the night before christmas by nikolai gogol

Medieval mysteries come to mind – a kind of pan-European trace of Gogol: the mysteries were always timed to certain church holidays. But, as it often happens, there is nothing “first” in the world, there will always be some predecessors.

It’s just that Gogol described this holiday so vividly and colorfully that one would like to say that he was the first. If we talk about the actual Christmas story, Gogol was far from the first in Russia to turn to this genre. The wonderful Gogol scholar Arkady Khaimovich Goldenberg has a whole book dedicated to calendar cycles in Gogol’s prose. In general, early Gogol has many stories and novellas timed to calendar holidays. And in another story of the same cycle – May Night, or the Drowned Maiden – the action takes place in the so-called Mermaid Week. And this duality is actually very felt in Gogol’s story. John’s Eve, then its events take place on the eve of a pagan holiday celebrated by Eastern Slavs on the summer solstice (June 24 / July 7) and coinciding with the Christian holiday of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist. Let’s remember that The Night Before Christmas is a story included in the cycle of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, in which there are other stories of the calendar cycle. Until that time, the work did not have such a reputation. In fact, Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas began to be considered a Christmas story only in the 1880s.

It is believed that Gogol was such a person in our Russian literature. − It is known that Charles Dickens brought the image of Christmas to world literature. Ekaterina Evgenyevna Dmitrieva is a Doctor of Philology, Leading Researcher of the Department of Russian Classical Literature at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The night before christmas by nikolai gogol