Sign-In
Cart
Dead Souls (The Adventures Of Chichikov): A New Translation
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 24 2025
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town with a traveling trunk, a servant, and a scheme of such peculiar ingenuity that it could only have occurred to someone who had studied the gap between Russian bureaucracy and Russian reality with the attention it deserved. He wants to buy dead people. Specifically: serfs who have died since the last census but are still listed as living property on the rolls - taxable, borrowable against, entirely useless, and therefore very cheap. With enough of them on paper, a man could be a landowner. With a large enough estate, a man could be anything.
What follows is one of the strangest journeys in world literature: a tour of provincial landowners, each more extravagantly, helplessly themselves than the last, each a fresh variation on the theme of what human beings look like when their particular obsession has been left to run unchecked for long enough. Gogol watches them with the focused tenderness of a naturalist who loves his specimens and cannot save them.
Gogol called Dead Souls a poem - and he meant it. He planned it as a Russian Divine Comedy: a descent through the circles of provincial life, followed by purgation, followed by redemption. He completed the first volume, burned the second, and died ten days later. What remains is the Inferno - which is to say, everything that mattered. It is one of the funniest, darkest, and most mysterious novels ever written, a work in which a swindler's property scheme becomes a meditation on what it means to be alive, and in which laughter and despair are not opposites but, in the end, the same thing.
Also in
Fiction Anthologies
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Robert M.
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Hardcover
James Weldon Johnson: Writings (Loa #145): The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man / Along This Way / Essays and Editorials / Selected Poems
Johnson, James Weldon
Hardcover
Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Shelley, Mary
Paperback
Sez I to Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt
McCourt, Malachy
McCourt, Frank
Hardcover
Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All.
Allen, Mel
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Sophocles
Aeschylus
Euripides
Paperback
Sherlock: Short Story Anthology: Ten New Cases. Ten Master Storytellers. One Immortal Detective.
The Conan Doyle Estate
Hardcover
异乡故人（壹嘉-人文）
刘宗坤
Paperback
Learn Russian with Beginner Stories: Interlinear Russian to English
Van Den End, Kees
Hyplern, Bermuda Word
Gettys, Serafima
Paperback
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews
Poe, Edgar Allan
Hardcover
Obvious Adams -- The Story of a Successful Businessman: New Business Edition
Updegraff, Robert R.
Paperback
Bookin' in the Big House: What I Learned Leading a Women's Prison Book Club
Devoto, Pat Cunningham
Paperback
Japanese Folktales for Language Learners: Bilingual Legends and Fables in Japanese and English (Free Online Audio Recording)
Sato, Anna
Sato, Eriko
Paperback
The World of Jane Austen: A Conversation Puzzle: 500-Piece Puzzle: Jigsaw Puzzle for Adults
Oakley, Jacqui
Other