Admired by writers from Nabokov to Bulgakov to George Saunders, Gogol is considered one of the more enigmatic of the Russian greats. He only wrote one novel, Dead Souls, and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major output.
In this collection, beautifully and skilfully translated by Oliver Ready, Gogol's three greatest stories - 'The Nose', 'The Overcoat' and 'The Diary of a Madman' - are presented alongside three masterworks from his earlier Ukrainian period - 'St John's Eve', 'Old-World Landowners', and 'The Carriage'. This exquisite selection demonstrates the breadth of Gogol's work with the early stories full of the folklore and mysticism of Little Russia, and the later stories delving into the bureaucratic labyrinth of St Petersburg.
Gogol's extraordinary work is characterised by his idiosyncratic, and often very funny sensibility, and these stories offer us his unique, original and marvellously skewed perspective on the world.
