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Informationen zum Autor Nikolai Gogol was born in the Ukraine in 1809 and died in 1852. Originally trained as a painter, he became interested in the theater and was soon known for his plays and short stories, notably “The Diary of a Madman” (1834), “The Nose” (1836), and “The Overcoat” (1842). Dead Souls, his novel, was published in 1842. Richard Pevear , a native of Boston, and Larissa Volokhonsky , a native of Leningrad, are married and live in France. Their translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Also translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky are Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol and Crime and Punishment, Demons, and Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Klappentext When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered." More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's 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. These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories. Leseprobe Translated and Annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky St. John's Eve A True Story Told by the Beadle of the ------ Church Foma Grigorievich was known to have this special sort of quirk: he mortally disliked telling the same thing over again. It sometimes happened, if you talked him into telling something a second time, that you'd look and he'd throw in some new thing or change it so it was unrecognizable. Once one of those gentlemen--it's hard for us simple folk to fit a name to them: writers, no, not writers, but the same as the dealers at our fairs: they snatch, they cajole, they steal all sorts of stuff, and then bring out booklets no thicker than a primer every month or week--one of those gentlemen coaxed this same story out of Foma Grigorievich, who then forgot all about it. Only there comes this same young sir from Poltava in a pea-green caftan, whom I've already mentioned and one of whose stories I think you've already read, toting a little book with him, and opening it in the middle, he shows it to us. Foma Grigorievich was just about to saddle his nose with his spectacles, but remembering that he'd forgotten to bind them with thread and stick it down with wax, he handed the book to me. Having a smattering of letters and not needing spectacles, I began to read. Before I had time to turn two pages, he suddenly grabbed my arm and stopped me. "Wait! first tell me, what's that you're reading?" I confess, I was a bit taken aback by such a question. "What's this I'm reading, Foma Grigorievich? Why, your true story, your very own words." "Who told you those are my words?"<...
