Dead Souls: The Great Unfinished Russian Novel

A smooth stranger arrives in a provincial Russian town and begins, politely, to buy up dead serfs — peasants who have died since the last census but still count, on paper, as taxable property. It is the strangest premise in Russian literature, and out of it Gogol built Dead Souls, a comic epic that is also a portrait of a whole rotten society, and one of the great unfinished books of the world.

Chichikov’s scheme takes him from one landowner to the next, and each is a monster of a different kind — the sugary sentimentalist, the miser, the bully, the hoarder drowning in his own junk. Gogol means them as a gallery of dead souls in the other sense: living people who have let their humanity rot away. He intended a vast three-part work, a Russian Divine Comedy that would carry Chichikov from this inferno toward redemption. He wrote the second part — and then, in a fit of religious despair, burned it, and died soon after.

What survives is the first part, complete in itself and dazzling: funny, grotesque, and shot through with the sudden lyrical grief that is Gogol’s signature — the famous image of Russia itself as a runaway troika hurtling into the dark, going where no one knows.

This edition gathers it with The Overcoat and the Petersburg tales.

Read Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls and the Petersburg Tales →