Nikolai Gogol's short fiction, collected here as "The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories", deeply influenced later Russian literature with powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. This "Penguin Classics" edition is translated [...]

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 pie[...]

Four outstanding works by great 19th-century Russian author: "The Nose," "Old-Fashioned Farmers," "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich" and "The Overcoat."
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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 doo[...]

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, C[...]