I Need to Read This Guy

I've never even heard of this guy, but I need to read him. From today's Writer's Almanac:

It is the birthday of Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809 in Sorochinsk, a town in what is now Ukraine.

Gogol wrote about his childhood in Ukraine, and some of his writings featured the devils, witches, and demons of Ukrainian folklore. These writings led to his book Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka -- a book that delighted the Russian literary world and made Gogol an overnight celebrity.

His novel Dead Souls (1842) was a satire and is considered to be Gogol's masterpiece. Gogol also wrote two famous stories, "The Nose (1836)," about a nose that disappears off the face of a collegiate assessor, is found by a barber, and then parades all around St. Petersburg, and "The Overcoat (1842)," about a man who acquires an overcoat and then dies of a broken heart when it is stolen. Gogol once wrote of his comic works, "The merriment observed in my early works corresponded to a certain spiritual need. I was subject to fits of melancholy which I could not even explain to myself and which may have originated in my poor health. To distract myself, I imagined every conceivable kind of funny story. I dreamed up droll characters and figures out of thin air and purposely placed them in the most comical circumstances."

The writer Dostoyevsky once famously remarked, "We have all come out from under Gogol's overcoat."

Russians are funny.

BTW, today is also the anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's debut album.