And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories

by Nikolai Gogol, Oliver Ready (Translator)

Overview

Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition

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 three greatest St Petersburg stories - 'The Nose', 'The Overcoat' and 'The Diary of a Madman' - are presented alongside three masterworks set in the Ukrainian and Russian provinces, demonstrating the breadth of Gogol's work.

Gogol's extraordinary work is characterised by his idiosyncratic and often very funny sensibility, and these stories offer us his unique, original and marvellously skewed perspective on the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782275152
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Series:	Essential Stories , #6
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	235,815
Product dimensions:	4.73(w) x 6.49(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in 1809 in Ukraine, and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work in an obscure government ministry. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), made him famous, and he went on to write several further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. Part I 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 burned much of his writing, including part II of Dead Souls. He died in 1852, possibly from self-starvation.

Read an Excerpt

The Nose
I
A most peculiar thing happened in St Petersburg on March 25th. The barber Ivan
Yakovlevich (only his first name and patronymic have been preserved: even his shop sign, which depicts a gentleman with a lathered cheek and the words We Also Let Blood,
says nothing about his surname), the barber Ivan Yakovlevich, who lives on
Voznesensky Prospect, woke quite early and caught the smell of hot bread. Lifting himself up a little in bed, he saw his spouse, quite a worthy lady who was very fond of coffee, taking some freshly baked loaves out of the stove.
“I won’t have any coffee today, Praskovya Osipovna,” Ivan Yakovlevich said.
“Today I’m in the mood for some warm bread and onion.”
(In fact, Ivan Yakovlevich would have liked both coffee and bread, but he knew that demanding two things at once was out of the question: Praskovya Osipovna strongly disapproved of all such whims.)
“More fool him,” his spouse thought to herself. “Means an extra cup for me.” And she chucked a loaf onto the table.
Donning his tailcoat over his nightshirt to make himself decent, Ivan Yakovlevich sat down at the table, sprinkled some salt, peeled two onions, picked up a knife and,
making a serious face, addressed the loaf. After cutting it in two equal halves, he was surprised to spot something white inside. Ivan Yakovlevich poked about gingerly with the knife and had a feel with his finger. “Pretty firm!” he said to himself. “What could it be?”
He stuck his fingers in and pulled out… a nose! Ivan Yakovlevich froze; he began rubbing his eyes and feeling the thing: a nose, most definitely a nose! And not just any old nose, but a nose he knew. Ivan Yakovlevich’s face was a picture of horror. But this horror was nothing compared to the rage that had overcome his spouse.

Editorial Reviews

"Gogol’s prose works feature a fiendishly complex narrative structure. In his engaging new versions, Oliver Ready deploys a rich vocabulary. . . . Along the way, there is much to savour." — Times Literary Supplement

"I wish I had written the story 'The Overcoat'. The sensibility of that story is perfect . . . spontaneous and funny and also formally very experimental" - George Saunders

"One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is also probably the funniest" - Guardian

"The greatest artist that Russia has yet produced" - Vladimir Nabokov

From the Publisher