Dead Souls (1842) is one of Russian literature’s great satirical novels. The schemer Chichikov travels from estate to estate across provincial Russia, purchasing the names of deceased serfs — “dead souls” — still listed on census rolls, in order to mortgage them for profit. Each landowner he encounters is a brilliantly grotesque portrait of a different variety of human folly and corruption.
Gogol’s novel is both wickedly funny and deeply unsettling — a comic epic that doubles as a dark diagnosis of Russian society. Download the free EPUB and discover why Nabokov called Gogol one of the greatest prose writers who ever lived.