'Rus! Russ!...Everything within you is open, desolate, and flat; your squat towns barely protrude above the level of your wide plains, marking them like little dots, like specks; here is nothing to entice and fascinate the onlooker's gaze. Yet whence this unfathomable, uncanny force that draws me to you?' Although Dead Souls (1842) was largely composed by Gogol during self-imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s, his last work remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature. As we follow its hero Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man, about the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise, there unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and Sterne. With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by Top page a superb introductory essay by the pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire.

Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song. What he does not say is that he then proposes to take out a huge mortgage against these fictitious citizens and buy himself a nice estate in Eastern Russia. Will he get away with it? Who will rumble him?

Opening a door to a bizarre world of broad comedy, fantasy, and social commentary, the title story offers an unforgettable depiction of a lunatic civil servant and his struggles to be noticed by the woman he loves. This excellent introduction to Gogol also features Nevski Prospect and The Portrait.

Includes both Nikolay Gogol's short fiction and famous drama. The stories gathered here range from comic to tragic and describe the isolated lives of low-ranking clerks, lunatics and swindlers. They include Diary of a Madman, Nevsky Prospect, and The Overcoat.

This collection contains Gogols finest tales — from the demon-haunted St Johns Eve and Viy to the surrealism of The Nose, from the trials of the copyist in The Overcoat to those of the delusional clerk in The Diary of a Madman.

These translations of Gogol's plays restore the vitality of Gogol's language and humour, finally allowing his dramatic art to speak directly to Western readers, directors, actors and theatre-goers. This volume contains The Government Inspector and Marriage — Gogol's greatest full-length plays — and a one-act satire, The Gamblers. Also included are writings on theatre from Gogol's notebooks and correspondences, as well as an appendix and extensive introduction.