Gogol Dead Souls

About Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is the most original novel in Russian literature — a picaresque journey through provincial Russia in which the mysterious Chichikov purchases the names of dead serfs as a financial scheme. The grotesque comedy of buying and selling the already-dead reveals the moral absurdity of a society built on serfdom. Gogol conceived the novel as a Russian Divine Comedy and completed only the first part (the Inferno) before burning the manuscript of the second. It is the foundation of Russian satirical literature, the direct ancestor of Bulgakov, Chekhov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Gogol's other major works — The Government Inspector, The Overcoat, The Nose — extend the same vision of a world in which the official and the absurd have become indistinguishable.