GOGOL, NIKOLAI V

GOGOL, NIKOLAI V., Russian author (1809–1852). Liked especially for his satire and humor, Gogol founded the Russian school of realism. His own religious temperament was fearful, though he might be described as a pietistic humanist who read the Bible for its prophecies and apocalypses. He spent a prolonged period of time in Rome and was fond of the Imitation of Christ and Thomas Aquinas, but read the Eastern Fathers as well. Although not known for his religious writing but for such works as the collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka or the play The Inspector General, nevertheless he authored a symbolic liturgical commentary entitled Meditations on the Divine Liturgy (1842–43), which was quite popular in Russia. The characters in Taras Bulba well illustrate the tension that prevailed between (Russian) Ukraine and the (Polish) West in religious affairs and otherwise. In Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends one can get glimpses of the religious crisis of the 19th-c. Russian intelligentsia and Gogol’s own desire for a socioreligious utopia, a theocratic tsardom. His greatest novel, Dead Souls (1842), had a sequel which he destroyed in a religious and moral frenzy that ended in his death.