Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

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.