Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol’s characteristic obsessions—city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise—and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso’s translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.

"The Overcoat," "The Nose," "Diary of a Madman," and "Nevsky Prospekt" are presented in their entirety, in the original Russian and in a facing English translation.

Written in the 1830s and early 1840s, these comic stories tackle life behind the cold and elegant façade of the Imperial capital from the viewpoints of various characters, such as a collegiate assessor who one day finds that his nose has detached itself from his face and risen the ranks to become a state councillor (‘The Nose’), a painter and a lieutenant whose romantic pursuits meet with contrasting degrees of success (‘Nevsky Prospect’) and a lowly civil servant whose existence desperately unravels when he loses his prized new coat (‘The Overcoat’). Also including the ‘Diary of Madman’, these Petersburg Tales paint a critical yet hilarious portrait of a city riddled with pomposity and self-importance, masterfully juxtaposing nineteenth-century realism with madcap surrealism, and combining absurdist farce with biting satire.

Using, or rather mimicking, traditional forms of storytelling Gogol created stories that are complete within themselves and only tangentially connected to a meaning or moral. His work belongs to the school of invention, where each twist and turn of the narrative is a surprise unfettered by obligation to an overarching theme. Selected from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and the Petersburg tales and arranged in order of composition, the thirteen stories in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogolencompass the breadth of Gogol's literary achievement. From the demon-haunted “St. John's Eve ” to the heartrending humiliations and trials of a titular councilor in “The Overcoat,” Gogol's knack for turning literary conventions on their heads combined with his overt joy in the art of story telling shine through in each of the tales. This translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is as vigorous and darkly funny as the original Russian. It allows readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostevsky and Kafka.

This volume brings together Gogol's Petersburg Tales with his two most famous plays, all of which guide us through the streets of St. Petersburg, the city erected by force and ingenuity on the marshes of the Neva estuary. Something of the deception and violence of the city's creation seems to lurk beneath its harmonious facade, however, and it confounds its inhabitants with false dreams and absurd visions. This new translation by Christopher English brings out the unique vitality and humor of Russia's finest comic writer. --Publisher.

Nine of Chekhov's most powerful and thought-provoking short stories are included here, in the original Russian and in a facing English translation, together with all the vocabulary notes and reference tables you need to make sense of Chekhov's original texts. Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features a new translation made specifically for this purpose, as well as detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs). The original Russian text is marked for stress, but is otherwise unedited and unsimplified. The short stories included in this volume are: "The Death of a Clerk" (how is a bureaucrat killed by a sneeze?), "The Student" (a moving vignette about both timeless meaning and transient youthful idealism), "A Little Joke" (an innocent joke takes on unimagined proportions - if our narrator is to be believed, that is), "Sleepy" (a servant girl, deprived of sleep, is pushed to the brink of madness), "Rothschild's Fiddle" (a deeply moving tale of intolerance, memory, and reconciliation through music), "Anna Round the Neck" (a young woman is forced to marry an older man for his money - but will she turn the tables?), "Gusyev" (a peasant soldier and an intellectual, representing starkly different perspectives on life, await death in a steamship sickbay), "The Lady with the Little Dog" (a couple finds love, and all of the anguish that sustaining it often entails), and "Ward No. 6." (a harrowing story of a provincial doctor and his patients; this unforgettable work is surely one of the most powerful treatments of madness and medical ethics - indeed, ethics is general - in all of world literature.

Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition 'One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is probably also the funniest' Guardian '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 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 Ukranian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvellously 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. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) was born in Ukraine and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work, at first, in various government departments. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), brought him widespread fame, and he went on to write further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. The first part of his great, and only, novel Dead Souls appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically and he repeatedly burned his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls. After the final burning in February 1852, he stopped eating and died in great pain ten days later.