This essay on the religious worldview of one of Russia’s greatest authors, Nikolai Gogol, was written by Professor Ivan Andreev and translated into English by Deacon Nicholas Kotar. Professor Andreev is best known as the author of Russia’s Catacomb Saints, and is remembered as one of the many celebrated professors of Holy Trinity Seminary. It was originally released in tandem with the publication of the current edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Meditations on the Divine Liturgy in 2014. As we are highlighting Meditations on the Divine Liturgy as our September 2025 Monthly Feature, we are posting this essay on Orthodox Life for our readers to gain an understanding of the deeply Orthodox piety of this great literary figure.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, one of the great geniuses of Russian and world literature, also had a tremendous significance in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Gogol, Ivan Kireyevsky, Alexey Khomiakov, Konstantin Leontiev—the greatest of Russia’s Orthodox religious thinkers—are at the same time bright historical personalities in their own right, who profoundly understood the significance of the Russian Orthodox Church in the history of Russian spiritual culture and who gave all their God-given talents to the service of that Church.
The aim of this biographical description is to attempt to understand and characterize Gogol as a deeply idiosyncratic, religious man. The religious aspect of this great Russian writer was hidden for a very long time, both from his contemporaries and from subsequent generations.
To properly understand any historical personage, it is worth delving into a special “historical-intellectual emotion,” or mindset, which allows us to see the characteristic details of a given personality and the complete whole of that person at the same time. It is extremely difficult to understand the contradictory and complex nature of Gogol’s personality: his taciturnity, coupled inexplicably with extroverted dynamism and a unique flair for the dramatic. It seems hard to find another writer who has inspired such wildly divergent opinions and assessments.
We would like to soften these extremes and find the proper “focus” of a spiritually minded exploration of the “inner” Gogol. The key to understanding this soul (like any other human soul), according to this writer’s opinion, is in his religious personality.
The formation of Gogol’s personality was organically influenced by many factors. In looking at the chronological flow of Gogol’s biography, we will especially stop to note and analyze the strong and profound influence on Gogol’s life of several people.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born March 20, 1809. He was a sickly infant and from his earliest childhood impressionable and prone to irritation. As the years passed, he developed certain psychopathological traits (a difficult and intractable character with unexplained idiosyncrasies and an inclination to hysteria), but avoided an emotional breakdown. Usually such inadequacies in character are explained away as unfortunate genetic predispositions.
Gogol’s father, Vasily Afanasievich, descended from an ancient Ukrainian noble family. He was a talented author in his own right, having written two one-act comedies and several humorous poems. He also worked for a time as a director and principal actor in an amateur theater troupe in the estate of his rich and well-connected relative, the former Ekaterinburg magnate and patron of the arts, D. P. Troshchinsky. Vasily Afanasievich was exceptionally cheerful in his manner and humor, but was also an excessively sensitive dreamer and a hypochondriac. He dabbled equally in folk poetry and the sentimental Romantic poetry typical of the age of Karamzin. He was a fantastic storyteller, loved to declaim in front of crowds, loved to make poses and theatrical gestures, and in general was a performer in everyday life. He also loved the Church, especially its rituals and singing, appreciating Orthodoxy mainly in its strictly aesthetic aspect.
It is worth mentioning that for several generations the family of Gogol had been very well educated, mostly thanks to priestly roots on his father’s side. Gogol’s great-grandfather was a priest, and both his grandfather and father were educated in the Kiev Spiritual Academy, but did not follow the priestly line. Gogol’s mother, Maria Ivanovna Kosiarovskaya, in her “Notes” (a memoir written after the death of her husband, characterized by great sincerity and simplicity, and not lacking in literary quality), comes across as a personality impressionable to a fault and inclined to exalted feelings. She believed in mysterious premonitions, omens, and prophetic dreams. She was especially sensitive in her “mystical experiences” of the dark powers: she shuddered before evil spirits and was deathly afraid of them. She was often afraid and suspicious, and tended to hypochondria. Gogol’s father was also a hypochondriac, but this common character trait was perhaps the only one the two shared.
Gogol inherited from his parents a heightened sensitivity, a love for the aesthetic, literary talent, humor, artistic capabilities, an easily disturbed character with strange prejudices and fears, and an inclination towards religious mysticism. From a rather early period, he would fall into periodic bouts of depression, which were always followed by periods of manic excitement. He would often react hysterically and invent fantastically ridiculous lies. He inclined to pseudo-reminiscence, showing off, philosophizing, bathos, and hyperbole in his expression of emotional distress, and he generally showed indications of a personality given to all forms of affectation.
But while he developed these obviously psychopathological traits from his early years, Gogol was prone to intense moral self-criticism, even self-condemnation, and had an unusually sensitive religious conscience. In his twenties, in one of his letters to his mother (1829), Gogol gives a remarkably sincere and genuine self-appraisal: “I often think to myself, why did God, who created a unique (or at least a very rare), pure, fiery soul that longs for all that is exalted and beautiful, why did he dress all of it in such a frightful mess of contradictions, stubbornness, obnoxious self-will and shameful self-abasement?”
Gogol was born in a place called Bol’shye Sorochintsy, in the Mirgorodsk uyezd of the Poltava gubernia, where he spent his childhood until age 12. This place was a beautiful and captivating corner of the Ukrainian countryside and a peaceful setting for his friendly and hospitable family of the minor nobility. The family kept a living memory of the former glory of Little Russia, of the feats of the Cossacks, creating a poetic atmosphere of love for folk songs, fairy tales, legends, and sayings—all of which idiosyncratically were interwoven with a love for the ritual beauties of the Orthodox Church. This religio-poetic attitude was the glue that held together all the aspects of manorial estate life, which at that time in the Ukraine was still very connected to the daily life of the serfs, something Russia had by then lost.
The Gogol family was well versed in both the sacred and secular culture of the time, and in addition to Gogol’s especially gentle love for his native, softly musical Ukrainian (which he spoke fluently), he was proficient in the literary Russian of the day, in which he wrote his great works and letters. Though a “Little Russian” by blood, Gogol was raised in the great “pan-Russian” spiritual culture, with her “great, mighty, free, and truthful” language. The influences on Gogol’s spiritual development are many: nature, folk poetry, sentimental Romantic literature, and especially the theater, which the impressionable youth first encountered in the village of Kibintsy ar D. P. Troshchinsky’s. Here, on the stage of the Kibinsty serf theater, Gogol’s father staged his comedies. The theater made a resounding impression on the young Gogol, profoundly damaging his sensitive soul and in many ways determining the character of his future creative work.
If every artist, according to Belinsky, “thinks in images,” then it would be safe to say about Gogol that, under the influence of the theater, he began “thinking in scenes.” This “scenic imagination” becomes a psychological key to understanding not only all his creative oeuvre, which so easily and naturally inhabits the stage as well as the page, but his entire work as a zealot of the word.
If Tiutchev was right when he said “any thought spoken out loud is a lie,” then this truth in Gogol’s context is inevitably tragic. The tortures of the creative word were to him only too well known. And the more subjective and emotional his ideas were, the more agonizing was the search for the words adequate to express their meaning. The brilliant artist of the word was not able to express his feelings with words!
This helps to explain the particularities of Gogol’s creativity. He had superlative abilities in the dramatic arts, especially in comedy. Furthermore he was a talented storyteller in the heroic style, and all that was comical or grotesque he could describe very vividly, like a sculpture. (It is interesting to note that in his own way Gogol appreciated, understood, and loved sculpture and architecture.) The hardest for him was any kind of lyrical writing. By and large his lyrical passages seem false, affected, and oratorical. He had a much easier time describing types than individuals.
His early exposure to sentimental Romantic literature—in which there was no less falsity, posing, declamation, and oratory as in so-called false Classicism—had a profound and lasting impact on Gogol. Even his early letters have the stamp of this influence. Even after his father’s death, the sixteen-year-old Gogol wrote about his perfectly natural suffering in a deliberately affected, declamational style that was full of bathos.
The gorgeous natural beauty of Little Russia, the poetic atmosphere of folk poetry, Romantic literature, and theater developed and encouraged only the aesthetic tastes of Gogol. The moral development of the sickly and impressionable youth was deeply inadequate. His parents, especially his mother, spoiled him and idolized him (he was the only boy in a family of four girls). They nurtured within his naturally sickly soul the tares of self-conceit, vanity, pride, and egotistical self-centeredness. His religious upbringing, although largely external and formalistic, nevertheless sowed many good seeds in his soul. From these (thanks especially to his inborn religious and mystical inclinations) he developed deeply religious feelings and thoughts. The child Gogol was taken to services, forced to fast, and made to listen to readings of the lives of the saints. And while no one explained the spiritual meaning of what he saw and heard, it could not but settle deep into the soul of the sensitive child.
Gogol himself, severely critical of the exclusively formal religious instruction he received from his family (“I crossed myself because I saw that everyone else was doing the same”), in one of his letters to his mother, movingly recalls one religious moment that impressed his youthful soul. “Once in my childhood you told me, so well, so touchingly, about those good things that await people of a righteous life, and so vividly, so frighteningly described the eternal torments of the sinful, that my entire sensitive nature was shaken and woken up. You planted and later produced the most exalted thoughts in me.”
In one of his letters to his mother (1829), Gogol gives a remarkably sincere and genuine self-appraisal: “I often think to myself, why did God, who created a unique (or at least a very rare), pure, fiery soul that longs for all that is exalted and beautiful, why did he dress all of it in such a frightful mess of contradictions, stubbornness, obnoxious self-will and shameful self-abasement?”
Gogol’s mother apparently told the story in a state of special compunction and trepidation, typical of her usual attitude towards the Final Judgment. Gogol’s “scenic imagination” filled out his mother’s story with the colors of his brilliantly creative imagination, so that he would remember it for his entire life.
At age twelve Gogol entered the Nezhinsky Lyceum, or the so-called Gymnasium of Higher Learning, where he studied from 1821 until 1828, boarding at the school. This Lyceum education widened his intellectual horizons and taught him the “scientific method.” In school he “learned how to learn.” Among his teachers was the notable German professor Zenger, who succeeded in making the study of German authors the favorite class of most of the students. He encouraged them to explore the exalted poetry of Schiller, whom Gogol started to study “with greatest pleasure.” Even more influential was the professor of the history of philosophy and juridical sciences, N. G. Belousov, who laid deep foundations of moral and civil duty in the young soul of the future moralist.
Gogol’s numerous friends—among whom were such talented youths like Kukolnik, Grebenka, Danilevky, Vysotsky, Redkin, and the brothers Prokopovich—also had a good moral influence on his developing character. However, his schooling could not fully undo the damage done by his early upbringing. It only intensified Gogol’s inner battle with himself, making more intense his natural tendency to moral self-criticism. By the time he finished the Lyceum, this battle was only complicated by the awakening of sexual passions, which Gogol described as a “sting in his body,” and of which he was deathly afraid throughout his life, fearing that “their flame can turn me into ash in one second.” Only his highly developed moral and analytical self-criticism, a sense of responsibility before his creative talent, and an unusually subtle religious conscience, saved the passionate Gogol from this deadly flame of physical lust. Gogol, as is well known, lived his entire life without ever partaking of the pleasures of the flesh.
When Gogol was sixteen, he lost his father. His mother, on the other hand, outlived Gogol, and was during his entire life a correspondent and friend with whom he shared all his joys and sorrows. After the death of his father, the young Gogol immediately grew up in a spiritual sense. He crossed a clear spiritual threshold— the depravity surrounding him, which up to this point had given him only a reason to laugh, appeared now a terrible, inevitable aspect of life, deeply affecting his mind and conscience.
In one of his letters to his friend G. N. Vysotsky (who finished the Lyceum a year earlier), Gogol calls the people surrounding him “survivors, who have stifled the high calling of mankind with the punishment of their earthliness and their worthless complacency.” At the same time he began to feel an impulse to break out of his “wretched anonymity” and do something important “to give meaning to his existence in the world.” In a letter to P. P. Kosiarovsky in 1827, Gogol wrote that he was “aflame with an undying zeal to make his life necessary for the good of the government.” Here we see the influence of his Lyceum professor N. G. Belousov.
After much deliberation and hesitation, Gogol decided to dedicate himself to the law, because in his opinion “injustice is the greatest misfortune in the world.” It is interesting to note that in the face of many social and political injustices, Gogol never for a moment considered the revolutionary solution, but rather intended to uproot these imperfections by his personal involvement in the social and civic life of his county. In this inclination it is impossible not to see the enormous positive influence of his Lyceum education.
Gogol’s favorite subjects in the Lyceum were history and the history of literature. The rather large Lyceum library proved insufficient to satisfy the inquisitiveness of Gogol and his friends, and they decided to supplement it with their own library. Gogol, who read a great deal in his school years and afterwards, was in charge of this library. The works of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, the Northern Flowers of Delvig, the Moscow Telegraph, News of Europe, Pogodin’s Moscow News—these were some of the books in their student library.
While speaking of Gogol’s school years, it is impossible to omit the importance of student dramatic productions. In such productions, Gogol first displayed a wonderful talent for acting. According to eyewitnesses, he was especially good in comic roles. In Fonvizin’s Nedorosl he played Prostakova, and in Krylov’s A Lesson for Daughters he had the role of Vasilievna. These student productions greatly increased his love for the theater. He became fascinated with dramatic literature and tried to write his own plays. The Lyceum theater was undoubtedly the birthplace of Gogol’s dramatic talent, so brilliantly on display in his eternal comedies The Inspector General and The Wedding.
After finishing the Lyceum, Gogol moved to St Petersburg. He brought with him a manuscript of his first creative work: an idyll in verse titled Hans Kuhelgarten (finished in 1828, when Gogol was nineteen). During this period, Gogol was a young dreamer, full of the most contradictory desires and plans, with a mix of idealized and self-promoting inclinations, a desire to serve Russia selflessly yet simultaneously to become famous in the process. St Petersburg seemed to him the center, where he would be able to bring all his plans to fruition and make all his dreams come true.
But Petersburg did not justify the rosy-hued hopes of the vain and self-assured dreamer. The cold Northern capital gave him a chilly reception, and for a long time he could find neither an appropriate job nor a decent apartment. His first experience in print was also unsuccessful: the idyll in verse “Hans Kuhelgarten,” published under the pseudonym V. Alov, was lambasted by the critics, and Gogol, having taken back nearly all the printed copies from booksellers, burned them.
Suffering a heavy shock close to despair, Gogol suddenly, without any definite goal, traveled abroad to Lubek and Hamburg. After returning from his pointless and thoughtless travels (which can only be explained by his psychologically depressed state, as does Prof. V. Chizh in his work “The Sickness of Gogol”) and after yet another unsuccessful search for work, Gogol once again turned to literature, but in a new form. He wrote Evenings in the Village near Dikanka. Disillusioned both by Petersburg’s nature and its way of life, he fondly remembered his first childhood memories of beautiful Little Russia and her folk poetry. After Evenings (1831–1832), he wrote Arabesques and Mirgorod (1835).
With these works, Gogol entered the annals of Russian literature and was welcomed joyfully and sympathetically by critics and the reading public alike, as well as by fellow writers. Gogol made many new literary acquaintances and connections, as well as many new friends. One of the first was Delvig, and through him, Zhukovsky.