Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol died on March 3, 1852. On March 6, 1852, he was buried in the cemetery near the Danilov Monastery. According to the will, no monument was erected to him - Golgotha towered over the grave.
But 79 years later, the ashes of the writer were removed from the grave: the Danilov Monastery was transformed by the Soviet government into a colony for juvenile delinquents, and the necropolis was subject to liquidation. Only a few graves were decided to be transferred to the old cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. Among these "lucky ones", along with Yazykov, Aksakovs and Khomyakovs, was Gogol ...
The entire color of the Soviet intelligentsia was present at the reburial. Among them was the writer V. Lidin. It is to him that Gogol owes the emergence of numerous legends about himself. One of the myths concerned the writer's lethargic sleep. According to Lidin, when the coffin was taken out of the ground and opened, those present were bewildered. In the coffin lay a skeleton with a skull turned to one side. No one has found an explanation for this.
I recalled the stories that Gogol was afraid of being buried alive in a state of lethargic sleep and seven years before his death he bequeathed: “My body should not be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating. What they saw shocked those present. Did Gogol really have to endure the horror of such a death?
It is worth noting that in the future this story was subject to criticism. Sculptor N. Ramazanov, who took off Gogol's death mask, recalled: "I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the prepared coffin ... finally, the incessantly arriving crowd of people who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased forced me and my old man, who pointed out the traces of destruction, to hurry ... "Found my own an explanation for the rotation of the skull: the side boards at the coffin were the first to rot, the lid falls under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man’s head, and it turns to its side on the so-called “Atlantean” vertebra.
However, Lidin's violent fantasy was not limited to this episode. A more terrible story followed - it turns out that when the coffin was opened, the skeleton did not have a skull at all. Where could he go? This new invention of Lidin gave rise to new hypotheses. They remembered that in 1908, when a heavy stone was installed on the grave, a brick crypt had to be erected over the coffin to strengthen the foundation. It was suggested that it was then that the writer's skull could have been stolen. It was suggested that it was stolen at the request of a Russian theater fanatic, merchant Alexei Alexandrovich Bakhrushin. It was rumored that he already had the skull of the great Russian actor Shchepkin.
SOME DETAILS OF N. V. GOGOL'S REBURIAL
Open the coffin and freeze in the snow.
Gogol lay crouched on his side.
An ingrown toenail tore the lining of the boot.
A. Voznesensky
Rumors that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was buried in a lethargic sleep have been living for more than half a century after the transfer of the ashes of the writer from the cemetery of the Danilovsky Monastery to Novodevichy. At the same time, the coffin was opened ... or, as they say in the act stored in the TsGALI, "the exhumation of the writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was carried out." Both the uncertainty of the medical report and the “Testament” of the author of Dead Souls, written seven years before his death, testify to the terrible version: “I bequeath my body not to be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating.
The study of this issue was carried out by Art. Yuri Vladimirovich Alekhin (1946-2003), a researcher at the State Literary Museum, who, when he was a student at the Literary Institute, heard the story of the writer V.G. Lidin (1894-1979), who was present at the reburial of Gogol. Here is the story. Once, the director of the Novodevichy cemetery called Vladimir Germanovich: “Tomorrow the reburial of Gogol's ashes will take place. Would you like to attend?" Lidin, of course, did not refuse, and the next day, May 31, 1931, he came to the cemetery of the Danilovsky Monastery to the grave of Gogol. (The ashes were transferred in connection with the liquidation of the necropolis). At the grave he met fellow writers Vs. Ivanov, V. Lugovsky, M. Svetlov, Y. Olesha. They were also notified the day before. Not without people from Bohemia, God knows how they learned about the transfer of ashes. Komsomol members from Khamovniki came in greater numbers (the director of the Novodevichy cemetery was nominated by the Komsomol). There were several policemen. Priests and gray-haired professors, which would befit the event, Lidin did not see. There were 20-30 people in total. The coffin was not immediately carried, recalled Lidin, for some reason it turned out not to be where they were digging, but a little further away. And when they pulled it out of the ground, apparently strong, from oak planks, and opened it, then more ... bewilderment was added to the heart trembling. In the coffin lay a skeleton with a skull turned to one side. No one has found an explanation for this. Someone superstitious, probably, then thought: “Well, the publican, during his lifetime, is as if not alive and after death not dead, this strange great man.”
The ashes of Gogol were transported by cart. Behind her, squelching through the puddles, silently walked people. The day was grey. Some of those who accompanied the cart had tears in their eyes. And the young employee of the historical museum, Maria Yuryevna Baranovskaya, the wife of a famous architect, wept especially bitterly. Seeing this, one of the law enforcement officers said to another: “Look, how the widow is being killed!”
The grave, holy for Russians, hastily leveled by gravediggers, is left behind in the past. And the heavy stone that stood above it, reminiscent of the outlines of Golgotha, was taken away somewhere a day or two earlier. Later, in the early 1950s, Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, the widow of the writer M.A. Bulgakov, found it among the rubble in the shed of the cutters of the Novodevichy cemetery. Gogol's stone lay on the grave of his worthy successor, the author of The Master and Margarita, who exclaimed in one of his letters: "Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron overcoat."
The ashes of Gogol were reburied mainly by people who did not believe in God; indifferent to the past, to someone else's death. On the way to Novodevichy, Gogol's ashes were devastated: first, pieces of cloth, then boots, ribs, even a tibia, all this slowly disappeared. The ashes were scattered by Komsomol members. To some extent, Lidin also joined them. He did not hide the fact that he took a piece of the vest. This relic, inserted by him into the metal-edged binding of Gogol's lifetime edition, has been preserved in the writer's library.
However, those who took the remains of Gogol, after a few days, having agreed with themselves, returned the confiscated with a small exception ... dug on the grave with earth. It was said that one of them dreamed of Gogol for three nights in a row demanding the return of his rib. And I couldn't find a second place for myself. He left a tibia in the pocket of his raincoat, hanging in the hallway, and the next morning he did not find it there. Interrogated others, no one took. And the third, perhaps for the sake of curiosity, read at that time Gogol's "Testament", where, among other things, it is said: "... it is a shame that he will be attracted by some attention to rotting dust, which is no longer mine ..." And he was ashamed of his act.
But despite all the mystical coincidences and signs, it seems that Gogol was still not buried in a lethargic dream. The sculptor N. Ramazanov, who took off the death mask from the writer, for example, wrote: “I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the prepared coffin ... finally, the incessantly staying crowd who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased, forced me and my old man, who pointed out the traces of destruction, to hurry ... "
And the fact that Gogol was lying in the coffin so unusually, as pathologists say, has a very simple explanation: the side, narrowest boards of the coffin are the first to rot, the lid begins to fall under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man’s head and it turns to one side on the so-called “Atlantic vertebra” ". Incidentally, the phenomenon is not uncommon.
However, I don’t want to think in such purely materialistic categories, because faith in a miracle, awe before mystical coincidences, beyond the grave, mysterious, they are always alive in the national character, which no ideologists of the recent past could reforge.
One of the most mysterious stories associated with Nikolai Gogol is still the disappearance of his head from the coffin. It’s worth mentioning right away that much of what you read below is based on hypotheses and conjectures. However, most of them, if not yet documented, are just a matter of time and perseverance of researchers.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol died on February 21, 1852. He was buried in the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery, and in 1931 the monastery and the cemetery on its territory were closed due to retraining in a juvenile colony. When the remains of Gogol were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery, they discovered that a skull had been stolen from the coffin of the deceased ...
It is immediately worth noting that Stalin was a longtime secret admirer of Gogol. And the message about the missing skull led the dictator into an indescribable rage. Moreover, Stalin was going to celebrate with great pomp the upcoming anniversary of the writer in three years. And then such a surprise. He gave the order to conduct an investigation as soon as possible and find out who stole the skull and where it is located. The guilty should be punished accordingly. There is no need to tell how it was done in those years ... They say that the culprit was found, but they could not punish him because of his death. And he took the secret of the skull with him to the grave.
The classified results of the investigation are still kept in the archives of the FSB. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to get acquainted with them. But the employees of the archive confirmed their presence in an informal conversation. Let's try and figure out what happened to the head of the great writer. 
Death
Gogol spent the last four years of his life in Moscow in a house on Nikitsky Boulevard. Two rooms have been preserved on the first floor, which were occupied by Nikolai Vasilyevich; the fireplace, in which the writer, according to legend, burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls, has been preserved, although in a modified form ...
With the owners of the house - Count Alexander Petrovich and Countess Anna Georgievna Tolstoy - Gogol met in the late 30s, the acquaintance grew into a close friendship. Gogol was taken care of like a child. Lunch, breakfast, tea, supper were served where he ordered. In addition to the numerous servants at home, he served in his rooms, his own man from Little Russia Semyon, a young guy, meek and extremely devoted to his master. The silence in the wing was extraordinary. Gogol either walked around the room from corner to corner, or sat and wrote, rolling balls of white bread, about which he told his friends that they help to solve the most complex and difficult problems.
On January 26, 1852, the wife of Gogol's friend, the famous Slavophil Khomyakov, died unexpectedly. The death of Ekaterina Mikhailovna, whom Gogol loved very much and considered the most worthy of the women he met in his life, shocked the writer. “The fear of death came over me,” he said to his confessor.
Since 1839, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol began a progressive mental and physical health disorder. At the age of 30, while in Rome, Gogol fell ill with malaria, and, judging by the consequences, the disease damaged the writer's brain. Seizures and fainting began to occur, which is characteristic of malarial encephalitis. In 1845, Gogol writes: “My body reached terrible cooling: neither day nor night could I warm myself with anything. My face turned yellow, and my hands were swollen and blackened and were unwarmed ice, so that their touch to me frightened me myself.
There were many rumors about Gogol's "religious insanity". But he was not a deeply religious person, and he cannot be called an ascetic. Religious reflections were supported by environment and illness.
It is impossible not to remember the influence of the mother. It was she who inspired the future writer with fear of hell and the Last Judgment, and even more so of the "afterlife" (all this is vividly reflected in "Viy"). Gogol's mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a very pious woman with a mystical character. She was orphaned early and married at the age of 14 to 27-year-old Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol-Yanovsky. Of their six sons, only one Nicholas survived. He was the firstborn, and his mother adored her Nikosha, named by her in honor of St. Nicholas of Dikansky, tried to give him a religious education. However, Gogol later wrote: "... I was baptized because I saw that everyone was being baptized."
Even after visiting Jerusalem in February 1848, Gogol did not feel any peace, joy, or cheerfulness of feelings, but only, in his words, "insensibility, callousness and woodenness." He becomes withdrawn, capricious and untidy.
A spiritual crisis led Gogol to publish in 1847 the book Selected passages from correspondence with friends, which, with the ideas of religious repentance, provoked a sharp rebuff from progressive Russian society and even Slavophiles and churchmen (for the seditious pride of the author). The fanatic priest Matvey Konstantinovsky, under whose influence Gogol is until his death, urges him to abandon literary work without which Gogol cannot imagine himself. This also adds confusion to his already torn soul in all directions ..
A few days before Gogol's death, the owner of the house where he was, Count Tolstoy, joyfully informed the writer, who was lying in bed, that the icon of the Mother of God, lost in the house, had unexpectedly been found. And Gogol replied irritably: "Is it possible to talk about these things when I am preparing for such a terrible moment!"
After the death of Khomyakova, Nikolai Vasilievich quit his literary work, began to eat little, although he did not lose his appetite and suffered from deprivation of food, prayed at night, and slept little.
On the night from Friday to Saturday (February 8-9), after another vigil, he, completely exhausted, fell asleep on the sofa and suddenly saw himself dead and heard some mysterious voices. The next morning he called the parish priest, wanting to take unction, but he persuaded him to wait.
On Monday, February 11, Gogol was exhausted to such an extent that he could not walk and went to bed. Visiting friends received reluctantly. But he found the strength to defend the service in the house church. At 3 o'clock in the morning from February 11 to 12, after a fervent prayer, he called Semyon to him, ordered him to go up to the second floor, open the stove valves and bring a briefcase from the closet. Taking a bunch of notebooks out of it, Gogol put them in the fireplace and lit a candle. Sitting on a chair, he waited until everything had burned down, got up, crossed himself, kissed Semyon, returned to the room, lay down on the sofa and wept. Thus ceased to exist the second volume of Dead Souls.
Literary scholars claim that the second volume consisted of 11 chapters and was much more perfect in terms of literature than the first. The burning of manuscripts was customary for Nikolai Vasilyevich. First, he burned the manuscript of Hans Küchelgarten, and in 1844 in Rome he threw the first version of the second volume of Dead Souls into the furnace. It is known that "Dead Souls" was conceived as "a book, after reading which, the world will shine with the beauty of perfection, and an eternal, sinless tribe will reign on the renewed earth." It was conceived as a trilogy built according to the classical Dante scheme: hell-purgatory-paradise. It was the “hellish” passage of the trilogy that we studied at school. “That's what I did! - he said the next morning to Tolstoy, - I wanted to burn some things that had been prepared for a long time, but I burned everything. How strong the evil one is - that's what he moved me to! And I was there a lot of practical clarified and outlined ... I thought to send to friends as a keepsake from a notebook: let them do what they wanted. Now everything is gone." 
Gogol ceased to take care of himself, did not wash, did not comb his hair. He ate bread, prosphora, porridge, prunes. I drank water with red wine, linden tea. On Monday, February 17, he went to bed in a dressing gown and boots and did not get up again. Moscow had already heard about Gogol's illness, and on February 19, when Dr. Tarasenkov arrived at the house, the whole front room was filled with a crowd of Gogol's admirers, who stood in silence with mournful faces.
Three days later, a medical council gathered: Over, Klimenkov, Sokologorsky, Tarasenkov and the Moscow medical luminary Evenius. It was decided to put two leeches to Gogol's nose, to do a cold dousing on his head in a warm bath. Klimenkov undertook to perform all these procedures, and Tarasenkov hurried to leave, "so as not to be a witness to the suffering of the sufferer."
Gogol screamed, but the Aesculapius treated him as if he had been implored. Then he could no longer turn around on his own, lay quietly when he was not being treated. Tried to drink. By evening he began to lose his memory, muttering indistinctly: “Come on, come on! Well, what is it? At eleven o'clock he suddenly shouted loudly: "Ladder, hurry, give me a ladder!" He made an attempt to get up. He was lifted out of bed and placed on a chair. But he couldn't even hold his head up. Gogol fell into a deep faint, around midnight his legs began to get cold ... All this was seen by the newly arrived Tarasenkov.
He left so that, as he later wrote, he would not run into the medical executioner Klimenkov, who tormented the dying Gogol all night, giving him calomel, covering his body with hot bread, which made Gogol groan and scream piercingly. He died without regaining consciousness at 8 am on February 21 on Thursday.
Gogol's ashes were buried at noon on February 24, 1852 by parish priest Alexei Sokolov and deacon John Pushkin.
The sculptor Ramazanov, who took off Gogol's death mask, recalled: "I did not suddenly decide to take off the mask, but the prepared coffin ... finally, the incessantly arriving crowd who wanted to say goodbye to the dear deceased forced me and my old man, who pointed out traces of destruction, to hurry ... "
In 1902, Dr. Bazhenov published a small work, Gogol's Illness and Death. After carefully analyzing the symptoms described in the memoirs of the writer's acquaintances and the doctors who treated him, Bazhenov came to the conclusion that the writer was killed by the wrong, weakening treatment for meningitis, which in fact was not.
The symptoms of Gogol's disease described by him are practically indistinguishable from the symptoms of chronic poisoning with mercury - the main component of calomel, which was fed to Gogol by every doctor who started treatment. The peculiarity of calomel is that it does not cause harm only if it is relatively quickly excreted from the body through the intestines. If it lingers in the stomach, then after a while it begins to act as the strongest mercury poison of sublimate. This, apparently, happened to Gogol: significant doses of the calomel he took were not excreted from the stomach, since the writer was fasting at that time and there was simply no food in his stomach. The gradually increasing amount of calomel caused chronic poisoning, and the weakening of the body from malnutrition, discouragement and barbaric treatment only hastened death ... 
Was Gogol alive at the burial?
There is still a lot of talk about the fact that Gogol was buried alive. This myth once again needs to be dispelled.
Confirmation that Gogol was dead during the burial can be an excerpt from a letter from Nikolai Ramazanov to Nestor Kukolnik. says not to bury his body until all signs of decay appear in the body. After removing the mask, one could be fully convinced that Gogol's fears were in vain; he will not come to life, this is not lethargy, but an eternal deep sleep.
The rotation of the skull, which is much talked about, will be explained. The side boards near the coffin were the first to rot, the lid falls under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man's head, and it turns on its side on the so-called "Atlantean vertebra".
The section of forensic medicine - thanatology (the science of death) explains such phenomena. From a scientific point of view, a change in body position is possible as a result of the resolution of rigor mortis. After death, rigor mortis develops in a descending order (from the head to the feet) and after 10-15 hours occurs in all muscle groups. On the third day, muscle relaxation begins in the same order, and the body is slightly stretched. Since relaxation of the neck muscles occurred last, and stretching was impossible in the coffin, the writer's head turned to the side. This does not exclude the possibility that, under the pressure of the ground, the lid of the coffin begins to move down and touches the skull, which lies at the highest point, as a result of which the head turns sideways. 
Monument and grave
Shortly after the funeral, an ordinary bronze Orthodox cross was placed on the grave. Konstantin Aksakov, the son of Gogol's friend Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, brought to Moscow from the Black Sea coast from the Crimea a stone resembling Calvary in shape - the hill on which Jesus Christ was crucified. This stone became the basis for the cross on the grave of Gogol. Next to him, a black marble stone in the form of a truncated pyramid with inscriptions on the edges was installed on the grave. A verse from the Holy Scriptures was placed on it - a quote from the prophet Jeremiah: "I will laugh at my bitter word."
The day before the opening of the Gogol burial, these stones and the cross were taken away somewhere and sunk into oblivion. Only in the early 1950s, Mikhail Bulgakov's widow Elena Sergeevna accidentally discovered Gogol's Golgotha stone in the shed of cutters and managed to install it on the grave of her husband, a passionate admirer of Gogol.
In 1909, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the writer, the burial was restored. A cast-iron lattice fence and a sarcophagus by sculptor Nikolai Andreev were installed on Gogol's grave. The bas-reliefs on the lattice are considered unique: according to a number of sources, they were made from a lifetime image of Gogol.
No less mystical is the fate of the Moscow monuments to Gogol. The idea of the need for such a monument was born in 1880 during the celebrations for the opening of the monument to Pushkin. After 29 years, on the centenary of Nikolai Vasilyevich on April 26, 1909, a monument created by the sculptor Andreev was unveiled on Prechistensky Boulevard. This sculpture, depicting a deeply dejected Gogol at the moment of his heavy thoughts, caused mixed reviews.
Stalin needed another Gogol - clear, bright, calm. In 1935, the All-Union Committee for Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR announces a competition for a new monument to Gogol in Moscow. The war interfered. But in 1952, on the centennial anniversary of Gogol's death, a new monument was erected on the site of the Andreevsky monument, created by the sculptor Tomsky and the architect Golubovsky. The Andreevsky monument was moved to the territory of the Donskoy Monastery, where it stood until 1959, when, at the request of the USSR Ministry of Culture, it was installed in front of Tolstoy's house on Nikitsky Boulevard.
Today, a pompous monument of the Stalin era by the sculptor Tomsky with a pompous inscription has been erected at the writer’s ceremonial burial place: “To the great artist, the words of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol from the government of the Soviet Union.” Thus, Gogol's will was violated - in correspondence with friends, he asked not to erect a monument over his remains.
Reburial
100 years ago, in 1909, on the eve of the upcoming celebrations on the centenary of the birth of Gogol, by decision of the Moscow City Duma, the dilapidated grave of the writer was put in order at the monastery cemetery at the St. Danilov Monastery. Workers installed a new cast-iron lattice fence, repaired a marble slab with a quotation from the Bible, a cross and a stone at the base of the cross, and repaired the underground crypt where the coffin with Gogol's ashes was placed. Part of the bricks from the vault crumbled. Works at the cemetery were carried out under the supervision of the abbot and monks from the economic service. By the appointed date, the restorers were in time. On the day of the anniversary, a solemn service was held at the grave. Not a sound about any loss from the grave ....
After 20 years, by decision of the Soviet authorities, the cemetery at the closed monastery was liquidated, the complex was transferred to accommodate a colony for juvenile delinquents, and it was decided to move several especially valuable graves from the acropolis to the new front cemetery, on Novodevichy. It was in particular about the graves of Gogol, the poet Nikolai Yazykov and the philosopher Alexei Khomyakov. The reburial of Gogol (06/01/1931) was solemnly furnished. Popular writers and public and political figures were invited to the cemetery with special passes. Among them were writers Valentin Kataev, Alexander Malyshkin, Vladimir Lidin, Yuri Olesha, Vsevolod Ivanov, poets Vladimir Lugovskoy, Mikhail Svetlov, Ilya Selvinsky, critic and translator Valentin Stenich. In addition to writers, the reburial ceremony was attended by historian Maria Baranovskaya, archaeologist Alexei Smirnov, artist Alexander Tyshler. It was they who leaked, and rumors instantly spread throughout the capital: when the coffin was opened, it was found that the skeleton did not have a skull, so they buried it ...
In the diary of a former member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Moscow, diplomat and writer Alexander Arosev, “Frank to the point of cruelty,” there is this entry: “... May 26, 1934. The other day I was at Vs. Ivanova, Pavlenko, N. Tikhonova. They said that they dug up the ashes of Gogol, Khomyakov and Yazykov. Gogol's head was not found ... "
But it was only at the end of the 20th century that this information was made public. So among the first appeared the memoirs of the writer, professor of the Literary Institute Vladimir Lidin, published in the journal Russian Archive (No. 1, 1990).
"... Gogol's grave was opened for almost a whole day. It turned out to be at a much greater depth than ordinary burials. Starting to dig it out, they stumbled upon a brick crypt of unusual strength, but they did not find a walled hole in it; then they began to dig in the transverse direction with such a calculation so that the excavation was to the east, and only in the evening was another side aisle of the crypt discovered, through which the coffin was pushed into the main crypt at one time.
The work of opening the crypt was delayed. It was already dusk when the grave was finally opened. The top boards of the coffin were rotten, but the side boards with preserved foil, metal corners and handles, and a partially intact bluish-lilac braid were intact. This is what Gogol's ashes were like: there was no skull in the coffin, and Gogol's remains began with the cervical vertebrae: the entire skeleton of the skeleton was enclosed in a well-preserved tobacco-colored frock coat; even linen with bone buttons survived under the frock coat; there were shoes on his feet ... The shoes were on very high heels, approximately 4-5 centimeters, which gives an unconditional reason to assume that Gogol was not tall.
When and under what circumstances Gogol's skull disappeared remains a mystery. At the beginning of the opening of the grave, at a shallow depth, much higher than the crypt with a walled coffin, a skull was discovered, but archaeologists recognized it as belonging to a young man ... Unfortunately, I could not remove Gogol's remains, since it was already twilight, and the next in the morning they were transported to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, where they were buried ... "
The assembled creators of literature pilfered for souvenirs, who managed what. So Lidin himself cut out a piece of fabric from the coattail with scissors he had already stocked up, in order to later make an insert for the case of the first edition of Dead Souls. Vsevolod Ivanov (according to another version, not he) took Gogol's rib, the director of the cemetery, Komsomol member Arakcheev, appropriated the shoes of the great writer ... They say the writer Malyshkin. how everyone rushed to snatch something from the coffin, brought home a piece of cloth, and at night he dreamed of Gogol himself: of enormous growth and menacingly shouted to Malyshkin in a thunderous voice: “But my overcoat is mine!”. Frightened by the vision, Malyshkin hurried to the Novodevichy cemetery in the morning and hid the stolen piece in a pile of fresh earth on the new grave of the classic. The button and some other belongings were returned by the vandals' relatives at the end of March 2009 to the newly opened first museum of the writer in Moscow. But what about the skull? When did he disappear?
According to Lidin, the skull was removed from the grave in 1909. Allegedly, then the philanthropist and founder of the theater museum Alexei Bakhrushin persuaded the monks to get Gogol's skull for him. “In the Bakhrushinsky Theater Museum in Moscow there are three skulls belonging to unknown persons: one of them, according to the assumption, is the skull of the artist Shchepkin, the other is the skull of Gogol, nothing is known about the third,” Lidin wrote in his memoirs “Transferring the ashes of Gogol”. It is unlikely that this version (with the skulls stored in the museum) has a serious basis. Stalin would have got to the bottom of the truth and transferred the skull to the grave. But this was not done. So, even assuming that Bakhrushin is behind this (let's remember this version), we doubt that the skull was put on public display.
It is much more possible to believe that the rumors about the stolen head could later be used by Mikhail Bulgakov, a great admirer of Gogol's talent, in his novel The Master and Margarita. In the book, he wrote about the head of the chairman of the board, MASSOLIT Berlioz, stolen from the coffin, cut off by tram wheels on the Patriarch's Ponds. This parallel was noticed by the writer Anatoly Korolev, who even wrote the novel Gogol's Head, which was made into a film. But even this did not move us one step closer to the mystery.
The emergency was reported to Stalin. He gave the command to urgently investigate the case. The Chekists arrested all those monks of the Danilovsky Monastery who, despite the closure of the monastery, nevertheless - under various pretexts - lived on the territory of the monastery. During the interrogations, the name of the kidnapper, the collector and founder of the theater museum in Moscow, Alexei Bakhrushin, surfaced. The monastic authorities knew about the vandalism and carried out their secret investigation back in 1909, where it turned out that, having arrived at the workers’ grave in the evening, the millionaire offered a lot of money for Gogol’s skull, and the deal went through.
For two days, the grave-diggers walked in the tavern for a fee. And then they blabbed. For an oversight, a monk from the economic part of the monastery was demoted and transferred to another monastery. The monastery decided to keep quiet about the incident itself. The Chekists could not get to Bakhrushin. Luckily, he was already dead by this time. Searches in the museum and the heirs did not give anything.
Moreover, according to rumors, there were up to 40 skulls in the millionaire's collection. Nothing was found. And where the collection is hidden is unknown. And he knew how to collect and did it very recklessly. First, the theatrical collection of the merchant and philanthropist filled the basement of his mansion, then the first floor, the second, the children's and pantry rooms, crawled out into the corridor and broke into the stable and carriage house in the yard. Most of all, the collector was interested in the personal belongings of famous people. When buying them, Bakhrushin liked to say: everything fits a good thief. 
The Bakhrushin Theater Museum, a Gothic palace opposite the Paveletsky railway station, is the most grandiose specialized collection in Moscow. The museum has 1 million exhibits. The library of the museum contains 60 thousand volumes.
Shortly before the revolution, Bakhrushin donated the entire huge collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And after the revolution, he was appointed director of the Bakhrushin Theater Museum by decree of Lenin himself. He held this position until his death in 1929.
According to rumors, Gogol's skull was kept in a leather medical bag, among anatomical medical instruments. So Bakhrushin wanted to secure Gogol's skull in case of an accidental discovery: you never know what the pathologist holds in his bag.
Leopold Yastrzhembsky, who first published Lidin's memoirs, writes in his comments to the article that his attempts to find any information about a skull of unknown origin allegedly located there did not lead to anything.
The historian, specialist in the Moscow necropolis, Maria Baranovskaya, claimed that not only the skull was preserved, but also the light brown hair on it. However, another witness to the exhumation - archaeologist Alexei Smirnov - denied this, confirming the version about the missing skull of Gogol. And the poet and translator Sergei Solovyov claimed that when the grave was opened, not only the remains of the writer, but also the coffin in general, were not found, but a system of ventilation ducts and pipes was allegedly discovered, arranged in case the buried person was alive.
The writer Yuri Alekhin, who in the mid-80s of the last century conducted his own investigation into the circumstances related to the reburial of Gogol, claims that Vladimir Lidin's numerous oral recollections of the events that took place on May 31, 1931 at St. Danilov Cemetery differ significantly from written ones. Firstly, in a personal conversation with Alekhine, Lidin did not even mention that Gogol's skeleton was beheaded. According to his oral testimony, brought to us by Alekhine, Gogol's skull was only "turned to one side", which, in turn, instantly gave rise to a legend that the writer, who allegedly fell into a semblance of a lethargic sleep, was buried alive.
Later, according to Lidin’s oral testimony, he and several other writers who were present at the opening of Gogol’s grave, for reasons of mystical order, secretly “buried” the stolen tibia and boot of the writer not far from his new grave at the Novodevichy cemetery.
And, according to Polonsky, the writer Lev Nikulin fraudulently took over Gogol's rib: “Stenich ... going to Nikulin, he asked to save the rib and return it to him when he goes to his place in Leningrad. Nikulin made a copy of the rib out of wood and returned it wrapped to Stenich. Returning home, Stenich gathered the guests - Leningrad writers - and ... solemnly presented the rib, - the guests rushed to examine and found that the rib was made of wood ... Nikulin assures that he handed over the genuine rib and a piece of braid to some museum. 
However, the legend that Bakhrushin stole the skull continues to live on. There are even surprising details. It is said that Gogol's head was adorned with Bakhrushin's silver laurel crown and placed in a glazed rosewood case lined with black morocco on the inside. According to the same legend, the great-nephew of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol - Yanovsky, a lieutenant of the Russian imperial fleet, having learned about this, threatened Bakhrushin and took his head off. He came to him with a weapon and said that if he did not give up the skull, he would shoot Bakhrushin and shoot himself. But, apparently, it was not required. He himself gave the skull.
And the young officer decided to take the skull to Italy (to the country that Gogol considered his second home). Back in 1908, Russian sailors helped the Italians cope with the consequences of the terrible earthquake in Messina: they rescued people from the rubble, provided medical assistance to the crippled, and fed the destitute. The Italian government highly appreciated the contribution of our sailors to the salvation of the Messinians and, on the next anniversary of the tragedy, invited the Russian Black Sea squadron to their place. A solemn reception was expected in Rome. Yanovsky decided to take advantage of this in order to get to Italy. However, he was unable to go.
In the spring of 1911, by agreement with the Russian side, Italian cruisers arrived in Sevastopol to pick up the ashes of their compatriots who died in the Crimean campaign. Their bodies were buried on Mount Gosforth.
Yanovsky decides to ask the captain of the Italian ship to transport the rosewood box with the skull to Rome and hand it over to the Russian consul in Italy, so that he will bury the skull according to the Orthodox rite. This unusual mission fell to Captain Borghese. He could not immediately get to the ambassador, and then went on a long trip, leaving his head at home.
In the summer of 1911, the captain's younger brother, a student at the University of Rome, went on a pleasure train trip with a group of friends. It was the famous Roman express tour of the super-long - at that time - tunnel, punched in the Apennines. Deciding to play a trick on his friends, the young man opened the box with the skull in the tunnel under the English Channel. Before the express entered the thick of the mountains, an inexplicable panic suddenly seized the passengers, the train was enveloped in a thick milky cloud of fog. Two managed by sheer chance to jump off the footboard of the car, the rest were carried away on the train into oblivion. They say that at the moment when the lid was opened, the train disappeared ... Borghese Jr. turned out to be one of the survivors. It was from his words that reporters received the first information about the disappearance of the Roman Express in the tunnel ... The legend says that the ghost train did not disappear forever. They seem to see him sometimes...
Following this version, the head of Nikolai Vasilyevich remained restless - restless, which the writer was so afraid of. The skull travels on a ghost train.
Oleg Fochkin.
P.S. Nose
A detective story happened with the monument to "Major Kovalev's nose"... Its story began in St. Petersburg on Voznesensky Prospekt. After 160 years, the “strange incident” described by the classic was decided to be immortalized in marble. So in the center of St. Petersburg a bas-relief appeared in the form of two fleshy nostrils. Seven years later, the Nose went for a "walk". The bas-relief was found in the entrance of one of the houses on Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street, where he stood, casually leaning on the railing. Where he spent almost a year will remain a mystery.
On February 21 (March 4), 1852, the great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol passed away. He died at the age of 42, suddenly, "burned out" in just a few weeks. Later, his death was called terrifying, mysterious and even mystical.
164 years have passed, and the mystery of Gogol's death has not been completely solved.
Sopor
The most common version. The rumor about the allegedly terrible death of the writer, who was buried alive, turned out to be so tenacious that many still consider it an absolutely proven fact. And the poet Andrei Voznesensky in 1972 he even immortalized this assumption in his poem "The Funeral of Gogol Nikolai Vasilyevich".
You carried the living across the country.
Gogol was in a lethargic dream.
Gogol thought in the coffin on his back:
“They stole the underwear from under the tailcoat.
It blows into the crack, but you can't get through it.
What is the torment of the Lord
before waking up in a coffin."
Open the coffin and freeze in the snow.
Gogol, crouching, lies on his side.
An ingrown toenail tore through the lining of the boot.
In part, rumors about his burial were created alive without knowing it ... Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The fact is that the writer was subject to fainting and somnambulistic states. Therefore, the classic was very afraid that in one of the attacks he would be mistaken for dead and buried.
In the Testament, he wrote: “Being in the full presence of memory and common sense, I state here my last will. I bequeath my body not to be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating ... "
It is known that 79 years after the death of the writer, Gogol's grave was opened to transfer the remains from the necropolis of the closed Danilov Monastery to the Novodevichy cemetery. They say that his body lay in an unusual position for a dead man - his head was turned to the side, and the upholstery of the coffin was torn to shreds. These rumors gave rise to the ingrained belief that Nikolai Vasilievich died a terrible death, in pitch darkness, underground.
This fact is almost unanimously denied by modern historians.
“During the exhumation, which was carried out in a certain secrecy, only about 20 people gathered at Gogol’s grave ... - writes in his article “The Mystery of Gogol’s Death,” an associate professor at the Perm Medical Academy Mikhail Davidov. - The writer V. Lidin became essentially the only source of information about the exhumation of Gogol. At first, he told about the reburial to the students of the Literary Institute and his acquaintances, later he left written memoirs. Lidin's stories were untruthful and contradictory. It was he who claimed that the writer's oak coffin was well preserved, the lining of the coffin was torn and scratched from the inside, and a skeleton lay in the coffin, unnaturally twisted, with the skull turned to one side. So, with the light hand of Lidin, who was inexhaustible in his inventions, the terrible legend that the writer was buried alive went for a walk around Moscow.
Nikolai Vasilyevich was afraid of being buried alive. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
To understand the inconsistency of the lethargic dream version, it is enough to think about the following fact: the exhumation was carried out 79 years after the burial! It is known that the decomposition of the body in the grave occurs incredibly quickly, and after only a few years, only bone tissue remains from it, and the discovered bones no longer have close connections with each other. It is not clear how, after eight decades, some kind of “twisting of the body” could be established ... And what remains of the wooden coffin and upholstery material after 79 years of being in the ground? They change so much (rot, fragment) that it is absolutely impossible to establish the fact of “scratching” the inner upholstery of the coffin.”
And according to the memoirs of the sculptor Ramazanov, who took off the death mask of the writer, post-mortem changes and the beginning of the process of tissue decomposition were clearly visible on the face of the deceased.
However, the version of Gogol's lethargic dream is still alive.
Suicide
In the last months of his life, Gogol experienced a severe mental crisis. The writer was shocked by the death of his close friend, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Khomyakova who died suddenly of a rapidly developing disease at the age of 35. The classic stopped writing, spent most of his time in prayer and fasting furiously. Gogol was seized by the fear of death, the writer reported to his acquaintances that he heard voices telling him that he would die soon.
It was during that hectic period, when the writer was half-delirious, that he burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. It is believed that he did this largely under the pressure of his confessor, Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky, who was the only person to read this never published work and advised to destroy the records. The priest had a huge impact on Gogol in the last weeks of his life. Considering the writer not righteous enough, the priest demanded that Nikolai Vasilievich "renounce Pushkin" as a "sinner and pagan." He urged Gogol to constantly pray and abstain from food, and also mercilessly intimidated him with the reprisal awaiting him for his sins "in the other world."
The writer's depression intensified. He grew weak, slept very little, and ate practically nothing. In fact, the writer voluntarily lived himself out of the world.
According to the doctor Tarasenkova, who observed Nikolai Vasilyevich, in the last period of his life, he aged “at once” in a month. By February 10, Gogol's forces had already left Gogol so much that he could no longer leave the house. On February 20, the writer fell into a feverish state, did not recognize anyone, and kept whispering some kind of prayer. A council of doctors gathered at the bedside of the patient prescribes “compulsory treatment” for him. For example, bloodletting with leeches. Despite all efforts, at 8 o'clock in the morning on February 21, he was gone.
However, the version that the writer deliberately "starved himself to death", that is, in fact, committed suicide, is not supported by most researchers. And for a fatal outcome, an adult needs not to eat for 40 days. Gogol refused food for about three weeks, and even then periodically allowed himself to eat a few tablespoons of oatmeal soup and drink linden tea.
medical error
In 1902, a short article by Dr. Bazhenov“Illness and death of Gogol”, where he shares an unexpected thought - most likely, the writer died from improper treatment.
In his notes, Dr. Tarasenkov, who first examined Gogol on February 16, described the writer's condition as follows: “... the pulse was weakened, the tongue was clean, but dry; the skin had a natural warmth. For all reasons, it was clear that he did not have a feverish condition ... once he had a slight nosebleed, complained that his hands were cold, his urine was thick, dark-colored ... ".
These symptoms - thick dark urine, bleeding, constant thirst - are very similar to those seen in chronic mercury poisoning. And mercury was the main component of the calomel preparation, which, as is known from the testimonies, Gogol was heavily fed by doctors, "for gastric disorders."
The peculiarity of calomel is that it does not cause harm only if it is quickly excreted from the body through the intestines. But this did not happen with Gogol, who, due to the long fasting, simply had no food in his stomach. Accordingly, the old doses of the drug were not withdrawn, new ones were received, creating a situation of chronic poisoning, and the weakening of the body from malnutrition and discouragement only accelerated death, scientists say.
In addition, an incorrect diagnosis was made at the medical consultation - "meningitis". Instead of feeding the writer with high-calorie foods and giving him plenty to drink, he was prescribed a procedure that weakens the body - bloodletting. And if not for this "medical care", Gogol could have survived.
Each of the three versions of the writer's death has its adherents and opponents. One way or another, this mystery has not been solved so far.
“I will tell you without exaggeration,” he wrote Ivan Turgenev Aksakov, - since I can remember, nothing has made such a depressing impression on me as the death of Gogol ... This strange death is a historical event and is not immediately clear; this is a mystery, a heavy, formidable mystery - one must try to unravel it ... But the one who solves it will not find anything encouraging in it.
Gogol's death mask, thanks to which we now know exactly what he looked like.
PHOTO: RIA NovostiHowever, most of them, if not yet documented, are just a matter of time and perseverance of researchers.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol died on February 21, 1852. He was buried in the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery, and in 1931 the monastery and the cemetery on its territory were closed due to retraining in a juvenile colony. When the remains of Gogol were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery, they discovered that a skull had been stolen from the coffin of the deceased ...
It is worth noting that Stalin was a longtime secret admirer of Gogol. And the message about the missing skull led the dictator into an indescribable rage. Moreover, Stalin was going to celebrate with great pomp the upcoming anniversary of the writer in three years. He gave the order to conduct an investigation as soon as possible and find out who stole the skull and where it is located. Punish the guilty. They say the culprit was found, but they could not punish him due to death. And he took the secret of the skull with him to the grave.
The classified results of the investigation are still kept in the archives of the FSB. Their presence in an informal conversation, the staff of the archive confirmed to us. Let's try and figure out what happened to the head of the great writer.
Death
Gogol spent the last four years of his life in Moscow in a house on Nikitsky Boulevard.
On the night from Friday to Saturday (February 8-9), after another vigil, he, completely exhausted, fell asleep on the sofa and suddenly saw himself dead and heard some mysterious voices. The next morning he called the parish priest, wanting to take unction, but he persuaded him to wait.
On Monday, February 17, he went to bed in a dressing gown and boots and did not get up again. In Moscow they heard about Gogol's illness, and on February 19, when Dr. Tarasenkov arrived at the house, the whole front room was filled with a crowd of Gogol's admirers, who stood in silence with mournful faces.
He died without regaining consciousness at 8 am on February 21. Gogol's ashes were buried at noon on February 24, 1852 by parish priest Alexei Sokolov and deacon John Pushkin.
Was Gogol alive at the burial?
There is still a lot of talk about the fact that Gogol was buried alive. This myth once again needs to be dispelled.
Confirmation that Gogol was dead at the time of burial can be found in an excerpt from a letter from the sculptor Nikolai Ramazanov: not to bury his body in the ground until all signs of decay appear in the body. After removing the mask, one could be fully convinced that Gogol's fears were in vain; he will not come to life, this is not lethargy, but an eternal deep sleep.
The rotation of the skull, which is much talked about, will be explained. The side boards near the coffin were the first to rot, the lid falls under the weight of the soil, presses on the dead man's head, and it turns on its side on the so-called "Atlantean vertebra".
Monument and grave
Shortly after the funeral, an ordinary bronze Orthodox cross was placed on the grave. Konstantin Aksakov, the son of Gogol's friend Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, brought to Moscow from the Black Sea coast from the Crimea a stone resembling Calvary in shape - the hill on which Jesus Christ was crucified. This stone became the basis for the cross on the grave of Gogol. Next to him, a black marble stone in the form of a truncated pyramid with inscriptions on the edges was installed on the grave. A verse from the Holy Scriptures was placed on it - a quote from the prophet Jeremiah: "I will laugh at my bitter word."
The day before the opening of the Gogol burial, these stones and the cross were taken away somewhere and sunk into oblivion. Only in the early 1950s, Mikhail Bulgakov's widow Elena Sergeevna accidentally discovered Gogol's Golgotha stone in the shed of cutters and managed to install it on the grave of her husband, a passionate admirer of Gogol. In 1909, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the writer, the burial was restored. A cast-iron lattice fence and a sarcophagus by sculptor Nikolai Andreev were installed on Gogol's grave. The bas-reliefs on the lattice are considered unique: according to a number of sources, they were made from a lifetime image of Gogol.
Today, a pompous monument of the Stalin era by the sculptor Tomsky with a pompous inscription has been erected at the writer’s ceremonial burial place: “To the great artist, the words of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol from the government of the Soviet Union.” Thus, Gogol's will was violated - in correspondence with friends, he asked not to erect a monument over his remains.
Reburial
In 1909, on the eve of the upcoming celebrations on the centenary of the birth of Gogol, by decision of the Moscow City Duma, the dilapidated grave of the writer was put in order at the monastery cemetery at the St. Danilov Monastery. The workers also repaired the underground crypt, where a coffin with the ashes of Gogol was placed. Part of the bricks from the vault crumbled. Works at the cemetery were carried out under the supervision of the abbot and monks from the economic service. By the appointed date, the restorers were in time. On the day of the anniversary, a solemn service was held at the grave. Not a sound about any loss from the grave ....
After 20 years, by decision of the Soviet authorities, the cemetery at the closed monastery was liquidated, the complex was transferred to accommodate a colony for juvenile delinquents, and it was decided to move several especially valuable graves from the acropolis to the new front cemetery, on Novodevichy. It was in particular about the graves of Gogol, the poet Nikolai Yazykov and the philosopher Alexei Khomyakov. The reburial of Gogol (06/01/1931) was solemnly furnished. Popular writers and public and political figures were invited to the cemetery with special passes. Among them were writers Valentin Kataev, Alexander Malyshkin, Vladimir Lidin, Yuri Olesha, Vsevolod Ivanov, poets Vladimir Lugovskoy, Mikhail Svetlov, Ilya Selvinsky, critic and translator Valentin Stenich. In addition to writers, the reburial ceremony was attended by historian Maria Baranovskaya, archaeologist Alexei Smirnov, artist Alexander Tyshler. It was they who leaked, and rumors instantly spread throughout the capital: when the coffin was opened, it was found that the skeleton did not have a skull, so they buried it ...
In the diary of a former member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Moscow, diplomat and writer Alexander Arosev, “Frank to the point of cruelty,” there is this entry: “... May 26, 1934. The other day I was at Vs. Ivanova, Pavlenko, N. Tikhonova. They said that they dug up the ashes of Gogol, Khomyakov and Yazykov. Gogol's head was not found ... "
But it was only at the end of the 20th century that this information was made public. So among the first appeared the memoirs of the writer, professor of the Literary Institute Vladimir Lidin, published in the journal Russian Archive (No. 1, 1990).
“... Gogol's grave was opened for almost a whole day. It turned out to be at a much greater depth than conventional burials. Starting to dig it out, they came across a brick crypt of unusual strength, but they did not find a walled hole in it; then they began to dig in the transverse direction in such a way that the excavation fell to the east, and only in the evening was another side aisle of the crypt discovered, through which the coffin was once pushed into the main crypt.
The skull was not in the coffin, and Gogol's remains began with the cervical vertebrae: the entire skeleton of the skeleton was enclosed in a well-preserved tobacco-colored frock coat; even linen with bone buttons survived under the frock coat; shoes were on their feet.
When and under what circumstances Gogol's skull disappeared remains a mystery. At the beginning of the opening of the grave, at a shallow depth, much higher than the crypt with a walled coffin, a skull was discovered, but archaeologists recognized it as belonging to a young man ... "
The assembled creators of literature pilfered for souvenirs, who managed what. So Lidin himself cut out a piece of fabric from the coattail with scissors he had already stocked up, in order to later make an insert for the case of the first edition of Dead Souls. Vsevolod Ivanov (according to another version, not he) took Gogol's rib, the director of the cemetery, Komsomol member Arakcheev, appropriated the shoes of the great writer ... They say the writer Malyshkin. how everyone rushed to snatch something from the coffin, brought home a piece of cloth, and at night he dreamed of Gogol himself: of enormous growth and menacingly shouted to Malyshkin in a thunderous voice: “But my overcoat is mine!”. Frightened by the vision, Malyshkin hurried to the Novodevichy cemetery in the morning and hid the stolen piece in a pile of fresh earth on the new grave of the classic. The button and some other belongings were returned by the vandals' relatives at the end of March 2009 to the newly opened first museum of the writer in Moscow. But what about the skull?
According to Lidin, the skull was removed from the grave in 1909. Allegedly, then the philanthropist and founder of the theater museum Alexei Bakhrushin persuaded the monks to get Gogol's skull for him. “In the Bakhrushinsky Theater Museum in Moscow there are three skulls belonging to unknown persons: one of them, according to the assumption, is the skull of the artist Shchepkin, the other is the skull of Gogol, nothing is known about the third,” Lidin wrote in his memoirs “Transferring the ashes of Gogol”. It is unlikely that this version (with the skulls stored in the museum) has a serious basis. Stalin would have got to the bottom of the truth and transferred the skull to the grave. But this was not done. So, even assuming that Bakhrushin is behind this (let's remember this version), we doubt that the skull was put on display.
It is much more possible to believe that the rumors about the stolen head could later be used by Mikhail Bulgakov, a great admirer of Gogol's talent, in his novel The Master and Margarita. In the book, he wrote about the head of the chairman of the board, MASSOLIT Berlioz, stolen from the coffin, cut off by tram wheels on the Patriarch's Ponds. This parallel was noticed by the writer Anatoly Korolev, who even wrote the novel Gogol's Head.
The emergency was reported to Stalin. He gave the command to urgently investigate the case. The Chekists arrested all those monks of the Danilovsky Monastery who, despite the closure of the monastery, nevertheless - under various pretexts - lived on the territory of the monastery. During the interrogations, the name of the kidnapper, the collector and founder of the theater museum in Moscow, Alexei Bakhrushin, surfaced. The monastic authorities knew about the vandalism and carried out their secret investigation back in 1909, where it turned out that, having arrived at the workers’ grave in the evening, the millionaire offered a lot of money for Gogol’s skull, and the deal went through.
For two days, the grave-diggers walked in the tavern for a fee. And then they blabbed. For an oversight, a monk from the economic part of the monastery was demoted and transferred to another monastery. The monastery decided to keep quiet about the incident itself. The Chekists could not get to Bakhrushin. Luckily, he was already dead by this time. Searches in the museum and the heirs did not give anything.
Moreover, according to rumors, there were up to 40 skulls in the millionaire's collection. Nothing was found. And where the collection is hidden is unknown.
Shortly before the revolution, Bakhrushin donated the entire huge collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And after the revolution, he was appointed director of the Bakhrushin Theater Museum by decree of Lenin himself. He held this position until his death in 1929.
According to rumors, Gogol's skull was kept in a leather medical bag, among anatomical medical instruments. So Bakhrushin wanted to secure Gogol's skull in case of an accidental discovery: you never know what the pathologist holds in his bag.
Leopold Yastrzhembsky, who first published Lidin's memoirs, writes in his comments to the article that his attempts to find any information about a skull of unknown origin allegedly located there did not lead to anything.
The writer Yuri Alekhin, who in the mid-80s of the last century conducted his own investigation into the circumstances related to the reburial of Gogol, claims that Vladimir Lidin's numerous oral recollections of the events that took place on May 31, 1931 at St. Danilov Cemetery differ significantly from written ones. Firstly, in a personal conversation with Alekhine, Lidin did not even mention that Gogol's skeleton was beheaded. According to his oral testimony, brought to us by Alekhine, Gogol's skull was only "turned to one side", which, in turn, instantly gave rise to a legend that the writer, who allegedly fell into a semblance of a lethargic sleep, was buried alive.
Later, according to Lidin’s oral testimony, he and several other writers who were present at the opening of Gogol’s grave, for reasons of mystical order, secretly “buried” the stolen tibia and boot of the writer not far from his new grave at the Novodevichy cemetery.
And, according to Polonsky, the writer Lev Nikulin fraudulently took over Gogol's rib: “Stenich ... going to Nikulin, he asked to save the rib and return it to him when he goes to his place in Leningrad. Nikulin made a copy of the rib out of wood and returned it wrapped to Stenich. Returning home, Stenich gathered the guests - Leningrad writers - and ... solemnly presented the rib, - the guests rushed to examine and found that the rib was made of wood ... Nikulin assures that he handed over the genuine rib and a piece of braid to some museum.
However, the legend that Bakhrushin stole the skull continues to live on. It is said that Gogol's head was adorned with Bakhrushin's silver laurel crown and placed in a glazed rosewood case lined with black morocco on the inside. According to the same legend, the great-nephew of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol - Yanovsky, a lieutenant of the Russian imperial fleet, having learned about this, threatened Bakhrushin and took his head off. He came to him with a weapon and said that if he did not give up the skull, he would shoot Bakhrushin and shoot himself. But, apparently, it was not required. He himself gave the skull.
And the young officer decided to take the skull to Italy. Back in 1908, Russian sailors helped the Italians cope with the consequences of the terrible earthquake in Messina. The Italian government highly appreciated the contribution of our sailors and invited the Russian Black Sea squadron to their place on the next anniversary of the tragedy. A solemn reception was expected in Rome. Yanovsky decided to take advantage of this in order to get to Italy. However, he was unable to go.
In the spring of 1911, by agreement with the Russian side, Italian cruisers arrived in Sevastopol to pick up the ashes of their compatriots who died in the Crimean campaign. Their bodies were buried on Mount Gosforth.
A monument to the Stalin era by the sculptor Nikolai Tomsky with a pompous inscription: "To the great artist of the word Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol from the government of the Soviet Union."
Yanovsky decides to ask the captain of the Italian ship to transport the rosewood box with the skull to Rome and hand it over to the Russian consul in Italy, so that he will bury the skull according to the Orthodox rite. This unusual mission fell to Captain Borghese. He could not immediately get to the ambassador, and then went on a long trip, leaving his head at home.
In the summer of 1911, the captain's younger brother, a student at the University of Rome, went on a pleasure train trip with a group of friends. It was the famous Roman Express tour of the super-long - in those days - tunnel. Deciding to play a trick on his friends, the young man opened the box with the skull in the tunnel. Before the express entered the thick of the mountains, an inexplicable panic suddenly seized the passengers, the train was enveloped in a thick milky cloud of fog. Two managed by sheer chance to jump off the footboard of the car, the rest were carried away on the train into oblivion. They say that at the moment when the lid was opened, the train disappeared ... Borghese Jr. turned out to be one of the survivors. It was from his words that reporters received the first information about the disappearance of the Roman Express in the tunnel ... The legend says that the ghost train did not disappear forever. They seem to see him sometimes...
Following this version, the head of Nikolai Vasilyevich remained restless, which the writer was so afraid of. The skull travels on a ghost train.
