Nikolai Gogol

Gogol arrived in St Petersburg from provincial Ukraine as an awkward young clerk with theatrical ambitions, failed as a history lecturer, and found his true instrument in a hybrid of folk tale and bureaucratic nightmare. Pushkin, his friend and champion, is said to have handed him the premise for Dead Souls; the resulting picaresque of a con man buying up deceased serfs on paper made him famous overnight.

The Overcoat, his other essential text, distilled the same vision to a single doomed clerk and his stolen coat, a story so foundational that Russian writers have spent generations answering it. Gogol spent his final years in religious crisis, touring monasteries under a fanatical confessor's influence; before he died in 1852 he burned the nearly finished second volume of Dead Souls in a fit of penitence.