And The Earth Will Sit On The Moon

Book excerpt: Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition 'One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is probably also the funniest' Guardian '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 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 Ukranian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvellously 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. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) was born in Ukraine and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work, at first, in various government departments. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), brought him widespread fame, and he went on to write further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. The first part 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 repeatedly burned his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls. After the final burning in February 1852, he stopped eating and died in great pain ten days later.