Nikolai Gogol (born in Sorochyntsi, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire, present-day Ukraine) - Russian writer of Ukrainian descent.

Gogol\'s mother was a descendant of Polish nobility. Gogol\'s father Vasyl Hohol-Yanovsky, a Ukrainian writer best known for his plays, died when Gogol was 15 years old. In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed an extraordinary talent for mimicry which later on made him a matchless reader of his own works.

In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to Petersburg. He had hoped for literary fame and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life – Ganz Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense, under the name of \"V. Alov.\" The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.

Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story, alongside Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was in touch with the \"literary aristocracy\", and was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin.

In 1831, he brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), which met with immediate success. He followed it in 1832 with 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. His fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Ukrainian cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests.

Between 1832 and 18

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