Product Description

This collection contains Gogol's three completed plays The Government Inspector, which satirises a corrupt society was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest play in the Russian language and is still widely studied in schools and universities: "I resolved to gather into one heap everything that was bad in Russia which I was aware of at that time, all the injustices being perpetrated in those places, and in those circumstances that especially cried out for justice, and tried to hold them all up to ridicule, at one fell swoop." (Nikolai Gogol) Marriage is a comedy about the business of matchmaking and matrimony; The Gamblers is an exoriating piece about the excesses of the Moscow aristocracy."Two and two make five, if not the square root of five, and it all happens quite naturally in Gogol's world Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange" (Vladimir Nabokov)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #860426 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-05
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Terrible translation
I'm sure that these plays were once good, the ideas are sound, but the translation was just terrible. The lines were reduced to corny english sayings such as "talks the hind legs off a donkey" (which I cannot imagine anyone saying in Russian). I just did not get the feeling that these plays took place in St Petersburg aside from the occasional mention of Roubles.
If you want to read these plays, I would recommend that you buy a different translation, unless you want to hear a 18th Century Russian Mayor utter the words "engaged my a**"