The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace , Crime and Punishment , and The Brothers Karamazov, a brilliant translation of Nikolai Gogol's short fiction. Collected here are Gogol's finest talesstories that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dwellerallowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. 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. The wholly unique blend of the mundane and the supernatural that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time. From The New Yorker ...a superb ... translation... [...] From Kirkus Reviews Pevear and Volokhonsky continue their remarkable conquest of 19th-century Russian fiction with this lively new translation of 13 of the Russian Dickens's'' wildest and finest stories. Excluding only lesser pieces from Gogol's earliest volumes (though one misses the madly romantic novella Taras Bulba''), this selection offers richly colloquial versions (which sound like spoken narrative) of such classic Ukrainian Tales'' as the imperturbably melodramatic The Terrible Vengeance'' and the memorably lurid vampire tale Viy,'' and also Petersburg Tales'' like the deliriously surrealistic The Nose'' and that uniquely dreamlike, and seminal, portrayal of a timid clerk's acquisition and loss of his only meaningful possession: The Overcoat.'' Pevear's informative Preface persuasively emphasizes the personal, nonpolitical, and, to some degree, haphazard nature of the distinctive alchemy by which a deeply flawed and troubled soul managed to create some of the most colorful and haunting fiction of his century. -- Copyright 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.