Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Gogol started life as a minor civil servant, sort of as a day job while trying to make it as a writer—so maybe he knows a little more than the average dude what Kovalev is all about. (source)
His BFF was Aleksandr Pushkin, the super-famous Russian romantic poet and author. Some of the ideas for Gogol's most famous work, the novel Dead Souls, came from Pushkin. (source)