The word “weird” could have been invented for Russia’s greatest comic writer, Nikolai Gogol (1809–52, though one almost wants to write 1852–09), who actually managed to be born on April 1 (March 20 by the Russian calendar). No one understood him, least of all himself. “What an intelligent, queer, and sick creature!” exclaimed Ivan Turgenev. When he died, one of his best friends, the writer Sergei Aksakov, wrote to his son Ivan: “I don’t know whether anyone liked Gogol exclusively as a human being. I don’t think so; it was, in fact, impossible. How can you love one whose body and spirit are recovering from self-inflicted torture?”

Even Gogol’s name was fictitious, a sort of natural pseudonym. The family name was Yanovsky, but when Catherine the Great decreed that only hereditary gentry could own serfs, Gogol’s Ukrainian grandfather invented a noble ancestor, Hohol (in Russian, Gogol) and changed his name to Gogol-Yanovsky, which was Gogol’s name until he dropped the real part. His mother, who was eighteen when Gogol was born, came to believe that her son had invented just about everything, including the steamboat and the railroad. Sickly and hypochondriacal, skeptical and pursued by the devil, paranoid and ironical, he would escape from real or imagined criticism by fleeing abroad. Gogol’s masterpiece Dead Soulsis set in the Russian provinces, but was written entirely in Europe, mostly in his beloved Rome. The city fascinated him by its beauty, its history, and its smells. “Would you believe me,”