Dead Souls

Although largely composed by Gogol during self-imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s, this work remains perhaps the most essentially "Russian" of novels. The reader follows Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned confidence man, through the countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise.

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Gogol's great 1842 classic is a comic masterpiece and one of the major works of Russian literature. When Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov takes up a new residence, he is set to carry out his bizarre plan to purchase the souls of dead peasants that once inhabited the town. Dead Souls takes a sharp but humorous look at life in all its strata, but especially the devious complexities in the country with its landowners and serfs.