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These fourteen essays reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary character of Russian literature research in general and of the study of Gogol in particular, focusing on specific works, Gogol's own character, and the various approaches to aesthetic, religious, and philosophical issues raised by his writing.

Gogol's claim to the title of national literary classic is incontestable. An exemplar of popular audiences no less than for the intelligentsia, Gogol was pressed into service under the tsarist and Soviet regimes for causes both aesthetic and political, official and unofficial. In Gogol's Afterlife, Stephen Moeller-Sally explores how he achieved this peculiar brand of cultural authority and later maintained it, despite dramatic shifts in the organization of Russian literature and society.

Part I charts the historical and cultural currents that shaped Gogol's reputation, devoting particular attention to the models of authorship Gogol himself devised in response to his changing audience and developing authorial mission. Part II takes a panoramic view of the social milieu in which Gogol's status evolved. Finally, Part III examines the place of the classics in Soviet culture, with a focus on Gogol's role in the cultural revolution and his peculiar relationship with state power under Stalinism.

The theatrical genius of Gogol has gone largely unappreciated by English-speaking audiences because literal translations have left his plays virtually impossible to perform. These fresh translations restore the vitality of Gogol's language and humor, allowing his dramatic art to speak to readers, directors, actors, and theater-goers.

 

Nikolai Gogol was an artist who, like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, "knew how to walk upside down in our valley of sorrows so as to make it to a merry place." The list of writers who credit his absurd, bitingly satirical, wildly funny work as an influence includes Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, and many more. 

 

This two-volume edition at last brings all of Gogol's fiction (except his novel Dead Souls) together in paperback. Volume 1 includes Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the early Ukrainian folktales that first brought Gogol fame, as well as "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Diary of a Madman." 
 

 

Nikolai Gogol was an artist who, like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, "knew how to walk upside down in our valley of sorrows so as to make it to a merry place." The list of writers who credit his absurd, bitingly satirical, wildly funny work as an influence includes Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, and many more. 

 

This two-volume edition at last brings all of Gogol's fiction (except his novel Dead Souls) together in paperback. Volume 2 of The Complete Tales includes Gogol's Mirgorod stories—among them that masterpiece of grotesque comedy, "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," the wonderfully satiric "Old World Landowners," and the Cossak epic "Taras Bulba." Here also is "The Nose," Gogol's final effort in the realm of the fantastic, as well as "The Coach," "The Portrait" (in its final version), and the most influential of his Petersburg stories, "The Overcoat."

"Sometimes it takes a poet to read a poet. In this inspired, idiosyncratic study, Ilya Kutik offers exemplary interpretations of three Russian writers, of the lessons of fatalism, and of the complexities of reading." —from the Introduction

A remarkable literary performance in its own right, this interpretive essay brings a highly original poetic sensibility to bear on the lives and works of three major Russian writers. It is Ilya Kutik's contention that many writers are tormented by secret fears and desires that only writing—in particular, the use of certain words and images—can exorcise. Making this biographical approach peculiarly his own—and susceptible to the nuances of comedy, tragedy, and critical equanimity—Kutik reads works of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol, three Russian writers who were demonstrably subject to the whims, superstitions, and talismans that Kutik identifies. Exposing the conjunction of literary effort and private act in writings such as "The Queen of Spades," Dead Souls, and A Hero of Our Time, Kutik's work gives us a new way of understanding these masterpieces of Russian literature and their authors, and a new way of reading the mysteries of life and literature as mutually enriching.