The Night Before Christmas

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS





THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS





PENGUIN BOOKS





THE DAY OF CHRISTMAS EVE ENDED, AND the night began, cold and clear. The stars and the crescent moon shone brightly upon the Christian world, helping all the good folks welcome the birth of our Savior. The cold grew sharper, yet the night was so quiet that one could hear the snow squeak under a traveler s boots from half a mile away. Caroling hadn t yet begun; village youths weren t yet crowded outside the windows waiting for treats; the moon alone peeked through, as though inviting the girls to finish up their toilette and run out onto the clean, sparkling snow. Just then one of the chimneys began to belch clouds of black smoke, and along with them, straddling a broom, flew out a witch. If Sorochintsy s property assessor happened to be passing by on a troika of horses in his resplendent winter attire, he surely would have noticed the witch, for that remarkable man noticed everything: every piglet, every bolt of cloth in a housewife s trunk, each household article her husband left at the tavern on Sunday. But, unfortunately, the assessor wasn t anywhere in the vicinity, and why would he be? He had his own district to mind.

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was the son of a Ukrainian gentleman farmer who was the author of several folk comedies. He attended a variety of boarding schools, where he proved an indifferent student but was admired for his theatrical abilities. In 1828 he moved to St. Petersburg and began to publish stories, and by the mid-1830s he had established himself in the literary world and been warmly praised by Pushkin. In 1836, his play The Inspector-General was attacked as immoral, and he left Russia, remaining abroad for most of the next dozen years. During that time he wrote two of his best-known stories, “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” and in 1842 he published the first section of his masterpiece Dead Souls. Gogol became increasingly religious as the years passed, and in 1847 he became the disciple of an Orthodox priest who influenced him to burn the second part of Dead Souls and then abandon writing altogether. After undertaking an extreme fast, he died at the age of forty-two.

Anna Summers (translator) is the editor and translator of two books by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, and the coeditor and cotranslator of Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. Born and raised in Moscow, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is the literary editor of The Baffler.

Konstantin Makovsky (illustrator; 1839–1915) was one of the most celebrated artists in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century.
 
Igor Grabar (illustrator; 1871–1960) was a student of Konstantin Makovsky’s, and a celebrated painter in his own right.  He later became one of the premier art administrators in the Soviet Union, personally advising Joseph Stalin.

For lit nerds and loved ones who are notoriously hard to shop for, you can t go wrong with these festively bound classics. . . . Their size makes them perfectly stocking-stuffable. Entertainment Weekly, The Must List
 
Leave it to the folks at Penguin who gave us Gothed-out editions of horror classics for Halloween to package these . . . slim Yuletide-themed volumes. Newsday, Best Books to Give as Holiday Gifts
 
Remember how Christmas was celebrated before Black Friday with these 19th-century authors, in small uniform volumes wrapped in pretty jackets. USA Today, Holiday Gift Books So Pretty, No Need to Wrap
 
Beautifully designed. The Washington Post