Our Notes & References

A very attractive, fine set of Gogol’s works, rarely found so.

The first collected edition of Gogol’s works came out during his lifetime in 1842 and consisted of 4 volumes but, significantly, it did not include Dead Souls, which were still in the process of composition and came out almost simultaneously in the same year.

Gogol started planning a second collected edition of his works in 1850, but it came out posthumously, with the assistance of Gogol’s nephew Nikolai Trushkovskii, in 1855-56, in 6 volumes. The reason for the delay was censorship, which grew stricter after Gogol’s death. Herzen’s article “On the development of revolutionary ideas in Russia” (1851) mentioned the radicalising role of Gogol’s works, and the government was worried, especially after Gogol’s funeral turned into a demonstration. Only the ascension of Alexander II made this second publication possible.

Our edition, the “third edition by [Gogol’s] heirs” as stated on the title page, although it is named as ‘Complete Works’, is a concise version of the second: it contains “Selected Extracts from the Correspondence with Friends”, first published in the second edition; however, Gogol’s early works, e.g. a Romantic poem of German idyllic life «Hans Küchelgarten», are not included. What this 1873-74 edition does contain from the lesser-known Gogoliana, is the draft of Gogol’s tragedy ‘Alfred’, based on the story of Alfred the Great. This draft was first published by a champion of Ukrainian literature, Panteleimon Kulish, Trushkovskii’s competitor in bringing new texts by Gogol to light, in his biography of Gogol in 1856. The edition also contains the surviving chapters of Vol. 2 of Dead Souls, as well as Gogol’s “Confession”: both were first published by Trushkovskii as a separate book in 1855.

In 1873 Gogol’s heirs included, apart from Trushkovskii, Gogol’s sisters Anna Gogol and Olga Gogol-Golovnia, Gogol’s brother-in-law Vladimir Bykov (husband of Gogol’s sister Elisaveta who died in 1864), and the latter’s son, Gogol’s nephew, Nikolai Vladimirovich Bykov. The latter lived in Poltava, but in 1881 would take an active part in collecting scattered unpublished works by Gogol, before sending them to the publisher Vladimir Dumnov, for the possible inclusion in the collected works.

Provenance

‘D.S’ (gilt initials in Latin on the spine of each volume).

Bibliography

Paderina, Yekaterina. “K istorii sokhraneniya i pervykh publikatsiy chernovykh rukopisey Gogolya: voprosy, problemy, novyye materialy”, in Vestnik slavyanskikh kul’tur, vol. 50, no. 4, 2018, pp. 165-177.