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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

1842

Novel

Comedy, Epic

The protagonist, Pavel Chichikov, travels in a dreary Russian province buying up as many dead serfs (officially called souls) as local landowners will sell him. Since these dead souls are considered legally alive until the next decade's census removes them from the tax rolls, he intends to mortgage them before then and to settle comfortably with the money thus realized on some remote estate where his shady past would be unknown.

Dead Souls is one of literature's greatest comic epics, planned as a secular companion to Dante's Divine Comedy and also as a parody of the picaresque novel, with Gogol's hero ordinary and bland rather than racy and witty, and the book's episodic events commonplace rather than hazardous. While the subtlety of Gogol's humor invites comparison with Cervantes, his emphasis on provincial pettiness and paltriness, snobbery and stupidity parallels Jonathan Swift's and Gustave Flaubert's pessimistic views of human nature.

Chichikov is a pleasantly featureless hero, neither too fat nor too thin, too young nor too old, who begins the first part by arriving in a sleepy, dreary town and ends it by departing from that town. He ingratiates himself with a gallery of increasingly grotesque landowners, flatters them by his tactful conversation, is invited to visit their homes and, upon doing so, bargains more or less successfully for their dead souls.

His first transaction is with the sentimental, sugary Manilov, who mirrors Chichikov's affability. Then, he interviews the mistrustful, superstitious widow Korobochka, who echoes his slyness in business enterprise. Next, he sees the lying, disorderly Nozdryov, whose deceitfulness is a variant of Chichikov's; then the ill-tempered, brutish Sobakevich, whose calculating egotism copies the hero's; last and most horrifying, the degenerate miser Plyushkin, who dresses in filthy rags and hoards any and all trash for the sheer greed of senseless, sterile accumulation thereby representing the shadowy side of Chichikov's acquisitiveness.

Gogol's denunciation of Russia's social and moral meanness of soul dominates this book. Yet he occasionally interrupts his portraiture of emptiness and damnation with remarkably lyric digressions on his native land's future prospects for greatness among nations.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Gogol, Nikolai. "Dead Souls." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0129.
APA 7th
Gogol, N. (2015). Dead Souls. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Gogol, Nikolai. "Dead Souls." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.