The message about Gogol is the most important. Biography, life story of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

Biography, life story of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

Childhood and youth

Nikolai Vasilievich was born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in the village of Sorochintsy, Poltava province. It got its name in honor of St. Nicholas. At birth, he received the surname Yanovsky, a little later - Gogol-Yanovsky. Subsequently, he refused the second part of the surname.

Nikolai's father - Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky - was born in 1777, died in 1825, when his son was only 15 years old. Vasily Afanasyevich was fond of stage activities, created plays for home theater. There is a version that it was these hobbies of his that influenced Nikolai Vasilyevich's penchant for art.

Nikolai's mother - Maria Ivanovna Kosyarovskaya - was born in 1791, died in 1868. Contemporaries claim that this was a woman of unearthly beauty. In addition to Nikolai, she had 11 more children. Not all of them, alas, were able to grow up, some of them were born dead, some died in early childhood.

When Nikolai Vasilyevich was 10 years old, he went to Poltava to a local teacher to prepare for studying at the gymnasium. After some time, he, Nikolai, began his studies at the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in the city of Nizhyn, where he studied from May 1821 to June 1828. He cannot be called an diligent student, but thanks to his phenomenal memory, he never failed in exams. He was especially good at Russian literature and drawing.

At the gymnasium, Nikolai met like-minded people who shared his passion for literature - Gerasim Vysotsky, Alexander Danilevsky and others. Together they subscribed to magazines and even created their own handwritten magazine, in which Nikolai Vasilyevich published his poems.

At the age of 15, when Gogol's father passed away, Nikolai takes care of his mother, who, considering her son a genius, helps him financially in his education. Realizing how difficult his education is for his family, Nikolai Vasilyevich responds to her with sincere love. And later, the abandonment of the inheritance in favor of the sisters.

CONTINUED BELOW

In December 1828, Gogol left for the city of St. Petersburg. Here he is met by the hardships and sorrows of the life of a big city, poverty and despair. But, despite this, it was here that his first publications appeared in such eminent publications as "Son of the Fatherland" and "Northern Archive". Some time later, his works "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" and "The Inspector General" were published in separate books.

A year after arriving in St. Petersburg, Nikolai received a job in the Department of State Economy and Public Buildings, and a year later - in the Department of Appanages. After that, he taught history at the Patriotic Institute and was an adjunct professor at St. Petersburg University in the department of general history. Moving up the career ladder for 6 years, Gogol made many useful acquaintances, and also made a good name for himself. In 1834 Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was admitted to the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature at Moscow University, at the same time he was awarded a diamond ring from the Empress for his work at the Patriotic Institute. In February 1845, Gogol was awarded the title of honorary member of Moscow University.

In 1836, Nikolai went abroad, where he stayed for about 10 years. Intermittently, he lived in Switzerland, France, Switzerland, Rome, Germany, Jerusalem. In Paris, Gogol met Count Tolstoy. They quickly became friends on the basis of common religious and moral convictions. This is evidenced by several letters "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends", which were addressed to Count Tolstoy from Gogol.

From 1835 to 1852, Nikolai Vasilyevich worked tirelessly on his most important work - the poem "Dead Souls". The first volume of Dead Souls was completed in the summer of 1841. And already in September, Gogol went to Russia to publish his book. Initially, it was decided to ban the book, but thanks to the help of Gogol's influential friends, it was allowed to print with only minor changes. The second volume was never seen by the public. The author burned it "under the influence of an evil spirit" in February 1852.

Death

A few days after the second volume of Dead Souls disappeared, Nikolai Vasilyevich stopped eating. They tried to help him, but to no avail - Gogol himself was ready for death and patiently waited for her. Compulsory treatment only worsened the condition of the writer. Not having lived another day, Gogol died of exhaustion.

Date of birth: April 1, 1809
Died: February 21, 1852
Place of birth: Sorochintsy, Poltava province

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol- Russian writer, playwright, Gogol N.V.- poet and publicist.

One of the classics of Russian and world literature.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, a famous Russian playwright, publicist and prose writer, was born in Sorochintsy (Poltava Province) on April 1, 1809. His father, Vasily Afanasevich, was a very wealthy landowner, who had about 400 serfs, his mother was a very young and active woman.

The writer spent his childhood in a colorful Ukrainian life, which he loved very much and remembered well. He knew the life of the gentry and peasants very well, at the age of ten he began to study with a teacher in Poltava, and then entered the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences. Researchers say that Gogol could not be called a successful student, most of the subjects were given to him with great difficulty, but he stood out among his peers for his excellent memory, the ability to correctly use the Russian language, as well as in drawing.
Gogol was actively engaged in self-education, wrote a lot, and together with his friends subscribed to the capital's magazines. Even in his youth, he began to write a lot, tried himself in prose and poetry. Gogol focused on managing the estate after his father's death. In 1828 he graduated from high school and went to St. Petersburg.

Life in the capital was very expensive, the wealth in the provinces was insufficient to lead a frivolous life in St. Petersburg. At first he decided to become an actor, but theaters refused to accept him. Work as an official did not attract him at all, and therefore he turned his attention to literature. In 1829, his idyll "Ganz Küchelgarten" was harshly received by critics and readers, and therefore Gogol personally destroyed the entire first edition.

In 1830 he nevertheless entered the civil service and began to work in the department of appanages. In the same year, he made a large number of various useful acquaintances in literary circles. The story "An Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" was immediately published, and one year later "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" saw the light.

In 1833, Gogol was attracted by the prospect of working in the scientific field, he began to cooperate with St. Petersburg University at the Department of General History. Here he spent the next two years of his life. In the same period he completed the collections "Arabesques" and "Mirgorod", which were published immediately after his departure from the university.

There were also those who desperately criticized his work. Critical pressure was one of the reasons why Gogol decided to take a break from literature and went to Europe. He lived in Switzerland, France and Italy. It was at this time that he completed the first volume of Dead Souls. In 1841 he decided that he needed to return to Russia, where he was warmly greeted by Belinsky and promoted the publication of the first volume.

Immediately after the publication of this book, Gogol began work on the second volume, at which point the writer was experiencing a creative crisis. A big blow to his literary vanity was Belinsky's devastating review of the book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. This criticism was received very negatively. At the end of 1847, Gogol went to Naples, from where he left for Palestine.

The return to Russia in 1848 was characterized by inconsistency in the life of the writer; he still could not find a place for himself. He lived in Moscow, Kaluga, Odessa, then again in Moscow. He was still working on the second volume of Dead Souls, but felt a significant deterioration in his state of mind. He became interested in mysticism, he was often pursued by strange thoughts.

On February 11, 1852, in the middle of the night, he unexpectedly decided to burn the manuscript of the second volume. He said that evil spirits made him do it. A week later, he felt weak all over his body, took to bed and refused any treatment.

The doctors decided that it was necessary to start compulsory procedures, but no tricks of the doctors improved the patient's condition. Gogol died on February 21, 1852. He rests in the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow.

Gogol was one of the strangest representatives of Russian classical literature. His work was received in different ways, critics praised and loved him. On the other hand, he was strongly constrained by the Nikolaev censorship.

Bulgakov and Nabokov looked back at Gogol in their work, many of his works were filmed in Soviet times.

The main milestones in the life of Nikolai Gogol:

Born in Sorochintsy on April 1, 1809
- Moving to Poltava in 1819
- Beginning of training at the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in Nizhyn in 1821
- The beginning of the Petersburg period in 1828
- Publication of the idyll "Hanz Kuchelgarten" in 1829
- The publication of "Evenings on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" in 1830
- Print "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" in 1831
- Work at the Faculty of History at St. Petersburg University in 1834
- Publication of the collections "Arabesques" and "Mirgorod" in 1835
- Beginning of a European journey in 1836
- Publication of the first volume of Dead Souls in 1841
- Destruction of the second volume for unknown reasons in 1852
- Death of N. V. Gogol on February 21, 1852

Interesting facts from the biography of Nikolai Gogol:

The writer was not married, was suspicious of women and was an introverted person; researchers say both his latent homosexuality, and the presence of secret love for several women
- There is a version that the writer did not die, but plunged into a lethargic sleep, after which he was buried alive
- The writer's skull was stolen from the grave in 1909, until the perestroika period, the public did not know about this incident
- Gogol could hardly endure a thunderstorm, he was very afraid of thunder and lightning
- The writer did a lot of handicrafts, was an excellent cook and had a sweet tooth

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

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). He was named Nicholas in honor of the miraculous icon of St. Nicholas.

According to family legend, he came from an old Cossack family and was presumably a descendant of Ostap Gogol - hetman of the Right Bank Army of the Zaporozhye Rzeczpospolita. Some of his ancestors pestered the gentry, and Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich Gogol-Yanovsky (1738-1805), wrote in official paper that “his ancestors, with the surname Gogol, of the Polish nation,” although most biographers tend to believe that he nevertheless he was a "Little Russian".

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

Great-great-grandfather Yan (Ivan) Yakovlevich, a pupil of the Kiev Theological Academy, “went out to the Russian side”, settled in the Poltava region, and from him came the nickname “Yanovskih”. (According to another version, they were Janowski, as they lived in the Janove area). Having received a noble letter in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname "Yanovsky" to "Gogol-Yanovsky". Gogol himself, being baptized "Yanovsky", apparently did not know about the real origin of the surname and subsequently discarded it, saying that the Poles had invented it.

Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky (1777-1825), died when his son was 15 years old. It is believed that the stage activities of his father, who was a wonderful storyteller and wrote plays for home theater, determined the interests of the future writer - Gogol showed an early interest in theater.

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

In addition to Nikolai, 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 the early deceased Ivan (1810-1819). Then the daughter Maria (1811-1844) was born. All middle children also died in infancy. The last were daughters Anna (1821-1893), Elizabeth (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

Life in the countryside before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of the Little Russian life, both of the landlord and the 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 Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his stories. The influence of the mother is credited with the inclinations of religiosity and 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; in a few days he prepared for exams and moved from class to class; he was very weak in languages ​​and only succeeded in drawing and Russian literature.

Apparently, the gymnasium of higher sciences itself, which was not very well organized in the first years of its existence, was, apparently, 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 strengthened the students' interest in romantic literature. The lessons of moral education were supplemented with a rod. Gogol also got it.

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

The comrades subscribed to the magazines; started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in poetry. At that time he wrote elegiac poems, tragedies, a historical poem and a story, as well as the satire "Something about Nezhin, or the Law Is Not Written to Fools." With literary interests, a love for the theater developed, where Gogol, already distinguished by his unusual comicism, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). Gogol's youthful experiences took shape in the style of romantic rhetoric - not in the taste of Pushkin, whom Gogol already admired at that time, but rather in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

The death of his father was a hard blow to the entire family. Gogol is also concerned about business; he gives advice, calms the mother, must think about the future arrangement of his own affairs. The mother worships her son Nikolai, considers him a genius, she gives him the last of her meager funds to provide for his Nezhin, and later Petersburg life. Nikolai also paid her all his life with warm filial love, but there was no complete understanding and trusting relationship between them. Later, he gave up his share in the common family inheritance in favor of the sisters in order to devote himself entirely to literature.

Towards the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of broad social activities, which, however, he does not see in the literary field; undoubtedly influenced by everything around him, he thinks to advance and benefit society in a service for which in fact he was not capable. Thus, plans for the future were unclear; but Gogol was sure that he had a wide field ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what ordinary people are content with, in his words, which were the majority of his Nizhyn comrades.

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

He was not accepted as an actor; the service was so empty that he began to feel weary about it; the more attracted him to the literary field. In St. Petersburg, for the first time, he kept the company of his fellow countrymen, which consisted partly of his former comrades. He found that Little Russia arouses a keen interest in Petersburg society; the failures he experienced turned his poetic dreams to his native land, and hence the first plans for work, which were 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, under the pseudonym V. Alov, he published the romantic idyll "Ganz Kuchelgarten" (1829), which was written in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and whose hero was given those ideal dreams and aspirations that he had been fulfilled in the last years of Nezhin's life. Soon after the book was published, he himself destroyed its circulation when criticism reacted unfavorably to his work.

In a restless search for a life's business, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lubeck, but a month later he returned to Petersburg again (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 between his lofty and arrogant dreams and practical life. “He was drawn to some fantastic country of happiness and reasonable productive labor,” says his biographer; America seemed to him such a country. In fact, instead of America, he ended up serving in the III Section thanks to the patronage of Thaddeus Bulgarin. However, his stay there was short-lived. Ahead of him was waiting for 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, a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin took place, which had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity.

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

Other works Gogol then published in the editions of Baron Delvig "Literaturnaya Gazeta" and "Northern Flowers", which included a chapter from the historical novel "Hetman". Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received Gogol with great cordiality: apparently, the first time between them was the mutual sympathy of people related in love of art, in religiosity, inclined to mysticism - after that they became very close.

Zhukovsky handed the young man over to Pletnev with a request to attach him, and indeed, in February 1831, Pletnev recommended Gogol for the position of teacher at the Patriotic Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Having got to know Gogol better, Pletnev was waiting for the opportunity to "bring him under the blessing of Pushkin": this happened in May of the same year. Gogol's entry into this circle, who soon appreciated his great nascent talent, had a huge impact on Gogol's fate. Finally, the prospect of broad activity, which he dreamed of, was opening before him - 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 provided him with the opportunity to conduct private classes with the Longinovs, Balabins, Vasilchikovs; but the main thing was in the moral influence that this environment, new to him, 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 persons who stood at the head of Russian fiction: his long-standing poetic aspirations could develop in all their breadth, an instinctive understanding of art could become a deep consciousness; the personality of Pushkin 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, and his slow manner of work, long definition and development of a plan and all the details. A society of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with poor knowledge brought 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 struck up a relationship that played a significant role in the future in his life, for example, with the Vielgorskys; at the Balabins he met the brilliant maid of honor Alexandra Rosetti (later Smirnova). The horizon of his life observations expanded, long-standing aspirations gained ground, and Gogol's lofty notion of his destiny became the utmost conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublimely idealistic, on the other, the prerequisites for religious searches arose, which marked the last years of his life.

This time was the most active era of his work. After small works, which were mentioned above in part, his first major literary undertaking, which laid the foundation for his fame, was "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka." The stories published by the pasichnik Rudy Pank ”, published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first included“ Sorochinskaya Fair ”,“ Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala ”,“ May Night, or Drowned Woman ”,“ The Lost Letter ”; the second - "The Night before Christmas", "Terrible revenge, an old story", "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and his aunt", "Enchanted place").

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

He grew up in the eyes of his closest circle and, in general, of the young literary generation. Meanwhile, in Gogol's personal life, events were taking place that in various ways influenced the inner makeup of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he visited his homeland for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The way lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: with Mikhail Pogodin, Mikhail Maksimovich, Mikhail Schepkin, Sergei Aksakov.

Staying at home at first surrounded him with the impressions of his beloved native environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household matters were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic youth that he left his homeland: life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and 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."

Ukrainian life at that time also provided material for his imagination, but the mood was different: in the stories of Mirgorod, this sad note, reaching high pathos, constantly sounds. Returning to St. Petersburg, Gogol worked hard on his works: this was generally the most active period 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 a thought as unrealizable as his previous plans for service were unrealizable: it seemed to him that he could perform in the scientific field. At that time, the opening of Kiev University was being prepared, and he dreamed of taking the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriotic Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kiev; Gogol dreamed of starting his studies in Kiev with him, wanted to invite Pogodin there too; in Kiev, his imagination imagined Russian Athens, where he himself thought to write 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 actually took this pulpit; several times he managed to deliver a spectacular lecture, but then the task was beyond his powers, and he himself gave up the professorship in 1835. In 1834 he wrote several articles on the history of the Western and Eastern Middle Ages.

In 1832, his work was suspended somewhat due to domestic and personal concerns. But already in 1833 he again worked hard, and the result of these years was the two mentioned collections. First came the "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"; "On architecture"; " About teaching general history ";" A look at the compilation of Little Russia ";" About Little Russian songs ", etc.), but at the same time, new stories" Portrait "," Nevsky Prospect "and" Notes of a Madman ".

Then in the same year Mirgorod. Stories serving as a continuation of the 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 reworked by Gogol. As 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 Gunia and Ostryanin. Apparently, the writer used the diaries of a Polish eyewitness to these events - military chaplain Simon Okolsky.

By the early thirties, the ideas of some of Gogol's other works also belong, such as the famous "Overcoat", "Carriage", perhaps, "Portrait" in its revised version; these works appeared in the Sovremennik by Pushkin (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); to a later stay in Italy refers to "Rome" in "Moskvityanin" Pogodin (1842).

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

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

The "Inspector" caused endless work of defining the plan and details of execution; there are a number of sketches, in whole and in parts, and the first printed form of a comedy appeared in 1836. The old passion for the theater took possession of Gogol to an extreme degree: the comedy did not leave his head; he was languishingly carried away by the idea of ​​becoming face to face with society; he tried with the greatest care to ensure that the play was performed in accordance with his own idea of ​​character and action; the production met a variety of obstacles, including censorship, and finally could be realized only at the behest of Emperor Nicholas.

The "Inspector" 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 cheats, the whole society revolted against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole order life, in which it itself dwells.

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 a beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new one, the emerging period of Russian art and the Russian public. Thus, the "Inspector General" split public opinion. If for the conservative-bureaucratic part of society the play seemed like a demarche, 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 the public sense he stood completely on the point of view of his friends from the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in this order of things, and therefore he was especially struck by the discordant noise of misunderstanding that arose around his play. Subsequently, in the "Theatrical passing after the presentation of a new comedy", on the one hand, he conveyed the impression that "The Inspector General" made in various strata of society, and on the other, he expressed his own thoughts about the great importance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans appeared to Gogol even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833 he was absorbed in the comedy "Vladimir 3rd degree"; it was not finished by him, but its material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "Morning of a Business Man", "Litigation", "Lackey" 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 there appeared for the first time "The Marriage", the sketches of which date from the same 1833, and "The Players", conceived in the middle of the 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 by going on a trip abroad.

In June 1836, Nikolai Vasilyevich went abroad, where he stayed with interruptions 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 became the embryo of deeply fatal phenomena. The experience of working with this book, the contradictory reaction of his contemporaries to it, just as in the case of The Inspector General, convinced him of the enormous influence and ambiguous power of his talent over the minds of his contemporaries. This thought gradually began to take shape in the idea of ​​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 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 he loved extremely 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 ancient monuments, art galleries, visited artists' workshops, admired the life of the people and loved to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian friends and acquaintances.

But in Rome he also 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 converted into "Rome", wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, however, after several alterations he destroyed.

In the fall of 1839, he, together with Pogodin, went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was met by the Aksakovs, who were enthusiastic about the talent of the writer. 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 finished chapters of Dead Souls to his closest friends.

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

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

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

A high idea of ​​his talent and the responsibility that lies on him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and take a broad view of life, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by divine thought. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood; in his circle, he found a convenient basis for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently gave instructions to his friends, and eventually came to the conviction that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem is no 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 was not in good health since childhood. The death of his younger brother Ivan in adolescence, the untimely death of his father left an imprint on his state of mind. The work on the sequel to Dead Souls did not go well, and the writer felt agonizing doubts that he would be able to bring the conceived work to the end.

In the summer of 1845, a painful mental crisis overtook him. He writes a will, burns the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls.

In commemoration of deliverance from death, Gogol decides to go to a monastery and become a monk, but monasticism did not take place. But his mind presented itself with the new content of the book, enlightened and purified; it seemed to him that he understood how to write in order to "direct the whole society towards beauty." He decides to serve God in the field of literature. A new work began, and in the meantime he was occupied with another thought: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful to him, and he decides to collect in one book everything he wrote to his friends in recent years in the spirit of his new mood and instructs to publish this book to Pletnev. These were "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" (St. Petersburg, 1847).

Most of the letters that make up this book date back to 1845 and 1846, the time when Gogol's religious mood reached its highest development. The 1840s was the time of the formation and demarcation of two different ideologies in the contemporary Russian educated society. Gogol remained alien to this demarcation, despite the fact that each of the two warring parties - the Westernizers and the Slavophiles - claimed their legal rights against Gogol. 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 in his tone of prophecy and edification, the preaching of humility, because of which, however, one could see his own conceit; condemnation of previous works, full approval of the existing social order, he clearly discordant with those ideologues who relied only on the social reorganization of society. Gogol, without rejecting the expediency of social reorganization, saw the main goal in spiritual self-improvement. Therefore, for many years, the subject of his study is the works of the Church Fathers. But, not adhering to either Westerners or Slavophiles, Gogol stopped halfway, not completely adhering to spiritual literature - Seraphim of Sarov, Ignatius (Brianchaninov), and others.

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

Gogol was agonizing over 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 mistake, by exaggeration of the didactic tone, and by the fact that the censorship had not missed several important letters in the book; but the attacks of the former literary adherents, he could only explain the calculations of parties and pride. The public sense of this controversy was alien to him.

In a similar sense, he then wrote the "Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls"; “The Inspector General's Denouement”, where he wanted to give the character of a moralizing allegory to a free artistic creation, and “The Notice,” which announced that the fourth and fifth editions of The Inspector General would be sold for the benefit of the poor ... The book's failure had an overwhelming effect on Gogol. He had to confess that the mistake was 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 so Khlestakov that I do not have the spirit to look into it."

In his letters from 1847, there is no longer the former arrogant tone of preaching and edification; he saw that it was possible to describe Russian life only in the middle of it and by studying it. His religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue the work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to worship 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 through Constantinople and Odessa.

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

He continued to work on the second volume of Dead Souls and read excerpts from it at the Aksakovs, but in it the same painful struggle between the artist and the Christian continued, which had been going on in him since the early forties. As usual, he rewrote 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 possessed by the fear of death; he gave up literary studies, began fasting at Shrovetide; Once, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die.

Since the end of January 1852, Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky of Rzhev, whom Gogol met in 1849, and before that he had known by correspondence, had been visiting the house of Count Alexander Tolstoy. Difficult, sometimes harsh conversations took place between them, the main content of which was insufficient humility and piety of Gogol, for example, the demand for Fr. Matthew: "Renounce Pushkin." Gogol invited him to read the white-paper version of the second part of Dead Souls for acquaintance, 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 second 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 of "Selected Places ...", calling the book "harmful").

The death of Khomyakova, the condemnation of Konstantinovsky and, possibly, other reasons convinced Gogol to give up creativity and start fasting a week before Lent. On February 5, he sees off Konstantinovsky and has eaten almost nothing since that day. On February 10, he handed Count A. Tolstoy a briefcase with manuscripts to be handed over to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, but the count refused this order so as not to aggravate Gogol in his gloomy thoughts.

Gogol stops leaving the house. At 3 o'clock in the morning from Monday to Tuesday 11-12 (23-24) February 1852, that is, in Great Compline on Monday of the first week of Great Lent, Gogol woke up the servant Semyon, ordered him to open the stove valves and bring a briefcase from the closet. Taking a bunch of notebooks out of it, Gogol put them in the fireplace and burned them. The next morning he told Count Tolstoy that he wanted to burn only some of the things prepared in advance for that, but he burned everything under the influence of an evil spirit. Gogol, despite the admonitions of his friends, continued to strictly observe the fast; On February 18, I 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.

On 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 which was the final exhaustion and loss of strength, in the evening he fell into unconsciousness, and on the morning of February 21 on Thursday he died.

The inventory of Gogol's property showed that after him there were personal belongings in the amount of 43 rubles 88 kopecks. The items included in the inventory were perfect cast-offs and spoke of the writer’s complete indifference to his appearance in the last months of his life. At the same time, SP Shevyrev had more than two thousand rubles in his hands, donated by Gogol for charitable purposes to needy students of Moscow University. Gogol did not consider this money his own, and Shevyrev did not return it to the writer's heirs.

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

In 1930, the Danilov Monastery was finally closed, the necropolis was soon liquidated. On May 31, 1931, Gogol's grave was opened and his remains were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery. Golgotha ​​was also transferred there.

The official examination report, drawn up by the NKVD officers and now stored in the RGALI (f. 139, no. 61), disputes the unreliable and mutually exclusive recollections of the participant and witness of the exhumation, writer Vladimir Lidin. According to one of his memoirs ("The Transfer of the Ashes of N. V. Gogol"), written fifteen years after the event and published posthumously in 1991 in the "Russian Archive", the writer's skull was missing in Gogol's grave. According to his other memoirs, transmitted in the form of oral stories to students of the Literary Institute when Lidin was a professor at this institute in the 1970s, Gogol's skull was turned on its side. This, in particular, is evidenced by a former student V.G. Lidina, and later a senior researcher at the State Literary Museum Yu.V. Alekhin. Both of these versions are apocryphal, they gave rise to many legends, including the burial of Gogol in a state of lethargic sleep and the abduction of Gogol's skull for the collection of the famous Moscow collector of theatrical antiquity A. A. Bakhrushin. The same contradictory character is attributed to the numerous recollections of the desecration of Gogol's grave by Soviet writers (and by Lidin himself) during the exhumation of Gogol's grave, published by the media according to V. G. Lidin.

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

Golgotha, as unnecessary for some time, was in the workshops of the Novodevichy cemetery, where she was found with an already scraped off inscription by E.S. Elena Sergeevna bought the tombstone, after which it was installed over the grave of Mikhail Afanasyevich. Thus, the writer's dream came true: "Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron greatcoat."

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth, at the initiative of the members of the organizing committee of the anniversary, the grave was given an almost original appearance: a bronze cross on a black stone.

Even remembering all the writers who contributed to the development of Russian literature, it is difficult to find a more mysterious figure than Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The biography summarized in this article will help you get some idea of ​​the personality of the genius. So, what interesting details are known about the life path traversed by the creator, his family, written works?

Father and mother of Gogol

Of course, all fans of the writer's work would like to have an idea of ​​the family in which he was born. Gogol's mother was called Maria, the girl came from a little-known family of landowners. If you believe the legend, there was no more beautiful young lady in the Poltava region. She married the father of the famous writer at the age of 14, gave birth to 12 children, some of whom died in infancy. Nikolai became her third child and first survivor. The memoirs of contemporaries say that Mary was a religious woman, diligently trying to instill love for God in her children.

It is also interesting who became the father of such an amazing person as Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The biography summarized in this material cannot but mention him. Vasily Yanovsky-Gogol for many years was an employee of the post office, rose to the rank of collegiate assessor. It is known that he was fond of the magical world of art, he even composed poetry, which, unfortunately, practically did not survive. It is possible that the son's talent for writing was inherited from his father.

Biography of the writer

Fans of the genius are also interested in where and when Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born. The biography, briefly given in this article, says that his homeland is the Poltava province. The boy, born in 1809, spent his childhood in the village of Sorochintsy. His education began at the Poltava school, then continued at the Nizhyn gymnasium. It is curious that the writer could not be called a diligent student. Gogol showed his interest mainly in Russian literature, and achieved some success in drawing.

Nikolai began to write as a teenager, but his first creations could not be called successful. The situation changed when he moved to St. Petersburg, already being an adult youth. For some time, Gogol tried to achieve recognition as an actor, performed on the stage of one of the St. Petersburg theaters. However, having failed, he completely concentrated on writing. By the way, a few years later he managed to become famous in the theatrical sphere, acting as a playwright.

What kind of work allowed such a person as Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol to declare himself as a writer? The biography, summarized in this material, claims that it was the story "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala". Initially, the story had a different title, but the publishers were asked to replace it for unknown reasons before publication.

Notable works

"Dead Souls" is a poem, without which it is difficult to imagine Russian literature, the work is included in the school curriculum. The writer in it considers his native state as a country suffering from bribery, mired in vices, impoverished spiritually. Of course, it predicts a mystical revival of the Russian Empire. It is interesting that it was after the writing of this poem that N.V. Gogol's death came.

"Taras Bulba" is a historical story, in the creation of which the author was inspired by the real events of the 15-17 centuries that took place on the territory of Ukraine. The work is interesting not only for the moral issues that it raises, but also for the detailed description of the life of the Zaporozhye Cossacks.

"Viy" invites readers to plunge into the legends of the ancient Slavs, to get to know the world inhabited by mystical creatures, allows them to get scared and overcome their fear. The "inspector" ridicules the way of life of the provincial bureaucracy, the vices inherent in its representatives. The Nose is a fantastic story about excessive pride and retribution.

Death of a writer

There is hardly a famous person whose death is surrounded by an equally large number of mysteries and assumptions. It is with death that many interesting facts about Gogol are associated, which haunt biographers.

Some researchers insist that Nikolai Vasilyevich killed himself using poison. Others argue that his early death was the result of the depletion of the body associated with numerous fasting. Still others insist on what caused the inappropriate treatment of meningitis. There are also those who assure that the writer was buried alive while staying in. None of the theories were proved.

It is only known for certain that during the last 20 years of his life, the writer suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, but avoided going to doctors. Gogol died in 1852.

Curious facts

Nikolai Vasilievich was distinguished by extreme shyness. It got to the point that the genius left the room, the threshold of which was crossed by a stranger. It is believed that the creator left this world without losing his innocence, he never had a romantic relationship with a woman. Gogol was also very dissatisfied with his own appearance, his nose was especially irritating. Apparently, this part of the body really worried him, since he even named a story in her honor. It is also known that when posing for portraits, he forced artists to change the appearance of his nose.

Interesting facts about Gogol are associated not only with his appearance and behavior, but also with creativity. Biographers believe that there was a second volume of "Dead Souls", which the writer personally destroyed shortly before his death. It is also curious that the plot of "The Inspector General" was suggested to him by Pushkin himself, sharing an interesting story from his life.

Nikolay Gogol

surname at birth Yanovskiy

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

short biography

- the greatest Russian writer, playwright, publicist, critic, classic of Russian literature - was born on April 1 (March 20, O.S.) 1809. His homeland was the Poltava province, the village of Bolshiye Sorochintsy, Mirgorodsky district. He was the son of a middle-class landowner. Nikolai began to receive education at the age of ten, having entered the Poltava district school, then in the course of private lessons, and in 1821 he left for the Chernigov region to join the ranks of the students of the Nizhyn gymnasium of higher sciences.

He did not shine with success in studies, which was partly due to the not very high-quality level of organization of teaching in the newly created educational institution. Deficiencies in education were compensated by the desire for knowledge of Nikolai himself and his comrades. They organized the issue of a manuscript journal, in which the first literary - both poetic and prosaic - samples of the future classic's pen appeared. The young Gogol was also keenly interested in theater, having established himself as a good actor and decorator. By the time he graduated from the gymnasium, Gogol dreamed of a great service to society, believing that he had every reason for brilliant success in this field, but did not even think about the hypostasis of a professional writer.

Filled with high hopes, aspirations and as yet unclear plans, in December 1828 Gogol arrived in St. Petersburg. The harsh reality, the inability to find oneself brought a bitter tinge of disappointment to his mood. The unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, the hardships of serving in the Department of State Economy and Public Buildings and later in the Department of Fates made the idea of ​​dedicating oneself to literary creation more and more attractive. However, there were pluses in the clerical service: it allowed Gogol to get acquainted with the life and work of officials from the inside, and this awareness later served a good service when writing works.

In 1829 Gogol published his first essay intended for the general public - a romantic idyll called "Ganz Kuchelgarten", which he signed with the pseudonym V. Alov. His debut work, written back in Nizhyn, drew criticism, so Gogol destroyed the circulation with his own hand. Failure did not turn me away from thoughts of literary glory, but made me look for other ways. Even in the winter of 1829, Gogol constantly asked his mother in letters to send him a description of the national Ukrainian traditions and customs. Finding that life in Little Russia is interesting to many, Gogol nurtured thoughts about a work that, on the one hand, could come to court, and on the other, satisfy his needs for literary creativity. Already in 1829, "May Night" and "Sorochinskaya" Fair were written, or at least started, at the beginning of 1830, "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" was published in the journal "Otechestvennye zapiski".

In the winter of 1831, the inspector of the Patriotic Institute, Pletnev, recommended Gogol as a teacher, and in May introduced him to Pushkin. This event became truly fateful in the biography of Gogol, having a huge influence on him as a person and a writer. In 1834, the young Gogol became an adjunct in the department of history at St. Petersburg University and was included in the circle of people at the forefront of Russian fiction. He perceived his service to the Word as the highest moral duty that must be sacredly fulfilled. This period became the most intense in his literary activity. In 1830-1832. published "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", which bring their author resounding fame.

The collections “Arabesques” and “Mirgorod”, published in 1835, strengthened Gogol's reputation as a brilliant writer. Meeting them allowed V. Belinsky to confer on Gogol the status of “head of literature, head of poets”. Literary creativity has become the main and only occupation of the writer since the summer of 1834. In the same year, The Inspector General was conceived, and the plot of the work was suggested by Pushkin (the same story was repeated later with Dead Souls). In 1836, the Alexandria Theater staged The Inspector General, but the decline in social acuteness when it was transferred to the stage brought disappointment to the author.

The enormous strain of physical and moral forces accumulated over several years led the writer to the idea of ​​taking a trip abroad to rest. Almost a dozen years, not counting short breaks, he spent in various cities in Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic. Staying outside his homeland, on the one hand, calmed him down, nourished him with new impressions and strength, but on the other hand, changes ripened in his soul, which later acquired a fatal, fatal character.

Finding himself in the spring of 1837 in Rome, the city that he fell in love with as his second home, Nikolai Vasilievich began to work on Dead Souls, which were conceived in 1835. In 1841, work on the first volume was completed, and in the fall Gogol returned to Russia to publish his works. With difficulty, not without the help of influential acquaintances, having passed the crucible of the St. Petersburg censorship, which excluded certain passages, the author gets the go-ahead for Dead Souls and publishes them in Moscow in 1842.

In the summer, the author of the poem again went abroad, moving from country to country, from city to city. The main changes took place, meanwhile, in his inner world. Gogol considered himself the creator of something providential, saw himself as a messiah, called upon to expose the vices of people and at the same time improve himself, and for him this path lay through religion. Repeated serious ailments contributed to the strengthening of his religiosity and prophetic sentiments. Everything that came out of his pen, he considered unworthy of his high destiny and sinful.

A severe mental crisis that broke out in 1845 prompts Gogol to write a will and burn the manuscript of the second volume of the poem "Dead Souls". Having experienced this terrible state, the writer, as a sign of deliverance from death, decides to take a monk's hair, but he fails to realize this idea. And then he comes to the idea of ​​serving God in the literary field, he comes to understand how it is necessary to write so that the whole society "strives for the beautiful."

The idea of ​​collecting everything written in recent years was realized in the form of the book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends", published in 1847 in St. Petersburg. Due to the mentoring, haughty tone, ambiguity of the ideological position, unwillingness to join the Westernizers and Slavophiles, who in the 1840s. actively challenged each other's right to truth, "Selected Places" remained incomprehensible and condemned. Grieving the failure, Gogol sought consolation in religion, considered it necessary to continue working only after a trip to holy places. Once again, the period of his stay abroad begins in the biography of the writer. At the end of 1747, Naples became his place of residence, and from there, at the beginning of 1848, he made a pilgrimage to Palestine.

In the spring of 1848 N.V. Gogol to Russia. Work on the second volume of Dead Souls continued against the backdrop of intense internal struggle. The writer's health, meanwhile, was getting worse every day. The death of his good friend Khomyakova made an extremely painful impression on him and exacerbated the fear of his own imminent demise. The situation was aggravated by the negative attitude of Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky (he was a guest in the house of Count Tolstoy, where Gogol lived at that time) to the manuscript of the second part of the poem, his call to destroy some chapters.

After seeing Konstantinovsky on February 5, Gogol stops leaving the house, begins to pray and fast with special zeal, although the time of Great Lent has not yet come. On the night of February 11-12 (O.S.) 1852, the writer burns his works, among which were the manuscripts of Dead Souls. On February 18, he finally took to his bed and stopped eating, refused the offered help of doctors and friends who tried in vain to rectify the situation. On February 20, the doctors who gathered for the council decided to treat Gogol forcibly, but this only deprived him of his last strength - by the evening he was unconscious, and on February 21 (March 4, according to the present), he died in the morning.

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

Biography from Wikipedia

Childhood and youth

Born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in Sorochintsy near the Psel River, on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts (Poltava province). He was named Nicholas in honor of Saint Nicholas. According to family legend, he came from an old Cossack family and was presumably a descendant of Ostap Gogol - hetman of the Right Bank Army of the Zaporozhye Rzeczpospolita. Some of his ancestors pestered the gentry, and Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich Gogol-Yanovsky (1738-1805), wrote in official paper that “his ancestors, with the surname Gogol, of the Polish nation,” although most biographers tend to believe that he nevertheless he was a "Little Russian". A number of researchers, whose opinion was formulated by V.V. Veresaev, believes that the descent from Ostap Gogol could have been falsified by Afanasy Demyanovich to receive him the nobility, since the priestly lineage was an insurmountable obstacle to acquiring a noble title.

Great-great-grandfather Yan (Ivan) Yakovlevich, a pupil of the Kiev Theological Academy, “came out to the Russian side”, settled in the Poltava region, and from him came the nickname “Yanovskiy” (according to another version, they were Yanovskiy, as they lived in the Yanove area). Having received a noble letter in 1792, Afanasy Demyanovich changed his surname "Yanovsky" to "Gogol-Yanovsky". According to the church metric, the future writer at birth was nevertheless named Nikolai Yanovsky. At the request of his father Vasily Afanasyevich, in 1820 Nikolai Yanovsky was recognized as a nobleman, and in 1821 the surname Gogol-Yanovsky was assigned to him. Apparently, Nikolai Vasilyevich did not know about the real origin of the surname and subsequently discarded its second part "Yanovsky", saying that the Poles had invented it, leaving only the first one - "Gogol". The writer's father, Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky (1777-1825), died when his son was 15 years old. It is believed that the stage activities of his father, who was a wonderful storyteller and wrote plays for home theater, determined the interests of the future writer - Gogol showed an early interest in theater.

Maria Ivanovna Gogol-Yanovskaya (born. Kosyarovskaya), the mother of the writer

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

In addition to Nikolai, 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 the early deceased Ivan (1810-1819). Then the daughter Maria (1811-1844) was born. All middle children also died in infancy. The last were daughters Anna (1821-1893), Elizabeth (married Bykov) (1823-1864) and Olga (1825-1907).

An old country house in the village of Vasilyevka, Poltava province, where N.V. Gogol spent his childhood.

Life in the countryside before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of the Little Russian life, both of the landlord and the 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 Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his stories. The influence of the mother is credited with the inclinations of that religiosity and that mysticism, which by the end of his life took possession of Gogol's entire being.

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

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; in a few days he prepared for exams and moved from class to class; he was very weak in languages ​​and only succeeded in drawing and Russian literature.

Apparently, the gymnasium of higher sciences itself, which was not very well organized in the first years of its existence, was, apparently, 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 strengthened the students' interest in romantic literature. The lessons of moral education were supplemented with a rod. Gogol also got it.

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

The comrades subscribed to the magazines; started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in poetry. At that time he wrote elegiac poems, tragedies, a historical poem and a story, as well as the satire "Something about Nezhin, or the Law Is Not Written to Fools." With literary interests, a love for the theater developed, where Gogol, already distinguished by his unusual comicism, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). Gogol's youthful experiences took shape in the style of romantic rhetoric - not in the taste of Pushkin, whom Gogol already admired at that time, but rather in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

The death of his father was a hard blow to the entire family. Gogol is also concerned about business; he gives advice, calms the mother, must think about the future arrangement of his own affairs. The mother worships her son Nikolai, considers him a genius, she gives him the last of her meager funds to provide for his Nezhin, and later Petersburg life. Nikolai also paid her all his life with warm filial love, but there was no complete understanding and trusting relationship between them. Later, he gave up his share in the common family inheritance in favor of the sisters in order to devote himself entirely to literature.

Towards the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of broad social activities, which, however, he does not see in the literary field; undoubtedly influenced by everything around him, he thinks to advance and benefit society in a service for which in fact he was not capable. Thus, plans for the future were unclear; but Gogol was sure that he had a wide field ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what ordinary people are content with, in his words, which were the majority of his Nizhyn comrades.

St. Petersburg

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

Despite his numerous attempts, he was never accepted as an actor. His service was so empty and monotonous that it became unbearable to him. The literary field became the only opportunity for his self-expression. In St. Petersburg, for the first time, he kept the company of his fellow countrymen, which consisted partly of his former comrades. He found that Little Russia arouses a keen interest in Petersburg society; the failures he experienced turned his poetic dreams to his native land, and hence the first plans for work, which were 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 the romantic idyll "Ganz Kuchelgarten" (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and whose hero was given those ideal dreams and aspirations that he was fulfilled in the last years of Nezhin's life. Soon after the book was published, he himself destroyed its circulation when criticism reacted unfavorably to his work.

In a restless search for a life's business, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lubeck, but a month later he returned to Petersburg again (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 between his lofty and arrogant dreams and practical life. “He was drawn to some fantastic country of happiness and reasonable productive labor,” says his biographer; America seemed to him such a country. In fact, instead of America, he ended up serving in the III Section thanks to the patronage of Thaddeus Bulgarin. However, his stay there was short-lived. Ahead of him was waiting for 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, a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin took place, which had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity.

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

Other works Gogol then published in the editions of Baron Delvig "Literaturnaya Gazeta" and "Northern Flowers", which included a chapter from the historical novel "Hetman". Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received Gogol with great cordiality: apparently, the first time between them was the mutual sympathy of people related in love of art, in religiosity, inclined to mysticism - after that they became very close.

Zhukovsky handed the young man over to Pletnev with a request to attach him, and indeed, in February 1831, Pletnev recommended Gogol for the position of teacher at the Patriotic Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Having got to know Gogol better, Pletnev was waiting for the opportunity to "bring him under the blessing of Pushkin": this happened in May of the same year. Gogol's entry into this circle, who soon appreciated his great nascent talent, had a huge impact on Gogol's fate. Finally, the prospect of broad activity, which he dreamed of, was opening before him - 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 provided him with the opportunity to conduct private classes with the Longinovs, Balabins, Vasilchikovs; but the main thing was in the moral influence that this environment, new to him, 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 persons who stood at the head of Russian fiction: his long-standing poetic aspirations could develop in all their breadth, an instinctive understanding of art could become a deep consciousness; the personality of Pushkin 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, and his slow manner of work, long definition and development of a plan and all the details. A society of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with poor knowledge brought 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 struck up a relationship that played a significant role in the future in his life, for example, with the Vielgorskys; at the Balabins he met the brilliant maid of honor Alexandra Rosetti (later Smirnova). The horizon of his life observations expanded, long-standing aspirations gained ground, and Gogol's lofty notion of his destiny became the utmost conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublimely idealistic, on the other, the prerequisites for religious searches arose, which marked the last years of his life.

This time was the most active era of his work. After small works, which were mentioned above in part, his first major literary undertaking, which laid the foundation for his fame, was "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka." The stories published by the pasichnik Rudy Pank ", published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first included" Sorochinskaya Fair "," Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala "," May Night, or the Drowned Woman "," The Missing Letter "; the second - "The Night before Christmas", "Terrible revenge, an old story", "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and his aunt", "Enchanted place").

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

He grew up in the eyes of his closest circle and, in general, of the young literary generation. Meanwhile, in Gogol's personal life, events were taking place that in various ways influenced the inner makeup of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he visited his homeland for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The way lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: with Mikhail Pogodin, Mikhail Maksimovich, Mikhail Schepkin, Sergei Aksakov.

Staying at home at first surrounded him with the impressions of his beloved native environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household matters were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic youth that he left his homeland: life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and 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."

Ukrainian life at that time also provided material for his imagination, but the mood was different: in the stories of Mirgorod, this sad note, reaching high pathos, constantly sounds. Returning to St. Petersburg, Gogol worked hard on his works: this was generally the most active period 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 a thought as unrealizable as his previous plans for service were unrealizable: it seemed to him that he could perform in the scientific field. At that time, the opening of Kiev University was being prepared, and he dreamed of taking the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriotic Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kiev; Gogol dreamed of starting his studies in Kiev with him, wanted to invite Pogodin there too; in Kiev, his imagination imagined Russian Athens, where he himself thought to write 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 actually took this pulpit; several times he managed to deliver a spectacular lecture, but then the task was beyond his powers, and he himself gave up 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 actor P.A.Karatygin in 1835

In 1832, his work was suspended somewhat due to domestic and personal concerns. But already in 1833 he again worked hard, and the result of these years was the two mentioned collections. First came the "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"; "On architecture"; " About teaching general history ";" A look at the compilation of Little Russia ";" About Little Russian songs ", etc.), but at the same time, new stories" Portrait "," Nevsky Prospect "and" Notes of a Madman ".

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

Then in the same year "Mirgorod" was published - a story serving 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 reworked by Gogol. As 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 Gunia and Ostryanin. Apparently, the writer used the diaries of a Polish eyewitness to these events - military chaplain Simon Okolsky.

By the early thirties, the ideas of some of Gogol's other works also belong, such as the famous "Overcoat", "Carriage", perhaps, "Portrait" in its revised version; these works appeared in the Sovremennik by Pushkin (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); to a later stay in Italy refers to "Rome" in "Moskvityanin" Pogodin (1842).

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

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

The "Inspector" caused endless work of defining the plan and details of execution; there are a number of sketches, in whole and in parts, and the first printed form of a comedy appeared in 1836. The old passion for the theater took possession of Gogol to an extreme degree: the comedy did not leave his head; he was languishingly carried away by the idea of ​​becoming face to face with society; he tried with the greatest care to ensure that the play was performed in accordance with his own idea of ​​character and action; the production met a variety of obstacles, including censorship, and finally could be realized only at the behest of Emperor Nicholas.

The "Inspector" 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 cheats, the whole society revolted against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole order life, in which it itself dwells.

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 a beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new one, the emerging period of Russian art and the Russian public. Thus, the "Inspector General" split public opinion. If for the conservative-bureaucratic part of society the play seemed like a demarche, 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 the public sense he stood completely on the point of view of his friends from the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in this order of things, and therefore he was especially struck by the discordant noise of misunderstanding that arose around his play. Subsequently, in the "Theatrical passing after the presentation of a new comedy", on the one hand, he conveyed the impression that "The Inspector General" made in various strata of society, and on the other, he expressed his own thoughts about the great importance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans appeared to Gogol even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833 he was absorbed in the comedy "Vladimir 3rd degree"; it was not finished by him, but its material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "Morning of a Business Man", "Litigation", "Lackey" 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 there appeared for the first time "The Marriage", the sketches of which date from the same 1833, and "The Players", conceived in the middle of the 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 by going on a trip abroad.

Honorary Member of Moscow University since 1844 “Moscow University, having respected the outstanding achievements and literary works in the field of Russian literature in the field of Russian literature, Mr. can contribute to the success of the sciences. "

Abroad

In June 1836, Nikolai Vasilyevich went abroad, where he stayed with interruptions 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 became the embryo of deeply fatal phenomena. The experience of working with this book, the contradictory reaction of his contemporaries to it, just as in the case of The Inspector General, convinced him of the enormous influence and ambiguous power of his talent over the minds of his contemporaries. This thought gradually began to take shape in the idea of ​​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 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 he loved extremely 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 ancient monuments, art galleries, visited artists' workshops, admired the life of the people and loved to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian friends and acquaintances.

But in Rome he also 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 converted into "Rome", wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, however, after several alterations he destroyed.

In the fall of 1839, he, together with Pogodin, went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was met by the Aksakovs, who were enthusiastic about the talent of the writer. 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 finished 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 masterpiece... The board was installed by the efforts of the writer P. D. Boborykin

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

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

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

A high idea of ​​his talent and the responsibility that lies on him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and take a broad view of life, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by divine thought. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which further increased his religious mood; in his circle, he found a convenient basis for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently gave instructions to his friends and eventually came to the conviction that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem "Dead Souls" is no more than a porch to the palace that is being built in it, then at that time he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high destiny.

Nikolai Gogol was not in good health since childhood. The death of his younger brother Ivan in adolescence, the untimely death of his father left an imprint on his state of mind. The work on the sequel to Dead Souls did not go well, and the writer felt agonizing doubts that he would be able to bring the conceived work to the end. In the summer of 1845, a painful mental crisis overtook him. He writes a will, burns the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. In commemoration of deliverance from death, Gogol decides to go to a monastery and become a monk, but monasticism did not take place. But his mind presented itself with the new content of the book, enlightened and purified; it seemed to him that he understood how to write in order to "direct the whole society towards beauty." He decides to serve God in the field of literature. A new work began, and in the meantime he was occupied with another thought: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful to him, and he decides to collect in one book everything he wrote to his friends in recent years in the spirit of his new mood and instructs to publish this book to Pletnev. These were "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" (St. Petersburg, 1847).

Most of the letters that make up this book date back to 1845 and 1846, the time when Gogol's religious mood reached its highest development. The 1840s was the time of the formation and demarcation of two different ideologies in the contemporary Russian educated society. Gogol remained alien to this demarcation, despite the fact that each of the two warring parties - the Westernizers and the Slavophiles - claimed their legal rights against Gogol. 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 in his tone of prophecy and edification, the preaching of humility, because of which, however, one could see his own conceit; condemnation of previous works, full approval of the existing social order, he clearly discordant with those ideologues who relied only on the social reorganization of society. Gogol, without rejecting the expediency of social reorganization, saw the main goal in spiritual self-improvement. Therefore, for many years, the subject of his study is the works of the Church Fathers. But, not adhering to either Westerners or Slavophiles, Gogol stopped halfway, not completely adhering to spiritual literature - Seraphim of Sarov, Ignatius (Bryanchaninov), etc.

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

Gogol was agonizing over 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 mistake, by exaggeration of the didactic tone, and by the fact that the censorship had not missed several important letters in the book; but the attacks of former literary adherents, he could only explain the calculations of political movements and pride. The public sense of this controversy was alien to him.

In a similar sense, he then wrote the "Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls"; "The Inspector General's Denouement", in which he wanted to give the character of a moralizing allegory to a free artistic creation, and "The Notice," which announced that the fourth and fifth editions of The Inspector General would be sold for the benefit of the poor ... The book's failure had an overwhelming effect on Gogol. He had to confess that the mistake was 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 so Khlestakov that I do not have the spirit to look into it."

In his letters from 1847, there is no longer the former arrogant tone of preaching and edification; he saw that it was possible to describe Russian life only in the middle of it and by studying it. His religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue the work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to worship 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 through Constantinople and Odessa.

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

Gogol calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; once caught in the rain 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 village and in Kaluga, where Smirnova's husband was the governor; 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 fall of 1851 he settled in Moscow, where he lived in the house of his friend Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy (No. 7 on Nikitsky Boulevard).

He continued to work on the second volume of Dead Souls and read excerpts from it at the Aksakovs, but in it the same painful struggle between the artist and the Christian continued, which had been going on in him since the early forties. As usual, he rewrote 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 possessed by the fear of death; he gave up literary studies, began fasting at Shrovetide; Once, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die.

Death

Since the end of January 1852, Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky of Rzhev, whom Gogol met in 1849, and before that he had known by correspondence, had been visiting the house of Count Alexander Tolstoy. Difficult, sometimes harsh conversations took place between them, the main content of which was insufficient humility and piety of Gogol, for example, Father Matthew's demand: "Renounce Pushkin." Gogol invited him to read the white paper version of the second part of Dead Souls for acquaintance - 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 second 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 of "Selected Places ...", calling the book "harmful").

The death of Khomyakova, the condemnation of Konstantinovsky and, possibly, other reasons convinced Gogol to give up creativity and start fasting a week before Lent. On February 5, he sees off Konstantinovsky and has eaten almost nothing since that day. On February 10, he handed Count A. Tolstoy a briefcase with manuscripts to be handed over to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, but the count refused this order so as not to aggravate Gogol in his gloomy thoughts.

Gogol stops leaving the house. At 3 o'clock in the morning from Monday to Tuesday 11-12 (23-24) February 1852, that is, in Great Compline on Monday of the first week of Great Lent, Gogol woke up the servant Semyon, ordered him to open the stove valves and bring a briefcase from the closet. Taking a bunch of notebooks out of it, Gogol put them in the fireplace and burned them. The next morning he told Count Tolstoy that he wanted to burn only some of the things prepared in advance for that, but he burned everything under the influence of an evil spirit. Gogol, despite the admonitions of his friends, continued to strictly observe the fast; On February 18, I 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.

On 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 was a 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, not having lived a month before his 43rd birthday.

Addresses in St. Petersburg

• End of 1828 - Trut's tenement house - 72, Catherine Canal embankment;
• the beginning of 1829 - Galibin's apartment building - 48 Gorokhovaya Street;
• April - July 1829 - the house of I.-A. Iokhima - Bolshaya Meshchanskaya street, 39;
• late 1829 - May 1831 - Zverkov's tenement house - 69 Catherine Canal embankment;
• August 1831 - May 1832 - Brunst's tenement house - Officer's Street (until 1918, now - Dekabristov Street), 4;
• summer 1833 - June 6, 1836 - courtyard wing of Lepen's house - Malaya Morskaya street, 17, apt. 10. Historical monument of federal significance; Object of cultural heritage № 7810075000 // Register of objects of cultural heritage of the Russian Federation. Checked out

• October 30 - November 2, 1839 - P. A. Pletnev's apartment in the Stroganov house - Nevsky prospect, 38;
• May - July 1842 - P.A.Pletnev's apartment in the rector's wing of the St. Petersburg Imperial University - Universitetskaya embankment, 9.

Property case

On February 21, 1852, an "announcement" was sent from the Talyzina house about Gogol's death to the police unit, and that after his death "... here in Moscow cash, treasury of tickets, debt documents, gold, silver, diamond and other precious things, except for an insignificant wearable there is nothing left of the dress ... ". The information provided to the police by Count Tolstoy's butler Rudakov, about the estate, heirs and servant of Gogol, is completely accurate and amazes with its laconic scarcity.

The inventory of Gogol's property showed that after him there were personal belongings in the amount of 43 rubles 88 kopecks. The items included in the inventory were perfect cast-offs and spoke about the complete indifference of the writer to his appearance in the last months of his life. At the same time, SP Shevyrev had more than two thousand rubles in his hands, donated by Gogol for charitable purposes to needy students of Moscow University. Gogol did not consider this money his own, and Shevyrev did not return it to the writer's heirs.

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

The protocol, drawn up by the quarter warden Protopopov and "bona fide witness" Strakhov, discovered another type of Gogol's property, omitted by the butler: books, and noted an interesting circumstance: Gogol's servant, a teenager Semyon Grigoriev, as can be seen from his signature, was literate.

At the hour of his death, Gogol had 150 books in Russian (of which 87 were bound) and 84 in foreign languages ​​(of which 57 were bound). This type of property was so insignificant in the eyes of the official appraisers that each book went in a herd for a penny apiece.

It should be noted with deep sorrow that the professor of Moscow University Shevyrev, who signed the inventory, did not show such interest in Gogol's dying library as to compile the same list for Gogol's books as his socks and underpants were awarded. What books Gogol kept with him in the last months of his life, what he read, we will never know: we only know that with him there was a library of 234 volumes.

The quarterly warden in the report to the bailiff of the Arbat unit rewrote the text of the protocol, with a significant addition: “The decree on resignation was not found between the papers he had, and because of his temporary stay here in Moscow, his written form in the quarter entrusted to me was not shown, there is no will left. " For the first time, the report spoke about Gogol's “papers” that were not mentioned in the “explanation” and the minutes, and about the absence of a “will”.

Earlier, the police - no later than an hour and a half after the death of Gogol - visited the rooms of the deceased writer Dr. A. T. Tarasenkov. “When I arrived,” he recalled, “they had already managed to inspect his cabinets, where they did not find any notebooks he had written or money.” Where did Gogol's money go, told the same Tarasenkov: after February 12, Gogol “sent his last pocket money to the poor and for candles, so that after his death he did not have a penny. Shevyrev has about 2000 rubles left. from the proceeds for the composition of the money. " Gogol did not consider this amount his own and therefore did not keep it with him, entrusting the disposal of it to Shevyrev.

Indeed, on May 7, 1852, Shevyrev wrote in "A note on the publication of the works of the late Nikolai V. Gogol and the amount of money he left for that": used to help poor young people engaged in science and art - 2,533 rubles. 87 kopecks His pocket money - the remainder of the proceeds for the 2nd edition of Dead Souls - 170 rubles. 10 k.Total 2.703 rubles. 97 K. "

Thus, in Gogol's room, even in the very "cabinet" mentioned in the police protocol, the very papers were kept - the "will" and "written notebooks" - which were not in place already within an hour and a half after death Gogol, neither under Dr. Tarasenkov, nor under a "bona fide witness."

Obviously, Count Tolstoy's butler Rudakov and Gogol's servant Semyon Grigoriev, in advance, immediately after the death of Gogol, removed them from his room in order to better preserve them for his family and posterity. Later Rudakov handed them over to Count Tolstoy, who had already informed Shevyrev and Kapnist.

On June 20, 1852, Shevyrev wrote to Gogol's mother: “One of these days, Count Tolstoy's butler is sending all Nikolai Vasilyevich's things and books to you with the transport of the Kharkov commission, and Semyon will go with them. I’ll bring all the remaining papers to you ... if something slowed down my proposed trip, I’ll send my wills by mail, but with a letter of insurance. These wills do not have the form of an act, but can only have family force. "

In the fall of 1852, Shevyrev visited the orphaned Vasilyevka, fulfilling his own desire to see Gogol's family and fulfilling the instructions of the Academy of Sciences - to collect materials for the biography of the deceased writer. Shevyrev brought Gogol's papers to Vasilyevka and there he received an assignment from Gogol's heirs to work on publishing Gogol's true legacy - his works.

On April 24, 1855, his mother wrote to OS Aksakova about the "remaining papers" - the most precious part of Gogolev's property: "It was hard for me to read the continuation of Dead Souls from those found in the rough in his closet." These five chapters from the second volume of "Dead Souls", published in 1855 by Gogol's nephew N. P. Trushkovsky (Moscow, University Printing House), were in those "written notebooks" that Tarasenkov mentioned as not found.

Funeral and grave

Friends wanted to service the deceased in the church of the Monk Simeon the Stylite, which he loved and attended.
The Moscow governor, Count A.A.Zakrevsky, in his letter to the chief of gendarmes, Count A.F. Orlov, dated February 29, 1852, wrote that the decision in which church to serve Gogol's funeral service was discussed by friends who had gathered in Count Tolstoy's house - Slavophiles A. Khomyakov, K. and S. Aksakov, A. Efremov, P. Kireevsky, A. Koshelev and Popov. Timofey Granovsky, a professor at Moscow University who was also there, said that it would be more appropriate to have his funeral service university church- as a person who, in some way, belongs to the university. The Slavophiles objected that he does not belong to the university, but belongs the people, and therefore, as a people of the people, and should be funeral in parish church, into which a footman, a coachman, and in general anyone who wishes, can enter to pay his last debt; and such people will not be allowed into the university church - that is, the funeral will be held as a public one. Zakrevsky ordered “Gogol, as an honorary member of the local university, must certainly serve the funeral service at the university church. (...) I was ordered to be the police and some of my officials, both during the transfer of Gogol's body to the church, as well as until the burial. "... But at the same time he agreed with friends: “And so that there was no murmur, I ordered everyone, without exception, to enter the university church. On the day of the burial, there were a lot of people of all classes and of both sexes, and in order to keep everything quiet at that time, I came to church myself. ".

Later, in 1881, Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov wrote about this feud to bibliographer Stepan Ivanovich Ponomarev: “At first, his closest friends began to take charge of the funeral, but then the university, which had recently interpreted Gogol as a half-madman, came to its senses, presented its rights and pushed us away from the orders. It turned out better, because the funeral got a more social and solemn character, and we all recognized this and gave the university complete freedom to dispose of, having ourselves become in the shadows ".

The writer was buried in the university church of the Martyr Tatiana. The funeral took place on Sunday afternoon, February 24 (March 7), 1852 at the Danilov Monastery cemetery in Moscow. A monument was erected on the grave, consisting of two parts: 1) a bronze cross, standing on a black tombstone (“Golgotha”), on which was carved the inscription in Slavic letters “Come to her, Lord Jesus! Apocalypse. ch. KV, st. K "; 2) a black marble slab lying on a gray granite base. The following inscriptions were carved on it in civil letters: On the upper obverse: “The body of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was buried here. Born March 19, 1809. Died on February 21, 1852. ”On the small side of the slab, facing the viewer:“ They will laugh at my bitter word. Jeremiah chapters. 20, art. 8 ". On the large side of the slab to the viewer:" Husband is the sensible throne. Prtichi ch. 12, art. 23 "," Truth raises the language. Proverbs ch. 14, art. 34 ". On the large lateral side of the slab, hidden from the viewer (to the grate):" The truth will fill the mouth with laughter, about the mouth of their confessions. Job ch. 8, Art. 21 "..

According to legend, IS Aksakov himself chose the stone for Gogol's grave somewhere in the Crimea (cutters called it "Black Sea granite").

Drawing of the grave of N.V. Gogol, made by the artist V.A.Evdokimov-Rozantsov. 1886 year

In 1930, the Danilov Monastery was finally closed, and the necropolis was soon liquidated.
On May 31, 1931, Gogol's grave was opened, and his remains were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery. Golgotha ​​was also transferred there.

The official examination report, drawn up by the NKVD officers and now stored in the RGALI (f. 139, no. 61), disputes the unreliable and mutually exclusive recollections of the participant and witness of the exhumation, writer Vladimir Lidin. According to one of his memoirs ("The Transfer of the Ashes of N. V. Gogol"), written fifteen years after the event and published posthumously in 1991 in the "Russian Archive", the writer's skull was missing in Gogol's grave. According to his other memoirs, transmitted in the form of oral stories to students of the Literary Institute when Lidin was his professor in the 1970s, Gogol's skull was turned on its side. This, in particular, is evidenced by a former student V.G. Lidina, and later a senior researcher at the State Literary Museum Yu.V. Alekhin. Both of these versions are apocryphal. They gave rise to many legends, including the burial of Gogol in a state of lethargic sleep and the abduction of the writer's skull for the collection of the famous Moscow collector of theatrical antiquity A. A. Bakhrushin. The same contradictory character is attributed to the numerous recollections of the desecration of Gogol's grave by Soviet writers (and by Lidin himself) during the exhumation of Gogol's grave, published by the media from the words of the same V.G. Lidin.

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

“Golgotha”, as unnecessary for some time, was in the workshops of the Novodevichy cemetery, where it was found with an already scraped off inscription by E. S. Bulgakova, who was looking for a suitable gravestone for the grave of her late husband, M. A. Bulgakov. Elena Sergeevna bought the tombstone, after which it was installed over the grave of Mikhail Afanasyevich. Thus, the writer's dream came true: "Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron greatcoat".

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth, at the initiative of the members of the organizing committee of the anniversary, the grave was given an almost original appearance: a bronze cross on a black stone.

Creation

It seemed to the early researchers of Gogol's literary activity, wrote A. N. Pypin, that his work was divided into two periods: the first, when he served the "progressive aspirations" of society, and the second, when he became religiously conservative.

Another approach to the study of Gogol's biography, which included, among other things, an analysis of his correspondence, which revealed his inner life, allowed researchers to come to the conclusion that, no matter how opposite the motives of his stories, The Inspector General and Dead Souls, on the one hand, and "Selected Places" - on the other, in the very personality of the writer there was not that turning point that was supposed to be in it, one direction was not thrown and another, opposite was taken; on the contrary, it was one integral 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 complicated by the internal dispute between the idealist poet, the citizen writer, and the consistent Christian.

About the properties of his talent, Gogol himself said: "I only came out well that was taken by me from reality, from the data known to me." At the same time, the faces he depicted were not just a repetition of reality: they were whole artistic types in which human nature was deeply understood. His heroes more often than any other Russian writer became household names.

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

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

All of Gogol's fundamental ideas about life and literature were those of the Pushkin circle. His artistic feeling was strong, and, appreciating the peculiar talent of Gogol, the circle took care of his personal affairs. As A. N. Pypin believed, Pushkin expected great artistic merit from Gogol's works, but hardly expected their social significance, as Pushkin's friends later did not fully appreciate him and how Gogol himself was ready to distance himself from him.

Gogol distanced himself from the understanding of the social significance of his works, which was invested in them by the literary criticism of V.G. Belinsky and his circle, social and utopian criticism. But at the same time, Gogol himself was no stranger to utopianism in the sphere of social reconstruction, only his utopia was not socialist, but Orthodox.

The idea of ​​"Dead Souls" in its final form is nothing more than an indication of the path to goodness for absolutely any person. The three parts of the poem are a kind of repetition of "Hell", "Purgatory" and "Paradise". The fallen heroes of the first part rethink their existence in the second part and are spiritually reborn in the third. Thus, a literary work was loaded with the applied task of correcting human vices. The history of literature before Gogol did not know such a grandiose plan. And at the same time, the writer intended to write his poem not just conventionally schematic, but lively and convincing.

After the death of Pushkin, Gogol became close to the circle of Slavophiles, or actually to Pogodin and Shevyrev, S. T. Aksakov and Yazykov; but he remained alien to the theoretical content of Slavophilism, and it did not in any way affect the makeup 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. Gogol did not see Russia without monarchy and Orthodoxy, he was convinced that the church should not exist separately from the state. However, later in the elder Aksakov, he met with a rebuff to his views expressed in "Selected Places."

The most acute moment of the collision of Gogol's worldview ideas with the aspirations of the revolutionary part of society was Belinsky's letter from Salzbrunn, the very tone of which painfully wounded the writer (Belinsky, with his authority, approved Gogol as the head of Russian literature during Pushkin's lifetime), but Belinsky's criticism could no longer change anything in the spiritual warehouse Gogol, and the last years of his life passed, as said, in the painful struggle between the artist and the Orthodox thinker.

For Gogol himself, this struggle remained unresolved; he was crushed by this internal discord, but, nevertheless, the significance of Gogol's main works for literature was extremely deep. Not to mention the purely artistic merits of performance, which after Pushkin himself raised the level of possible artistic perfection among writers, his deep psychological analysis had no equal in previous literature and expanded the range of topics and possibilities of literary writing.

However, artistic merits alone cannot explain either the enthusiasm with which his works were accepted in the younger generations, or the hatred with which they were met in the conservative mass of society. By the will of fate, Gogol was the banner of a new social movement, which was formed outside the sphere of the writer's creative activity, but in a strange way intersected with his biography, since this social movement did not have any other figures of this magnitude for this role at that moment. In turn, Gogol misinterpreted the readers' hopes for the ending of Dead Souls. The hastily published concise equivalent of the poem in the form of "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" turned into a feeling of annoyance and irritation of the deceived readers, since among the readers there was a steady reputation for Gogol as a humorist. The public was not yet ready for a different perception of the writer.

The spirit of humanity that distinguishes the works of Dostoevsky and other writers after Gogol is already vividly revealed in Gogol's prose, for example, in "The Overcoat", "Notes of a Madman", "Dead Souls". Dostoevsky's first work adjoins Gogol to the point of obviousness. In the same way, the depiction of the negative aspects of the landlord's life, adopted by the writers of the "natural school", is usually traced back to Gogol. In further work, new writers made an independent contribution to the content of literature, since life posed and developed new questions, but the first thoughts were given by Gogol.

Gogol's works coincided with the emergence of social interest, which they greatly served and from which literature did not emerge until the end of the 19th century. But the evolution of the writer himself was much more complicated than the formation of the "natural school". Gogol himself hardly coincided with the "Gogol trend" in literature. It is curious that in 1852, for a small article in memory of Gogol, I.S. The explanation for this was found for a long time in the dislike of the Nikolaev government towards Gogol the satirist. It was later established that the real motive for the ban was the government's desire to punish the author of the Hunter's Notes, and the prohibition of the obituary due to the violation of the censorship charter by the author (the publication in Moscow of an article banned by the censorship in St. Petersburg) was only an excuse to suppress the activities of a socially dangerous Nikolaev censorship of the writer. There was no single assessment of Gogol's personality as a pro-government or anti-government writer among the officials of Nicholas I. One way or another, the second edition of the "Works", begun in 1851 by Gogol himself and not completed due to his premature death, could only come out in 1855-1856. But Gogol's connection with subsequent literature is beyond doubt.

This connection was not limited to the 19th century. In the next century, the development of Gogol's work took place at a new stage. The Symbolist writers found a lot for themselves in Gogol: imagery, a sense of the word, "new religious consciousness" - FK Sologub, Andrei Bely, DS Merezhkovsky, etc. Later, MA Bulgakov established their succession with Gogol , V.V. Nabokov.

Gogol and Orthodoxy

Gogol's personality has always stood out for its special mystery. On the one hand, he was a classic type of a satirist, denouncer of vices, social and human, a brilliant humorist, on the other hand, an initiator of the patristic tradition in Russian literature, a religious thinker and publicist, and even an author of prayers. Its last quality has not been sufficiently studied to date and is reflected in the works of the doctor of philological sciences, professor of the Moscow State University. Lomonosov V.A. Voropaev, who is convinced that Gogol was an Orthodox Christian, and his Orthodoxy was not nominal, but effective, believing that without this it is impossible to understand anything from his life and work.

Gogol received the beginnings of faith with his family. In a letter to his mother dated October 2, 1833 from St. Petersburg, Nikolai Gogol recalled the following: “I asked you to tell me about the Last Judgment, and you told me the child so well, so understandably, so touchingly told about the benefits that await people for a virtuous life, and they described the eternal torment of sinners so strikingly, so terribly that it shook and awakened all my sensitivity. This planted and subsequently produced the highest thoughts in me. "

From a spiritual point of view, Gogol's early work contains not just a collection of humorous stories, but an extensive religious teaching, in which the struggle between good and evil takes place and good invariably triumphs, and sinners are punished. The main work of Gogol also contains a deep subtext - the poem "Dead Souls", the spiritual meaning of the plan of which is revealed in the writer's dying note: "Be not dead, but living souls. There is no other door besides the one indicated by Jesus Christ ... "

According to VA Voropaev, satire in such works as "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" is only their upper and shallow layer. Gogol conveyed the main idea of ​​the "Inspector" in a play called "The denouement of the" Inspector ", where there are the following words:" ... the inspector who is waiting for us at the door of the coffin is terrible. " This, according to Voropaev, is the main idea of ​​the work: one should not be afraid of Khlestakov and not the inspector from St. Petersburg, but “the One who is waiting for us at the door of the coffin”; it is the idea of ​​spiritual retribution, and the real auditor is our conscience.

Literary critic and writer I.P. Zolotussky believes that the fashionable disputes about whether Gogol was a mystic or not are unfounded. A person who believes in God cannot be a mystic: for him, God knows everything in the world; God is not a mystic, but a source of grace, and the divine is incompatible with the mystical. According to IP Zolotussky, Gogol was "a Christian believer in the bosom of the Church, and the concept of the mystical is not applicable either to him or to his writings." Although there are sorcerers and the devil among his characters, they are just heroes of a fairy tale, and the devil is often a parody, comic figure (as, for example, in "Evenings on a Farm"). And in the second volume of Dead Souls, a modern devil is brought out - a legal adviser, a rather civilized person, but in fact more terrible than any evil spirits. By rotating anonymous papers, he created great confusion in the province and turned the existing relative order into complete chaos.

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

Gogol completed his career as a writer "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" - a Christian book. However, it has not yet been truly read, according to Zolotussky. Since the 19th century, it has been generally accepted that a book is a mistake, a writer's departure from his path. But perhaps she is his path, and even more than other books. According to Zolotussky, these are two different things: the concept of a road (“Dead Souls” at first glance is a road novel) and the concept of a path, that is, the exit of the soul to the top of the ideal.

In July 2009, Patriarch Kirill blessed the publication during 2009 of the complete collected works of Nikolai Gogol at the Publishing House of the Moscow Patriarchate. The new edition has been prepared at the academic level. The working group for the preparation of the complete collected works of N.V. Gogol included both secular scientists and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Gogol and Russian-Ukrainian ties

The complex intertwining of two cultures in one person always made the figure of Gogol the center of interethnic disputes, but Gogol himself did not need to find out if he was Ukrainian or Russian - he was drawn into disputes about this by his friends. The writer himself could not give an unambiguous answer to this question, leaning towards the synthesis of two cultures.

In 1844, he answered the request of Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova in the following way: “ I will tell you one word about what kind of soul I have, Khokhlak or Russian, because, as I see from your letter, at one time it was the subject of your discussions and disputes with others. To this I will tell you that I myself do not know what kind of soul I have, Ukrainian or Russian. I only know that I would not give an advantage to either the Little Russian over the Russian, or the Russian over the Little Russian. Both natures are too generously endowed by God, and how deliberately each of them separately contains something that is not in the other - a clear sign that they must replenish one another. For this, the very stories of their past life are given to them unlike one another, so that the various forces of their character could be raised separately, so that later, merging together, make up something most perfect in humanity..»

Until now, not a single work of the writer written in Ukrainian is known, and a few writers of Russian origin had a chance to make a contribution commensurate with Gogol's to the development of the Russian language. But due to the peculiarities of the nature of his work, repeated attempts were made to understand Gogol from the point of view of his Ukrainian origin: the latter, to a certain extent, explained his attitude to Russian life. Gogol's attachment to his Little Russian homeland was very strong, especially in the first years of his literary career and until the completion of the second edition of Taras Bulba, and his satirical attitude to Russian life, presumably, is explained not only by his national characteristics, but also by the nature of his internal development ...

There is no doubt that Ukrainian features are reflected in the writer's work. These are considered the features of his humor, which remained the only example of its kind in Russian literature. As A. N. Pypin wrote, "the Ukrainian and Russian beginnings happily merged in this talent into one, extremely remarkable phenomenon."

A long stay abroad balanced the Ukrainian and Russian components of Gogol's worldview, he now called Italy the homeland of his soul; At the same time, he loved Italy for the same thing, for which he preferred Dikanka over St. Petersburg - for the archaism and opposition to the Europeanized civilization (“here the Little Russian element also acted partly,” PV Annenkov writes about Gogol’s attachment to Italy). The dispute between the writer and O.M.Bodyansky about the Russian language and the work of Taras Shevchenko, transmitted from the words of G.P.Danilevsky, reflected the late Gogol's supposed understanding of the peculiarities of Russian-Ukrainian relations. " We, Osip Maksimovich, need to write in Russian, we must strive to support and consolidate one dominant language for all our native tribes. The dominant feature for Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians and Serbs should be a single shrine - the language of Pushkin, which is the Gospel for all Christians, Catholics, Lutherans and Hernuts ... We, Little Russians and Russians, need one poetry, calm and strong, incorruptible poetry of truth, good beauty. Russian and Little Russians are twin souls, replenishing one another, dear and equally strong. It is impossible to give preference to one over the other.". It follows from this dispute that by the end of his life Gogol was concerned not so much with the national issue as with the antagonism of faith and unbelief. And the writer himself was inclined towards moderate Pan-Slavism and the synthesis of Slavic cultures.

Gogol and painters

Title page of the second edition of Dead Souls. Sketch by N.V. Gogol

Along with writing and an interest in theater from a young age, Gogol was fascinated by painting. This is evidenced by his school letters to his parents. At the gymnasium, Gogol tries himself as a painter, book graphic artist (handwritten magazines Meteor Literature, Dung Parnassky) and theater decorator. Already after leaving the gymnasium in St. Petersburg, Gogol continues painting in the evening classes of the Academy of Arts. Communication with Pushkin's circle, with K.P.Bryullov, makes him a passionate admirer of art. An article in the collection "Arabesques" is devoted to the painting of the latter, "The Last Day of Pompeii". In this article, as well as in other articles in the collection, Gogol defends a romantic view of the nature of art. The artist's image, as well as the conflict between aesthetic and moral principles, will become central in his Petersburg stories "Nevsky Prospect" and "Portrait", written in the same years 1833-1834 as his publicistic articles. Gogol's article "On the architecture of the present time" was an expression of the architectural predilections of the writer.

In Europe, Gogol enthusiastically devotes himself to the study of architectural monuments and sculptures, paintings by old masters. AO Smirnova recalls how in the Strasbourg Cathedral “he sketched on a piece of paper with a pencil ornaments over Gothic columns, marveling at the selectivity of the ancient masters, who over each column made decorations excellent from others. I looked at his work and was surprised how clearly and beautifully he sketched. “How well you draw!” I said. "And you didn't know that?" Gogol answered. " Gogol's romantic elation is replaced by the well-known sobriety (A. O. Smirnova) in assessing art: "Harmony in everything, that's what is beautiful." Raphael becomes the most appreciated artist for Gogol. PV Annenkov: “Under these masses of greenery of Italian oak, sycamore, pina, etc. Gogol, it happened, was inspired as a painter (he, as you know, painted decently himself). Once he said to me: “If I were an artist, I would have invented a special kind of landscape. What trees and landscapes are being painted now! .. I would link a tree to a tree, confuse branches, throw out the light, where no one expects it, these are the landscapes to paint! “”. In this sense, in the poetic depiction of Plyushkin's garden in Dead Souls, the look, method and composition of Gogol the painter are clearly felt.

In 1837, in Rome, Gogol met Russian artists, boarders of the Imperial Academy of Arts: the engraver Fyodor Jordan, the author of a large engraving from Raphael's painting "Transfiguration", Alexander Ivanov, who was then working on the painting "The Appearance of the Messiah to the People", F. A. Moller and others sent to Italy to improve their art. Particularly close in a foreign land were A. A. Ivanov and F. I. Jordan, who, together with Gogol, represented a kind of triumvirate. A long-term friendship will connect the writer with Alexander Ivanov. The artist becomes the prototype of the hero of the updated version of the story "Portrait". At the time of the heyday of his relationship with AO Smirnova, Gogol presented her with Ivanov's watercolor "The Groom Choosing a Ring for the Bride". Jordan, he jokingly called "Raphael the first manner" and recommended his work to all his acquaintances. Fyodor Moller painted a portrait of Gogol in Rome in 1840. In addition, there are seven more portraits of Gogol painted by Moller.

But most of all, Gogol appreciated Ivanov and his painting "The Appearance of the Messiah to the People", he participated in the creation of the concept of the picture, took part as a model (the figure closest to Christ), fussed, wherever he could, about extending the artist's opportunity to work calmly and without haste above the picture, he dedicated a large article to Ivanov in "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" "Historical Painter Ivanov". Gogol contributed to Ivanov's turning to writing genre watercolors and to the study of iconography. The painter reconsidered the ratio of the lofty and the comical in his paintings; in his new works, features of humor appeared that were previously completely alien to the artist. Ivanov's watercolors, in turn, are close in genre to the story "Rome". On the other hand, Gogol was several years ahead of the beginnings of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in the study of the Old Russian Orthodox icon. Along with A.A.Agin and P.M.Boklevsky, Alexander Ivanov was one of the first illustrators of Gogol's works.

The fate of Ivanov had much in common with the fate of Gogol himself: on the second part of Dead Souls, Gogol worked as slowly as Ivanov on his painting, both were equally rushed from all sides to finish their work, both were equally in need, unable to come off from your favorite business for outside earnings. And Gogol had in mind equally himself and Ivanov when he wrote in his article: “Now everyone feels the absurdity of the reproach of slowness and laziness to such an artist who, like a toiler, sat all his life on work and even forgot whether there was any enjoyment other than work. The artist's own mental affair was connected with the production of this painting - a phenomenon that is too rare in the world. " On the other hand, the brother of AA Ivanov, the architect Sergei Ivanov, testifies that AA Ivanov “never had the same thoughts with Gogol, he never agreed with him internally, but at the same time never argued with him” ... Gogol's article weighed on the artist, outstripping praise, premature fame fettered him and put him in an ambiguous position. Despite personal sympathy and a common religious attitude towards art, the once inseparable friends, Gogol and Ivanov, towards the end of their lives, move away somewhat internally, despite the fact that the correspondence between them does not stop until the last days.

In a group of Russian artists in Rome

Group daguerreotype of Russian artists. Author Sergey Levitsky. Rome, 1845, atelier Perrot

In 1845, Sergei Levitsky came to Rome and met with Russian artists and with Gogol. Taking advantage of the visit to Rome of the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Arts, Count Fyodor Tolstoy, Levitsky persuaded Gogol to star in a daguerreotype with a colony of Russian artists. The idea was connected with the arrival of Nicholas I from St. Petersburg to Rome. The Emperor personally visited the boarders of the Academy of Arts. More than twenty boarders were summoned to St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, where, after Russian-Italian negotiations, Nicholas I arrived, accompanied by the vice-president of the Academy, Count F.P. Tolstoy. “Passing from the altar, Nicholas I turned around, greeted with a slight tilt of his head and instantly looked around the audience with his quick, brilliant look. “Artists of Your Majesty,” Count Tolstoy pointed out. “They say they walk a lot,” the emperor remarked. "But they also work," replied the count. "

Among those depicted are architects Fyodor Eppinger, Karl Beine, Pavel Notbek, Ippolit Monighetti, sculptors Pyotr Stavasser, Nikolai Ramazanov, Mikhail Shurupov, painters Pimen Orlov, Apollon Mokritsky, Mikhail Mikhailov, Vasily Sternberg. For the first time the daguerreotype was published by the critic V.V. Stasov in the journal "Ancient and New Russia" for 1879, No. 12, which described the depicted as follows: "Look at these theatrical" brigantes "hats, on cloaks, as if unusually picturesque and majestic - what an absurd and untalented masquerade! And yet, this is still a truly historical picture, because it sincerely and faithfully conveys a whole corner of the era, a whole chapter from Russian life, a whole strip of people, and lives, and delusions. " From this article, we know the names of those photographed and who is where. Thus, through the efforts of S.L. Levitsky, the only photographic portrait of the great writer was created. Later, in 1902, on the 50th anniversary of the death of Gogol, in the studio of another prominent portrait painter Karl Fischer, his image was framed from this group photo, reshot and enlarged.

In the group of those photographed, there is also Sergei Levitsky himself - second from the left in the second row - without a frock coat.

Identity hypotheses

Gogol's personality attracted the attention of many cultural figures and scientists. Even during the life of the writer, conflicting rumors circulated about him, aggravated by his isolation, a tendency to mythologize his own biography and a mysterious death, which gave rise to many legends and hypotheses. Among the most famous are the hypothesis of his homosexuality, as well as the hypothesis of the death of Gogol.

Bibliography

Major works

• Dead Souls
• The auditor
• Marriage
• Theatrical siding
• Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
• Mirgorod
  • Viy
  • The story of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich
  • Old world landowners
  • Taras Bulba
• Petersburg stories
  • Nevsky Prospect
  • Overcoat
  • Diary of a Madman
  • Portrait
  • Stroller
• Selected places from correspondence with friends

First editions

• The first collected works were prepared by the author in 1842. The second he began to cook in 1851; it was already completed by his heirs: here the second part of Dead Souls appeared for the first time.
• The six-volume edition of Kulish (1857) first published an extensive collection of Gogol's letters (the last two volumes).
• The publication prepared by Chizhov (1867) contains "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" in full, including what was not passed by the censorship in 1847.
• The tenth edition, published in 1889 under the editorship of N. S. Tikhonravov, is the best of all those published in the 19th century: this is a scientific edition with a text corrected from manuscripts and Gogol's own editions, and with extensive commentaries detailing the history of each of Gogol's works based on preserved manuscripts, according to his correspondence and other historical data.
• The letter material collected by Kulish and the text of Gogol's writings began to grow, especially from the 1860s: "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin" based on a manuscript found in Rome ("Russian Archive", 1865); unpublished from Selected Places, first in the Russian Archive (1866), then in Chizhov's edition; about Gogol's comedy "Vladimir 3rd degree" - Rodislavsky, in "Conversations in the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature" (Moscow, 1871).
• Studies of the texts of Gogol and his letters: articles by V. I. Shenrok in the "Bulletin of Europe", "Artist", "Russian antiquity"; Mrs. E. S. Nekrasova in "Russian antiquity" and especially the comments of Mr. Tikhonravov in the 10th edition and in a special edition of "The Inspector General" (Moscow, 1886).
• There is information about the letters in the book "Index to Gogol's Letters" by Mr. Shenrock (2nd ed. - M., 1888), which is necessary when reading them in the Kulish edition, where they are interspersed with deaf, randomly taken letters instead of names and other censorship defaults ...
• Gogol's Letters to Prince VF Odoevsky (in the Russian Archive, 1864); “To Malinovsky” (ibid., 1865); "To the book. P. A. Vyazemsky "(ibid., 1865, 1866, 1872); “To I. I. Dmitriev and P. A. Pletnev” (ibid., 1866); “To Zhukovsky” (ibid., 1871); "To M. P. Pogodin" from 1833 (not 1834; ibid., 1872; more complete than Kulish, V, 174); "Note to S. T. Aksakov" ("Russian antiquity", 1871, IV); a letter to the actor Sosnitsky about the "Inspector General" in 1846 (ibid., 1872, VI); Letters from Gogol to Maksimovich, published by S.I.Ponomarev, etc.

Influence on modern culture

Gogol's works have been filmed many times. Composers composed operas and ballets based on his works. In addition, Gogol himself became a hero of films and other works of art.

The most famous are:

• the film "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" (1961, restored in 1970). Screenplay and production by A. Rowe based on the story "The Night Before Christmas";
• TV series "N. V. Gogol. Dead Souls. Poem "(1984). Written and directed by M. Schweitzer.

Based on the novel Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Step Creative Group has released two quests: Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (2005) and An Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala (2006).
The first game based on Gogol's story was Viy: A Story Told Again (2004).

In Ukraine, the annual multidisciplinary festival of contemporary art Gogolfest, named after the writer, is held.

The writer's surname is reflected in the name of the musical group Gogol Bordello, whose leader, Yevgeny Gudz, is a native of Ukraine.

Memory

Streets and educational institutions in many cities of Russia, Ukraine and other countries are named after Nikolai Gogol. Several stamps and commemorative coins were issued in honor of Gogol. More than 15 monuments to the writer have been installed in various cities of the world. Several documentaries and fiction films have also been dedicated to him.