eflected itself even much earlier in the Memoirs of a Madman:
"Oh, little mother, save your poor son! Look how they are tormenting
him.... There's no place for him on earth! He's being driven!... Oh,
little mother, take pity on thy poor child."

All the contradictions of Gogol's character are not to be disposed of
in a brief essay. Such a strange combination of the tragic and the comic
was truly seldom seen in one man. He, for one, realised that "it is
dangerous to jest with laughter." "Everything that I laughed at became
sad." "And terrible," adds Merejkovsky. But earlier his humour was
lighter, less tinged with the tragic; in those days Pushkin never failed
to be amused by what Gogol had brought to read to him. Even Revizor
(1835), with its tragic undercurrent, was a trifle compared to Dead
Souls, so that one is not astonished to hear that not only did the Tsar,
Nicholas I, give permission to have it acted, in spite of its being a
criticism of official rottenness, but laughed uproariously, and led the
applause. Moreover, he gave Gogol a grant of money, and asked that its
source should not be revealed to the author lest "he might feel obliged
to write from the official point of view."

Gogol was born at Sorotchinetz, Little Russia, in March 1809. He left
college at nineteen and went to St. Petersburg, where he secured a
position as copying clerk in a government department. He did not keep
his position long, yet long enough to store away in his mind a number of
bureaucratic types which proved useful later. He quite suddenly started
for America with money given to him by his mother for another purpose,
but when he got as far as Lubeck he turned back. He then wanted to
become an actor, but his voice proved not strong enough. Later he wrote
a poem which was unkindly received. As the copies remained unsold, he
gathered them all up at the various shops and burned them in his room.

His next effort, Evenings at the Farm of Dikanka (1831) was more
successful. It was a series of gay and colourful pictures of Ukraine,
the land he knew and loved, and if he is occasionally a little over
romantic here and there, he also achieves some beautifully lyrical
passages. Then came another even finer series called Mirgorod, which won
the admiration of Pushkin. Next he planned a "History of Little Russia"
and a "History of the Middle Ages," this last work to be in eight or
nine volumes. The result of all this study was a beautiful and short