Editing Nikolai Gogol (section)

==Style==
[[Image:Korobochka.jpg|thumb|Among the illustrators of ''Dead Souls'' was [[Pyotr Sokolov (painter)|Pyotr Sokolov]].]]
[[D. S. Mirsky]] characterizes Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected – in the strictest sense, original<ref>This does not mean that numerous influences cannot be discerned in his work. The principle of these are: the tradition of the Ukrainian folk and [[puppet theatre]], with which the plays of Gogol's father were closely linked; the heroic poetry of the Cossack ballads (''[[Duma (epic)|dumy]]''), the ''[[Iliad]]'' in the Russian version by [[Nikolay Gnedich|Gnedich]]; the numerous and mixed traditions of comic writing from [[Molière]] to the vaudevillians of the 1820s; the [[picaresque novel]] from [[Alain-René Lesage|Lesage]] to [[Vasily Narezhny|Narezhny]]; [[Laurence Sterne|Sterne]], chiefly through the medium of German romanticism; the German romanticists themselves (especially [[Ludwig Tieck|Tieck]] and [[E.T.A. Hoffmann]]); the French tradition of [[Gothic romance]] – a long and yet incomplete list.{{citation needed|date=June 2015}}</ref> – worlds ever created by an artist of words".<ref>[[D.S. Mirsky]]. ''A History of Russian Literature''. [[Northwestern University Press]], 1999. {{ISBN|0-8101-1679-0}}. p. 155.</ref>

Gogol 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."<ref>Mirsky, p. 191</ref> According to [[Andrey Bely]], Gogol's work influenced the emergence of [[Gothic romance]], and served as a forerunner for [[Literary nonsense|absurdism]] and [[Impressionism (literature)|impressionism]].<ref>{{Cite book|language=ru|author=Andrey Bely|title=The Mastery Of Gogol|publisher=Ogiz|location=Leningrad|date=1934|url=http://gogol-lit.ru/gogol/kritika/belyj-masterstvo-gogolya/index.htm}}</ref>

The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the Russian word ''[[poshlost']]'', which means something similar to "triviality, banality, inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in a group of people or the entire society. Like [[Laurence Sterne|Sterne]] before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and of romantic illusions. He undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had before.<ref> According to some critics, Gogol's grotesque is a "means of estranging, a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality". See: Fusso, Susanne. ''Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word''. Northwestern University Press, 1994. {{ISBN|0-8101-1191-8}}. p. 55.</ref> "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror."<ref>"Russian literature." [[Encyclopædia Britannica]], 2005.
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His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while "[[The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich]]" begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum "It is dull in this world, gentlemen!"