Dead Souls

About the book

Chichikov arrives in a provincial town with careful manners and a scheme involving serfs who have died but remain listed in official records. His visits to landowners turn the purchase of these registered souls into a journey through habits of greed, suspicion, waste, and self-importance. Gogol gives each encounter a distinctive material world, making possessions, food, rooms, and conversational rhythms disclose the person who inhabits them. The narrator repeatedly interrupts the business with reflections and extravagant comparisons, so the book's movement exceeds the mechanics of its plot. This edition contains the complete first part and surviving material from the unfinished second. Its uneven larger shape accompanies a remarkably sustained comic vision of people who have learned to mistake accumulation, status, or administrative recognition for a meaningful life.

• Property and personhood
• Social performance
• Bureaucracy

Why read it

For a richly particular social satire whose extraordinary transaction makes ordinary habits of valuation look newly grotesque.

Complete Part I and surviving Part II · translated by D. J. Hogarth