Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 into a family of small landowners in the province of Poltava in Ukraine; his father liked to write comedies. At nineteen he came to St Petersburg hoping to serve the state; his first long poem, published at his own expense, was savaged by the critics, and he bought up every copy he could find and burned them. He then worked as a minor government clerk and taught history briefly at the university. He made his name with Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, stories of Ukrainian village life, and won the admiration of Pushkin, who is said to have given him the subjects of both the comedy The Government Inspector and the novel Dead Souls. After The Government Inspector was staged he was so fiercely attacked that he went abroad and lived for twelve years in Rome and elsewhere. In his last years he fell into religious fervour, burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls late one night, and soon afterwards starved himself to death.