Facts about Nikolai Gogol
- 09
Gogol's 1835 story The Overcoat depicts a minor St. Petersburg clerk whose entire life revolves around purchasing a single winter coat, becoming the template for Russian literature's sympathetic treatment of the socially insignificant.
- 08
Gogol's correspondence reveals he suffered from severe hypochondria, consulting doctors across Europe for ailments including melancholia and digestive disorders that may have hastened his physical and mental decline.
- 07
At age 34, Gogol accepted a teaching position as professor of medieval history at Saint Petersburg University in 1834, though his lectures were reportedly disorganized and he abandoned the role within a year.
- 06
Gogol spent his final twelve years in self-imposed exile across Europe, living in Rome, Switzerland, and Paris before returning to Moscow in 1848, where religious despair consumed him until his death.
- 05
Gogol's 1835 collection Arabesques marked his shift toward the grotesque and supernatural, establishing the literary style that would define Russian fantastical fiction for generations.
- 04
Burning manuscripts became Gogol's destructive obsession in his final years, leading him to destroy the second volume of Dead Souls just days before his death in February 1852.
- 03
Gogol's nose—the 1836 short story about a St. Petersburg official who loses his nose—was adapted into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1930, though never completed or performed during the composer's lifetime.
- 02
The 1836 premiere of Gogol's play The Inspector General caused such scandal in Saint Petersburg that the author fled Russia for Rome within months, believing his career was ruined.
- 01
In 1842, Nikolai Gogol published Dead Souls, a novel satirizing Russian provincial bureaucracy through the picaresque adventures of Pavel Chichikov.