Authors Like Nikolai Gogol

Alexander Pushkin

Russian · Eugene Onegin (1833), “The Queen of Spades” (1834), The Captain’s Daughter (1836)

Pushkin (1799–1837) was born in Moscow and is usually called the founder of modern Russian literature. Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, was published in full in 1833; “The Queen of Spades” follows an officer obsessed with an old countess’s secret for winning at cards. He was fatally wounded in a duel in St Petersburg in 1837. Gogol knew him well, and Pushkin suggested the ideas behind both The Government Inspector and Dead Souls.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

German · The Devil’s Elixirs (1815–1816), “The Sandman” (1816), “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (1816)

Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a Prussian lawyer and judge who was also a composer and music critic. In “The Sandman” a student becomes convinced that a sinister lawyer is the childhood monster who steals eyes, and falls in love with a mechanical doll; Freud built his 1919 essay on the uncanny around it. His Nutcracker tale is the source of Tchaikovsky’s ballet.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · Poor Folk (1846), Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866)

Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was born in Moscow. In his first novel, Poor Folk, a poor St Petersburg copying clerk, Makar Devushkin, reads Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and is hurt by its portrait of a man like himself. In 1849 he was sentenced to death for membership of a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to Siberia. His journalism of the 1870s includes antisemitic passages.

Every book by Fyodor Dostoevsky →

Franz Kafka

Czech, writing in German · The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925)

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, worked for an insurance institute and published little before he died of tuberculosis in 1924. In The Metamorphosis a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect; The Trial, published after his death by his friend Max Brod, follows a man arrested for a crime nobody will name.

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Mikhail Bulgakov

Russian, born in Kyiv · Heart of a Dog (written 1925), The Master and Margarita (written 1928–1940, published 1966–1967)

Bulgakov was born in Kyiv in 1891, trained as a doctor and became a playwright in Moscow, where his work was repeatedly banned. The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil and his retinue, including a giant talking cat, arrive in Stalin’s Moscow and expose its writers and officials, appeared in censored form more than twenty-five years after his death in 1940. His grave at Novodevichy Cemetery is topped with the stone that once marked Gogol’s. Since 2022 his hostility to Ukrainian independence has made him a contested figure in Kyiv.

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Vladimir Nabokov

Russian-American · Nikolai Gogol (1944), Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962)

Nabokov (1899–1977) was born in St Petersburg, left Russia after the revolution, and wrote first in Russian and then, from the late 1930s, in English. Nikolai Gogol, his short and opinionated study, reads Gogol as a poet of the strange detail and the irrational rather than a social satirist; he called The Government Inspector the greatest play written in Russian.

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Flann O'Brien

Irish · At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), The Third Policeman (1967)

Flann O’Brien was one of the pen names of Brian O’Nolan (1911–1966), who worked for many years in the Irish civil service and wrote a satirical column for The Irish Times as Myles na gCopaleen. At Swim-Two-Birds is a novel about a student writing a novel whose characters rebel against their author; The Third Policeman, written around 1940 and published after his death, follows a murderer through a countryside run by policemen obsessed with bicycles.

Daniil Kharms

Russian · Elizaveta Bam (1927), Incidences (1933–1939), The Old Woman (1939)

Kharms (1905–1942), born Daniil Yuvachev in St Petersburg, founded the avant-garde group OBERIU in 1928 and earned his living writing for children. His tiny, violent, very funny prose pieces include one in which Pushkin and Gogol keep tripping over each other. Arrested in 1941, he died of starvation in a prison psychiatric ward during the siege of Leningrad. Today I Wrote Nothing (2007), translated by Matvei Yankelevich, collects his work in English.

George Saunders

American · Tenth of December (2013), Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021)

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, grew up near Chicago and has taught creative writing at Syracuse University for many years. Lincoln in the Bardo, set among ghosts in the graveyard where Abraham Lincoln’s young son lies, won the Booker Prize in 2017. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain grew out of his class on Russian short stories and includes a close reading of Gogol’s “The Nose”.

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Andrey Kurkov

Ukrainian · Death and the Penguin (1996), Grey Bees (2018), The Silver Bone (2024 in English)

Kurkov was born in Leningrad in 1961 and moved to Kyiv at the age of two; he writes in Russian and Ukrainian, and was elected president of PEN Ukraine in 2018. In Death and the Penguin a struggling Kyiv writer who lives with a penguin from the zoo takes a job writing obituaries of people who are still alive. Grey Bees, about a beekeeper in the grey zone of the Donbas, won the Prix Médicis étranger in French translation in 2022.