The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol - (Vintage Classics) (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"A superb new translation" (The New Yorker) of stories that allow readers to experience the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka.

When Nikolai Gogol left his Ukrainian village in 1828 to seek his fortune in St. Petersburg, he began composing these marvelous stories--tales that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city-dweller.

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales--from the demon-haunted "St. John's Eve" to the strange surrealism of "The Nose," from the heartrending trials of the copyist in "The Overcoat" to those of the delusional clerk in "The Diary of a Madman."

To this exquisite translation--destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's short fiction--Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Gogol's classic novel Dead Souls and their award-winning version of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

Review Quotes

"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 the Ukraine in 1809 and died in 1852. Originally trained as a painter, he became interested in the theater and was soon known for his plays and short stories, notably "The Diary of a Madman" (1834), "The Nose" (1836), and "The Overcoat" (1842). Dead Souls, his novel, was published in 1842.

Richard Pevear, a native of Boston, and Larissa Volokhonsky, a native of Leningrad, are married and live in France. Their translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.

Also translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky are Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol and Crime and Punishment, Demons, and Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.