El que hoy es un impetuoso joven se quedaría horrorizado si contemplara el retrato de lo que será en su vejez. Llevaos con vosotros todos los impulsos humanos cuando salgáis de los fáciles años de la juventud para entrar en la severa virilidad que todo lo endurece, lleváoslo, no los abandonéis en el camino. ¡Después no os será posible recuperarlos! ¡La vejez que os aguarda, horrible y temible, jamás devuelve nada! Más compasiva que la vejez es la sepultura, en ella se escribirá: «Aquí han enterrado a un hombre», pero nada se puede leer en los insensibles y fríos rasgos de la inhumana vejez.

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. Early life
Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire present-day Ukraine. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place.

The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842) along with the short stories "Diary of a Madman" "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" "The Portrait" and "The Carriage" round out the tally of his best-known works. Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose" "Viy" "The Overcoat" "Nevsky Prospekt"). 19 March] 1809 – 4 March [O.