Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:  Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (Мико́ла Васи́льович Го́голь; 1 April 1809 – 4 March 1852) was a Russian    novelist, short story writer and playwright of Ukrainian origin. Gogol was one of the first to use the techniques of surrealism and the grotesque in his works ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt"). According to Viktor Shklovsky, Gogol's strange style of writing resembles the "ostranenie" technique. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore. His later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls). The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842), along with the short stories "Diary of a Madman", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", "The Portrait" and "The Carriage", are also among his best-known works. Many writers and critics have recognized Gogol's huge influence on Russian and world literature. Gogol's influence was acknowledged by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Flannery O'Connor, Franz Kafka and others.
Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:  Government Inspector as a "comedy of the absurd situation", revealing to his fascinated spectators a corrupt world of endless self-deception. In 1934 Andrei Bely published the most meticulous study of Gogol's literary techniques up to that date, in which he analyzed the colours prevalent in Gogol's work depending on the period, his impressionistic use of verbs, the expressive discontinuity of his syntax, the complicated rhythmical patterns of his sentences, and many other secrets of his craft. Based on this work, Vladimir Nabokov published a summary account of Gogol's masterpieces. Gogol's impact on Russian literature has endured, yet various critics have appreciated his works 
Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:  strong impression on Gogol. His principal work during the years following Pushkin's death was the satirical epic Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks – recast Taras Bulba (1842) and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage (Zhenitba), wrote the fragment Rome and his most famous short story, "The Overcoat". In 1841, the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under a new title imposed by the censorship, The Adventures of Chichikov. The book established his reputation as one of the greatest prose writers in the language.
Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:   In 1831, the first volume of Gogol's Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka) was published, and met with immediate success. A second volume was published in 1832, followed by two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod in 1835, and two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. At this time, Russian editors and critics such as Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin saw Gogol as a Ukrainian, rather than Russian, writer, and used his works to illustrate the differences between Russian and Ukrainian national characters. The themes and style of these early prose works by Gogol, as well as his later drama, were similar to the 
Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:  as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopædia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony". The period of literary modernism saw a revival of interest in and a change of attitude towards Gogol's work. One of the pioneering works of Russian formalism was Eichenbaum's reappraisal of "The Overcoat". In the 1920s a group of Russian short-story writers, known as the Serapion Brothers, placed Gogol among their precursors and consciously sought to imitate his techniques. The leading novelists of the period – notably Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov – also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. In 1926 Vsevolod Meyerhold staged 
Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:  Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. His mother was descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, who died when Gogol was 15 years old, was a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks (see Lyzohub family) and belonged to the 'petty gentry'. He wrote poetry in Ukrainian and Russian, and was an amateur Ukrainian-language playwright. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the family spoke Ukrainian as well as Russian. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncle's home theater. In 1820, Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn (now Nizhyn Gogol State University) and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not 
Title: Nikolai Gogol
Content:  D. S. Mirsky characterizes Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected – in the strictest sense, original – worlds ever created by an artist of words". A characteristic of Gogol's writing is his 'impressionist' vision of reality and people. He saw the outer world strangely metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, "A Terrible Vengeance" and "A Bewitched Place". His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things: "His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist – which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability – attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality – that seems to beggar the visible world itself." According 
Title: Nikolai Gogol bibliography
Content:  Gogol's short stories composed between 1830 and 1835 are set in Ukraine, and are sometimes referenced collectively as his Ukrainian tales. His short stories composed between 1835 and 1842 are set in Petersburg, and are sometimes referenced collectively as his St Petersburg tales.
Title: The Government Inspector
Content:  Early in his career, Gogol was best known for his short stories, which gained him the admiration of the Russian literary circle, including Alexander Pushkin. After establishing a reputation, Gogol began working on several plays. His first attempt to write a satirical play about imperial bureaucracy in 1832 was abandoned out of fear of censorship. In 1835, he sought inspiration for a new satirical play from Pushkin. "Do me a favour; send me some subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy... Give me a subject and I'll knock off a comedy in five acts – 
Title: The Carriage
Content:  Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) is a well-known Russian novelist and short-story writer. He was born and raised in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg in 1828. His short story "The Carriage" was published in the first volume of Pushkin's literary journal The Contemporary in 1836. It is speculated that Gogol wrote the short story to echo Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, as he mimics Pushkin's use of anecdotes, irony, and structure in media res. It is classified as one of his Petersburg tales (along with "Nevsky Prospekt", "The Diary of a Madman", "The Nose", "The Overcoat", and "The Portrait"). The Petersburg Tales create a profile of St. Petersburg as the only modern city in imperial Russia. The stories focus on the great administrative city's indifference to the plight of individuals, describing the personal narratives of people rebelling against its climate.

Question: what kind of writing is nikolai gogol famous for?
Answer: Dramatist.