Gogol

American  

[goh-guhl, -gawl, gaw-guhl] / ˈgoʊ gəl, -gɔl, ˈgɔ gəl /

noun

1. Nikolai Vasilievich 1809–52, Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.

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Gogol British  

/ ˈɡɔɡəlj, ˈɡəʊɡɒl /

noun

1. Nikolai Vasilievich (nikaˈlaj vaˈsiljɪvitʃ). 1809–52, Russian novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. His best-known works are The Government Inspector (1836), a comedy satirizing bureaucracy, and the novel Dead Souls (1842)

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Other Word Forms

• Gogolian
  adjective

Example Sentences

Here, Melville is an American Kafka or Gogol, and in this guise, he skewers our pervasive national ethos that values ambition and striving above all.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 5, 2026

Variously compared to Irish writer Samuel Beckett and Russia's Fyodor Dostoyevsky, late American critic Susan Sontag called Krasznahorkai "the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville".

From Barron's • Oct. 9, 2025

What happened next, as recounted by Irina and her mother, is as surreal and dark as a novel by 19th Century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol.

From BBC • Sep. 13, 2024

Books: Dozens of rare editions by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol are vanishing from European libraries.

From New York Times • May 1, 2024

Ashoke shakes his head at Gogol, disapproving, unyielding.

From "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri