ISBN Dead Souls book English Paperback 488 pages

Since its publication in 1842,Dead Soulshas been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol’s wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for 'dead souls'–deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them–we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov’s proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel’s lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol was born in 1809; his family belonged to a minor gentry of Ukrainian Cossack extraction, and his father was the author of a number of plays based on Ukrainian popular tales. He attended school in Nézhin and gained…