Taras Bulba

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was born in the Ukrainian countryside and moved to St Petersburg to make his name, where his comic tales of Ukrainian village life won the friendship of Pushkin. His play The Government Inspector, his story The Overcoat and his novel Dead Souls made him the great satirist of Russian life.

He spent years in Rome, became increasingly religious and tormented, and shortly before his death burned most of the second part of Dead Souls. Later Russian writers, Dostoevsky among them, acknowledged their debt to him; read Dostoevsky's Poor Folk to see it.