When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered."
More than a century and a half later, Niko[...]
Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literature-a satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.
Gogol hoped to show the world "the untold riches of the Russian soul" in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensian swarm o[...]
"Taras Bulba" is the story of its title character, Taras Bulba, an old Ukrainian Cossack and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap, who journey to Zaporizhian Sich located in Ukraine to fight Polish nobles with fellow Cossacks. A romanticized historical novel, "Taras Bulba" is a story of great adventure an[...]
The compassion, simplicity, and gentle humor with which he treats the poignant quest of a hapless civil servant for the return of his stolen overcoat and the fantastic yet realistic manner in which he takes revenge on his nemesis, the Very Important Person mark "The Overcoat" as one of the greatest [...]
"Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English." --James Wood, "New Yorker"
Called "the greatest play written in Russian" by Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol's immortal comedy is a pitch-perfect satire of social corruption. Now, renowned American playwrig[...]