Dead Souls

The greatest con man in Russian literature arrives in a nowhere provincial town with a carriage and a scheme so strange it could only be born from the fertile absurdity of the Russian imagination. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov wants to buy dead people. Not murder them, of course. Simply purchase their names as they appear on the census, serfs who have died since the last count but whom landowners still pay taxes on. For a pittance, Chichikov collects these "dead souls," dreaming of using them as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman and marry into money. What follows is a grotesque carnival of Russian provincial types: Manilov, the vacuous sentimentalist whose estate is falling apart; Sobakevich, the bear-like brute who treats his dogs like humans and humans like dogs; the thieves and swindlers who populate the local bureaucracy. Gogol dissects a society where everyone is buying, selling, and pretending, where the dead are more valuable than the living, and where Chichikov, himself a creature of emptiness, might be the most honest character of all. Russia's first major novel is also its strangest: an unfinished, mid-sentence masterpiece that somehow contains all of Russian life in its pages. If you want to understand how a nation learned to laugh at itself while drowning in its own contradictions, start here.