According to Viktor Shklovsky, Gogol used the technique of defamiliarization when a writer presents common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so that the reader can gain new perspectives and see the world differently.

[6][7] His later writing satirised political corruption in contemporary Russia (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls), although Gogol also enjoyed the patronage of Tsar Nicholas I who liked his work.

His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, who died when Gogol was 15 years old, was supposedly a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks (see Lyzohub family) and belonged to the 'petty gentry'.

He desired literary fame, and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life – Hans Küchelgarten, and had it published at his own expense, under the pseudonym "V.

[12] In 1831, the first volume of Gogol's Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka) was published under a pen name "Rudy Panko", was in line with this trend, and met with immediate success.

[18] Despite the support of Alexander Pushkin and Sergey Uvarov, the Russian minister of education, the appointment was blocked by a bureaucrat on the grounds that Gogol was unqualified.

At the final examination, he sat in utter silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache, while another professor interrogated the students.

Concurrently, he worked at other tasks – recast Taras Bulba (1842)[26] and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage (Zhenitba), wrote the fragment Rome and his most famous short story, "The Overcoat".

Gogol was mourned in the Saint Tatiana church at the Moscow University before his burial and then buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov.

[35] Gogol saw the outer world strangely metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, "A Terrible Vengeance" and "A Bewitched Place".

But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability – attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality – that seems to beggar the visible world itself.

[37] The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the Russian word poshlost', which means something similar to "triviality, banality, inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in a group of people or the entire society.

[38] "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror.

Gogol himself, an adherent of the Slavophile movement, believed in a divinely inspired mission for both the House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church.

[40] After defending autocracy, serfdom, and the Orthodox Church in his book Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends (1847), Gogol came under attack from his former patron Vissarion Belinsky.

The first Russian intellectual to publicly preach the economic theories of Karl Marx, Belinsky accused Gogol of betraying his readership by defending the status quo.

[43] Slavicist Edyta Bojanowska writes that Gogol, after arriving in St. Petersburg, was surprised to find that he was perceived as a Ukrainian, and even as a khokhol (hick).

According to Scollins, Gogol's narrative double-voicedness in both Evenings and Taras Bulba and "pidginized Russian" of the Zaporizhian Cossacks in "The Night before Christmas represents a "strateg[y] of resistance, self-assertion, and divergence"".

[45] Linguist Daniel Green notes "the complexities of an imperial culture in which Russian and Ukrainian literatures and identities informed and shaped each other, with Gogol´ playing a key role in these processes".

[47] In his interpretation of Taras Bulba (1842), Ilnytzkyj argues that the second edition of the novel is a profound assertion of Ukrainian nationalism, supported by a meticulous examination of Gogol’s use of terms such as russkii, Rossiia, and tsar'.

According to Ilnytzkyj, Gogol deliberately linked his Ukrainian Cossack characters to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, crafting a distinct Ukrainian-Rus’ian identity with the term russkii—a direct challenge to the "all-Russian" narrative advanced by Russian imperial ideology.

After publishing Dead Souls and the revised Taras Bulba, Gogol ceased to function as an artist, despite attempts to sustain his earlier creative efforts.

His later non-fiction, shaped by a religious crisis and pressure to revise his views on Russia, cannot negate the Ukrainian nationalist and anti-Russian achievements of his earlier fiction.

Although he recognized "several young writers" who "have shown a particular desire to observe real life", he upbraided the deficient composition and style of their works.

[48] Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopædia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony".

In 1926, Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Government Inspector as a "comedy of the absurd situation", revealing to his fascinated spectators a corrupt world of endless self-deception.

Belinsky, for instance, berated his horror stories as "moribund, monstrous works", while Andrei Bely counted them among his most stylistically daring creations.

[53] Felix Dreizin and David Guaspari, for example, in their The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Literary Ethnocentrism, discuss "the significance of the Jewish characters and the negative image of the Ukrainian Jewish community in Gogol's novel Taras Bulba, pointing out Gogol's attachment to anti-Jewish prejudices prevalent in Russian and Ukrainian culture.

BBC Radio 4 made a series of six Gogol short stories, entitled Three Ivans, Two Aunts and an Overcoat (2002, adaptations by Jim Poyser) starring Griff Rhys-Jones and Stephen Moore.

Just two years later, in 1874, Tchaikovsky composed his version under the title Vakula the Smith (with Russian libretto by Yakov Polonsky) and revised it in 1885 as Cherevichki (The Tsarina's Slippers).