This innovative study of one of the most important writers of Russian Golden Age literature argues that Gogol adopted a deliberate hybrid identity to mimic and mock the pretensions of the dominant culture.

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.

Nikolai Gogol, Russia's greatest comic writer, is a literary enigma. His masterworks--"The Nose," "The Overcoat," The Inspector General, Dead Souls--have attracted contradictory labels over the years, even as the originality of his achievement continues to defy exact explanation. Donald Fanger's superb new book begins by considering why this should be so, and goes onto survey what Gogol created, step by step: an extraordinary body of writing, a model for the writer in Russian society, a textual identity that eclipses his scanty biography, and a kind of fiction unique in its time. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, as well as on everything Gogol wrote, including journal articles, letters, drafts, and variants, Fanger explains Gogol's eccentric genius and makes clear how it opened the way to the great age of Russian fiction. The method is an innovative mixture of literary history and literary sociology with textual criticism and structural interrogation. What emerges is not only a framework for understanding Gogol's writing as a whole, but fresh and original interpretation of individual works. A concluding section, "The Surviving Presence," probes the fundamental nature of Gogol's creation to explain its astonishing vitality. In the process a major contribution is made to our understanding of comedy, irony, and satire, and ultimately to the theory of fiction itself.

Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol’s characteristic obsessions—city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise—and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso’s translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.

This two-volume edition at last brings all of Gogol's fiction (except his novel Dead Souls) together in paperback. Volume one includes Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, as well as 'Nevsky Prospekt' and 'Diary of a Madman'.

Nikolai Gogol was the most idiosyncratic of the great Russian novelists of the 19th century and lived a tragically short life which was as chaotic as the lives of the characters he created. This biography begins with Gogol's death and ends with his birth, an inverted structure typical of both Gogol and Nabokov. The biographer proceeds to establish the relationship between Gogol and his novels, especially with regard to "nose-consciousness", a peculiar feature of Russian life and letters, which finds its apotheosis in Gogol's own life and prose. There are more expressions and proverbs concerning the nose in Russian than in any other language in the world. Nabokov's style in this biography is comic, but as always leads to serious issues—in this case, an appreciation of the distinctive "sense of the physical" inherent in Gogol's work. Nabokov describes how Gogol's life and literature mingled, and explains the structure and style of Gogol's prose in terms of the novelist's life.

Written in the 1830s and early 1840s, these comic stories tackle life behind the cold and elegant façade of the Imperial capital from the viewpoints of various characters, such as a collegiate assessor who one day finds that his nose has detached itself from his face and risen the ranks to become a state councillor (‘The Nose’), a painter and a lieutenant whose romantic pursuits meet with contrasting degrees of success (‘Nevsky Prospect’) and a lowly civil servant whose existence desperately unravels when he loses his prized new coat (‘The Overcoat’). Also including the ‘Diary of Madman’, these Petersburg Tales paint a critical yet hilarious portrait of a city riddled with pomposity and self-importance, masterfully juxtaposing nineteenth-century realism with madcap surrealism, and combining absurdist farce with biting satire.

Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition 'One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is probably also the funniest' Guardian 'The most morally complete writer: baffled, outraged, reverent, mock-didactic, mocking, all at once. He honours life by feeling no one way about it' GEORGE SAUNDERS No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - 'The Overcoat', 'The Nose' and 'Diary of a Madman' - alongside lesser known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukranian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvellously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire. Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) was born in Ukraine and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work, at first, in various government departments. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), brought him widespread fame, and he went on to write further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. The first part of his great, and only, novel Dead Souls appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically and he repeatedly burned his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls. After the final burning in February 1852, he stopped eating and died in great pain ten days later.

"The Cloak" tells the story of the life and death of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, an unremarkable and indeed pathetic middle-aged titular councillor and copying clerk serving in an unnamed department of the Russian civil service. Though Akaky has very little and is cruelly picked on by his coworkers, Akaky displays no discontentment with his plight, in fact even openly relishing his copying work, in which he appears to find some interesting world of his own. His life is thrown into disarray, however, when he finds that he must buy a new overcoat, a great expense for which he is unprepared. Though he is initially upset by the need for the new overcoat, he soon finds in the quest to save up for and design the new overcoat a higher purpose. The thought of the new overcoat becomes a deep comfort to him, like having a steady companion. The day he receives the coat is the happiest day of his life. However, a turn of events leads to the sudden loss of his coat, and shortly thereafter, of his own life. After his death, Akaky returns as a ghost to haunt St. Petersburg for a time, stealing coats, and in particular the coat of a general who had refused to help Akaky.

Through careful textual readings of Gogol's most famous works, Karlinsky argues that Gogol's homosexual orientation—which Gogol himself could not accept or forgive in himself—may provide the missing key to the riddle of Gogol's personality. "A brilliant new biography that will long be prized for its illuminating psychological insights into Gogol's actions, its informative readings of his fiction and drama, and its own stylistic grace and vivacity."—Edmund White, Washington Post Book World