The Russian writer who wrote the work of the same name as Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" is

Gogol (1809～1852)

Gogol, Nikolay

Russian writer. Born on April 1, 1809, in a landlord family in the village of Bolshoi Sorokhintce, Mirgorod County, Poltava Province, Ukraine. He died in Moscow on March 4, 1852. Gogol loved Ukrainian ballads, legends and folk dramas since he was a child. From 1821 to 1828, he studied at the Nezhen High School of Science in Poltava Province. He was influenced by the poems of the Decembrist poets and Pushkin, as well as the works of French Enlightenment scholars. He also played the leading role in satirical comedies in amateur performances. At the end of 1828, he went to St. Petersburg with the desire to serve in the judiciary. The following year, he published a long poem "Hans Gushegaton". From 1829 to 1831, he worked in the State Property and Public Real Estate Bureau and the Fiefdom Bureau in St. Petersburg, and experienced firsthand the poor life of a small clerk. During this period, he also studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts.

In the summer of 1831, Gogol met Pushkin, and they became close friends from then on, which greatly influenced his creative thinking. Later, the first and second episodes of "Dikangka's Night Talk" were published. These two collections of novels show the poetic Ukrainian national life. What dominates the work is romanticism.

Beginning in the autumn of 1834, Gogol served as associate professor of world history at St. Petersburg University, where he conducted research on Ukrainian history and world medieval history. He resigned at the end of the following year and has been focusing on creation ever since. The collection of novellas "Milgorod" and "Sketches" published in the same year indicate that Gogol's critical realism creation method has begun to take shape.

While writing novellas, Gogol began writing satirical comedies in 1833. In April 1836, "The Imperial Envoy" was performed for the first time at the Alexandra Theater in St. Petersburg. The play is based on an anecdote provided by Pushkin as the plot, bringing together all the ugliness and injustice in Russian bureaucratic society and "ridiculing it incisively and vividly." The story takes place in a remote city in Russia. When a group of officials headed by the mayor heard the news that the imperial envoy had come to inspect, they were panicked. They actually thought that a passing Petersburg official, Khlestakov, was the imperial envoy, and flattered and bribed him. Just as the mayor was betrothing his daughter to this "imperial envoy" and dreaming of promotion and wealth, news came that the real imperial envoy had arrived, and the comedy ended in silence. With outstanding realistic artistic techniques, Gogol depicts the cunning mayor, the negligent judge, the director of the charity hospital who does not care about the life and death of the patients, the ignorant school inspector, and the postmaster who steals letters - all of these images are extremely real. It reflects the essential characteristics of the Russian bureaucracy such as corruption, perversion of the law, flattery, despicability and vulgarity. Khlestakov was a young man from the provinces who was infected with the bureaucratic habits of the Petersburg aristocracy. He was frivolous, superficial, vain, boastful, and shameless. He was a typical figure in Russian society at that time. It had an important impact on the development of Russian drama.

After the performance of "The Imperial Envoy", it was attacked and slandered by the Russian bureaucratic aristocratic society headed by Nicholas I. In June 1836, Gogol left Russia for Germany and Switzerland, writing the novel "Dead Souls" that he started the previous year. Moved to Rome in March 1837. In May 1842, the first part of "Dead Souls" came out, which "shocked the whole of Russia" (Herzen said) after "The Imperial Envoy". The protagonist Chichikov in the book is a typical image of the transition from a small aristocratic landowner to an emerging bourgeoisie in Russian society in the 1830s and 1840s. He has been in the officialdom for many years and has developed a "genius" for speculation and fraud. At that time, Russia conducted population registration every 10 years, and serfs who died between the two registrations were still legally regarded as living persons. Some landowners used them as collateral to borrow money from the national bank. Chichikov is determined to go to remote provinces and purchase "dead souls" to make huge profits. As the plot of the novel develops. It shows the images of landowners one after another, such as the lazy dreamer Manilov, the ignorant and money-grubbing Korobochka, the drunkard and gambler Nozdrev who likes to lie and fight, the rude and stubborn Sobakovich and Plyushkin, the miser who loves money as much as his life, and so on. Gogol used bitter satire to describe these characters' living environment, appearance, hobbies, speech, psychology, etc. extremely well, making them immortal artistic models in Russian critical realism literature.

The novel also reflects the people's sentiment against the autocratic serfdom through the episode in which the disabled soldier Captain Gobegin rebels against the tsarist government. In the lyrical narration of the novel, Gogol compared Russia to a galloping troika to express his confidence in the bright future of his motherland.

After the first part of "Dead Souls" was published, Gogol continued to write the second part while also publishing the novella "The Jacket" and the comedy "The Marriage" and so on. "The Overcoat" describes the tragic experience of a petty official in Petersburg and issues a humanitarian appeal to protect the "little brother", which has had a strong impact on the humanitarian trend of thought in Russian literature.

Gogol temporarily returned to China when "Dead Souls" was published, and went abroad again in June 1842. He mostly lived in Rome, but often traveled between Italy, France and Germany, mainly for medical treatment. . He always hoped to transform society through humanitarianism and moral improvement. In his later years, he fell into philanthropy and religious mysticism. In the second part of "Dead Souls", although he continued to make some criticisms of the autocratic serfdom society, he created some ideal and high-moral images of bureaucrats, landowners and pious tax merchants. As a realist artist, Gogol felt that these positive images were pale and he burned the manuscript. In 1847, he published "Selected Letters to Friends", which promoted the monarchy, super-class fraternity and religious mysticism, and defended Russia's autocratic serfdom. In the same year, Belinsky wrote "A Letter to Gogol", seriously criticizing Gogol's ideological errors. In the spring of 1848, Gogol returned to his country after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and settled in Moscow.

Gogol and Pushkin laid the foundation of Russian critical realist literature in the 19th century and were the founders of the natural school in Russian literature. Gogol's contribution to the development of Russian novel art is particularly significant. Chernyshevsky called him "the father of Russian prose." Outstanding writers such as Turgenev, Goncharov, Shchedrin, and Dostoevsky were all influenced by Gogol's creations. Since the early 20th century, Gogol's works have been translated and introduced to China. Lu Xun praised Gogol's work for "invigorating the people of his country with the sadness of invisible tears"; in 1935 he translated "Dead Souls". From the 1920s to the 1930s, the Chinese left-wing troupe repeatedly performed the comedy "The Imperial Envoy" (then translated as "The Imperial Envoy"), which aroused widespread response. Gogol's creations had a great influence on the new Chinese literature after the May Fourth Movement.