The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (Pevear / Volokhonsky Translation) Book

To those interested in the short fiction of Gogol, I couldn't recommend a better collection. All the masterpieces are here, the selection is representative, the translation is vigorous, and the introduction is informative and helpful.

Of course the masterpieces of the St. Petersburg period are here ("The Nose," "The Diary of a Madman, "Nevsky Prospect," "The Overcoat"), Gogol's macabre and satiric depictions of humiliation and madness among the bureaucrats of Russia's capital city, but the masterpieces of Gogol's Ukrainian period are here also ("St. John's Eve," "The Night Before Christmas," "The Terrible Vengeance," "Viy"), those exuberantly improvisational riffs on folklore themes filled with witches, wizards, and exorcisms (plus a czarina's slippers, a flight on the back of a devil, and a monster whose eyelids stretch all the way down to its feet.) The St. Petersburg tale's are well known, but the Ukrainian tales are an equally valid'and more vivid and high-spirited'expression of Gogol's genius.

I am, however, happy to see that some of the lesser tales'fine stories, only lesser when compared with Gogol's best'are here too, giving the reader a more balanced and representative sampling of the author's work. From the Ukraine, we have the more mundane accounts of Ukrainian small town and country life ("Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt," "Old World Landowners," "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich") which show us a somewhat sunnier side of Gogol, and from St Petersburg, we have two memorable tales ("The Carriage" and the "Portrait"), the first slightly marred by an abrupt ending, the second by an excess of moral seriousness.

The translation is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband-and-wife team best known for their translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As is usual with their collaborations, this translations seeks a perfect balance between faithfulness to the original Russian idioms and a natural, flowing English style. And is usual with their translations, they often find it.

Pevear himself wrote the introduction to this volume, and it is a helpful, for he understands Gogol's contradictory nature: an improvisational genius, entranced both by the marvelous and the realistic, yet haunted by the fear that he had failed to achieve what was for him a sacred task: Gogol was made uneasy by his works. They detached themselves from him and lived on their own, producing effects that he had not foreseen and that sometimes dismayed him. He would write commentaries after the fact, trying to reduce them to more commonplace and acceptable dimensions. But their initial freedom stayed with them. It was inherent in his method of composition, and in his astonishing artistic gift'astonishing first of all to himself.