In 1831, the first publication of N. V. Gogol’s article “Some Thoughts on Teaching Geography to Children” took place. The topic raised in it meant a lot to the author of “Dead Souls” - it is known that he planned to write an entire book about the geography of Russia. Detailed geographical descriptions, in the spirit of scientific works of the first half of the 19th century, are also found in Gogol’s works of art. It was during the writer’s life that geography as a science was born, and it was fueled by the ideas of German romanticism, and its methodology was based on models of artistic landscape. Drawing on the concept of geographical imagination developed in intellectual history over the past few decades, I. Vidugirite first considers the intertextual intersections of Gogol's work with the geographical discourse of his time. The author not only traces the connection between the writer’s spatial images and specific geographical and cartographic sources, but also shows that Gogol was one of the first in Russia to formulate the principles that formed the basis of modern geography.