This is, quite simply, the funniest book in the Russian language before the twentieth century. It is an enjoyable comic romp through a retarded part of a backward country, a picaresque series of grotesque portraits, situations and conversations described with Gogolian humour based mainly on hyperbole. That amazing institution, the Russian novel, not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. There is much interest and some suspense in considering these issues, but the real pleasure of this story lies elsewhere. Dead Souls, first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. Will he get away with it? Who will rumble him? Does this narrative contain a deeper message about Russia itself or the spiritual health of humanity? What he does not say is that he then proposes to take out a huge mortgage against these fictitious citizens and buy himself a nice estate in Eastern Russia.

Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song.

These are the papers relating to serfs who have died since the last census, but who remain on the record and still attract a tax demand. Nikolai Gogols epic poem in prose, Dead Souls is a damning indictment of a corrupt society, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by. The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local estates buying up ‘dead souls’. There is a stranger in town, and he is behaving oddly.

The dead souls gogol