Mykola Gogol was born on March 20, 1809 in the village of Velyki Sorochyntsi (now Myrhorod district) in Poltava region. His father - Ostap Gogol was the great-grandson of Colonel Cossack's army in the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Later, the famous descendant magnified him to the legendary figure and write in the image of Taras Bulba. The childhood of the future writer has passed in the village Vasylivtsi (now Gogolevo) in his parents' estate. From 1818 to 1819 he studied at the Poltava County School, and from 1821 to 1828 - at the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences.
The linguistic and musical culture of the native land found its expression in the educational practice of Grandmother. Loves for the language, feelings of the word have been instilled in young M. Gogol since his childhood. Subsequently, he became fond of collecting Ukrainian folk songs, proverbs and sayings, and started to prepare materials for the Ukrainian-Russian dictionary.
Later, he wrote about the Ukrainian song: "If our country had no such treasure trove of songs, I would never have understood its history because I would not have realized the past ..." "My joy, my life! How I love you! What a cold chronicle in which I now dig, in front of these sonorous, live chronicles! How they help me in the history of the song!" "This is a people's story, alive, bright, colorful, true, that reveals the whole life of the people." Even in his student years, he was deeply concerned with social troubles, internally opposing various manifestations of evil, while he was cheering for the whole state and his “sweet Ukraine”; Gogol was attuned to such activities as “to be truly beneficial for humanity”.
Despite the fact that Gogol lived in Chernihiv region only 7 years, this made a huge impact on his creative work. One of his first works was called "Something about Nizhyn, or There is no law written for fools." Namely, in Nizhyn Gogol heard the legend about the revived young lady, that later formed the basis of "Vij". In the Annunciation Cathedral in Nizhyn M. Gogol paid attention to one of the paintings of the Last Judgment. In Hell, the Nizhyn moneylenders were burned. This is exactly that Gogol used in his other immortal work, "The Night before Christmas." (Christmas Eve).
