Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

“Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” (Part One—1831, Part Two—1832) is the immortal masterpiece of the great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852).

Enthusiastically received by his contemporaries (for example, A.S. Pushkin wrote: “I just read ‘Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.’ They amazed me. This is real fun—sincere, effortless, without affectation, without stiff pomposity. And sometimes, what poetry. What feeling! All of this is so extraordinary in our literature that I have not yet come to my senses…”), the book remains one of the readers’ favorite works even today.

The story freely moves from the 19th century (“Sorochinskaya Fair”) to the 17th (“An Evening Before Ivan Kupala”), then to the 18th (“A May Night, or the Drowned Woman,” “The Missing Letter,” “A Night Before Christmas”) and again to the 17th (“A Terrible Vengeance”), and back once more to the 19th (“Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”). Both books are “ringed” by stories told by the deacon’s grandfather, Thomas Grigorievich—an impetuous Zaporizhian Cossack whose life, as it were, connects the past and the present, truth and fiction. The flow of time is not broken across the pages of the work, remaining in a kind of spiritual and historical unity.