Gogol Dead Souls Reading Order

Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is one of the strangest and funniest novels in world literature — a picaresque journey through provincial Russia in which the mysterious Chichikov travels from estate to estate purchasing the names of serfs who have died since the last census (and therefore still officially exist as taxable 'souls'). The genius of the scheme — and of Gogol's portrait of Russia — is that the dead souls are more vivid than the living: the absurdity of a society that treats human beings as property reveals itself most completely in the grotesque comedy of buying and selling the already dead. Gogol conceived Dead Souls as a Russian counterpart to Dante's Divine Comedy, of which only the Inferno (the first part of the projected trilogy) was completed. It is the founding text of the tradition of Russian satirical literature that runs through Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and beyond.