The Collected Tales Of Nikolai Gogol

Description

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted 'St John's Eve' to the strange surrealism of 'The Nose', from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in 'The Overcoat' to those of the delusional clerk in 'The Diary of a Madman' - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. To this superb new translation - the first in twenty-five years and destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's short fiction - Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's works and to War and Peace.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was one of the great masters of Russian literature, and was the author of numerous stories and a novel, Dead Souls. Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated Dostoevsky's Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, for which they were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. They then translated several works by Bulgakov for Penguin Classics. Latterly, their new versions of Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina attracted global acclaim. Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot is also published by Granta Books.

Gogol's occasional weirdness is just as weird today, of such a strange order of invention, that even a word like "exuberant" doesn't begin to cover it ... Gogol is strangely timeless -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian * This was, for me, an electric introduction to Russian literature. -- AD Miller * The Independent * Nabokov was right about Gogol's greatness, and right to point out that he was a creator of a new reality -- A.S. Byatt Gogol's narratives take on a compelling logic of their own and the details are by turn comic, sinister, and even touching ... Gogol doesn't ignore the conventions of realism, but, rather, jumbles them up, as in a dream. His stories build their hilarious fantasies on solid observational foundations -- Edmund Gordon * Observer * One of the most unfathomable minds and most spellbinding narrators in literary history. Shrewd observer, Romantic dreamer, idiot savant, parodist, or a comic Dante, Gogol still eludes all categories -- Donald Rayfield * Literary Review * The "father of Russian Modernism" came to fame very early which possibly burned him out, as he wrote little in the last 10 years of his life. His tales might have been written weeks ago though, so fresh and vibrant are they, a testament to the youth of their author when he wrote them -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald * Such is Gogol's all-pervasive influence on European writing that both of these new editions are great value -- Eileen Battersby, Books of the Year * Irish Times *