Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, written from 1831-1832. They appeared in various magazines and were published in book form when Gogol, who had spent his life in today’s Ukraine up to the age of nineteen, was twenty-two. He put his early impressions and memories of childhood into these pictures of peasant life. This was Gogol’s groundbreaking work, though not his first, and formed the core of his style, especially his sense of the macabre. It was this collection that proved he was a new power in Russian literature with unique innovation and a carefully arranged mingling of the horrifying and the humorous.