Ms. Hen reviews The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

 

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

Vintage Classics 1999

Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Ms. Hen decided to read this book because she was researching the meaning of the term "Russian soul," and she learned that this idea started with Gogol. She usually likes to read a Russian book in March, around her birthday, but she's late doing this. She got this book from her local library.

The collection is in two sections: Ukrainian Tales and Petersburg Tales. She had read some of the Petersburg Tales before. She thinks the Ukrainian tales are dream-like and similar to fairy tales. Some of them are funny and some dark. She especially enjoyed, "The Night Before Christmas," with the way it turns and twists and transforms into different stories.

In the Petersburg Tales, Ms. Hen was struck by the story, "The Nose." It reminds Ms. Hen of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in the way that it is absurd, but Gogol's story is satire, and Kafka's is dark. In "The Nose," a man wakes up to find his nose gone. A barber's wife bakes the nose into a loaf of bread, and when the barber finds it he becomes dismayed.

In the story, "The Overcoat," the character is a titular councillor who needs a new overcoat, and saves money to buy one, but it's stolen. Ms. Hen learned that scholars think this is the best Russian short story ever written, and she can understand why. It's about the anguish of poverty and the ridiculousness of bureaucracy, which Ms. Hen found similar to Kafka's THE TRIAL. Ms. Hen has read "The Overcoat" before, but she still finds it compelling, because she always finds something different in it. The character evokes pathos, and his life gets worse and worse.

This collection took a long time for Ms. Hen to read. Not because it wasn't interesting to her, but she had other things going on while she read it. Lots of chickens appear in this book, which Ms. Hen liked a lot. Ms. Hen enjoys reading classics to learn how life was in the past. She thinks they are like time machines, instead of learning about history from a class or a non-fiction book, we can learn through the pages of book written a long time ago about the attitudes of people, and how different the world was back then. The world has changed, but we still have a long way to go.