Nikolai Gogol

"e;How dared you, in disregard of all decency, call me a goose?"e;This lesser-known work is perhaps the perfect distillation of Nikolai Gogol's genius: a tale simultaneously animated by a joyful, nearly slapstick sense of humor alongside a resigned cynicism about the human condition. In a sharp-edged translation from...

An NYRB Classics OriginalThe 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...

The First New Translation in Forty YearsSet sometime between the mid-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, Gogols epic tale recounts both a bloody Cossack revolt against the Poles (led by the bold Taras Bulba of Ukrainian folk mythology) and the trials of Taras Bulbas two sons.As Robert Kaplan writes in his Introduction, [Taras Bulba] has a...

A NovelSince 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, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling...