About this item
Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.
About the Author
Nikolai Gogol (1809 - 1852) - Russian writer, playwright, poet, critic, publicist, recognized as one of the classics of Russian literature, author of the immortal works "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", "Taras Bulba", "The Viy", "Inspector", " Dead Souls ", etc. The amazing talent of Gogol is manifested in these so different from each other works in different ways - that striking the reader with the richness of the language and the colorfulness of the Ukrainian theme (and the epic scope of "Taras Bulba") , then captivating the fiction of Petersburg novels , then causing laughter in the "Inspector" and "Dead Souls". The life and creative path of Gogol and his tragic fate still represent a riddle that is unraveled by more than one generation of researchers.He belonged to artists, whose work hides many secrets, exciting imagination, causing controversy, but leaving no one indifferent.