Today, 1 April, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Gogol, author of the most brilliant and surreal comic literature in the Russian language.

His subjects were fraud, greed, hubris.  Many of his stories, especially those of St. Petersburg, depict descents into madness. In The Nose, the civil servant hero wakes up to find that his nose is missing. He follows it around the city, at one point encountering it in the Kazan Cathedral. However, his nose has already achieved a higher rank and the hero of the tale is now unsure how to approach it. Eventually, he starts "to cough in the Nose's vicinity, but the Nose did not change its position for a single moment."

UNESCO has declared 2009 the Year of Gogol.

Click here for Nikolai Gogol