Gogol Three Plays: The Government Inspector; Marriage; The Gamblers

Description

This collection contains Gogol's three completed plays The Government Inspector, which satirises a corrupt society was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest play in the Russian language and is still widely studied in schools and universities: "I resolved to gather into one heap everything that was bad in Russia which I was aware of at that time, all the injustices being perpetrated in those places, and in those circumstances that especially cried out for justice, and tried to hold them all up to ridicule, at one fell swoop." (Nikolai Gogol) Marriage is a comedy about the business of matchmaking and matrimony; The Gamblers is an exoriating piece about the excesses of the Moscow aristocracy. "Two and two make five, if not the square root of five, and it all happens quite naturally in Gogol's world... Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange" (Vladimir Nabokov)

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) won fame as a short story writer, and in 1836, his satirical comedy The Government Inspector created such a furore that Gogol left Russia to settle in Rome, in self-imposed exile. Religious mania in his later years contributed to his early death in Moscow. Born Glasgow, 1937, married with three children, lecturer in History of Art at Glasgow School of Art. Freelance writer, broadcaster and translator. Literary output includes poetry, short stories and criticism, also several original plays for television, and some ninety plus hours of radio drama, serials, adaptations and original plays. His adaptation of Yerofeev's 'Moscow Stations', published by Oberon Books, has been staged in Edinburgh, London and New York. Since the late 1980's has concentrated on translation from Russian.