Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales— from the demon-haunted St John's Eve to the strange surrealism of The Nose, from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in The Overcoat to those of the delusional clerk in The Diary of a Madman—allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. To...

One of the most influential short stories ever written, Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat first appeared in 1842 as part of a four-volume publication of its author's Collected Works. The story is considered not only an early masterpiece of Russian Naturalism—a movement that would dominate the country's literature for generations—but a progenitor of the modern short story form itself. "We all...