While reading this biography, one is surprised by the patience of Nicolas Gogol’s friends. They readily accept his bad temper, shamelessness, and ingratitude without complaint. This Russian poet and writer of the first half of the 19th century would today be considered a hypochondriac, always ill, always complaining, never satisfied.
Moreover, Gogol is a spendthrift, constantly asking his friends and even Emperor Nicholas I for financial support. Never satisfied, in fact, he does not even know himself what he wants. Once in Italy, he longs to return to Russia; he detests Germany and Austria, yet he goes there and returns! A traveler who cannot stay put, he enthuses about a place only to later curse it.
Gogol is also a freeloader, living off his hosts while simultaneously criticizing them. “Never satisfied” could have been the title or subtitle of this biography. Gogol writes, tears up, shreds, and rewrites his manuscripts. Never satisfied, always grumbling, yet he somehow comes across as a likable character.
Henry Troyat takes us into the intimacy of this writer, where we read his extensive correspondence, his reflections on his often sharp and never charitable contemporaries. Yet, he has the tormented soul of a mystic, an enigmatic Russian soul, elusive and incomprehensible to a Cartesian mind, which the author successfully captures in this biography of Gogol, born in 1809 and died in 1852.
