Born in 1809 in the Russian Empire, the writer first made his name with his tales about rural Ukrainian life. However, it was his later work that he is best remembered for, including the classic novel Dead Souls and the play The Government Inspector, both set in rural Russia, and the short stories The Nose and The Overcoat, set in St. Petersburg.
Dead Souls (1842) was, in the words of the writer, an "epic poem in prose," and was intended as the first part of a trilogy. The book's title comes from the practice of counting the "souls" of serfs in property registers, and the book contains gross caricatures of the worst elements of Russian life at the time.
A number of political and cultural figures from both Russia and Ukraine gathered at Gogol's grave in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery on Wednesday to pay tribute to the writer.
"We all came from Gogol," Russian Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev said at the ceremony, echoing Dostoyevsky's famous assertion that Russian literature "came out from under Gogol's Overcoat."
"His genius described the Russian universe of that period - from the high social life of St. Petersburg to beloved Ukraine," he added.
Many of the writer's short stories, especially his St. Petersburg tales, depict descents into madness and unreality. In The Nose, the civil servant hero wakes up one morning to find that his nose is missing. He then follows it around the city, at one point encountering it in Kazan Cathedral. However, his protuberance has already achieved a higher rank and the hero of the tale is unsure of how to approach it. Eventually, he starts "to cough in the Nose's vicinity, but the Nose did not change its position for a single moment."
Diary of a Madman and The Overcoat also tell the stories of the mental sufferings of low-ranking civil servants, with the hero of the former tormented by schizophrenia and the latter describing the tribulations of Akakii Akakievich, a terminally shy St. Petersburg clerk who saves up to buy a new coat only to have it stolen by muggers.
Celebrated Russian animator Yury Norshtein recently told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper that he considered The Overcoat to be comparable to parts of the Bible, in particular the Book of Job.
"It's just that The Overcoat was lost thousands of years ago, and now it's been found," he said.
Debate has intensified of late as to whether Gogol should be considered a Russian or a Ukrainian writer. Russians claim his as their own by virtue of the fact that he wrote in Russian, lived in St Petersburg and died in Moscow.
Ukrainians say that his birthplace of Poltava, located in present-day Ukraine, means they have the right to count him their greatest writer.
A museum devoted to Gogol opened in Moscow on Friday in the building where the writer spent the last four years of his life and where he is believed to have burnt the second part of Dead Souls during a partial fast and a fit of depression. He is reported to have said later that this was a mistake and a trick played on him by the devil. He then took to his bed and stopped eating completely. He died shortly afterwards on March 4, 1852 at the age of 42.
Film versions of Gogol's Viy and Taras Bulba stories are due for release in Russia in 2009. Viy, which tells the tale of a witch and the young man who meets her, was earlier adapted for the big screen in the Soviet period and is considered the only horror film to have been released in the world's first socialist state.
UNESCO has declared 2009 the Year of Gogol.
