Nikolai Gogol

Russian literature in the last half of the nineteenth century provides a congenial and artistic medium for the discussion of political and social issues that cannot be addressed directly because of government restrictions.

The writers of this period share important qualities: great attention to realistic, detailed descriptions
of everyday Russian life; the lifting of the taboo on describing the vulgar, unsightiy side of life; and a satirical attitude toward mediocrity and routine.

Although varying widely in style, subject matter, and viewpoint, these writers stimulate government bureaucrats, nobles, and intellectuals to think about important social issues.

This period of literature, which becomes known as the Age of Realism, lasts from about mid-century to 1905.

The literature of the Age of Realism owes a great debt to three authors and to a literary
critic of the preceding half-century: Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, and Vissarion Belinsky.

These figures set a pattern for language, subject matter, and narrative techniques, which before 1830 had been very poorly developed.

The critic Belinsky becomes the patron saint of the radical intelligentsia throughout the century.

Russian literature gains international stature and recognition through the works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, and numerous others.

Nikolai Gogol, a twenty-one year-old Russian writer, moves in 1829 from his home village of Sorochintsi in Poltava Guberniya (now Ukraine) to St. Petersburg, where he writes a poem, Ode to Italy, and Hanz Küchelgarten, a narrative poem published under the pseudonym "V. Alov” to scathing reviews.

Mortified, Gogol, buys up and burns the unsold copies and briefly flees Russia.

Nikolai Gogol has attempted an acting career, worked in a government office while studying painting, and taught in a girls' boarding school since his return to St. Petersburg,

Drawing from the rich folklore of the Ukraine, its Cossack traditions, and the parochial life-style of its people, he had won his first literary success with the two-volume story collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, published in 1831 and 1832.

Having spent 1834 teaching medieval history at the University of Saint Petersburg, Gogol publishes additional Ukrainian tales in 1835 under the title Mirgorod.

The same year, he publishes Arabesques, featuring the stories "The Portrait" and "Nevsky Prospect".

Nikolai Gogol moves to Rome in 1836, publishing in this year one of his great masterpieces, The Inspector General, a comic drama that ridicules petty officialdom and, by extension, contemporary Russian society.

The work will evoke harsh criticism from conservative elements at its first performance in Saint Petersburg.

Alexander Pushkin has pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers.

He had met Nikolai Gogo in 1831l, and after reading Gogol's 1831-2 volume of short stories Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Pushkin had supported him critically and later in 1836, after starting his magazine, The Contemporary, began to feature some of Gogol's most famous short stories.

Pushkin’s most famous works of this era include the Stone Guest, a poetic dram written in 1830 and based on the Spanish legend of Don Juan, and Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, published in serial form between 1825 and 1832.

The latter, more loved for its style of storytelling than for what is actually told, will become a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist will serve as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes.

Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he had married in 1831, have become regulars of court society.

When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, the poet had become enraged: he felt this occurred not only so that his wife, who had many admirers—including the Tsar himself—could properly attend court balls, but also to humiliate him.

In 1837, falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenges Georges d'Anthès, a man who has insulted his wife, to a duel which leaves both men injured, Pushkin mortally.

He dies two days later.

The government fears a political demonstration at his funeral, which it moves to a smaller location and makes open only to close relatives and friends.

His body is spirited away secretly at midnight and buried on his mother's estate.

Nikolai Gogol, still living in Rome, satirizes bureaucracy in his 1842 novel, Dead Souls (Part One) the same year he writes another of his absurdist masterpieces, a story titled The Overcoat.

Among the liberal critics condemning Nikolai Gogol’s reactionary Selected Passages from Correspondence is the influential Vissarion Belinsky, now the foremost Russian literary critic and a leader of the progressive intelligentsia.

Widely known for his annual surveys of Russian literature and essays on major figures of Russian and world literature, Belinsky has attempted to synthesize his conception of literature as an organ of social progress with German idealist aesthetics.

A committed revolutionary, Belinsky believes that literature should, if necessary, sacrifice artistic excellence to social values.

Nikolai Gogol, who has become progressively more preoccupied with religion during the past decade in Rome, finally succeeds in giving expression to his positive religious ideas in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in 1847.

Liberal critics condemn the work as politically and socially reactionary.

Nikolai Gogol, stung by the critical attacks on his Selected Passages, has gradually fallen into religious obsessions and in 1848 returns to Russia.