Dead Souls

Although Dead Souls (1842) was largely composed by Gogol during self-imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s, his last work remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature. As we follow its hero Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned confidence man, about the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise, there unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding, and Sterne. With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists, and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls stands as one of the most unusual and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. This new translation by Christopher English includes the surviving chapters and fragments of Part Two, and is complemented by an introductory essay by the pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire.