This is Nikolai Gogol.
Wikipedia as ever was my first port of call, but this is my potted biography.
Gogol (1809-1852) was a Ukrainian famed for writing Russian literature. After an unhappy childhood he left for St Petersburg to make his name as a writer. At first he failed dismally, his poetry widely derided by critics. But 1831's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka was well-received and his controversial 1836 satire The Government Inspector, only staged once personally green-lighted by Nicholas I, saw him 'hit the bigtime'. He travelled Europe for years churning out celebrated work, particularly the unfinished epic Dead Souls (which ranks alongside Crime & Punishment as one of the 'realistic' Russian novels) and masterful short stories like The Overcoat and The Diary of a Madman.
However his final years saw a pitiful decline. A relationship with deeply-religious Matvey Konstantinovsky drove him to believe his literary work to be sinful. Convinced he was going to hell, he became depressed, and began a practice of extreme self-denial that saw him fast fanatically. In 1852 a week, despairing Gogol burnt his manuscript for the the second part of Dead Souls, and died just a week later.
The existing part of Dead Souls is available at Bibliomania but as a sad geeky completist I've bought the book, along with a selection of the short stories. Reading starts now.
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