Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls & Collected Tales (5 books)

NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH GOGOL (1809-1852) was a Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer. Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque.

DEAD SOULS (1842) 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 and dealing for "dead souls" -- deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them -- we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. Three translations are presented in this collection.

The COLLECTED TALES bring together Gogol's finest stories that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller. All his most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. This wholly unique blend of the mundane and the supernatural that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.


The following books are in ePUB format except the Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS:

* THE COLLECTED TALES OF NIKOLAI GOGOL (Pantheon, 1998). Translated and Annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

* DEAD SOULS: The Reavey Translation, Backgrounds & Sources, Essays in Criticism (Norton Critical Edition, 1985). Edited by George Gibian and translated by George Reavey. -- PDF

* DEAD SOULS (Barnes & Noble, 2005). Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Jeffrey Meyers.

* DEAD SOULS (Pantheon, 1996). Translated and Annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

* THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL: A Comedy in Five Acts (Floating Press, 2011). Translated by Thomas Seltzer.