Dead Souls — Nikolay Gogol

Although Dead Souls 1842 was largely composed by Gogol during self imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s his last work remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature As we follow its hero Chichikov a dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man about the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise there unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of Chaucer Rabelais Fielding and Sterne With its rich and ebullient language ironic twists and startling juxtapositions Dead Souls stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by a superb introductory essay by the pre eminent Gogol scholar Robert Maguire

Although Dead Souls 1842 was largely composed by Gogol during self imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s his last work remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature As we follow its hero Chichikov a dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man about the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise there unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of Chaucer Rabelais Fielding and Sterne With its rich and ebullient language ironic twists and startling juxtapositions Dead Souls stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by a superb introductory essay by the pre eminent Gogol scholar Robert Maguire