Sorochyntsi first appears in the records of the 1620s as a sloboda, a frontier settlement, and in 1646 it passed to a Polish prince of the powerful Wiśniowiecki family. By the turn of the eighteenth century it had become the seat of a Cossack district government, and its most consequential son was already shaping its future. Danylo Apostol, born here and destined to become Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host, founded the Sorochyntsi St Michael's Monastery in 1670. Decades later, in 1732, he built the Church of the Transfiguration in the Ukrainian Baroque style, and was buried there two years afterward. That same church would witness another beginning nearly eighty years on, when the infant Gogol was brought to its font to be baptized.

The Sorochyntsi Fair grew into an institution. Under the Russian Empire it convened five times a year, a great regional gathering of trade and spectacle. Soviet rule imposed a forty-year silence on it, but the fair was revived and now runs annually, and since a 1999 presidential decree it holds the status of a national trade fair. It remains a showcase for the crafts of the region: the intricate white-on-white embroidery of nearby Reshetylivka, the ceramics of Opishnia, woven rugs, and the theatrical performers who bring Gogol's own scenes back to life among the stalls. To walk it is to step, for a day, into the world Gogol described, where every transaction carries a whiff of comedy and the crowd itself is half the show.

The village has never let go of its most famous native. On August 23, 1911, a monument to Gogol by the sculptor Ilya Ginzburg was unveiled here, and a Gogol Memorial Museum keeps his memory close. The recognition reached national scale in 1983, when the Soviet Union issued a postage stamp depicting both the monument and the museum. Gogol is not the only writer the village claims; the poet Volodymyr Samiylenko was also born here. And in 1845 the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko passed through on behalf of an archaeological commission surveying the history and architecture of the Poltava region, an errand commemorated by a street that has borne his name here for well over half a century.

History left its marks on the village's identity as well as its buildings. From 1925 to 1931 it was renamed Neronovychi, after Yevhen Neronovych, a revolutionary figure who had been executed in the town amid the chaos of 1918, a grim episode from the years when the region changed hands repeatedly. The old name returned, and Velyki Sorochyntsi, once granted town status and later reclassified as a village, settled back into being what it fundamentally is: a small rural community of a few thousand people, its population around 3,809 by 2013. Yet for one crowded, colorful week each year, the fair Gogol immortalized proves that a village's fame need not depend on its size.