THE COLLECTED TALES

Pevear and Volokhonsky continue their remarkable conquest of 19th-century Russian fiction with this lively new translation of 13 of “the Russian Dickens’s” wildest and finest stories. Excluding only lesser pieces from Gogol’s earliest volumes (though one misses the madly romantic novella “Taras Bulba”), this selection offers richly colloquial versions (which sound like spoken narrative) of such classic “Ukrainian Tales” as the imperturbably melodramatic “The Terrible Vengeance” and the memorably lurid vampire tale “Viy,” and also “Petersburg Tales” like the deliriously surrealistic “The Nose” and that uniquely dreamlike, and seminal, portrayal of a timid clerk’s acquisition and loss of his only meaningful possession: “The Overcoat.” Pevear’s informative Preface persuasively emphasizes the personal, nonpolitical, and, to some degree, haphazard nature of the distinctive alchemy by which a deeply flawed and troubled soul managed to create some of the most colorful and haunting fiction of his century.