Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Russian-language writer of Ukrainian origin. Although his early works were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing, he wrote in Russian and his works belong to the tradition of Russian literature. The novel Dead Souls (1842), the play Revizor (1836, 1842), and the short story The Overcoat (1842) count among his masterpieces.

Gogol was born in the Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, Poltava guberniya (now Ukraine). His father was Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a small squire and an amateur Ukrainian playwright who died when the boy was 15 years old. Some of his ancestors culturally associated themselves with Polish szlachta. For instance, his grandfather Afanasiy Gogol wrote in census papers that "his ancestors, of the family name Gogol, are of the Polish nation". However, his great-grandfather, Jan Gogol, after studying in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (a deeply Ukrainian and Orthodox Christian educational institution), moved to pro-Russian Left-bank Ukraine (Malorossia) and settled in Poltava region. Gogol himself did not use the second part of his name considering it an artificial Polish addition.

In 1820 Gogol went to a grammar school in Nezhin and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not very popular among his school-fellows, but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, mingled of painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed an extraordinary mimic talent which later on made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.

In contemporary scholarship, there is a great deal of speculation and controversy over whether Gogol was a repressed homosexual and, if so, to what extent this accounts for his later creative and spiritual crises. The question is legitimate, but probably unanswerable, in part because sexual identity is highly culturally mediated, and thus can be applied retrospectively only at great risk of misrepresenting the subject. There appears to be little evidence that Gogol himself, consciously at least, identified as homosexual.

In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to Petersburg, full of vague but glowingly ambitious hopes. They were at once cruelly frustrated. He had hoped for literary fame and brought with him a Romantic poem, very weak and puerile, of German idyllic life — Hanz Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense of course, under the name of "V. Alov". It was met by the magazines with deserved derision. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.

In this state of disillusionment he suddenly went off abroad, with the intention, as he said to his friends, of going to America. But he went only as far as Lübeck. After a few days' stay there he returned to Petersburg and once more tried his fortune, this time with better patience. He entered the civil service, still hoping to become a great administrator, and he began writing prose stories.

He came in touch with the "literary aristocracy", had a story published in Delvig's Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin. He was well received in this most select of literary sects and, with his usual vanity, became enormously proud of his success and very self-confident. Thanks to Pletnyov's good offices, he was appointed teacher of history at a young ladies' institute and at once began to imagine that the way he was to become great was by writing history.

In the meantime (1831), he brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), which met with immediate success. It was followed in 1832 by a second volume, and in 1835 by two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, as well as by two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. At this time, Gogol developed a passion for Ukrainian history and tried to obtain an appointment to the history department at Kiev University. Despite the support of Pushkin and the Russian minister of education Sergey Uvarov, his appointment was blocked by a Kievan bureaucrat on the grounds that he was unqualified. His fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Ukrainian cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests. During this time he also developed a close and life-long friendship with another Ukrainian then living in Russia, the historian and naturalist Mykhaylo Maksymovych. Indeed, throughout his life Gogol maintained close contact with his fellow countrymen. According to the poet Nikolai Berg, in his interactions with fellow Ukrainians Gogol demonstrated a joyfullness and passion that contrasted with usual morose and quiet demeanor .

In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, though he had little qualifications for the chair. This academic venture proved a failure. Turgenev, who happened to be one of Gogol's audience, has left a record of the painful impression his showy rhetoric produced. Gogol soon realized his failure (though he does not seem to have acknowledged his inadequacy) and resigned his chair in 1835.

While Pushkin and Zhukovsky encouraged his literary career, there was never any real intimacy between the poets of Pushkin's circle and Gogol. They liked him and appreciated his comic talent but refused to idolize him. While the "aristocracy of letters" gave him qualified admiration, it was in Moscow that Gogol met with the adulation and recognition sufficient to satisfy his ambitions. The young Westernizing idealists, with Vissarion Belinsky at their head, carried him to the skies, but it was not with them he made friends. The set that became his principal sanctuary was the nascent circle of the Slavophiles (especially the family of Sergei Aksakov), in which he was compared to Homer and Shakespeare.

Though between 1832 and 1836 Gogol worked at his imaginative creations with great energy, and though almost all his work has in one way or another its sources in these four years of contact with Pushkin, he had not yet decided that his ambitions were to be fulfilled by success in literature. It was only after the presentation, on April 19, 1836, of his comedy Revizor (traditionally translated in English as "The Inspector General") that he finally believed in his literary vocation. The comedy, a violent satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, saw the stage owing only to the personal intervention of Nicholas I. It was met by both enthusiastic praise and virulence.

When, two months after the first night, he left Petersburg for abroad, he was finally convinced that his vocation was to "be useful" to his country by the power of his imaginative genius. For twelve years (1836-48) he lived abroad, visiting Russia for short periods only. After travelling throughout Germany and Switzerland, Gogol spent the winter of 1836-1837 in Paris, where he spent time among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, frequently meeting with the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. After having chosen Rome for his headquarters, he became enamoured with the Eternal City, which answered to his highly developed sense of the magnificent, and where even the visions that always obsessed him of vulgar and animal humanity assumed picturesque and poetical appearances that fitted harmoniously into the beautiful whole.

The death of Pushkin produced a strong impression on Gogol, especially by feeding his conviction that he was now the head of Russian literature and that great things were expected of him. His principal work during these years was the great satirical epic (poema, or an epic poem, as the Russian subheading goes) — Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks — recast Taras Bulba and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage, wrote the fragment Rome and his greatest short story, The Overcoat.

In 1841 the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under the title, imposed by the censorship, of The Adventures of Chichikov. The book instantly established his reputation as the greatest prose writer in the language. Nobody could have expected that it would be the last work of fiction published during his lifetime.