Nich pered Rizdvom

Mykola Gogol (1809-1852) was an outstanding Ukrainian writer who wrote in Russian and became a classic of Russian literature. Reading "The Night Before Christmas" in the brilliant translation of Maxim Rylskyi, you willingly believe the old legend according to which Gogol wrote his first works in Ukrainian. In this youthful story, the ancestral umbilical cord that connected the descendant of the Cossack colonel with his native land still seems to have not been severed. In "The Night Before Christmas" the evil force still easily fits in the Cossack's pocket...