toten Seelen

Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov is a man with a plan. Traveling through the provincial backwaters of Russia, he approaches landowners with an unusual proposition: he wishes to purchase their dead serfs. These "dead souls" - serfs who have died since the last census but whose names still exist on the rolls - seem worthless to the landowners. But Chichikov sees opportunity. He will gather these phantom souls, use them as collateral for loans, and reinvent himself as a gentleman of substance. What follows is one of literature's most devastating satires: a roving portrait of a society where everyone is corrupt, everyone is grasping, and everyone is profoundly, tragically hollow. Gogol's prose shifts seamlessly from broad comedy to something approaching nightmare, from caricature to tragic resonance. The first volume, published in 1842, stands as a complete masterwork that essentially invented the modern Russian novel. The surviving fragments of the second volume only deepen the mystery of what Gogol imagined at the end. This is a book about the soul of Russia - and the terrifying possibility that there may be nothing there at all.