Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol died on March 3, 1852. On March 6, 1852, he was interred 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 writer's ashes were recovered from the grave: by the Soviet government, the Danilov Monastery was transformed into a colony for juvenile delinquents, and the necropolis was subject to liquidation. Only a few burials 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 …
All the bloom of the Soviet intelligentsia was present at the reburial. Among them was the writer V. Lidin. It was 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 removed from the ground and opened, the audience was seized with bewilderment. In the coffin lay a skeleton with a skull turned to one side. Nobody found an explanation for this.
I recalled 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 there are obvious signs of decomposition. I mention this because even during the illness itself they found moments of vital numbness on me, my heart and pulse stopped beating. What he saw plunged those present into shock. Did Gogol really have to endure the horror of such a death?
It is worth noting that later this story was criticized. The 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 constantly 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 …" the explanation of the turn of the skull: the side boards of the coffin were the first to rot, the lid lowers 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.
However, Lidin's exuberant 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 assumed that it was then that the writer's skull could be stolen. It was surmised that he had been kidnapped at the request of the Russian theater fanatic, merchant Alexei Alexandrovich Bakhrushin. It was rumored that he already had the skull of the great Russian actor Shchepkin.