In the last years of his life Nachman began telling stories, in Yiddish, and they are unlike anything else in the literature. A king's daughter is lost and a viceroy spends years searching for her and fails at the last moment, repeatedly. Seven beggars, each maimed in a way that turns out to be a concealed perfection, come to a wedding. A prince believes he is a turkey and lives under the table until a wise man joins him there. He refused to explain them, said that they were the garments of very high teachings, and told his disciple that people would fall asleep during the difficult discourses and stay awake for these.
That disciple, Nathan of Nemirov, is the reason any of it exists. He wrote down the discourses, the tales, the conversations and the biography, published them after Nachman's death at his own expense and considerable risk, and organised the community that carried them.
Nachman died of tuberculosis at thirty eight in 1810 and was buried at Uman. No successor was appointed, then or since, which is unique among the Hasidic courts: the Breslov community has had the same rebbe for more than two centuries and he has been dead for all of them. The annual gathering at his grave for Rosh Hashanah survived a century of Soviet prohibition and now draws tens of thousands of men to a Ukrainian town for two days a year.