More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him the Russian Dickens to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. 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.

These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these souls as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the Father of the Golden Age of Russian Literature, Nicolai Gogol's The Overcoat is one of the greatest short stories of all time. This satire on Russia's 19th century bureaucracy is amusing, pointed and has influenced many renowned Russian writers.

Civil servant, Akakiy Akakievitch, is underpaid and underappreciated. The harsh winter months are fast approaching and Akakievitch knows all too well that his overcoat won't survive another repair. He scrimps and saves to the best of his ability until he finally has the funds to purchase a new coat. With the arrival of the garment, we see Akakievitch emerging from his shell. He is gradually more outgoing and is given a new lease of life. But in the cruel world of 19th century Russia, this newfound happiness cannot last long.

When Akakievitch is assaulted on his way home, the two thugs steal his new overcoat. His coworkers, the police and even a government official refuse to assist Akakievitch. As the days grow shorter and the nights colder, Akakievitch falls deathly ill...

Originally published in 1842, The Overcoat is a short story with great impact. Its themes of social commentary, the human condition and a touch of the supernatural are combined with Gogol's biting wit and innovative writing.

Complete with a specially commissioned author biography, Read & Co. Books is proud to have republished this new edition of The Overcoat. A must-have addition to the bookshelves of classic Russian literature lovers, this short story is not one to be missed.

Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol's peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns--or at once--funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature.

These stories showcase Gogol's vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol's characteristic obsessions--city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise--and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso's translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.

Translated by Priscilla Meyer and Andrew R. McAndrew

With a New Introduction

and an Afterword by Priscilla Meyer

An original selection of short fiction by Nikolai Gogol, the Russian Dickens, translated by the great Constance Garnett and curated by Natasha Randall, that captures the genius of one of the most daring, inventive writers of the nineteenth century.

A wounded solider vanishes into notoriety.
A nose is found in a loaf of bread.
Places--like the Nevesky Prospect--are not what they seem.

Nikolai Gogol was one of the nineteenth century's greatest and most influential Russian writers, a realist whose acerbic observations and taste for the absurd give his writing its strange, comic voice.

In this edition of A Place Bewitched and Other Stories, Natasha Randall presents a new, curated collection of Gogol's short fiction, selected from the work of Constance Garnett, one of Gogol's earliest translators. Randall has lightly revised Garnett's essential translations and frames the collection with a new foreword. Full of the wit of Gogol's work, this edition is the perfect introduction to a great writer and a must for the enthusiast.

From the Father of the Golden Age of Russian Literature, Nicolai Gogol's The Overcoat is one of the greatest short stories of all time. This satire on Russia's 19th century bureaucracy is amusing, pointed and has influenced many renowned Russian writers.

Civil servant, Akakiy Akakievitch, is underpaid and underappreciated. The harsh winter months are fast approaching and Akakievitch knows all too well that his overcoat won't survive another repair. He scrimps and saves to the best of his ability until he finally has the funds to purchase a new coat. With the arrival of the garment, we see Akakievitch emerging from his shell. He is gradually more outgoing and is given a new lease of life. But in the cruel world of 19th century Russia, this newfound happiness cannot last long.

When Akakievitch is assaulted on his way home, the two thugs steal his new overcoat. His coworkers, the police and even a government official refuse to assist Akakievitch. As the days grow shorter and the nights colder, Akakievitch falls deathly ill...

Originally published in 1842, The Overcoat is a short story with great impact. Its themes of social commentary, the human condition and a touch of the supernatural are combined with Gogol's biting wit and innovative writing.

Complete with a specially commissioned author biography, Read & Co. Books is proud to have republished this new edition of The Overcoat. A must-have addition to the bookshelves of classic Russian literature lovers, this short story is not one to be missed.

The most morally complete writer: baffled, outraged, reverent, mock-didactic, mocking, all at once. He honours life by feeling no one way about it. -- George Saunders

No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - The Overcoat, The Nose and Diary of a Madman -- alongside lesser known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvelously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire.

Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul.

The only Russian reader with literal word-for-word translation and idiomatic explanation where necessary. This book contains short stories from classic Russian authors Chekhov and Gogol.

We have added an interlinear translation to the Russian text. This means that the meaning of every Russian word is immediately accessible, which in turn will make it much easier for you to expand your Russian vocabulary fast. This is a unique method enabling you to read Russian from the start.

How to learn Russian fast with this bookUse the following method to learn Russian fast and easy. Read the stories and re-read them until you know almost all the words. This is a fast process because there's no lookup time.

Then focus on the remaining words that you still don't know by marking those in the text or noting their pages. Because of the literal and idiomatic interlinear text this is the best way to learn French reading fast. Feel free to contact us for a pdf or to get the free audio for this book

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales--stories that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller--allowing 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 acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, a brilliant translation of Nikolai Gogol's short fiction.

Full text.

A young priest is ordered to preside over the wake of witch in a small old wooden church of a remote village. This means spending three nights alone with the corpse with only his faith to protect him.

Chichikov, a middle-aged gentleman of middling social class and means arrives in a small town and turns on the charm to woo key local officials and landowners. He reveals little about his past, or his purpose, as he sets about carrying out his bizarre and mysterious plan to acquire dead souls. When rumors flare up about his ideas, Chichikov flees to another part of Russia and attempts to continue his venture. Again he goes from estate to estate, encountering eccentric and absurd characters all along the way.

In the Russian Empire, before 1861, landowners had the right to own serfs to farm their land. Landowners could buy, sell or mortgage them, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the classifier soul was used: e.g., six souls of serfs. The plot of the novel relies on dead souls (i.e., dead serfs) which are still accounted for in property registers. On another level, the title refers to the dead souls of Gogol's characters, all of which represent different aspects of poshlost, a Russian word that means petty evil, vulgarity, or obscenity and bad taste.

This case laminate collector's edition includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket.

The first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the local landowners wonder, even as some rush to unload what isn't of any use to them anyway, while others seek to negotiate the best deal possible, and others yet hold on to their dead for dear life, since if somebody wants what you have then no matter what don't give it away. Chichikov's scheme soon encounters obstacles, but he is never without resource, and as he stumbles forward as best he can, Gogol paints a wonderfully comic picture of Russian life that also serves as a biting satire of a society as corrupt as it is cynical and silly. At once a wild phantasmagoria and a work of exacting realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art that spills over with humor and passion and absurdity.
Donald Rayfield's vigorous new translation corrects the mistakes and omissions of earlier versions while capturing the vivid speech rhythms of the original. It also offers a fuller text of the unfinished second part of the book by combining material from Gogol's two surviving drafts into a single compelling narrative. This is a tour de force of art and scholarship--and the most authoritative, accurate, and readable edition of Dead Souls available in English.

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as an extraordinarily fine piece of work and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendices that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Deal Souls.

I am delighted that Guerney's translation of Dead Souls [is] available again. It is head and shoulders above all the others, for Guerney understands that to 'translate' Gogol is necessarily to undertake a poetic recreation, and he does so brilliantly.--Robert A. Maguire, Columbia University

The Guerney translation of Dead Souls is the only translation I know of that makes any serious attempt to approximate the qualities of Gogol's style--exuberant, erratic, 'Baroque, ' bizarre.--Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley

A splendidly revised and edited edition of Bernard Guerney's classic English translation of Gogol's Dead Souls. The distinguished Gogol scholar Susanne Fusso may have brought us as close as the English reader may ever expect to come to Gogol's masterpiece. No student, scholar, or general reader will want to miss this updated, refined version of one of the most delightful and sublime works of Russian literature.--Robert Jackson, Yale University

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Nikolai Gogol, an early 19th century Ukrainian-born Russian novelist, humorist, and dramatist, considered the father of modern Russian realism, created some of the most important works of Russian literature. Gogol satirized the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire through the scrupulous and scathing realism of his writing, which would ultimately lead to his exile. Among some of his finest works are his short stories. A representative selection of Gogol's short stories are presented in this volume. The following stories can be found herein: The Fair of Sorotchinetz, St. John's Eve, An Evening in May, Old-Fashioned Farmers, The Viy, The Night of Christmas Eve, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, The Mysterious Portrait, The Diary of a Madman, The Nose, The Carriage, and The Overcoat. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.