Nikolai Gogol
1) Dead Souls
3) Viy
A young priest is preparing to spend three nights alone with the corpse of a dead witch and only his faith to protect him. He is ordered to supervise the waking of the dead witch in a small old wooden church of a remote village. Join the priest on his journey in this Sovereign Classic edition of Viy.
Explore a fascinating period in history through the eyes of renowned Russian literary realist Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. This historian-turned-fiction-writer had a lifelong interest in the culture of the Ukranian Cossacks, the community at the center of the tale "Taras Bulba" and several of the other stories brought together in this engrossing and meticulously researched collection.
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
...Admired by writers from Nabokov to Bulgakov to George Saunders, Gogol is considered one of the more enigmatic of the Russian greats. He only wrote one novel, Dead Souls, and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major output.
In this collection, beautifully and skilfully translated by Oliver Ready, Gogol's...
Although it may read to modern audiences like a hilarious slapstick comedy, The Inspector-General is actually much more than that. Famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol intended it to be a veiled but pointed satire of the ineptitude, corruption, and greed that exemplified the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. The witty play was later used as the basis for a movie version starring Danny Kaye (1949).
Selected from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and the Petersburg tales and arranged in...
13) Taras Bulba
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...