Nikolai Gogol
1) Dead Souls
Explore a fascinating period in history through the eyes of renowned Russian literary realist Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. This historian-turned-fiction-writer had a lifelong interest in the culture of the Ukranian Cossacks, the community at the center of the tale "Taras Bulba" and several of the other stories brought together in this engrossing and meticulously researched collection.
A midlevel bureaucrat in the czar’s administration, Poprishchin is hurrying to work when he sees a woman step out of a carriage. Her beauty astounds him, and as she passes by, he hears something impossible: Her dog opens its mouth, and begins to speak. It is Poprishchin’s...
Although it may read to modern audiences like a hilarious slapstick comedy, The Inspector-General is actually much more than that. Famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol intended it to be a veiled but pointed satire of the ineptitude, corruption, and greed that exemplified the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. The witty play was later used as the basis for a movie version starring Danny Kaye (1949).
6) Almas Mortas
Explore the Russian creative movement known as literary realism through the work of writer Nikolai Vassilievitch Gogol, whom many critics regard not only as one of the foremost practitioners of this style, but also as one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. This exquisitely translated collection brings together several of the short pieces widely categorized as Gogol's finest work.
Gogol's stories are admired for their skillful mingling of fantasy and reality, quiet good humor and use of mundane details—as Gogol put it—"to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary." Imaginative and timeless, they remain as fresh and significant today as they were to readers generations ago.
This rich selection of four short stories by the great 19th-century Russian author of Dead Souls includes "The Nose," a savage satire
...Selected from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and the Petersburg tales and arranged in...
