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The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered."
More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. 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.
These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.
Contains:
-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
More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. 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.
These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.
Contains:
-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
435 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1835
About the author
Nikolai Gogol
1,528 books4,979 followersPeople consider that Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь) founded realism in Russian literature. His works include
The Overcoat
(1842) and
Dead Souls
(1842).
Ukrainian birth, heritage, and upbringing of Gogol influenced many of his written works among the most beloved in the tradition of Russian-language literature. Most critics see Gogol as the first Russian realist. His biting satire, comic realism, and descriptions of Russian provincials and petty bureaucrats influenced later Russian masters Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Gogol wittily said many later Russian maxims.
Gogol first used the techniques of surrealism and the grotesque in his works The Nose , Viy , The Overcoat , and Nevsky Prospekt . Ukrainian upbringing, culture, and folklore influenced his early works, such as Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka .
His later writing satirized political corruption in the Russian empire in Dead Souls .
Ukrainian birth, heritage, and upbringing of Gogol influenced many of his written works among the most beloved in the tradition of Russian-language literature. Most critics see Gogol as the first Russian realist. His biting satire, comic realism, and descriptions of Russian provincials and petty bureaucrats influenced later Russian masters Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Gogol wittily said many later Russian maxims.
Gogol first used the techniques of surrealism and the grotesque in his works The Nose , Viy , The Overcoat , and Nevsky Prospekt . Ukrainian upbringing, culture, and folklore influenced his early works, such as Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka .
His later writing satirized political corruption in the Russian empire in Dead Souls .
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 427 reviews
August 31, 2021
For a job application once I answered the question "if money were not a problem, what is one project you would do?" and I wrote "I would film Gogol's story Viy with the muppets a la Jim Henson's The Storyteller. I got the bartneding job but we never talked about making that happen, unfortunately.
December 19, 2012
"We all came from Gogol's overcoat."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
During my childhood, like many other kids, I was also in the habit of listening to bedtime stories. They were usually told by my father or my grandmother. My granny stuck to stories she knew already, either related to her life in her village or some anecdotes related to Hindu Mythology where there is no dearth of tales. My father however had to come up with a new story every time in an on-the-spot manner. These stories used to be sweet, simple, at times illogical but enjoyable nevertheless. The topics used to vary but the purpose was the same, to put me to sleep with sweet thoughts in my head to carry forward to the dream world. These are the luxuries one enjoys being a child but soon our dependence on such stories fades away and inadvertently we start finding solace in a more complicated network of words to excite us.
Lately I’ve been reading some twisted literature and enjoy it too but thanks to Italo Calvino, I also became particularly inclined to short stories and started looking for some good collection by other writers and thereupon came across Nikolai Gogol. Initially his simple introduction that I encountered was: Russian writer who introduced realism to Russian literature (1809-1852).
Later after reading few of his stories, I searched a little more and found this extended introduction: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer.Considered by his contemporaries’ one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque.
But to be honest, I just don’t want to objectify him with any of that literary jargon. For me he is just a story-teller who knew his gift very well and wanted his readers to enjoy his beautifully crafted tales with that child-like excitement and curiosity. For most of the time, I felt like being present at this imaginary set up consisting of a full moon night, with bonfire burning in the middle of a beautiful meadow in a nice country place, and a wise old village patriarch is reciting stories that his old eyes had long witnessed in his wondrous life . The only difference is that those stories are not for children.
This bizarre collection has generous use of outlandish and idiosyncratic elements conveying dark humor in its highest form making each single story worth reading and re-reading. Though of course there are some which are better than others namely The Nose, The Overcoat and The Diary of a Madman, which are mainly in the same league of brilliance covering themes such as alienation in society and status & class anxiety imbued with ruthless satire. These stories are heavily based on nonsensical musings and that’s the very thing that would strike a chord with its readers i.e enjoying the supposed nonsense and making out logical interpretations of the same. Some sources have revealed baffling implications of certain props Gogol applied to his works. He definitely had a fixation with human Nose which features in most of these stories. .
The Overcoat recounts the story of a socially withdrawn clerk whose fatal obsession with getting him a new overcoat/cloak turned into a series of unexpected consequences. I especially liked its starting:
“In the department of -- but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service. Each individual attached to them nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person. Quite recently a complaint was received from a justice of the peace, in which he plainly demonstrated that all the imperial institutions were going to the dogs..”
Diary of a Madman is another masterpiece of a short story surrounding around schizophrenia and depicts the protagonist’s gradual declivity into madness due to his confinement to societal pressures and the standard identity imposed upon him which was in no way unique or special to make him feel a man of some importance. It also presents a broader view upon Russia’s identical crisis in the wake of the 19th century. The Nose is a satirist aim at societal hypocrisy and administrative & bureaucratic set-up, along with The Overcoat .
Apart from them, I was really looking forward to reading The Viy, a tale reproduced from a specimen Russian folk-lore having facets of magical realism. Now I knew that I was supposed to get scared by reading it but I really don’t get frightened by just ‘reading’ such stories so I deliberately created an environment wherein I sat alone in a dim-lighted room at midnight and read it. It worked, Yes. Speaking of which I thoroughly enjoyed The Mysterious Portrait which had its share of supernatural elements supported by important life lessons based on spirituality and recognizing the good and the evil in this world.
Stories like ‘How two Ivans quarreled’ (Apparently Ivan was Gogol's favorite character name probably because it was his younger brother’s name who died at the tender age of 8) is a sweet story supported by the old world humor. I equally relished rest of the stories like Old Fashioned Farmers, The Fair of Sorotchinetz, An Evening in May, Mid-Summer Evening, and The Carriage though there were instances of getting a bit bored due to some detailed descriptions of the settings and characters but since they were necessary points for the development of narrative I’ll blame that on my impatience.
The main thing I found common w/r/t all these stories at least in my case is that they evoked a very balanced set of emotions in me. There was no extremity I experienced, being it sadness, happiness, bewilderment or sympathy. It was as if Gogol is implying, “Oh you’re feeling sad for that character, take this!” and the very next moment I started to laugh at some turn of events in the narration. Therefore the pathos he created around his works were skillfully juxtaposed with hilarity and there lies Gogol’s strength as an outstanding writer who changed the face of literary world and influenced many great works which later served and still serving as the epitome of great literature. I’m glad that it was through these short-stories that I’ve begun my expedition into the world of Russian Literature and also that of Gogol’s before reading his celebrated ‘Dead Souls’.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
During my childhood, like many other kids, I was also in the habit of listening to bedtime stories. They were usually told by my father or my grandmother. My granny stuck to stories she knew already, either related to her life in her village or some anecdotes related to Hindu Mythology where there is no dearth of tales. My father however had to come up with a new story every time in an on-the-spot manner. These stories used to be sweet, simple, at times illogical but enjoyable nevertheless. The topics used to vary but the purpose was the same, to put me to sleep with sweet thoughts in my head to carry forward to the dream world. These are the luxuries one enjoys being a child but soon our dependence on such stories fades away and inadvertently we start finding solace in a more complicated network of words to excite us.
Lately I’ve been reading some twisted literature and enjoy it too but thanks to Italo Calvino, I also became particularly inclined to short stories and started looking for some good collection by other writers and thereupon came across Nikolai Gogol. Initially his simple introduction that I encountered was: Russian writer who introduced realism to Russian literature (1809-1852).
Later after reading few of his stories, I searched a little more and found this extended introduction: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer.Considered by his contemporaries’ one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque.
But to be honest, I just don’t want to objectify him with any of that literary jargon. For me he is just a story-teller who knew his gift very well and wanted his readers to enjoy his beautifully crafted tales with that child-like excitement and curiosity. For most of the time, I felt like being present at this imaginary set up consisting of a full moon night, with bonfire burning in the middle of a beautiful meadow in a nice country place, and a wise old village patriarch is reciting stories that his old eyes had long witnessed in his wondrous life . The only difference is that those stories are not for children.
This bizarre collection has generous use of outlandish and idiosyncratic elements conveying dark humor in its highest form making each single story worth reading and re-reading. Though of course there are some which are better than others namely The Nose, The Overcoat and The Diary of a Madman, which are mainly in the same league of brilliance covering themes such as alienation in society and status & class anxiety imbued with ruthless satire. These stories are heavily based on nonsensical musings and that’s the very thing that would strike a chord with its readers i.e enjoying the supposed nonsense and making out logical interpretations of the same. Some sources have revealed baffling implications of certain props Gogol applied to his works. He definitely had a fixation with human Nose which features in most of these stories. .
The Overcoat recounts the story of a socially withdrawn clerk whose fatal obsession with getting him a new overcoat/cloak turned into a series of unexpected consequences. I especially liked its starting:
“In the department of -- but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service. Each individual attached to them nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person. Quite recently a complaint was received from a justice of the peace, in which he plainly demonstrated that all the imperial institutions were going to the dogs..”
Diary of a Madman is another masterpiece of a short story surrounding around schizophrenia and depicts the protagonist’s gradual declivity into madness due to his confinement to societal pressures and the standard identity imposed upon him which was in no way unique or special to make him feel a man of some importance. It also presents a broader view upon Russia’s identical crisis in the wake of the 19th century. The Nose is a satirist aim at societal hypocrisy and administrative & bureaucratic set-up, along with The Overcoat .
Apart from them, I was really looking forward to reading The Viy, a tale reproduced from a specimen Russian folk-lore having facets of magical realism. Now I knew that I was supposed to get scared by reading it but I really don’t get frightened by just ‘reading’ such stories so I deliberately created an environment wherein I sat alone in a dim-lighted room at midnight and read it. It worked, Yes. Speaking of which I thoroughly enjoyed The Mysterious Portrait which had its share of supernatural elements supported by important life lessons based on spirituality and recognizing the good and the evil in this world.
Stories like ‘How two Ivans quarreled’ (Apparently Ivan was Gogol's favorite character name probably because it was his younger brother’s name who died at the tender age of 8) is a sweet story supported by the old world humor. I equally relished rest of the stories like Old Fashioned Farmers, The Fair of Sorotchinetz, An Evening in May, Mid-Summer Evening, and The Carriage though there were instances of getting a bit bored due to some detailed descriptions of the settings and characters but since they were necessary points for the development of narrative I’ll blame that on my impatience.
The main thing I found common w/r/t all these stories at least in my case is that they evoked a very balanced set of emotions in me. There was no extremity I experienced, being it sadness, happiness, bewilderment or sympathy. It was as if Gogol is implying, “Oh you’re feeling sad for that character, take this!” and the very next moment I started to laugh at some turn of events in the narration. Therefore the pathos he created around his works were skillfully juxtaposed with hilarity and there lies Gogol’s strength as an outstanding writer who changed the face of literary world and influenced many great works which later served and still serving as the epitome of great literature. I’m glad that it was through these short-stories that I’ve begun my expedition into the world of Russian Literature and also that of Gogol’s before reading his celebrated ‘Dead Souls’.
August 17, 2020
To those interested in the short fiction of Gogol, I couldn’t recommend a better collection. All the masterpieces are here, the selection is representative, the translation is vigorous, and the introduction is informative and helpful.
Of course the masterpieces of the St. Petersburg period are here (“The Nose,” “The Diary of a Madman, “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Overcoat”), Gogol’s macabre and satiric depictions of humiliation and madness among the bureaucrats of Russia’s capital city, but the masterpieces of Gogol’s Ukrainian period are here also (“St. John’s Eve,” “The Night Before Christmas,” “The Terrible Vengeance,” “Viy”), those exuberantly improvisational riffs on folklore themes filled with witches, wizards, and exorcisms (plus a czarina’s slippers, a flight on the back of a devil, and a monster whose eyelids stretch all the way down to its feet.) The St. Petersburg tale’s are well known, but the Ukrainian tales are an equally valid—and more vivid and high-spirited—expression of Gogol’s genius.
I am, however, happy to see that some of the lesser tales—fine stories, only lesser when compared with Gogol’s best—are here too, giving the reader a more balanced and representative sampling of the author’s work. From the Ukraine, we have the more mundane accounts of Ukrainian small town and country life (“Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” “Old World Landowners,” “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”) which show us a somewhat sunnier side of Gogol, and from St Petersburg, we have two memorable tales (“The Carriage” and the “Portrait”), the first slightly marred by an abrupt ending, the second by an excess of moral seriousness.
The translation is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband-and-wife team best known for their translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As is usual with their collaborations, this translations seeks a perfect balance between faithfulness to the original Russian idioms and a natural, flowing English style. And is usual with their translations, they often find it.
Pevear himself wrote the introduction to this volume, and it is a helpful, for he understands Gogol’s contradictory nature: an improvisational genius, entranced both by the marvelous and the realistic, yet haunted by the fear that he had failed to achieve what was for him a sacred task:
Gogol was made uneasy by his works. They detached themselves from him and lived on their own, producing effects that he had not foreseen and that sometimes dismayed him. He would write commentaries after the fact, trying to reduce them to more commonplace and acceptable dimensions. But their initial freedom stayed with them. It was inherent in his method of composition, and in his astonishing artistic gift—astonishing first of all to himself.
Want to read
March 22, 2021“St. John’s Eve” is a tale of a Faustian bargain cut so Pyotr might win the confidence of his sweetheart’s avaricious father and, thus, the sweetheart herself. The story is phantasmagorically rich and speeds along with astonishing velocity.
The Night Before Christmas” strikes me as proto-Mikhail Bulgakov. The story of witches and devils and Cossacks and peasants feels (at times) like an abandoned fragment from The Master and Margarita. It has that kind of madcap tone.
“The Terrible Vengeance” Patches of melodrama here but otherwise readable. Weakest story so far. Ghosts call “I can’t breathe” (seriously) from a graveyard. It turns out there’s a sorcerer is on the loose. He takes the form of a father-in-law who murders his own daughter who is the wife of a Cossack chief. A massacre of neighboring Poles occurs. Mayhem generally.
Still reading
The Night Before Christmas” strikes me as proto-Mikhail Bulgakov. The story of witches and devils and Cossacks and peasants feels (at times) like an abandoned fragment from The Master and Margarita. It has that kind of madcap tone.
“The Terrible Vengeance” Patches of melodrama here but otherwise readable. Weakest story so far. Ghosts call “I can’t breathe” (seriously) from a graveyard. It turns out there’s a sorcerer is on the loose. He takes the form of a father-in-law who murders his own daughter who is the wife of a Cossack chief. A massacre of neighboring Poles occurs. Mayhem generally.
Still reading
May 7, 2015
Do you remember that bit in Through the Looking-glass where the Red Queen turns into a sheep?
‘Oh, much better!’ cried the Queen, her voice rising into a squeak as she went on. ‘Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!’ The last word ended in a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started.
She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn't make out what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really – was it really a sheep that was sitting on the other side of the counter?
When I was a kid I was obsessed by this passage. That a writer should ‘make things up’ was something I accepted instinctively – nothing could be more natural than to invent incidents, people, even whole species, for a story. But that the basic preconditions of reality – the laws of physics, the relationship between senses and experience – that these could be simply ignored, or blended at will – that a queen could become a sheep, mid-sentence, with no explanation considered necessary…that just blew my mind.
I reread this little section endlessly, amazed by how I would fall for the sleight-of-hand even while aware of it. And that nonsensical line of speech (Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!) is, silly as this sounds, one of the most talismanic in all literature for me. It represents something fiction can do that cannot be done by any other medium.
A Terrible Revenge
Carroll had the device down perfectly, and I reckon that's why the Alice books, despite being written for children, have such a hold over literary history. It is easy to see that a queen becoming a sheep in 1871 is not far away from a salesman waking up as a giant insect forty-four years later. Reading Gogol's ‘The Nose’ (Нос) was therefore a bit of a join-the-dots moment for me, because here we have the literary ancestor of all such techniques. I especially loved that exquisite moment where our noseless narrator first glimpses a familiar figure in the streets of Petersburg:
Something inexplicable took place before his eyes: a carriage was stopping at the entrance, the carriage door flew open; a gentleman in uniform, bending down, sprang out and ran up the steps. What was the horror and at the same time amazement of Kovalyov when he recognised that this was his own nose! At this extraordinary spectacle it seemed to him that everything was heaving before his eyes; he felt that he could scarcely stand; but he made up his mind, come what may, to await the gentleman's return to the carriage, and he stood trembling all over as though in fever. Two minutes later the nose actually did come out. He was in a gold-laced uniform with a big stand-up collar; he had on chamois-leather breeches, at his side was a sword. From his plumed hat it might be gathered that he was of the rank of a civil councillor. Everything showed that he was going somewhere to pay a visit. He looked to both sides, called to the coachman to open the carriage door, got in and drove off.
What makes this so wonderful is the matter-of-fact prose: Kovalyov may be astonished, but the narrator is not. In the unlikely event that such a scene would even occur to any other writer, it's very easy to see that, in less skilful hands, paragraphs of description might be dedicated to convincing you of how a two-inch nose can have become a six-foot personage capable of wearing clothes and of moving of its own accord. Gogol makes no attempt whatever to convince, to persuade. He just relates the impossible.
For him, clearly, this epistemological malleability is something that has been inherited from folktales. The earliest stories in this collection are basically Ukrainian folk stories, and I found them mostly tiresome and overblown. Only later, when you get to the good stuff, do the earlier stories become more interesting in retrospect, because you can see where a lot of his techniques originated.
St John's Eve
The unrestrained demonic hijinks of his earlier stories are gradually brought under control and funnelled into specific themes and ideas – as in ‘The Portrait’ (Портрет), for instance, where a strong element of supernaturalism is used as a means to comment on artistic integrity. Even in the straighter stories, though, an underlying uncertainty bubbles up into a sense of genuine weirdness, especially in the later works – there's an almost Nervalian, unhinged quality that manifests itself in odd little unexplained narrative devices. There is certainly something eerily convincing about ‘A Madman's Diary’ (Записки сумасшедшего), with its progressively insane dating system. ‘I don't remember the date,’ one entry is headed. ‘There was no month either.’
The Nevsky Prospect
This collection culminates in the very influential ‘The Overcoat’ (Шинель), a story that oozes with proto-Freudianism and that seems, despite its comic-philosophical flourishes, to be papering over some underlying terror. Neverthless, ‘The Nose’ remains my favourite piece. It is just so odd, so resistant to any satisfactory interpretation, and the idea that it might just be intended at face value is almost frightening. ‘What is utterly nonsensical,’ Gogol asserts with appealing simplicity, ‘happens in this world.̀’
This particular edition from the Folio Society comes with eleven beautiful iconographic illustrations from Peter Suart, a few of which are scattered above. They complement Gogol's brand of formal weirdness perfectly.
May 7, 2023
Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative mystery than Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol(31 March 1809 – 4 March 1852). He has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came, Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous in effect, with pseudo-classism with strong foreign influences. In the speech of the upper circles, there was an over fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them, the two friends, by the force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a nude structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word borne of the people gave soul and wings to literature. Only by coming to earth, the native earth was it enabled to sour.
Coming up from Little Russia, Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into a body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novelist direction to this very day.
I think the introduction above, which is used by a multitude of websites, including Amazon, describes Gogol's work and person the best.
I read this collection of tales throughout 2019 and really enjoyed the 'other worldliness' of them all. Once again, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated and annotated this volume splendidly. They made the reading of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov a good experience too. With the footnotes and annotations added to their work, they just make a much bigger literary adventure possible for so many readers. Therefore, it was a delight to find this work from them as well.
This collection includes:
Ukrainian Tales:
-St. John's Eve;
-The Night Before Christmas;
-The Terrible Vengeance;
-Ivan Fyodorovich Sphonka and His Aunt;
-Old World Landowners;
-Viy;
-The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforvich;
Petersburg Tales:
-Nevsky Prospect;
-The Dairy of a Madman;
-The Nose;
-The Carriage;
-The Portrait;
-The Overcoat.
There is a touch of modern authors such as Garrison Keillor and Richard Russo to these old-world tales. Nikolai Gogol was a raconteur par excellence, in my view anyway.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol(31 March 1809 – 4 March 1852) was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin.
Although Gogol was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in his work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt"). His early works, such as "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka", were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture, and folklore. His later writing satirized political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls). The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842), along with the short stories Diary of a Madman, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, The Portrait and The Carriage, are also among his best-known works.
Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the triumph of Gogolesque irony
The leading novelists of the period – notably Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov – also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. Source: Wikipedia
Well, this was just the formal introduction to the experience you might enjoy when deciding to read Nikolai Gogol.
I found the stories so rich in atmosphere, detail, and pathos. Romantic (a little bit of romantic escapism), yet very often satirical, with a touch of nostalgia for his homeland. His pessimism about life came through as well. There was a fine balance between the elements he so effortlessly incorporated into his work.
He described his childhood farm and the surroundings so vividly: the landscapes, peasants, boisterous village lads, the folklore populated with witches, devils, demonic figures, and fantasy. In between he threw in realistic incidences(political criticism et al) of the times they were living in. It was like looking at an old Russian painting and without warning being swept into it.
One can hardly draw a comparison between Gogol and Franz Kafka. There is no comparison as far as clarity of thought and intent is concerned. Gogol was passionate about life itself. He loved writing. He loved the intrigue of living. Franz Kafka was a troubled, tragic soul. But brilliant at it in his own right. I'm just mentioning this in case someone considers reading Gogol, which I highly recommend. His work is light, yet dark; playful, yet serious; raw; unpretentious; from the soul. His work is brilliant. So many authors, such as Kafka, Dostoevsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Mikhail Bulgakov would later borrow from his brilliance and keep his memory alive. In fact, years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was to exclaim that all Russian realists had come “from under Gogol’s greatcoat.”
I strongly recommend this article: Writing the Russian Reader into the text: Gogol, Turgenev, and their Audiences.
Some quotes from his work - just to whet your appetite :-)
Goodreads Quotes of Nikolai Gogol's works
I made so many notes, that this review will turn into a book if I keep at it. lolol. So I will refrain. I can only accomplish that by sitting on my hands! Oy!
Forgive me :-) but here are a few:
There was a church in the hamlet, of St. Panteleimon if I remember rightly. A priest lived by it then, Father Afanasy, of blessed memory. Noticing that Basavriuk did not come to church even on Easter Sunday, he decided to reprimand him and put him under a church penance. Penance, hah! He barely escaped. “Listen, my good sir!” the man thundered in reply, “you’d better mind your own business and not go meddling in other people’s, unless you’d like to have that goat’s gullet of yours plugged with hot kutya!” What could be done with the cursed fellow? Father Afanasy merely announced that anyone who kept company with Basavriuk would be regarded as a Catholic, an enemy of Christ’s Church and of the whole human race. ...~from St. John's Eve
... it’s easier for a woman to kiss the devil, meaning no offense, than to call another woman a beauty. ~from St. John's Eve...
...“If you ever show up in my cottage again, or even just under the windows, then listen, Pyotr: by God, that’ll be the end of your black moustache, and your topknot as well; here it is going twice around your ear, but it’ll bid farewell to your head or I’m not Terenty Korzh!”...~from St. John's Eve
...He kept looking to see if the tree’s shadow was getting longer, if the setting sun was getting redder—and the more impatiently as it went on. So drawn out! God’s day must have lost its end somewhere. ...~from The Terrible Vengeance
...The river is not mutinous. He grumbles and murmurs like an old man: nothing pleases him; everything has changed around him; he is quietly at war with the hills, forests, and meadows on his banks, and carries his complaint against them to the Black Sea....~from The Terrible Vengeance
This collection was truly a highlight of 2019.
Coming up from Little Russia, Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into a body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novelist direction to this very day.
I think the introduction above, which is used by a multitude of websites, including Amazon, describes Gogol's work and person the best.
I read this collection of tales throughout 2019 and really enjoyed the 'other worldliness' of them all. Once again, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated and annotated this volume splendidly. They made the reading of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov a good experience too. With the footnotes and annotations added to their work, they just make a much bigger literary adventure possible for so many readers. Therefore, it was a delight to find this work from them as well.
This collection includes:
Ukrainian Tales:
-St. John's Eve;
-The Night Before Christmas;
-The Terrible Vengeance;
-Ivan Fyodorovich Sphonka and His Aunt;
-Old World Landowners;
-Viy;
-The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforvich;
Petersburg Tales:
-Nevsky Prospect;
-The Dairy of a Madman;
-The Nose;
-The Carriage;
-The Portrait;
-The Overcoat.
There is a touch of modern authors such as Garrison Keillor and Richard Russo to these old-world tales. Nikolai Gogol was a raconteur par excellence, in my view anyway.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol(31 March 1809 – 4 March 1852) was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin.
Although Gogol was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in his work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt"). His early works, such as "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka", were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture, and folklore. His later writing satirized political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls). The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842), along with the short stories Diary of a Madman, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, The Portrait and The Carriage, are also among his best-known works.
Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the triumph of Gogolesque irony
The leading novelists of the period – notably Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov – also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. Source: Wikipedia
Well, this was just the formal introduction to the experience you might enjoy when deciding to read Nikolai Gogol.
I found the stories so rich in atmosphere, detail, and pathos. Romantic (a little bit of romantic escapism), yet very often satirical, with a touch of nostalgia for his homeland. His pessimism about life came through as well. There was a fine balance between the elements he so effortlessly incorporated into his work.
He described his childhood farm and the surroundings so vividly: the landscapes, peasants, boisterous village lads, the folklore populated with witches, devils, demonic figures, and fantasy. In between he threw in realistic incidences(political criticism et al) of the times they were living in. It was like looking at an old Russian painting and without warning being swept into it.
One can hardly draw a comparison between Gogol and Franz Kafka. There is no comparison as far as clarity of thought and intent is concerned. Gogol was passionate about life itself. He loved writing. He loved the intrigue of living. Franz Kafka was a troubled, tragic soul. But brilliant at it in his own right. I'm just mentioning this in case someone considers reading Gogol, which I highly recommend. His work is light, yet dark; playful, yet serious; raw; unpretentious; from the soul. His work is brilliant. So many authors, such as Kafka, Dostoevsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Mikhail Bulgakov would later borrow from his brilliance and keep his memory alive. In fact, years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was to exclaim that all Russian realists had come “from under Gogol’s greatcoat.”
I strongly recommend this article: Writing the Russian Reader into the text: Gogol, Turgenev, and their Audiences.
Some quotes from his work - just to whet your appetite :-)
Goodreads Quotes of Nikolai Gogol's works
I made so many notes, that this review will turn into a book if I keep at it. lolol. So I will refrain. I can only accomplish that by sitting on my hands! Oy!
Forgive me :-) but here are a few:
There was a church in the hamlet, of St. Panteleimon if I remember rightly. A priest lived by it then, Father Afanasy, of blessed memory. Noticing that Basavriuk did not come to church even on Easter Sunday, he decided to reprimand him and put him under a church penance. Penance, hah! He barely escaped. “Listen, my good sir!” the man thundered in reply, “you’d better mind your own business and not go meddling in other people’s, unless you’d like to have that goat’s gullet of yours plugged with hot kutya!” What could be done with the cursed fellow? Father Afanasy merely announced that anyone who kept company with Basavriuk would be regarded as a Catholic, an enemy of Christ’s Church and of the whole human race. ...~from St. John's Eve
... it’s easier for a woman to kiss the devil, meaning no offense, than to call another woman a beauty. ~from St. John's Eve...
...“If you ever show up in my cottage again, or even just under the windows, then listen, Pyotr: by God, that’ll be the end of your black moustache, and your topknot as well; here it is going twice around your ear, but it’ll bid farewell to your head or I’m not Terenty Korzh!”...~from St. John's Eve
...He kept looking to see if the tree’s shadow was getting longer, if the setting sun was getting redder—and the more impatiently as it went on. So drawn out! God’s day must have lost its end somewhere. ...~from The Terrible Vengeance
...The river is not mutinous. He grumbles and murmurs like an old man: nothing pleases him; everything has changed around him; he is quietly at war with the hills, forests, and meadows on his banks, and carries his complaint against them to the Black Sea....~from The Terrible Vengeance
This collection was truly a highlight of 2019.
October 17, 2012
First: this is not The Complete Tales. The unlearned distinction between Collected & Complete has angered completists the world over. Collected means incomplete: a mixtape of works that constitute, critically, the best this writer has to offer. Complete means the totted-up totality, depending upon what is being completed, i.e. Complete Works is ambiguous and open to omissions, depending on what is classed as a work—prose? plays? Just assume a fuller completion when it’s Complete, not Collected. Except in those rare moments when Collected means Complete. In the case of Gogol, Yale U Press have the one Complete Tales in print, in two volumes, incorrectly lumped with the Collected Tales eds. This beautiful Everyman’s hardcover edition (and, presumably, the paperback equivs) omit a slab of material from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which only exists as an old Oxford paperback conflated with Mirgorod stories, suggesting the work is so lacklustre it doesn’t bear reprinting.
For the sake of tedious exactitude, this edition omits all the story fragments, and, from Evenings: The Fair at Sorochintsï, May Night or the Drowned Maiden, The Lost Letter, A Bewitched Place. From Mirgorod, Taras Bulba is omitted (available as a separate book from the Modern Library). These tales, presumably, are found in Yale’s Complete Tales. The tales in this Collected Tales perform the Gogol mixtape function perfectly, from the rambling horror of Viy and The Night Before Christmas to the hilarious sinister satire of The Nose and The Overcoat. Not all the tales spark and sizzle, like the slight St. John’s Eve and Old World Landowners, but the best of these, the bestest, are, at their bestestest, some of the premier examples of the Russian short story: chilling and macabre, thigh-splitting and mad.
For the sake of tedious exactitude, this edition omits all the story fragments, and, from Evenings: The Fair at Sorochintsï, May Night or the Drowned Maiden, The Lost Letter, A Bewitched Place. From Mirgorod, Taras Bulba is omitted (available as a separate book from the Modern Library). These tales, presumably, are found in Yale’s Complete Tales. The tales in this Collected Tales perform the Gogol mixtape function perfectly, from the rambling horror of Viy and The Night Before Christmas to the hilarious sinister satire of The Nose and The Overcoat. Not all the tales spark and sizzle, like the slight St. John’s Eve and Old World Landowners, but the best of these, the bestest, are, at their bestestest, some of the premier examples of the Russian short story: chilling and macabre, thigh-splitting and mad.
December 20, 2021
My grandfather (God rest his soul! and may he eat nothing in that world but white rolls and poppyseed cakes with honey!) was a wonderful storyteller. Once he began to talk, you wouldn’t budge from your place the whole day for listening. No comparison with some present-day babbler, who starts spouting off, and in such language as if he hadn’t had anything to eat for three days – you just grab your hat and run.
Grandpa Gogol is indeed a wonderful storyteller capable of making you forget where you are and of magically transporting you to a classic Christmas world filled with snow, baked sweets and a family gathered around the massive stove to listen to some old world stories.
Most of the first half of this collection, the one under the heading Ukrainian Tales is traditional, inspired by folk tales and Cossack history, and it makes for a wonderful Christmas gift. Reading these early tales made it easy for me think of Nikolai Gogol as the Russian Dickens, but the second half of the collection, the ‘Petersburg Tales’ , show a much more modern and ambitious writer. Gogol is able to combine realism with what Andrei Bely called ‘impressionism’ and with sharp social satire, with absurdity and with supernatural intervention into a style that will eventually lead to Hermann Melville, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Bely, Oscar Wilde and numerous other writers who acknowledge and pay tribute to this master of mischief with a tragic streak.
The current collection, translated by the always excellent duo of Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, includes the most famous and the most charming/disturbing stories from the author. Some of them are so good, it is almost a disservice to reduce them to only a couple of paragraphs of internet review, when they deserve long tomes of commentary dedicated exclusively to them [which they have, by the way]
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St. John’s Eve is the source of my opening quote, the one of the grandfather who spins tall tales before the oven fire, but ‘will never tell a lie’ . I sat as enchanted as his nephews as I listened to this Cossack fable of a young peasant who falls in love with the daughter of his wealthy employer. In a Faustian deal, this young man asks for help from the Devil and an old crone [Baba Yaga?]. He receives a chest of gold in exchange for his soul, with the expected tragic consequences.
Not your typical uplifting Holiday read, but made memorable by the evocation of village life in Ukraine.
The Night Before Christmas has again a witch and the Devil planning mischief in the dark skies above the village of Dikanka. But this one is a much merrier tale that again has two young people in love having difficulties in their courtship. The whole village: old people, youths and children go out at night either to get drunk, to sing carols, to search for illicit love or to play pranks on the neighbours. The fantastic elements take us all the way to the court of Ekatherina the Great and the famous Zaporozhian Cossacks.
Wondrous the moon shines! It’s hard to describe how good it is to jostle about on such a night with a bunch of laughing and singing girls and lads ready for every joke and prank that a merrily laughing night can inspire. It’s warm under your thick sheepskin; your cheeks burn still brighter with the frost; and the evil one himself pushes you into mischief from behind.
The Terrible Vengeance is a historical fable with a definite Gothic feel. It is again a love story doomed by the intervention of the Devil, pointing out that the realist Gogol also subscribed to deep religious feelings. The story is also proof of the author interest in Ukrainian history and of his love for the Dniepr and the steppe.
The plot is convoluted and hard to describe without spoilers, but it deals with the Cossack rebel spirit, their love for battle, music and drink, for sleeping free under the stars and for believing in sorcerers and devils while fighting the Turks and the Poles.
Ivan Fyodorovich Schponka and His Aunt is an unfinished [deliberately?] story about the tribulations of a timid young man who just wants a peaceful life. Yet when he inherits a rich farm, he returns from the army to manage the estate. Ivan Schponka is bossed around both by his assertive aunt and by a venal, epicurean neighbour who apparently has stolen some of the land that belongs to Ivan. This neighbour also has a beautiful if vapid daughter.
“What, auntie?” Ivan Fyodorovich cried out, frightened. “What, a wife? No, auntie, for pity’s sake ... You make me completely ashamed ... I’ve never been married before ... I absolutely wouldn’t know what to do with her!”
Old World Landowners marks a departure from the folk tales with supernatural elements of Gogol’s early period. It is a bittersweet love song to family life and to simple living about an elderly couple who owns a charming cottage with a rich garden. Some commenters have noticed similarities with the classic story of Philemon and Baucis. A strong critical view of modern life and of Sankt Petersburg in particular is contrasted with the traditional lifestyle of an Ukrainian village, with the sad ending announcing a dim prospect for the future of the country.
And which is stronger in us – passion or habit? Or do all our strong impulses, all the whirlwind of our desires and boiling passions, come merely from our bright youth and seem deep and devastating only because of that? Be it as it may, just then all our passions seemed childish to me compared with this long, slow, almost insensible habit.
Viy is probably the most fantastic story in the collection, a straight horror offering worthy of the pen of Edgar Allan Poe. It starts, as usual for Gogol, in a different register, as a funny tale about three students from a Kiev seminary who go on their summer vacation penniless. When they seek shelter at night at an isolated farm, one of them has a nightmare about being ridden like a horse by the old crone who owns the cottage. The young man manages to turn the tables on the witch and rides her in turn and beats her bloody, in which moment she turns into a beautiful young maiden [to the great amusement of future Freudian analysts].
The story doesn’t end here, but with the young student forced to go to the maiden’s village where her Cossack father forces him to hold vigil over the girl’s corpse for three nights. More horrible events follow, the forces of good [prayer] and evil [sexual promiscuity] fighting it out in the little village church.
The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarelled with Ivan Nikiforovich is the last of the folk tales and marks the transition from village bucolic life to big city stress. With great comedic timing Gogol presents two rich and lazy neighbours in the town of Mirgorod, who spend their whole day lounging in their gardens and contemplating their good fortune.
While lying there, he spent a long time looking at the sheds, the yard, the outbuildings, the chickens running in the yard, and thought to himself, “Lord God, what a proprietor I am! Is there anything I haven’t got? Fowl, outbuildings, barns, what not else; vodka of various flavors; pears and plums in the orchards; poppies, cabbage, and peas in the garden ... What is there that I haven’t got? ... I’d like to know, what haven’t I got?”
One of the Ivans covets something from the other Ivan, and when that one refuses to give the item over, the two former friends fight bitterly for years and years, spending their fortune dealing with the corrupt and slow justice courts while their estates degrade, to the exasperation of their neighbours. Comedy is never more than step away from tragedy in Gogol’s universe.
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Nevsky Prospekt is the first big city story, and the first time I started to think of Gogol’s prose in terms of ‘masterpiece’. It is also the first story to feature an impoverished artist, the introverted painter Piskarev, who strolls along the famous boulevard in the company of his friend, the extrovert Lieutenant Pirogov. Both young men, under the influence of the spring sun, are gazing enchanted at the young ladies passing by.
A thousand kinds of hats, dresses, shawls – gay-colored, ethereal, for which their owners’ affection sometimes lasts a whole two days – will bedazzle anyone on Nevsky Prospect. It seems as if a whole sea of butterflies has suddenly arisen from the stems, their brilliant cloud undulating over the black beetles of the male sex.
Both Piskarev and Pirogov pick a young woman to chase on the streets, but with wildly different results, contrasting the feeble idealism of the Romantic Movement with the pragmatic, coarse and self-serving Realism. In the background, the luxurious and sparkling with promise Nevsky Prospekt, is revealed to be the stuff that dreams are made of.
“God, what is our life! An eternal discord between dream and reality!”
The Diary of a Madman continues the theme of alienation of the individual when his illusions about life in the big city turn to ashes in his real life. The story is exactly what it says on the cover, the musings of a deranged man who feels wronged by society and who lives in an alternative universe that exists only inside his mind. Numerous doctors have praised the story for its accurate depiction of schizophrenia.
The theme is well suited to Gogol’s satirical pen, mocking here both the bureaucracy and the social life of the elites. Absurd elements of talking dogs and tea-drinking cows are a precursor to the celebration of nonsense from the very next story.
The Nose defies logic with subversive and comical verve, presenting yet another bureaucrat and social-climber brought low by an unexplained magical incident. It all starts when a local barber discovers a human nose inside the morning bread his wife has just baked.
“Devil knows how it happened,” he said finally, scratching himself behind the ear. “Whether I came home drunk yesterday or not, I can’t say for sure. But by all tokens this incident should be unfeasible: for bread is a baking matter, and a nose is something else entirely. I can’t figure it out! ...”
His wife urges the barber to throw the offending item in the Neva, while in another part of the city Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes up without the mentioned appendage. As he tries to go to the police, to doctors and to the newspapers to report the incident and to ask for the return of his nose, Kovalyov notices that the very same nose has started to stroll to town, richly dressed, in a modern carriage and visiting the best houses.
The very absurdity of the story makes a rich playing field for savant interpretations, but I prefer to enjoy the part that makes fun of social aspirations and vanity. I do enjoy the comparisons some critics have made to the work of Lawrence Sterne and to Mikhail Bulgakov, as it marks a spiritual continuity across continental and historical borders between authors who see it as their duty to expose the foibles of their contemporaries.
The Carriage is probably the shortest story of the collection, but it is as well polished and incisive as the others. While part of the Petersburg Tales thematically, it actually takes place in a boring provincial town only known as B.
The local landowner , wanting to impress the officers of a visiting cavalry regiment, boasts about the expensive carriage he has just bought and invites everybody to visit his estate and admire it, but he gets stinking drunk with the same officers and forgets to notify his wife of the visit.
In the morning his shallowness and his insecurity are exposed by the cruel light of Reality. The themes, the humour, the language and the characters have by now become what critics call ‘Gogolian’.
The Portrait is the story of the demonic painting of an unknown man, bought under an unexplained compulsion by an impoverished painter, who goes on to become rich and fashionable, but abandons his artistic integrity. His pact with the Devil ultimately brings him misfortune in what for me is the template from which the more famous “Portrait of Dorian Gray” was drawn. Other commenters have found similarities with ETA Hoffman, Edgar Alan Poe and Washington Irving, but for me here is a continuity in the study of the influence of Evil in our ordinary lives, a conflict between the idyllic landscape of Gogol’s earlier stories and the growing alienation of his city years.
The Overcoat is the case of saving the best for last! It is the culmination of the growth of Gogol as an artist, at least for me. Elegant, poignant and timeless, this is the story of a nobody, who for too brief an interlude believed he could be somebody.
When and at what time he entered the department and who appointed him, no one could recall. However many directors and other superiors came and went, he was always to be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, in the same capacity, as the same copying clerk, so that after a while they became convinced that he must simply have been born into the world ready-made, in a uniform, and with a balding head.
Like Bartleby the Scrivener, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is a nondescript clerk in a bureaucratic office. Unlike Bartleby, Akaky loves his work copying legal papers, and would prefer to do this happily his whole life, if not for the other clerks who bully him mercilessly.
Akaky is also very poor, and bullied not only for his meekness but also for his threadbare winter coat. With great sacrifice and with some help from a local tailor, Akaky saves enough to buy the materials for a new overcoat which his friend sews together admirably. Once he puts on the new coat, his whole life changes: his colleagues take notice of him and celebrate the event, his self-confidence soars and his chronic depression is lifted. Alas, while returning home from a party in his honour, Akaky is robbed of his new possession. The police and the bureaucrats do nothing to help the poor man, who dies destitute and disappointed in humanity.
Reading a little afterwards about the life of Gogol, I was eerily aware of the parallels between his meteoric rise to fame and his miserable, sordid ending under the influence of toxic religious guidance. A man with a great sense of humour and a sensitive soul who will be nevertheless remembered for his incredible talent with the pen.
Vanished and gone was the being, protected by no one, dear to no one, interesting to no one, who had not even attracted the attention of a naturalist – who does not fail to stick a pin through a common fly and examine it under a microscope; a being who humbly endured office mockery and went to his grave for no particular reason, but for whom, all the same, though at the very end of his life, there had flashed a bright visitor in the form of an overcoat, animating for an instant his poor life, and upon whom disaster then fell as unbearably as it falls upon the kings and rulers of this world ...
November 29, 2021
I liked the most "The Tales of Nevsky Prospect", especially "Overcoat". Gogol's language is unique and the sense of humour is ahead of his time. But still my heart belongs to Dead Souls.
April 6, 2023
It is just such a joy to read Gogol’s work. He has yet to disappoint me. Five stars all the way!
November 27, 2017
My first reaction to Gogol was bewilderment. It's funny, and engaging to read, but...what the hell is it about? I'm not sure what the point of "Diary of a Madman" is, although I know I enjoyed it.
Pevear and Volokhonsky's intro is helpful, although it contains a number of minor spoilers. Their point is that if you try to understand Gogol, you are failing: Gogol himself didn't understand Gogol. "We still do not know what Gogol is," says some guy they quoted. P&V write that Gogol, as compared to traditional storytellers, "has nothing in mind. Memory plays no part in his work. He does not know where the act of writing will lead him."
Pushkin, an early and ardent supporter, wrote, "Here is real gaiety - honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places, what poetry! What sensitivity! All this is so unusual in our present-day literature that I still haven't recovered." And that seems fair to me. It's still unusual now (although at least we have Borges); maybe we should shut up about what it means and just have a good time with it.
2017-11-17 Diary of a Madman
The madman is a clerk, and right away hears two dogs chatting. One belongs to the directir's hot daughter. Never mind, never mind. Silence. The dogs are corresponding by letter; he steals the letters to find out more about the daughter.
Meanwhile, Spain is in turmoil: the throne is vacant. It cannot be, he says, that there was no king. A state cannot be without a king. There is a king, only he's somewhere unknown. ...luckily our clerk realizes that he is actually indeed the king of Spain. (Around this time the dates on his diary entries start getting more royal - from Dec. 8 to the 86th of Martober, to "date none. The day had no date." He is eventually returned to Spain, which bears a passing resemblance to an insane asylum, where he is shaved and beaten and possibly murdered.
Pevear and Volokhonsky's intro is helpful, although it contains a number of minor spoilers. Their point is that if you try to understand Gogol, you are failing: Gogol himself didn't understand Gogol. "We still do not know what Gogol is," says some guy they quoted. P&V write that Gogol, as compared to traditional storytellers, "has nothing in mind. Memory plays no part in his work. He does not know where the act of writing will lead him."
Pushkin, an early and ardent supporter, wrote, "Here is real gaiety - honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places, what poetry! What sensitivity! All this is so unusual in our present-day literature that I still haven't recovered." And that seems fair to me. It's still unusual now (although at least we have Borges); maybe we should shut up about what it means and just have a good time with it.
2017-11-17 Diary of a Madman
The madman is a clerk, and right away hears two dogs chatting. One belongs to the directir's hot daughter. Never mind, never mind. Silence. The dogs are corresponding by letter; he steals the letters to find out more about the daughter.
Meanwhile, Spain is in turmoil: the throne is vacant. It cannot be, he says, that there was no king. A state cannot be without a king. There is a king, only he's somewhere unknown. ...luckily our clerk realizes that he is actually indeed the king of Spain. (Around this time the dates on his diary entries start getting more royal - from Dec. 8 to the 86th of Martober, to "date none. The day had no date." He is eventually returned to Spain, which bears a passing resemblance to an insane asylum, where he is shaved and beaten and possibly murdered.
October 15, 2014
Nikolai Gogol, based on the image results my Google search spat back, reminds me of that quietly excited classmate who's usually game to tag along with you for some mischief-making. Whoopee cushions and joy buzzers presumably hadn't been around then, so one shudders at the tricks his imagination must've improvised. From his eyes shines a look too knowing not to have exposed his hastily-planned cover-ups and landed him in a few or hundred detentions, spent here sweeping grounds and there copying lines. In short: my kinda guy. Russian literature, since books began making me feel things, has been for me that scary mountain whose lack of obvious footholds has sent me running home into the squishier bosoms of easier genres, whose peak is peopled with happy campers roasting marshmallows while animatedly discussing scenes from this Dostoevsky classic or that Tolstoy epic. What sure hand would, as soon as I attempt the climb, save me from tripping over the first loose rock and snap my neck? Gogol's, while mindful to point out where not to step, wouldn't hold mine, yet what convinced me more to turn to his works first of all was learning of the ripples they caused that soon impacted on others' in waves. "We all came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat'," some dude said, which, prisoner to that tedious no-stones-left-unturned school of thought that I am, rather finally shut the case.
No gripes to be had here about that, to be on the same page, as evident by how finding no more of the book to savor left me so restless my withdrawal dissipated only when I spent half an hour the next day at the bookstore, head-deep inside The Inspector-General a similar collection of another company included (and, along with several other shorts, this one has omitted for crimes againsthumanity convenience). Let's come back to the point: the hype? It's real. Where Gogol's praisers have stumbled is that they haven't been louder about it. Each of the stories, 13 in all (and more besides that lay scattered elsewhere), springs from a mind able to hop between moods as simply as switching socks and, more impressively, capture all that in writing that not so much reads as flows. By no means, mind, does Gogol here achieve infallibility: St. John's Eve, where the roller-coaster rolls out of the station, and The Terrible Vengeance get so twisty and turny I had to read the latter twice before heads and tails could be made of it. The Carriage, fangirled over to no end by Anton Chekhov, fell short of my hopes, which, granted, the preceding unbeatable trifecta kicking off the second half of the book set impossibly high. The Overcoat, too, didn't much measure up to those same expectations. People, at least in the earlier parts, are either regularly found with their "arms akimbo" or perennially "vexed." But for all that, any misgivings don't matter so much the more I think on them. If they're not because my attention wandered, they're a placement issue; if not that as well, then nitpicks. Where there are strike-outs, Gogol makes up for a hundredfold in home runs.
The Night Before Christmas is hugely fun and entertaining, the vibe throughout fit for a 90's Saturday-morning cartoon, albeit one soon headed for the chopping block on account of complaints from parents outraged at their bumpkins' being exposed to such degenerate content as "a devil who had one last night to wander about the wide world and teach good people to sin." Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt contains the strangest dream sequence that, contrasted with the mundane goings-on its characters face in the waking world, not enough weed will ever exist to help make sense of it. Old World Landowners, even without witches and devils, is still plenty captivating with two old couple, developed masterfully, taking center stage. The second-scariest short of the lot, Viy, proves books can take years off such scaredy-cats as me as well as that closet scene The Ring have long sucker-punched unsuspecting viewers with. Wrapping up the first half of Gogol's colorful re-imagining of his country's rural life is The Quarrel, which boasts of a higher laugh-per-page rate than any other short to date—"Excuse me for appearing before you in my natural state," says the more corpulent main character called Ivanovich Nikiforovich after being barged in on by his friend, neighbor, and soon-to-be-bitter-rival. St. John's Eve, either, doesn't lack for bright spots, and even those are soon outshone into white oblivion by a passage of just astounding imagery in The Terrible Vengeance that describes the Dnieper river to musical perfection.
Gogol's genius, aimed at the then-capital, burns even hotter. While not as inventively and unapologetically fantastic and outrageous as their Ukrainian predecessors, the Petersburg Tales, far from stumbling for their lack of broomstick-riding witches, moon-stealing devils, and the odd incest, are likelier than the former to worm their way into the collective subconscious to there make a permanent home. The devil, representative in Gogol's wacky world of the ubiquitousness of bad influences whose seduction every day tempts us, lurks even in the city, but almost as an afterthought: what need have we of the ultimate troublemaker when man himself can beat the master at his own game? In the majority of the shorts, no puppet master hides behind purple curtains, pulling levers and pushing buttons to nudge events his way. The result is often spectacular. Nevsky Prospect throws a knockout from the opening bell, soaking us with ejaculations the narrator makes over what a great place Nevsky Prospect is, and then magnifies the microscope over two acquaintances, each different in their approaches, chasing after two women spotted there. Gogol, at one point, shows so powerfully what it is to fall in love that it would still be a more effective form of communication than if telepathy were possible. The Diary of a Madman, as the title gives away, takes us into the mind of an apparently healthy everyman whose mental deterioration should well satiate that morbidly curious class of gawkers-by who gravitate towards car-accident sites. Dogs exchanging letters and talking politics aren't even the weirdest things here.
Next, The Nose seems straightforward enough, almost too straightforward: someone finds someone else's nose inside his bread one morning and, after his story's more or less wrapped up, we trail the said noseless man as he tries to locate it. No other story, however, has ever so completely robbed me of my words, myself prostrate with awe at Gogol's audacity, as this one where he blindsides you with the last expectation you can think of. It's a tough act no one wants to follow, so The Carriage, with its relatively normal happenings, can be forgiven for not wowing some people. The Portrait, on the other hand, picks things up and Gogol is back where he's comfortable: keeping therapists in business by sending to their recliner chairs us traumatized readers. The story, separated into two parts, details the rags-to-riches-to-ruin life of an artist called Chartkov, whose painting skills are moderate and potential unmistakable, who happens upon a mysterious portrait of a creepy old man. His stare, which Gogol's description gives major heft, is worse to imagine than to watch the best horror has to offer cinema. In a nutshell: there's gold hidden behind the portrait's frame that Chartkov exploits to better his position in society and that in the end destroys him. The second part delves fully into the portrait's origins and is no less mesmerizing. Along the way, Gogol touches on the artist's life and their creative process, social manipulation and superficiality, competition and obsolescence. It's a meaty story with something for everyone and, as with most of his works so far, to relish anew with every reread.
The Overcoat, the last in line, continues the supernatural element The Portrait brought back, but dominated by the more down-to-earth routines of mediocre, bullied outcast Akaky Akakievich, it takes a backseat. After his tatty overcoat, a source of ridicule at work, became useless as protection against the brutal Russian winter, Akaky gets another made, which gains him confidence and popularity. His moment in the sun doesn't last, though, and from there does the story return to more familiar grounds: doom and gloom. This second bookend may have suffered from the same positional problem The Carriage did (the lesson here: short-story collections read from cover to cover are bound to favor some and hurt others), but hindsight is its friend. There's a matter-of-fact, deadpan quality to the narration that gets funnier in retrospect. A long-suffering tone there also can't be missed when the writing takes great pains to explain how Akaky Akakievich came by that name, the purpose of which section is obvious and hilarious when (Wikipedia to the rescue!) you read later that it is the Russian equivalent of "John Johnson" as well as sounds like the Russian word "obkakat" or "kaka," meaning "to smear with excrement," that makes it read as "Poop Poopson." The idea that the likes of Dostoevsky wasn't above toilet humor warms these cockles greatly. Then, on the aforementioned Russian winter, it's not generally that it's the enemy of poor people, but that it's the enemy of people "earn[ing] a salary of four hundred roubles or thereabouts." The exactitude is killer. Another: "An order was issued for the police to catch the dead man at all costs, dead or alive." Added to Gogol's in-jokes and humor is a question that, if given any consideration, is an easy road to a panic attack: what's your overcoat? Another character features in the story that goes by no other name than "the important person," and in answer, he would probably bring up his rank, which is as much smokes and mirrors as Akaky's overcoat is that masks their total ignorance about certain workings of the world. The balance between such introspective moments and the satirical asides in this story and the others is, if you ask me, not a half-bad explanation for why Gogol is ducking awesome.
No gripes to be had here about that, to be on the same page, as evident by how finding no more of the book to savor left me so restless my withdrawal dissipated only when I spent half an hour the next day at the bookstore, head-deep inside The Inspector-General a similar collection of another company included (and, along with several other shorts, this one has omitted for crimes against
The Night Before Christmas is hugely fun and entertaining, the vibe throughout fit for a 90's Saturday-morning cartoon, albeit one soon headed for the chopping block on account of complaints from parents outraged at their bumpkins' being exposed to such degenerate content as "a devil who had one last night to wander about the wide world and teach good people to sin." Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt contains the strangest dream sequence that, contrasted with the mundane goings-on its characters face in the waking world, not enough weed will ever exist to help make sense of it. Old World Landowners, even without witches and devils, is still plenty captivating with two old couple, developed masterfully, taking center stage. The second-scariest short of the lot, Viy, proves books can take years off such scaredy-cats as me as well as that closet scene The Ring have long sucker-punched unsuspecting viewers with. Wrapping up the first half of Gogol's colorful re-imagining of his country's rural life is The Quarrel, which boasts of a higher laugh-per-page rate than any other short to date—"Excuse me for appearing before you in my natural state," says the more corpulent main character called Ivanovich Nikiforovich after being barged in on by his friend, neighbor, and soon-to-be-bitter-rival. St. John's Eve, either, doesn't lack for bright spots, and even those are soon outshone into white oblivion by a passage of just astounding imagery in The Terrible Vengeance that describes the Dnieper river to musical perfection.
Gogol's genius, aimed at the then-capital, burns even hotter. While not as inventively and unapologetically fantastic and outrageous as their Ukrainian predecessors, the Petersburg Tales, far from stumbling for their lack of broomstick-riding witches, moon-stealing devils, and the odd incest, are likelier than the former to worm their way into the collective subconscious to there make a permanent home. The devil, representative in Gogol's wacky world of the ubiquitousness of bad influences whose seduction every day tempts us, lurks even in the city, but almost as an afterthought: what need have we of the ultimate troublemaker when man himself can beat the master at his own game? In the majority of the shorts, no puppet master hides behind purple curtains, pulling levers and pushing buttons to nudge events his way. The result is often spectacular. Nevsky Prospect throws a knockout from the opening bell, soaking us with ejaculations the narrator makes over what a great place Nevsky Prospect is, and then magnifies the microscope over two acquaintances, each different in their approaches, chasing after two women spotted there. Gogol, at one point, shows so powerfully what it is to fall in love that it would still be a more effective form of communication than if telepathy were possible. The Diary of a Madman, as the title gives away, takes us into the mind of an apparently healthy everyman whose mental deterioration should well satiate that morbidly curious class of gawkers-by who gravitate towards car-accident sites. Dogs exchanging letters and talking politics aren't even the weirdest things here.
Next, The Nose seems straightforward enough, almost too straightforward: someone finds someone else's nose inside his bread one morning and, after his story's more or less wrapped up, we trail the said noseless man as he tries to locate it. No other story, however, has ever so completely robbed me of my words, myself prostrate with awe at Gogol's audacity, as this one where he blindsides you with the last expectation you can think of. It's a tough act no one wants to follow, so The Carriage, with its relatively normal happenings, can be forgiven for not wowing some people. The Portrait, on the other hand, picks things up and Gogol is back where he's comfortable: keeping therapists in business by sending to their recliner chairs us traumatized readers. The story, separated into two parts, details the rags-to-riches-to-ruin life of an artist called Chartkov, whose painting skills are moderate and potential unmistakable, who happens upon a mysterious portrait of a creepy old man. His stare, which Gogol's description gives major heft, is worse to imagine than to watch the best horror has to offer cinema. In a nutshell: there's gold hidden behind the portrait's frame that Chartkov exploits to better his position in society and that in the end destroys him. The second part delves fully into the portrait's origins and is no less mesmerizing. Along the way, Gogol touches on the artist's life and their creative process, social manipulation and superficiality, competition and obsolescence. It's a meaty story with something for everyone and, as with most of his works so far, to relish anew with every reread.
The Overcoat, the last in line, continues the supernatural element The Portrait brought back, but dominated by the more down-to-earth routines of mediocre, bullied outcast Akaky Akakievich, it takes a backseat. After his tatty overcoat, a source of ridicule at work, became useless as protection against the brutal Russian winter, Akaky gets another made, which gains him confidence and popularity. His moment in the sun doesn't last, though, and from there does the story return to more familiar grounds: doom and gloom. This second bookend may have suffered from the same positional problem The Carriage did (the lesson here: short-story collections read from cover to cover are bound to favor some and hurt others), but hindsight is its friend. There's a matter-of-fact, deadpan quality to the narration that gets funnier in retrospect. A long-suffering tone there also can't be missed when the writing takes great pains to explain how Akaky Akakievich came by that name, the purpose of which section is obvious and hilarious when (Wikipedia to the rescue!) you read later that it is the Russian equivalent of "John Johnson" as well as sounds like the Russian word "obkakat" or "kaka," meaning "to smear with excrement," that makes it read as "Poop Poopson." The idea that the likes of Dostoevsky wasn't above toilet humor warms these cockles greatly. Then, on the aforementioned Russian winter, it's not generally that it's the enemy of poor people, but that it's the enemy of people "earn[ing] a salary of four hundred roubles or thereabouts." The exactitude is killer. Another: "An order was issued for the police to catch the dead man at all costs, dead or alive." Added to Gogol's in-jokes and humor is a question that, if given any consideration, is an easy road to a panic attack: what's your overcoat? Another character features in the story that goes by no other name than "the important person," and in answer, he would probably bring up his rank, which is as much smokes and mirrors as Akaky's overcoat is that masks their total ignorance about certain workings of the world. The balance between such introspective moments and the satirical asides in this story and the others is, if you ask me, not a half-bad explanation for why Gogol is ducking awesome.
August 15, 2020
Gogol wrote many fine short stories, almost all of which, I think, are collected here. Since I read the more well-known "Petersburg" tales recently, I skipped those, though the P/V translations are always better. The gems here are the stories subsumed under the "Ukrainian Tales", most of which deal with supernatural themes, in my opinion, Gogol's real forte. "St. John's Eve" and the "Night Before Christmas" deal with hellish visitation and torment. "Viy", one of my favorites (also check out the surreal film version from the 60s), finds a young seminarian watching over a dead girl's corpse...until she opens her eyes. It's all downhill from there. The other stories collected here are funny variations on Gogol's latter-day themes one finds in Dead Souls, the silliness of the provincial gentry and the general absurdity of society in general, whether through social mores, litigation, or fancy carriages.
July 7, 2020
These tales (and novellas) are incredible. I was already familiar with "The Overcoat" and "The Nose", both of which exude a certain bureaucratic, Bartleby-ish vibe. But what especially impressed me this time around were the earlier "Ukrainian Tales", such as the poignant "Old World Landowners" and the indescribably disturbing "Terrible Vengeance", which combine folklore, proto po-mo narrative and surreal nightmare logic into something completely and utterly sui generis.
Less impressive, in my view, is the now ubiquitous Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. I'd enjoyed PV's version of The Brothers Karamazov – a novel largely consisting of dialogue and plot – but found their doggedly literal approach ill-suited to such a vibrant prose stylist as Gogol. In their hands, Gogol's language often came across as stiff, awkward and vaguely academic. (I had a similar problem with their translation of Bulgakov.) People say that Guerney's the one to get when it comes to Dead Souls, but English-language readers of the Tales may just need to buckle down and learn some Russian...
A highly rewarding read, nonetheless.
Less impressive, in my view, is the now ubiquitous Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. I'd enjoyed PV's version of The Brothers Karamazov – a novel largely consisting of dialogue and plot – but found their doggedly literal approach ill-suited to such a vibrant prose stylist as Gogol. In their hands, Gogol's language often came across as stiff, awkward and vaguely academic. (I had a similar problem with their translation of Bulgakov.) People say that Guerney's the one to get when it comes to Dead Souls, but English-language readers of the Tales may just need to buckle down and learn some Russian...
A highly rewarding read, nonetheless.
April 20, 2012
This anthology is so achingly good that I read it slowly over a period of abouta year, and when I was through I was extremely sad that there weren't any more tales for me to come to afresh. But I can still re-read these many a time and always gain once again that feeling of a glorious, unfettered sort of artistic madness that teeters on so many precipices but never falls nor falters. Here we have wild humour, sincere and touching expressions of humanity, carousing, feasting, absurdity, and threatening darkness touched with a hint of irreverent levity even at the worst of times.
I love the Ukrainian tales, with their lyrical style and descriptions of tiny hamlets and provincial revelry. But, these are not cozy tales; in fact, there is a real grimness leaning over your shoulder in many of these. "Viy" utterly surprised and thrilled me with its depiction of the macabre and the horrific, especially as I didn't imagine at the time any writers in Gogol's time addressing the supernatural with such plain, open language and without a hint of repentence or avoidance of the "bloody details". "Viy" even became the basis for Mario Bava's classic film Black Sunday, one of the ultimate gothic revenge movies, but believe it or not, the Gogol story is even darker. It's also kind of funny, though, especially with all of Gogol's descriptions of the young priest and his fruitless efforts to get away from the village so he wouldn't have to perform an exorcism. Then there's "A Terrible Vengeance", which is probably the dreariest, grimmest thing in this anthology and makes you feel bitter toward everything. But, Gogol seems to be saying, "you need this! You simply must be reminded!"
I notice a certain sad wistfulness in the Petersburg tales. I get the feeling that Gogol, while kind of set afire by the cosmopolitan glories of Petersburg, missed his homeland terribly. Of course I could be misapprehending here, but the character of the stories in the second half of the anthology is different....the pain more introspective, the appeals to human nature touched by genuine sad experience. I was particularly moved by "Nevsky Prospekt", which is a story so modern in its apprehensions and depictions of urban life that its quite startling and eye-opening. I wonder if Dickens ever read Gogol?
The style of Gogol, whether told (and these stories really do all feel as though they were told, and not written) in Petersburg or Kiev and the surrounding villages, is steady and assured throughout the book. And lest you think that in Petersburg Gogol gave up his provincialism and love of the fantastic and strange, think again....all this stuff is very much still alive in the big city. There's nothing that Gogol can see that can't, at some point, be touched by the supernatural and eerie. This is in fact one of the things that I love most about him. He tells his stories as though they were folk knowledge, but the introduction in this book stresses that in fact they weren't and that he really made most of this stuff up himself. I've a feeling he would have been a strange, compelling man to meet. The translation by Pevear and Belakhovsky is excellent, and although I don't know Russian, I always look for their translations of Russian classics because they feel very genuine somehow, very natural and alive with their attempt to communicate the lyrical power of the writers whose work they bring to the english-speaking world.
I love the Ukrainian tales, with their lyrical style and descriptions of tiny hamlets and provincial revelry. But, these are not cozy tales; in fact, there is a real grimness leaning over your shoulder in many of these. "Viy" utterly surprised and thrilled me with its depiction of the macabre and the horrific, especially as I didn't imagine at the time any writers in Gogol's time addressing the supernatural with such plain, open language and without a hint of repentence or avoidance of the "bloody details". "Viy" even became the basis for Mario Bava's classic film Black Sunday, one of the ultimate gothic revenge movies, but believe it or not, the Gogol story is even darker. It's also kind of funny, though, especially with all of Gogol's descriptions of the young priest and his fruitless efforts to get away from the village so he wouldn't have to perform an exorcism. Then there's "A Terrible Vengeance", which is probably the dreariest, grimmest thing in this anthology and makes you feel bitter toward everything. But, Gogol seems to be saying, "you need this! You simply must be reminded!"
I notice a certain sad wistfulness in the Petersburg tales. I get the feeling that Gogol, while kind of set afire by the cosmopolitan glories of Petersburg, missed his homeland terribly. Of course I could be misapprehending here, but the character of the stories in the second half of the anthology is different....the pain more introspective, the appeals to human nature touched by genuine sad experience. I was particularly moved by "Nevsky Prospekt", which is a story so modern in its apprehensions and depictions of urban life that its quite startling and eye-opening. I wonder if Dickens ever read Gogol?
The style of Gogol, whether told (and these stories really do all feel as though they were told, and not written) in Petersburg or Kiev and the surrounding villages, is steady and assured throughout the book. And lest you think that in Petersburg Gogol gave up his provincialism and love of the fantastic and strange, think again....all this stuff is very much still alive in the big city. There's nothing that Gogol can see that can't, at some point, be touched by the supernatural and eerie. This is in fact one of the things that I love most about him. He tells his stories as though they were folk knowledge, but the introduction in this book stresses that in fact they weren't and that he really made most of this stuff up himself. I've a feeling he would have been a strange, compelling man to meet. The translation by Pevear and Belakhovsky is excellent, and although I don't know Russian, I always look for their translations of Russian classics because they feel very genuine somehow, very natural and alive with their attempt to communicate the lyrical power of the writers whose work they bring to the english-speaking world.
September 19, 2023
The Ukrainian Tales, which make up roughly half of this collection — the other half being the Petersburg Tales, which I just finished reading last week in a German translation — are equally excellent and provide a superb glance at life in Ukraine in the 19th century. Gogol’s wit, humour and sarcasm combine to make a very enjoyable reading experience.
March 17, 2022
Overall: 3.5
Dostoevsky is said to have said: “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” When I came upon that remark, it seemed to me I had to finally check out the work of a name I've heard for decades. 'Dead Souls' seemed a bit more than I wanted to take on at the moment (maybe later), so I opted for this smorgasbord of smaller pieces.
This collection ends with 'The Overcoat' - easily a 5-star story. It's so deeply felt, so sad - among the saddest stories I've ever read - and the writing is remarkable. It's an account that capsulizes much of the tragedy of humanity. It gave me a window into what Dostoevsky was talking about.
The rest of the collection has its ups and downs - as is often said of story collections (though I've experienced collections that have been mostly rather solid; but this isn't one of them).
One of the major 'ups' here is that the volume is yet another smooth translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It seems that, even when the content was problematic, they found ways of rising to the challenge in order to facilitate reading at a clip.
In his introduction, Pevear states that there's a marked growth from the time of the first set of stories ('Ukrainian Tales') through the second set ('Petersburg Tales'). But that's not how I would put it. Instead, I'd say that the successful stories here seem to be the result of when Gogol actually applied himself in proper accordance with his abilities.
Some stories - like 'St. John's Eve', 'The Night Before Christmas', 'The Terrible Vengeance', immersed in superstition and folklore - reveal intelligence without revealing much by way of kinetic storytelling. (Another spirit tale - 'Viy' - at least finally builds to a rather menacing showdown with a witch.) Other stories - specifically 'Old World Landowners', 'The Diary of a Madman', 'The Carriage' - are similarly lethargic, seemingly content with 'promise'.
Peppered throughout are a few examples of when the writer takes off to a more considerable - and more satisfying - degree: 'Ivan Fyodorovichi Shponka and His Aunt', 'The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich' (which I particularly enjoyed, in part for its 'humor'), 'Nevsky Prospect', and 'The Nose' (which may have inspired Kafka's 'Metamorphosis').
The penultimate narrative - 'The Portrait' - comes closest to 'The Overcoat' in strength. A vivid tale of possession, it has a diabolical quality that could have found its way into Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.
Upon finishing a reading of 'The Overcoat', I had some difficulty reconciling that work with what preceded it. Was this really the same writer?! All told, this volume certainly has its merits but the reading is also an exercise in frustration. Still, it's capped with 'The Overcoat' - which spoke to my soul.
Dostoevsky is said to have said: “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” When I came upon that remark, it seemed to me I had to finally check out the work of a name I've heard for decades. 'Dead Souls' seemed a bit more than I wanted to take on at the moment (maybe later), so I opted for this smorgasbord of smaller pieces.
This collection ends with 'The Overcoat' - easily a 5-star story. It's so deeply felt, so sad - among the saddest stories I've ever read - and the writing is remarkable. It's an account that capsulizes much of the tragedy of humanity. It gave me a window into what Dostoevsky was talking about.
The rest of the collection has its ups and downs - as is often said of story collections (though I've experienced collections that have been mostly rather solid; but this isn't one of them).
One of the major 'ups' here is that the volume is yet another smooth translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It seems that, even when the content was problematic, they found ways of rising to the challenge in order to facilitate reading at a clip.
In his introduction, Pevear states that there's a marked growth from the time of the first set of stories ('Ukrainian Tales') through the second set ('Petersburg Tales'). But that's not how I would put it. Instead, I'd say that the successful stories here seem to be the result of when Gogol actually applied himself in proper accordance with his abilities.
Some stories - like 'St. John's Eve', 'The Night Before Christmas', 'The Terrible Vengeance', immersed in superstition and folklore - reveal intelligence without revealing much by way of kinetic storytelling. (Another spirit tale - 'Viy' - at least finally builds to a rather menacing showdown with a witch.) Other stories - specifically 'Old World Landowners', 'The Diary of a Madman', 'The Carriage' - are similarly lethargic, seemingly content with 'promise'.
Peppered throughout are a few examples of when the writer takes off to a more considerable - and more satisfying - degree: 'Ivan Fyodorovichi Shponka and His Aunt', 'The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich' (which I particularly enjoyed, in part for its 'humor'), 'Nevsky Prospect', and 'The Nose' (which may have inspired Kafka's 'Metamorphosis').
The penultimate narrative - 'The Portrait' - comes closest to 'The Overcoat' in strength. A vivid tale of possession, it has a diabolical quality that could have found its way into Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.
Upon finishing a reading of 'The Overcoat', I had some difficulty reconciling that work with what preceded it. Was this really the same writer?! All told, this volume certainly has its merits but the reading is also an exercise in frustration. Still, it's capped with 'The Overcoat' - which spoke to my soul.
May 21, 2015
Gogol’s wild and wonderful fantasies expose the phantasmagoria of his imagination-from the lowly civil servant who haunts to streets of St Petersburg in search of his overcoat, to the man who one days wakes up to find his nose has disappeared and is walking the streets disguised as a titular councillor, Gogol’s tales are by turns whimsical and melancholy, exposing the irrationality and absurdities of life.
Some people, shockingly, call Gogol a “realist”-whilst he may have intermittently dabbled in what he deemed “realistic” fiction, none of his characters are remotely real, instead they exist as vague shadows who exist upon the fringes of Gogol’s outlandish mind, so although Nevsky Prospect is essentially a tediously told story about a morosely idiotic and inattentive artist falling in love with a papier-mâché girl, it is saved from the brink and banality by Gogol’s wonderful and unique long, rambling metaphors, like a thief is able to steal a pumpkin from a field at night, when the moon is as round as the button on a soldier’s uniform. (A very Gogolian metaphor!)
“Both the muddy, clumsy boot of the discharged soldier, under whose very weight the granite appears to crack, and the miniature shoes, as light as a puff of smoke, of the young lady who, like a sunflower to the sun, turns her head towards the glittering shop windows, the rattling sable of the ambitious ensign that leaves a sharp scratch-everyone displays his own strength or weakness…”
Gogol as a realist is tedious, but as a fantasist when he gives free reign to his imagination like a master who frees his horse to gallop in the sallow, sodden fields (another Gogolian metaphor) he is unmatchable; never read grotesque Gogol to learn about people, but read Gogol to be enchanted and entranced, ‘Gogolized’ as Nabokov put it; his works are like the cool remnants of wax from the burned out candle of his mind; strange and surreal, they will drip constantly through the readers mind even long after they read them.
None of Gogol’s stories are as profound as ‘The Overcoat’ the story of Akaky, a pathetic and snivelling civil servant, who dreams of one day owning an overcoat, only to have it stolen from him. Gogol is able to capture the lowliest and most vulnerable members of society, not due to promote any social or political message, but to demonstrate the dignity of every human being, even those as pathetic as Akaky and their constant struggle to find happiness in a world which only offers them pain. Gogol is able to capture these awkward and weird characters, because he was essentially one of them himself, an outside from birth onwards, Gogol was sensitive to the plight of the outsider in society and was able to give them a voice without sounding tendentious or sentimental. Gogol is also able to capture the absurdity of human behaviour, in this case that of civil servants and our often illogical social conventions-such as the bellicose yet ultimately pathetic director, whose dressing down of Akaky inadvertently leads to his death and yet Akaky is able to avenge his mistreatment by the director by haunting him and stealing his overcoat after he dies; showing the director up to be the weak and weasely man that he is.
The Nose is off-set with more humour than ‘The Overcoat’, as the protagonist, Major Kovalyov, wakes up to one day to find his nose has disappeared (we learn that the disappearance may have something to do with the nose tweaking habits of his barber, Ivan) and to run into him in the streets, only to greeted in haughty and supercilious manner and to find out later that his nose has attempted to flee the city under the guise of a state councillor, only to be stopped by some eagle eyed official. Although the absurdity of the tale was not lost on Gogol, it was no absurd in his mind, than the asinine social conventions which his plastic characters go through on a daily basis-for Gogol if a man can spend so much time worrying about the cut of his waistcoat, then it is really so absurd that a man can one day wake up to find his nose has disappeared; finishing Gogol is like waking from a long, deep and absurd dream (or nightmare).
Some people, shockingly, call Gogol a “realist”-whilst he may have intermittently dabbled in what he deemed “realistic” fiction, none of his characters are remotely real, instead they exist as vague shadows who exist upon the fringes of Gogol’s outlandish mind, so although Nevsky Prospect is essentially a tediously told story about a morosely idiotic and inattentive artist falling in love with a papier-mâché girl, it is saved from the brink and banality by Gogol’s wonderful and unique long, rambling metaphors, like a thief is able to steal a pumpkin from a field at night, when the moon is as round as the button on a soldier’s uniform. (A very Gogolian metaphor!)
“Both the muddy, clumsy boot of the discharged soldier, under whose very weight the granite appears to crack, and the miniature shoes, as light as a puff of smoke, of the young lady who, like a sunflower to the sun, turns her head towards the glittering shop windows, the rattling sable of the ambitious ensign that leaves a sharp scratch-everyone displays his own strength or weakness…”
Gogol as a realist is tedious, but as a fantasist when he gives free reign to his imagination like a master who frees his horse to gallop in the sallow, sodden fields (another Gogolian metaphor) he is unmatchable; never read grotesque Gogol to learn about people, but read Gogol to be enchanted and entranced, ‘Gogolized’ as Nabokov put it; his works are like the cool remnants of wax from the burned out candle of his mind; strange and surreal, they will drip constantly through the readers mind even long after they read them.
None of Gogol’s stories are as profound as ‘The Overcoat’ the story of Akaky, a pathetic and snivelling civil servant, who dreams of one day owning an overcoat, only to have it stolen from him. Gogol is able to capture the lowliest and most vulnerable members of society, not due to promote any social or political message, but to demonstrate the dignity of every human being, even those as pathetic as Akaky and their constant struggle to find happiness in a world which only offers them pain. Gogol is able to capture these awkward and weird characters, because he was essentially one of them himself, an outside from birth onwards, Gogol was sensitive to the plight of the outsider in society and was able to give them a voice without sounding tendentious or sentimental. Gogol is also able to capture the absurdity of human behaviour, in this case that of civil servants and our often illogical social conventions-such as the bellicose yet ultimately pathetic director, whose dressing down of Akaky inadvertently leads to his death and yet Akaky is able to avenge his mistreatment by the director by haunting him and stealing his overcoat after he dies; showing the director up to be the weak and weasely man that he is.
The Nose is off-set with more humour than ‘The Overcoat’, as the protagonist, Major Kovalyov, wakes up to one day to find his nose has disappeared (we learn that the disappearance may have something to do with the nose tweaking habits of his barber, Ivan) and to run into him in the streets, only to greeted in haughty and supercilious manner and to find out later that his nose has attempted to flee the city under the guise of a state councillor, only to be stopped by some eagle eyed official. Although the absurdity of the tale was not lost on Gogol, it was no absurd in his mind, than the asinine social conventions which his plastic characters go through on a daily basis-for Gogol if a man can spend so much time worrying about the cut of his waistcoat, then it is really so absurd that a man can one day wake up to find his nose has disappeared; finishing Gogol is like waking from a long, deep and absurd dream (or nightmare).
October 3, 2019
I'm a Gogol admirer & I've given five stars to other Gogol works & collections, so why four this time?
Well, possibly because of the translation. I know I'm in the minority here, but I wasn't captivated by the Pevear/Volokhonsky version. I've read quite a few of these stories before, and I remember liking them much more last time around.
I've heard the opinion that their work is more true to the original - does this mean I don't like Russian literature as much as I thought I did? Only time will tell I suppose; it's only an opinion after all, and there are lots of different translations of Russian works that I have enjoyed.
Perhaps the above issue contributed towards my very slow reading on this one, but I don't think time matters when they are individual/short stories. On a positive note I hadn't read 'The Portrait' before, and that was one of my favourites.
Well, possibly because of the translation. I know I'm in the minority here, but I wasn't captivated by the Pevear/Volokhonsky version. I've read quite a few of these stories before, and I remember liking them much more last time around.
I've heard the opinion that their work is more true to the original - does this mean I don't like Russian literature as much as I thought I did? Only time will tell I suppose; it's only an opinion after all, and there are lots of different translations of Russian works that I have enjoyed.
Perhaps the above issue contributed towards my very slow reading on this one, but I don't think time matters when they are individual/short stories. On a positive note I hadn't read 'The Portrait' before, and that was one of my favourites.
Read
August 2, 2015A few old favorites, plus a number of Gogol stories I hadn't read before, including “The Portrait,” which seems to rank among his finest works. For those of you who haven't read Gogol, please do so as soon as possible-- the great unkempt beast of Russian literature emerges from the woods in these stories, and they're as full of as much violence, absurdity, superstition, and vodka-drenched misery as you could want.
May 27, 2018
Mit meist großem Vergnügen habe ich nunmehr den ganzen Gogol gelesen. Was gerade bei den weniger bekannten Erzählungen ins Auge sticht: 1. Es steckt unglaublich viel E.T.A. Hoffman - mit allen guten aber auch schlechten Seiten - in Gogol. 2. Gogol ist - insbesondere im Frühwerk - erstaunlich ukrainisch, was Handlung aber auch Hintergrund der Charaktere angeht. Gerade diese Facette ist reizvoll und eröffnet interessante Einblicke.
January 3, 2018
Even if he had published nothing but Dead Souls, Gogol would still have a claim to be one of Ukraine's all-time greatest novelists. Luckily for us, he kept writing, and these excellent short stories show that his transition to becoming a more "Russian" writer did not dampen his humor or invention one bit. This collection shows off both sides of Gogol's output: first, the strange, magical Ukrainian stories full of drunken peasants, quarreling landowners, hilarious religious bigotry, and fantastical adventures that he wrote to exoticize his homeland to his new Russian friends. Second, there's the more conceptual St. Petersburg stories, which have more realist settings but no less surreal plots, with maddening bureaucracies, inexplicable transformations, and copious humiliations for the unfortunate denizens of the Russian capital. The second half has the more famous stories like The Nose and The Overcoat, which show Gogol's gift for presenting absurd situations in a straightforward, even poignant way, but even the earlier stories have their touches of genius, often coming across as minor theatrical masterpieces or as undiscovered fairytales. Almost no one was better at taking a mundane scene, adding an outlandish twist, and then following that wherever it led to emerge on the other side as a savage social critique.
February 6, 2010
There's not a bad story in this batch! But I especially loved "Nevsky Prospect" and "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich". These are long stories, but they are cozy and full-of-life stories that I want to read out loud by a campfire. Nobody alternates between the absurdly comical and the frightfully chilling like Gogol. The first half (Ukrainian Tales) tells more stories that are mystical in nature, sounding sometimes like folktales, dealing with witches and devils. The second half (Petersburg Tales) have some of that as well, but more surreal unexplained occurrences (like "The Nose") and other oddities. Gogol makes hilarious observations about his characters and their hypocrisies. He also inserts his own (or his persona's) storyteller voice in almost every story, wedging himself inside of them (sometimes the narrator's voice adds a whole new dimension to the basic story) would hardly work for any other writer but Gogol is not just any other writer. Ah, but before we go on, we should first acquaint the reader somewhat with this remarkable character, Nikolai Gogol...
December 3, 2021
I read read these stories at three separate periods of time. I would recommend The Overcoat, The Nose, and Diary of a Madman to be read first then if you like them read the other stories.
June 16, 2012
Split into two sets of stories - those that take place in Ukraine and those in Russia, this is a collection that takes pride of place on my bookshelf.
The theme of each story tends to deal with the darker aspects of human nature – depravity, poverty, the squandering of talent and opportunity, groupthink and malice. However, the narrative never dips into over-sincerity or narcissistic exposition. There is a sharp, honest, knowing quality to the writing that is evident from the surface level aesthetics down to the very core of each story.
There are some writers who are good storytellers and some who are known because of their penmanship skills. Even translated, Gogol is clearly both. The 13 stories in this collection, while undeniably Gogol’s, play with a range of styles and rhythms. He describes states of being and situations from the disintegration of one’s mind to the excitement a young girl can feel for her booties; From the combat of a warrior to a human nose on legs with prose that is completely fitting to each situation. He is not scared of playing with a reader’s expectations in this arena. Yet somehow the writing is never inconsistent, either.
Pathos and menace are nearly always present, but somehow you feel comfortable in his hands. He plays and teases with you, drawing you in one direction before shoving you into another. Gogol paints his pictures with deep colours and complex textures, yet communicates all of this with a simple stroke, a glance in one direction that is fleeting but piercing, unapologetic, maybe dangerous in its unwavering loyalty to honesty. One scene (this does not spoil any of the stories), briefly shows a wizard flying past the moon in a magic saucepan. Written here this is sugar and twee. From the pen of Gogol it is delightful and energetic, entirely suited to the scene and, rather than squeezed in like a square peg into a pre-thought squarish hole, is in fact inevitable. It was reading this moment for the first time that I felt that rising excitement in my chest that tells me I’m reading genius. For me it’s a standout moment and one I return to again and again.
But as I said, it’s not just the writing (and of course this is translated! Gogol is famous for the sophistication of his literary techniques but I shall never read his poetry as he intended me to) but the content of the stories, too. In the grand Russian tradition they tackle the very worst of humanity in a way that is rescued from cynicism with a tinge of optimism for the future, but Gogol’s inimitable - slightly mad, and obviously completely at odds with the world around him - mind doesn’t just twist some old formulas around but instead smashes them into each other and creates something brand new and rude in their originality. In each story you can see the germination of ideas explored by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka… and these ideas are spat out and dispensed with almost immediately. Most writers could spend a career delving into each one. The rate at which Gogol sprays them across the page is staggering and beautiful. It’s ‘The Mysterious Portrait’, however, that stands out as the true achievement. Anybody - anybody - who has ever had even an inclination towards art in the smallest bone in their body (in the ear, right?) needs to read it. Gogol lacerates through every affectation and whimsy in order to get to the truth in brutal fashion, executed with such style, with such sureness and swiftness and with such power that I find it difficult to type about right now without running downstairs to reread it.
While dealing with lofty ideas and rich characters, the stories are also compelling and - importantly - fun. You want to see what happens. Not with dread or fear for the worst, but with excitement. It helps that even at his most morose, Gogol is funny. As with his writing style, he has it all - wit, sarcasm, slapstick and punch lines. He has his heroes and his villains, self-discovery, transcendence of thought and all-out action, the scenes of which put the imagination of Hollywood’s directors to shame. There is more packed into these 13 short stories than the entire careers of many giants of literature. If you read the stories in one sitting you’re left reeling, dizzy with ideas, unsure of which one to contemplate first.
And the best thing about this collection is that this isn’t even Gogol’s best stuff. That would be Dead Souls Part I and II, which I’ll write about at some point in the near future.
The theme of each story tends to deal with the darker aspects of human nature – depravity, poverty, the squandering of talent and opportunity, groupthink and malice. However, the narrative never dips into over-sincerity or narcissistic exposition. There is a sharp, honest, knowing quality to the writing that is evident from the surface level aesthetics down to the very core of each story.
There are some writers who are good storytellers and some who are known because of their penmanship skills. Even translated, Gogol is clearly both. The 13 stories in this collection, while undeniably Gogol’s, play with a range of styles and rhythms. He describes states of being and situations from the disintegration of one’s mind to the excitement a young girl can feel for her booties; From the combat of a warrior to a human nose on legs with prose that is completely fitting to each situation. He is not scared of playing with a reader’s expectations in this arena. Yet somehow the writing is never inconsistent, either.
Pathos and menace are nearly always present, but somehow you feel comfortable in his hands. He plays and teases with you, drawing you in one direction before shoving you into another. Gogol paints his pictures with deep colours and complex textures, yet communicates all of this with a simple stroke, a glance in one direction that is fleeting but piercing, unapologetic, maybe dangerous in its unwavering loyalty to honesty. One scene (this does not spoil any of the stories), briefly shows a wizard flying past the moon in a magic saucepan. Written here this is sugar and twee. From the pen of Gogol it is delightful and energetic, entirely suited to the scene and, rather than squeezed in like a square peg into a pre-thought squarish hole, is in fact inevitable. It was reading this moment for the first time that I felt that rising excitement in my chest that tells me I’m reading genius. For me it’s a standout moment and one I return to again and again.
But as I said, it’s not just the writing (and of course this is translated! Gogol is famous for the sophistication of his literary techniques but I shall never read his poetry as he intended me to) but the content of the stories, too. In the grand Russian tradition they tackle the very worst of humanity in a way that is rescued from cynicism with a tinge of optimism for the future, but Gogol’s inimitable - slightly mad, and obviously completely at odds with the world around him - mind doesn’t just twist some old formulas around but instead smashes them into each other and creates something brand new and rude in their originality. In each story you can see the germination of ideas explored by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka… and these ideas are spat out and dispensed with almost immediately. Most writers could spend a career delving into each one. The rate at which Gogol sprays them across the page is staggering and beautiful. It’s ‘The Mysterious Portrait’, however, that stands out as the true achievement. Anybody - anybody - who has ever had even an inclination towards art in the smallest bone in their body (in the ear, right?) needs to read it. Gogol lacerates through every affectation and whimsy in order to get to the truth in brutal fashion, executed with such style, with such sureness and swiftness and with such power that I find it difficult to type about right now without running downstairs to reread it.
While dealing with lofty ideas and rich characters, the stories are also compelling and - importantly - fun. You want to see what happens. Not with dread or fear for the worst, but with excitement. It helps that even at his most morose, Gogol is funny. As with his writing style, he has it all - wit, sarcasm, slapstick and punch lines. He has his heroes and his villains, self-discovery, transcendence of thought and all-out action, the scenes of which put the imagination of Hollywood’s directors to shame. There is more packed into these 13 short stories than the entire careers of many giants of literature. If you read the stories in one sitting you’re left reeling, dizzy with ideas, unsure of which one to contemplate first.
And the best thing about this collection is that this isn’t even Gogol’s best stuff. That would be Dead Souls Part I and II, which I’ll write about at some point in the near future.
Read
August 19, 2008Gogol's tales in this book are split into two distinct sections. The first is concerned mostly with life in Ukraine in the early 19th century and is filled with superstitious people and the demons and devils they interact with regularly. The stories are tremendously funny but also strange and dark, mysterious in the best, most inexplicable way. I was reminded at times of the short work of Hawthorne, in which dark creatures often seem to be lurking in the woods, but Gogol feels more modern somehow.
The second part deals with Petersburg and is decidedly more surreal. In "The Nose," a man wakes one day to find that his nose is gone from his face. He later meets this nose in the street wearing the military uniform of a general. These stories clearly prefigure Dostoevsky's writing ("Diary of a Madman" especially) and seem to lay the narrative and formal groundwork for writers like Walser and Kafka. This was one of the best and most riveting collections of stories I have read and I highly recommend it.
The second part deals with Petersburg and is decidedly more surreal. In "The Nose," a man wakes one day to find that his nose is gone from his face. He later meets this nose in the street wearing the military uniform of a general. These stories clearly prefigure Dostoevsky's writing ("Diary of a Madman" especially) and seem to lay the narrative and formal groundwork for writers like Walser and Kafka. This was one of the best and most riveting collections of stories I have read and I highly recommend it.
May 5, 2011
A digression-free, lean review, gentlemen! exclamation points a-plenty!
The first six Ukrainian tales are a tedious, dreadful slog. "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" has a funny premise, and funny moments, but is too bloated. Then, we hope Gogol gets better when he gets to Petersburg, and he mostly does. "The Nose" is really good; "The Overcoat" is great; and "Diary of a Madman" is awesome. The others are as clunker-ish as the first half of the entire book (though I suppose "The Portrait" is alright).
Honestly, stick with "The Nose," "The Overcoat," and "Diary of a Madman." The rest of this collection (that's 75% of it) isn't worthwhile. Did it suck? Well, maybe, but, you know, haters gonna hate.
The first six Ukrainian tales are a tedious, dreadful slog. "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" has a funny premise, and funny moments, but is too bloated. Then, we hope Gogol gets better when he gets to Petersburg, and he mostly does. "The Nose" is really good; "The Overcoat" is great; and "Diary of a Madman" is awesome. The others are as clunker-ish as the first half of the entire book (though I suppose "The Portrait" is alright).
Honestly, stick with "The Nose," "The Overcoat," and "Diary of a Madman." The rest of this collection (that's 75% of it) isn't worthwhile. Did it suck? Well, maybe, but, you know, haters gonna hate.
February 22, 2021
28 February 2009 - I have previously read Gogol's Dead Souls, so I thought I knew what to expect from this. But I was surprised by the supernaturalism of the earlier Ukrainian stories. After a while I came to think of them as written to a weekly television show level of entertainment rather than a literary audience. Situation comedies in some cases; thrillers in others. The later Petersburg stories are definitely more intentional and serious. And then there is the incomparable "The Nose".
The contents are as follows -
UKRAINIAN TALES
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
PETERSBURG TALES
Nevsky Pospect
The Diary of a Madman
The Nose
The Carriage
The Portrait
The Overcoat
The contents are as follows -
UKRAINIAN TALES
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
PETERSBURG TALES
Nevsky Pospect
The Diary of a Madman
The Nose
The Carriage
The Portrait
The Overcoat
May 5, 2019
This was overall a big disappointment. Most of the stories I would rate no higher than 2 stars as they are boring, anti Semitic, sexist and often needlessly repetitious. A few gems (the overcoat and the portrait) boost the book to an overall 3 star. Gogol isn’t all he is made out to be in my opinion.
Want to read
November 13, 2023Contains the stories:
Ukrainian Tales
St. John's Eve -
The Night Before Christmas - 3/5 - like most Christmas tales, this one starts off with a witch and a devil...
The Terrible Vengeance -
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt -
Old World Landowners -
Viy -
The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich -
Petersburg Tales
Nevsky Prospect -
The Diary of a Madman -
The Nose -
The Carriage -
The Portrait -
The Overcoat - 5/5 - Akakievich is a bureaucratic clerk who is needs a new cloak, becomes obsessed with a obtaining a new cloak, luxuriates in his new cloak, has his new cloak stolen, is unable to obtain sympathetic assistance from the powers-that-be in regaining his new cloak, dies without his cloak, and revenges himself upon the neighborhood at large as a ghost who attempts to steal the capes of others. It's easy to see why this story has come to be considered as so influential by both Russian and non-Russian writers - there are so many things going on and so many themes to consider, not the least of which is the absurdist examination of the helpless individual in the face of overwhelming bureaucratic oppression and societal indifference.
Ukrainian Tales
St. John's Eve -
The Night Before Christmas - 3/5 - like most Christmas tales, this one starts off with a witch and a devil...
The Terrible Vengeance -
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt -
Old World Landowners -
Viy -
The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich -
Petersburg Tales
Nevsky Prospect -
The Diary of a Madman -
The Nose -
The Carriage -
The Portrait -
The Overcoat - 5/5 - Akakievich is a bureaucratic clerk who is needs a new cloak, becomes obsessed with a obtaining a new cloak, luxuriates in his new cloak, has his new cloak stolen, is unable to obtain sympathetic assistance from the powers-that-be in regaining his new cloak, dies without his cloak, and revenges himself upon the neighborhood at large as a ghost who attempts to steal the capes of others. It's easy to see why this story has come to be considered as so influential by both Russian and non-Russian writers - there are so many things going on and so many themes to consider, not the least of which is the absurdist examination of the helpless individual in the face of overwhelming bureaucratic oppression and societal indifference.
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