Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel is one of the founding works of Russian literature and one of its strangest. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a flatterer of indeterminate origin, arrives in a provincial Russian town and begins paying calls on local landowners with an extraordinary proposition, he wants to buy their dead serfs. Until the next census these men, taxed as if alive, are a quiet hemorrhage on the landowners' books, and the eccentric, the suspicious, the corrupt, and the merely lonely all entertain the offer with reactions Gogol uses to anatomize an entire society. The novel was meant as the first of three volumes echoing Dante's Commedia, but Gogol burned the second and never finished. What survives is a comic masterpiece, dark, unsettlingly modern, and translated most influentially by Pevear and Volokhonsky for English readers a century and a half later.
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In Tsarist Russia, the smooth-talking Chichikov travels from estate to estate buying up the names of serfs who have died but are still on the census, hoping to use the paper souls to make himself look wealthy.
No. Nikolai Gogol completed only Part One of Dead Souls before destroying most of Part Two in a religious crisis shortly before his death in 1852. Surviving fragments of Part Two are sometimes included in modern editions.
Yes. Dead Souls was first published in 1842 and is in the public domain. Free editions are available legally through Project Gutenberg, though many readers prefer modern translations, which remain copyrighted.
Dead Souls was written by Nikolai Gogol, published in 2016 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Dead Souls is 266 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Dead Souls takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Dead Souls is a standalone novel by Nikolai Gogol, not part of a series.
Dead Souls is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
