Nikolai Gogol laughed at Russia in such a way that theatre audiences roared with laughter — and then stepped out into the street and understood that they had been laughing at themselves. The Government Inspector was written in two months. Dead Souls took ten years, and its second volume he burned.
He was born in 1809 in the Poltava region, into a family of the Ukrainian gentry. His childhood was the village, the church, and the puppet theatre his father staged. He arrived in Petersburg at nineteen, carrying manuscripts and ambition. His first publications failed. Then came Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka: Ukrainian devilry, Cossack tales, laughter and dread.
Pushkin gave him the plots of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls, drawn from his own hoard of overheard anecdotes. Gogol turned them into a mirror. Chichikov, buying up the "souls" of dead peasants, is an image of a Russia in which papers matter more than reality and appearance stands in for life.
The end of his life was terrible. Gogol fell under the influence of a fanatical priest, gave himself over to fasting, stopped writing. In February 1852 he burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Nine days later he died. He was forty-two. People said: "Russia is lost."