Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol

Gebundenes Buch

The Mantle and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol, Fiction, Classics, Literary

Beschreibung

Gogol has made brilliantly colored pictures of his Zaporogues, which please by their very grotesqueness; but sometimes it is too evident that he has not drawn them from nature. Moreover, these character-pictures are framed in such a trivial and romantic setting that one regrets to see them so ill-placed. The most prosaic story would have suited them better than these melodramatic scenes in which are accumulated tragic incidents of famine, torture, etc. In short, one feels that the author is not at ease on the ground which he has chosen; his gait is awkward and the invariable irony of his style makes the perusal of these melancholy incidents more painful. This style which, in my opinion, is quite out of place in some parts of "Taras Bulba," is much more appropriate in the "Viy," or "King of the Gnomes," a tale of witchcraft, which amuses and alarms at the same time. The grotesque easily blends with the marvelous. Recognizing to the full the poetic side of his subject, the author, while describing the savage and strange customs of the old-time Cossacks with his usual precision and exactitude, has easily prepared the way for the introduction of an element of uncanniness. -- From Prosper Merimée's Preface to this volume.

Autor

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809 - 1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer whose work was strongly influenced by Ukrainian culture. Although Gogol was considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in his work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat," "Nevsky Prospekt"). His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, culture and folklore. His later writing satirized political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls). The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842), along with the short stories "Diary of a Madman", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", "The Portrait" and "The Carriage", round out the tally of his best-known works.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Aegypan
• Seitenzahl: 160
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2011
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 13mm
• Gewicht: 392g
• ISBN-13: 9781463895761
• ISBN-10: 1463895763
• Artikelnr.: 33812048