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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol, 1842

565 pages · 141,142 words · about 10 hours · regard 91 of 100

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Chichikov, a gentleman of uncertain background and oily charm, travels through provincial Russia buying "dead souls"—serfs who have died since the last census but still appear on tax rolls. He can use these paper people as collateral for a loan, then abscond with the cash. Gogol turns this con into a panorama of Russian society: the misers, the dreamers, the brutes, the fools who own the countryside. Each landowner Chichikov visits reveals a different form of spiritual deadness more damning than the serfs' physical deaths. Gogol planned three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—but completed only the satirical first. He burned most of Part Two in religious despair. What remains is the great comic novel of Russia: grotesque, digressive, and animated by prose that seems to breathe. "Russia, where are you flying to?" Gogol asks in a famous passage. She gives no answer.

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