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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

If you want to read Dead Souls, there's a free high quality edition at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/nikolai-gogol/dead-souls/d...

It's a surprisingly funny and brisk read.

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Gogol is the master of witty short stories. I also recommend Diary of a Madman, in which a mediocre civil servant begins to imagine he is the King of Spain.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36238/36238-h/36238-h.htm#Pa...

Speaking about his short stories, read "The Overcoat"/"The Mantle" by Gogol. Dostoevsky is said to have said that "we all came out of 'the overcoat' of/by Gogol", in the sense that the tradition of deep compassion with the simple/poor in Russian literature started with this work. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36238/36238-h/36238-h.htm#Pa...

Another very good (and short one) is 'the Nose' - this one is quite surrealistic, it's a hundred years ahead of its time. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36238/36238-h/36238-h.htm#Pa...

That's a great one! Also available at SE as "Memoirs of a Madman": https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/nikolai-gogol/short-fictio...

I remember laughing out loud at some description of how one may refer to a smelly cheese in polite society, but I can't find anything about cheese at all in the English translation. Maybe the Norwegian translator made up a joke more palatable to Norwegians =D

A big part of the jokes I seemingly missed reading it in English, according to a friend of mine who read it in Russian, is that some of the landowners and other characters' names are untranslated puns.

I enjoyed it but I also felt that there was too much of a culture gap (or simply my own lack of knowledge of 19th century Russia) for me to fully appreciate everything that was going on.

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