10 minutes to Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka — the magical Ukrainian countryside Gogol conjured in his early twenties

Opening

A blacksmith grabs the devil by the tail, pins him down, and makes the sign of the cross over his head. The devil is still shaking and cursing when the blacksmith swings onto his back and orders him to fly — to Petersburg, to fetch the shoes off the Tsarina's feet. This all happens on a winter night in eighteenth-century rural Ukraine, in a village smithy, the same night someone steals the moon and pockets it, while the local witch works her way through a kitchen full of suitors, stuffing each one into a coal sack as the next comes knocking.

The scene is as absurd as a fairy tale and as earthy as something an old woman would tell you at the edge of the village. This is the stone Gogol threw into Petersburg's literary world in his early twenties: the whole muddy, haunted countryside of Poltava, Ukraine, hauled intact into the pages of a magazine in the Russian capital.

What this book is

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka came out in 1832, Gogol's first book and the one that made him famous overnight. He was in his early twenties then, holed up in a Petersburg apartment, looking for a way into literature. The collection holds eight independent stories printed in two volumes, the first in 1831 and the second in 1832, all folk tales from around Dikanka, in Poltava province on the left bank of the Dnieper. That was Gogol's own home ground.

It is remembered in an odd way, not as a major work in itself but as a doorway. Pushkin, already the sun of Russian letters, read the little collection and wrote to Gogol with a kind of praise Russian literature had not heard in a while: roughly, that its cheerfulness and sincerity felt like something new. After that Gogol never let up, going on to The Government Inspector and Dead Souls, but that came later. This thin book is where all of it starts.

People and world

The setting is Cossack Ukraine at the start of the nineteenth century. The huts have whitewashed clay walls and thatched roofs, sunflowers and pumpkins grow in the yards, and the girls wear embroidered shirts with strings of coral beads. Church holidays like Christmas and St. John's Eve share a calendar with pagan folklore. The devils and witches are not visitors from some other world; they are neighbors on this street.

The book's two best-known men are the blacksmith Vakula and a poor young fellow named Gritsko. Vakula paints icons for the church and has real skill, but Oksana, the prettiest girl in the village, thinks he lacks polish. Gritsko is in love with Paraska, Cherevik's daughter, and runs straight into her vicious stepmother. The two men solve their problems differently, but in the same spirit: nerve, quick wits, and eventually a touch of magic. The women around them match them in kind. Oksana is vain but cries herself sick over the man she loves, and Paraska is timid, worn down by a stepmother who never lets up. Off to the side stands Solokha, the village witch, wild and free with her favors. She is Vakula's own mother, entertaining several men in her kitchen at once on Christmas Eve, and the last one stuffed into a coal sack turns out to be the young devil who has just stolen the moon.

The first is freshness. In Petersburg's literary world of the early nineteenth century, salon poetry and sentimental novels ruled, and then a young man from the provinces dropped a whole book of Ukrainian dialect, embroidered shirts, sunflower fields, and devils who feel the cold. Russian readers seemed to discover for the first time that people like this, telling stories like these, lived in the empire's southwest corner. Much of the cheerfulness and sincerity Pushkin praised came from that cultural jolt.

The second is craft. A devil stuffed into a coal sack, a witch entertaining lovers under her own roof, a blacksmith riding that same devil to the capital for a pair of shoes: Gogol tames the horror in these folk tales with a comic touch, and the reader ends up laughing along with a talking demon instead of flinching from it. That folk-comedy method later runs through The Government Inspector and Dead Souls and becomes Gogol's own signature.

The third is reach. The scene of the blacksmith riding the devil is famous enough that both Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov turned it into an opera, a classic Soviet-era animated film put it on screen, and it still turns up in Chinese children's books and cartoons today. You may never have read Gogol, but you have probably seen some version of this scene.

It reads less like literature than like Gogol handing Petersburg his hometown's fireside stories whole — devils who feel the cold, girls who know how to pout, a blacksmith bold enough to grab a demon by the tail.

Why read the actual book

A guide like this one gives you the map; the actual text is the ground itself. The pleasure of this book is in Gogol's own sentences — the playfulness of his Ukrainian dialect, the deadpan nonsense of a devil stealing the moon, the laugh when a leg pokes out of a coal sack and gets shoved right back in. None of that survives a summary. It will not take you half a day to read, and you will remember it for a long time.