Description:
The complete tales of one of the most creative, incisive, and entertaining of the Russian masters Nikolai Gogol was an artist who, like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, "knew how to walk upside down in our valley of sorrows so as to make it to a merry place." The list of writers who credit his absurd, bitingly satirical, wildly funny work as an influence includes Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, and many more. This two-volume edition at last brings all of Gogol's fiction (except his novel Dead Souls) together in paperback. Volume 1 includes Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the early Ukrainian folktales that first brought Gogol fame, as well as "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Diary of a Madman."
Brief description:
Constance Garnett (1861-1946) was the first person to translate Anton Chekhov's work into English, and the first to translate most of Fyodor Dostoevsky's work as well. Her translations of those two and other Russian writers, including Tolstoy and Turgenev established the achievements of Russian literature for English-language readers for the first time. She ultimately translated seventy-one works from Russian into English, and most of them remain in print today.
Review Quotes:
"Kent has thoroughly revised Constance Garnett's conscientious and skillful translation, eliminating the Victorianisms of her style, correcting mistakes and pruderies of diction, and making the whole translation sound much more contemporary and alive. But he has avoided the whimsicality and 'curliness' in which some recent translators indulged, and he has not changed or suppressed anything material. He has also supplied helpful notes which are often the first annotation in English, and he has written an introduction which steers the correct middle course between making Gogol an irresponsible artist of the grotesque and proving him a documentary historian of backward Russia."
--Rene Wellek, Yale University