Dead Souls (Royal Collector's Edition) (Case Laminate Hardcover with Jacket)

by Nikolai Gogol, Charles James Hogarth (Translator)

Overview

Chichikov, a middle-aged gentleman of middling social class and means arrives in a small town and turns on the charm to woo key local officials and landowners. He reveals little about his past, or his purpose, as he sets about carrying out his bizarre and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls." When rumors flare up about his ideas, Chichikov flees to another part of Russia and attempts to continue his venture. Again he goes from estate to estate, encountering eccentric and absurd characters all along the way.

In the Russian Empire, before 1861, landowners had the right to own serfs to farm their land. Landowners could buy, sell or mortgage them, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the classifier "soul" was used: e.g., "six souls of serfs." The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e., "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers. On another level, the title refers to the "dead souls" of Gogol's characters, all of which represent different aspects of poshlost, a Russian word that means petty evil, vulgarity, or obscenity and bad taste.

This case laminate collector's edition includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781778780103
Publisher:	Royal Classics
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Nikolai Gogol (March 19, 1809 - March 4,1852) was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, in the Russian Empire. He began writing early and after he left school in 1828, he went to St. Petersburg to pursue a career as a writer. He found success with his first volume of short stories and developed a passion for Ukrainian Cossack history. His novel, Taras Bulba, was the result of this phase in his interests.In 1834, Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which he had no qualifications. The academic venture proved a disaster, and he resigned in 1835. From 1836 to 1848, Gogol lived abroad, travelling through Germany and Switzerland. Gogol spent the winter of 1836-37 in Paris, among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles. In 1842, the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under a new title imposed by the censorship, The Adventures of Chichikov. The book established his reputation as one of the greatest prose writers in the language. After the triumph of Dead Souls, Gogol's contemporaries came to regard him as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. In April 1848, Gogol returned to Russia from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and spent his last years in restless movement throughout the country. On the night of 24 February 1852 he burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of Dead Souls. Soon thereafter, he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later.