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The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, changed the way I look at fiction. I read the book first as an undergraduate, and then later as a graduate student. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation is astonishing, and I don’t think I’d have connected to the work so strongly if I’d read a lesser version. There’s any number of ways that you can divide up Gogol’s stories, but the obvious way is to place them in the same two categories Pevear and Volokhonsky do; rural Ukranian tales, and urban St. Petersburg tales. Seeing them side by side in that way, the careful reader will notice that the rural/urban division mirrors another division in the tales. The rural tales are very clearly oral in nature. They are loose, fluid, comfortable, adaptable. The urban tales, on the other hand are tight, structured, detailed. They are the very… Continue Reading →

They had never been lovers, were barely friends, and he could count on one hand the number of times they had touched. He still felt deep in his bones, and lightly across his skin and hair, every one of those moments. If he closed his eyes, he could relive them all. The first time, when he had said or done something, he couldn’t exactly remember what, her eyes had lit up the way he imagined newborn stars would, the change from dark indifference to the powerful, blazing expression of life and attentiveness so abrupt and affecting that it was, paradoxically, almost imperceptible. She had reached out to him, impulsively, and given him one of the light embraces with which young girls so often express unexpected pleasure, careless of their potential force and investing in them, or so they think, only transient meaning. That first time was for him still the… Continue Reading →