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For a time, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was seen as the leader of Russian literature. His short story “The Overcoat” and his novel Dead Souls (1842) are some of his most well-known and influential works. Gogol was born in 1809 in the Ukrainian countryside. He began writing as a boy, contributing poetry and prose to a local magazine in his hometown and portrayed comical old men and women in school theatrical productions. In 1828 he moved to St. Petersburg, hoping to become a civil servant. He had trouble achieving this goal and even tried to become an actor. Once, he took money from his mother meant for a mortgage and instead took a boat to Germany. When he ran out of money, he returned to St. Petersburg and took a job for little pay. 

Gogol struggled to publish his writing and received little acclaim until he published eight stories in 1831-1832 under the title Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. These stories mixed romantic portraits of his childhood with realistic tales from his life in St. Petersburg. Gogol became famous nearly overnight. He was admired by the famous poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky. Over the course of ten years, Gogol published many stories and novels. The final ten years of his life were creatively dry, and he failed to produce any meaningful works. Ten days before his death in 1852, Gogol burned the completed manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Gogol’s influence on Russian literature was immense, as his realism was taken up by satirists throughout Russia and he was a champion of the little man as a literary hero. Along with his realist tendencies, the ornate prose of his novels was taken up by Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of the greats of Russian literature.

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