The Short Fiction of Nikolai Gogol

This volume gathers the short stories that made Gogol a founder of modern Russian fiction, ranging from the folk comedy and horror of his Ukrainian tales to the bleak absurdity of his Petersburg stories. Here is ‘The Overcoat,’ whose meek clerk chases a stolen coat into the afterlife, alongside ‘The Nose,’ ‘Diary of a Madman,’ and the Cossack epic ‘Taras Bulba.’ Gogol slides between village slapstick, real terror, and biting portraits of clerks and petty officials, sometimes within a single page. His influence on Dostoevsky and the Russian writers who followed is hard to overstate. Free PDF and EPUB editions collect the stories together in one book.