Dead Souls

Pavel Chichikov, a polite and plump gentleman, arrives in a provincial town and begins visiting the local landowners with a strange offer: he wants to buy their dead serfs, peasants who have died but are still listed on the tax registers until the next census. Each landowner he meets, the sentimental Manilov, the suspicious widow Korobochka, the brawler Nozdryov, the bear-like Sobakevich and the miser Plyushkin, is a comic masterpiece.

Published in 1842, Dead Souls is Gogol's great comic novel of Russian life, and the idea for it came from Pushkin. Gogol meant it as the first part of a trilogy, but burned much of the second part shortly before he died. Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk, grew directly out of Gogol's world.

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was born in the Ukrainian countryside and moved to St Petersburg to make his name, where his comic tales of Ukrainian village life won the friendship of Pushkin. His play The Government Inspector, his story The Overcoat and his novel Dead Souls made him the great satirist of Russian life.

He spent years in Rome, became increasingly religious and tormented, and shortly before his death burned most of the second part of Dead Souls. Later Russian writers, Dostoevsky among them, acknowledged their debt to him; read Dostoevsky's Poor Folk to see it.