Nikolai Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas is not the kind of Christmas story today’s readers expect to find on the holiday sale shelf.

The novella is unlike most Christmas stories. It opens with the devil flying above the small village of Dikanka, enjoying one last night of freedom before he must return to hell, when he decides to steal the moon and put it in his pocket in order to thwart the amorous designs of the local blacksmith, Vakula. In addition to being an excellent blacksmith, Vakula is also a talented painter, and his favorite theme is the vanquishing of Satan.

Micah Mattix writes, “perhaps no Russian writer is as foreign as Nikolai Gogol. He was even baffling to his own countrymen. ‘Gogol was a strange creature,’ Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in his idiosyncratic biography of the writer, ‘but genius is always strange.’”