Novelist, dramatist, and satirist Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Russian writer of Ukrainian ancestry whose works deeply influenced later Russian literature through powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. Gogol’s best-known short stories — "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" — display strains of Surrealism and the grotesque, while his greatest novel, Dead Souls, is one of the founding books of Russian realism.