It so happened that N.V. Gogol, nee Gogol-Yanovsky, was born on April 1, 1809 in the town of Veliky Sorochintsy of the Poltava province in the house of 79-year-old philanthropist Mikhail Yakovlevich Trakhimovsky, who had to give birth to Maria Ivanovna Gogol-Yanovskaya, nee Kosyarovskaya.
Her husband, college assessor Vasily Opanasovich Gogol-Yanovsky brought her here from his family estate in Vasilyevka to an old doctor’s companion, worrying about the life of his wife. Gogol’s mother, Maria Ivanovna (1791-1868), nee Kosyarovskaya, was married 1805 at the age of fourteen. The groom was twice her age. When the first two sons died after childbirth, Vasily and Maria, again pregnant, decided to come to the estate where Dr. M.Y. Trokhimovsky. In the estate of Trokhimovsky a boy was born, who was named Nikolai. In addition to Nikolai, the family had eleven more children, of whom only the eldest son Nikolai and three (?) Sisters remained.
Not far from Trakhimovsky’s house, there is still a wonderful Transfiguration Church built by the last elected hetman of the Left-Bank Ukraine Danil Apostol. In this church the rite of baptism of the future great writer took place. At the same time, by the will of the parents, the newborn Nikolai, the son of Vasiliev was recorded in the metric book under the same name – Yanovsky. Surprisingly, it is a fact: after 23 years, the writer officially abandoned this surname, leaving the right to use another, not recorded in the metric – Gogol.
That is how Nikolai Vasilievich signed such masterpieces as The Inspector General, Dead Souls … For more than a century, the mystery of choosing the name of “one of the most mysterious writers” remained unsolved. So, let us try to do this together with you, turning the yellowed pages of the Ukrainian Cossacks for the umpteenth time.
Little Russian coat of arms and genealogies, reconstructing the genealogical tree of the Gogol family, which is intertwined with the famous Cossack families of Ukraine from the time of the Hetman.
It seems that Nikolai Vasilyevich thoroughly knew everything that we are trying to find out about today.
The word “gogol” in Old Ukrainian meant the name of an important bird – a drake. It became the Cossack nickname of the founder of the Gogol family Ostap Gogol, Colonel Mogilev-Podolsky, a companion of the hetman of Right-Bank Ukraine Petro Doroshenko.
The chronicle knows that when, in 1674, in the struggle for power in Ukraine, the left-bank hetman Ivan Samoilovich defeated the army of Petro Doroshenko, the Mogilev colonel Ostap Gogol, along with his son Prokop and the Cossacks loyal to them, did not succumb to Samoilovich’s persuasion, transferred the unrequited Mogilev fortress of Rzecz Pospolita , and went into service with the warlike Polish king Jan III Sobesski.
As a reward, Ostap and his son received a letter of merit from the king on lands in Poland and moved there with the whole family. In the same year, as indicated in the pedigree, Ostap Gogol became a punished hetman and received a mace from the king.
Interestingly, in 1792, when filling out documents for the nobility, Gogol’s grandfather, second-major Afanasy Demyanovich Gogol-Yanovsky deliberately withheld the name of Ostap and called his great-grandfather not Colonel Andrei Gogol, who was unknown to anyone. (In connection with this fact, the names of the sons of the legendary Taras Bulba come to mind). In his testimonies Afanasy Demyanovich reported that this Andrei in 1674 received a letter of merit from the Polish king Jan Casimir, which could not be, because 6 years before that king abdicated. As revealed during the investigation, a copy of the royal letter presented by Gogol’s grandfather to the Kiev deputy assembly was false. In The Missing Letter, Gogol ridiculed the tricks of his grandfather, who nevertheless managed to confuse not only the commission of the district noble deputies, but also all future writers of the writer.
But he could not deceive his astute grandson. So why did Gogol’s grandfather need this masquerade? The fact is that during the reign of Empress Catherine II, the historical emphasis in the assessment of the Zaporizhzhya army changed. According to St. Petersburg, the Cossacks became a brake on the new economic development of Little Russia, a source of rebellion. And the government could not allow this.
In 1769, the last hetman of Left-Bank Ukraine Kirill Razumovsky resigned. Little Russia was divided into provinces. In 1775, the New Sich was destroyed. Former foremen received new ranks, altered into the Russian nobility and strengthened local authority. Russified descendants of the Cossacks were no longer proud of the exploits of their ancestors of the Hetman period.
So Gogol’s grandfather, orientated himself in the new political situation, insisted on his “Polish-chivalrous” origin. And remembering that “Gogol” is still a bird, he chose the corresponding coat of arms with a hawk from the Polish coat of arms for his future noble dynasty. His helmet was crowned by a noble crown, on which a bird sat, holding in its paw a silver horseshoe of happiness, a symbol of a successful marriage with the heiress of a noble noble family Lizogubov.
But let us return to 1686, in which Jan Sobesski concluded the Eternal Peace Agreement with Russia, according to which all left-bank Ukraine and Kiev were assigned to Moscow, and after another 7 years Ivan Mazepa was chosen instead of the displaced Samoilovich. A recent rival, Gogoley Samoilovich, was exiled to Siberia, where he died in Tobolsk in 1690. Ostap Gogol and his son Prokop died in Polish campaigns.
His orphaned children, Fedor and Yan, decided to settle on the left-bank Ukraine in the ancient town of Lubny.
Here Fedor became a regimental clerk, and his brother Jan became a priest. So the former “Polish gentry” began a new life. As we are convinced, Gogol had no Polish roots, just as there was no last name “Yanovsky”. He was already invented by the great-grandson of Ostap Gogol, the priest of the Assumption Church with. Kononovki Lubensky district Demyan Ivanovich Gogol (great-grandfather of the writer), who decided to immortalize the name of his father in the family chronicle, named after the Polish king Jan.
Thus, the double surname Gogol-Yanovsky appeared.
An important role in the history of the Gogol family was played by the unusual marriage of the writer’s grandfather, who, not being a nobleman, in 1776 combined his fate with hereditary noblewoman Tatyana Semenovna Lizogub, great-granddaughter of hetman of Left-Bank Ukraine Ivan Skoropadsky and great-great-granddaughter of right-bank hetman Petro Doroshenko.
The Lizogubov clan originates from the registry cossack of the Pereyaslavl regiment of Glemyazovskaya hundreds of Yakov Kondratievich Lizogub and the Cossack Agafya Baranova, who had five daughters and a son, Yukhim.
Being in the rank of Colonel Kanevsky, Yakov Kondratyevich in 1667 received from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich a honorary diploma for the nobility and coat of arms, becoming the general Yesul and punishable hetman from Petro Doroshenko with whom he became related in 1673, when his son, the general, married in Kanev Bunchuzhny Yukhim Yakovlevich Lizogub with the daughter of the hetman Lyubov Petrovna Doroshenko.
Lizoguby, as mentioned above, were related, on the one hand, to the hetman Skoropadsky, and on the other, to Pavel Polubotok, who, according to popular legend, gave chains in prison in the form of a menacing answer, reminding him of the Last Judgment in the face of the almighty God (this plot inspired the artist Volkov, who painted the painting “Peter I and the Half Work”).
Semyon Lizogub and Galina Tanskaya officially concluded their marriage in 1742, and a year later they had a daughter, Tatyana – eventually Gogol’s beloved grandmother, a representative of the constellation of old Ukrainian clans: Lizogubov, Doroshenkov, Skoropadsky, Tansky and Zabel.
So, in her youth Tanya Lizogub fell in love with her home teacher Opanas, at that time the usual clerk of the regimental Mirgorod office. His grandfather and father were Lubensky priests, their family Gogol – Yanovsky did not belong to the nobles, and they only had a church parish for five domestic souls.
But on the blood-red shield of the coat of arms of Lizogubov there was a hand in armor armed with a sword, which sent a gold cavalry cross to the exploits. Behind this combat right hand there were many lands and serfs. Naturally, on the part of the Lizogubs, there could be no talk of the blessing of marriage. And then Tatyana secretly married Athanasius, breaking all family laws and traditions. By the way, this couple was later glorified by their grandson in the images of the old-world landowners Pulcheria Ivanovna and Athanasius Ivanovich Tovstogubov.
Due to the fact that the nobility was recognized only through the male line, the father of Gogol, Vasily Afanasevich, was not destined to be born with a noble title. When Vasily was 4 years old, old S.S. Lizogub, realizing that nothing could be changed, wrote with a letter of 1781 to his grandson his family farm Kupchin in the Mirgorod regiment. The farm was immediately renamed Vasilyevka, after the name of a young heir. When Vasily began the fifth year, Afanasy Demyanovich managed, by hook or by crook, to write his own Gogol-Yanovsky family in a noble book. Since that time, Vasilyevka was also called Yanovshchina. Today it is the village of Gogolevo, Shishatsky district, Poltava region, where on April 1, 1984, on the 175th anniversary of the writer’s birthday, the reserve was inaugurated.
As you know, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol did not leave offspring.
Genealogy of the Gogol-Yanovsky family: proza.ru
Source: sites.google.com/site/mnemocina
Good luck in finding.
