Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

By -
Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky

Gogol wrote a whole lot of short stories, and he kind of did it in two phases of his career.  He started off in Ukraine, so the first half of the stories are called "Ukrainian Tales."  The second half are the "Petersburg Tales," written in the city.

Ukrainian tales are mostly pastoral; they take place in villages and on farms, unless someone treks off to Kiev.  They're a bit folky in flavor, and frequently have some supernatural element.  I really enjoyed most of these stories, especially "The Night Before Christmas," where a proud village girl tells her swain that she won't marry him unless he brings her a pair of boots just like the tsaritsa wears -- and so off he goes to do it.  And there was a melancholy, highly realistic story about two neighbors who were the best of friends, until a chance word causes offense, and every time they get close to reconciling, they choose to insult each other again.  It ends up consuming their lives instead of enriching them.

The Petersburg tales are about more sophisticated people -- shopkeepers or officials or young ladies -- but they're human just the same and the trademark Gogol comedy is more in evidence here.  "The Diary of a Madman" is mostly sad, as a minor official slowly loses his grip on reality.  He develops a crush on his boss' pretty daughter, and believes that he can hear her lapdog conversing with other dogs  "The Nose" is Gogol's most famous story, as an official's nose takes a vacation from his face and is seen around town.   "The Portrait" is a disturbing supernatural story that I thought was very good, and "The Overcoat" is another famous tale, the story of a poor clerk who finally saves up enough to have a new overcoat made, with larger consequences than expected.

It took me a good long time to read this collection, but it was very well worth it.  The stories aren't really very difficult to read, but they do take concentration (for a modern American at least), just because they're set in 1840s Russia.  I tried to read each story in one sitting, or at least in one day, and I enjoyed them pretty well.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more