Biography
Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in Sorochyntsi in the Poltava Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine; he wrote in Russian and was of Ukrainian origin. After school in Nizhyn he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1828, where the story collection “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” brought his breakthrough in 1831/32. In 1835 he published the volume “Mirgorod”, containing “Taras Bulba” and “Viy”, as well as “Diary of a Madman”; “The Nose” (1836) and “The Overcoat” (1842) followed, stories in which the grotesque pervades the everyday life of Petersburg officials. Alexander Pushkin supported him and suggested the idea for the comedy “The Government Inspector”, which premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on 19 April 1836; “Marriage” reached the stage in 1842. Between 1836 and 1848 he lived mostly abroad, above all in Rome, where he wrote much of his novel “Dead Souls”, whose first part appeared in 1842. Gogol died in Moscow in 1852; his material has often been adapted for the stage, for example by Modest Mussorgsky in the opera “The Fair at Sorochyntsi”.
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