Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) was a Russian short-story writer, novelist and dramatist. Born in the Ukraine, he was a key figure in the realist movement in Russian literature, though there are elements of romanticism, of fantasy and even of surrealism in his work.

Some of his best-known works included:
-- Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-32), a romantic story about his native Ukraine
-- Taras Bulba (1835), a romantic novel about a 17th-century Cossack chief
-- The Diary of a Madman (1835), a short story about a frustrated minor civil servant who finds relief in megalomania and descends into insanity
-- The Nose (1835-36), a surrealist short story about a nose which manages to buy a job in the bureaucracy
-- The Inspector-General (sometimes titled as: The Government Inspector) (1836), a satirical play which attacked the corruption, vanity, vice and folly of provincial bureaucrats during the repressive era of Czar Nicholas I
-- The Overcoat (sometimes titled as: The Cloak) (1842), a nightmarish short story about a lowly clerk who makes untold sacrifices to buy an expensive overcoat that is stolen the very first time he wears it
-- Dead Souls (1842), a satirical and picaresque novel in which the protagonist, an adventurer named Chichikov, buys the names of dead serfs and then mortgages them to buy property (sadly, after working for more than ten years on the second part of this work, Gogol destroyed it while he was depressed).