On Gogol: He aspired to great heights and was terrified that death might keep him from attaining them

He aspired to great heights and was terrified that death might keep him from attaining them...Even in his boyhood, he said, he was fired by the desire to "Make (his) life useful" and would break into a cold sweat at the thought that he might perish without achieving fame. His relations with others were conditioned by this desire; the world was his audience or his congregation, and he spent his life entertaining, instructing, preaching-- always with the restless intensity of one who feels himself to be constantly under threat of death.

        --Helen Muchinic, about Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) in the New York Review of Books, 31March 1977