Story 5 of 12 · Ukraine · 1832
Christmas Eve
Who it suits: Readers of ten and over, and a good story to read aloud to a family.
On Christmas Eve in the village of Dikanka, a devil steals the moon, a blacksmith flies to the imperial capital on the devil’s back, and a proud young woman learns what she wants. Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in Sorochyntsi, in the Poltava region of what is now Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. He grew up among Ukrainian songs, puppet plays and Christmas customs, moved to Saint Petersburg at nineteen, and wrote in Russian.
“Christmas Eve” comes from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, two books of village stories published in 1831 and 1832, which made Gogol famous. The stories are presented as tales told by a beekeeper called Rudy Panko, and they are full of the Christmas customs Gogol knew as a child: young people going from house to house singing carols, the Christmas Eve supper, the sledges, the frost and the gossip.
The plot is a comic adventure. Vakoola, the village blacksmith, loves Oxana, the daughter of a rich Cossack. Oxana teases him and says she will marry him if he brings her the boots the empress herself wears. Vakoola catches the devil, rides him through the night sky to Saint Petersburg, and returns before morning. The translation printed here was made by George Tolstoy and published in London in 1860, an early English translation of the story. It keeps the spellings of its time: the blacksmith is Vakoola, the girl is Oxana, and the empress is the Czarina. In three places in the story, villagers speak with prejudice about the Jewish woman who keeps the village shop. The words are printed as the translator wrote them, and a note at the first of them says what they are.
In the book, this chapter is printed in full with fifteen notes beside the words they explain, its map, its city view and its illustration.
