Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted St John's Eve to the strange surrealism of The Nose, from the heartrending 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 this superb new translation - the first in twenty five years and destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's short fiction - Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's works.