The Lost Letter, Christmas Eve, and A Terrible Vengeance, stories from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, which is contained in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Vol. 1.
Of these three, “The Lost Letter” is the weakest. Grandfather must take a letter to the Czarina. He stops by a tavern, gets side-tracked, and loses the letter. The tavern owner tells him how to get the letter back by going into a certain area of the forest. When he gets there, he has to play a card game with some witches and win the game to get the letter. Impossible task, or maybe not. I wonder who outwits whom. . .
“Christmas Eve” once again has the devil in human form being used to get a girl. This time, though, it is the most pious man in the village “using” (outwitting) the devil to do it. Another witch is involved, as well as a snowstorm, and the Czarina’s slippers. Oh, yeah, and some sacks full of other “devils,” too.
“A Terrible Vengeance” was the creepiest of the three stories. A Cossack and his wife try to fend off the wife’s father, a sorcerer. What the father wants to do is the creepy part, along with some scary cemetery imagery.
All in all, these have been great for the RIP II Challenge. I have 4 stories left to review in Volume 1, and after that I’m looking forward to reading more of Gogol next year for the Russian Reading Challenge.
The only Gogol I’ve read was “The Cloak” (or “the Overcoat” depending on the translation). While I loved it, it didn’t have as many supernatural elements as the ones you’ve describe here. It does have the ghost at the end, but even that seems left to the reader to believe or not.
Oh sounds really good. Spooky. Thanks for the link.