The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol, Susanne Fusso (Translator)

Overview

Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature.

These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol’s characteristic obsessions—city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise—and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso’s translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231190695
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Series:	Russian Library
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	122,024
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was born in Ukraine and achieved literary success in St. Petersburg. Among his most famous works are Dead Souls and The Government Inspector, as well as short stories set in the Ukrainian countryside and tales of St. Petersburg. He spent some of his most productive years in Rome. Upon his return to Russia, he struggled unsuccessfully to write a sequel to Dead Souls, burning the manuscripts not long before his death.

Susanne Fusso is Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages and professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University. Her many books include Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (1993), and she has translated Russian writers including Sergey Gandlevsky.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Susanne Fusso
Notes on the Translation
Table of Ranks
1. The Lost Letter
2. Viy
3. The Portrait (1835 version)
4. Nevsky Avenue
5. Diary of a Madman
6. The Carriage
7. The Nose
8. Rome (A Fragment)
9. The Overcoat
Notes

Editorial Reviews

While they deal in subjects including witchcraft, demonic influence, and madness, Gogol’s stories are as humorous as they are bizarre . . . The Nose and Other Stories is filled with ill-fated characters, strange happenings, and satirical commentary.

Foreword Reviews

Since much of Gogol’s humor depends on linguistic play, he has proven resistant to adequate translation. . . Fusso’s ear for humor makes all the difference.

New York Review of Books

In a move that preserves a sense of foreignness in the English translation, Fusso employs something closer to a literal translation than the more idiomatic one used by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in their 2011 rendering of Gogol’s stories. Fusso maintains the pacing and eeriness of Gogol’s narrative flow while also stretching out some of the language . . . Such choices in translation create a subtle nod to the linguistic distance Russian readers would have experienced reading Gogol’s prose.

The Nation

An erudite, modern translation of [Gogol’s] work that shows clearly how this strange writer became a defining influence on Russian literature and beyond.

Paperback Paris

The first major English translation of his stories in more than twenty years, The Nose and Other Stories captures Gogol’s humor and complexity brilliantly. This volume will prove to be a great read for students and Russian literature enthusiasts alike.

Bruce Holl

★ 2020-08-19
A new translation of nine Gogol stories, some of them among his best known.

Gogol is indisputably, as translator Fusso notes, “one of the greatest writers in the Russian language,” and, because of his rich, sometimes arcane vocabulary, one of the most untranslatable. She acquits herself admirably in this collection, which brings out Gogol’s playfulness and eccentricity. One of the stories, for instance, is “Viy,” one of his Mirgorod cycle, populated by Cossack characters—to say nothing of a witch who, beaten to death by a seminarian, exacts a terrible vengeance that might have been scripted in a 1950s vampire film: “He turned his eyes away and then turned toward the coffin in horror. She got up…she was walking around the church with her eyes closed, constantly stretching out her arms as if trying to catch someone.” “The Overcoat,” a sardonic masterpiece, addresses the travails of a bureaucrat so badly paid that he can’t afford the titular garment and is robbed of it when he does finally manage to buy it, catching his death of the St. Petersburg winter cold but then going on to exact vengeance of his own. That story is less bizarre than the one that gives this collection its name: A barber finds a nose that belongs to one of his customers, depriving its erstwhile owner of his sense of smell: “The room that was accommodating this whole company was small, and the air in it was extremely dense, but Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov could not catch the scent, because he had covered himself with a kerchief and because his nose itself was located in God knows what locality.” Compared to the errant nose, Mikhail Bulgakov’s gun-toting cat is as normal as Russian snow. An added virtue of this first-rate collection is the inclusion of “Rome,” a long story not often anthologized, in which the plot is thin but the imagery extraordinary, whether describing the beautiful Annunziata—“Everything about her recalls those ancient times when marble came to life and sculptors’ chisels gleamed”—or a sunset over the Alban Hills.

Admirers of Gogol and his odd sensibilities will devour this excellent gathering.

Kirkus Reviews

Susanne Fusso does excellent work making the Russian-to-English prose accessible, readable, and unfussily poetic.

Jason Half's Blog

[Fusso's] translation captures all of Gogol’s magic.

Evilcyclist's Bookshelf

Crazy, colorful, delightful, and sad, Gogol’s short stories are among the great gems of Russian literature. Susanne Fusso’s scholarly and stylish new translations bring them alive once again and make this selection a pleasure to read.

David Bellos

[A] really wonderful collection of Gogol’s writings, and essential for any lover of his work.

Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings