This story, set alongside The Nose (1836) and The Overcoat (1842), represents the high point of Gogol's career as a writer of short fiction. At least, all I have to do is throw out the best parts.' But thank God things are a little better today. As he wrote in a letter to Pushkin concerning Diary of a Madman (1835), his only first-person narrative: 'met with a rather unpleasant little snag with the censor yesterday. Reading restored, annotated versions of his works makes plain the frustrations he endured. The distancing of his narratives, through which a sense is imparted that the teller of the story and its author are not the same, is artful, and grew only more sophisticated throughout his career.Īlso notable is the fact he had to contend with the state censor. His evocations of scenery and place – not least a forbidding, almost demonic St Petersburg - are justly held up as some of the finest examples of descriptive writing in Russian literature. Such touches make reading Gogol a very immediate, stimulating experience. They also display Gogol's love for the macabre, the intermingling of the fantastic with the mundane, and a pronounced metafictional streak: the reason why Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt – the collection's most psychologically complex story – ends with the words ' … Auntie had hatched a new plan which you will learn more about in the next chapter' is because, as the narrator explains at the outset, his housekeeper has been using pages of the manuscript as baking paper. Following Pushkin, whom he idolised and became close to (although letters suggest their affections were not commensurate), these stories are rich in folk idioms.

Essentially, Gogol was much too funny to succeed as a prophet, although this was a joke he was understandably incapable of appreciating.įollowing Hans Küchelgarten (1830), a self-published poem in the German Romantic style which received two unfavourable reviews (Gogol tracked down as many copies as he could find and, true to form, burned them), his next book, Evenings on a Farm Near Didanka (1831-2), received near universal acclaim.Ĭentred on life in Little Russia, as Ukraine was then known, the collection finds several of Gogol's key stylistic traits already in place. Gogol was too acute an observer of his fellow men (his women, disappointingly, are sketchy and marginal) to complete this self-appointed task he was too gifted at tweaking his flawed characters into outstanding, profoundly memorable grotesques.

The nose the overcoat