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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.
The StoryTeller is a live-action/puppet television series that originally aired in 1987 and which was created and produced by Jim Henson.
"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.
The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants: From the Notes of an Unknown, also known as The Friend of the Family, is a novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and first published in 1859.
May Night is a comic opera in three acts, four scenes, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov from a libretto by the composer and is based on Nikolai Gogol's story "May Night, or the Drowned Maiden", from his collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1829-1832).
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"The Twelve Dancing Princesses" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1815. It is of Aarne-Thompson type 306.
"The Thief and His Master" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales as tale number 68. In the first edition there was another fairy tale at place 68. The name of the fairy tale is "Von dem Sommer- und Wintergarten".
"The Girl Without Hands" or "The helpless Maiden" or "The Armless Maiden" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale number 31 and was first published in the 1812 edition of Children's and Household Tales. The story was revised by the Grimm brothers over the years, and the final version was published in the 7th edition of Children's and Household Tales in 1857. It is Aarne-Thompson type 706.
"The Fair at Sorochyntsi" is the first story in the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Later in the 19th century the story was adapted as an opera of the same name by Modest Mussorgsky.
"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 1832 collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol.
"Christmas Eve" is the first story in the second volume of the 1832 collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol.
The Prince Who Worked as Satan's Servant and Saved the King from Hell is a Lithuanian fairy tale collected by German linguists August Leskien and Karl Brugmann. Andrew Lang included it in The Grey Fairy Book under the title The Magician's Horse.
The King of Love is an Italian fairy tale from Sicily collected by Giuseppe Pitre and translated into English by Thomas Frederick Crane in Italian Popular Tales.
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Gogol. A Terrible Vengeance is a 2018 fantasy action horror mystery thriller film directed by Egor Baranov and starring Alexander Petrov in the title role. It is the third and the final film in the title trilogy. The film’s plot follows a resurrected Nikolai Gogol as he continues to try to find and stop the murderous and mysterious Dark Horseman, with the returning help of Inspector Yakov Petrovich Guro, only to stumble upon a shocking truth. The film was released in Russia and worldwide on August 30, 2018 and has received positive reviews.
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