Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol, the Molière of Russia, was born in the sunny Ukraine in March, 1809, and died in Moscow forty-three years later. The author of Russia's famous national comedy, «The Inspector-General,» Gogol was the first dramatist of his country to write plays on the Western European model, even as his friend Pushkin was the first Russian poet to introduce the Western strain into the literature of his people. In the comedy «Marriage,» which Gogol began in 1832 as «The Wooers»...