The Collected tales of Nikolai Gogol

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Art has the provinces in its blood. Art is provincial in principle, preserving for itself a naive, external, astonished and envious outlook,

– Andrei Sinyavsky, In Gogol's Shadow

Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol was born on April 1, 1809, in the village of Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district, Poltava province, in the Ukraine, also known as Little Russia. His childhood was spent on Vassilyevka, a modest estate belonging to his mother. Nearby was the town of Dikanka, once the property of Kochubey, the most famous hetman of the independent Ukraine. In the church of Dikanka there was an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, for whom Gogol was named.

In 1821 Gogol was sent to boarding school in Nezhin, near Kiev. He graduated seven years later, and in December 1828, at the age of nineteen, left his native province to try his fortunes in the Russian capital. There he fled from posts as a clerk in two government ministries, failed a tryout for the imperial theater (he had not been a brilliant student at school, but had shown unusual talent as a mimic and actor, and his late father had been an amateur play- wright), printed at his own expense a long and very bad romantic poem, then bought back all the copies and burned them, and in 1830 published his first tale, "St. John's Eve," in the March issue of the magazine Fatherland Notes. There followed, in September 1831 and March 1832, the two volumes of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, each containing four tales on Ukrainian themes with a prologue by their supposed collector, the beekeeper Rusty Panko. They were an immediate success and made the young provincial a famous writer.

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