Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

11 hrs. 14 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Nikolai Gogol

Narrator Evgeny Ternovsky

Description

“Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” is Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s first major work, which immediately brought him fame and recognition among his fellow writers. While working on the book, Gogol used Ukrainian legends told to him by his mother, and the first of the two parts—as he later admitted—he initially didn’t want to publish, but left it, because on these pages one could feel “sweet moments of young inspiration.” When the stories came out, Pushkin wrote about the “Evenings”: “They astounded me. Here is real cheerfulness, sincere, easygoing, without any affectation, without any stiffness. And what poetry!.. All this is so extraordinary in our literature that I still haven’t fully come to my senses.” Baratynsky echoed him: “We didn’t yet have an author with such a joyous cheerfulness… His style is alive, original, full of colors and taste.” The terrible and the funny, the real and the mystical, somehow live side by side on the pages of these immortal stories, and the rich, vivid, and precise language rightly lets us call this Gogol work true masterpieces.