Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was born in Ukraine and achieved literary success in St. Petersburg. Among his most famous works are Dead Souls and The Government Inspector, as well as short stories set in the Ukrainian countryside and tales of St. Petersburg. He spent some of his most productive years in Rome. Upon his return to Russia, he struggled unsuccessfully to write a sequel to Dead Souls, burning the manuscripts not long before his death.
Susanne Fusso is Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages and professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University. Her many books include Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (1993), and she has translated Russian writers including Sergey Gandlevsky.