A great poem, a celebration of absurdity and grotesqueness, from which, paradoxically, the history of Russian realism is counted. Having conceived a three-part work modeled on the Divine Comedy, Gogol managed to complete only the first volume, in which he introduced a new hero, a businessman and a rogue, into literature, and created an immortal image of Russia as a troika of birds flying in an unknown direction.

“The Main Books of Russian Literature” is a joint series of the Alpina. Proza publishing house and the Polka online project. The works that are published in it are selected by contemporary writers, critics, literary scholars, and teachers. This is both an attempt to determine what the Russian literary canon looks like today and a new look at famous works: each book is accompanied by a preface by the Polka authors.