientific field. At that time, the opening of the Kyiv University was being prepared, and he dreamed of taking the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriot Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; G. thought to settle with him in Kyiv, he wanted to invite Pogodin there as well; in Kyiv, he finally imagined Russian Athens, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in world history, and at the same time studying Little Russian antiquity. To his chagrin, it turned out that the chair of history had been given to another person; but on the other hand, he was soon offered the same department at St. Petersburg University, thanks, of course, to the influence of his high literary friends. He really took this pulpit; once or twice he managed to give an effective lecture, but then the task proved beyond his strength, and he himself resigned from the professorship in 1835. It was, of course, a great presumption; but his guilt was not so great, if we recall that G.'s plans did not seem strange either to his friends, among whom were Pogodin and Maksimovich, the professors themselves, or to the Ministry of Education, which found it possible to give a professorship to a young man who ended the course in half gymnasiums; the entire level of university science at that time was still so low. In 1832, his work was somewhat suspended due to all sorts of household and personal chores; but already in 1833 he was again hard at work, and the result of these years were the two collections mentioned above. First came "Arabesques" (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; about architecture; about Bryullov's painting; about teaching general history; a look at the state of Little Russia; about Little Russian songs, etc. ), but at the same time new stories: "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Notes of a Madman". Then, in the same year, "Mirgorod. Tales serving as a continuation of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" was published (two hours, St. Petersburg, 1835). Here was placed whole line works in which new striking features of G.'s talent were revealed. In the first part of "Mirgorod" appeared "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba"; in the second - "Viy" and "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich." "Taras Bulba" appeared here in the first essay, which was later developed by G. much more widely (1842). These first thirties include the ideas of some other works of G., such as the famous "Overcoat", "Carriage", perhaps "Portrait" in its reworked version; these works appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); a later stay in Italy includes "Rome" in Pogodin's "Moskvityanin" (1842). By 1834, the first concept of the Inspector General is also attributed. The surviving manuscripts of G. generally indicate that he worked extremely carefully on his works: from what survived from these manuscripts, it is clear how the work in its finished form known to us grew gradually from the original sketch, becoming more and more complicated with details and finally reaching that amazing artistic fullness and vitality, with which we know them at the end of a process that sometimes dragged on for years. It is known that the main plot of The Inspector General, like the plot of Dead Souls, was reported by G. Pushkin; but it is clear that in both cases the whole creation, from the plan to the last details, was the fruit of own creativity G: an anecdote that could be told in a few lines turned into a rich work of art. "The Inspector", it seems, in particular caused G. this 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 G. to an extraordinary degree: the comedy did not go out of his head; he was tormented by the thought of being face to face with society; he took great pains to ensure that the play was performed in complete accordance with his own idea of ​​characters and action; the production met various obstacles, including censorship, and finally could be realized only at the behest of Emperor Nicholas. The Inspector General had an extraordinary effect: the Russian stage had never seen anything like it; the reality of Russian life was conveyed with such force and truth that although, as G. himself said, it was only about six provincial officials who turned out to be rogues, the whole society rebelled against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole the order of life in which it itself exists. But, on the other hand, comedy was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by those best elements of society who were aware of the existence of these shortcomings and the need for denunciation, and especially by the young literary generation, who saw here once again, as in the previous works of a beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new, emerging period of Russian art and Russian society. This last impression was probably not entirely clear to G.: he did not yet set himself on such broad social aspirations or hopes as his young admirers; he was completely on the point of view of his friends in the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in the given order of things, and for this reason he was especially struck by the cries of condemnation that rose up against him. 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 sectors of society, and on the other hand, expressed his own thoughts about the great significance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans came from G. even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833 he was absorbed in the comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree"; it was not finished by him, but its material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "Morning of a Businessman", "Litigation", "Lakey's" and "Fragment". The first of these plays appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836), the rest in his first collected works (1842). In the same meeting appeared for the first time "Marriage", the first drafts of which date back to the same 1833, and "Players", conceived in the mid-thirties. Tired of the intensified work of recent years and the moral anxieties that the "Inspector General" cost him, G. decided to rest away from this crowd of society, under a different sky. In June 1836, he went abroad, where he then stayed, with interruptions of visits to Russia, for many years. Stay in" beautiful far away"for the first time strengthened and calmed him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, "Dead Souls" - but it became the germ and deeply fatal phenomena. Dissociation from life, increased withdrawal into oneself, exaltation of religious feeling led to pietistic exaggeration, which ended with his last book, which amounted, as it were, to a denial of his own artistic work ... Having gone abroad, he lived in Germany, 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 struck him terribly. In March 1837, he was in Rome, which became extremely fond of him and became for him, as it were, a second homeland. European political and social life has always remained alien and completely unfamiliar to G.; he was attracted by nature and works of art, and the then Rome only represented these interests. G. studied the monuments of antiquity, art galleries , visited the workshops of artists, admired the life of the people and loved to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends. But in Rome he worked hard: the main subject of this work was "Dead Souls", conceived back in St. Petersburg in 1835; here, in Rome, he finished "The Overcoat", wrote the story "Anunziata", later altered into "Rome", wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, however, he destroyed after several alterations. In the autumn of 1839, together with Pogodin, he went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was greeted with enthusiasm by the Aksakovs. Then he went to Petersburg, where he had to take the sisters from the institute; then he returned to Moscow again; in St. Petersburg and Moscow he read the completed chapters of Dead Souls to his closest friends. Having built some of his own affairs, G. 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 this first volume was ready. In September of this year, G. went to Russia to print his book. He again had to endure the severe anxieties that he had once experienced when staging The Inspector General on stage. The book was first presented to the Moscow censorship, which was going to ban it altogether; then the book was given to St. Petersburg censorship and, thanks to the participation of influential friends of G., was, with some exceptions, allowed. She was published in Moscow ("The Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls, a poem by N. G.", M. 1842). In June, G. went abroad again. This last stay abroad was the final turning point in the state of mind of G. 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 in him the pietistic trend, which was mentioned above, was developing more and more. A lofty idea of ​​his talent and the responsibility that lay with him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and look at life broadly, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by contemplation of God. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which still increased his religious mood; in his circle he found a favorable ground for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently instructed his friends, and finally came to the conclusion that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he now considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem is nothing more than a porch to the palace that is being built in it, now he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission. Once, in a moment of heavy reflection on the fulfillment of his duty, he burned the second volume of Dead Souls, offered it as a sacrifice to God, and the new content of the book, enlightened and purified, presented itself to his mind; it seemed to him that he now understood how to write in order to "direct the whole society towards the beautiful." A new work began, and in the meantime another thought occupied him: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful to him, and he decided to collect in one book everything he had written in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood and instructed to publish this Pletnev's book. These were "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (St. Petersburg, 1847). Most of the letters that make up this book refer to 1845 and 1846, the time when this mood G. reached its highest development. The book made a heavy impression even on G.'s personal friends with its tone of prophecy and teaching, the preaching of humility, because of which, however, one could see extreme self-conceit; condemnations of former works, in which Russian literature saw one of its best ornaments; complete approval of those social orders, the failure of which was clear to enlightened people without distinction of parties. But the impression of the book on G.'s literary admirers was depressing. The highest degree of indignation aroused by "Selected Places" was expressed in the well-known (unpublished in Russia) letter of Belinsky, to which G. did not know how to answer. Apparently, he was not fully aware of this meaning of his book. He partly explained the attacks on her by his own mistake, by exaggerating his teacher's tone, and by the fact that the censors did not let through several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by the calculations of parties and vanities. The public meaning of this controversy eluded him; he himself, having left Russia long ago, retained those indefinite social concepts that he had acquired in the old Pushkin circle, was alien to the literary and social ferment that had arisen since then and saw in it only the ephemeral disputes of writers. In a similar sense, he then wrote "Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls"; "The Examiner's Denouement", where he wanted to give a free artistic creation the strained character of some kind of moralizing allegory, and "Forewarning", 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 confess that a mistake had been made; even friends, like S. T. Aksakov, told him that the mistake was gross and pitiful; he himself confessed to Zhukovsky: "I swung in my book with such Khlestakov that I do not have the spirit to look into it." In his letters from 1847 there is no longer the former haughty tone of preaching and teaching; he saw that it was possible to describe Russian life only in the midst of it and by studying it. Religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue his work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to bow to the Holy Sepulcher. At the end of 1847 he moved to Naples and at the beginning of 1848 sailed to Palestine, from where he finally returned to Russia via Constantinople and Odessa. The stay in Jerusalem did not produce the effect he expected. “Never before have I been so little satisfied with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. and selfishness." G. calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; caught in the rain one day in Nazareth, he thought he was just sitting in Russia at the station. He spent the end of spring and summer in the village with his mother, and on September 1 he moved to Moscow; spent the summer of 1849 with Smirnova in the countryside and in Kaluga, where Smirnova's husband was governor; in the summer of 1850 he lived again with his family; then he lived for some time in Odessa, was once again at home, and in the autumn of 1851 he settled again in Moscow, where he lived in the house of c. A.P. Tolstoy. He continued to work on the second volume of "Dead Souls" and read excerpts from it from the Aksakovs, but it continued the same painful struggle between the artist and the pietist that had been going on in him since the early forties. As was his wont, he redid what he had written many times, probably succumbing to one or another mood. Meanwhile, his health was getting weaker and weaker; in January 1852, he was struck by the death of Khomyakov's wife, who was the sister of his friend Yazykov; he was seized by the fear of death; he gave up literary studies, began to fast at Shrove Tuesday; One day, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die. One night, in the midst of religious contemplation, he was seized by religious horror and doubt that he had not so fulfilled the duty imposed on him by God; he woke the servant, ordered him to open the chimney of the fireplace, and taking the papers from the briefcase, burned them. In the morning, when his consciousness cleared up, he repentantly told about this gr. Tolstoy and believed that this was done under the influence evil spirit; since then, he fell into gloomy despondency and died a few days later, on February 21, 1852. He was buried in Moscow, in the Danilov Monastery, and on his monument are the words of the prophet Jeremiah: "I will laugh at my bitter word."

The study of the historical significance of Gogol has not been completed to this day. Present period Russian literature has not yet emerged from under his influence, and his activities represent a variety of aspects that emerge with the course of history itself. At the first time, when the last facts of Gogol's activity took place, it was believed that it represented two periods: one, where he served the progressive aspirations of society, and the other, when he openly took the side of immovable conservatism. A more careful study of Gogol's biography, especially his correspondence, which revealed his inner life, showed that no matter how, apparently, the motives of his stories, "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls", on the one hand, and "Selected Places" - with on the other hand, in the very personality of the writer there was not that turning point that was supposed to be in it, one direction was not abandoned and another, opposite, was adopted; on the contrary, it was one whole inner life, where already at an early time there were the makings of later phenomena, where the main feature of this life did not stop - service to art; but this personal life was broken by the contradictions with which she had to reckon in the spiritual principles of life and in reality. G. was not a thinker, but he was a great artist. About the properties of his talent, he himself said: “The only thing that worked out well for me was what I took from reality, from data known to me” ..... “My imagination still hasn’t given me a single wonderful character and has created not a single thing that my gaze in nature has not noticed somewhere. It could not have been easier and stronger to indicate the deep foundation of realism that lay in his talent; but the great property of his talent lay in the fact that he erected these features of reality "into the pearl of creation." And the faces depicted by him were not a repetition of reality: they were whole artistic types in which human nature was deeply understood. His heroes, as rarely in any other Russian writer, became household names, and before him in our literature there was no example of such an amazing inner life being revealed in the most modest human existence. Another personal feature of G. was that from the earliest years, from the first glimpses of his young consciousness, he was excited by lofty aspirations, the desire to serve society with something lofty and beneficial; from an early age, he was hated by limited complacency, devoid of inner content, and this trait later, in the thirties, showed itself with a conscious desire to denounce social ulcers and corruption, and it also developed into high performance about the meaning of art, standing above the crowd as the highest enlightenment of the ideal ... But G. was a man of his time and society. He took little out of school; no wonder that the young man did not have a certain way of thinking; but for this there was no deposit and in his further education. His opinions on the fundamental questions of morality and social life remained even now patriarchal and simple-hearted. A powerful talent was maturing in him - his feeling and observation deeply penetrated into vital phenomena- but his thought did not dwell on the causes of these phenomena. He was early filled with a generous and noble desire for human good, sympathy for human suffering; he found for their expression sublime poetic language, deep humor and stunning pictures; but these aspirations remained at the level of feeling, artistic insight, ideal abstraction - in the sense that, with all their strength, G. did not translate them into the practical idea of ​​\u200b\u200bimproving the social, and when they began to show him a different point of view, he could no longer understand it. .. All the fundamental ideas of G. about life and literature were the ideas of the Pushkin circle. G. entered it as a young man, and the faces of this circle were already people of mature development, a more extensive education, and a significant position in society; Pushkin and Zhukovsky are at the height of their poetic fame. The old legends of Arzamas developed into a cult of abstract art, which eventually led to a removal from the questions of real life, with which the conservative view in public subjects naturally merged. The circle bowed before the name of Karamzin, was carried away by the glory of Russia, believed in its future greatness, had no doubts about the present, and, indignant at shortcomings that could not be overlooked, attributed them only to a lack of virtue in people, to the failure to comply with laws. By the end of the thirties, even during Pushkin's lifetime, a turn began, showing that his school had ceased to satisfy the new aspirations of society that had arisen. Later, the circle more and more retired from new trends and was at enmity with them; according to his ideas, literature should have hovered in lofty regions, shunned the prose of life, stood “above” social noise and struggle: this condition could only make its field one-sided and not very wide ... The artistic feeling of the circle was, however, strong and appreciated G.'s peculiar talent, the circle also took care of his personal affairs ... Pushkin expected great artistic merit from G.'s works, but he hardly expected them public interest how later Pushkin's friends did not fully appreciate him and how G. himself was ready to deny him ... Later G. became close to the Slavophile circle, or actually with Pogodin and Shevyrev, S. T. Aksakov and Yazykov; but he remained completely alien to the theoretical content of Slavophilism, and it had no effect on the form of his work. In addition to personal affection, he found here an ardent sympathy for his works, as well as for his religious and dreamy-conservative ideas. But later, in the elder Aksakov, he also met with a rebuff to the mistakes and extremes of Selected Places ... The sharpest moment of the collision of G.'s theoretical ideas with reality and the aspirations of the most enlightened part of society was Belinsky's letter; but it was already too late, and the last years of G.'s life passed, as was said, in a hard and fruitless struggle between the artist and the pietist. This internal struggle of the writer is not only of interest to the personal fate of one of the greatest writers of Russian literature, but also to the broad interest of a socio-historical phenomenon: the struggle of moral and social elements - the prevailing conservatism, and the demands of personal and social freedom and justice - was reflected in the personality and activities of G. , the struggle of old tradition and critical thought, pietism and free art. For G. himself, this struggle remained unresolved; he was broken by this internal discord, but nevertheless the significance of the main works of G. for literature was extremely deep. The results of his influence are reflected in many different ways in all subsequent literature. Apart from the purely artistic merits of performance, which after Pushkin still raised the level of possible artistic perfection in later writers, his deep psychological analysis was unparalleled in previous literature and opened up a wide path of observations, of which so many were made later. Even his first works, so severely later condemned by him "Evenings", no doubt, did a lot to strengthen that loving attitude towards the people, which developed later. "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" were again unprecedented in this measure until then, a fiery protest against the insignificance and corruption of public life; this protest broke out of personal moral idealism, had no definite theoretical basis, but this did not prevent him from making a striking moral and social impression. historical question about this meaning of G., as has been noted, has not yet been exhausted. They call it prejudice the opinion that H. was among us the initiator of realism or naturalism, that he made a revolution in our literature, the direct consequence of which is modern literature; they say that this merit is the work of Pushkin, and G. only followed the general course of the then development and represents only one of the steps in the approximation of literature from sky-high heights to reality, that the brilliant accuracy of his satire was purely instinctive and his works are striking in the absence of any conscious ideals - as a result of which he later became entangled in the labyrinth of mystical-ascetic speculations; that the ideals of later writers have nothing to do with this, and therefore G. with his brilliant laugh and his immortal creations should not be put ahead of our century. But there is an error in these judgments. First of all, there is a difference between taking, manner naturalism and the content of literature. A certain degree of naturalism among us goes back to the eighteenth century; G. was not an innovator here, although even here he went further than Pushkin in approaching reality. But the main thing was in that bright new feature of the content, which before him, to this extent, did not exist in literature. Pushkin in his stories was a pure epic; G. - at least semi-instinctively - is a writer social. Needless to say, his theoretical outlook remained obscure; a historically noted feature of such genius talents is that they often, without realizing themselves in their work, are profound expressions of the aspirations of their time and society. Artistic merits alone cannot explain either the enthusiasm with which his works were received by the younger generations, or the hatred with which they were met in the conservative crowd of society. What explains the internal tragedy, in the cat. G. spent the last years of his life, if not a contradiction of his theoretical worldview, his repentant conservatism, with that extraordinary social influence of his works, which he did not expect and did not expect? G.'s works precisely coincided with the emergence of this social interest, which they greatly served and from which literature no longer came out. The great importance of G. is also confirmed by negative facts. In 1852, for a small article in memory of G. Turgenev, he was arrested in part; censors were ordered to strictly censor everything that is written about G.; it was even declared a complete ban on talking about G. The second edition of the "Works", begun in 1851 by G. himself and not completed due to these censorship obstacles, could only come out in 1855-1856 ... G.'s connection with subsequent literature is not is subject to doubt. The defenders of the mentioned opinion, which limits the historical significance of G., themselves admit that Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" seem to be a continuation of "Dead Souls". The "spirit of humanity" that distinguishes the works of Turgenev and other writers new era, in the environment of our literature, no one else brought up G., for example, in "The Overcoat", "Notes of a Madman", "Dead Souls". In the same way, the depiction of the negative aspects of landowner life is reduced to G. The first work of Dostoevsky adjoins G. to the point of obviousness, etc. In further activity, new writers made independent contributions to the content of literature, just as life posed and developed new questions - but the first impulses were given by Gogol.

By the way, definitions of G. were made from the point of view of his Little Russian origin: the latter explained, to a certain extent, his attitude towards Russian (Great Russian) life. G.'s attachment to his homeland was very strong, especially in the early years of his literary activity and up to the completion of the second edition of Taras Bulba, but the satirical attitude to Russian life, no doubt, is explained not by its tribal properties, but by the whole nature of its internal development. . There is no doubt, however, that tribal traits also affected the nature of G.'s talent. These are the features of his humor, which still remains the only one of its kind in our literature. The two main branches of the Russian tribe happily merged in this talent into one, highly remarkable phenomenon.

Editions. Above are the main editions of Gogol's works, as they appeared during his career. The first collected works were made by himself in 1842. The second he began to prepare in 1851; it was already finished by his heirs: here for the first time the second part of "Dead Souls" appeared. In the edition of Kulish, in six volumes, 1857, for the first time appeared an extensive collection of Gogol's letters (the last two volumes), which has not been repeated since. In the edition prepared by Chizhov (1867), "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" are printed in full, with the inclusion of what was not allowed by the censors in 1847. The last, 10th edition, published since 1889 under the editorship of N. S. Tikhonravov, is the best of all: it is a scholarly edition with a text corrected according to Gogol's manuscripts and own editions, and with extensive comments, where the history of each from the works of Gogol according to the surviving manuscripts, according to the evidence of his correspondence and other historical data. The material of the letters collected by Kulish and the text of G.'s writings began to grow, especially since the sixties: "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin" based on a manuscript found in Rome ("R. archive", 1865); unpublished from "Selected Places" first in "R. arch." (1866), then in the edition of Chizhov; about G.'s comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree", Rodislavsky, in "Conversations in the General. Lovers of Russian Literature" (M. 1871). Recently, a number of studies of G.'s texts and his letters: articles by V. I. Shenrok in Vestnik Evropy, Artist, R. Starine; Ms. E. S. Nekrasova in "R. Starina" and especially the comments of Mr. Tikhonravov in the 10th edition and in a special edition of "The Government Inspector" (M. 1886). For letters, see Mr. Shenrock's "Index to Gogol's Letters" (2nd ed., Moscow, 1888), which is necessary when reading them in Kulish's edition, where they are interspersed with deaf, arbitrarily taken letters instead of names and other censorship defaults. "Letters of G. to Prince V. F. Odoevsky" (in the "R. archive", 1864); "to Malinovsky" (ibid., 1865); "to Prince P. A. Vyazemsky" (ibid., 1865, 1866, 1872); "to I. I. Dmitriev and P. A. Pletnev" (ibid., 1866); "to Zhukovsky" (ibid., 1871); "to MP Pogodin" dated 1833 (not 1834; ibid., 1872; fuller than Kulish, V, 174); "Note to S. T. Aksakov" ("R. antiquity", 1871, IV); Letter to the actor Sosnitsky about the "Inspector General", 1846 (ibid., 1872, VI); Gogol's letters to Maksimovich, published by S. I. Ponomarev, etc.

Biographical and critical materials. Belinsky, "Works", vol. I, III, VI, XI and many references in general. - "The experience of the biography of G., with the inclusion of up to forty of his letters", Op. Nikolai M. (Kulish, St. Petersburg, 1854), and another, widespread publication: "Notes on the life of G., compiled from the memoirs of his friends and from his own letters" by P. A. Kulish. Two volumes, with a portrait (St. Petersburg, 1856-57). But the same author, who was a panegyrist here, rebelled against the Little Russian stories of G. in R. Conversation (1857) and especially in Osnova (1861-62), to which Maksimovich answered him at the same time in The Day. - N. G. Chernyshevsky, "Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature" ("Contemporary", 1855-56, and separately, St. Petersburg. 1892); about the publication of "Works and letters of G." Mr. Kulish, "Modern." (1857, No. 8), and in "Critical Articles" (St. Petersburg, 1892). - "Memories of G." Longinov, in "Sovremennik" 1854, No. 3. - "Memoirs about G. (Rome) in the summer of 1841" by P. Annenkov, "Bibl. for reading", 1857, and in "Memoirs and critical. Essays" , vol. I. (St. Petersburg, 1877). - "Resume." L. Arnoldi, "R. Vestn." 1862, No. 1, and in the new separate edition. - "Resume." J. Grota, "R. archive", 1864. - "Recovery." (about the Roman life of G.) M. Pogodin, "R. arch.", 1865. - "Recollection of the gr. V. A. Sollogub", ibid., 1865, and in a separate edition (St. Petersburg. 1887). - "Resume." N. V. Berg, "R. star.", 1872, V. - The correspondence of G.'s friends concerning his affairs is important: Zhukovsky, Pletnev, Ms. Smirnova, Prince. Vyazemsky, and their biographies. - O. N. Smirnova "Etudes et Souvenirs" in "Nouvelle Revue", 1885, book. 11-12. - "Childhood and youth of G." Al. Koyalovich, in "Moscow. collection." Sharapova (M. 1887). - "The appearance in print of the works of G." in "Research and articles on Russian literature and education." Sukhomlinov, vol. II (St. Petersburg, 1889). - "The story of my acquaintance with G." S. T. Aksakov, "R. arch.", 1890, and separately (see "Vestn. Evr.", 1890, book 9). - "G. and Ivanov" by E. Nekrasova, "Vestn. Evr., 1883, book 12; her own, "On G.'s relationship to gr. A.P. Tolstoy and gr. A. E. Tolstoy", in "Collection in memory of S. A. Yuriev" (M., 1891). - "G. and Shchepkin" N. S. Tikhonravova, "Artist", 1890, No. 1 - "Memories of G." book N. V. Repnina, "R. Archive", 1890, No. 10. - About "Dead Souls" (the experience of revealing their whole plan) by Alexei Veselovsky, "Vestn. Evr.", 1891, No. 3. - P.V. Vladimirova, "From G.'s student years." (Kiev, 1890). - "Essay on the development of G.'s creativity." (Kiev, 1891). - "On G.'s attitude to mother" Ms. Belozerskaya, "R. antiquity", 1887; Ms. Chernitskaya about the same, "Histor. Bulletin", 1889, June; M. A. Trakhimovsky, "Rus. antiquity", 1888. - "G. in his letters" Or. Miller, in "R. antiquity", 1875, No. 9, 10, 12. - A number of biographical works of V. I. Shenrok are combined in "Materials for the biography of G." (volumes one and two, M. 1892-1893). Finally, we note the new biographical messages of O. N. Smirnova, in "Sev. Vestn." (1893). - On the historical significance of Gogol, compare also Skabichevsky, "Works" (vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1890, about the historical novel), and "The History of the Newest Russian. literature" (St. Petersburg, 1891); Pypin, "Characteristics of literary. opinions of the 1820s-50s" (2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1890). A review of the literature on Gogol was made by Mr. Ponomarev in the "Izvestia" of the Nezhin Philological Institute for 1882 and in the "Bibliographic Index on N . V. Gogol from 1829 to 1882. "Gorozhansky, in the appendix to" Russian. thoughts" (1883); finally, briefly - in the book of Mr. Shenrock.

G.'s translations on foreign languages(French, German, English, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech) are listed in Mezhov's Systematic Catalog (from 1825 to 1869; St. Petersburg, 1869). Better known: "Nouvelles russes, trad. par L. Viardot" (Par., 1845-1853), "Nouvelles, trad. par Mérimée" (Par., 1852); "Les Ames Mortes, par Moreau" (Par., 1858); "Russische Novellen, von Bode" (translated from Viardot, Lpts., 1846); "Die Todten Seelen, von Löbenstein" (Lpts., 1846); "Der Revisor, von Viedert" (Berl., 1854), etc. Finally, translations into Little Russian by Olena Pchilka, M. Staritsky, Loboda and others.

A. Pypin.

(Brockhaus)

Gogol, Nicholas Vasilevich

Famous Russian writer (1809-1852). The mention of Jews and Jewish images found in his works - mainly in "Taras Bulba" and so called. "Excerpts from an unfinished story" - captured by the ordinary anti-Semite epoch. This is not a real image, but caricatures, appearing mainly to make the reader laugh; petty thieves, traitors and ruthless extortionists, Gogol's Jews are devoid of any human feelings. Andrey, the son of Taras Bulba, betrayed his homeland - father condemns him to death for this infamy, but the Jew Yankel does not understand the very horror of betrayal: "He is better there, and he moved there," he says calmly. Seeing Bulba, who had once saved him from inevitable death, the Jew first of all thought that the head of his savior was valued; he was ashamed of his self-interest and "struggled to suppress in himself the eternal thought of gold, which, like a worm, encircles the soul of a Jew"; however, the author leaves the reader in doubt: perhaps Yankel would have betrayed his savior if Bulba had not rushed to give him the two thousand chervonets promised by the Poles for his head. Dubious Reports of Jewish Leases Orthodox churches translated by G. into fiction twice with details that are not, of course, in any historical documents: a Jew puts a sign with "unclean hand" with chalk on holy Easter, Jewish women sew skirts for themselves from priestly cassocks, Jewish tax-farmers take away his unpaid money from a hundred-year-old Easter, etc. Rarely do those bloody retributions that the Jews in Ukraine were subjected to for their imaginary guilt cause human relation in Gogol: the infinite contempt that imprints his every word about the Jew, makes G. depict humorously the darkest tragedies of their existence. When the raging tyrants-Cossacks drown the Jews without any fault, only because their co-religionists were guilty of something somewhere, the author sees only "miserable faces, warped with fear" and ugly people "sliding under the skirts of their Jewish women." G., however, knows how the Ukrainian Jews paid for their natural position as trading intermediaries during the Cossack indignations. "A hair would now stand on end from those terrible signs of the ferocity of the semi-savage age, which the Cossacks brought everywhere." Beaten babies, circumcised breasts of women, skin torn from the knees of those released to freedom, in a word, "the Cossacks repaid their former debts with a large coin." True, G., through the mouth of a tipsy Pudok, seems to be joking at vulgar anti-Semite phobia: “Well, goodness, it’s not offensive? True, through the mouth of Yankel, he himself recalls some of the truths of trampled justice: "because everything that is good, everything falls on the Jew, because ... they think that he is not a man, if he is a Jew?" But the writer himself invested so little human in Jewish images that Yankel's reproach could be directed against him as well. Of course, when evaluating Gogol's attitude towards the Jews, one should not exaggerate its significance. Gogol's anti-Semitism has nothing individual, concrete, does not come from acquaintance with modern reality: it is a natural echo of the traditional theological idea of ​​​​the unknown world of Jewry, it is an old template according to which types of Jews were created in Russian and Jewish literature.

A. Gornfeld.

(Heb. enc.)

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich

One of the largest representatives of the local style of the 30s and early 40s. Genus. in Ukraine, in the town of Sorochintsy, on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod counties. The main stages of his life are as follows: he spends his childhood up to the age of 12 in the small estate of his father - Vasilievka, from 1821 to 1828 he studies at the Nizhinsky gymnasium of higher sciences, for seven years - with short breaks - lives in St. Petersburg; 1836-1849 spends, intermittently, abroad; from 1849 he settled in Moscow, where he lived until his death. G. himself later characterizes the situation of his estate life in his letter to Dmitriev, written from Vasilievka in the summer of 1832. ruined and unpaid arrears ... They begin to understand that it is time to take on manufactories and factories; but there is no capital, a happy thought slumbers, finally dies, and they (the landowners) scour with grief for hares ... Money is a complete rarity here. Gogol's departure to St. Petersburg was prompted by his rejection of the socially worthless and economically ruined small estate environment, whose representatives he contemptuously calls "existents." The Petersburg period is characterized by Gogol's acquaintance with the bureaucratic environment (service in the department of appanages from 1830 to 1832) and rapprochement with the large-scale and high society environment (Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Pletnev, etc.). Here G. publishes a number of works, has great success and finally comes to the conclusion that he was sent to earth to fulfill the divine will as a prophet and preacher of new truths. He leaves abroad due to fatigue and grief from theatrical intrigues and the noise raised around the comedy "Inspector General" staged on the Alexandria stage. Lives abroad, ch. arr. in Italy (in Rome), and is working there on the first part of "Dead Souls". In 1847 he published the didactic essay Selected passages from correspondence with friends. Abroad, he begins work on the second part of "Dead Souls", where he tries to portray the positive types of the local bureaucratic circle. Feeling the unbearableness of the task he had taken on, G. was looking for a way out in personal self-improvement. He is seized by religious and mystical moods, and for the purpose of spiritual renewal, he undertakes a journey to Palestine. The Moscow period is characterized by the continuation of the unsuccessful work on the second part of "Dead Souls" and the progressive mental and physical collapse of the writer's personality, finally ending with the tragic story of the burning of "Dead Souls" and death.

At the first glance at Gogol's work, we are struck by the variety of social groups as if they had nothing in common with each other. In 1830 the first work of G. appeared in print - an idyll from German life - "Hanz Kühelgarten"; from 1830-1834 a number of Ukrainian novels and short stories were created, united in collections - "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" and "Mirgorod". In 1839, a long-conceived and carefully edited novel from the same life, Taras Bulba, was published; in 1835, a colorful story from the life of the local environment "Carriage" appears; in 1842 - the comedy "Players"; in 1834-1842, chapters of the first part of "Dead Souls" were created one after another, which, with unprecedented breadth, covers the landlord life of the pre-reform province, and in addition a number of works from the life of the official circle; in 1834 the Notes of a Madman appeared, in 1835 the Nose, in 1836 the Inspector General, and in 1842 the Overcoat. During the same time, G. tries to portray intellectuals - writers and artists - in the stories "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Portrait". Since 1836, G. creates a series of sketches from the life of a large and high society environment. A number of unfinished works from the life of this circle appear: an excerpt from The Morning of a Businessman, Lakeyskaya, Litigation, the unfinished story Rome, and, finally, until 1852 - the year of his death - G. is working hard on the second part of The Dead shower", where most of the chapters are devoted to the image of a large circle. The genius of G., as it were, overcomes both chronological and social boundaries and supernatural power imagination broadly embraces both the past and the present.

However, this is only the first impression. With a more careful study of Gogol's work, this whole motley string of themes and images turns out to be connected by organic kinship, which grew up and developed on the same soil. This soil turns out to be a small estate, which raised and educated G. himself. Through all G.'s works, their characters, faces, scenes and movements, we are gradually confronted with the image of the small landowner of the pre-reform era in all its economic and psychological variations. The very external history of Gogol's creativity makes us feel this.

The largest and most significant work of G. - "Dead Souls" - is just dedicated to the image of the main layer of the small local environment, the image various types small landowners who have not broken their ties with the small estate and peacefully live out their lives in remote provincial estates.

G. extremely clearly shows the decomposition of local-patriarchal foundations. The extensive gallery of local "existents" bred here vividly illustrates all their social worthlessness. And the sensitive, dreamy Manilov, and the noisy, active Nozdryov, and the cold-blooded, judicious Sobakevich, and, finally, the most synthetic type of Gogol - Chichikov - they are all smeared with one world, they are all either mere idlers, or stupid, useless troublemakers. At the same time, they are completely unaware of their worthlessness, but on the contrary, they are most often convinced that they are the "salt of the earth." This is where the whole comedy of their situation comes from, this is where Gogol's "bitter laughter" over his heroes comes from, which permeated all of his work. The worthlessness and conceit of G.'s heroes are more their misfortune than their fault: their behavior is dictated not so much by their personal qualities as by their social nature. Freed from all serious and responsible work, deprived of all creative significance, the local class in its mass became lazy and stupefied with idleness. His life, devoid of serious interests and concerns, turned into an idle vegetative existence. Meanwhile, this trifling life moved to the forefront, reigned like a lamp on a mountain. Only exceptional people from the landowner's environment guessed that such a life was not a lamp, but an oil lamp. And the ordinary, mass landowner, who served as the main object of Gogol's creativity, smoked the sky and at the same time looked around like a bright falcon.

The transition from local topics to bureaucratic topics took place in G. quite naturally, as a reflection of one of the paths of evolution of the local environment. The rebirth of a landowner into a city dweller - an official - was a fairly common occurrence in those days. It assumed ever larger proportions, depending on the growing ruin of the landowners' economy. The ruined and impoverished landowner joined the service in order to improve circumstances, gradually fledged in the service, striving to re-acquire a village and return to the bosom of his native local environment. There was a close connection between the local and bureaucratic environment. Both environments were in constant communication. The landowner could go and often went into the ranks of officials, the official could return again and often returned to the local milieu. As a member of the local environment, G. constantly came into contact with the bureaucratic environment. He himself served and, therefore, he himself experienced something of the psychology of this environment. It is not surprising that G. was an artist of the bureaucratic circle. The ease of transition from the image of the local to the image of the bureaucratic environment is very well illustrated by the story of the comedy "Marriage". This comedy was conceived by Gogol and sketched back in 1833 under the title "Grooms". Here the characters are all landowners, and the action is played out in the estate. In 1842, Gogol reworks the comedy for publication, introduces several new faces, but all the old ones are preserved, without changing at all in their characters. Only now they are all officials, and the action is played out in the city. Socio-economic kinship is inevitably associated with psychological kinship; That is why the psychology of the bureaucratic circle in its typical features was homogeneous with the psychology of the local circle. Comparing the local and bureaucratic heroes, we can already at the first glance establish that they are very close relatives. Among them, there are also the Manilovs, and the Sobakeviches, and the Nozdrevs. Official Podkolesin from the comedy "Marriage" is very close to Ivan Fedorovich Shponka; officials Kochkarev, Khlestakov and lieutenant Pirogov show us Nozdryov in official uniform; Ivan Pavlovich Fried eggs and the mayor Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky are distinguished by Sobakevich's temperament. However, the break with the landowner's estate, the flight to the city occurred not only for economic reasons and not only for officials. Along with the economic collapse, the primitive harmony of the local psyche was also shaken. Together with the invasion of money and exchange, which destroyed the serfdom natural economy, new books and new ideas invaded, penetrating into the most remote corners of the province. These ideas and books, in young and at least somewhat active minds, gave rise to an indefinite thirst for that new life that was spoken of in these books, gave rise to a vague impulse to leave the cramped estate for the unknown. new world where these ideas originated. Impulse turned into action, and there were individuals, though exceptional, who went in search of this new world. Most often, these searches led everything to the same bureaucratic swamp and ended with a return to the estate, when the so-called. "reasonable age". In exceptional cases, these seekers fell into the ranks of intelligent workers, writers and artists. Thus, a numerically insignificant group was created, in which, of course, the typical features of the local psyche were preserved, but the edge survived an extremely complex evolution and acquired its own special and sharply different physiognomy. Energetic work of thought, communication with the raznochintsy intelligentsia or, in case of success, with high-society circles, strongly responded to the psychology of this group. Here the break with the estate was much deeper and more decisive. The psychology of this group was also close to G. A brilliant artist of a small local environment could not fail to experience and reproduce all the ways in which his social group developed.

He portrayed her and joined the ranks of the urban intelligentsia. But he saw only these people from the small estate world in the world of the urban intelligentsia, creating images of two artists: the Manilov-like sensitive Piskarev and the Nozdrev-active Chertkov. The indigenous urban intelligentsia, the intelligentsia of the landlord elite and the professional bourgeois intelligentsia remained outside his field of vision. In general, a strong intellectual life remained outside the limits of Gogol's achievements precisely because the intellectual culture of the small local circle was rather elementary. This was the reason for G.'s weakness when he took on the image of the intelligentsia, but it was also the reason for that especially penetrating achievement in the psychology of an ordinary "existent" from the local and bureaucratic circle, which gave him the right to eternity as an artist of these circles.

In G.'s attempts to portray the circle of high society, the latter's similarity in typical features with the small local environment was reflected. It is undeniable, and G. clearly feels it. However, peering into the fragments created by G. and unfinished works from the life of the high society circle, you feel that in this area G. would hardly have been able to create anything serious and profound. Obviously, the transition from the milieu of small localities and bureaucrats to the milieu of large localities and high society turned out to be not at all as easy as it seemed to the artist. Obviously, it was just as difficult for an artist of a small local circle to move on to depicting a large local circle, as it was difficult and almost impossible for a small landowner to turn into a large local ace or a high society lion. Comme il faut "noe upbringing and at least a superficial, but not devoid of brilliance, education so complicated this psychology that the resemblance became very distant. That is why G.'s attempts to capture the upper layers of the landlord circle with his brush were not entirely successful. Nevertheless, with for all the imperfection of these fragmentary sketches, it would be unfair to deny their significance: G. outlines here a number of completely new characters, which only much later received vivid artistic expression in the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev. young and at least somewhat active caused protest and impulses to leave in search of another more interesting and fruitful life... These impulses to get away from their environment and at least in dreams to live with other living people in the work of G. were reflected in the form of a transition from local motives to imitative and historical motives.Already his earliest work, "Hanz Küchelgarten", which is an imitation of either Pushkin or Zhukovsky; then to the German poet Foss, is an attempt to transfer the yearning local hero - the "seeker" - into an atmosphere of exotic life. True, this attempt turned out to be unsuccessful, because exoticism did not suit the small local hero with his skinny wallet and no less skinny education, but nevertheless, "Hanz Küchelgarten" is of considerable interest to us in the sense that here we first encounter the topic of opposition sleepy inactive existence - a life rich in vivid impressions and extraordinary adventures. This theme is developed later by Gogol in a number of his works. Only now, having abandoned the exotic excursions that failed him, G. turns his dreams into the past of Ukraine, so rich in energetic, passionate natures and stormy, amazing events. In his Ukrainian stories, we also observe the opposition of vulgar reality and vivid dreams, only here real images, nurtured by a small local environment, is contrasted not with the exoticism that is completely alien to G., but with the images learned by him through Cossack thoughts and songs, through legends old Ukraine and finally through acquaintance with the history of the Ukrainian people. Both in "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" and in "Mirgorod" we see, on the one hand, a large group of small local smokers dressed in Cossack scrolls, on the other hand, ideal types of Cossacks, constructed on the basis of poetic echoes of Cossack antiquity. The elderly Cossacks depicted here - Cherevik, Makogonenko, Chub - are lazy, rude, roguishly simple-hearted, extremely reminiscent of landowners of the Sobakevichev warehouse. The images of these Cossacks are bright, alive and leave an unforgettable impression; vice versa, perfect images Cossacks, inspired by the Little Russian antiquity - Levko, Gritsko, Petrus - are extremely uncharacteristic, pale. This is understandable, since living life influenced G., of course, stronger and deeper than purely literary impressions.

Turning to the consideration of the composition of Gogol's works, we also notice here the dominant influence of the small local environment, which gave the structure of his works really original, purely Gogol features. One of these extremely characteristic features of Gogol's composition, which sharply distinguishes him from other major artists of the word, is the absence in his works of the main character - the hero. This is explained by the fact that Gogol is an artist of an ordinary person who cannot become a leading hero, because everyone around him is the same equal heroes. That is why in G. every personality is equally interesting, described with all care, always outlined brightly and strongly, and if Gogol has no heroes, then there is no crowd either. To this it must be added that all Gogol's images are, so to speak, static. In none of the works of G. you will find images of evolution, character development, at least a successful image. Its actors are too primitive and uncomplicated to be engaged in their evolution! Thanks to the latter circumstance, the very development of Gogol's creativity proceeded in a very peculiar way: Gogol could not develop his works in depth by depicting the chronological and psychological growth of his hero, but on the other hand, he developed in breadth all the more extensively, fixing in his works an increasing and greater number of characters. Another characteristic feature of Gogol's composition, found, however, in all other artists of the local environment, is the slowness and thoroughness of the narrative; sequentially, smoothly and calmly deploys G. before the reader picture after picture, event after event. He has nowhere to hurry and there is no need to worry: the landed-serf life surrounding him flows slowly and monotonously, and for years and even decades everything

remains the same unchanged in any noble nest. The slowness and thoroughness of the narrative is expressed by G. in the predominance of the epic element over the dramatic, the story over the action; they are manifested in the abundance of wide paintings, especially pictures of nature, in the multitude of portraits, distinguished by the thoroughness of the finish, and finally, in the abundance of digressions of all kinds, subjective reflections and lyrical outpourings of the author. At the same time, carefully examining each individual structural component of the narrative, we notice that, as a depiction of nature, G. was formed almost exclusively under the influence of the Ukrainian-Cossack elements. His landscapes did not arise under the living influence of direct impressions, but were born as a result of literary influences and the creative work of the imagination. G.'s landscapes do not have inner strength, but they captivate us with the external beauty of speech and the grandeur of images. If, as a landscape painter, G. drew the least from his native local environment, then, on the contrary, as a genre painter, he takes most of all from a small estate and a provincial town. Here his paintings breathe life and truth. A small and medium-sized estate, a provincial town, a fair, a ball - this is where his creative brush gives original and artistically finished paintings. Where he tries to go beyond these limits, his paintings become pale and imitative. Such are his attempts to depict a large European city in the story "Rome" or a secular ball in "Nevsky Prospekt". In the genre paintings of Cossack Ukraine, Gogol is also not distinguished by great pictorial power. Here he is most successful in battle paintings, in the depiction of which G. successfully uses the poetic techniques of Ukrainian folk poetry. As for the data G. sketches of the appearance of his heroes, he gives in his works a large collection of portraits of first-class dignity. G.'s portraitism is explained by the fact that the pre-reform local way of life provided special convenience for a portrait image. The rapid change of things and persons, characteristic of the exchange economy, did not take place here; on the contrary, the pre-reform landowner, attached to one place and isolated in his estate from the whole world, was an extremely stable figure with an eternally unchanged way of life, with traditional manners, with a traditional cut of dress. However, G. only those portraits and have artistic value, which reproduce the images of the local and bureaucratic world; where Gogol, trying to get away from these dull, vulgar images, creates demonic or beautiful portraits, his colors lose their brightness and originality. In connection with the already indicated features of the composition, there is another specific structural feature inherent in G., namely, the absence in the structure of his works of harmonious connectedness, organic unity. Each chapter, each part of G.'s work is something complete, independent, connected with the whole by a purely mechanical connection. This mechanical structure of Gogol's works is, however, far from accidental. She, as well as possible, is suitable for conveying the features of the social element depicted by G.. Organic connectedness was not only not needed by G., but would be downright out of place for him, while the mechanical nature of the work in itself makes the reader feel all the primitiveness and uncomplicatedness of life in the small-town and petty-official provincial wilderness, the absence of bright personalities and deep social ties, the lack of development, harmony and connectedness in it. The introduction of fantasy must also be attributed to the features of the architectonics of G.'s works. This fantasy in G. also has an extremely peculiar character. This is not mysticism or vision, not a fantasy of the supernatural, but a fantasy of nonsense, nonsense, which has grown up on the basis of the stupidity, absurdity and illogicality of a small local environment. It has its roots in the lies of Khlestakov and Nozdryov, grows out of the hypotheses of Ammos Fedorovich and the lady "pleasant in all respects." Gogol skillfully uses this fantasy and with the help of it brighter and more convexly draws before us all the hopeless everyday life and vulgarity of the social environment he depicts.

G.'s language produces an ambiguous impression. On the one hand, the speech sounds measured, rounded, solemn - something songful is heard in the rhythm and turns of this speech. It is replete with lyrical digressions, epithets and tautologies, that is, just those literal devices that are characteristic of epic folk poetry and the Ukrainian Duma. Gogol uses this style mainly in works depicting the life of the Cossacks. However, G. often uses the same techniques of solemn style when depicting the real life surrounding him, and so on. arr. a new aesthetic effect is obtained. The discrepancy between style and content causes uncontrollable laughter; the contrast of the content with the form more clearly outlines the essence of the content. G. generously and with great skill took advantage of this contrast. That property of Gogol's creativity, which is denoted by the word humor, is largely reduced to this contrast. But still, when depicting real life, it is not these techniques that play the leading role, they do not give a tone to the style. Here another series of stylistic devices, inherent in Gogol's work, comes onto the scene, snatched from life itself and perfectly conveying the characteristic features of the social corner depicted by G. Of these, first of all, it is necessary to mention alogisms, i.e. type "In the garden of elderberry, and in Kiev uncle." The speech of Gogol's heroes is full of alogisms; the ignorance, stupidity, and empty thinking of small-town dwellers find their expression in the utterance of all sorts of absurd hypotheses, in putting forward incredible arguments to prove their thoughts. The empty thinking of a small local environment is inevitably accompanied by idle talk; lack of ideas, weakness of mental development entails the inability to speak, a small vocabulary, tongue-tied. Empty talk in Gogol's language. transmitted by a special amplification technique. Amplification, that is, helpless marking time, a heap of phrases without a subject and a predicate, or phrases that are completely unnecessary in the meaning of speech, sprinkling speech with meaningless words, like "that", "it", "in some way", etc. ., perfectly conveys the speech of an undeveloped person. Of other methods, it is also necessary to note the use of provincialisms, the familiarity of languages. and characteristic comparisons. Provincialisms, with which Gogol's speech is abundantly equipped, are often rude, but always bright and characteristic words and expressions, for which the local, and even more bureaucratic environment of the pre-reform period was very inventive. The familiarity of the language, so beloved by Gogol as a technique, he needed to convey that special shortness of relations that was created in the conditions of small-town life. The rough patriarchy of the small local and petty bureaucratic milieu and at the same time its fragmentation into small groups led to the fact that people knew all the ins and outs of each other, were close to each other almost in a kindred way. The comparisons used by G. in his real language are also taken, with a few exceptions, from the everyday life of the local bureaucratic circle. Only some comparisons are clearly borrowed by him from folk poetry; most of them, on the contrary, are distinguished by exceptional originality, being constructed from peculiar elements of small-scale and small-scale life.

G.'s work, like the work of any writer, is not a completely isolated phenomenon, but, on the contrary, is one of the links in a continuously developing literary chain. On the one hand, G. continues the traditions satirical literature(Narezhny, Kvitka, etc.) and is their best spokesman; on the other hand, he is the founder and leader of a new literary movement, the so-called. " natural school". Worldwide fame of Gogol is based on his works of art, but he also acted as a publicist. Of his journalistic things, "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" and "Confession" made a lot of noise, where G. takes on the role of a preacher and teacher of life. These publicistic speeches by Gogol were extremely unsuccessful both in their philosophical naivety and in the extreme reactionaryness of the thoughts expressed. The result of these speeches was the well-known murderous rebuke of Belinsky. However, despite the fact that G. subjectively was a representative and defender of the reactionary interests of the local nobility, objectively, with his artistic activity, he served the cause of the revolution, awakening among the masses a critical attitude towards the surrounding reality.This is how Belinsky and Chernyshevsky assessed him in their time, and this is how he entered our consciousness.

Bibliography: I. Best of ed. coll. sochin. Gogol - tenth, ed. N. S. Tikhonravova, M., 1889, 5 vols. Behind death ed. was completed by V. I. Shenrok, who published 2 additional volumes; from others we note ed. "Enlightenment", ed. V. Kallash, 10 vols., St. Petersburg, 1908-1909; Letters from N. Gogol, ed. V. I. Shsnroka, 4 vols., St. Petersburg, 1902.

II. Kotlyarevsky N., Gogol, St. Petersburg, 1915; Mandelstam I., On the nature of Gogol's style, Helsingfors, 1902; Ovsyaniko-Kulikovskiy D.N., Sobr. sochin., vol. I. Gogol, ed. 5th, Guise; Pereverzev V. F., Gogol's work, ed. 1st, M., 1914; Slonimsky A, Gogol's comic technique, P., 1923; Gippius V., Gogol, L., 1924; Vinogradov V., Etudes on the style of Gogol, L., 1926; Him, Evolution of Russian naturalism, L., 1929 (four recent work- formalistic character).

III. Mezier A., ​​Russian literature from the 11th to the 19th centuries. inclusive, part II, St. Petersburg, 1902; Vladislavlev I., Russian writers, L., 1924; Him, Literature of the Great Decade, M. - L., 1928; Mandelstam R. S., Fiction in the assessment of Russian Marxist criticism, ed. 4th, M., 1928.

V. Pereverzev.

(Lit. Enz.)

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich

Outstanding Russian. writer, classic of Russian literature. Genus. in with. Velyki Sorochintsy (Poltava Province, now Ukraine), graduated from the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences; since 1928 he lived in St. Petersburg, worked as an official in decomp. dep., adjunct prof. in St. Petersburg un-those; several lived abroad for years.

Gravity for fantasy - preim. fabulous and ballad type - already the first publ. book G., "idyll in pictures", "Ganz Küchelgarten" (1829 ). Track. book, "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka" (1831-32 ) relied heavily on science fiction. basis, in which the motives of lit. origin (V.Tik, E. Hoffman, O.Somov and others) intertwined with folklore motifs; created by t. mythologized image of Ukraine found its development and completion in the story "Viy" (1835 ), in which fantasy is organically fused with everyday life. Along with the image of Ukraine, G. from the beginning. 1830s intensively develops mythologized, painted in science fiction. tone image of St. Petersburg - the story "Portrait," Notes of a Madman "," Nevsky Prospekt "(all - in Sat. "Arabesque", 1835 ), as well as "The Nose" (1836) and "The Overcoat" (1842); fiction "Petersburg. stories" G. also relied on both lit. ( E. Hoffman, V. Odoevsky etc.), and oral traditions (the so-called "Petersburg folklore").

With regard to poetics, H. fantasy has undergone a significant evolution. If in a number of his early works. infernal forces - the devil or persons who have entered into a criminal relationship with him - actively intervene in the action, then in other productions. participation similar characters relegated to myth. prehistory, present same time plan remained only "fantastic. trail" - in the form of dec. anomalies and fatal coincidences. A key place in the development of Gogol's fiction is occupied by the story "The Nose", where the subject of infernal evil (and, accordingly, the personified source of fantasy) is completely eliminated, however, the very fantasticness and unrealizability of the incident is left, which is emphasized by the removal from the original text of the mention of sleep as the motivation for "extraordinarily strange incidents."

Elements of science fiction occupy a special place in G.'s TV. utopias, as in art. - 2nd vol. "Dead Souls"(fragm. 1855 ), and in conceptual and journalistic terms ("Selected passages from correspondence with friends"); however, such motives should not be exaggerated: G. nowhere strictly adheres to the boundaries of utopian time and space, trying to find and root a positive principle in the nat. and historical characteristics of Russian life.

Lit. (optional):

VI Shenrok "Materials for the biography of Gogol" in 5 vols. (1892-97).

S. Shambinago "Trilogy of Romanticism (N.V. Gogol)" (1911).

V. Gippius "Gogol" (1924).

"Gogol in the memoirs of his contemporaries" (1952).

N.L.Stepanov "N.V.Gogol. Creative way" (1959).

G.A. Gukovsky "Gogol's Realism" (1959).

N.L. Gogol "Gogol" (1961).

Abram Terts ( A. Sinyavsky) "In the shadow of Gogol" (1975 - London).

Yu.Mann "Gogol's Poetics" (1978; corrected additional 1988).

I.P. Zolotussky "Gogol" (1979; revised add. 1984).

Lermontov Encyclopedia

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich one of the greatest writers of Russian literature (1809 1852). He was born on March 20, 1809 in the town of Sorochintsy (on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod counties) and came from an old Little Russian family; in troubled... Biographical Dictionary

Russian writer. Born into a family of poor landowners V. A. and M. I. Gogol Yanovsky. G.'s father wrote several comedies in Ukrainian. Education G. ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Gogol is the most mysterious and mystical figure in the pantheon of Russian classics.

Woven from contradictions, he amazed everyone with his genius in the field of literature and oddities in everyday life. The classic of Russian literature, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, was an incomprehensible person.

For example, he only slept sitting up, afraid of being mistaken for dead. He took long walks around ... the house, drinking a glass of water in each room. Periodically fell into a state of prolonged stupor. And the death of the great writer was mysterious: either he died of poisoning, or of cancer, or of mental illness.

Doctors have been unsuccessfully trying to make an accurate diagnosis for more than a century and a half.

strange child

The future author of "Dead Souls" was born in a disadvantaged family in terms of heredity. His grandfather and grandmother on his mother's side were superstitious, religious, believed in omens and predictions. One of the aunts was completely “weak in the head”: she could grease her head with a tallow candle for weeks to prevent graying of her hair, made faces while sitting at the dinner table, hid pieces of bread under the mattress.

When a baby was born in this family in 1809, everyone decided that the boy would not last long - he was so weak. But the child survived.

True, he grew up thin, frail and sickly - in a word, one of those “lucky ones” to whom all sores stick. First, scrofula became attached, then scarlet fever, followed by purulent otitis media. All this against the backdrop of persistent colds.

But Gogol's main illness, which bothered him almost all his life, was manic-depressive psychosis.

It is not surprising that the boy grew up withdrawn and uncommunicative. According to the recollections of his classmates at the Nezhinsky Lyceum, he was a gloomy, stubborn and very secretive teenager. And only a brilliant game in the lyceum theater said that this person has a remarkable acting talent.

In 1828 Gogol came to St. Petersburg with the aim of making a career. Not wanting to work as a petty official, he decides to enter the stage. But unsuccessfully. I had to get a job as a clerk. However, Gogol did not stay long in one place - he flew from department to department.

The people with whom he was in close contact at that time complained about his capriciousness, insincerity, coldness, inattention to the owners and hard-to-explain oddities.

Despite the hardships of the job, this period of life was the happiest for the writer. He is young, full of ambitious plans, and his first book, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, is published. Gogol meets Pushkin, which he is terribly proud of. Rotates in secular circles. But already at that time in the St. Petersburg salons they began to notice some oddities in the behavior of the young man.

Where to put yourself?

Throughout his life, Gogol complained of stomach pains. However, this did not prevent him from eating dinner for four in one sitting, “polishing” it all with a jar of jam and a basket of cookies.

No wonder that from the age of 22 the writer suffered from chronic hemorrhoids with severe exacerbations. For this reason, he never worked while sitting. He wrote exclusively while standing, spending 10-12 hours a day on his feet.

As for relationships with the opposite sex, this is a secret behind seven seals.

Back in 1829, he sent his mother a letter in which he spoke of a terrible love for some lady. But already in the next message - not a word about the girl, only a boring description of a certain rash, which, according to him, is nothing more than a consequence of childhood scrofula. Having connected the girl with a sore, the mother concluded that her son had caught a shameful illness from some kind of metropolitan flirtatious.

In fact, Gogol invented both love and malaise in order to extort a certain amount of money from a parent.

Did the writer have carnal contacts with women - big question. According to the doctor who observed Gogol, there were none. The reason for this is a certain castration complex - in other words, a weak attraction. And this despite the fact that Nikolai Vasilievich loved obscene anecdotes and knew how to tell them, without omitting obscene words at all.

Whereas bouts of mental illness were undoubtedly evident.

The first clinically delineated bout of depression, which took the writer "almost a year of life", was noted in 1834.

Beginning in 1837, seizures, varying in duration and severity, began to be observed regularly. Gogol complained of anguish, "which has no description" and from which he did not know "what to do with himself." He complained that his "soul ... is languishing from a terrible blues", is "in some kind of insensible sleepy position." Because of this, Gogol could not only create, but also think. Hence the complaints about the "eclipse of memory" and "strange inactivity of the mind."

Attacks of religious enlightenment gave way to fear and despair. They encouraged Gogol to perform Christian deeds. One of them - exhaustion of the body - and led the writer to death.

Subtleties of the soul and body

Gogol died at the age of 43. The doctors who treated him in recent years were completely at a loss about his illness. A version of depression was put forward.

It began with the fact that at the beginning of 1852 the sister of one of Gogol's close friends, Ekaterina Khomyakova, died, whom the writer respected to the depths of his soul. Her death provoked a severe depression, resulting in religious ecstasy. Gogol began to fast. His daily diet consisted of 1-2 tablespoons of cabbage pickle and oatmeal, occasionally prunes. Considering that Nikolai Vasilyevich's body was weakened after an illness - in 1839 he had malarial encephalitis, and in 1842 he suffered from cholera and miraculously survived - starvation was mortally dangerous for him.

Gogol then lived in Moscow, on the first floor of the house of Count Tolstoy, his friend.

On the night of February 24, he burned the second volume of Dead Souls. After 4 days, Gogol was visited by a young doctor, Alexei Terentiev. He described the state of the writer as follows: “He looked like a man for whom all tasks were resolved, all feelings were silent, all words were in vain ... His whole body had become extremely thin; the eyes became dull and sunken, the face was completely haggard, the cheeks were sunken, the voice weakened ... "

The house on Nikitsky Boulevard, where the second volume of "Dead Souls" was burned. Here Gogol died. Doctors invited to the dying Gogol found severe gastrointestinal disorders in him. They talked about "gut catarrh", which turned into "typhus", about an unfavorable course of gastroenteritis. And, finally, about "indigestion", complicated by "inflammation".

As a result, the doctors diagnosed him with meningitis and prescribed bloodletting, hot baths and douches, which are deadly in this state.

The writer's pitiful withered body was immersed in a bath, his head was poured with cold water. They put leeches on him, and with a weak hand he convulsively tried to brush off the clusters of black worms that were clinging to his nostrils. But how could one think of a worse torture for a person who had felt disgust all his life in front of everything creeping and slimy? “Remove the leeches, lift the leeches from your mouth,” Gogol groaned and pleaded. In vain. He was not allowed to do so.

A few days later the writer was gone.

Gogol's ashes were buried at noon on February 24, 1852 by parish priest Alexei Sokolov and deacon John Pushkin. And after 79 years, he was secretly, thievishly removed from the grave: the Danilov Monastery was being transformed into a colony for juvenile delinquents, in connection with which its necropolis was subject to liquidation. It was decided to transfer only a few of the most dear to the Russian heart burials to the old cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. Among these lucky ones, along with Yazykov, Aksakovs and Khomyakovs, was Gogol ...

On May 31, 1931, twenty to thirty people gathered at Gogol's grave, among whom were: historian M. Baranovskaya, writers Vs. Ivanov, V. Lugovskoy, Yu. Olesha, M. Svetlov, V. Lidin and others. It was Lidin who became almost the only source of information about the reburial of Gogol. With his light hand terrible legends about Gogol began to circulate in Moscow.

The coffin was not found immediately, - he told the students of the Literary Institute, - for some reason he was not where they were digging, but somewhat at a distance, to the side. And when they pulled it out of the ground - flooded with lime, seemingly strong, from oak planks - and opened it, bewilderment was added to the heart trembling of those present. In the coffin lay a skeleton with a skull turned to one side. No one has found an explanation for this. Someone superstitious, probably, then thought: “Well, after all, the publican - during his lifetime, as if not alive, and after death not dead, this strange great man.”

Lidin's stories stirred up old rumors that Gogol was afraid of being buried alive in a state of lethargic sleep and, seven years before his death, bequeathed:

“Do not bury my body until there are clear signs of decomposition. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating.

What the exhumers saw in 1931 seemed to indicate that Gogol's testament was not fulfilled, that he was buried in a lethargic state, he woke up in a coffin and experienced the nightmarish minutes of a new death...

In fairness, it must be said that Lidin's version did not inspire confidence. Sculptor N. Ramazanov, who took off Gogol's death mask, recalled: "I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the prepared coffin ... finally, the incessantly arriving crowd who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased forced me and my old man, who pointed out the traces of destruction, to hurry ... "Found my own an explanation for the rotation of the skull: the side boards at the coffin were the first to rot, the lid falls under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man’s head, and it turns to its side on the so-called “Atlantean vertebra”.

Then Lidin launched a new version. In his written memoirs of the exhumation, he told a new story, even more terrible and mysterious than his oral stories. “This is what Gogol's ashes were like,” he wrote, “there was no skull in the coffin, and Gogol's remains began with the cervical vertebrae; the entire skeleton of the skeleton was enclosed in a well-preserved tobacco-colored frock coat ... When and under what circumstances Gogol's skull disappeared remains a mystery. At the beginning of the opening of the grave at a shallow depth, much higher than the crypt with a walled coffin, a skull was found, but archaeologists recognized it as belonging to a young man.

This new invention of Lidin required new hypotheses. When could Gogol's skull disappear from the coffin? Who could need it? And what kind of fuss is raised around the remains of the great writer?

They remembered that in 1908, when a heavy stone was installed on the grave, a brick crypt had to be erected over the coffin to strengthen the foundation. It was then that the mysterious intruders could steal the writer's skull. As for interested parties, it was not without reason that rumors circulated around Moscow that the skulls of Shchepkin and Gogol were secretly kept in the unique collection of A. A. Bakhrushin, a passionate collector of theatrical relics ...

And Lidin, inexhaustible in inventions, amazed the listeners with new sensational details: they say, when the ashes of the writer were taken from the Danilov Monastery to Novodevichy, some of those present at the reburial could not resist and grabbed some relics for themselves. One allegedly pulled off Gogol's rib, the other - the tibia, the third - the boot. Lidin himself even showed the guests a volume of a lifetime edition of Gogol's works, in the binding of which he inserted a piece of fabric, torn off by him from the coat of Gogol, who was lying in the coffin.

In his will, Gogol shamed those who "will be attracted by some kind of attention to rotting dust, which is no longer mine." But the windy descendants were not ashamed, violated the writer's testament, with unclean hands began to stir up "rotting dust" for fun. They did not respect his covenant not to erect any monument on his grave.

The Aksakovs brought to Moscow from the Black Sea coast a stone resembling Golgotha, the hill on which Jesus Christ was crucified. This stone became the basis for the cross on the grave of Gogol. Next to him, a black stone in the form of a truncated pyramid with inscriptions on the edges was installed on the grave.

The day before the opening of the Gogol burial, these stones and the cross were taken away somewhere and sunk into oblivion. It was not until the early 1950s that Mikhail Bulgakov's widow accidentally discovered Gogol's Golgotha ​​stone in a cutters' shed and managed to install it on the grave of her husband, the creator of The Master and Margarita.

No less mysterious and mystical is the fate of the Moscow monuments to Gogol. The idea of ​​the need for such a monument was born in 1880 during the celebrations for the opening of the monument to Pushkin on Tverskoy boulevard. And 29 years later, on the centenary of the birth of Nikolai Vasilyevich on April 26, 1909, a monument created by the sculptor N. Andreev was opened on Prechistensky Boulevard. This sculpture, depicting a deeply dejected Gogol at the moment of his heavy thoughts, caused mixed reviews. Some enthusiastically praised her, others furiously condemned her. But everyone agreed: Andreev managed to create a work of the highest artistic merit.

Disputes around the original author's interpretation of the image of Gogol did not continue to subside even in Soviet times, which could not bear the spirit of decline and despondency even among the great writers of the past. Socialist Moscow needed a different Gogol - clear, bright, calm. Not Gogol of Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, but Gogol of Taras Bulba, The Government Inspector, Dead Souls.

In 1935, the All-Union Committee for Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR announced a competition for a new monument to Gogol in Moscow, which marked the beginning of developments interrupted by the Great Patriotic War. She slowed down, but did not stop these works, in which the largest masters of sculpture participated - M. Manizer, S. Merkurov, E. Vuchetich, N. Tomsky.

In 1952, on the centennial anniversary of Gogol's death, a new monument was erected on the site of the Andreevsky monument, created by the sculptor N. Tomsky and the architect S. Golubovsky. The Andreevsky monument was moved to the territory of the Donskoy Monastery, where it stood until 1959, when, at the request of the USSR Ministry of Culture, it was installed in front of Tolstoy's house on Nikitsky Boulevard, where Nikolai Vasilyevich lived and died. It took Andreev's creation seven years to cross the Arbat Square!

The controversy surrounding the Moscow monuments to Gogol continues even now. Some Muscovites are inclined to see the transfer of monuments as a manifestation of Soviet totalitarianism and party dictates. But everything that is done is done for the better, and Moscow today has not one, but two monuments to Gogol, equally precious for Russia in moments of both decline and enlightenment of the spirit.

IT LOOKS LIKE GOGOL WAS ACCIDENTALLY POISONED BY DOCTORS!

Although the gloomy mystical halo around Gogol's personality was largely generated by the blasphemous destruction of his grave and the absurd inventions of the irresponsible Lidin, much remains mysterious in the circumstances of his illness and death.

Indeed, from what could a relatively young 42-year-old writer die?

Khomyakov put forward the first version, according to which the root cause of death was a severe mental shock experienced by Gogol due to the fleeting death of Khomyakov's wife Ekaterina Mikhailovna. “Since then, he has been in some kind of nervous breakdown, which took on the character of religious insanity,” Khomyakov recalled. “He talked and began to starve himself, reproaching himself for gluttony.”

This version seems to be confirmed by the testimonies of people who saw what effect the accusatory conversations of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky had on Gogol. It was he who demanded that Nikolai Vasilievich keep a strict fast, demanded from him special zeal in fulfilling the harsh instructions of the church, reproached both Gogol himself and Pushkin, before whom Gogol revered, for their sinfulness and paganism. The denunciations of the eloquent priest shocked Nikolai Vasilievich so much that one day, interrupting Father Matthew, he literally groaned: “Enough! Leave, I can’t listen any longer, it’s too scary!” Tertiy Filippov, a witness to these conversations, was convinced that Father Matthew's sermons set Gogol in a pessimistic mood, convinced him of the inevitability of imminent death.

And yet there is no reason to believe that Gogol has gone mad. An unwitting witness to the last hours of Nikolai Vasilievich's life was the yard man of a Simbirsk landowner, paramedic Zaitsev, who in his memoirs noted that the day before his death Gogol was in a clear memory and sound mind. Having calmed down after the “therapeutic” tortures, he had a friendly conversation with Zaitsev, asked about his life, even made corrections in the poems written by Zaitsev on the death of his mother.

The version that Gogol died of starvation is not confirmed either. An adult healthy person can do without food for 30-40 days. Gogol, on the other hand, fasted for only 17 days, and even then he did not refuse food completely ...

But if not from madness and hunger, then could some infectious disease cause death? In Moscow in the winter of 1852, an epidemic of typhoid fever raged, from which, by the way, Khomyakova died. That is why Inozemtsev, at the first examination, suspected that the writer had typhus. But a week later, a council of doctors, convened by Count Tolstoy, announced that Gogol did not have typhus, but meningitis, and prescribed that strange course of treatment, which cannot be called anything other than "torture" ...

In 1902, Dr. N. Bazhenov published a small work, Gogol's Illness and Death. After carefully analyzing the symptoms described in the memoirs of the writer's acquaintances and the doctors who treated him, Bazhenov came to the conclusion that it was precisely this wrong, weakening treatment for meningitis, which actually did not exist, that killed the writer.

It seems that Bazhenov is only partly right. The treatment prescribed by the council, applied when Gogol was already hopeless, aggravated his suffering, but was not the cause of the disease itself, which began much earlier. In his notes, Dr. Tarasenkov, who first examined Gogol on February 16, described the symptoms of the disease as follows: “... the pulse was weakened, the tongue was clean, but dry; the skin had a natural warmth. For all reasons, it was clear that he did not have a feverish condition ... once he had a slight nosebleed, complained that his hands were cold, his urine was thick, dark-colored ... ".

One can only regret that Bazhenov, when writing his work, did not think of consulting a toxicologist. After all, the symptoms of Gogol's disease described by him are practically indistinguishable from the symptoms of chronic poisoning with mercury - the main component of the same calomel that everyone who started the treatment of an aesculapius stuffed Gogol with. In fact, in chronic calomel poisoning, thick dark urine and various kinds of bleeding are possible, more often gastric, but sometimes nasal. A weak pulse could be a consequence of both the weakening of the body from burnishing, and the result of the action of calomel. Many noted that throughout his illness, Gogol often asked for water: thirst is one of the characteristics and signs of chronic poisoning.

In all likelihood, the start of the fatal chain of events was an upset stomach and the "too strong effect of the medicine" about which Gogol complained to Shevyrev on February 5. Since gastric disorders were then treated with calomel, it is possible that the medicine prescribed for him was calomel and prescribed it by Inozemtsev, who after a few days fell ill himself and stopped observing the patient. The writer passed into the hands of Tarasenkov, who, not knowing that Gogol had already taken a dangerous medicine, could prescribe him calomel again. For the third time, Gogol received calomel from Klimenkov.

The peculiarity of calomel is that it does not cause harm only if it is relatively quickly excreted from the body through the intestines. If it lingers in the stomach, then after a while it begins to act as the strongest mercury poison of sublimate. This, apparently, happened to Gogol: significant doses of the calomel he took were not excreted from the stomach, since the writer was fasting at that time and there was simply no food in his stomach. The amount of calomel gradually increasing in his stomach caused chronic poisoning, and the weakening of the body from malnutrition, discouragement and Klimenkov's barbaric treatment only accelerated death ...

It would not be difficult to test this hypothesis by examining the mercury content of the remains using modern means of analysis. But let us not become like the blasphemous exhumers of the year 1931, and for the sake of idle curiosity we will not disturb the ashes of the great writer a second time, we will not again throw off the tombstones from his grave and move his monuments from place to place. Everything connected with the memory of Gogol, let it be preserved forever and stand in one place!

According to materials:

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

Nikolai Vasilievich 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). Nicholas was named after Saint Nicholas. According to family tradition, he came from an old Cossack family and was supposedly a descendant of Ostap Gogol, the hetman of the Right-Bank Zaporizhian Army of the Commonwealth. Some of his ancestors also molested the nobility, and even Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich Gogol-Yanovsky (1738-1805), wrote in an official paper that "his ancestors, with the surname Gogol, of the Polish nation", although most biographers tend to believe that he yet he was a "Little Russian". A number of researchers, whose opinion was formulated by V.V. Veresaev, believe that the descent from Ostap Gogol could be falsified by Afanasy Demyanovich in order to obtain the nobility, since the priestly pedigree was an insurmountable obstacle to acquiring a noble title.

Great-great-grandfather Jan (Ivan) Yakovlevich, a graduate of the Kyiv Theological Academy, “having gone to the Russian side”, settled in the Poltava region, and the nickname “Yanovsky” came from him. (According to another version, they were Yanovskaya, as they lived in the area of ​​Yanov). Having received a letter of nobility in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname "Yanovsky" to "Gogol-Yanovsky". Gogol himself, being baptized [ specify] "Yanovsky", apparently, did not know about the real origin of the surname and subsequently discarded it, saying that the Poles 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 activity of his father, who was a wonderful storyteller and wrote plays for the home theater, determined the interests of the future writer - Gogol showed an early interest in the theater.

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

In addition to Nicholas, the family had eleven more children. There were six boys and six girls in total. The first two boys were born dead. Gogol was the third child. The fourth son was Ivan (1810-1819), who died early. Then a daughter, Maria (1811-1844), was born. All middle children also died in infancy. The last daughters born were Anna (1821-1893), Elizaveta (in the marriage of Bykova) (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

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

Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of the Little Russian life, both pan and peasant. Subsequently, these impressions formed the basis of Gogol's Little Russian stories, served as the reason for his historical and ethnographic interests; later, from St. Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his stories. The influence of the mother is attributed to the inclinations of that religiosity and that mysticism, which by the end of his life took possession of Gogol's entire being.

At the age of ten, Gogol was taken to Poltava to one of the local teachers to prepare for the gymnasium; then he entered the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in Nizhyn (from May 1821 to June 1828). Gogol was not a diligent student, but he had an excellent memory, he prepared for exams in a few days and moved from class to class; he was very weak in languages ​​and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature.

The high school of higher sciences itself, in the first years of its existence, was not very well organized, apparently, was partly to blame for the poor teaching; for example, history was taught by cramming, the literature teacher Nikolsky extolled the importance of Russian literature of the 18th century and did not approve of the contemporary poetry of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, which, however, only increased the interest of high school students in romantic literature. Lessons moral education were supplemented with a rod. Got it and Gogol.

The shortcomings of the school were made up for by self-education in a circle of comrades, where there were people who shared literary interests with Gogol (Gerasim Vysotsky, who apparently had a considerable influence on him then; Alexander Danilevsky, who remained his friend for life, like Nikolai Prokopovich; Nestor Kukolnik, with whom, however, Gogol never got along).

The comrades subscribed to magazines; started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in verse. At that time, he wrote elegiac poems, tragedies, a historical poem and a story, as well as a satire "Something about Nizhyn, or the law is not written for fools." With literary interests, a love for the theater also developed, where Gogol, already distinguished by unusual comedy, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). Gogol's youthful experiments developed in the style of romantic rhetoric - not in the taste of Pushkin, whom Gogol already admired then, but rather in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

The death of his father was a heavy blow to the entire family. Worries about affairs also fall on Gogol; he gives advice, reassures his mother, must think about the future organization of his own affairs. The mother idolizes her son Nikolai, considers him a genius, she gives him the last of her meager means to provide for his Nezhin, and subsequently Petersburg life. Nikolai also paid her all his life with ardent filial love, but there was no complete understanding and trusting relationship between them. Later, he will give up his share in the common family inheritance in favor of the sisters in order to devote himself entirely to literature.

By the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of a wide social activity, which, however, he does not see at all in the literary field; no doubt under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to come forward and benefit society in a service for which he was in fact incapable. Thus plans for the future were unclear; but Gogol was sure that a wide field lay ahead of him; he is already talking about the indications of providence and cannot be satisfied with what simple townsfolk are content with, as he puts it, as most of his Nizhyn comrades were.

Saint Petersburg.

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

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

But before that, he published under a pseudonym V. Alova romantic idyll "Hanz Kühelgarten" (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and the hero of which is given those ideal dreams and aspirations that he was fulfilled in the last years of Nizhyn's life. Soon after the book was published, he himself destroyed its circulation, when criticism was unfavorable to his work.

In a restless search for life's work, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lübeck, but a month later he returned again to St. Petersburg (September 1829) - and after that he explained his act by the fact that God showed him the way to a foreign land, or referred to hopeless love . In reality, he fled from himself, from the discord of his lofty and arrogant dreams with practical life. “He was drawn to some fantastic country of happiness and reasonable productive labor,” says his biographer; America seemed to him to be such a country. In fact, instead of America, he ended up in the service of the III Division thanks to the patronage of Faddey Bulgarin. However, his stay there was short-lived. Ahead of him was a service in the department of appanages (April 1830), where he remained until 1832. In 1830, the first literary acquaintances were made: Orest Somov, Baron Delvig, Pyotr Pletnev. In 1831, there was a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin, which had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity.

The failure of the Hanz Küchelgarten was a tangible indication of the need for another literary path; but even earlier, from the first months of 1829, Gogol besieged his mother with requests to send him information about Little Russian customs, traditions, costumes, as well as to send “notes kept by the ancestors of some ancient family, ancient manuscripts”, etc. All this was material for future stories from Little Russian life and legends, which became the beginning of his literary fame. He already took some part in the publications of that time: at the beginning of 1830, Svinin’s “Notes of the Fatherland” published (with editorial changes) “Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala”; at the same time (1829) "Sorochinsky Fair" and "May Night" were started or written.

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

Zhukovsky handed over the young man to Pletnev with a request to attach him, and indeed, in February 1831, Pletnev recommended Gogol to the post of teacher at the Patriotic Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Having got to know Gogol better, Pletnev was waiting for an opportunity to “bring him under the blessing of Pushkin”: this happened in May of that year. Gogol's entry into this circle, which soon appreciated the great nascent talent in him, had a huge impact on Gogol's fate. Before him opened, finally, the prospect of broad activities, which he dreamed of - but in the field not official, but literary.

In material terms, Gogol could be helped by the fact that, in addition to a place at the institute, Pletnev gave him the opportunity to conduct private classes with the Longinovs, Balabins, Vasilchikovs; but the main thing was the moral influence that this new environment had on Gogol. In 1834 he was appointed to the post of adjunct in the department of history at St. Petersburg University. He entered the circle of people who stood at the head of Russian fiction: his long-standing poetic aspirations could develop in all breadth, an instinctive understanding of art could become a deep consciousness; Pushkin's personality made an extraordinary impression on him and forever remained an object of worship for him. Service to art became for him a high and strict moral duty, the requirements of which he tried to fulfill sacredly.

Hence, by the way, his slow manner of work, the long definition and development of the plan and all the details. The company of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with meager knowledge taken out of school: his observation becomes deeper, and with each new work his creative level reaches new heights. At Zhukovsky's, Gogol met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic; in the latter, he soon began a relationship that played a significant role in his future life, for example, with the Vielgorskys; at the Balabins he met the brilliant lady-in-waiting Alexandra Rosetti (later Smirnova). The horizon of his life observations expanded, long-standing aspirations gained ground, and Gogol's high concept of his destiny became the ultimate conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublimely idealistic, on the other, the prerequisites for religious quests arose, which marked the last years of his life.

This time was the most active era of his work. After small works, partly named above, his first major literary work, which laid the foundation for his fame, was "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka". Stories published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank", published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first included "Sorochinsky Fair", "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala", "May Night, or the Drowned Woman", "The Missing Letter"; in the second - "The Night Before Christmas", "A Terrible Revenge, an Old True Story", "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt", "The Enchanted Place").

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

He grew up in the eyes of both his inner circle and the younger literary generation in general. In the meantime, events were taking place in Gogol's personal life that influenced in various ways the internal warehouse of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was at home for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The path lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: Mikhail Pogodin, Mikhail Maksimovich, Mikhail Shchepkin, Sergei Aksakov.

At first, staying at home surrounded him with impressions of his beloved environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household affairs were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic young man he left his homeland: life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and see its often sad, even tragic basis behind its outer shell. Soon his "Evenings" began to seem to him a superficial youthful experience, the fruit of that "youth during which no questions come to mind."

Ukrainian life even at that time provided material for his imagination, but the mood was different: in the stories of Mirgorod this sad note constantly sounds, reaching high pathos. Returning to St. Petersburg, Gogol worked hard on his works: this was generally the most active time of his creative activity; he continued, at the same time, to build life plans.

From the end of 1833, he was carried away by an idea as unrealizable as his previous plans for service were unrealizable: it seemed to him that he could act in the academic field. At that time, the opening of Kyiv University was being prepared, and he dreamed of taking the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriot Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; Gogol dreamed of starting studies in Kyiv with him, he wanted to invite Pogodin there as well; in Kyiv, Russian Athens appeared to his imagination, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in world history.

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

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

In 1832, his work was somewhat suspended due to domestic and personal troubles. But already in 1833 he again worked hard, and the result of these years were the two collections mentioned. First, “Arabesques” (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835) were published, where several articles of popular scientific content on history and art were published (“Sculpture, Painting and Music”; “A Few Words about Pushkin”; “On Architecture”; “ On the Teaching of World History"; "A Look at the Compilation of Little Russia"; "On Little Russian Songs", etc.), but at the same time also new stories "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Notes of a Madman".

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

Then, in the same year, "Mirgorod" came out - stories that serve as a continuation of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835). A number of works were placed here, in which new striking features of Gogol's talent were revealed. In the first part of "Mirgorod" appeared "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba"; in the second - "Viy" and "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich."

Subsequently (1842) "Taras Bulba" was completely revised by Gogol. Being a professional historian, Gogol used factual materials to build the plot and develop the characteristic characters of the novel. The events that formed the basis of the novel are the peasant-Cossack uprisings of 1637-1638, led by Gunya and Ostryanin. Apparently, the writer used the diaries of a Polish eyewitness to these events - military chaplain Simon Okolsky.

By the beginning of the thirties, the ideas of some other works of Gogol, such as the famous "Overcoat", "Carriage", perhaps "Portrait" in its reworked version, date back; these works appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); a later sojourn in Italy includes "Rome" in Pogodin's "Moskvityanin" (1842).

By 1834, the first concept of the "Inspector General" is attributed. The surviving manuscripts of Gogol indicate that he worked extremely carefully on his works: from what has survived from these manuscripts, it is clear how the work in its finished form known to us grew gradually from the original sketch, becoming more and more complicated with details and finally reaching that amazing artistic fullness and vitality, with which we know them at the end of a process that sometimes dragged on for years.

The main plot of The Inspector General, as well as the plot of Dead Souls, was communicated to Gogol by Pushkin. The entire creation, from the plan to the last details, was the fruit of Gogol's own creativity: an anecdote that could be told in a few lines turned into a rich work of art.

The "Auditor" caused an endless work of determining the plan and execution details; there are a number of sketches, in whole and in parts, and the first printed form of the comedy appeared in 1836. The old passion for the theater took possession of Gogol to an extraordinary degree: the comedy never left his head; he was tormented by the thought of being face to face with society; he took care with the greatest care that the play be performed in accordance with his own idea of ​​character and action; the production met with various obstacles, including censorship, and finally could be realized only at the behest of Emperor Nicholas.

The Inspector General had an extraordinary effect: the Russian stage had never seen anything like it; the reality of Russian life was conveyed with such force and truth that although, as Gogol himself said, it was only about six provincial officials who turned out to be rogues, the whole society rebelled against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole order life, in which it itself abides.

But, on the other hand, the comedy was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by those elements of society who were aware of the existence of these shortcomings and the need to overcome them, and especially by the young literary generation, who saw here once again, as in the previous works of their beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new, emerging period of Russian art and Russian society. Thus, the "Revizor" split public opinion. If for the conservative-bureaucratic part of society the play seemed like a demarche, then for the seeking and free-thinking admirers of Gogol it was a definite manifesto.

Gogol himself was interested, first of all, in the literary aspect, in public terms, he was completely on the point of view of his friends of the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in the given order of things, and therefore he was especially struck by the discordant noise of misunderstanding that arose around his play. Subsequently, in "Theatrical tour after the presentation of a new comedy", on the one hand, he conveyed the impression that the "Inspector General" made in various sectors of society, and on the other hand, expressed his own thoughts about the great significance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans appeared to Gogol even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833 he was absorbed by the comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree"; she was not finished by him, but her material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "Morning of a Businessman", "Litigation", "Lakey's" and "Fragment". The first of these plays appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836), the rest in his first collected works (1842).

In the same meeting appeared for the first time "Marriage", the outlines of which date back to the same year 1833, and "Players", conceived in the mid-1830s. Tired of the creative tension of recent years and the moral anxieties that The Inspector General cost him, Gogol decided to take a break from work, having gone on a trip abroad.

Honorary member of Moscow University since 1844. “Moscow University, respecting the excellent academic achievements and literary works in Russian literature of Mr. collegiate adviser N.V. Gogol, recognizes it as an honorary member, with full confidence in his assistance to Moscow University in everything, what can contribute to the success of sciences"

Abroad.

In June 1836, Nikolai Vasilyevich went abroad, where he stayed intermittently for about ten years. At first, life abroad seemed to strengthen and reassure him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, Dead Souls, but it became the germ of deeply fatal phenomena. The experience of working with this book, the contradictory reaction of contemporaries to it, just as in the case of The Inspector General, convinced him of the enormous influence and ambiguous power of his talent over the minds of his contemporaries. This idea gradually began to take shape in the idea of ​​his prophetic destiny, and, accordingly, about the use of his prophetic gift by the power of his talent for the benefit of society, and not to its detriment.

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

In March 1837, he was in Rome, which he fell extremely fond of and became for him, as it were, a second home. European political and social life has always remained alien and completely unfamiliar to Gogol; he was attracted by nature and works of art, and Rome at that time represented precisely these interests. Gogol studied antiquities, art galleries, visited the workshops of artists, admired the life of the people and liked to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends.

But in Rome he worked hard: the main subject of this work was "Dead Souls", conceived back in St. Petersburg in 1835; here, in Rome, he finished The Overcoat, wrote the story Anunziata, later remade into Rome, wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, however, he destroyed after several alterations.

In the autumn of 1839, together with Pogodin, he went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was met by the Aksakovs, who were enthusiastic about the writer's talent. Then he went to Petersburg, where he had to take the sisters from the institute; then he returned to Moscow again; in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he read the completed chapters of Dead Souls to his closest friends.

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

Having arranged his affairs, Gogol again went abroad, to his beloved Rome; he promised his friends to return in a year and bring the finished first volume of Dead Souls. By the summer of 1841, the first volume was ready. In September of this year, Gogol went to Russia to print his book.

He again had to go through severe anxieties, which he once experienced when staging The Inspector General on stage. The book was first submitted to the Moscow censorship, which was going to completely ban it; then the book was given to the censorship of St. Petersburg and, thanks to the participation of influential friends of Gogol, was, with some exceptions, allowed. She was published in Moscow (“The Adventures of Chichikov or Dead Souls, a poem by N. Gogol”, M., 1842).

In June Gogol went abroad again. This last stay abroad was the final turning point in Gogol's state of mind. He lived first in Rome, then in Germany, in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, then in Nice, then in Paris, then in Ostend, often in the circle of his closest friends - Zhukovsky, Smirnova, Vielgorsky, Tolstoy, and in him religious - the prophetic direction mentioned above.

A high idea of ​​​​his talent and the duty that lay on him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and look at life broadly, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by divine thinking. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood; in his circle he found a favorable ground for the development of religious exaltation - he assumed a prophetic tone, self-confidently instructed his friends, and finally came to the conclusion that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem 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 mission.

Nikolai Gogol from childhood did not differ in good health. The death in adolescence of his younger brother Ivan, the untimely death of his father left an imprint on his state of mind. Work on the continuation of "Dead Souls" did not stick, and the writer experienced painful doubts that he would be able to bring the planned work to the end. In the summer of 1845, he was overtaken by a painful mental crisis. He writes a will, burns the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. To commemorate the deliverance from death, Gogol decides to enter a monastery and become a monk, but monasticism did not take place. But his mind presented the new content of the book, enlightened and purified; it seemed to him that he understood how to write in order to "direct the whole society towards the beautiful." He decides to serve God in the field of literature. A new work began, and in the meantime another thought occupied him: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful to him, and he decides to collect in one book everything he had written in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood and instructed to publish this Pletnev's book. These were "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (St. Petersburg, 1847).

Most of the letters that make up this book date from 1845 and 1846, the time when Gogol's religious mood reached its highest development. The 1840s is the time of the formation and delimitation of two different ideologies in the contemporary Russian educated society. Gogol remained a stranger to this demarcation, despite the fact that each of the two warring parties, the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, laid claim to Gogol's legal rights. The book made a heavy impression on both of them, since Gogol thought in completely different categories. Even his Aksakov friends turned their backs on him. Gogol with his tone of prophecy and edification, his preaching of humility, which, however, showed his own conceit; condemnation of previous works, the complete approval of the existing social order, clearly dissonant with those ideologists who relied only on the social reorganization of society. Gogol, without rejecting the expediency of social restructuring, saw the main goal in spiritual self-improvement. Therefore, on long years the subject of his study are the works of the fathers of the Church. But, without joining either the Westernizers or the Slavophiles, Gogol stopped halfway, without fully joining spiritual literature - Seraphim of Sarov, Ignatius (Bryanchaninov), and others.

The impression of the book on Gogol's literary admirers, who wished to see in him only the leader of the "natural school", was depressing. The highest degree of indignation aroused by the "Selected Places" was expressed in the famous letter from Belinsky from Salzbrunn.

Gogol painfully experienced the failure of his book. Only A. O. Smirnova and P. A. Pletnev were able to support him at that moment, but those were only private epistolary opinions. He explained the attacks on her in part both by his own mistake, by exaggerating the didactic tone, and by the fact that the censors did not miss several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by the calculations of parties and vanities. The public meaning of this controversy was alien to him.

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

In his letters from 1847 there is no longer the former haughty tone of preaching and edification; he saw that it is possible to describe Russian life only in the midst of it and by studying it. Religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue his work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to bow to the Holy Sepulcher. At the end of 1847 he moved to Naples and at the beginning of 1848 sailed to Palestine, from where he finally returned to Russia via Constantinople and Odessa.

The stay in Jerusalem did not produce the effect he expected. “Never before have I been so little satisfied with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. “I was at the Holy Sepulcher, as if in order to feel there on the spot how much coldness of the heart is in me, how much selfishness and pride.”

Gogol calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; caught in the rain one day in Nazareth, he thought he was just sitting in Russia at the station. He spent the end of spring and summer in the village with his mother, and on September 1 (13) he moved to Moscow; spent the summer of 1849 with Smirnova in the countryside and in Kaluga, where Smirnova's husband was governor; in the summer of 1850 he lived again with his family; then he lived for some time in Odessa, was once again at home, and in the autumn of 1851 he settled again in Moscow, where he lived in the house of his friend Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy (No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard).

He continued to work on the second volume of "Dead Souls" and read excerpts from it from the Aksakovs, but it continued the same painful struggle between the artist and the Christian that had been going on in him since the early forties. As was his wont, he redid what he had written many times, probably succumbing to one or another mood. Meanwhile, his health was getting weaker and weaker; in January 1852, he was struck by the death of A. S. Khomyakov’s wife, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, who was the sister of his friend N. M. Yazykov; he was seized by the fear of death; he gave up literary studies, began to fast at Shrove Tuesday; One day, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die.

Death .

Church of Simeon the Stylite on Povarskaya, visited by Gogol in the last years of his life

From the end of January 1852, the Rzhev archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, whom Gogol met in 1849, and before that he had known by correspondence, visited the house of Count Alexander Tolstoy. Between them there were complex, sometimes harsh conversations, the main content of which was Gogol's insufficient humility and piety, for example, the demand of 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 for reading. Archpriest Matthew became the only lifetime reader of the manuscript of the 2nd part. Returning it to the author, he spoke out against the publication of a number of chapters, "even asked to destroy" them (earlier, he also gave a negative review to "Selected places ...", calling the book "harmful").

The death of Khomyakova, the condemnation of Konstantinovsky, and, perhaps, other reasons convinced Gogol to abandon creativity and start fasting a week before Lent. On February 5, he sees off Konstantinovsky and from that day on he has hardly eaten anything. On February 10, he handed over to Count A. Tolstoy a briefcase with manuscripts for transfer to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, but the count refused this order so as not to aggravate Gogol in gloomy thoughts.

Gogol stops leaving the house. At 3 o'clock in the morning from Monday to Tuesday, February 11-12 (23-24), 1852, that is, on Great Compline on Monday of the first week of Great Lent, Gogol woke Semyon's servant, ordered him to open the oven valves and bring a briefcase from the closet. Taking a bunch of notebooks out of it, Gogol put them in the fireplace and burned them. The next morning, he told Count Tolstoy that he wanted to burn only some things that had been prepared in advance for that, but he burned everything under the influence of an evil spirit. Gogol, despite the exhortations of his friends, continued to strictly observe the fast; On February 18, he went to bed and stopped eating altogether. All this time, friends and doctors are trying to help the writer, but he refuses help, internally preparing for death.

February 20, medical consultation (Professor A.E. Evenius, Professor S.I. Klimenkov, Doctor K.I. Sokologorsky, Doctor A.T. Tarasenkov, Professor I.V. Varvinsky, Professor A.A. Alfonsky, Professor A.I. . Over) decides on compulsory treatment of Gogol. The result of it was the final exhaustion and loss of strength; in the evening the writer fell into unconsciousness.

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

It would seem that almost everything is known about Gogol. But again and again new ones pop up and sometimes completely unexpected facts. The whole life of Gogol still remains an unsolved mystery. He was haunted by mysticism, and his death left more questions than answers. And how many versions exist that refute the myths about Gogol! But I think these versions will appear in the comments, but I present to you data.

♦ Nikolai Gogol was named after the miraculous icon of St. Nicholas, which was kept in the church of Bolshie Sorochintsy, where the writer's parents lived.

♦ Gogol had a passion for needlework. He knitted scarves on knitting needles, cut dresses for his sisters, wove belts, sewed neckerchiefs for the summer.

♦ The writer loved miniature editions. Not loving and not knowing mathematics, he wrote out a mathematical encyclopedia only because it was published in the sixteenth part of a sheet (10.5 × 7.5 cm).
Surely, he would be delighted with such an edition of his book:

♦ Gogol wrote very mediocre compositions at school, he was very weak in languages ​​and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature.

♦ Gogol liked to cook and treat his friends to dumplings and dumplings.

♦ One of his favorite drinks is goat's milk, which he cooked in a special way, adding rum. He called this concoction mogul-mogul and often, laughing, said: "Gogol loves eggnog!" A recipe for a modern mogul-mogul, for those who are interested: beat the yolks with sugar until white foam. Continuing to beat, slowly pour in the whiskey, rum, milk and a little cream. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites into a stiff foam and add a mixture of yolks + a little more cream, powdered sugar and beat the mass until thick. Ready!

♦ The writer walked along the streets and alleys, usually on the left side, so he constantly collided with passers-by.

♦ Gogol was very afraid of thunderstorms. According to contemporaries, bad weather had a bad effect on his weak nerves.

♦ He was extremely shy. As soon as a stranger appeared in the company, Gogol disappeared from the room. And they say that he never met anyone. Some believe that Gogol died a virgin, these statements appeared, because. it is unknown about his connections with women in general. True, in the spring of 1850, N.V. Gogol made an offer (first and last) to A.M. Vielgorskaya, but was refused. There is also a version about Gogol's unconventional orientation, even whole articles are devoted to this and guess who)))

♦ Gogol often, when writing, rolled white cotton balls :). He told his friends that this helped him in solving the most difficult problems.

♦ Gogol always had sweets in his pockets. Living in a hotel, he never allowed the servants to take away the sugar served for tea, he collected it, hid it, and then ate the pieces while working or talking.

♦ Gogol was very attached to his dog Josie of the pug breed, presented to him by Pushkin. When she died (Gogol did not feed the animal for weeks), Nikolai Vasilyevich was attacked by mortal anguish and despondency.

♦ The source of the plot for Gogol's play "The Inspector General" was a real incident in the city of Ustyuzhna, Novgorod province, and Pushkin told the author about this case. It was Pushkin who advised Gogol to continue writing the work, when he more than once wanted to quit this business.

By the way, on the delightful monument of the 1000th anniversary of Russia in Veliky Novgorod in the group "Writers and Artists"Pushkin stands next to Gogol, whose image was placed only under public pressure.
And next to it is our beloved Lermontov, saddened)))

♦ The history of his native Ukraine was one of his favorite studies and hobbies. It was these studies that inspired him to write the epic story "Taras Bulba". It was first published in the Mirgorod collection, and in 1835 Gogol personally handed one copy of this magazine into the hands of the Minister of Public Education Uvarov, so that he presented it to Emperor Nicholas I.

♦ Gogol was ashamed of his nose. In all the portraits of Gogol, his nose looks different - so, with the help of artists, the writer tried to confuse future biographers.

♦ It is known that Nikolai Vasilyevich died at the age of 42 from constant depression and gloomy thoughts, but modern experts in the field of psychiatry have analyzed thousands of documents and have come to a very definite conclusion that Gogol did not have any mental disorder at all. Perhaps he suffered from depression, and if the right treatment had been applied to him, the great writer would have lived much longer.

♦ Neither contemporaries nor descendants can explain what happened to Gogol in the last years of his life. At the age of 30, while in Rome, Gogol fell ill with malaria, and judging by the consequences, as well as the symptoms proposed by modern pathologists, the disease struck the writer's brain. At regular intervals, he began to have seizures and fainting, which, according to modern diagnostics, is characteristic of malarial encephalitis. Every year, seizures and fainting with side effects became more frequent. In 1845 Gogol wrote to his sister Lisa: “My body reached terrible cooling: neither day nor night I could warm myself with anything. My face turned yellow, and my hands were swollen and blackened and were like ice, it frightened me myself.”

Monument to Gogol in Rome in the Roman "Garden of Poets" (Zurab Tsereteli, 2002)Here is what Gogol says about Italy: “Here is my opinion! Who was in Italy, say "forgive" to other lands. Whoever was in heaven will not want to land. In a word, Europe compared to Italy is like a cloudy day compared to a sunny day!”
N.V. Gogol with Russian artists in Rome. 1845

There were many rumors, however, not without foundation, about his "religious insanity", although in the generally accepted sense he was not a deeply religious person. And he was not an ascetic. The illness, and with it the general "headache", prompted the writer to "non-programmable" religious reflections. And the new environment in which he found himself strengthened and supported them ( we are talking that Gogol fell under the influence of the "Martyrs of Hell" sect).

True, there was one family circumstance - under the influence of his mother, Gogol's fear of hell was rooted in his mind from childhood and doomsday, before the "afterlife" (suffice it to recall the mysticism of his story "Viy"). Historiographers and biographers of Gogol confirm that his mother, Maria Ivanovna, because of her difficult fate, was a pious woman prone to mysticism. She was from impoverished local nobles and was left an orphan early, as a result of which she married (most likely, she was extradited) at the age of 14 to 27-year-old Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky. Of their six sons, only Nikolai survived. He was the first-born and the only surviving guardian of the family, and his mother adored her Nikosha, named by her in honor of St. Nicholas of Dikansky. Based on the circumstances, as a pious person, she tried to give him a religious education, although the writer himself did not consider his religiosity to be true. Gogol himself later wrote about his attitude to religion: "... I was baptized because I saw that everyone was being baptized."
Nevertheless, despite signs of depression and insanity, he found the strength to go in February 1848 to Jerusalem to the Holy Sepulcher. However, the trip did not bring spiritual relief. He becomes withdrawn, strange in communication, capricious and untidy in clothes. Gogol writes even to his beloved mother less and less and, in contrast to previous years, more and more dryly. And having come to visit native home in 1848, he treated the sisters, whom he loved terribly, coldly and indifferently, although earlier he had tenderly patronized them and helped with advice and money. When his middle sister Maria died, instead of words of reassurance, Gogol even wrote such lines, unusual for his mother: "Happy is the one to whom God will send some terrible misfortune and misfortune will force him to wake up and look back at himself."

♦ In the autumn of 1850, while in Odessa, Nikolai Vasilyevich felt relieved. Contemporaries recall that his usual vivacity and cheerfulness returned to him. He returned to Moscow and seemed perfectly healthy and cheerful. Gogol read to his friends separate fragments from the second volume of Dead Souls and rejoiced like a child, seeing the delight and hearing the laughter of the listeners. But as soon as he put an end to the second volume, it seemed to him that emptiness and doom fell upon him. He felt the fear of death, such as his father had once suffered.

♦ What happened on the night of February 12, 1852, no one knows for sure. Biographers, with a joint titanic effort, tried literally minute by minute to restore the events of that night, but it is only known for certain that Gogol prayed earnestly until three o'clock in the morning. Then he took his briefcase, took out some sheets of paper from it, and ordered everything that was left in it to be burned immediately. Then he crossed himself and, returning to bed, sobbed uncontrollably until the morning. It is traditionally believed that on that night Gogol burned the second volume of Dead Souls, but some biographers and historians are sure that this is far from the truth, which is unlikely to be known to anyone. There is a version that Gogol first burned the manuscript of several chapters of the second volume of "Dead Souls" back in 1845 because of his mental disorder due to malaria caught in Rome. But he burns the main part of the first three chapters of the second volume of "Dead Souls", since the continuation of this work at times seems to him not a divine revelation, but a devilish obsession. Fear of hell, afterlife torment and a terrible judgment hastened his death, for which, in fact, he was preparing in the last weeks of his life.

♦ The writer in his will 7 years before his death warned that his body would be buried only in case of obvious signs of decomposition. This then became the reason for numerous mystical assumptions that in reality the writer was buried in a state of lethargic sleep. Rumor has it that during the reburial, in 1931, a skeleton with a skull turned to one side was found in his coffin. (According to other data, the skull was absent altogether)

P.S.There is a very interesting documentary about Gogol by Leonid Parfyonov, as well as many detailed articles devoted to one aspect of his biography or work.

This article will discuss the life of Gogol. This writer created many immortal works that rightfully occupy a worthy place in the annals of world literature. Many rumors and legends are associated with his name, some of which Nikolai Vasilievich spread about himself. He was a great inventor and hoaxer, which, of course, was reflected in his work.

Parents

Gogol Nikolai Vasilievich, whose biography is discussed in this article, was born in 1809, on March 20, in the settlement of Velikie Sorochintsy in the Poltava province. On the paternal side, the family of the future writer included church ministers, but the boy's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich, left his spiritual career and began working in the hetman's office. It was he who subsequently added to the surname Yanovsky received at birth another, more famous - Gogol. So the ancestor of Nikolai Vasilyevich sought to emphasize his relationship with the famous in Ukrainian history Colonel Ostap Gogol, who lived in the 17th century.

The father of the future writer - Gogol-Yanovsky Vasily Afanasyevich - was an exalted and dreamy man. This can be judged from the history of his marriage to the daughter of a local landowner, Kosyarovskaya Maria Ivanovna. As a thirteen-year-old teenager, Vasily Afanasyevich saw in a dream the Mother of God, pointing out to him a little unfamiliar girl as a future wife. After some time, the boy recognized the heroine of his dream in the seven-month-old daughter of the Kosyarovsky neighbors. From an early age, he anxiously looked after his chosen one and married Maria Ivanovna, as soon as she was 14 years old. Gogol's family lived in great love and harmony. The biography of the writer began in 1809, when the couple finally had their first child, Nikolai. Parents were kind to the baby, tried their best to protect him from any troubles and upheavals.

Childhood

Gogol's biography, a summary of which will be useful for everyone to know, began in truly greenhouse conditions. Dad and mom adored the baby and did not refuse him anything. In addition to him, the family had eleven more children, but most of them died in middle age. However, Nikolai, of course, enjoyed the greatest love.

The writer spent his childhood years in Vasilievka, the parental estate. cultural center this region was considered the town of Kibintsy. It was the fiefdom of D.T. Troshchinsky, a former minister and a distant relative of the Yanovsky-Gogols. He held the post of district marshal (that is, he was the district marshal of the nobility), and Vasily Afanasyevich was listed as his secretary. Theatrical performances were often held in Kibitsy, in which the father of the future writer took an active part. Nikolai often attended rehearsals, was very proud of it, and at home, inspired by the work of the pope, he wrote good poetry. However, Gogol's first literary experiments have not been preserved. And as a child, he drew well and even organized an exhibition of his paintings in his parental estate.

Education

Together with his younger brother Ivan in 1818 he was sent to the Poltava district school and Nikolai Gogol. The biography of a home boy, accustomed to greenhouse conditions, went according to a completely different scenario. His cozy childhood was rapidly coming to an end. At the school, he was taught a very strict discipline, but Nikolai did not show much zeal for the sciences. The very first holidays ended in a terrible tragedy - brother Ivan died of an unknown illness. After his death, all the hopes of the parents were placed on Nikolai. He needed to get a better education, for which he was sent to study at the Nizhyn Classical Gymnasium. The conditions here were very harsh: children were raised daily at 5.30 am, and classes lasted from 9.00 to 17.00. In the remaining time, the students were supposed to study their lessons and pray diligently.

However, the future writer managed to get used to the local order. Soon he made friends, well-known and respected people in the future: Nestor Kukolnik, Nikolai Prokopovich, Konstantin Bazili, Alexander Danilevsky. All of them, having matured, became famous writers. And this is not surprising! While still high school students, they founded several handwritten magazines: "Meteor of Literature", "Dawn of the North", "Star" and others. In addition, teenagers were passionately fond of the theater. Moreover, Gogol's creative biography could well have been different - many predicted for him the fate of a famous actor. However, the young man dreamed of public service and, after graduating from high school, resolutely went to St. Petersburg to make a career.

Official

Together with his friend from the gymnasium Danilevsky in 1828, Gogol went to the capital. Petersburg met young people unfriendly, they were constantly in need of money and unsuccessfully tried to find a decent job. At this time, Nikolai Vasilyevich was trying to earn a living through literary experiments. However, his first poem "Hanz Kühelgarten" was not successful. In 1829, the writer began to serve in the department of state economy and public buildings of the Ministry of the Interior, then worked for almost a year in the department of appanages under the supervision of the famous poet V.I. Panaev. Staying in the offices of various departments helped Nikolai Vasilyevich to collect the richest material for future works. However, the public service forever disappointed the writer. Fortunately, soon he was waiting for the real dizzying success in the literary field.

Fame

In 1831 Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka were published. "Here is real gaiety, sincere, unconstrained ..." - Pushkin said about this work. Now the personality and biography of Gogol have become interesting to the most famous people in Russia. His talent was readily recognized by all. Nikolai Vasilyevich was beside himself with joy and constantly wrote letters to his mother and sisters asking them to send him more material about Little Russian folk customs.

In 1836, the famous "Petersburg story" of the writer - "The Nose" - was published. In this extremely daring work for its time, worship of rank is ridiculed in its smallest and sometimes disgusting manifestations. At the same time, Gogol created the work "Taras Bulba". The biography and work of the writer are inextricably linked with his dear homeland - Ukraine. In "Taras Bulba" Nikolai Vasilyevich tells about the heroic past of his country, about how the representatives of the people (Cossacks) fearlessly defended their independence from the Polish invaders.

"Inspector"

How much trouble this play gave the author! Being a brilliant writer and playwright who far anticipated his time, Nikolai Vasilievich was never able to convey to his contemporaries the meaning of his immortal work. The plot of The Inspector General was presented to Gogol by Pushkin. Inspired by the great poet, the author wrote it in just a few months. In the autumn of 1835, the first drafts appeared, and in 1836, on January 18, the first hearing of the play took place at the evening at Zhukovsky's. On April 19, the premiere of The Government Inspector took place on the stage of the Alexandria Theatre. Nicholas the First himself came to it together with the heir. They say that after watching the emperor said: “Well, a play! Everyone got it, but I - more than anyone! However, Nikolai Vasilievich was not laughing. He, a convinced monarchist, was accused of revolutionary sentiments, undermining the foundations of society, and God knows what else. But he was simply trying to ridicule the abuse of local officials, his goal was morality, and not politics at all. The upset writer left the country and went on a long trip abroad.

Abroad

An interesting biography of Gogol abroad deserves special attention. In total, the writer spent twelve years on "saving" journeys. In 1936, Nikolai Vasilievich did not limit himself to anything: at the beginning of the summer he settled in Germany, spent the autumn in Switzerland, and came to Paris for the winter. During this time, he made great progress in writing the novel Dead Souls. The plot of the work was suggested to the author by the same Pushkin. He highly appreciated the first chapters of the novel, recognizing that Russia, in essence, is a very sad country.

In February 1837, Gogol, whose biography is interesting and instructive, moved to Rome. Here he learned about the death of Alexander Sergeevich. In desperation, Nikolai Vasilyevich decided that "Dead Souls" was the poet's "sacred testament", which must necessarily see the light of day. Zhukovsky arrived in Rome in 1838. Gogol enjoyed walking along the streets of the city with the poet, painting local landscapes with him.

Return to Russia

In 1839, in September, the writer returned to Moscow. Now Gogol's creative biography is devoted to the publication of "Dead Souls". Summary works are already known to many friends of Nikolai Vasilyevich. He read individual chapters of the novel at the Aksakovs' house, at Prokopovich's and Zhukovsky's. His closest circle of friends became his listeners. All of them were delighted with the creation of Gogol. In 1842, in May, the first publication of "Dead Souls" was published. At first, the reviews about the work were mostly positive, then the ill-wishers of Nikolai Vasilyevich seized the initiative. They accused the writer of slander, caricature, farce. A truly devastating article was written by N. A. Polevoy. However, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol did not take part in all this controversy. The biography of the writer continued abroad again.

Affairs of the Heart

Gogol never married. Very little is known about his serious relationships with women. His longtime and devoted friend was Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova. When she came to Rome, Nikolai Vasilyevich became her guide in the ancient city. In addition, a very lively correspondence was conducted between friends. However, the woman was married, so the relationship between her and the writer was only platonic. Gogol's biography is adorned with another heartfelt passion. A brief history of his personal relationships with women says: one day the writer nevertheless decided to marry. He became interested in the young Countess Anna Villegorskaya and proposed to her in the late 1940s. The girl's parents were against this marriage, and the writer was refused. Nikolai Vasilievich was greatly depressed by this story, and since then he has not tried to arrange his personal life.

Work on the second volume

Before leaving, the author of "Dead Souls" decided to publish the first collection own compositions. He, as always, needed money. However, he himself did not want to deal with this troublesome business and entrusted this matter to his friend - Prokopovich. In the summer of 1842, the writer was in Germany, and in the fall he moved to Rome. Here he worked on the second volume of Dead Souls. Almost the entire creative biography of Gogol is devoted to writing this novel. The most important thing he wanted to do at that moment was to show the image of an ideal Russian citizen: smart, strong and principled. However, the work is progressing with great difficulty, and at the beginning of 1845 the writer had the first signs of a large-scale spiritual crisis.

Last years

The writer continued to write his novel, but was increasingly distracted by other things. For example, he composed The Examiner's Denouement, which radically changed the entire previous interpretation of the play. Then, in 1847, "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" were printed in St. Petersburg. In this book, Nikolai Vasilievich tried to explain why the second volume of "Dead Souls" had not yet been written, and expressed doubts about the educational role of fiction.

A whole storm of public indignation fell upon the writer. "Selected Places ..." is the most controversial moment that marked Gogol's creative biography. A brief history of the creation of this work suggests that it was written in a moment of spiritual confusion of the writer, his desire to move away from his former positions and start a new life.

Manuscript burning

In general, the writer burned his writings more than once. This, one might say, was his bad habit. In 1829, he did this with his poem Hans Küchelgarten, and in 1840 with the Little Russian tragedy Shaved Mustache, which Zhukovsky could not impress. At the beginning of 1845, the writer's health deteriorated sharply, he constantly consulted with various medical celebrities and went to water resorts for treatment. He visited Dresden, Berlin, Halle, but could not improve his health. The religious exaltation of the writer gradually increased. He often communicated with his confessor, Father Matthew. He believed that literary creativity distracts from inner life and demanded from the writer that he renounce his divine gift. As a result, on February 11, 1852, Gogol's biography was marked by a fateful event. The most important creation of his life - the second volume of "Dead Souls" - was ruthlessly burned by him.

Death

In April 1848 Gogol returned to Russia. He spent most of his time in Moscow, sometimes he came to St. Petersburg and to his homeland, to Ukraine. The writer read individual chapters from the second volume of "Dead Souls" to his friends, again bathed in the rays of universal love and worship. Nikolai Vasilyevich came to the production of "The Inspector General" at the Maly Theater and is satisfied with the performance. In January 1852, it became known that the novel was "completely finished." However, Gogol's biography was soon marked by a new mental crisis. The main business of his life - literary creativity - seemed to him useless. He burned the second volume of "Dead Souls" and a few days later (February 21, 1852) died in Moscow. He was buried in the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery, and in 1931 he was transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery.

Posthumous will

Such is the biography of Gogol. Interesting facts from his life are largely related to his posthumous will. It is well known that he asked not to erect a monument over his grave and not to bury him for several weeks, as sometimes the writer fell into a kind of lethargic sleep. Both wishes of the writer were violated. Gogol was buried a few days after his death, and in 1957 a marble bust of the work of Nikolai Tomsky was installed at the burial site of Nikolai Vasilyevich.