Authors

Russian · 1809–1852

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian author whose grotesque comedies and prose fiction transformed Russian literature. The Inspector General (1836) — in which a provincial town mistakes a passing nonentity for a government inspector — is the most frequently performed Russian play. Dead Souls (1842) and the story 'The Overcoat' invented the comic-absurdist Russian prose tradition that runs through Dostoevsky to Bulgakov. He burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls in religious despair and died forty days later.