And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon
Essential Stories
Published on 29. February 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-1-80533-033-2 (ISBN)
Description
No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - 'The Overcoat', 'The Nose' and 'Diary of a Madman' - alongside lesser known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvelously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire.
Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul.
Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul.
Reviews / Votes
Much to savour... With its diverse selection of canonical works, Oliver Ready's engaging, entertaining volume gives a good sense of Gogol's range and will find readers inside and outside classrooms * TLS * The most morally complete writer: baffled, outraged, reverent, mock-didactic, mocking, all at once. He honours life by feeling no one way about it -- George Saunders One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is also probably the funniest * Guardian * The greatest artist that Russia has yet produced -- Vladimir Nabokov No previous translator of these stories has ever captured Gogol's free-floating lunacy with such fine-grained accuracy, truly bringing the moon and the earth together. Such a feat requires great daring and great attentiveness, the key ingredients of translational genius, which Oliver's every sentence demonstrates in full. * Boris Dralyuk *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pushkin Press
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
199 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80533-033-2 (9781805330332)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
New editions
Book
12/2019
Pushkin Press
€34.86
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Previous edition
Book
12/2019
Pushkin Press
€34.86
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Persons
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in 1809 in Ukraine, and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work in an obscure government ministry. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), made him famous, and he went on to write several further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. Part I of his great, and only novel, Dead Souls, appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically, and he burned much of his writing, including part II of Dead Souls. He died in 1852, possibly from self-starvation.