Editing Nikolai Gogol (section)

==Later life==
[[File:Gogol Portrait.jpg|upright|thumb|One of several portraits of Gogol by [[Fyodor Moller]] (1840)]]
After the triumph of ''Dead Souls'', Gogol's contemporaries came to regard him as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. They did not know that ''Dead Souls'' was but the first part of a planned modern-day counterpart to the ''[[Divine Comedy]]'' of [[Dante Alighieri|Dante]].{{Citation needed|date=July 2017}} The first part represented the ''[[Inferno (Dante)|Inferno]]''; the second part would depict the gradual purification and transformation of the rogue Chichikov under the influence of virtuous publicans and governors – ''[[Purgatorio|Purgatory]]''.<ref>Gogol declared that "the subject of ''Dead Souls'' has nothing to do with the description of Russian provincial life or of a few revolting landowners. It is for the time being a secret which must suddenly and to the amazement of everyone (for as yet none of my readers has guessed it) be revealed in the following volumes..."</ref>

In April 1848, Gogol returned to Russia from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and passed his last years in restless movement throughout the country. While visiting the capitals, he stayed with friends such as [[Mikhail Pogodin]] and [[Sergey Aksakov]]. During this period, he also spent much time with his old Ukrainian friends, [[Mykhaylo Maksymovych|Maksymovych]] and [[Osyp Bodiansky]].<!--The hilarious detail is out of place in this part of Gogol's biography, which was a continuous nightmare: Describing Gogol's 41st birthday celebration, [[Sergey Aksakov]] wrote that "the three Ukrainians were charming. They sang without the music and Gogol read to me some [[Duma (epic)|dumy]] of the Ukrainian [[Homer]]." --> He intensified his relationship with a [[starets]] or spiritual elder, Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom he had known for several years. Konstantinovsky seems to have strengthened in Gogol the fear of perdition (damnation) by insisting on the sinfulness of all his imaginative work.