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.
REVIEWS
Much to savour… With its diverse selection of canonical works, Oliver Ready’s engaging, entertaining volume gives a good sense of Gogol’s range and will find readers inside and outside classrooms
TLS
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
One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is also probably the funniest
Guardian
The greatest artist that Russia has yet produced
Vladimir Nabokov
No previous translator of these stories has ever captured Gogol’s free-floating lunacy with such fine-grained accuracy, truly bringing the moon and the earth together. Such a feat requires great daring and great attentiveness, the key ingredients of translational genius, which Oliver’s every sentence demonstrates in full.
Boris Dralyuk
