Even before the publication of
Dead Souls, Belinsky recognized Gogol as the first Russian-language realist writer and as the head of the
natural school, to which he also assigned younger or lesser authors such as
Goncharov,
Turgenev,
Dmitry Grigorovich,
Vladimir Dahl and
Vladimir Sollogub. Gogol himself appeared skeptical about the existence of such a literary movement. Although he recognized "several young writers" who "have shown a particular desire to observe real life", he upbraided the deficient composition and style of their works. Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the
Encyclopædia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony". The period of literary
modernism saw a revival of interest in and a change of attitude towards Gogol's work. One of the pioneering works of
Russian formalism was
Eichenbaum's reappraisal of "The Overcoat". In the 1920s, a group of Russian short-story writers, known as the
Serapion Brothers, placed Gogol among their precursors and consciously sought to imitate his techniques. The leading novelists of the period – notably
Yevgeny Zamyatin and
Mikhail Bulgakov – also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. In 1926,
Vsevolod Meyerhold staged
The Government Inspector as a "comedy of the absurd situation", revealing to his fascinated spectators a corrupt world of endless self-deception. In 1934,
Andrei Bely published the most meticulous study of Gogol's literary techniques up to that date, in which he analyzed the colours prevalent in Gogol's work depending on the period, his impressionistic use of verbs, the expressive discontinuity of his syntax, the complicated rhythmical patterns of his sentences, and many other secrets of his craft. Based on this work,
Vladimir Nabokov published a summary account of Gogol's masterpieces. ''. Gogol's impact on Russian literature has endured, yet various critics have appreciated his works differently.
Belinsky, for instance, berated his horror stories as "moribund, monstrous works", while
Andrei Bely counted them among his most stylistically daring creations. Nabokov especially admired
Dead Souls,
The Government Inspector, and "
The Overcoat" as works of genius, proclaiming that "when, as in his immortal 'The Overcoat', Gogol really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced." Critics traditionally interpreted "The Overcoat" as a masterpiece of "humanitarian realism", but Nabokov and some other attentive readers argued that "holes in the language" make the story susceptible to interpretation as a supernatural tale about a ghostly double of a "small man". Of all Gogol's stories,
"The Nose" has stubbornly defied all abstruse interpretations:
D.S. Mirsky declared it "a piece of sheer play, almost sheer nonsense". In recent years, however, "The Nose" has become the subject of several postmodernist and postcolonial interpretations. The portrayals of Jewish characters in his work have led to Gogol developing a reputation for
antisemitism. Due to these portrayals, the Russian Zionist writer
Ze'ev Jabotinsky condemned Russian Jews who participated in celebrations of Gogol's centenary. Later critics have also pointed to the apparent antisemitism in his writings, as well as in those of his contemporary,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Felix Dreizin and David Guaspari, for example, in their
The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Literary Ethnocentrism, discuss "the significance of the Jewish characters and the negative image of the Ukrainian Jewish community in Gogol's novel
Taras Bulba, pointing out Gogol's attachment to anti-Jewish prejudices prevalent in Russian and Ukrainian culture." In
Léon Poliakov's
The History of Antisemitism, the author mentions that "The 'Yankel' from
Taras Bulba indeed became the archetypal Jew in Russian literature. Gogol painted him as supremely exploitative, cowardly, and repulsive, albeit capable of gratitude. But it seems perfectly natural in the story that he and his cohorts be drowned in the
Dniper by the Cossack lords. Above all, Yankel is ridiculous, and the image of the plucked chicken that Gogol used has made the rounds of great Russian authors." Despite his portrayal of Jewish characters, Gogol left a powerful impression even on Jewish writers who inherited his literary legacy. Amelia Glaser has noted the influence of Gogol's literary innovations on
Sholem Aleichem, who "chose to model much of his writing, and even his appearance, on Gogol... What Sholem Aleichem was borrowing from Gogol was a rural East European landscape that may have been dangerous, but could unite readers through the power of collective memory. He also learned from Gogol to soften this danger through laughter, and he often rewrites Gogol's Jewish characters, correcting anti-Semitic stereotypes and narrating history from a Jewish perspective."
In music and film Gogol's oeuvre has also had an impact on Russia's non-literary culture, and his stories have been
adapted numerous times into opera and film. The Russian composer
Alfred Schnittke wrote the eight-part
Gogol Suite as
incidental music to The Government Inspector performed as a
play, and
Dmitri Shostakovich set
The Nose as his first opera in 1928 – a peculiar choice of subject for what was meant to initiate the great tradition of Soviet opera. More recently, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Gogol's birth in 1809, Vienna's renowned
Theater an der Wien commissioned music and libretto for a full-length opera on the life of Gogol from Russian composer and writer
Lera Auerbach. More than 135 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent being
The Girl in the White Coat (2011). ==Legacy==