This unusual portrait of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was made from life on April 18, 1836, at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. It was drawn by actor Pyotr Andreyevich Karatygin during the last rehearsal before the premiere of “The Government Inspector”. The inscription “Gogol in 1835”, which is featured on the drawing, was left by an unknown person.
Karatygin’s son, in his “Memoirs”, describes the
circumstances of the portrait’s creation,
Gogol was greatly alarmed and, apparently, upset… Immodest gaiety was aroused not by the comedy, but by its author. A short blond man with a huge toupée, wearing gold glasses on a long aquiline nose, with narrowed eyes and tightly compressed, almost clenched lips. A green coat with long tails and small mother-of-pearl buttons, brown trousers and a tall top hat, which Gogol would impulsively take off, plunging his fingers into his toupée, then he would turn it in his hands, — all this made the figure of the great writer look like something of a caricature. No one could know what great talent was hidden in this weak body, and what suffering he was experiencing, anticipating that neither the actors nor the majority of the audience would appreciate and understand the ‘Inspector’ during the first performance.
This portrait was first published as an illustration to an article by Karatygin’s son. The portrait came to the Pushkin House from the collection of Pavel Dashkov in 1919.
In the ‘Inspector’, I resolved to gather together all the bad in Russia I then knew into one heap, all the injustice that was practiced in those places and in those human relations in which more than anything justice is demanded of men, and to have one big laugh over it all.
It is known that the sovereign was present at the premiere of the play. He, according to contemporaries, laughed and at the end of the play declared,
We all got it in the neck — and me most of all!
From then on, until the end of his life, Gogol received financial subsidies from Nicholas, which was requested on his behalf by the poet Vasily Zhukovsky.
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