The Fall and Rise of a Mysterious Beekeeping Dwarf

Nikolai Gogol (pronounced Gaw-gol) was declared dead on the 4th March 1852. The writer had starved himself to death. Some time later, when his coffin was exhumed during restructuring work on the Novodevichy Cemetery, fearful scratch marks were found inside Gogol’s casket. His body was pale and emaciated, twisted on its side and his spine could be felt through his stomach, prompting rumours that he had been buried alive. Somehow it seems fitting that Russia’s most enigmatic writer should leave one final mystery hanging over himself – one last unanswered question after a lifetime of curiosities.

Little Nikolai had been a strange and intriguing child, given to wearing his left shoe on his right foot and to arranging his bedroom furniture in bizarre, upside-down and back-to-front configurations. His left ear leaked yellow pus and his classmates wouldn’t touch his books. Maria Gogol, his overprotective and fanatically religious mother, doted on him but unwittingly filled his head with an oppressive fear of Hell and the Devil. He grew up looking on anything black or slimy or furtive with deep suspicion. He was haunted throughout his life by the early memory of strangling and burying a black cat from the village, because the way it slinked through the streets had put him in mind of the Devil. In the final moments of his life, exhausted and sweating, pleading with overzealous doctors to leave him in peace as they placed huge bloodsucking leeches on the end of his nose, he must surely have thought that the Devil himself had returned to exact his revenge.

Anyone who had known Gogol would have squirmed behind their gossip columns while reading such accounts of his hideous mistreatment. They knew just how sensitive Gogol was about his nose. Long and thin, he could touch its tip with his bottom lip and it made his eyes appear small and shifty. Teased mercilessly about it at school and obsessed with every aspect of his appearance in adulthood, images of noses frequently poke their way into Gogol’s fiction as though in hope of some kind of exorcism. Whether they succeeded is unclear — but these stories do much to demonstrate the weird, mysterious and absurd nature of Gogol’s vision.

He moved to St Petersburg at the age of nineteen to escape his mother and to seek fame and fortune with the literary career he felt he deserved. Having paid for the publication of his first book himself, the harsh words of his critics sent him scurrying off, frantically buying back and burning all the remaining copies he could get his hands on. Perhaps this first disastrous experience in Petersburg goes some way to explaining the strange ongoing obsession he had with the city. He spent his youth longing to be there and most of his adult life trying to escape it. He was drawn to it by his childhood ideals of what Petersburg could be: creative, energetic and full of all the pleasures any young, talented artist could wish for. Once installed there, he was repulsed by its mundane reality and wrote about it through disillusioned eyes. In Gogol’s Petersburg, anything can happen — and frequently does — without reason or explanation. It’s a weird and often terrifying version of Alice Through The Looking Glass, full of shifting perspectives, sleight-of-hand, and that trait which lay at the core of Gogol’s existence, hideous pretence.

He was a compulsive liar and everyone he dealt with closely soon knew it. He would concoct elaborate stories to wheedle his way out of difficult situations and to extract financial support from friends and family. Before long, the boundaries between the fact and fiction of Gogol’s life became so blurred that many biographers over the years have lost patience with their subject.

Like so many of the paradoxes surrounding Gogol, it is precisely these falsehoods and fabrications which ultimately reveal so much of the truth about him. He was deceitful, certainly, but not in a malicious way; somehow rather because the truth was just too difficult for him to handle, or else too embarrassing, or too mundane. The people who knew Gogol better than he knew himself accepted this behaviour for what it was: their friend’s only means of survival. Things did not turn sour until towards the end of his life, when his formidable genius had waned and when panic had set in. Like his mother before him, he became fanatically religious, and went on to publish a book in which he deplored the moral standards of some of his most loyal friends. Some might say this was profoundly hypocritical.

The night before he died, the by now almost friendless Gogol was helped by his loyal manservant to gather up the remnants of the final manuscript he had been struggling to write, in which he set out his monumental vision of how the Russian people should live a morally noble life. In spite of the servant’s protests, the thick hoard of paper was dutifully burned. When the flames began to die down, Gogol opened the bundle and fed each sheet into the fire with his own hand. As the last page was consumed, Gogol broke down and sobbed, kissed his manservant and promptly dismissed him, before then shuffling off to his bed. In so doing, Gogol ended his literary career precisely as he had begun it: obliterated in a pile of ashes.