Gogol was born in 1809 in what is now central Ukraine. His parents, minor landowners and members of the local gentry, were both descendants of Ukrainian Cossacks. His father was an amateur poet and playwright, and as a child, Gogol briefly considered becoming an actor. After moving to St. Petersburg in 1828, he attained a job in the civil service and began writing fiction. His first major work, a collection of short stories called Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), was an instant success, and Gogol soon became known as a regional Ukrainian writer whose work depicted specifically Ukrainian characters and themes (he would soon become “reclassified” as a Russian writer). He lived abroad between 1836 and 1848, spending much of that time in Italy and Germany, and in 1842 he published Dead Souls, a picaresque novel satirizing the aristocratic pretensions of the middle class in Imperial Russia (a similar critique of The Performance of Class animates “The Carriage”). After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he settled near Moscow, dying in 1852.

Although critics often focus on Gogol’s critiques of Russian politics and society, Gogol was a prominent member of what is now known as the Slavophile movement.