Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"-deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them-we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition.
50 Chefs-D'œuvre Que Vous Devez Lire Avant De Mourir : Vol 1 (Golden Deer Classics)
Mark Twain, Stendhal, Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyle, René Descartes, Lewis Carroll, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Golden Deer, Alain-Fournier, Jules Amédée d'Aurevilly, Paul Bourget, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Pierre Corneille, Nikolai Gogol, Gustave Leroux, Marquis De Sade, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Daniel Lesueur, Marcel Proust, Edmond Rostand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Sun Tzu, Rodolphe Töpffer, Vatsyayana, Jules Verne, Voltaire, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola
