Collected here are Gogol’s finest tales – from the demon-haunted ‘St John’s Eve’ to the strange surrealism of ‘The Nose’, from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in ‘The Overcoat’ to those of the delusional clerk in ‘The Diary of a Madman’ – allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. To this superb new translation – the first in twenty-five years and destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol’s short fiction – Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Dostoevsky’s works and to War and Peace.