the couple had six sons and eight daughters. His eldest daughter Vera Aksakova who was born in 1819 was also a noted author. He began publishing translations, reviews, and articles in the early 1820s, though his important work came much later. In 1827 he was appointed to the Moscow Censorship Committee, from which he was dismissed in 1832 for allowing the publication of a "scurrilous" pamphlet on drunken policemen; in 1833 he became an inspector at the Grand Duke Constantine School of Surveying, and in 1835 the first director of the Constantine Geodetic Institute (Konstantinovsky mezhevoi institut). He retired from the civil service in 1838. In 1832 he met Nikolai Gogol "and recognized in him what he had failed to see in Púshkin or any other man—a purely Russian genius. Aksákov's house, a stronghold of pure Russianism in Moscow society, became the temple of the cult of Gogol, and Aksakov its high priest." It was Gogol who revealed to Aksakov the possibility of creating literature based directly on life, without forcing it into the mold of classical forms. In 1834 Aksakov published his first realistic story, "A Blizzard." Around 1840, encouraged by Gogol, he began writing the book that would make him famous, A Family Chronicle. While he was working on that, he published books about two of his favorite activities since his youth, Notes on Fishing (1847) and Notes of a Hunter in Orenburg Province (1852). Their "limpid style and concrete content," which were "almost unique in Russian literature," were appreciated by contemporaries; Turgenev reviewed them enthusiastically, and Gogol wrote Aksakov, "Your birds and fishes are more alive than my men and women." Later life In 1843 Aksakov settled in the village of Abramtsevo, near Moscow, where he entertained writers including Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy and which was also frequented by his Slavophile sons, Konstantin and Ivan. In the late 1850s he published his most enduring works, The Family Chronicle (Semeinaya khronika, 1856; translated as A Russian Gentleman) and Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson (Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka, 1858, translated as Years of Childhood). These reminiscences of a childhood spent in a Russian patriarchal family "brought Aksakov recognition as a literary artist of the first rank." Aksakov's semi-autobiographical narratives are unmatched for their scrupulous and detailed description of the everyday life of the Russian nobility. Among Aksakov's other works are The History of My Acquaintance with Gogol (Istoriya moego znakomstva