Nikolai Gogol wrote Dead Souls — the novel that Nabokov called "the greatest Russian prose masterpiece" — and then burned the manuscript of Part Two in a fit of religious mania ten days before starving himself to death. The father of Russian literature destroyed his own greatest work because a fanatical priest convinced him it was sinful, and Russia lost a masterpiece to a bonfire and a breakdown.
This episode traces Gogol from his Ukrainian childhood through the stories and plays that invented Russian literary comedy, the tortured composition of Dead Souls, and the religious crisis that drove him to destroy his work and himself.
Gogol's Ukrainian childhood and the move to St. Petersburg that launched his literary career
The Inspector General, "The Overcoat," and the satirical works that founded Russian prose fiction
Dead Souls Part One and the decade of agonized work on Part Two
The burning of the manuscript, the religious mania, the self-starvation, and his death at forty-two
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