The definitive collection of Gogol?s most celebrated tales and plays?witty, uncanny, and startlingly modern.
A masterpiece of satire, absurdity, and dark comedy, The Inspector-General and Other Works brings together some of Nikolai Gogol?s most enduring and influential writings. At the heart of this collection is The Inspector-General, the celebrated play that exposed the corruption, vanity, and incompetence lurking beneath the surface of official life. When a small-town bureaucracy mistakes an insignificant young traveller for a powerful government inspector, panic erupts, and deception spirals into farce, creating one of the greatest comedies ever written. Alongside this landmark drama are some of Gogol?s finest works of fiction: The Nose, a brilliantly surreal tale of identity and social pretension; The Overcoat, a moving and unforgettable portrait of loneliness and human dignity; Diary of a Madman, a haunting descent into obsession and delusion; The Viy, a chilling masterpiece drawn from Ukrainian folklore and the supernatural imagination; and A May Night, or the Drowned Girl, a lyrical blend of romance, folklore, humour, and the supernatural that captures the enchantment of rural Ukrainian life.
By turns hilarious, poignant, and unsettling, these works reveal a writer of extraordinary originality whose vision of human folly remains as fresh and relevant today as when it first astonished nineteenth-century readers.