The Nose

NIKOLAI GOGOL was born in 1809 in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochintsy. Seeking literary fame, he went to St. Petersburg at 18 to self-publish an epic poem, which was so ridiculed that he fled the city. He eventually returned and began writing stories influenced by Ukrainian folklore. Collected asEvenings on a Farm Near Dilanka, they were an enormous success. New friends including Pushkin encouraged him, and in stories such as "The Overcoat" and "The Nose," and novels such as Dead Souls , Gogol developed a bitter realism mixed with ironic humor and surprisingly prescient surrealism. In 1836, fearing he'd offended the tsar with his satirical play "The Inspector General," Gogol left Russia for a twelve-year European hiatus. Upon returning he published an essay collection supporting the government he'd always criticized, and was so mercilessly attacked by former admirers that he became despondent. Falling into a state of questionable sanity, he renounced writing as an immoral activity, and in 1852 burned his last manuscript, a sequel to Dead Souls , just days before dying of self-imposed starvation. IAN DREIBLATT has translated Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Nikolai Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer for The Art of the Novella series.

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