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...
