Nikolai Gogol's 'epic poem in prose', Dead Souls is a damning
indictment of a corrupt society, translated from the Russian with
an introduction and notes by Robert A. Maguire in Penguin Classics.
Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of
'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange
offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered
on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to
use these 'dead souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a
aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece, Gogol created
a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich
to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con
man Chichikov. Dead Souls (1842), Russia's first major novel, is
one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a
devastating satire on social hypocrisy. In his introduction, Robert
A. Maguire discusses Gogol's life and literary career, his
depiction of Russian society, and the language and narrative
techniques employed in Dead Souls. This edition also includes a
chronology, further reading, appendices, a glossary, map and notes.
Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) was born in the Ukraine. His experience of
St Petersburg life informed a savagely satirical play, The
Government Inspector, and a series of brilliant short stories
including Nevsky Prospekt and Diary of a Madman. For over a decade,
Gogol laboured on his comic epic Dead Souls- before renouncing
literature and burning parts of the manuscript shortly before he
died. If you enjoyed Dead Souls, you might like Fyodor
Dostoyevsksy's The Brothers Karamazov, also available in Penguin
Classics. 'Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always
strange' Vladimir Nabokov 'I admire the way in which Maguire has
kept his own brilliantly variegated vocabulary away from
20th-century phrases, without ever looking parodic or antiquarian'
A.S. Byatt, author of Possession
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