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In February 1852, days before his death in Moscow, Nikolai Gogol burned most of the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls, the novel he had been working on for a decade. He was 42. He had been born in 1809 in Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava region of what is now Ukraine, arrived in St Petersburg at nineteen, and within eight years had written the stories and the play that Russian literature still measures itself against: a clerk who loses his overcoat, a man whose nose walks off without him, a provincial town that mistakes a nobody for a government inspector. Most of his major work appeared between 1831 and 1842. This guide covers his 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1831–1847 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Nikolai Gogol’s best-known works are Dead Souls (1842), “The Overcoat” (1842), the comedy The Government Inspector (1836), “The Nose” (1836) and Taras Bulba (1835). Start with “The Overcoat”: it is short, and the later Russian writers who followed him start from it. The list below gives all 11 key works in order, with what each one is about.
Where to Start with Nikolai Gogol
If you want the one story everyone reads
→ The Overcoat (1842) — a poor clerk, a new coat, and a city that does not care.
If you want his great novel
→ Dead Souls (1842) — a swindler buying up dead serfs across provincial Russia.
If you want comedy for the stage
→ The Government Inspector (1836) — the 1836 play about a town of corrupt officials.
If you want folk tales and the supernatural
→ Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831) — his first success, set in the Ukrainian countryside.
11 Nikolai Gogol Books, in Order
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
Eight stories in two volumes (1831 and 1832), told by a red-haired beekeeper, Rudy Panko, and drawing heavily on Ukrainian folklore: devils, witches, a drowned maiden and village fairs. Among them are “Sorochyntsi Fair”, “St John’s Eve”, “Christmas Eve” and “A Terrible Vengeance”. It was his first success, published when he was twenty-two; “Christmas Eve” was filmed in 1913 and again in 1961.
Nevsky Prospect
The first of his St Petersburg stories, published in the collection Arabesques. Two young men follow two women along the city’s main avenue: the painter Piskaryov, whose idealised stranger turns out to be a prostitute, and the lieutenant Pirogov, whose pursuit of a German craftsman’s wife ends in a beating. The narrator’s warning is not to trust Nevsky Prospect.
Diary of a Madman
Also from Arabesques: the diary of Poprishchin, a low-ranking civil servant in St Petersburg who is in love with his director’s daughter. He starts reading letters he believes two dogs have written to each other, then decides he is the King of Spain, and the entries end in an asylum.
Mirgorod
A second collection of Ukrainian stories, in two volumes. It includes “Old-World Landowners”, about an elderly couple on a quiet estate; the horror story “Viy”, in which a seminarian must read prayers for three nights over a dead witch; the first version of Taras Bulba; and the story of how two neighbours, Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich, fall out for good over a gun. That last one ends: “It is dull in this world, gentlemen!”
Taras Bulba
A romanticised story of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the first half of the 17th century. The old Cossack Taras takes his sons Ostap and Andriy to war against Poland; Andriy falls for a Polish noblewoman, changes sides during the siege of Dubno and is killed by his father. Gogol expanded it in 1842 with three new chapters and a new ending, a version critics link to Russian nationalist themes; its portrayal of the Jewish character Yankel has been criticised as antisemitic. It was filmed in 1962 with Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis, and in Russia in 2009.
The Nose
A barber finds a nose baked into his breakfast bread. Its owner, the collegiate assessor Kovalyov, wakes to find it gone, then sees it riding through St Petersburg in a carriage, dressed in the uniform of a higher rank, and refusing to know him. Pushkin published it in his journal The Contemporary in 1836. Shostakovich turned it into an opera, first performed in 1930.
The Government Inspector
The officials of a corrupt provincial town hear that an inspector is coming incognito, and mistake Khlestakov, a penniless young clerk at the inn, for him. He takes their “loans”, flirts with the Mayor’s wife and gets engaged to his daughter before leaving town. Tsar Nicholas I intervened to have it staged, and it premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1836. Gogol based it on an anecdote from Pushkin; Danny Kaye starred in a loose Hollywood version, The Inspector General (1949).
Dead Souls
Landowners in tsarist Russia paid tax on their serfs, or “souls”, as counted in the census, even after the serfs had died. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov travels from estate to estate buying the dead ones, which still exist on paper, to use in a loan scheme; the landowners he meets, from the sentimental Manilov to the miser Plyushkin, are the book’s gallery. Gogol called it a “poem”; the censor made him publish it as The Adventures of Chichikov. Pushkin suggested the plot. It was meant as the first of three parts.
The Overcoat
Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a poor and mocked copying clerk in a St Petersburg government office, saves for months to replace his threadbare coat. On the night he first wears the new one, he is robbed of it on his way home. The police are indifferent, a “Person of Consequence” shouts him out of his office, and he falls ill and dies; afterwards a ghost is said to be pulling coats off people in the street.
Marriage
His second full-length comedy. Podkolyosin, a civil servant who has decided to marry, is pushed by a matchmaker and by his friend Kochkaryov towards a merchant’s daughter who already has several other suitors. Just as the wedding is arranged, he loses his nerve and jumps out of the window.
Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends
A book of essays in the form of letters, in which Gogol defended autocracy, serfdom and the Orthodox Church and asked readers to treat his earlier work in a moral light. It turned many admirers against him. The critic Vissarion Belinsky answered with his Letter to Gogol (1847), accusing him of betraying his readers; the letter was banned but circulated in copies, and Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 in a circle where it was read aloud.
In What Order to Read Nikolai Gogol
None of Gogol’s books continue from one another, so you can read in any order. Publication order does show his route, though: from the Ukrainian village tales of Dikanka and Mirgorod to the St Petersburg stories, where the supernatural moves into offices and streets, and then to the long satire of Dead Souls.
The short stories are the easiest way in, and most English editions collect “The Overcoat”, “The Nose”, “Diary of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospect” together. Read Dead Souls once you know his voice, and leave Selected Passages for last: it matters mainly for what it tells you about the man and the reaction it caused.
A reading path
1. “The Overcoat” (1842)
2. “The Nose” (1836)
3. The Government Inspector (1836)
4. Dead Souls (1842)
5. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831)
Everything Else Nikolai Gogol Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 6 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Books and collections
3
3 books · 1829–1855
- 1829Hanz Küchelgartena Romantic poem published at his own expense as “V. Alov”; he bought up and destroyed the copies
- 1835Arabesquestwo volumes of essays and stories, including “Nevsky Prospect”, “Diary of a Madman” and “The Portrait”
- 1855Dead Souls, Part Twothe surviving draft chapters, published after his death
Other stories and plays
3
3 books · 1835–1842
- 1835The Portraita story about a painter and a cursed portrait, revised in 1842
- 1836The Carriagea short story published in Pushkin’s The Contemporary
- 1842The Gamblersa one-act comedy about card sharps cheating a cheat
The years · 1809–1852
Quick facts about Nikolai Gogol
- Known for
- Gogol is known as the comic and grotesque founder of the Russian prose tradition, the writer of “The Overcoat” and Dead Souls whose clerks, swindlers and officials later Russian writers kept returning to.
- 1809
- Born in Sorochyntsi, Poltava region
- 1831
- Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
- 1836
- The Government Inspector premieres; he leaves Russia
- 1842
- Dead Souls
- 1852
- Burns Dead Souls Part Two; dies in Moscow
- Born
- 1 April 1809, Sorochyntsi, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
- Education
- The school of higher art in Nizhyn, 1820–1828
- St Petersburg
- Arrived in 1828; briefly taught medieval history at the university, 1834–1835
- Abroad
- 1836–1848, mostly in Italy, settling in Rome
- Pen name
- “Rudy Panko”, the beekeeper narrator of Dikanka
- Died
- 4 March 1852, Moscow, aged 42
- Grave
- Danilov Monastery; moved to Novodevichy Cemetery in 1931
The red mark is 1842: Dead Souls, his only novel, published in Moscow the same year as “The Overcoat”.
How Nikolai Gogol Writes: Comedy at the Edge of Nightmare
Gogol’s stories start from one absurd or tiny fact and treat it with complete seriousness: a nose goes missing, a coat is stolen, a man buys dead serfs. The characters are ordinary and often petty, mostly clerks, landowners and officials, and the tone is comic, but the endings are frequently bleak. “The Overcoat” ends with a death and a ghost; the tale of the two Ivans ends with “It is dull in this world, gentlemen!”
Much of the effect is in the narrator’s voice, which digresses, chatters, gets details wrong and wanders off into side characters who never return. Gogol borrowed this from oral storytelling in Dikanka, where it belongs to the beekeeper Rudy Panko, and kept it for St Petersburg. Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a short book on him, Nikolai Gogol (1944), argued that these digressions, rather than the plots, are the real substance of his work.
Read in Russia in the 1840s, the same books were taken as realist exposure of a corrupt bureaucracy and serfdom, which is how Belinsky praised them before the break over Selected Passages. Later readers see something stranger: a world where the official rank on a coat matters more than the person inside it. That second reading runs on from Gogol to Dostoevsky’s early clerks and to Kafka.
Frequently asked questions about Nikolai Gogol’s books
How many books has Nikolai Gogol written?
Gogol’s work is small: a handful of books published between 1829 and 1847, plus stories and plays that appeared in journals and in his 1842 collected works. This page covers 11 key works, from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831) to Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847); the rest are listed under “Everything Else”.
What are Nikolai Gogol’s books in order?
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), “Nevsky Prospect” (1835), “Diary of a Madman” (1835), Mirgorod (1835), Taras Bulba (1835), “The Nose” (1836), The Government Inspector (1836), Dead Souls (1842), “The Overcoat” (1842), Marriage (1842) and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847).
Where should I start with Nikolai Gogol?
With “The Overcoat” (1842), a short story you can read in an hour. If you like it, go on to “The Nose” and The Government Inspector, then Dead Souls.
What is Nikolai Gogol’s most famous book?
Dead Souls (1842), his only novel, about a swindler who buys up the paper ownership of dead serfs. Among his shorter works, “The Overcoat” and The Government Inspector are the most famous.
What is Dead Souls about?
Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov travels around provincial Russia buying “dead souls”: serfs who have died but still count on the census lists, and on which their owners still pay tax. He plans to use them in a loan scheme. Gogol meant it as the first of three parts but never finished the rest.
Why did Gogol burn the second part of Dead Souls?
On the night of 24 February 1852 he burned most of the manuscript of Part Two. In his last years he had grown intensely religious, and his spiritual adviser, the priest Matvey Konstantinovsky, encouraged his fear that his imaginative work was sinful. Gogol afterwards called the burning a mistake, which he blamed on the Devil. Some draft chapters survived and were published after his death.
Was Gogol Russian or Ukrainian?
Both labels are used, and scholars disagree. He was born in the Poltava region of present-day Ukraine, drew his early stories from Ukrainian folklore, and wrote in Russian. Critics such as Belinsky claimed him as a Russian writer as early as the 1830s; scholars such as Edyta Bojanowska and Oleh Ilnytzkyj argue he remained a self-consciously Ukrainian writer working within an imperial culture.
Did Dostoevsky say “We all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat”?
The line is often credited to Dostoevsky, but it is usually traced to the French critic Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, writing about Russian literature in the 1880s. Whoever said it first, it sums up how much later Russian fiction grew out of Gogol’s story of a poor clerk.
Which Gogol books have been adapted?
Taras Bulba was filmed in 1962 with Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis and in Russia in 2009. Shostakovich’s opera The Nose premiered in 1930. The Government Inspector has been filmed many times, including as the Danny Kaye musical The Inspector General (1949), and Mikhail Bulgakov adapted Dead Souls for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1932.
Was Gogol buried alive?
There is no evidence that he was. He died in Moscow on 4 March 1852, aged 42. When his remains were moved from the Danilov Monastery to Novodevichy Cemetery in 1931, reports that the body lay face down fed a lasting rumour that he had been buried alive.
Footnotes
- Nikolai Gogol — Wikipedia
- Nikolay Gogol — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Dead Souls — Wikipedia
- The Government Inspector — Wikipedia
- Taras Bulba — Wikipedia
- Letter to Gogol — NCAC Censorship Wiki
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“What are you laughing about? You are laughing about yourselves!”
— Nikolai Gogol, The Government Inspector (1836), the Mayor in the final act
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