On the Pragmatics of the Genre and the Source of the “Literary” Memories about Late Gogol

This essay examines an episode of Nikolay Gogol’s biography described in fourmemoir texts — by I.I. Panayev, A.YA. Panaeva, P.V. Annenkov, and N.A. Nekrasov.All the four texts tell the story of Gogol meeting “young writers” in St. Petersburg inthe late 1840s. As it often happens in memoirs, the authors describe the same eventdifferently. The author of this article thoroughly examines the sources of this particularepisode and comes to the following conclusion. The memoirs of Gogol`s meeting withthe “young writers” in the late 1840s tells us a lot about how Gogol’s personality wasperceived by his younger and less famous contemporaries. It also sheds light on thetypology and evolution of memoir genres in the second half of the 19th century. Yetthe reliability of biographical data about Gogol is insufficient. The total amount ofinformation indicates the probability that the meeting took place but gives a reason todoubt almost all the details of this event. The participants named by the authors of thememoirs (Goncharov, Grigorovich, Druzhinin, etc.) kept silent about this importantmeeting while the data available to modern Gogol scholars points at the hypotheticalcharacter of the mentioned episode.