Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava region of Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, into a family of Ukrainian Cossack gentry. He attended a school in Nizhyn and in 1828 moved to St Petersburg, where he worked as a minor government clerk and briefly taught history at the university. His first success was Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832), lively stories of Ukrainian village life and folklore. He became friends with the poet Alexander Pushkin, who is said to have given him the ideas for his comedy The Government Inspector (1836), about a town's officials who mistake a young traveler for a government inspector, and for his novel Dead Souls (1842), about a swindler who buys the names of dead serfs. His story The Overcoat (1842), about a poor clerk who saves for a new coat, influenced generations of Russian writers. Gogol lived for many years in Rome. In his last years he became deeply religious and depressed, and he burned manuscripts containing most of the second part of Dead Souls. He died in Moscow in 1852.

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Faith: Russian Orthodox; his grave is marked with an Orthodox cross. Source: Wikipedia