The article is devoted to the study of the influence of N.V. Gogol’s spiritual and artistic ideas on the formation of the creative personality and poetics of V. V. Korsak-Zavadsky, the writer of the first wave of Russian emigration. The methodology is based on a comparative-historical, cultural-typological approach and principles of historical poetry. It concludes that Gogol’s romantic approach to the reflection of reality allows Korsak-Zavadsky to combine a religious worldview with utopianism and lyricism. While Gogol’s utopianism was associated with laughter as a tool for eradicating vices, in the work of Korsak-Zavadsky we encounter a utopianism of memory based on the idea of the aesthetic and religious resurrection of the human soul in opposition to the apocalyptic present and the Western secularism.