Dead Souls
Мёртвые души
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A great book. First published AD 1842, written in Russian
Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book characterised it as a "poem in prose". Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. Modern editions of Dead Souls include what survives from Part Two, as reconstructed by editors from Gogol's notebooks. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence, it is regarded by some as complete in the extant form. The novel is a satire of 19th-century Russian bureaucracy.
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Your reading
Its heirs
Later works that draw on Dead Souls.
The DoubleGreat book
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, AD 1846
Dostoevsky's early novella is his most Gogolian work: a timid Petersburg clerk, a comedy that turns into nightmare, and a subtitle, 'A Petersburg Poem', that echoes Gogol's calling Dead Souls a poem.
Source: Wikipedia, The Double (Dostoevsky novel)
“The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works; its subtitle "A Petersburg Poem" echoes that of Gogol's Dead Souls.” Read it there
