Mirgorod nikolai gogol biography

Nikolai Gogol is one of Russia’s most famous writers, renowned for his short stories, novels, and plays. Vladimir Nabokov called him “the strangest prose-poet Russia ever produced.” Scholars Dmytro Chyzhevsky and Danylo Husar Struk say of his writing, “Gogol's works display different variations of the Romantic style and a masterly use of metaphor, hyperbole, and ironic grotesque. His language is exceptionally rhythmic and euphonic. He was the first writer of the so-called Ukrainian school in Russian literature to employ a host of lexical and syntactic Ukrainianisms, primarily to play with various stylistic levels from the vulgar to the pathetic.”

Gogol was born on March 31, 1809 in the Poltava province in Ukraine. While his family name was Ianovskii, his grandfather took “Gogol” to connect him to his Cossack ancestry. His father was a minor Ukrainian noble who also wrote, and his mother was a religious woman who