Nikolai Gógol - O Bruxo Víi

Translation by Nina Guerra and Filipe Guerra

“The rooster crowed. It was the second time it had crowed, but the first time the gnomes hadn’t heard it. The frightened spirits threw themselves against the windows and doors in great confusion, trying to escape quickly, but it was too late: they remained there, stuck to the doors and windows. The priest, when he entered, stopped petrified at the sight of that incredible desecration of the holy place and did not dare to say the funeral mass in such a place. Thus, the church remained forever with the monsters stuck to the doors and windows, covered in undergrowth—roots, herbs, wild plumes. No one will ever be able to find their way back to it.”

NIKOLAI GOGOL was born on March 20, 1809, in the Poltava province (Ukraine), into a family of middle-class landowners (1200 hectares and 200 serfs). He left for St. Petersburg at a young age to pursue his career. He spent much of his life traveling abroad and throughout Russia. After a slow agony, he died on March 4, 1852, in a state of asceticism and great suffering.

"Vii is a gigantic creation of the people's imagination. The Ukrainians give this name to a chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids droop to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I did not want to change it in any way and I tell it in almost the same simple form as I heard it."

Nikolai Gogol