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"A Bewitched Place" is the last story in the second volume of Nikolai Gogol's first collection of short stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1832).
Like the concluding tale of the first volume, "The Lost Letter: A Tale Told by the Sexton of the N...Church", it is told by an exuberant Cossack narrator, the old sexton Foma, who says that the tale is about his grandfather.
Foma's grandfather takes care of melons and spends most of his time at a shanty nearby, taking pleasure in groups of wagons that come by with various items. One day, while discussing matters with some passing wagoneers, his grandfather decides to outdo Foma and his friend at dancing. He does quite well until he reaches a spot in the garden where he cannot seem to move and his legs stiffen up. He curses the devil, and tries his luck again.
Suddenly he is transported to a different area that seems to be the local priest's garden. He comes up to a gravestone that is shimmering, and marks it with a stick believing there to be treasure below somewhere. When he comes home he won't discuss what happened and ventures out the next day to find the spot. When he gets to the priest's garden, he cannot spot the gravestone above the buried treasure and he curses the devil again for tricking him.
The next day, Foma's grandfather explores the place where he could not dance the day before and finds that this spot is capable of magically transporting him to the cemetery where the grave is marked. He digs and finds a cauldron, while being mocked by a bird, a sheep and a bear, that, in a horrifying manner, repeat what he says. After he finds the treasure, the devil tries to terrify him again by making it appear as though he was below a precipice ready to come down on him with a monstrous head peeping from behind it. He is not frightened though and takes the cauldron back home.
His wife, thinking the boys are behind it as it comes towards her, throws dirty dishwater behind it, covering him with melon waste. He tells them what he found but when he opens the cauldron finds filth and from that day forward never trusts the devil again and crosses himself whenever he comes to a spot said to have something wrong with it. He fences off the area where he couldn't dance and has everyone throw all the garbage and weeds they collect on the spot.
Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. The story depicts the character's 19-year-long struggle to lead a normal life after serving a prison sentence for stealing bread to feed his sister's children during a time of economic depression and various attempts to escape from prison. Valjean is also known in the novel as Monsieur Madeleine, Ultime Fauchelevent, Monsieur Leblanc, and Urbain Fabre.
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"The Nose" is a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol written during his time living in St. Petersburg. During this time, Gogol's works were primarily focused on the grotesque and absurd, with a romantic twist. Written between 1835 and 1836, "The Nose" tells the story of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own. "The Nose" was originally published in The Contemporary, a literary journal owned by Alexander Pushkin. The use of a nose as the main source of conflict in the story could have been due to Gogol's own experience with an oddly shaped nose, which was often the subject of self-deprecating jokes in letters. The use of iconic landmarks in the story, as well as the sheer absurdity of the story, has made "The Nose" an important part of St. Petersburg's literary tradition.
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"St. John's Eve", also known as "The Eve of Ivan Kupala," is the second short story in the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol. It was first published in 1830 in the literary Russian periodical Otechestvennye Zapiski and in book form in 1831.
"The Lost Letter" (1831) is the fourth Ukrainian tale in the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol.
"Christmas Eve" is the first story in the second volume of the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol.
Christmas Eve is an opera in four acts with music and libretto by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Composed between 1894 and 1895, Rimsky-Korsakov based his opera on a short story, "Christmas Eve", from Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. The story had been used as the basis for an opera at least three times previously, including for Tchaikovsky's Vakula the Smith (1874). Oliver Knussen writes that "Rimsky is only interested in recreating the atmosphere of the folk-tale, fleshing it out for his stage pageant in a comparable way to Humperdinck in Hansel. Gerald Abraham, on the other hand, praises the vivid humanity and humour of Rimsky's setting, as well as its atmospheric strength.
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