Nikolai Gogol

This early work by Nikolai Gogol was originally published in 1835 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Overcoat' is a short story about a government clerk who has his precious new overcoat stolen. No-one seems willing to help him retrieve his prized possession, a fact that continues to concern him even when he is beyond the grave. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born in Sorochintsi, Ukraine in 1809. In 1831, Gogol brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories, 'Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka'. It met with immediate success, and he followed it a year later with a second volume. 'The Nose' is regarded as a masterwork of comic short fiction, and 'The Overcoat' is now seen as one of the greatest short stories ever written; some years later, Dostoyevsky famously stated "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'." He is seen by many contemporary critics as one of the greatest short story writers who has ever lived, and theFather of Russia's Golden Age of Realism."

The Overcoat

المعطف

Tells the tale of a Christmas Eve in the village of Dikanka featuring the wicked mischief of the devil as he runs amok in the town and torments the town blacksmith, Vakula, as Vakula tries to win the love of Oksana.

The Night Before Christmas

Chichikov, an amusing and often confused schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from landholders' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit

Dead Souls

المعطف والأنف

Gogol's biting satirical comedy, first published in 1835, is an outrageous rant against the civil service and the class system of 19th century Russia. It combines realism with the fantastic and the absurd as one man struggles to be noticed by the woman he adores. Gogol's stories are rooted in commonplace events and his characters are common people but Gogol combined that in a weird world of fantasy, broad comedy and lunacy. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Diary of a Madman

الأنفس الميتة

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852) was a Russian writer of Ukrainian ethnicity and birth. Often called the "father of modern Russian realism, " he was one of the first Russian authors to criticize his country's way of life. Although his early works were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, he wrote in Russian and his works belong to the tradition of Russian literature. Gogol was one of the first masters of short prose, alongside Pushkin, Mérimée, Hoffmann, and Hawthorne. The main and most persistent characteristic of Gogol's style is its verbal expressiveness. He wrote with a view not so much to the acoustic effect on the ears of the listener as to the sensuous effect on the vocal apparatus of the reciter. The other main characteristic of his genius is the extraordinary intensity and vividness of impressionist vision, sometimes skirting expressionism. The Dead Souls (1842), The Inspector-General and The Overcoat (1842) are among his masterpieces.

The Mysterious Portrait

الأنف

A bizarre mix of broad comedy, fantasy, and social commentary, the title story offers an unforgettable depiction of a lunatic civil servant. Includes "Nevski Prospect" and "The Portrait."

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov awakens to discover that his nose is missing, he finds and confronts his nose, but the nose has acquired a higher rank in the civil service than he and refuses to return to his face.

The Nose

It is not necessary to say much about this tailor; but, as it is the custom to have the character of each personage in a novel clearly defined, there is no help for it, so here is Petrovitch the tailor. At first he was called only Grigoriy, and was some gentleman's serf; he commenced calling himself Petrovitch from the time when he received his free papers, and further began to drink heavily on all holidays, at first on the great ones, and then on all church festivities without discrimination, wherever a cross stood in the calendar.

The Overcoat and the Nose

المفتش العام

Вий

In this Russian comedy, a young traveller in a provincial town is mistaken for a government inspector.

The Government Inspector

Using, or rather mimicking, traditional forms of storytelling Gogol created stories that are complete within themselves and only tangentially connected to a meaning or moral. His work belongs to the school of invention, where each twist and turn of the narrative is a surprise unfettered by obligation to an overarching theme. Selected from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and the Petersburg tales and arranged in order of composition, the thirteen stories in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogolencompass the breadth of Gogol's literary achievement. From the demon-haunted “St. John's Eve ” to the heartrending humiliations and trials of a titular councilor in “The Overcoat,” Gogol's knack for turning literary conventions on their heads combined with his overt joy in the art of story telling shine through in each of the tales. This translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is as vigorous and darkly funny as the original Russian. It allows readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostevsky and Kafka.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Robert W. Chambers

Edgar Allan Poe

O Henry

J M Barrie

Our journey through the arc and pages of a book is often in the safe and knowing words of a narrator. But sometimes these friends, these guardians of our trust play games, they betray our literary friendship with lines on which we can’t rely. They take us into literary mazes turn characters we accept into those we mistrust, situations we know into something we can now only doubt. However, we still enjoy the journey; sometimes they make it so much fun there may be a happy ending. But often there isn’t. I did say they were unreliable. Among their untrustworthy ranks are J M Barrie, George Eliot, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Nikolai Gogol, O Henry and Edgar Allan Poe.

Short Stories With An Unreliable Narrator: For these authors, the truth has many versions and perspectives

Short Stories With An Unreliable Narrator

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, written from 1831-1832. They appeared in various magazines and were published in book form when Gogol, who had spent his life in today's Ukraine up to the age of nineteen, was twenty-two. He put his early impressions and memories of childhood into these pictures of peasant life. This was Gogol's groundbreaking work, though not his first, and formed the core of his style, especially his sense of the macabre. It was this collection that proved he was a new power in Russian literature with unique innovation and a carefully arranged mingling of the horrifying and the humorous.

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

The First New Translation in Forty Years Set sometime between the mid-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, Gogol’s epic tale recounts both a bloody Cossack revolt against the Poles (led by the bold Taras Bulba of Ukrainian folk mythology) and the trials of Taras Bulba’s two sons. As Robert Kaplan writes in his Introduction, “[Taras Bulba] has a Kiplingesque gusto . . . that makes it a pleasure to read, but central to its theme is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything that Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba to better understand the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face today in places like the Middle East and Central Asia.” And the critic John Cournos has noted, “A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic’s observation about Gogol: ‘Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life.’ But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in almost all of Gogol’s work his ‘free Cossack soul’ trying to break through the shell of sordid today like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are to our life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And they have all the joy and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much.”

Nikolai Gogol

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