Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol ” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol 

(1809 — 1852)

Gogol was a Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of the 19th-century Russian realist literature. Gogol was born on March 20, 1809, in Sorochintsy Mirgorod, Poltava Province, of cossack parents. In 1828 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he eventually secured employment in the civil service and became known in literary circles.

Enthusiastic praise greeted his volume of short stories of Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831). Then followed another collection, Mirgorod (1835), containing Taras Bulba, which was expanded in 1842 into a full-length novel. In 1836, Gogol’s play The Inspector General appeared. A rollicking satire on the cupidity and stupidity of bureaucratic officials is a comedy of errors regarded. by many critics as one of the most significant plays in Russian literature. It concerns the local officials of a small town who mistake a young traveller for an expected government inspector and offer him propitiatory bribes to induce him to over-look their misconduct in office. From 1826 to 1848 Gogol worked on one of the finest novels in world literature, Dead Souls (1842). In structure, Dead Souls is akin to Don Quixote by the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Its extraordinary humour, however, is derived from a unique and sardonic conception: Collegiate Councilor Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, an ambitious, shrewd, and unscrupulous adventurer, goes from place to place, buying, stealing, and wheedling from their owners the titles to serfs whose names appeared on the preceding census lists but who had since died and were, accordingly, called “dead. souls.” Dead Souls exerted an enormous influence on succeeding generations of Russian writers. Chichikov’s travels provide the occasion for profound reflections on the degrading and stultifying influence of serfdom on both owner and serf Many of the witty sayings expressed in its pages have become Russian maxims. As published, Dead Soul” was intended to constitute the first part of a larger work; Gogol began the sequel but in a fit of hypochondriacal melancholy burned the manuscript. In 1842 Gogol published another famous work The Overcoat, a short story about an overworked clerk who falls victim to Russian social injustice. In the following year Gogol made a pilgrimage to the” Holy Land, and on his return a pries persuaded him that his fictional work was sinful. Gogol there-upon destroyed a number of his unpublished manuscripts.

He died March 4, 1852, in Moscow. Gogol is ranked with such literary giants as the novelists Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the poet Aleksandr Pushkin.