Nikolai Gogol was an artist who, like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, "knew how to walk upside down in our valley of sorrows so as to make it to a merry place." This two-volume edition at last brings all of Gogol's fiction (except his novel Dead Souls) together in paperback. Volume 1 includes Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the early Ukrainian folktales that first brought Gogol fame, as well as "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Diary of a Madman." "It is good to have a complete collection of Gogol's tales in paperback. . . . Professor Kent has thoroughly revised Mrs. Garnett's...
Nikolai Gogol was an artist who, like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, "knew how to walk upside down in our valley of sorrows so as to make it ...
Volume 2 of The Complete Tales includes Gogol's Mirgorod stories among them that masterpiece of grotesque comedy, "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," the wonderfully satiric "Old World Landowners," and the Cossak epic "Taras Bulba." Here also is "The Nose," Gogol's final effort in the realm of the fantastic, as well as "The Coach," "The Portrait" (in its final version), and the most influential of his Petersburg stories, "The Overcoat.""
Volume 2 of The Complete Tales includes Gogol's Mirgorod stories among them that masterpiece of grotesque comedy, "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovi...
Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol Susanne Fusso Bernard Guilbert Guerney
Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work" and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier...
Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russia...
Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol Larissa Volokhonsky Richard Pevear
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry . . . I still haven't recovered."
More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together...
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained,...
The five other "Tales of Good and Evil" in this superb collection demonstrate the broad range of Gogol's literary palette in his short fiction: the fantastic, supernaturally tinged "The Terrible Vengeance," the comic portraiture of "Ivan Fydorovich Shponka and His Aunt," the tragic moral realism of "The Portrait" and "Nevsky Avenue," and the rampaging satire and absurdism of his send-up of Russian upper-class stupidity, "The Nose." The stories offer the reader the perfect introduction to the imaginative genius of Gogol, which was to flower so triumphantly in his masterpiece, Deal...
The five other "Tales of Good and Evil" in this superb collection demonstrate the broad range of Gogol's literary palette in his short fiction: the fa...
Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol George Reavey George Gibian
A few factual points ought to be explained to the reader, even though the novel itself eventually suffices to clarify some of them. First, the title of the book. Among Russian serf-owning gentry, the idiomatic way to assess someone's wealth was to express it in terms of the number of "souls" he owned--that is, male, adult serfs. Taxes on serfs had to be paid by the owner until the next census or registration date even if they may have died in the meantime. Gogol's "dead souls," in addition to this literal reference to serfs who had died since the last registration date for serfs, are also a...
A few factual points ought to be explained to the reader, even though the novel itself eventually suffices to clarify some of them. First, the title o...
This collection contains Gogol's three completed plays
The Government Inspector, which satirises a corrupt society was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest play in the Russian language and is still widely studied in schools and universities: "I resolved to gather into one heap everything that was bad in Russia which I was aware of at that time, all the injustices being perpetrated in those places, and in those circumstances that especially cried out for justice, and tried to hold them all up to ridicule, at one fell swoop." (Nikolai Gogol)
Marriage is a comedy about the business...
This collection contains Gogol's three completed plays
The Government Inspector, which satirises a corrupt society was regarded by Nabokov as...
Gogol's stories are admired for their skillful mingling of fantasy and reality, quiet good humor and use of mundane details -- as Gogol put it -- "to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary." Imaginative and timeless, they remain as fresh and significant today as they were to readers generations ago. This rich selection of four short stories by the great 19th-century Russian author of Dead Souls includes "The Nose," a savage satire of incompetent bureaucrats and the snobbery and complacency of the Russian upper classes; "Old-Fashioned Farmers," a sketch depicting an elderly couple who...
Gogol's stories are admired for their skillful mingling of fantasy and reality, quiet good humor and use of mundane details -- as Gogol put it -- "to ...
A stranger arrives in a Russian backwater community with a bizarre proposition for the local landowners: cash for their "dead souls," the serfs who have died in their service and for whom they must continue to pay taxes until the next census. The landowner receives a payment and a relief of his tax burden, and the stranger receives -- what? Gogol's comic masterpiece offers the answer in a vast and satirical painting of the Russian panorama, as it traces the path and encounters of its mysterious protagonist, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, in pursuit of his dubious scheme. The plot of...
A stranger arrives in a Russian backwater community with a bizarre proposition for the local landowners: cash for their "dead souls," the serfs who ha...
Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol Richard Pevear Larissa Volokhonsky
Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive...
Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly ...