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 i...

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

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.

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 master...

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 wa...

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 fantastic...

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 tr...

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.

“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” Patc...

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. Betwe...

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.

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

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

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 vie...

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 threa...

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 te...

"We all came from Gogol's overcoat."Fyodor DostoevskyDuring 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...

Overall: 3.5Dostoevsky 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 re...

A 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.

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.