Alongside with Nikolai Gogol’s lacking social life, many scholars who have taken the quest of uncovering his love life will soon realize a glaring truth. Gogol has spent years traveling abroad in various European locations, and though letters have been found received and sent form those places to dear friends, most of his time was focused upon his fiction. His biography left significant gaps among his travels, which could be associated with a deliberate omission to mask embarrassing romantic failures, or simple neglect due to uneventful years.
Despite his several close relationships with woman, Gogol was believed to never have been romantically inclined or sexually active. One close relationship was discovered between Gogol and one his closest friends and endearing confidantes Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova, though the relationship remained strictly platonic. Amidst this suggestive uncertainty, Gogol’s sexuality became a passive topic of debate, some suggesting that he may be homosexual, and most concluding that he was asexual. Regardless, that question never seemed to seldom cross Gogol’s mind during his time.
Other authors such as Vladimir Nabokov had noted his inexperience with women as a contributing factor to misrepresentation of women in his literature. He even went as far as describing Gogol’s later works – notably pieces like ‘The Nose’ – as “misogynistic or lacking in nuance,” saying that he himself was “depressed and puzzled” by Gogol’s “inability to describe young women.”
In one of many letters that Nabokov translated, Gogol conjured his last words upon unexpectedly departing Saint Petersburg and beginning his travels abroad in Europe around 1829. His letter alludes to an ‘exalted’ being or a ‘goddess slightly clothed in human passions’, who ostensibly instigated his need to drop his life and set foot abroad. Despite this lofty and hyperbolic language, there is little evidence supporting the fact that this woman ever existed. Gogol himself entertains the idea that this mysterious woman was a figment of his under-stimulated mind, whom he creative to keep him accompany. Nabokov writes:
“First of all, whatever his sexual life was (he showed complete indifference towards woman insofar as the facts of his riper years show), it is quite obvious that the allusions to the “exalted creature,” to the pagan goddess so strangely created by Christian God, is a purple patch of shameless fiction.”
Upon further investigation, an underwhelming affirmation arose that even Gogol’s closest friends “have testified that nothing remotely resembling any romantic disaster ever came young Gogol’s way.”
A slight bias should be noted with Nabokov’s analysis, because some others found evidence that Gogol’s lack of dalliance with women may not simply be an absence in libido, but a misdirection of it. Simon Karlinsky, writer of The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, posited that the ‘missing key to the riddle of his personality’ was Gogol’s secret emotional orientation towards members of his own sex, hence the perceived rejection to intense physical or emotional connection to women. Many of his stories featured characters in pursuit of love, but are never successful, some falling for obviously forbidden love interests such as married women or prostitutes, and some simply not being reciprocated.
Towards the end of Gogol’s travels, Karlinsky summarizes Gogol's attitude towards women by highlighting his continuous attempt to portray women as irrational and hard to comprehend.