Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogols epic poem in prose Dead Souls is a damning indictment of a corrupt society translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by Robert A. Maguire in Penguin Classics.Chichikov a mysterious stranger arrives in the provincial town of N visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census saving their owners from paying tax on them and to use these dead souls as collateral to reinvent himself as a aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types from the bearlike Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov and above all the devilish con man Chichikov. Dead Souls (1842) Russias first major novel is one of the most unusual works of nineteenthcentury fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.In his introduction Robert A. Maguire discusses Gogols life and literary career his depiction of Russian society and the language and narrative techniques employed in Dead Souls. This edition also includes a chronology further reading appendices a glossary map and notes.Nikolai Gogol (180952) was born in the Ukraine. His experience of St Petersburg life informed a savagely satirical play The Government Inspector and a series of brilliant short stories including Nevsky Prospekt and Diary of a Madman. For over a decade Gogol laboured on his comic epic Dead Souls before renouncing literature and burning parts of the manuscript shortly before he died.If you enjoyed Dead Souls you might like Fyodor Dostoyevsksys The Brothers Karamazov also available in Penguin Classics. Gogol was a strange creature but then genius is always strangeVladimir NabokovI admire the way in which Maguire has kept his own brilliantly variegated vocabulary away from 20thcentury phrases without ever looking parodic or antiquarianA.S. Byatt author of Possession