Amara Romero

When I was first assigned a short story by Nikolai Gogol in my intro class on the Golden Age of Russian literature, I expected him to feel distant. Often hailed as the “father of Russian realism”, Gogol’s work, like any writer’s, is of course a reflection of his time. I anticipated tales of 19th century clerks and government officers, all part of a monolithic cultural and historical identity that I, as a Mexican-American sophomore in college, would have little to no connection with while reading in the 21st century. Instead, I found a writer whose concerns and societal observations felt shockingly current. Gogol’s characters are constantly worried about status and identity, and many of them are situated in moral conflict surrounding the instability of who they are in the eyes of others. Considered and taught as a major figure in Russian literary tradition, Gogol’s own identity and personal history concretize the common theme in his writing of interrogating one’s place in society. As a Ukrainian-born writer whose early works drew heavily on Ukrainian folklore, culture, and landscape, Gogol and his writing resist being understood through a single national category, despite the language of composition. That complexity is what makes him continually relevant today. Across his portfolio, he repeatedly returns to unstable identities, shifting social roles, linguistic confusion, and characters left in the margins of the systems they are desperate to be recognized by. Gogol’s prevailing modernity lies both in the exceptionality of his style and storytelling, and in the way his life and fiction work in tandem to reveal how fragile identity can become when shaped by culture, language, bureaucracy, and empire. Reading Gogol today means encountering a world that is funny, strange, and unsettlingly recognizable, because it reveals how easily identity can be constructed, distorted, or claimed by others.

Gogol’s world is hilariously absurd, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make any sense. Absurdism and humor often become the mechanisms by which his characters reckon with their place in bureaucracy, a system that regulates their entire lives. His main characters are often ordinary people: Akaky Akakievich in “The Overcoat”, Poprishchin in “Diary of a Mad Man”, and Kovalyov in “The Nose” are all civil servants. These characters’ obsessions with status and recognition ultimately reveal both how deeply identity depends on social validation and how absurd the systems of validation become when titles, uniforms, and appearances are treated as measures of human worth. Akaky Akakievich’s life and death become wholly focused on a coat, Poprishchin’s desire for status, and therefore worth, quickly spirals into delusion, and like Akakievich, is what leads to his undoing. When Kovalyov’s nose escapes his face and is found to be a higher-ranking official than its owner, Kovalyov’s peers refuse to help or believe him due to the disparity in status between the two parties. Gogol’s funny and absurd world, then, presents itself as something entirely apart from the “random silliness” that one could perceive upon a first read. Instead, it exaggerates the social pressures and irrational logic already built into ordinary social life. These social pressures remain pervasive today, when a question like “What do you do?” becomes synonymous with “What is your job?” The phrasing implies that work is not just one part of life, but one of the primary ways a person becomes socially legible.

This emphasis on status also makes identity in Gogol’s writing feel more like something performed for others, rather than something internally controlled and stable. His characters often read as ridiculous because of how intensely they care about how they are perceived, and the lengths they go to in order to address or “fix” this unstable perception. Akaky should need the overcoat for warmth, but this reason becomes marginalized when he realizes that his new coat allows him to be seen as more important to his coworkers. Poprishchin invents a royal identity because his actual social position feels unbearable, and Kovalyov panics over the loss of his nose because it disrupts the image of dignity and authority he believes he is entitled to project. In each case, identity is unstable, and mediated by an audience. Gogol’s characters want to appear important, respectable, intelligent, or socially valuable, and their desperation becomes absurd because their world has taught them that appearance is inseparable from worth. This is precisely where Gogol begins to feel especially modern. Contemporary life is not organized around the same imperial ranks, but it still asks people to perform identity and success through job titles, resumes, academic achievement, class markers, and constructed public identities. With modern displays of personhood through social media, for example, public life nowadays has almost become even more performative, with carefully constructed pages meant to demonstrate our lives to the world and those around us. We too are hyperfocused on how we are perceived by others, and through our modern systems, show the same desperation as Akaky, Poprishchin, and Kovalyov to control this perception. 

This instability that Gogol gives his characters is also reflected in Gogol’s own place in literary history, where his identity has often been claimed, simplified, and divided by national categories. Even though he was born in Ukraine, with much of his early work drawing on this background, he wrote in Russian, and is claimed and centralized in the Russian literary canon. His career shows that literary identity can be just as unstable as the identities of his characters. It can be shaped by qualities such as language or birthplace, or distorted entirely under the pressures of empire. Gogol’s characters struggle to control how they are seen under and within bureaucratic and social systems, and Gogol, posthumously, is frequently positioned by literary history within categories that cannot fully contain him. Asking whether Gogol is a “Russian writer” or a “Ukrainian writer” may be less revealing than asking why literary history has so often needed him to be one thing at a time, and why one category has so often been privileged over the other.

We all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat

– Fyodor Dostoevsky (supposedly…)

When I first encountered Gogol, I expected to meet a writer whose world would feel far removed from my own. However, I found that the distance I anticipated was part of what made his work so enduringly powerful. His clerks, officials, coats, noses, and absurd bureaucracies may belong to another century, but the anxieties beneath them remain familiar. It is impossible to claim that I connected to Gogol’s work because my world is the same as his, but situated comfortably within the realm of possibility is the idea that his stories deal with familiar things like status, work, ambition, embarrassment, and identity, which absurdity makes look strange enough that we can see them more clearly. Gogol’s world is funny because it is exaggerated, strange because it is distorted, and modern because it shows how fragile identity can become when it depends on recognition. What I initially imagined as a recollected, incomprehensible world from the past strangely and unexpectedly reflected my own, because it revealed how many of the questions his characters face have remained unsolved today.