This unique book with a truly bizarre and dramatic fate has been reaching readers for seventy-five long years. A trial print run of Gogol's biography in the "ZhZL" series, signed for publication in 1934, was banned, because the author of the biography, a brilliant writer and publicist, Alexander Voronsky, was subjected to repression and was shot. Miraculously, several copies of this publication survived. A. Voronsky's book is intended for a wide range of readers. It recreates the living appearance of Gogol as a person and a writer; his works of art are of interest to the biographer primarily to the extent that they reflect the personality of the creator. Voronsky’s Gogol has, as it were, “double vision,” allowing him, on the one hand, to see the “materiality of the world” with amazing acuteness, and on the other, to discern the spiritual growth of man. The text retains some features of the author’s spelling and the quotes given.