On leaving school in 1828, Gogol went to Saint Petersburg, full of vague but ambitious hopes. Equally early he developed a talent for mimicry, which later made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. He was not popular among his schoolmates, who called him their 'mysterious dwarf', but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. In 1820, Nikolai Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nezhin (Nizhyn) (now Nizhyn Gogol State University) and remained there until 1828. As a child, Gogol helped stage plays in his uncle's home theater. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the family spoke Ukrainian as well as Russian. His father wrote poetry in Ukrainian as well as Russian, and was an amateur playwright in his own theatre. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, who died when Gogol was 15 years old, was supposedly a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks (see Lyzohub family) and belonged to the 'petty gentry'.

His mother was descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé said: 'We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat.' Gogol's influence was acknowledged by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor and others. Many writers and critics have recognized Gogol's huge influence on Russian, Ukrainian and world literature. The novel Taras Bulba (1835), the play Marriage (1842), and the short stories ' The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich', ' The Portrait' and ' The Carriage', are also among his best-known works. His later writing satirised political corruption in contemporary Russia ( The Government Inspector, Dead Souls), although Gogol also enjoyed the patronage of Tsar Nicholas I who liked his work. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore. According to Viktor Shklovsky, Gogol's strange style of writing resembles the 'ostranenie' technique of defamiliarization. These stories, and others such as ' Diary of a Madman', have also been noted for their proto-surrealist qualities. Gogol was one of the first to use the technique of the grotesque, in works such as ' The Nose', ' Viy', ' The Overcoat', and ' Nevsky Prospekt'. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1 April 1809 – 4 March 1852) was a Russian novelist, short story writer and playwright of Ukrainian origin. Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845 by Sergei Lvovich Levitsky (1819–1898)

Gogol souls