His early years gave no evidence of exceptional talent of any kind. He was born in 1809 into a Polish-Ukrainian family of moderately prosperous landowners in rural Ukraine, and completed his formal education when he graduated in 1828 from the gymnasium in Nezhin, some one hundred miles northwest of his home. He set out at once for St Petersburg, the goal of many an ambitious young man. A year earlier he had confided to a friend that from early childhood he had ‘burned with an unquenchable fervour to make my life necessary for the good of the state’, and proposed a career in ‘justice’ as a clear possibility.¹ But after he established himself in the capital, prospects looked dimmer. He auditioned for the Imperial Theatres with hopes of becoming an actor, but met with crushing rejection; for a short time he taught at a girls’ school; he secured a drastically underpaid position in an obscure branch of the civil service; he took some classes at the Academy of Arts. While still at school, he had turned out a few poems, but they made no impression on his fellow-students. His earliest effort at prose fiction, ‘The Brothers Tverdislavich’, also dates from his years at Nezhin. It prompted a schoolmate to remark: ‘You’ll never make a fiction writer, that’s obvious right now’,² upon which he tore up the manuscript and burned it. In 1830, he published two poems: the brief and forgettable ‘Italy’, and a long and laboured effort under the fashionably German rubric of Hanz Küchelgarten, which garnered reviews so savage that he bought up every copy he could find and burned them.

It seems remarkable that he would persist in a literary career despite such rebuffs. But he was endowed with two characteristics which, when combined with a hitherto inconspicuous yet spectacular talent, would soon elevate him into the front ranks of promising writers, and, within ten years, make him a modern master in the eyes of the public and most critics. They were a conviction that he stood above the ‘crowd’, and a steely ambition to create something out of himself. ‘A cold sweat broke out on my face,’ he continued in the letter to his friend in 1827, ‘at the thought that perhaps it would be my lot to perish in the dust without having distinguished my name with a single beautiful deed. To be in the world and not distinguish my existence – that would be dreadful for me.’³ Writers, not government officials, were the great celebrities of the time, much like actors or rock musicians today, and Russian literature was in a state of throbbing, even frantic, development, boasting of an ever-growing body of readers avid for new talent that would not only prove entertaining, but would address questions that the European Romantics in particular had taught Russians to expect writers to engage. One of the most important was national identity, or narodnost’. It had been in vogue since the late eighteenth century, had taken on special urgency since the defeat of Napoleon in the War of 1812, and had engaged the energies of a pantheon of new writers, especially in novels, short stories, ballads, folk tales and histories. Gogol, always alert to opportunity, undoubtedly sensed it here. It presented itself in the form of his homeland, the Ukraine.

Exotic climes and exotic people were very much in vogue in the early nineteenth century. The Ukraine, although part of Russia since 1654, had a language and culture distinctive enough to make it ‘exotic’ in the eyes of Russian readers. As early as 30 April 1829 – even before the disaster with Hanz Küchelgarten – we find Gogol writing to his mother from St Petersburg, begging her to do him the ‘greatest of favours’: putting her ‘fine, observant mind’ and her knowledge of the ‘customs and usages of our Little Russians’ (as Ukrainians were officially designated at the time) to his service and providing him with detailed descriptions of folk customs and costume ‘down to the last ribbon’. He does not tell her why this material is ‘very, very necessary’ to him, but we may safely assume that he was already intending to work on some Ukrainian subjects.⁴ He could also have drawn material from the comedies that his father (dead since 1825) had written in Ukrainian, as well as from Ukrainian folklore and the work of writers who had been busy creating a Ukrainian literary renaissance. For the kind of national fame to which he aspired, however, it was essential to write in Russian, the official language of the Empire, and he did so throughout his career, while always retaining an interest in and affection for his Ukrainian heritage.

His earliest uses of these materials date from 1830, with the story ‘Bisavryuk, or St John’s Eve’, fragments of a historical novel, The Hetman, which was never finished, and, the following year, two brief chapters of a horror story (also never completed) entitled ‘The Terrifying Boar’.⁵ But the crowning work of the early 1830s was the two volumes of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (which included a heavily revised ‘St John’s Eve’). Its eight stories and two prefaces focused on ordinary people in rural settings, and partly on those most exotic of Ukrainian phenomena, the Cossacks, with colourful descriptions of folk customs, scary yet humorous intrusions of the supernatural, madness, magic spells, love intrigues and idyllic landscapes, sufficiently seasoned with quotidian detail and Ukrainian words to create the impression that they were intimations, if not evocations, of ‘real’ life. They enjoyed enormous popularity, and made Gogol an instant celebrity.

The short story had for some time been the most popular literary genre in Russian, as in European literature, and Gogol was always alert to literary fashions. As Russia’s most influential critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote in 1834: ‘In all literatures the short story now is the exclusive object of the attention and activity of all who write and read, our daily bread, our bedside book, which we read as we close our eyes at night and read as we open them in the morning.’⁶ The most famous early instance in Russia was Nikolay Karamzin’s ‘Poor Liza’ (1792), with the well-used theme of the tragedy of two lovers who belong to very different social classes, and a style that was widely credited with canonizing a supple, rich Russian literary prose. Gogol proved highly skilful at adapting the techniques of the European story to subject matter, genres and styles that were unmistakably Ukrainian, and later Russian.

In the five years that followed the publication of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Gogol tried his hand at a number of different prose forms and genres, notably stories, plays and essays. Like many other writers of the time, he was fascinated by historical subjects and processes. To friends he confided his ambition to write a large-scale history of the Ukraine, as well as a history of the world. Part of his preparation consisted in securing a position at St Petersburg University as a teacher of history, which found him lamentably unprepared and was not renewed. He collected materials from folklore, and undertook a series of notebooks that would record unusual or odd usages of language, both Russian and Ukrainian. An overview of this period reveals a mind ranging in many different directions. The wonder is that he managed to bring anything to completion. But in 1834 he published the story ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’, and two articles on history. In January 1835 a substantial volume entitled Arabesques appeared, consisting mainly of thirteen essays on a variety of topics, such as Aleksandr Pushkin, the Ukraine, contemporary architecture, the Middle Ages, geography, the teaching of history, and sculpture, painting and music. It also made three new additions to Gogol’s short stories: ‘Diary of a Madman’, ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, and ‘The Portrait’, the second of which has been freshly translated for the present collection. In March of the same year Gogol took readers back to the Ukraine with a collection of four long stories that appeared under the title Mirgorod (a district and town located in Poltava province): these were ‘Old World Landowners’, ‘Taras Bulba’, ‘Viy’ and the story about the two Ivans that had been separately published the year before. In 1836 his interest in drama culminated in The Government Inspector, which, unusually for Gogol, is set in provincial Russia, and received its première on 19 April in St Petersburg. That same month two new stories appeared in literary journals: ‘The Nose’, again set in St Petersburg, and ‘The Carriage’, which unfolds in the provinces. This busy period was followed by a hiatus, during which Gogol was working frantically to complete the novel Dead Souls, the first part of which was published in 1842. Finally, there came a fresh burst of published stories in 1842, with ‘The Overcoat’ and heavily revised versions of ‘The Portrait’ and ‘Taras Bulba’. The final story was ‘Rome’ (1842), a tribute to the city in which he spent so much of his adult life, but a curiously flawed work which has never achieved much popularity even among devotees of Gogol.

Gogol lived until 1852 but never produced another short story. This final decade was given over to essays – many on personal, religious and moralistic themes – and to Part II of Dead Souls, which he twice burned and constantly rewrote in a vain effort to complete it. A substantial part of it remains, showing us a Gogol who was moving closer to what we have come to appreciate as the great ‘psychological’ novels by Russian writers of the next generation, but, it is widely agreed, a Gogol who had also moved out of his element. That element is best represented by Part I of Dead Souls, and by the cluster of nineteen splendid short stories that were produced over a period of some ten years and are well represented in the collection now before us.

It is hardly surprising that this impassioned literary activity, conducted over such a short span of time, strikes readers as all of a piece. Each of the stories is very different from the others; yet each draws on a pool of themes, situations, stylistic devices and ideas that run throughout his work, and are developed, modified, reconfigured and varied in ways so ingenious that we always feel that we are on new territory, while at the same time recognizing familiar landmarks. It is impossible to confuse a story by Gogol with a story by anyone else, despite the numerous imitators he has attracted during the century and a half since his death.

So strong is the note of pathos with which the decline of these self-contained entities is treated that we suspect we are really dealing with versions of the idyll. This literary form has been defined as a work in prose or poetry which ‘describes a picturesque rural scene of gentle beauty and innocent tranquillity and narrates a story of some simple sort of happiness’.⁷ The most obvious exemplifications of this definition are the Dikanka stories. The tone is established by several great set pieces, like the summer night in Little Russia, in ‘The Fair at Sorochintsy’, the panorama of the mighty Dnieper River, in ‘A Terrible Vengeance’, and the moving scene in ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt’ (included in this collection), where the emphasis is on the wonders of Nature and the human desire to share in them, even if only partially. Such passages evoke a universe of beauty and harmony, which also embraces the world that the human inhabitants have created in their dedication to fruitful and timeless pursuits like love, the kind of family in which everyone, young and old, has a part, and a celebration of natural processes and cycles like marriages, births, and deaths. Gogol subtitled Hanz Küchelgarten ‘an idyll in pictures’, and in several of his articles on history he posited a unity of this kind at various times in the past. But even in the Dikanka stories it has begun to unravel. In keeping with the strong fairy-tale coloration of this collection, the intruders are often supernatural beings, like witches, goblins or demons, sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent, even comic. At the end, a semblance of harmony is restored, as the intruding element is banished, placated or somehow incorporated into the life of the community. The one exception is the story ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’. Here a curious reversal takes place: the hero, Shponka, though a fully-fledged member of the community, is himself the intruder, an utter misfit by virtue of not wishing to participate at all in his seemingly (albeit deceptively) idyllic society.

Another striking feature of the Dikanka stories is the way in which they are narrated. They are presented to the reader by one Rudy Panko, an old beekeeper, who has gathered them during long winter evenings in the village from various storytellers, and is reproducing them exactly as he has heard them. We too are supposed to imagine that we are hearing them without the intervention of print. Michael Wood has pointed out that the ‘birthplace’ of the story form ‘is not the solitary individual but the person who lives in a community and has experiences he/she can pass on’.⁸ In other words, oral narrative promotes unity and in this sense is well suited to the idyll. This is a technique that Gogol followed throughout his storytelling career. Usually the oral narrator stands, intellectually and culturally, somewhere between the characters and the presumed author. The reader, then, finds himself at a double remove from the characters, and can never confidently identify himself with the ‘real’ author, or Gogol himself. This sense of remove is also part of the feeling that an idyll generates in the reader.

The Dikanka stories also provide some glimpses of psychological motivation, which are among the several features that tell us they are not ‘pure’ idylls. ‘A Terrible Vengeance’, for instance, follows the workings of a curse on the mind of an increasingly deranged Cossack wife. But nowhere in this cycle of stories are these elements stronger than in ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’. This is a portrait of a young man who is beholden to an array of peculiar and powerful authority figures – the schoolmaster, a bullying neighbour and the aunt – who are frighteningly adept at manipulating him to their ends. He does have a semblance of an inner life – as virtually (though not all) of Gogol’s main characters have – but it mostly finds expression in infantile sexual fantasies, which are ultimately frustrated or exposed. Only in solitude is he able to enjoy some measure of contentment; but as the story ends, he is about to be denied even that.

In its theme and its hints at characters who have a rather more fully developed psychological life, ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’ has always struck critics as being out of place in the Dikanka cycle. But it does point ahead to Gogol’s second set of Ukrainian stories, published in 1835 under the title of Mirgorod. If these stories are longer and more complex than the Dikanka ones, that is partly because Gogol is now increasingly interested in psychological factors. In particular, he wants to explore a question that he has not addressed in any depth in the earlier collection (not even in ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’): why does the idyll disintegrate and collapse?

The four stories in Mirgorod begin by looking like idylls, offering as they do prosperous estates, bountiful harvests, a smiling nature and a cohesive and fruitful family life. Before long, however, each of them betrays flaws that are ultimately fatal. In ‘Old World Landowners’, the first indication that something is wrong comes when we realize that the relationship of the old married couple is more like brother and sister than husband and wife, that boasting and teasing are the prevalent modes of discourse, and eventually become acidulous enough to unravel the relationship, bring about the death of the old woman, and with it, the estate. The undying friendship of the two Ivans provides a model for the town of Mirgorod, which was small enough to partake of many of the features of the countryside as well, and therefore to qualify at least as quasi-idyllic, but it is spoiled irreparably by jealousy and envy, and the much-vaunted ‘closeness’ of the two men becomes a prison of hatred and vindictiveness. In ‘Taras Bulba’ we are shown a close-knit Cossack community, which was always a positive phenomenon for Gogol, as he seems to have wanted to remind us by making this one of the two stories he completely rewrote towards the end of his active life as a creator of fiction. But it is gradually undone by a younger son who falls in love with a Polish girl, thereby betraying his birthright and his family (Poles being deadly enemies of the Cossacks). Finally, there is ‘Viy’, an untranslatable name for the monster who, in a throwback to the supernatural world of Dikanka, destroys the dreams and fantasies of an already weak-willed hero and of an entire Cossack family. In these more sophisticated stories, the invasive agents are often internal, and easily find fertile ground. The community or the individual carry within them the seeds of their own undoing, which merely await the appearance of a catalytic agent to begin to sprout. They may be flaws of character, infection by a hostile ideology or a return to the community after living outside it for too long. In The Government Inspector, all the townspeople are venal in one way or another – tainted with what the Mayor delicately refers to as ‘little indiscretions’ – but have found ways of living in harmony and creating what to all appearances is a flourishing community. But once the intruding agent, in the person of Khlestakov, is introduced, harmony turns disharmonious, compromise becomes chaos, and at length even life ceases, as Gogol strongly suggests in the mute scene that concludes the play.

The city is deception because it is an imitation of an idyll, an artificial construct that was created to keep Nature out or to confine it in manageable ways. Although it contains thousands of inhabitants, there is no sense of community, as Gogol explained to his mother in the letter he wrote to her soon after his arrival. At best, it is an assemblage of disconnected bits, which can fool people into imagining that it is a whole.

In the rural idylls of earlier stories there is still some sense that humans are open to the universe, that society and Nature can communicate; but in St Petersburg Nature is regarded as an enemy, to be defended against (hence the powerful image of the flood in Pushkin’s poem, and the cold wind in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’). The world outside Petersburg also came to include the spiritual world: nowhere in his stories is any serious mention made of God; human aspirations are therefore always framed in purely human terms. The city becomes a prison, from which there is no escape.

Cities and idylls are poles apart; yet Petersburg is the end result of the decaying idyll that Gogol has been tracing throughout his works, and, as such, it stands for him as the prime symbol of modern times. Gogol is by no means the first writer to view the city in this way, but he is one of the most powerful and effective, as the enduring impact and popularity of these ‘Petersburg’ stories attest.

What sort of characters inhabit this urban prison that Gogol has so ingeniously and persuasively fashioned? Most are what critics came to refer to as ‘little men’, often lower-grade civil servants, obscure army officers, students, medium- or even high-ranking government officials. They are typically beleaguered, imposed upon and bullied, and in these senses are versions of Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka, although frequently far more complex. Each is in the thrall of one obsession, which fully defines him (and it is always ‘him’: there are no women in this category of characters), prevents him from interacting with other people in any meaningful way and deprives him of any connection with society as a whole except as something to be feared or exploited. He is completely isolated (nearly all are bachelors) and completely disconnected from any sense of a higher spiritual power. Ultimately, what these obsessions amount to is the pursuit of sex and rank, which Gogol seems to see as the two most important human drives. Sex is of course pervasive, but rank was one of the defining features of life in St Petersburg, perhaps because the city was mainly given over to the civil service, where everyone had a rank prescribed by the government. Most people who inhabited this world, in Gogol’s fictional versions, had the illusion that the pursuit of higher rank would lead to happiness. The most complex and poignant exploration of this theme occurs in ‘Diary of a Madman’. Poprishchin is already a titular counsellor (class nine: see also Table of Ranks, p. xxxv), but aspires higher, so much higher, in fact, that eventually he imagines himself to be King of Spain, as he is confined to a madhouse and tormented by his keepers. Worse, his new rank isolates him utterly from society, as his final despairing outburst indicates: ‘There’s no place for him in this world!’

What is it that stirs such ambitions? It is not money or worldly goods, but rather power over others, and, above all, the thirst for recognition and respect, which most of Gogol’s characters feel to be the ultimate validation of themselves as human beings. They have never learned what any new recruit into armies all over the world learns on his first day of service: that respect is to be accorded to the rank of his superiors, not to the persons who hold rank. To be a king or a general is to run the risk of turning entirely into the rank itself and therefore ceasing to exist as a person. This is Poprishchin’s terrible discovery, and one definition of madness, as it had been in an earlier unfinished play of Gogol’s.¹² Rank functions, we might say, the way Akaky Akakievich’s overcoat does in ‘The Overcoat’: as a second self which, if lost or removed, makes the first self unrecognized and therefore non-existent. The acquisition of the coat sets Akaky on a level with his fellow-workers, who not so long ago were mocking and even persecuting him. The coat represents power not so much in the sense of encouraging him to treat others despotically or even condescendingly, but more as conferring a sense of personal empowerment. We do not know, however, that, if faced with another humble copyist in his office, he would not proceed to act the way his fellowcopyists had acted towards him. Likewise, the ending of the story of the two Ivans is depressingly similar to the beginning. They are under intense social pressure to resume their old relationship but nothing helps, and they remain the closest of enemies, a situation that prompts the narrator’s famous closing line: ‘It’s a dreary world, gentlemen!’ Seen this way, the inability of Gogol’s characters to escape their situations and to change is perhaps more the result of moral deficiency than of victimhood. This question was never answered in the stories or the plays. It would have to wait until Dead Souls, and even then until the unfinished Part II, where Gogol’s narrator would show ways that people could live happily and productively in the here and now. In the stories, meanwhile, Gogol lets us understand that one reason that the consequences of ambition are usually so dire is that the characters in question have done nothing to merit higher rank, and that it is therefore difficult to sympathize with them too much.

So far little has been said about the female characters in Gogol’s stories and plays. That is because they are usually one-dimensional and considerably less interesting than the men. The aunt in ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’ is a variant of one common type of woman in Gogol, the shrew, who in other Dikanka stories often appears as a witch. In ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’, this type is represented by Agafiya Fedoseyevna, who bites the governor’s ear (a vampire, perhaps?) and is ultimately responsible for heating up the quarrel between the two men. In ‘The Nose’, she is Podtochina, whom Kovalyov suspects of having sexual designs on him. Another type of woman is readily apparent in The Government Inspector, in the personages of Anna Andreyevna and Marya Antonovna, the major’s wife and daughter. They are both empty-headed females who are concerned only with the social niceties of provincial living, and with the possibility of catching the government inspector as a husband for the daughter (and perhaps a lover for the mother). The extreme variants of this type are the tease, the vamp and the prostitute. Idylls are built on stereotypes; and the continuing presence of such characters in Gogol’s fiction is a sign that the impulses of the idyll remained strongly present to the end of his career as a writer of fiction. Pushkin had created a fully developed woman in Tatyana in his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1833), but otherwise it was not until the late 1850s and early 1860s that equal treatment was extended to them in prose fiction by writers like Goncharov, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky.

His techniques of bringing detail to life are many and varied. The simplest is, of course, personification, as with Kovalyov’s very ordinary nose, which, once it ceases to be a mere appendage, becomes a plausible individual in its own right. Another simple but effective trick is to view the object from several different angles, thereby enhancing its importance. Such is the case with the aunt’s carriage in ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’, dating back perhaps to the time of Adam (mythological perspective), which is constantly besieged by dogs trying to ‘lick the grease off the wheels’ (object of desire) and tilting ‘slightly to one side so it was much higher on the right than the left’ (narrator’s vantage point) and much to the aunt’s liking, since ‘it could accommodate five undersized ones and three the size of Auntie’ (aunt’s view). Realization or displacement of metaphor figures heavily, as in the famous naming scene in ‘The Overcoat’: ‘His surname was Bashmachkin, which all too plainly was at some time derived from bashmak [‘shoe’]… Both his father and his grandfather, and even his brother-in-law and all other Bashmachkins, went around in boots [shoes] and had them soled only three times a year.’ The attentive reader will find many other such techniques in operation, all of which function to pull ordinary objects out of an ordinary world, and present them in a new light.

The opening pages of ‘The Two Ivans’ are rife with such devices. There is first of all exaggeration, or hyperbole: ‘You should see Ivan Ivanovich’s marvellous short fur jacket! It’s quite fantastic!… I’ll bet you anything you like nobody has lambskins to compare with his.’ Hyperbole by definition calls attention to itself. Then comes a shift of vantage point, which confers a two-dimensionality, and, therefore, greater substance, on the jacket: ‘Heavens – just take a look at them from the side… simply gorge your eyes on them!’ These devices seize our attention even if we find them unwarranted or absurd by what convention deems trivial; but Gogol is always intent on destroying preconceived notions and prejudged categories. In another instance, vantage point is enhanced by a subtlety of syntax: ‘All that’s at the front of the house, but you should take a look at his garden! What doesn’t he have! Plums, cherries, every kind of vegetable, sunflowers, cucumbers, melons, chickpeas – even a threshing-floor and a forge.’ Enumeration in itself confers a weight and importance on the objects in question; and the little word ‘even’ – one of Gogol’s signature words throughout his work – heightens the reader’s expectation that what follows will be even grander and more important. ‘All that’ already suggests abundance, and the sudden shift to the garden, which is presumably at the back of the house, creates the impression that even more will be found there: if what lies at the back is even more important, then what lies at the front must already be important.

Even though such details, which abound in each of the stories, are in constant movement, and require constant re-examination, they do not take the reader or the characters outside the boundaries of the narrative, but serve to redefine and strengthen those boundaries. They give the story a feeling of inevitability, for both characters and readers. Situation trumps character; and if we feel that we cannot escape the situations as Gogol creates them, then we cannot expect the characters to do so either. They have to deal with the world around them – a largely artificial world that has been created by others for them, especially in the Petersburg stories, and to which none of them is capable of adding anything of his own.

Two works from 1836 are set in provincial Russia, as Dead Souls (1842) would later be as well: ‘The Carriage’ and The Government Inspector. The first of these, which embodies many themes familiar from the earlier stories, such as the importance of rank, boasting, a childish attitude towards women and a desire to be what one is not, is a small masterpiece. The ending, where Chertokutsky is discovered hiding in the carriage by the unwanted visitors, has puzzled many readers, although it is really a more sophisticated version of the non-ending of ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’ or ‘The Nose’. The major masterpiece from the same year is The Government Inspector. It was flanked by other plays: The Order of Vladimir, Third Class (1832–4) and Marriage, which, though written by 1835, did not reach final form until 1842, and was followed by The Gamblers (1842) and Leaving the Theatre After the Performance of a New Comedy (1842). The Government Inspector is a comedy of misunderstanding, but is brought off in unmistakably Gogolian ways that link it to the stories. It is set in an enclosed space (an isolated provincial town) that is suddenly invaded by an outside force (the putative government inspector) which throws everything into confusion and brings about such drastic changes that nothing can ever be put right again. As the mayor says, ‘the whole world’s gone topsy-turvy’. Khlestakov, who is mistaken for the inspector, is an empty and stupid young man, perhaps the most unaware of any of Gogol’s characters, but, like most of them, driven by a single impulse, in this case the ‘will to please’, and not ‘ulterior motives’, as in Act IV, Scene II. It is one of the funniest plays in Russian literature, yet, like all of Gogol’s work, has a sombre side. The theme of rank is now developed to the point where it is the townsfolk who confer it on someone unworthy – Khlestakov. The same would be true of Chichikov in Dead Souls, who presents himself to the inhabitants of the town and vicinity as merely a would-be landowner, but before long is endowed by them with a series of identities, one more absurd than the next: millionaire, Napoleon in disguise, forger of official banknotes, brigand, seducer of the governor’s daughter, and so on. The point seems to be that people feel enlarged and ennobled by association with someone lofty, even if they suspect him to be a fraud. Here Gogol has moved a few steps closer to one of Dostoyevsky’s seminal insights about human nature.