The Collected Tales (Everyman's Library)

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About The Collected Tales

Product Description Collected here are Gogol’s finest tales—stories that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller—allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. All of Gogol’s most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of the mundane and the supernatural that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, a brilliant translation of Nikolai Gogol’s short fiction. Review “The present translators have contrived to reveal [Gogol’s qualities] to the non-Russian reader at last, and virtually for the first time.” —John Bayley, The New York Review of Books“A superb translation.” —The New Yorker About the Author Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809. The author of such classic works as Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and Taras Bulba, he died in 1852. Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol. They live in Paris. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I N T R O D U C T I O N -- Art has the provinces in its blood. Art is provincial in principle, preserving for itself a naive, external, astonished, and envious outlook. ANDREI SINYAVSKY, In Gogol's Shadow Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol was born on April 1, 1809, in the village of Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district, Poltava province, in the Ukraine, also known as Little Russia. His childhood was spent on Vassilyevka, a modest estate belonging to his mother. Nearby was the town of Dikanka, once the property of Kochubey, the most famous hetman of the independent Ukraine. In the church of Dikanka there was an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, for whom Gogol was named. In 1821 Gogol was sent to boarding school in Nezhin, near Kiev. He graduated seven years later, and in December 1828, at the age of nineteen, left his native province to try his fortunes in the Russian capital. There he fled from posts as a clerk in two government ministries, failed a tryout for the imperial theater (he had not been a brilliant student at school, but had shown unusual talent as a mimic and actor, and his late father had been an amateur playwright), printed at his own expense a long and very bad romantic poem, then bought back all the copies and burned them, and in 1830 published his first tale,''St. John's Eve,'' in the March issue of the magazine Fatherland Notes. There followed, in September 1831 and March 1832, the two volumes of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, each containing four tales on Ukrainian themes with a prologue by their supposed collector, the beekeeper Rusty Panko. They were an immediate success and made the young provincial a famous writer. Baron Delvig, friend and former schoolmate of the poet Alexander Pushkin and editor of the almanac Northern Flowers, had introduced Gogol to Pushkin's circle even before that, and in 1831 he had made the acquaintance of the poet himself. Writing to Pushkin on August 21 of that year, Gogol told him how his publisher had gone to the shop where the first volume of Evenings was being printed and found the typesetters all laughing merrily as they set the book. Shortly afterwards, Pushkin mentioned the incident in one of the first published notices of Gogol's work, a letter to the editor of a literary supplement, which began: ''I have just read Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. It amazed me. Here is real gaiety - honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! What sensitivity! All this is so unusual