Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

"Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka" — the first collection by Gogol, which immediately made his name known. Pushkin laughed while reading these stories and highly appreciated the young writer.

Gogol subtly captured the trend of folk themes and styled the... book as "evenings" — tales told at sunset. After the puppet story about the devil who steals the moon, follows a grim legend about a sorcerer. Folklore, satire, and mysticism create a world where the funny coexists with the eerie.

The collection consists of two parts and is united by the image of the storyteller — the beekeeper Ruda Panko. These are stories in which folk legends, mystical events, and vivid scenes from village life intertwine so naturally that the boundary between fiction and reality almost disappears. The everyday coexists with the incredible, but man remains the main miracle among miracles.