About the book: 1995 / Gogol was not only a great artist: he was also a moral teacher, a Christian ascetic, and a mystic. We are trying to tell the story of this Gogol , using as materials correspondence, religious and moral writings of Gogol and testimonies of contemporaries; aesthetic assessment of the artistic works of the author of “Dead Souls” is not part of our task: we bring them into consideration only as psychological and ideological documents.