Gogol has remained, in the words of another contemporary, among the world’s most “undeciphered people.” “To say that Nikolai Gogol is one of the most controversial figures in Russian literature,” Victor Erlich began his classic study of the writer, “is to offer one of the few noncontroversial statements that can legitimately be made about this remarkable writer.” “I am considered a riddle by everyone,” Gogol observed, and he was no less enigmatic to himself. “What an intelligent, queer, and sick creature!” remarked Turgenev another major prose writer, Sergey Aksakov, referred to the “unintelligible strangeness of his spirit.” When Gogol died, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky sighed, “Your life was an enigma, so is today your death.” Strange, peculiar, wacky, weird, bizarre, and other words indicating enigmatic oddity recur in descriptions of him. Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Russia’s greatest comic writer, thoroughly baffled his contemporaries.
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