Pre-revolutionary Russian literature might not resound with comedy (War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Eugene Onegin, anyone?) but this collection of "Russian comic stories" is not an oxymoron. Any story that starts: "Once upon a time there were two generals. They were both nitwits, and so, in no time at all, by a wave of some magic wand, they found themselves on a desert island," as Mikhail Saltykov's "Two Generals" does, gets this reviewer's vote for irreverence, not to mention surreal scene-setting. 

As with the best comedy, the stories are fuelled with strife. The two Ivans of Gogol's title story called "The Squabble" in Gogol's native Ukraine are neighbours and inseparable friends until one Ivan takes a fancy to the other's shotgun, "a fine little thing". When the other Ivan won't swap the gun for a brown sow, battle commences and if they had had leylandii hedges, by heavens they would be 200ft tall by now.

Set in Mirgorod, Gogol's fictional bucolic town that hosts many of his other tales, and peopled by characters whose "legs were very short and shaped like two pillows", who "talked scandal, ate boiled beets in the morning and swore wonderfully well", Gogol slyly pokes fun at the townspeople, turns them into "living lampoons of mankind" (as Belinsky is quoted in the introduction).

Despite or maybe because of literature's first porca ex machina (the brown sow steals the other Ivan's petition from the courtroom), the pair never make up, and Gogol exits the story with the resonant line: "It is dreary in this world, gentlemen."

Many of the stories in this collection target, inevitably, bureaucrats; and many, especially Tolstoy's "The Tale of Ivan the Fool", are shot through with the delightful turns of phrase found in folk stories and fables. And although these tales laugh at rather than with, although they satirise petty human foibles in all their stupid glory, ultimately they give us the life-enhancing, empowering chance to laugh at ourselves, at a remove of a continent and more than a century. And for that, bravo.