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The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

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The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

By: Nikolai Gogol
Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
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About this listen

The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colorful collection containing the finest short stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque "The Nose", where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative "The Overcoat", about a reclusive man whose only ambition is to replace his old, threadbare coat, Gogol gives us a unique take on the absurd. Gogol’s tales of inconsequential civil servants, mixing the everyday with the surreal, foreshadow the work of his later acolytes, Bulgakov and Kafka. None is more cutting than the main story, "The Diary of a Madman", where a government clerk descends to insanity, claiming that he can communicate with dogs and that he is next in line to the throne of Spain. Translator: Constance Garnett.

©2018 Public Domain (P)2018 Naxos AudioBooks Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Classics Fiction Short Stories Russia Witty

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Brilliant. These stories are funny and tragic, at times worthy of a Monty python sketch. Nicholas Boulton reads them so we'll.

Gogol is a great storyteller.

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I found the stories in this collection to all be enjoyable and engaging, and also to be quite varied.
The are all very well written and well read. I also found it interesting to get some insight into life in “Little Russia” at that time.

A great collection of enjoyable stories

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Before Python and Round the Horne, there was Gogol... another giant of Russian literature doing a lousy PR job for his homeland. This is a good selection of his stories, and the Audible reading makes them considerably more accessible than on the printed page. Perfectly delivered by Nicholas Boulton.

Madness made accessible

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Brilliant performance and brilliant stories that well underated. However, it is such a shame there are no details about each book and each chapter, not even an accompanying PDF. Instead you have over one hundred chapters randomly starting and ending midway through the storytelling.
There is one story in particular where the final chapter was never finished by the author,so it just ends, I didn't know this, so of course it made no sense at all to me; the listener. It was only because I was googling all of the author's books I was able to keep track what book I was actually listening to. hahaha.

brilliant performance brilliant stories...but

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I'm a big fan of Gogol and Nicolas Boulton's superb narration (ingeniously married in the Dead Souls audiobook),so was very much looking forward to this compilation. Unfortunately it was a bit of a disappointment. The first half- the city, character based stories are good, although mostly quite depressing. I prefer the more amusing, satirical ones, like The Nose. However, the second half is a very different beast. I found the over dramatic, superstitious Ukrainian/Cossack rural stories unbearably repetitive, ultra depressing and tedious. It starts with beautiful, poetic descriptions of the landscape and then quickly descends into a macho, devil obsessed hysterical overload I just haven't the patience for , even when trying to treat as cultural/historical insight.
The narration is still great though and I will seek other books read by N.B. This one would massively benefit from a list of chapters. If any book needs to be accompanied by a PDF file, it's this one!

First half is good, second not so much,sadly...

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