With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs Translated by Isabel F Hapgood Russia in the 1840s There is a stranger in town & he is behaving oddly The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local estates buying up &dead souls& These are the papers relating to serfs who have died since the last census but who remain on the record & still attract a tax demand Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song What he does not say is that he then proposes to take out a huge mortgage against these fictitious citizens & buy himself a nice estate in Eastern Russia Will he get away with it? Who will rumble him? Does this narrative contain a deeper message about Russia itself or the spiritual health of humanity? There is much interest & some suspense in considering these issues but the real pleasure of this story lies elsewhere It is an enjoyable comic romp through a retarded part of a backward country a picaresque series of grotesque portraits situations & conversations described with Gogolian humour based mainly on hyperbole This is quite simply the funniest book in the Russian language before the twentieth century