Russia, Today and Yesterday

On this day in 1852 Nikolai Gogol died at the age of forty-two. His unique style — most famously in stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” the play The Inspector General; and the novel Dead Souls — is a comic-tragic-absurd hybrid which has led to him being labeled the Hieronymous Bosch of Russian Literature. Having come under the sway of a fanatical priest late in life, and then been subjected to the treatments of several quack doctors, Gogol’s last days mirrored one of his nightmare stories all too closely.

Gogol had always been deeply religious, but his priest convinced him that he should cleanse himself by not merely fasting, praying and reading the lives of the saints but renouncing his writing as vainglorious and unholy; in his zeal, Gogol burned all his writing, including the manuscripts of his sequels to Dead Souls, the labor of years. His doctors’ last-hour attempts to save him included not just trying to hypnotize him into eating or applying blisters to his extremities but giving him hot baths while pouring ice-water on his head, or giving him ice-baths and then putting him to bed among warm loaves of bread. Throughout all this Gogol pleaded to be left to die in peace; when he tried to swat away the leeches that had been applied to his nose and were now trying to crawl into his mouth, he had to be restrained — though at death he was described as being so frail that his spine could be seen through his stomach.

Even by the next generation his reputation as the father of Russian realism was established, Dostoevsky famously saying that he and his contemporaries had come “out from under Gogol’s overcoat.” According to Nabokov, “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight . . . . [but when] Gogol really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.” … more>>