Nikolai Gogol

Published as part of the Four Corners Familiars series, this beautiful edition of the great Russian author Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat (a short story originally published in 1842) includes newly commissioned artwork from Sarah Dobai. This influential story--in which a lowly government clerk's life is briefly transformed by the extravagant purchase of a new coat--has been adapted into a variety of stage and film interpretations; as Fyodor Dostoevsky remarked on the story's impact in Russian literature, "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat.'"Artist, filmmaker and photographer Sarah Dobai responds to the story's preoccupation with material desire and illusion; the text is printed alongside her photographs of shop windows in London and Paris, showing ready-made still lifes of merchandise and mannequins in window displays. Combining contemporary visual work with a beloved 19th-century classic, this special edition of The Overcoat reimagines Gogol for a new generation.

"Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English." --James Wood, "New Yorker" Called "the greatest play written in Russian" by Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol's immortal comedy is a pitch-perfect satire of social corruption. Now, renowned American playwright Richard Nelson and the foremost contemporary translators of classic Russian literature Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, collaborate on a revelatory new translation of Gogol's biting masterpiece. With an introduction and text notes by Richard Pevear, this essential edition marks the first in a series of translations of major works of Russian drama for TCG. Forthcoming titles include: "A Month in the Country" by Ivan Turgenev"The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov Richard Nelson's many plays include "The Apple Family: Scenes from Life in the Country" ("That Hopey Changey Thing," "Sweet and Sad," "Sorry" and "Regular Singing"); "Nikolai and the Others"; "Goodnight Children Everywhere" (Olivier Award for Best Play); "Franny's Way"; "Some Americans Abroad"; "Frank's Home"; "Two Shakespearean Actors" and J"ames Joyce's The Dead" (with Shaun Davey; Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical). Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated the works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov. Their translations of "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Anna Karenina" won the PEN Translation Prize in 1991 and 2002, respectively. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married and live in France.

Written in the 1830s and early 1840s, these comic stories tackle life behind the cold and elegant façade of the Imperial capital from the viewpoints of various characters, such as a collegiate assessor who one day finds that his nose has detached itself from his face and risen the ranks to become a state councillor (‘The Nose’), a painter and a lieutenant whose romantic pursuits meet with contrasting degrees of success (‘Nevsky Prospect’) and a lowly civil servant whose existence desperately unravels when he loses his prized new coat (‘The Overcoat’). Also including the ‘Diary of Madman’, these Petersburg Tales paint a critical yet hilarious portrait of a city riddled with pomposity and self-importance, masterfully juxtaposing nineteenth-century realism with madcap surrealism, and combining absurdist farce with biting satire.