Books about life and creativity are different. Edifying, moralizing and pathetic, constructed according to the scheme “born - studied - married/not married - died”. Or those, when reading which, after a couple of paragraphs, you begin to doubt whether it was written in your native language, or is it some kind of special dialect, accessible only to members of the secret brotherhood of literary critics and philologists. So, “In the Shadow of Gogol” is not such a book at all. And it begins, as befits an unusual book, with an epilogue. As a matter of fact, straight from the funeral. And in the last chapter, the dead are resurrected and we rush “forward - to the origins!” And we, following the author, follow the opposite path to that prescribed for biography. From the period of collapse and transformation of the writer into a “living corpse” from literature to the sparkling beginning, when creativity did not yet seem to Gogol as a burden, service or duty to the people and the fatherland. Reading Andrei Sinyavsky’s book, you think about how the writer, striving for perfection and trying to comprehend his every step, decompose his gift into its component parts, “revealing harmony,” kills both his talent and himself: “Sometimes it seems that Gogol was dying all the time.” your life, and everyone is already tired of it. He specialized in this activity, and comparisons with those buried alive escaped him so often, as if the thought of them persistently tormented and tormented him. "In the Shadow of Gogol." Read with pleasure, because the main advantage of this book is a lively, unblinded look at Gogol’s texts and his heroes.