Gogol's father was an educated and gifted man, who wrote plays, poems, and sketches in Ukrainian. His real surname was Ianovskii, but the writer's grandfather had taken the name 'Gogol' to claim a noble Cossack ancestry. Nikolai Gogol was born in Sorochintsi, Ukraine, where he grew up on his parents' country estate. This is also why we cannot see our own noses – they're all on the moon." (from Diary of a Madman, 1835) Another reason the moon is such a tender globe it that people just cannot live on it any more, and all that's left alive there are noses. He put in a creosoted rope and some wood oil and this has led to such a terrible stink all over the earth that you have to hold your nose. "The moon is made by some lame cooper, and you can see the idiot has no idea about moons at all. As an exposer of grotesque in human nature, Gogol could be called the Hieronymus Bosch of Russian literature. Gogol's prose is characterized by imaginative power and linguistic playfulness. Great Ukrainian novelist, dramatist, satirist, founder of the so-called critical realism in Russian literature, best-known for his novel Mertvye dushi I-II (1842, Dead Souls).
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