Nikolai Gogol
From Philosopedia
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich (31 March 1809 - 4 March 1852)
Ukranian-born Gogol was one of the most eminent of all Russian writers, a leader of literary realism.
His Dead Souls (1842) is a picaresque novel about a humorous rogue who buys the names of dead people in order to profit by mortgaging them. The work was a call to reform society and free the serfs. But, outraged at that reaction, the politically conservative Gogol published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1846), in which he openly spoke his political mind.
His experience in 1834 as a University of St. Petersburg Professor of Medieval History illustrates his eccentricity. T. Lindstrom A Concise History of Russian Literature Volume I from the Beginnings to Chekhov (1966) described his job as one in which
- he had no qualifications. He turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. After an introductory lecture made up of brilliant generalizations which the "historian" had prudently prepared and memorized, he gave up all pretense at erudition and teaching, missed two lectures out of three, and when he did appear, muttered unintelligibly through his teeth. At the final examination, he sat in utter silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache, while another professor interrogated the students.
He resigned in 1835, and in the following year he wrote The Government Inspector (Revizor), which was such a satire of provincial bureaucrats that only because Nicholas I intervened was he able to continue the drama's showings.
According to the University of California’s Simon Karlinsky in The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (1966), Gogol immersed himself in the Orthodox Church and believed that “Slavery was justified in the Bible and must not be abolished; social stratification had been decreed by God; and any reform or political change is an offense against Christianity.”
When in 1852 Gogol, a strong believer according to Karlinsky, confessed his homosexuality to Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, admitting his self-hatred and guilt, the bigoted and sinister priest prescribed abstinence from sleep and food in order to cleanse Gogol’s “inner filth.” In obeying, Gogol renounced literature and food, burned most of the second part of Dead Souls, and died of starvation a month later with the help of his doctors, “who in order to help him, bled him profusely and subjected him to treatments that were physical tortures.”
Gogol was buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931, Moscow authorities demolished the monastery and had his remains transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery.
In moving the body, it was found that he was lying face down, leading some to speculate that he had been buried while alive. Officials, however, said that in his final weeks he burned some of his work, admitted it had been a mistake but a joke played on him by the Devil, after which he refused to eat and died in great pain soon thereafter.
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