Only three of the seventeen works in Arabesques have been translated into English before [this edition]. Gogol the essayist is virtually unknown in English, and because of his art for art's sake views and his political conservatism, his essays have intentionally been kept out of print even in Russian during the Soviet period. The pieces which Gogol included in Arabesques date from a important era in his career, the "Petersburg period," the time of his closest collaboration with Pushkin, just before 1836 when he abruptly left Russia to live in Italy. The brilliant stories collected in Arabesques, and the passionately rhetorical essays which echo their themes, are a vital part of Gogol's work and Russian Romanticism.