Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich: The Overcoat and other selected Short Stories. Dec 2007

[Roy White]

Gogol was one of the first masters of short prose, alongside Pushkin, Mérimée, Hoffmann, and Hawthorne. He wrote extensive short stories that are surprisingly difficult to find as e-texts. Here are 8 stories that appear to be his major works as short stories.

The Overcoat is his best known and spawned the phrase, "We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat" attributed to Dostoevsky.

Is worth a read. An insignificant clerk has a worn overcoat his co-workers tease him about. He decides to get it repaired but the tailor talks him into buying a new coat. He saves and buys a magnificent coat and is a smash hit at an office party. On the way home he gets robbed of his new life's joy. He goes to the police and meets resistance. Finally, obsessed with the coat he falls ill and dies. A ghost then begins accosting strangers in the city stealing their overcoats. Stuff happens...

The Nose (Another story) is great. A guy is eating his cheerios for breakfast and his nose falls off. He is an exceedingly shallow character and ... Stuff happens...

Other shorts in this collection include St. John's Eve, How the two Ivans Quarrelled, The Calash, and the great Taras Bulba. (Among others)

I tried to tackle Gogol twenty years ago and was stumped. Its time for me to give him another go. So I thought I would share it here..

Enjoy

Roy

(I will be posting his unfinished Novel Dead souls soon)

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[hidari]

Cheers for the book. In Moskva where I live ...Of course He is a GOD> I have read some of his short stories in Russian...good fun. Will read these again .....cheers

[chrisc]

Dear lord, there are no paragraph indents!

Is this how it was written, or is it a conversion issue?

[Roy White]

Conversion issue... I downloaded the stories from a website, then for some reason Book Designer formatted all of it as a new paragraph in the middle of every other sentence. I fiddled and fussed with it then in a fit of pique selected all the text and converted it ALL into one paragraph.. The text is all there... Just... ((I was and am too lazy to go through 555 pages of text fixing every line manually..)) So I since I'm not a perfectionist I just took the easy way out.

My apologies..

Roy