Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) grant No. 20-012-00139a.
Abstract
This essay examines an episode of Nikolay Gogol’s biography described in four memoir texts — by I.I. Panayev, A.YA. Panaeva, P.V. Annenkov, and N.A. Nekrasov. All the four texts tell the story of Gogol meeting “young writers” in St. Petersburg in the late 1840s. As it often happens in memoirs, the authors describe the same event differently. The author of this article thoroughly examines the sources of this particular episode and comes to the following conclusion. The memoirs of Gogol`s meeting with the “young writers” in the late 1840s tells us a lot about how Gogol’s personality was perceived by his younger and less famous contemporaries. It also sheds light on the typology and evolution of memoir genres in the second half of the 19th century. Yet the reliability of biographical data about Gogol is insufficient. The total amount of information indicates the probability that the meeting took place but gives a reason to doubt almost all the details of this event. The participants named by the authors of the memoirs (Goncharov, Grigorovich, Druzhinin, etc.) kept silent about this important meeting while the data available to modern Gogol scholars points at the hypothetical character of the mentioned episode.
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