Dead Souls

Product Description

Nikolai Gogols epic poem in prose Dead Souls" is a damning indictment of a corrupt society translated from the Russian with an introduction & notes by Robert A. Maguire in " Penguin Classics". Chichikov a mysterious stranger arrives in the provincial town of N visiting a succession of landowners & making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census saving their owners from paying tax on them & to use these dead souls as collateral to re-invent himself as a aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov & above all the devilish con man Chichikov. " Dead Souls" (1842) Russias first major novel is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction & a devastating satire on social hypocrisy. In his introduction Robert A. Maguire discusses Gogols life & literary career his depiction of Russian society & the language & narrative techniques employed in " Dead Souls". This edition also

Includes:: a chronology further reading appendices a glossary map & notes. Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) was born in the Ukraine. His experience of St Petersburg life informed a savagely satirical play " The Government Inspector" & a series of brilliant short stories including " Nevsky Prospekt" & " Diary of a Madman". For over a decade Gogol laboured on his comic epic " Dead Souls"
- before renouncing literature & burning parts of the manuscript shortly before he died. If you enjoyed " Dead Souls" you might like Fyodor Dostoyevsksys " The Brothers Karamazov" also available in " Penguin Classics". " Gogol was a strange creature but then genius is always strange". (Vladimir Nabokov). "I admire the way in which Maguire has kept his own brilliantly variegated vocabulary away from 20th-century phrases without ever looking parodic or antiquarian". (A.S. Byatt author of " Possession")."