The title reflects the stories’ portrayal of provincial Ukrainian life, similar to Gogol’s successful previous collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.
Gogol conceived of the stories as circular like a Mirgorod bread ring, and endeavored to exhaustively display in them the panorama of traditional Ukrainian provincial life.
As a result, Gogol was forced to hastily add two superfluous pages to “Viy” so that the finished bindings of the first edition would still fit.
Alexander Pushkin singled out “Old World Landowners” in particular as a “comic touching idyll, which forces us to laugh through tears of sadness and tenderness.”[10] The influential 19th-century Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky highly praised the collection.
In the year of its publication he hailed Gogol as the new “head of Russian literature.”[11] Leo Tolstoy read “Viy” as a young man and counted it among the works of literature that left a “tremendous” impression him.