Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol, Susanne Fusso, Bernard Guilbert Guerney

Overview

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic materpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work" and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendices that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Deal Souls.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300060997
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	02/21/1996
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,051,519
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), Russian short-story writer, novelist, and playwright, is best known for his novel Dead Souls, his play The Inspector-General, and stories such as "The Nose" and "The Overcoat." Bernard Guilbert Guerney (1894-1979) was a bookstore owner, fiction writer, and translator of Russian literature. Susanne Fusso is associate professor of Russian at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Admired not only for its enduring comic portraits but also for its sense of moral purpose." —-Meriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature

Clifford Odets

Where else has one met such a group of brawling men, all of them straining, pleading, expostulating - bellowing to be released from the printed page? In Homer, in Shakespeare, in Rabelais, but not in many other places. Here are characters who veritably fly at the reader's throat.

Editorial Reviews

"I am delighted that Guerney's translation of Dead Souls [is] available again. It is head and shoulders above all the others, for Guerney understands that to 'translate' Gogol is necessarily to undertake a poetic recreation, and he does so brilliantly."—Robert A. Maguire, Columbia University

"The Guerney translation of Dead Souls is the only translation I know of that makes any serious attempt to approximate the qualities of  Gogol's style—exuberant, erratic, 'Baroque,' bizarre."—Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley

"A splendidly revised and edited edition of Bernard Guerney's classic English translation of Gogol's Dead Souls. The distinguished Gogol scholar Susanne Fusso may have brought us as close as the English reader may ever expect to come to Gogol's masterpiece. No student, scholar, or general reader will want to miss this updated, refined version of one of the most delightful and sublime works of Russian literature."—Robert Jackson, Yale University

From the Publisher

Considered one of the great novels in the Russian canon, this book is a symbolic snapshot of nineteenth-century Russian life, and an intense literary experience. The story revolves around Chichikov, a man who comes to a Russian town to buy the souls of dead peasants who are still listed on the census, setting in motion a story of greed and distrust. Narrator Tom Weiner has a deep, robust, nasally tinged voice that captures the tone of the book at the beginning, but he doesn’t vary his pitch and characters enough to keep the work moving. He also reads a bit too quickly; slowing down would allow us to more easily digest the philosophical aspects of the story. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile