During his life, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol made many travels. And the trip to Lubeck in July 1829 was only the first of them. And he went to Germany that summer in order to somehow get rid of the bitterness of defeat - his first composition, the romantic poem “Hans Küchelgarten”, published under the pseudonym Alov, brought him nothing but disappointment. They absolutely did not want to buy the poem, critics spoke extremely negatively about it, so the aspiring author himself was forced to buy up the entire circulation and destroy it. A trip to a foreign land seemed like a salvation to him: this way he could somehow forget and start a new life.