The Collected Tales
Gogol invented Russian realism and then mocked it from inside. "The Overcoat," "The Nose," "Diary of a Madman": these stories are so strange they still feel contemporary. Every Russian writer claims Gogol as the origin.
This translation is the fault line: readers who've read Gogol in an older edition call the Pevear-Volokhonsky choice “stiff, awkward and vaguely academic”, and one reviewer says outright, “I wasn't captivated by the Pevear/Volokhonsky version.” Another calls the same prose a “doggedly literal approach ill-suited to such a vibrant prose stylist” rather than a faithful rendering. The title causes its own friction too: this is Collected, not Complete, skipping stories a fuller edition would include, and readers say “the unlearned distinction between Collected & Complete has angered completists” who expected everything. The earlier Ukrainian folk tales drag next to the sharper Petersburg stories, and The Terrible Vengeance gets picked out as the weakest of the bunch, tipping into melodrama readers elsewhere in the book don't have to sit through.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
