- "I wish I had written the story 'The Overcoat'. The sensibility of that story is perfect . . . spontaneous and funny and also formally very experimental" - George Saunders - "One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is also probably the funniest" - Guardian - "The greatest artist that Russia has yet produced" - Vladimir Nabokov

Admired by writers from Nabokov to Bulgakov to George Saunders, Gogol is considered one of the more enigmatic of the Russian greats. He only wrote one novel, Dead Souls, and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major output. In this collection, beautifully and skilfully translated by Oliver Ready, Gogol's three greatest St Petersburg stories - 'The Nose', 'The Overcoat' and 'The Diary of a Madman' - are presented alongside two masterworks set in the Ukrainian and Russian provinces, demonstrating the breadth of Gogol's work. Gogol's extraordinary work is characterised by his idiosyncratic, and often very funny sensibility, and these stories offer us his unique, original and marvellously skewed perspective on the world.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in 1809 in Ukraine, and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work in an obscure government ministry. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), made him famous, and he went on to write several further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. Part I of his great, and only novel, Dead Souls, appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically, and he burned much of his writing, including part II of Dead Souls. He died in 1852, possibly from self-starvation.