page_title: Nikolai Gogol
section_title: Politics
hierarchical_section_title: Nikolai Gogol / Politics
context_page_description: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin.
  According to Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Gogol became the founder of the literary direction — the main stage of the "Natural school" of the 40s and had a huge influence on Russian and world literature. Gogol's influence on his work was recognized by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Flannery O'Connor, Franz Kafka and others.
context_section_description: It stunned Gogol when critics interpreted The Government Inspector as an indictment of tsarism despite Nicholas I's patronage of the play. Gogol himself, an adherent of the Slavophile movement, believed in a divinely inspired mission for both the House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church. Similar to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gogol sharply disagreed with those Russians who preached constitutional monarchy and the disestablishment of the Orthodox Church.
  After defending autocracy, serfdom, and the Orthodox Church in his book Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends (1847), Gogol came under attack from his former patron Vissarion Belinsky. The first Russian intellectual to publicly preach the economic theories of Karl Marx, Belinsky accused Gogol of betraying his readership by defending the status quo.
caption: A more conventional statue of Gogol at the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome.
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