book review dead souls

Book Reviews/Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. Along with Gogol's short stories, it is considered a masterpiece. Although it is primarily concerned with Russian society during the early 19th century, Gogol's wit and fresh prose make it a joy to read today.

Recommended translation: Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls. Ed. Susanne Fusso. Trans. Bernard G. Guerney. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.

• 1 Introduction to Dead Souls
• 3 Character Descriptions
• 4 Major Themes
• 5 Composition History
• 6 Publication History
• 7 Literary Significance
• 8 Adaptations
• 9 Study Questions
• 10 References

Introduction to Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls is a satire that exposes the corrupt "underbelly" of Russian nineteenth century society. On a superficial level, the title refers to the book’s plot, where the main character Chichikov sets out to amass serfs, or souls, to his name. In order to do so, he buys the names of dead peasants off of landowners who are still being taxed for them because censuses were taken once every few years, resulting in a list congruous with the previous census in his name. On a more philosophical level, the title refers to the morality or lack thereof of the characters the reader meets within the novel. Their actions, though consistent with societal expectations, are corrupt, showing how fraudulent Russian society really is, and Gogol has the reader question the ultimate ethicalness of the Russian 19 th century world.

The novel begins with Chichikov coming to the town of N--. He is welcomed by everyone, who think he is a model person, and is invited to various social gatherings. He begins roaming around the countryside with his coach driver, Selifan, looking for land owners to buy dead serfs from. The land owners are presented as comedic and simple caricatures, with much of the novel's humor derived from interactions with them. The first land owner, Manilov, is so friendly he takes on a farcical air; Korobochka is a widow out of touch with the world; Nozdrev is deceitful; and Sobakevich is an adroit business man who knows no morals. Even Pliushkin, the most tragic of the land owners, is first introduced in a comic fashion: Chichikov mistakes him for an old, female serf.) The plot is considered very circular because of the visits to the land owners

Despite distrust and greed somewhat hampering Chichikov's acquisition of the dead souls, he returns to the village after meeting with Pliushkin, having amassed four hundred dead souls. Once back, he promptly resumes festivities with the people. Eventually, however, rumors begin to spread about Chichikov when they realize all the serfs he bought were dead. Some conjecture that he wants to run away from with the governor's daughter, while others think he is Napoleon or a war veteran who lost his leg in disguise, revealing the backwardness of the townspeople. Chichikov is at first blissfully unaware of the people's gossip; when it comes to his attention he quickly leaves town.

During the final chapter much of Chichikov's life is revealed. He was a studious and hardworking student with a knack for money, and after graduation works several government jobs. The real reason for the acquisition of dead souls is also revealed: the more serfs one has in Russia at this time, the greater their social standing. It is, in other words, a get rich quick scheme. The novel ends on an uncertain note, as it is unclear where Chichikov will go or what he plans to do next.

Character Descriptions

Chichikov: The protagonist of the novel. The driving force of his story is his desire to obtain dead souls from serf owners in the region. His past and motivations for collecting dead souls remain a mystery for much of the novel. He is cordially greeted when he arrives in the town of N-- and impresses the residents there. Although at first he appears warm and honest to the reader as well, as the narrative goes on he appears to become more and more superficial. His name is derived from the Russian word for "sneeze."

Selifan: Chichikov's carriage driver. He is portrayed as dimwitted and lazy and is also of a lower social standing than many of the other characters in the novel.

Manilov: The first serf owner Chichikov visits. He is both nice and welcoming to a fault, as well as being highly sentimental. His name means "to lure, attract, or beckon" in Russian.

The Widow Korobochka: The second serf owner Chichikov visits. She is an old widow and very shrewd in her ways. She is hesitant to sell Chichikov the serfs because she is afraid dead souls actually sell for much more than what Chichikov is offering. Her name means "little box" in Russian.

Nozdrev: The third serf owner. He is superficial and a dilettante, in addition to being incredibly two-faced. Gogol asserts that everyone knows someone who has similar characteristics as Nozdrev. Nozdrev is also the Russian word for "nostril."

Sobakevich: The fourth serf owner. He is a quiet and resourceful man who tries to sell Chichikov dead souls the instant he thinks he can make a profit from him. His name means "dog" in Russian.

Plyushkin: The fifth and final serf owner. Chichikov thinks he is a serf when he first sees him. He has a troubled past: his older daughter eloped with a soldier, his wife and younger daughter are dead, and his son, against Plyushkin's wishes, joined the military. His farm has fallen into disrepair and because of this Chichikov is able to buy a multitude of serfs from him.

Major Themes

Artificiality vs. Nature: While on the surface many characters act in certain ways, they rarely show their true colors, preferring instead to present to the world masks they wear. Chichikov, for instance, appears as a nice, charming man to many of the town's residents, but in actuality he arguably feels none of those emotions. He is simply doing this to get on their good side like the social climber he is. Characters like the two-faced Nozdrev and the other land owners are similar in this regard, as they only let their true feelings show when no one is around. Nozdrev even puts on different masks for when he is with different people, playing to what each person wants to hear.

This theme is prevalent in other Russian works from this time period, such as Eugene Onegin . The difference here is that Gogol seems to be saying nothing is truly natural when it comes to Russia. There are hardly any characters in the book who do not pander to another's liking and reveal who they truly are.

Greed: All of the land owners who Chichikov goes to in order to purchase dead souls bargain with him over the selling price. This might not seem too important until one realizes that by giving away these dead souls, for which they are taxed but receive none of the benefits they would from a living serf, they would be benefiting themselves. Gogol, then, takes greed to the extreme; the characters here are so greedy they are only hurting themselves. By bringing attention to this, Gogol critiques and satirizes another part of Russian society, pointing out the foolhardiness in parts of daily life that some Russians assume are perfectly fine.

Materialism: Description is favored over plot in this book. Though this may irk some, there is a good reason behind this choice in design: Gogol wanted to emphasize character's possessions, the same way they try to emphasize them. In 19th century Russia, one's social standing meant everything, and this social standing was determined by one's possessions. It is for this reason that Chichikov desires those dead souls so very much. By placing descriptions of the things people own above plot in terms of significance, Gogol satirizes the need to show off one's wealth and property and reveals the pitfalls in considering one's possessions the most important things in life.

Gossip: A very common motif in the novel. In later chapters of the book, it takes on a significant role, to the point where it is gossip that ends Chichikov's plans. Village people gossip with one another about Chichikov and his past, creating pasts for him so absurd they are humorous. Some think that Chichikov is Napoleon in disguise, trying to make a new life for himself. One man even states that Chichikov is an old war veteran who lost his leg in the war. When other men point out that Chichikov does not have a wooden leg, the man backs down, but others' ideas are still just as ridiculous.

In this way the backwardness of the townspeople is revealed. Though they fancy themselves smart and capable individuals, they are all irrational in their conjectures and crave gossip. Though on the surface the townspeople might look innocuous and even welcoming, deep down they cannot escape their backwater country roots, and eventually these inevitably come to light.

Composition History

Gogol first referenced the work that would become Dead Souls in a letter to his friend Alexander Pushkin in 1835. At this point in time he was already an established novelist, having published short story collections to much acclaim like Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Arabesques . He referred to it as “a very long novel” and continued to work on the novel intermittently while also writing other work like his short stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat” and traveling around Europe (Gogol, 278). Much of Dead Souls was written during his time in Rome. After much work, the novel was finally published in 1842. Gogol had meant the book that was published to be the first part in a modern rendering of Dante’s Divine Comedy , roughly corresponding to the Inferno . He continued work on the project, but gradually he fell into a slump as he experienced a creative decline. In 1852, Gogol slipped into depression and burned his manuscripts, including what was to be the sequel to Dead Souls. Gogol died nine days later, but luckily some pieces of the manuscript he had been working on survived.

Publication History

The first edition of Dead Souls was printed in Moscow and published in Russia in 1842. An English translation by D.J. Hogarth followed later that year; this translation is currently in the public domain. Bernard Guilbert Guerney translated the novel into English again in 1942, was revised in 1948, and was published by the New York Readers' Club.

Literary Significance

Dead Souls: A Poem came under scrutiny for its title, which was deemed heretical, prompting Nikolai Gogol to change it to The Adventures of Chichikov: Dead Souls . The work is considered to be a novel, yet Gogol calls it a poema , perhaps for its philosophical qualities and musings on the state of the Russian Empire. Anne Lounsbury, however, states that poema is “an ambiguous generic label that in his day generally signified a long work in verse, epic or mock epic” (Lounsbury, 125.) Gogol may in fact be deriding his contemporaries, depicting a bleak and grotesque rather than a romanticized version of the Russian provincial townships and the supposedly erudite people that inhabit them.

Lounsbery also notes that “Gogol’s career coincided with the period when Russian literature moved decisively out of the aristocratic and semiprivate sphere of the salons and into the broader and far less predictable realm of print” (Lounsbery, 127.) Dead Souls therefore is significant for its wider audience; its distribution exceeded high society and went towards the literate mercantile and provincial gentry. It was received at the time with mixed opinions, as book reviewers, used to romantic novels filled with virtuous heroes modeled after the Russian skazka , or fairy tale, criticized the lack of plot and excessive detail. It is precisely this description-centric aspect of the work that distinguishes it from the preceding literary tradition; Gogol emphasizes the characters’ material possessions just as they themselves do. Almost fifty years later, in 1886, a book review in the New York Times (see References ) described it as Gogol’s masterpiece, a work that perfectly encapsulates the Russian condition in the provincial townships. According to the book review, Alexander Pushkin, clearly aware of the disparaging social criticism remarked, “It is the picture of the universal platitude of the country (Russia.)” Furthermore, when Gogol read the work aloud to him, he supposedly burst into tears and said, “The sad thing, our poor Russia!” Such pity-evoking depictions of the Russian Empire influenced writers such as Turgenev, who according to this 1886 book review “sang the same” themes, but in a more refined manner: “It is a tender minor on the part of [Turgenev], exquisite in its delicacy, intoned with a broken heart, while Gogol howls it, if you like in the major key, with many a joke and a quibble.” This theme of discussing the errors within Russian society such as its materialism, its gossipy nature and its corruption (one only has to look at Chichikov’s rise to prominence to see this element) is an integral part of the Russian literary tradition; it is Gogol's manner in addressing the question that is unique.

Adaptations

Mikhail Bulgakov first adapted the novel for the Moscow Art Theatre. The production was directed by Constantin Stanislavski and opened on 28 th November, 1932.

Dead Souls was also turned into an opera in 1976 by Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin.

In 1984, it became a television mini-series directed by Mikhail Shveytser.

In 2006, the novel was aired on the BBC’s Radio 4, incorporating the voices of Mark Heap as Chichikov and Michael Palin as the narrator.

Source: Dead Souls. Wikipedia Encyclopedia. May 14, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls .

Study Questions

1. What kind of hero is Chichikov? Can he even be called one?

2. Gogol frequently makes detailed lists about inanimate objects. What may be the purpose of such attention on seemingly superfluous matters?

3. What are the satirical elements of the book?

4. What impressions of Russian life do you as the reader get from Dead Souls ? Are they positive or negative?

5. Analyze a passage that you found to be thematically rich and apply it to the work's title. What insights do you garner?

6. How does Gogol portray serfs and serfdom?

7. What was serfdom like in Russia when Gogol wrote the book?

8. What does Chichikov value? What does he want from life?

9. What are the types of Russian landlords? Are there any good landlords?

10. Besides serfdom, what else is Gogol criticizing in the novel?

Manuscripts

Bely, Andrei translated by Christopher Colbath. Gogol’s Artistry . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Fanger, Donald. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol . Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Fasso, Susanne and Priscilla Meyer , eds. Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls. Ed. Susanne Fusso. Trans. Bernard G. Guerney. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.

Lindstrom, Thaïs S. Nikolay Gogol . New York, New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc, 1974.

Lounsbery, Anne. Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America . Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Maguire, Robert A. Exploring Gogol . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Maguire, Robert A. Gogol from the 20th Century: 11 Essays . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Rowe, William Woodin. Through Gogol’s Looking Glass: Reverse Vision, False Focus and Precarious Logic . New York, NY: New York University Press, 1976.

Journal Articles

Brodiansky, Nina. “Gogol and His Characters.” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 31, No. 76 (December, 1952): 36-57. JSTOR. org. 10 May, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204403 .

Fanger, Donald. “Dead Souls: The Mirror and the Road.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 1, (June, 1978): 24-47. JSTOR. org. May 14, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2932925 .

Freeborn, Richard. “Dead Souls: A Study.” The Slavonic and East European Review , Vol. 49, No. 114 (January, 1971): 18-44. JSTOR. org. 10 May, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4206320 .

Futrell, Michael H. “Gogol and Dickens.” The Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 34, No. 83, (June, 1956): 443-459. JSTOR. org. 10 May, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204752 .

Golstein, Vladimir. “Landowners in Dead Souls: Or the Tale of How Gogol Blessed What He Wanted to Curse.” The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1997): 243-257. JSTOR. org. May 14, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/309735 .

Snyder, Harry C. “Airborne Imagery in Gogol's Dead Souls.” The Slavic and East European Journal Vol. 23, No. 2, (Summer, 1979): 173-189. JSTOR. org. May 14, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/308110 .

Weathers, Winston. “Gogol's Dead Souls: The Degrees of Reality.” College English Vol. 17, No. 3 (December, 1955): 159-164. JSTOR. org. May 14, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/495738 .

Web Articles

Byatt, A.S. A Poll Tax on Souls. October 29, 2004. The Guardian. May 10, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/oct/30/classics.asbyatt .

Kalfus, Ken. Waiting for Gogol. August 4, 1996. The New York Times Book Review. May 10, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/04/books/waiting-for-gogol.html .

Magarshack, David. Books: A Mad Russian. September 16, 1957. Time Magazine. May 14, 2012. http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,809933-1,00.html

New York Times Book Review. Dead Souls: Nikolai Gogol, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield. The New York Times Review Books. May 10, 2012 http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/dead-souls/ .

New York Times Book Review. Gogol’s Masterpiece. December 19, 1886. The New York Times. May 10, 2012. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40F16F6355A1A738DDDA00994DA415B8684F0D3

Yarmolinsky, Avrahn. Gogol's Dead Souls Revived in Translation. May 20, 1923. The New York Times Book Review. May 10, 2012 http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA081FFD3B5516738DDDA90A94DD405B838EF1D3

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By the Book

How ‘Dead Souls’ Taught Mel Brooks What Comedy Writing Could Be

“I’d never read anything like it,” says the actor and director, whose memoir “All About Me!” is newly out in paperback. “It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time. It’s like Gogol stuck a pen in his heart, and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page.”

Credit... Rebecca Clarke

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What books are on your night stand?

You may be surprised to learn that on my nightstand is a book called “The Art of Cooking Omelettes,” by Madame Romaine de Lyon. It’s an incredible cookbook with hundreds of French omelette recipes. I’m a bit of an omelette connoisseur, and every night before I go to sleep I love dreaming about which omelette I’ll have for breakfast the next day.

When I was writing the musical of “The Producers” for Broadway with my wonderful collaborator Thomas Meehan, we’d often meet for brunch at Madame Romaine de Lyon’s restaurant in New York. A lot of “The Producers” musical was actually written while Tom and I were having a jambon , fromage and tomate omelette (ham, cheese and tomato). They were always perfectly cooked, slightly browned on the outside and soft and runny in the middle. The French call that baveuse . I call it heaven.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

The ideal reading experience for me is when I’m reclining in a lounge chair under the cool shade of a huge umbrella on my back porch in Santa Monica, Calif. It’s very peaceful and allows me to really get lost in a book.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

If you’ll permit me, let me be a proud father and say that one of the writers I admire is my son Max Brooks. He is the author of several great books including “The Zombie Survival Guide,” “World War Z” and “Devolution.” (By the way, they’re best sellers. So it’s not just me bragging!)

What books, if any, most contributed to your artistic development?

I could name influential authors like Thomas Hardy, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Molière and a hundred others who all had an impact on my writing. But there is a whole other group of great writers who are not always recognized as such because they didn’t write books — they wrote lyrics.

My artistic development was influenced by so many great lyricists. A few that come to mind are of course Cole Porter with “You Do Something to Me” ( Do do that voodoo that you do so well ), Irving Berlin with “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” ( Before the fiddlers have fled / Before they ask us to pay the bill / and while we still have the chance / Let’s face the music and dance), Yip Harburg with “Over the Rainbow” ( Where troubles melt like lemon drops / Away above the chimney tops / That’s where you’ll find me ), Ira Gershwin with “S’Wonderful” (‘ S marvelous / You should care for me / ‘S awful nice / ‘S paradise / ‘S what I love to see ), Alan Jay Lerner with “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” ( Lots of chocolate for me to eat / Lots of coal makin’ lots of heat / Warm face, warm hands, warm feet / Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly? ), Oscar Hammerstein II with “Ol’ Man River” ( I gets weary, an’ sick o’ tryin’ / I’m tired of livin’ and I’m scared of dyin’ ) and Irving Mills with “It Don’t Mean a Thing” ( It don’t mean a thing, all you got to do is sing / Doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah ). Maybe not recognized among the most famous lyricists is Irving Caesar, who wrote “Tea for Two” and together with George Gershwin the unforgettable “Swanee” — in the middle of which there is this little genius run of letters spelling out “dixie” ( D-I-X-I-E-ven though my mammy’s waiting for me / Praying for me, down by the Swanee).

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Nikolai Gogol, Robert A. Maguire | 4.14 | 61,815 ratings and reviews

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Book Reviews

'dead souls' is a smart book, in some ways a good one — also, it's unreadable.

In a scene close to the end of the English poet and publisher Sam Riviere's debut novel Dead Souls , a twice-disgraced poetry plagiarist named Solomon Wiese explains that, before he got expelled from the literary establishment, he never listened when people complimented his work. In the sycophantic poetry community, Wiese declares, praise springs from "monstrous insincerity," and is, therefore, deadly. As a critic who strives to be completely honest, I can't help but take this proclamation as a bit of an insult — what am I, chopped liver? — but still, I know it holds truth. In general, I feel similarly toward Dead Souls. Riviere is sharp and funny, and he fills his novel with insights that are both rude and correct. It is undeniably a smart book, and, in certain ways, a good one. That said, it is unreadable.

Dead Souls takes place during one long night at the bar of a London Travelodge, where Wiese tells the story of his downfall to the narrator, a supremely irritating, hyper-self-conscious poetry magazine editor. It has no paragraph breaks, no chapters, almost no plot, and no interest whatsoever in life outside the publishing industry. (Could it be set in Brooklyn? It could.) Nor is it interested in creating a nuanced, intriguing, or even three-dimensional portrait of Publishing World for readers who may not already be involved — or, to use the narrator's preferred word, embroiled — in the literary sphere. Instead, Riviere works from the premise that "[f]or a long time now there had been no poetry in the poetry." According to his narrator, nearly all contemporary poetry is so derivative and bad that it barely deserves the name. His prose is dense with satire, but, stripped down, it seems to ask three plaintive, linked questions: How did poetry get so phony? What even is real poetry? And, whatever it is, will it ever be back again?

All three questions are indisputably valid. Riviere has good answers to the first: he skewers publishing for ignoring rural and regional writers, for being too driven by social pressure, and for being all but inaccessible to anyone whose parents can't support them financially. He's also clever on the self-serving, often vacuous nature of social media praise and pile-ons, which he satirizes well. In order to answer the second and third questions, though, he'd have to venture outside irony, which his narrator is incapable of doing. This nameless narrator limits Riviere severely. He's repressed, status- and self-obsessed, and utterly resistant to most types of meaningful thought. He devotes the bulk of his intellectual efforts to "microanalysis of the ethics of [any] situation, which, despite the amount of time and energy I seemed to expend on it, I regarded basically as a private entertainment." It is a great relief, when Wiese begins his monologue, to escape the narrator somewhat — but Riviere never lets us escape completely. We receive Wiese's tale via the narrator, which means that we get it stripped of empathy or artistic concern.

To Summarize, 'Infinite Country' Can Be Frustrating

The Weird World Of 'Cosmogony' Is Immensely Inviting

Perhaps I shouldn't blame the narrator, who is, after all, Riviere's invention. It is certainly Riviere's choice to exclude non-participants in Publishing World from Dead Souls . Inside jokes (tote bags! Ha!) abound; explanations or extrapolations to the rest of society, not so much. Wiese may believe that his "poetic destiny" is to produce "a work of real art," but he is so plainly a charlatan that I struggle to imagine any reader who wishes to write good poetry — or create good art of any sort — choosing to spend time with him. I am not, to be clear, complaining that he's not likeable; rather, as I read, I found myself thinking often of the fiction-writing protagonist of Lily King's Writers & Lovers , who refuses to date a guy with writer's block because "[t]hat kind of thing is contagious." Wiese's B.S. seems contagious, too. Riviere writes him as a personification of Publishing World: He absorbs the whole poetry ecosystem, then regurgitates it so obviously that he gets caught and shamed for plagiarism not once, but twice.

Dead Souls plainly takes inspiration from two writers: Thomas Bernhard, king of the single-paragraph novel, and Roberto Bolaño, who founded a poetry movement in Mexico in the 1970s, then wrote an exceptional novel, The Savage Detectives , about a made-up poetry movement much like his own. It is my personal, unshakable belief that writing without paragraphs is a middle finger to the reader, which suits Bernhard; his books are rageful howls. Dead Souls is a gripe. Gripes, by me, should have breaks in them. As far as the resemblance between Dead Souls and The Savage Detectives goes, I will say only that the latter loves poetry; the former doesn't even know what poetry is. It seems unsurprising, then, that while Bolaño's novel overflows with joy, excitement, confusion, and humor, Riviere's is fundamentally dried out. It is a collection of ideas with no emotion. Why turn to fiction for that?

Lily Meyer is a writer and translator living in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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America’s dead souls, first person.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Engraving from Gustave Doré’s 1861 illustration of Dante’s Inferno . Scanned, postprocessed, and uploaded by Karl Hahn. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Soul s, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace . I had already read War and Peace . It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time.

I wish I would have been more cautious in picking a book. Every time I read one of the Russian greats my life transforms into an eerie mirror of the work. I had already experienced a year of obsessive relationship analysis ( Anna Karenina ), six months beneath the thumb of a powerful boss whose political maneuvers were far reaching and whose requests quickly spiraled into the hellish and fantastic ( The Master and Margarita ), a week on the run with a depressive whose obsessive psychosis ended in a prison sentence ( Crime and Punishment ), a much-too-long friendship with a man whose preoccupations with his father were borderline incestuous ( Fathers and Sons ), and, after I finished War and Peace , years stuck in sprawling disillusionment that, unlike many characters in the novel, I have yet to overcome. Had I not learned my lesson? I wasn’t keen to fall into the trap of Russian literature again.

But, I reasoned, what could possibly happen to me while I read about Chichikov? Good, bumbling Chichikov, who purchased dead serfs in order to turn a profit. A man whose harmless scheming and bribing promised quick prosperity. We were in the middle of a pandemic. What relevance could this bourgeois con artist possibly have to my life?

Sound logic, I thought. Surely, surrealism is safe. Except shortly after I picked up Dead Souls , my mother died a gruesome, absurd death, and I quickly found that the surrealism of Gogol was not so surreal after all. Chichikov knew more of life’s truths than I did: no matter how poor, there is money to be made from the dead. The poor are worth more dead than alive.

At the end of her life my mother made less than $10,000 a year. Suffering from debilitating depression while caring for her aging parents, she found herself chronically unemployed, undermedicated, and overstressed. In our final phone call, as we navigated her looming eviction, she asked me, rhetorically: “Why are these people harassing me? What good does it do them?” I didn’t have an answer for her. Or I did, but it felt obvious and stupid to say out loud. They wanted money. Everybody wants money. The people in power don’t care if we live or die, as long as they get paid. My last correspondence with my mom was a $2,500 money order (two and a half months of my pay), which I hoped would buy me time to cobble together a more sustainable plan.

Her chronic delinquency with bills was publicly searchable in government databases and thus acted as a beacon to financial predators. She owed everyone. Or at least that’s what the letters said. They bombarded her daily with phone calls, notices, emails. The IRS garnished her wages for back taxes calculated from a years-old misfiling they refused to correct. And then, through a series of absurd events that would make even Gogol shudder, she died, and I inherited it all.

Well, not all of it. I didn’t inherit the assets. She didn’t leave a will, which meant the state of Tennessee inherited her house. What I inherited was her debt.

I suddenly found myself looking down a double-barreled future of doom and despair. The hospital where my mother died claimed I owed them more than a quarter of a million dollars. Wells Fargo held me responsible for a house I no longer had legal claim to. Creditors and housing developers knew about my mom’s death before my extended family did. I was a few months away from turning twenty-six. Two days after she died they began calling me.

There are horror stories online about the profit trap of dying youngish, poorish, without health care or a will. I invite you to read them. I hadn’t read any at the time. My only familiarity with the subject was the old saying about the IRS, which I now know can be applied to America’s debt-for-profit system writ large: they go after the poor because the rich have money to fight back.

Dead Souls is often called a masterpiece of bleak and comedic surrealism. Its publication in 1842 marked a noted departure from Gogol’s earlier work, which is widely considered to be the foundation of Russian literary realism. I get why Dead Souls is classified as surreal. But I personally disagree. In a world where one day of lost wages can compound into houselessness, the lives of the poor will always look surreal to the middle class and the wealthy.

From my vantage point, the only parts of Dead Souls that seem to be rooted in something other than realism are the moments when Chichikov imagines the lives of the souls he’s collected. He can’t seem to stop himself from reading a name and wondering about that person’s existence:

When afterwards he glanced at the lists, at the peasants who really had once been peasants, had worked, ploughed, got drunk, been drivers, cheated their masters, or were perhaps simply good peasants, a strange feeling which he could not comprehend took possession of him. Each list had an individual character, and through it the peasants themselves have an individual character too.

If only the con artists and thieves of America’s upper classes would wonder about the dead they’ve profited from. There are endless articles on why America has failed to curb the pandemic. The truth is simple. People profit from our death. Foreclosure companies, debt collectors, real estate agents, news corporations, health care tycoons, senators, and presidents, to name a few. After my mom’s death I found myself locked into a dentist chair, comforting the assistant of my dental hygienist. She wore a hazmat suit. In her plastic safety helmet, she sobbed through a panic attack. I weakly patted her gloved hand. Her father had died unexpectedly several months ago. She couldn’t prove he didn’t owe the debts they claimed he owed. She tried to tell the collectors her story (her father left no paperwork or will, he had died horribly and abruptly, she couldn’t afford to pay). Only one collector took pity on her. He explained it just wasn’t good business to believe her. If his firm believed every story they were told they would be poor men indeed.

What did I tell her to do? I told her to do what I did. Pretend you’re rich. Hire a lawyer. Open a credit card, if you have to. A meager amount of wealth will insulate you from a lifetime of woe, exactly as it was designed to. All my lawyer had to do was send a memo on official letterhead and my mother’s debts in death dropped 90 percent. More than a quarter of a million dollars was erased in an instant—an accounting that five weeks of my pleading, bargaining, reasoning, denying, uploading, scanning, begging, faxing, and crying had not been able to extract.

Professionalism and bureaucracy shield contemporary death-for-profit workers, administrators, and executives so that they may staff cruel systems without experiencing feelings of culpability, not to mention empathy or curiosity. Yet I still find myself hoping at least one of those infinite bureaucrats saw my mother’s name on a list and, like Chichikov, took a moment to reflect upon her humanity. Should they have struggled with where to begin, I would have offered this as a starting point: Her humor and her rage were unmatched. In the evenings, against the setting Tennessee sun, she liked to drink red can Cokes in the garden while snuffing cigarettes out against the yard’s ant colonies. She could reckon with anyone just by looking them in the eye. Men were terrified of her, rightfully so. She was sweet. In the last week of her life, when she couldn’t understand where she was or who she was talking to, she greeted everyone the same: “Hi, pal. Hope you’re doing okay. When can you come pick me up?”

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department as a teaching fellow. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s , The Believer , NOON , and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and she now brings the strange to life at Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, Molly is at work on a novel about the inherent absurdity of debt. This is her first publication.

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Dead Souls: One of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture

Written as a single paragraph over 300 pages – the book is daunting but this is not a negative review, article bookmarked.

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Dead Souls , by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down.

But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: Dead Souls is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry . One of the book’s blurbs claims it’s “gut-wrenchingly funny,” which may be true for a certain subset of lute-playing spoken-word baristas in Brooklyn, but others should temper their expectations.

This is not a negative review.

Indeed, I think Dead Souls is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell.

The story begins in an era that arose from the ruins of a world-shattering crisis when the publishing industry was afflicted by “widespread, debilitating anxiety”. Editors, publishers and book reviewers – even book reviewers! – lost all faith in their own judgments. As panic spread, the industry was rocked by “an annihilating spiral” of disasters: “Two of the main commercial houses had been proven to have released several fixed books , that is, to have sold, as new, publications that were revealed to be reprints of earlier publications, with minimal changes implemented to disguise this fact.”

As Facebook has taught us, every social and political ill can be cured with better algorithms. And so, the publishing industry, desperate to regain the public’s trust, devises a computer tool

The public reacts to this revelation of publishing malfeasance as though it were Watergate, the Gunpowder Plot and the Teapot Dome scandal combined. “Every aspect of the industry’s architecture came under intense scrutiny,” Riviere writes in his perfectly modulated tone of mock horror. “Every major player in the field received challenges to redress and redesign, as shockwaves moved up and down the once proud edifices of publishing, shaking loose careers and reputations.”

As Facebook has taught us, every social and political ill can be cured with better algorithms. And so, the publishing industry, desperate to regain the public’s trust, devises a computer tool: the Quantitative Analysis and Comparison System. QACS analyses all aspects of a work of literature – “the machinations of plot, the structural dynamics of narrative and perspective, the balancing of metaphor and the density of descriptive language” – to identify elements of plagiarism. No infraction is too small to escape QACS’ notice. It can detect the felonious reuse of “children who die in the first twenty pages. Descriptions of the light in western Scotland. Easter as the story’s climactic and final date. Friendships resulting from traffic accidents. Giant plants” – in short, all the various “crimes against originality” that authors are wont to commit.

But Riviere is just getting started with his deadpan satire. Dead Souls opens in the aftermath of this cultural obsession with literary crime. Horrified by the deceptions perpetrated by novelists, dramatists, historians and biographers, the reading public turns in desperation to poets. “Poets were making real money,” Riviere says. “Poetry was flooding the market. There were rich poets .” In this surreal time, poetry has finally attained the central position that poets are always telling us it possesses.

What no summary can convey is the hypnotic effect of Riviere’s relentless prose. The entire novel comes to us as a fevered confession delivered by an unnamed “editor at a mid-circulation literary magazine”. He begins, “I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank.” The tone feels like an homage to Kint’s wandering tale about Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects . On and on, this mid-circulation editor talks about Solomon Wiese, the most famous and unrepentant poetry plagiarist of them all. Soon after the narrator spots him at a literary conference, he meets him at a bar, a coincidence that feels both natural and surreal, the way we meet people in dreams. “I knew at this point that he must be Solomon Wiese, or I knew it without knowing it,” the editor says. “It had simply become obvious that every development pointed in that direction, that the familiarity of his face mirrored my recent awareness of his name.”

As Dead Souls evolves, Solomon Wiese begins telling the captivated editor the manic story of his literary anarchy. It’s the tale of an angry poet-terrorist determined to demolish the culture of poetry by seducing it with its own mediocrity.

Riviere has written a satire that hunts down artistic pretensions and assassinates them one by one. He’s particularly brutal toward poetry anthologies, which no one ever reads, and the “deadly words of praise” offered at poetry readings. He skewers the way woke men graciously acknowledge their dominance of the cultural sphere instead of graciously not dominating the cultural sphere. And the inanity of Instagram poets is wickedly lampooned with his description of an app called Locket, on which poets assemble vast virtual crowds to listen to and praise Solomon Wiese’s stolen verse.

Deadly as it is, I suspect the kill zone from Dead Souls has a fairly small radius. But if you’re in the poetry world or you aspire to be or you escaped it, this is an astute, wildly original novel that talks trash about everyone whose success galls you. And there’s nothing quite so delicious as that.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere. Orion Publishing Co. £16.99

© The Washington Post

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Noir Weekend Sale: Up to 40% off 30 noir and nearly noir books

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by Nikolai Gogol , translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield

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Dead Souls is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for July 2012. The first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the local landowners wonder, even as some rush to unload what isn't of any use to them anyway, while others seek to negotiate the best deal possible, and others yet hold on to their dead for dear life, since if somebody wants what you have then no matter what don't give it away. Chichikov's scheme soon encounters obstacles, but he is never without resource, and as he stumbles forward as best he can, Gogol paints a wonderfully comic picture of Russian life that also serves as a biting satire of a society as corrupt as it is cynical and silly. At once a wild phantasmagoria and a work of exacting realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art that spills over with humor and passion and absurdity.

Donald Rayfield's vigorous new translation corrects the mistakes and omissions of earlier versions while capturing the vivid speech rhythms of the original. It also offers a fuller text of the unfinished second part of the book by combining material from Gogol's two surviving drafts into a single compelling narrative. This is a tour de force of art and scholarship—and the most authoritative, accurate, and readable edition of Dead Souls available in English. Nikolai Gogol, Donald Rayfield

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics ISBN: 9781590173763 Pages: 432 Publication Date: July 17, 2012

Gogol's Dead Souls has achieved a magnificent re-birth.... Rayfield's translation is one that Vladimir Nabokov would unreservedly admire.... A big, beautiful book and a mould-breaking classic reinvigorated. —William Boyd, The Guardian

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by Ian Rankin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

Increasingly—though still in his 40s—Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh police has been sounding the autumnal note. The tenth in his series ( The Hanging Garden , 1998, etc.) finds him full in the winter of his discontent. Bleak questions prevail. Will his daughter’s automobile accident leave her permanently crippled? Has his relationship with his lover plummeted past the irretrievable? And what about his job? Has he lost his sense of vocation? One of his colleagues thinks so. “Something in you has gone bad, John,” she tells him. After a stakeout at the Edinburgh zoo, Rebus makes a bad mistake—arrests the wrong man’setting in motion a chain of events that leads to a brutal murder. Now Rebus is face to face with that most searching of all questions, one that early in his career would have been unimaginable: Should he actually quit? But then the pace of events accelerates swiftly. There’s time only to pursue the links between the death he may have caused, a young man’s inexplicable disappearance, and a fellow cop’s apparent suicide. He connects them, of course. And in the process tracks down a particularly vicious murderer whose cleverness and talent for gamesmanship is sufficient to force Rebus to the top of his own game. Rebus in action is Rebus restored. Some lives, he decides—his own, for instance—are best left unexamined. Hard-drinking, hard-living Rebus remains a compelling figure, but in a book this long he gets too much time to pick at himself.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-312-20293-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

Share your opinion of this book

More by Ian Rankin

BOOK REVIEW

by Ian Rankin

by William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

More by Kathy Reichs

by Kathy Reichs

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series ( Stone Cold , 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

Pub Date: July 28, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7

Page Count: 272

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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‘Dead Souls’ is a 300-page paragraph that’s unputdownable | Book review

“It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down,” writes the reviewer of a book he nevertheless found very funny.

By Sam Riviere

Catapult. 291 pp. $26

By Ron Charles

Dead Souls , by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like I was wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down.

But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: Dead Souls is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry. One of the book’s blurbs claims it’s “gut-wrenchingly funny,” which may be true for a certain subset of lute-playing spoken-word baristas in Brooklyn, but others should temper their expectations.

This is not a negative review.

Indeed, I think Dead Souls is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise, and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell.

The story begins in an era that arose from the ruins of a world-shattering crisis when the publishing industry was afflicted by “widespread, debilitating anxiety.” Editors, publishers and book reviewers — even book reviewers! — lost all faith in their own judgments. As panic spread, the industry was rocked by “an annihilating spiral” of disasters: “Two of the main commercial houses had been proven to have released several ( fixed books , that is, to have sold, as new, publications that were revealed to be reprints of earlier publications, with minimal changes implemented to disguise this fact.”

The public reacts to this revelation of publishing malfeasance as though it were Watergate, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Teapot Dome scandal combined. “Every aspect of the industry’s architecture came under intense scrutiny,” Riviere writes in his perfectly modulated tone of mock horror. “Every major player in the field received challenges to redress and redesign, as shockwaves moved up and down the once proud edifices of publishing, shaking loose careers and reputations.”

As Facebook has taught us, every social and political ill can be cured with better algorithms. And so, the publishing industry, desperate to regain the public’s trust, devises a computer tool: the Quantitative Analysis and Comparison System. QACS analyzes all aspects of a work of literature — “the machinations of plot, the structural dynamics of narrative and perspective, the balancing of metaphor and the density of descriptive language” — to identify elements of plagiarism. No infraction is too small to escape QACS’ notice. It can detect the felonious reuse of “children who die in the first twenty pages. Descriptions of the light in western Scotland. Easter as the story’s climactic and final date. Friendships resulting from traffic accidents. Giant plants” — in short, all the various “crimes against originality” that authors are wont to commit.

But Riviere is just getting started with his deadpan satire. Dead Souls opens in the aftermath of this cultural obsession with literary crime. Horrified by the deceptions perpetrated by novelists, dramatists, historians, and biographers, the reading public turns in desperation to poets. “Poets were making real money,” Riviere says. “Poetry was flooding the market. There were rich poets .” In this surreal time, poetry has finally attained the central position that poets are always telling us it possesses.

What no summary can convey is the hypnotic effect of Riviere’s relentless prose. The entire novel comes to us as a fevered confession delivered by an unnamed “editor at a mid-circulation literary magazine.” He begins, “I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank.” The tone feels like an homage to Kint’s wandering tale about Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects . On and on, this mid-circulation editor talks about Solomon Wiese, the most famous and unrepentant poetry plagiarist of them all. Soon after the narrator spots him at a literary conference, he meets him at a bar, a coincidence that feels both natural and surreal, the way we meet people in dreams. “I knew at this point that he must be Solomon Wiese, or I knew it without knowing it,” the editor says. “It had simply become obvious that every development pointed in that direction, that the familiarity of his face mirrored my recent awareness of his name.”

As Dead Souls evolves, Solomon Wiese begins telling the captivated editor the manic story of his literary anarchy. It’s the tale of an angry poet-terrorist determined to demolish the culture of poetry by seducing it with its own mediocrity.

Riviere has written a satire that hunts down artistic pretensions and assassinates them one by one. He's particularly brutal toward poetry anthologies, which no one ever reads, and the "deadly words of praise" offered at poetry readings. He skewers the way woke men graciously acknowledge their dominance of the cultural sphere instead of graciously not dominating the cultural sphere. And the inanity of Instagram poets is wickedly lampooned with his description of an app called Locket, on which poets assemble vast virtual crowds to listen to and praise Solomon Wiese's stolen verse.

Deadly as it is, I suspect the kill zone from Dead Souls has a fairly small radius. But if you’re in the poetry world or you aspire to be or you escaped it, this is an astute, wildly original novel that talks trash about everyone whose success galls you. And there’s nothing quite so delicious as that.

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Dead Souls Paperback – February 21, 1996

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls , a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work" and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls . The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendices that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Deal Souls .

"I am delighted that Guerney's translation of Dead Souls [is] available again. It is head and shoulders above all the others, for Guerney understands that to 'translate' Gogol is necessarily to undertake a poetic recreation, and he does so brilliantly."―Robert A. Maguire, Columbia University

"The Guerney translation of Dead Souls is the only translation I know of that makes any serious attempt to approximate the qualities of Gogol's style―exuberant, erratic, 'Baroque,' bizarre."―Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley

"A splendidly revised and edited edition of Bernard Guerney's classic English translation of Gogol's Dead Souls . The distinguished Gogol scholar Susanne Fusso may have brought us as close as the English reader may ever expect to come to Gogol's masterpiece. No student, scholar, or general reader will want to miss this updated, refined version of one of the most delightful and sublime works of Russian literature."―Robert Jackson, Yale University

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication date February 21, 1996
• Dimensions 5.75 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0300060998
• ISBN-13 978-0300060997
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward ? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis . --Kerry Fried

"The Guerney translation of Dead Souls is the only translation I know of that makes any serious attempt to approximate the qualities of  Gogol's style—exuberant, erratic, 'Baroque,' bizarre."—Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Subsequent edition (February 21, 1996)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300060998
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300060997
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
• #10,924 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #22,102 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Nikolai vasilevich gogol.

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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 62% 26% 7% 2% 2% 26%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 62% 26% 7% 2% 2% 7%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 62% 26% 7% 2% 2% 2%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 62% 26% 7% 2% 2% 2%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the humor brilliant and intact. They describe the writing as beautiful, easy to read, and pure art. Readers also mention the book is educational, insightful, and relevant.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the humor brilliant and intact. They say the book is clearly ahead of its time and a withering critique of 19th-century Russia.

"...The first book is filled with so much robust humour , that you are left dying for more...." Read more

"...The humor of Dead Souls is intact . A book clearly ahead of its time." Read more

"...But I found it to be the best kind of comedy , a comedy written by someone who loves the subject, so the author isn't being mean...." Read more

"...This particular story also happens to be humorous ...." Read more

Customers find the translation quality good, timeless, and easy to read. They also say the writing is beautiful and the novel is pure art.

"This is probably the best translation available . Guerney, who has Russian roots, is able to fully capture Gogol's masterwork...." Read more

"This translation is excellent, beautiful , and easy to read. The humor of Dead Souls is intact. A book clearly ahead of its time." Read more

"...In any case, however, this translation is still great ...." Read more

"...#34;Classics" - they are educational, timeless and the writing is typically beautiful . This particular story also happens to be humorous...." Read more

Customers find the book educational, timeless, and insightful. They say it provides valuable background information and is relevant.

"...Guerney also provides valuable background information in helping to understand the nexus for Gogol's strange journey into the heartland of..." Read more

"...same way that I enjoy reading other "Classics" - they are educational , timeless and the writing is typically beautiful...." Read more

"150+ years later, it's still hilarious and insightful ...." Read more

"Surprisingly fun and relevant ..." Read more

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