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"Dead Souls" is an 1842 novel by Nikolai Gogol that follows a mysterious protagonist traveling through rural Russia purchasing the names of deceased serfs from landowners. The work is considered a masterpiece of Russian literature and offers a satirical portrait of Russian society and bureaucracy during that era.
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Book · Open Library
- Author
- Николай Васильевич Гоголь
- First published
- 1942
- Editions
- 218
- Subjects
- Fiction, historical, general, Russia (federation), fiction, Slavic philology
via Open Library
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Dead Souls (Russian: Мёртвые души Myórtvyye dúshi, pre-reform spelling: Мертвыя души) is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book characterised it as a "poem in prose". Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. Modern editions of Dead Souls include what survives from Part Two, as reconstructed by editors from Gogol's notebooks. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey), it is regarded by some as complete in the extant form. The novel is a satire of 19th-century Russian bureaucracy.
Characterization
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Dead Souls” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.