Old-World Landowners / The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich / Diary of a Madman

This audiobook includes three short novels by N.V. Gogol. The slightly melancholy story "Old-World Landowners", the epistolary novella "Diary of a Madman", and the partly comic, partly instructive "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich".

"Diary of a Madman" is written in the form of the personal diary of titular councillor Poprishchin. Gogol draws a portrait of Poprishchin with evident sympathy for his hero, a typical "little man" who tries to rise above his station. The clerk works in a department, sharpens quills and copies papers, and considers himself, in his own opinion, quite the expert at this. In the evenings he goes to the theatre to see vaudevilles and reads notices by "Kursk landowners" in the newspaper The Northern Bee, with touching naivety regarding himself as a cultured man. He is very lonely but is in love with his department director's daughter and hopes that someday she will return his feelings. And with each entry in the diary it becomes ever more apparent that Poprishchin is hopelessly retreating from reality into the shadow of madness.

"The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" tells of a long-standing enmity that replaced an equally long-standing friendship between two neighbors. Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich, as the first chapter makes clear, are people not exactly free of faults, to put it mildly. But the inhabitants of the small Little Russian town greatly respect them and consider them a model of unbreakable friendship — until one fine day Ivan Ivanovich visits Ivan Nikiforovich to obtain as a gift or to trade for a rifle he has taken a fancy to, and a single careless word proves enough to turn them into enemies forever.

"Old-World Landowners" is the story of an elderly married couple. In the home of the landowners Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna, as in their inner world, there reigns the quiet, peace, boundless kindness and hospitality that the writer holds dear — everything one would not find in the bustle of city life. Gogol's tone in this story is very lyrical, with a light touch of gentle irony. The main characters cannot imagine life without each other. But the time comes when Afanasy Ivanovich is left alone. A few years of life remain to him, yet the old man's "cooling heart" will never be able to forget his departed companion.

"Only what I took from reality, from facts known to me, ever came out well" — so wrote the great Russian prose writer N.V. Gogol, who succeeded in masterfully conveying in his characters the most characteristic and significant features of human nature.