The Nose

Nikolai Gogol

июль 2014 г. · Melville House

Об электронной книге

A masterpiece of satire and a key work of the Russian "fantastic" movement. One of the most celebrated tales in Russian literature.

Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov awakens to discover that his nose is missing, leaving a smooth, flat patch of skin in its place. He finds and confronts his nose in the Kazan Cathedral, but from its clothing it is apparent that the nose has acquired a higher rank in the civil service than he and refuses to return to his face.

THE ART OF THE NOVELLA
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers but beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. The Art of the Novella Series celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners. The series has been recognized for its "excellence in design" by AIGA.

Об авторе

NIKOLAI GOGOL was born in 1809 in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochintsy. Seeking literary fame, he went to St. Petersburg at 18 to self-publish an epic poem, which was so ridiculed that he fled the city. He eventually returned and began writing stories influenced by Ukrainian folklore. Collected asEvenings on a Farm Near Dilanka, they were an enormous success. New friends including Pushkin encouraged him, and in stories such as "The Overcoat" and "The Nose," and novels such as Dead Souls, Gogol developed a bitter realism mixed with ironic humor and surprisingly prescient surrealism. In 1836, fearing he'd offended the tsar with his satirical play "The Inspector General," Gogol left Russia for a twelve-year European hiatus. Upon returning he published an essay collection supporting the government he'd always criticized, and was so mercilessly attacked by former admirers that he became despondent. Falling into a state of questionable sanity, he renounced writing as an immoral activity, and in 1852 burned his last manuscript, a sequel to Dead Souls, just days before dying of self-imposed starvation.

IAN DREIBLATT has translated Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Nikolai Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer for The Art of the Novella series.