The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

by Nikolai Gogol, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375706158
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/29/1999
Series:	Vintage Classics
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1030L (what's this?)

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.

Read an Excerpt

Translated and Annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(Continues…)

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Copyright © 1999 Nikolai Gogol.
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Table of Contents

St. John’s Eve

The Night Before Christmas

The Terrible Vengeance

Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt

Old World Landowners

Viy

The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich

Nevsky Prospect

The Diary of a Madman

The Nose

The Carriage

The Portrait

The Overcoat

What People are Saying About This

Vladamir Nabokov

"The greatest artist that Russia has yet produced."

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

Pevear and Volokhonsky continue their remarkable conquest of 19th-century Russian fiction with this lively new translation of 13 of "the Russian Dickens's" wildest and finest stories. Excluding only lesser pieces from Gogol's earliest volumes (though one misses the madly romantic novella "Taras Bulba"), this selection offers richly colloquial versions (which sound like spoken narrative) of such classic "Ukrainian Tales" as the imperturbably melodramatic "The Terrible Vengeance" and the memorably lurid vampire tale "Viy," and also "Petersburg Tales" like the deliriously surrealistic "The Nose" and that uniquely dreamlike, and seminal, portrayal of a timid clerk's acquisition and loss of his only meaningful possession: "The Overcoat." Pevear's informative Preface persuasively emphasizes the personal, nonpolitical, and, to some degree, haphazard nature of the distinctive alchemy by which a deeply flawed and troubled soul managed to create some of the most colorful and haunting fiction of his century.

Kirkus Reviews