I headcanon that Nikolai Gogol suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. He has an uncanny obsession with freeing himself from his emotions and essentially separating himself from humanity. It makes sense to me that this obsession would come from a place of feeling his emotions far too strongly for far too long; controlled entirely by overwhelming fear and sadness and mania and panic. Nikolai seeks to strip himself of humanity in desperate hopes that he'll be able to FINALLY get off his rollercoaster and feel remotely stable for the first time in his life... and I think it's quite possible that he, being so different, never felt human to begin with. (I don't kin Nikolai to a concerning degree, you do 😂)