Mirgorod (Gogol)
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Mirgorod (1835) is a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol meant to be a sequel of sorts to his two volumes of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. The stories in this collection are of similar origin and based on Ukrainian folklore, though they seem to have a sense of nostalgia and some characters are believed to actually be portrayals of Gogol's grandparents and people he knew while living in Ukraine. This collection, unlike Dikanka, has no given narrator.
Though grouped together, the stories could be separated with no way to tell they were meant to be bulked in the same collection. Regardless, Mirgorod was published in two volumes with two stories in each. Numbers one and three represent Gogol's Shponka tradition, after the name of the story, where his realistic stories become almost unreal because their reality is so intense. These stories carry a sense of the Gothic, with grotesque, horrifying scenes as well as idyllic situations, lacking the folkloric elements found in his earlier works and the influence from the Ukraine. The other two stories follow more along his earlier, more Romantic tradition.
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