Monument to Gogol in Saint Petersburg. The decision to erect the monument was made back in 1952, on the centenary of Gogol's death. A foundation stone was laid in Manezhnaya Square, engraved with an inscription stating that a monument to the writer N.V. Gogol would be installed here. But the project dragged on... The stone outlasted the USSR and was removed in 1999, since in 1997 the Gogol monument was placed in another location — on Malaya Konyushennaya Street, which by that time had been turned into a pedestrian zone.

The monument was created by sculptor Belov, a student of the famous St. Petersburg sculptor Mikhail Konstantinovich Anikushin. Gogol turned out gloomy, mysterious, and even mystical; his face is slightly covered and turned to the side, his body constrained. Anikushin’s sculpture of Pushkin at the end of the "Chyornaya Rechka" metro station somewhat resembles this monument — the same long coat with a cape, crossed arms, the left leg slightly forward — only Pushkin’s head is raised, unlike Gogol’s depiction, and the crossed arms are lowered instead.

There is a legend that the monument was erected not only for Gogol but also for the criminal authority Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin, who resembled the writer in appearance, and the names of the gang members are engraved on the pedestal. This story is described, attributed to Kumarin himself, in the book "Sealed In. Chronicles of the Kremlin Central" by Ivan Borisovich Mironov: “They put up a monument to Nikolai Vasilyevich in Petersburg. Journalists immediately noticed the facial resemblance and claimed that the monument was not for Gogol but for me. On the first button of the TV, there is a hysterical fool who makes crime stories, and she even went so far as to say that the Gogol-Kumarin monument opposite Kazan Cathedral was erected as a symbol of the irreconcilable struggle between the Tambov and Kazan gangs…”

However, jokes about Gogol are especially bad; he is not some respectable Turgenev. Gogol expressed his will on this matter clearly and categorically: “I bequeath that no monument be erected over me and that no such trifle, unworthy of a Christian, be thought of.” This will opens the “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.” In short, they did it in vain!

https://www.dp.ru/a/2009/05/08/S_Gogolem_shutki_osobenno

https://biography.wikireading.ru/60508