Complete Works 3: Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Fantastic Novellas

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich, 1809-1852Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
559K words
Chapters
56

Tags

Foreign Literature Classic Works Country LifeLegendary LivesHumor ReliefWeird TalesSatirical StyleUkrainian FolkloreExotic CultureFolk CustomsFolk Legend

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Sämmtliche Werke 3: Abende auf dem Gutshof bei Dikanka; Phantastische NovellenAuthor: Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich, 1809-1852,Language: German, Class: PG: Language and Literatures: Slavic (including Russian), Languages and Literature, Release Date: Jul 2, 2017

Editor's review

This is the German translation of Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, a collection of eerie and fantastical tales set in the Ukrainian countryside. The work blends folklore, ghost stories, and rural life; the narrator's voice is lively, and the scenes shift with the bustle of an oral tradition, combining slapstick humor with an unease that lurks in the darkness. For Chinese readers, its significance lies in showing how folk imagination and satire intertwine in Gogol's early work, laying the groundwork for the kind of social observation later seen in Dead Souls. The German translation is generally readable and works well as supplementary material for a foreign literature course unit on "folktales and Romanticism." There is no need to parse every word; following the storyteller's rhythm better conveys that half-true, half-false rural atmosphere. Note that this is the German edition; readers without German should choose a translation in another language.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read each piece independently and pause briefly after each; there is no need to finish the whole book in one sitting.
  2. Pay attention to the narrator's tone and interjections; they are key to understanding the work's oral-tradition style.
  3. Start with a shorter eerie tale to see whether the style suits you, then decide on the reading order.
  4. If using the book for German study, organize the scene descriptions and dialogue in each piece separately to build up expressions.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56

FAQ

Which work by Gogol is this book? This is the German translation of Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, a collection of eerie and fantastical tales set in the Ukrainian countryside. It belongs to his early work; the language is lively and colored by folk oral tradition.
How difficult is the German? Is it suitable for beginners? The text is literary narrative, with sentence structures and vocabulary of some difficulty, so it is not suitable for German beginners to read closely. Readers at intermediate level or above who are willing to use a dictionary will better appreciate the narrative appeal.
Is the style the same as Gogol's later works? Not entirely. This early work relies more on folklore, ghost stories, and an exaggerated storytelling voice, and its satire is comparatively lighthearted; the social observation in the later works is cooler, but the threads of folk imagination and satire are already visible here.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich, 1809-1852 Author

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852) was a Russian writer, born in what is now Ukraine, known for his fiction and drama. The collection here holds 24 of his works, including the novel Dead Souls, the comedy The Inspector-General, and shorter works such as The Mantle, Viitta, and The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich. His writing often uses satire to portray bureaucratic habits and the fate of ordinary little people, shifting between the grotesque and the realistic. He is regarded as one of the founders of Russian realist literature and has had a lasting influence on later fiction and drama. Some details of his life are limited in public sources, so this note focuses on his themes and style.