His mental state arising from all these disappointments became so serious that he went abroad with money that his mother sent him to pay a mortgage on their estate, and told his mother to take his portion of the estate in exchange for it. He went to Lübeck by sea, staid there a month, took a few baths, and returned to Petersburg without seeing any thing more of Europe. At all events, he returned, sobered, refreshed, and strengthened, in September, 1829. In April, 1830, Gogol found a very insignificant place in the ministry of Appanages. The whole outcome of this year of servitude was the knowledge of tying up papers, and a vivid memory of various types of Tchinovniks which he used to advantage in his works later on.
In 1829 he wrote his poem “Italy,” and sent it anonymously to the publisher of Suin Otetchestva (Son of the Fatherland.) Soon afterwards he published “Hans Küchel-Garten,” which had been written while he was in the gymnasium. It was signed Alof, and brought a review full of unmerciful ridicule. This review cut Gogol so keenly that he immediately withdrew the story from circulation. Buying up all the copies that he could get hold of, he hired a room in a hotel, and made a grand holocaust of them. The last tendencies of his immature, imitative romanticism went up with the incense of the fire and smoke. He soon saw that a new spirit was invading Russian literature: historical novels were becoming fashionable. So Gogol writes to all his friends and relatives in Malo-Russia to send him every possible scrap about the history of that region, about the habits, manners, customs, legends, games, songs, of the Cossacks. “It is very, very necessary for me,” he would add. He was working over his “Evenings on the Farm near Dikanka.” In February, 1830, there appeared anonymously in the Otetchestvennuie Zapiski one of Gogol’s tales, entitled “Bassavriuk; or, Ivan Kupala’s Eve.” In 1831, in “Northern Flowers,” appeared a chapter of his historical novel “Hetman,” signed with four zeros. In the first number of the “Literary Gazette” he published a sketch from his Malo-Russian story, Strashnui Kaban (The Terrible Boar). He also wrote serious articles and translations.
In March, 1831, he was made teacher of Russian in the Patriotic Institute. Here, instead of teaching Russian, he taught history, geography, and international history; and when he was called to account for his vagaries, and was asked when he was going to teach the Russian language, he smiled, and said, “What do you want it for, gentlemen? The main thing in Russian is to know the difference between yé and yat [two similarly sounding, but differently written, letters], and that I perceive you know already, as is seen by your copy-books. No one can teach you to write smoothly and gracefully. This power is granted by nature, but not by instruction.”
Indeed, Gogol himself, to his dying day, was not able to spell correctly. He cared more for the spirit than the form. The publication of “Evenings on the Farm,” especially the second series, which are marked by the purest humor, without a shade of melancholy, immediately placed him in the front rank of the authors of his day; and this was the happiest epoch of his life. Soon afterwards he began to feel a re-action. In 1833 he wrote to Pogódin: “Let my stories be doomed to oblivion till something really solid, great, artistic, shall come out of me. But I stand idle, motionless. I don’t want to do any thing trivial, and I can’t think of any thing great.” He then betook himself to historical investigation, and determined to write the history of Malo-Russia and of the Middle Ages. He laid out the work on a colossal scale. He wrote to Maksímof, “I am writing the history of the Middle Ages, and I think it will fill eight volumes, if not nine.” He never finished these histories, but his study of Malo-Russia led him to the composition of his great epos “Taras Bulba.”
There happened to be a vacancy in the university of St. Vladímer in Kief. Some one suggested Gogol, and he was invited to apply. He came, he saw, and he conquered the man in whose hands the appointment lay, by his wonderful flow of brilliant conversation; but he brought no documents. He was requested to come again, with his documents and application. Again he appeared, and again he dazzled by his wit; but when he was asked for his documents he pulled from his inside pocket his certificate of graduation from the gymnasium, which gave him the right to a tchin of the fourteenth class, and an application for the chair of Ordinary Professor. He was told that it was impossible, with such credentials, for him to be given any thing more than the chair of adjunct. Gogol was obstinate, and absolutely refused to take that position. Shortly after, he was appointed professor at Petersburg, where he gave the one lecture which was so beautiful. “We awaited the next lecture with impatience,” says Ivanitsky, who was a pupil at that time; “Gogol came in very late, and began with the phrase: ‘Asia was a volcano belching forth people.’ Then he spoke a few words about the emigration of nations; but it was so dull, lifeless, and desultory that it was tedious to listen to him, and we could not believe that it was the same Gogol who had spoken so beautifully the week before. Finally he mentioned a few books where we could read up the subject, and bowed and left. The whole lecture lasted twenty minutes. The following lectures were of the same stamp; so that we became entirely cool to him, and the classes became smaller and smaller. But once,—it was October,—while walking up and down the hall of assembly, and waiting for him, suddenly Pushkin and Zhukovsky came in. They knew, of course, through the Swiss, that Gogol had not yet come; and so they only asked us in which room he would read. We showed them the auditorium. Pushkin and Zhukovsky looked in, but did not enter. They waited in the hall of assembly. In quarter of an hour the lecturer came; and we, following the three poets, entered the auditorium and sat down. Gogol took his chair, and suddenly, without any warning, began to read the history of the Arabians. The lecture was brilliant, exactly in the manner of the first. Word for word it was published in the ‘Arabesques.’ It was evident that he knew beforehand the intention of the poets to come to his lecture, and therefore he prepared himself to treat them like poets. After the lecture Pushkin said something to Gogol, but the only word I heard was ‘fascinating’ (uvlekátelno). The rest of his lectures were very dry and tedious. Not one historical personage caused any lively and enthusiastic discussion.... He looked upon the dead nations of the past with dreary eyes, as it were; and it was doubtless true that it was tedious to him, and he saw that it was tedious to his hearers. He used to come and speak half an hour from his platform, and then leave for a whole week and sometimes for two. Then he would come again and repeat the same proceeding. Thus went the time till May.”
He gave up his thoughts of the nine-volume history of the Middle Ages; and of this year of disappointment there remained only a few articles in the “Arabesques,” and the sketches of a tragedy entitled “Alfred,” which show that he had not a trace of talent for tragedy. In 1835 he resigned, and devoted himself entirely to literature.
About this time he began to develop a great passion for the supernatural, which is best illustrated in his sketch “Vii.” It is an interesting fact that the poet Pushkin, whose influence over Gogol was considerable, suggested to him the subject of “Dead Souls.” He also told him the story which he afterwards worked up into the “Revizor.” Pushkin himself at one time intended to use both of these subjects. Gogol attended the first production of the “Revizor” on the stage, and was greatly disgusted. He trained the actors, however, giving them the meaning of every inflection, and showing what gesticulation was needed. “All are against me,” he wrote to M. S. Shchepkin in 1836, “all the decent tchinovniks are shouting that I hold nothing sacred, since I dared to speak so about people who are in the service. The police are against me, merchants are against me, literary men are against me: they berate me, yet they go to see the play. At the fourth act it is impossible to get tickets. Had it not been for the mighty protection of the emperor, my play would never have been put on the stage; and people even now are doing their best to have it suppressed. Now I see what it means to be a comic writer. The least spark of truth, and all are against you,—not one man, but all classes. I imagine what it would have been if I had taken something from Petersburg life, with which I am even more acquainted than provincial life. It is very unpleasant for a man to see people against him whom he loves with brotherly affection.”
Gogol wrote another comedy, entitled “The Leaving of the Theatre after the Production of a New Comedy.” It was founded on the various criticisms of his “Revizor,” but it was not very successful. In 1836 Gogol went abroad. He lived most of the time in Rome, though he wandered all over Europe, and occasionally returned for short visits, renewing his acquaintance with his old friends. Like Turgénief, while he was in Russia he was disgusted with the state of affairs, but when he left there his soul began to turn with intense yearning for his native land. In 1837 Gogol wrote “Dead Souls.” He said in his “Confessions of an Author,” “I began to write ‘Dead Souls’ without laying out any circumstantial plan, without deciding what the hero should be. I simply thought that the bold project, with the fulfilment of which Tchitchikof was occupied, would of itself lead me to various persons and characters, that the natural impulse in me to laugh would create many scenes which I intended to mingle with pathetic ones. But I was stopped with questions at every step, why and wherefore? What must express such and such a character? What must express such and such a phenomenon? Now I had to ask: What must be done when such questions arise? Drive them off? I tried, but the stern question confronted me. As I felt no special love for this character or that, I could not feel any love for the work to bring it out. On the contrary, I felt something like contempt: every thing seemed strained, forced; and even that which made me laugh became pitiable.”
Charles Edward Turner, English lector in the University of St. Petersburg, says in his “Studies in Russian Literature:” “In the year 1840 Gogol came to Russia for a short period, in order to superintend the publication of the first volume of the “Dead Souls”, and then returned to Italy. With the appearance of this volume we may date the close of his literary career; for though in 1846, at which period he again settled in Russia, he published his “Correspondence with my Friends,” the work can only be regarded as the production of a disordered and enfeebled intellect.... Describing his final illness and death in 1852, he says, “One of his last acts was to burn the manuscript of the concluding portion of ‘The Dead Souls,’ and to write a few sad lines in which he prays that all his works may be forgotten as the products of a pitiable vanity, composed at a time when he was still ignorant of the true interests and duties of man.” At the end of his article on Gogol he says, “What ultimately became of Tchitchikof, we do not know; for, as has been already stated, the concluding portion of his adventures was destroyed by Gogol in a fit of religious enthusiasm.” A certain Dr. Zahartchenko of Kief thought fit to publish, in 1857, a continuation of Gogol’s inimitable work. The stolid complacency which alone could encourage an obscure and talent-less novelist to undertake such a task is in itself a sufficient standard of the success he could achieve; and his book must be regarded with the same mingled feeling of astonishment and pity an Englishman would experience on having put before him a continuation of Thackeray’s “Denis Duval” or Dickens’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
In 1848 Gogol made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and returned to Russia by way of Odessa. The last years of his life were passed in Moscow in an ever-deepening state of fanatical mysticism. His death, in March, 1852, was probably due to his insane attempt to keep the strict fast. His last days were troubled by strange hallucinations. His life-long disorder was an acute derangement of the nerves caused by self-abuse.