* A superb new translation of one of the greatest comic works of
Russian literature 'Rus! Russ!...Everything within you is open,
desolate, and flat; your squat towns barely protrude above the
level of your wide plains, marking them like little dots, like
specks; here is nothing to entice and fascinate the onlooker's
gaze. Yet whence this unfathomable, uncanny force that draws me to
you?' Although Dead Souls (1842) was largely composed by Gogol
during self-imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s, his last work
remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great
novels in Russian literature. As we follow its hero Chichikov, a
dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man, about
the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise, there
unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of
Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and Sterne. With its rich and ebullient
language, ironic twists and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls
stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the
nineteenth century. This brilliant new translation by Christopher
English is complemented by a superb introductory essay by the
pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire. Readership: Students of
Russian literature, university courses on the novel and the general
reader.
