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Nikolai Gogol (1809 - 1852) was an outstanding Ukrainian writer who wrote in Russian and became a classic of Russian literature. Reading The Night Before Christmas in the brilliant translation by Maksym Rylsky, you willingly believe the old legend that Gogol wrote his first works in Ukrainian. In this youthful story, it is as if the ancestral umbilical cord that connected the descendant of a Cossack colonel with his native land has not yet been severed. In "The Night Before Christmas", evil spirits still easily fit into a Cossack pocket...

The book was illustrated by Kost Lavro (1961), a recognised master of modern Ukrainian book graphics, whose childhood was spent on one of Gogol's farms near Dykanka. Books with illustrations by Kost Lavro are read to children from 2 to 102 years old in many countries around the world.