Dead Souls (Everyman's Library Classics)

One of the greatest masterpieces of Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, published in 1842, is at one level a comic satire on the failings of bureaucracy and serfdom. The real meaning of the story, however, concerns the moral and spiritual ailments of a society which replaces the worship of God with the worship of gold. Chichikov, the story's leading character, conducts a paper trade in dead souls i.e., serfs who still remain on the register although they have died. Gogol's achievement is to turn this macabre activity and the gloomy underworld in which it takes place into occasions for biting comedy.